The CES mega-event in Las Vegas at the beginning of each year is like the tarot reading of tech. It foreshadows the biggest changes in consumer tech for the year ahead, unveiling futuristic tech we never saw coming. And it accurately predicts — or rather, presents — the array of devices that will make their way into our homes and handbags.

While endless gadgets are announced at CES 2025, I’ve cherry-picked the most striking ones that are certain to be made available to Indian consumers as the year rolls along.

Work life

With AI innovations well underway for the last couple of years, brands have focused on making laptops more premium and powerful this year. The general focus was on enhancing user experience and performance.

Dell has simplified its laptop portfolio across three categories — for play, school and work. And then there’s Dell Pro, designed for professional-grade productivity; the Dell Pro Max offers the most powerful performance in the portfolio.

What caught my eye is the Dell Pro Premium CoPilot PC, which sports a 13-inch Tandem OLED display, and weighs just above 1 kilogram! Ain’t that gonna be a breeze to carry across stakeholder meetings?

The uber-cool Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable AI PC sports a collapsible OLED display that can expand from 14 to 16.7 inches with a simple gesture. You get up to 1 TB SSD, along with a 5-megapixel IR camera and two Harman Kardon speakers on board. Priced approximately ₹3 lakh, this might be the most expensive party trick you could be pulling this year.

The premium Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro and Galaxy Book5 360 now include AI features such as AI Select — an easy way to find information by highlighting a photo, text or object you see on the screen. The laptop also houses the Photo Remaster, which retouches images and cleans up blurry photos.

ASUS also upgraded its laptops across categories, which includes the first-ever Snapdragon-enabled Asus Zenbook A14. The superlight Copilot+ PC weighs less than 1 kg while still packing in a high-capacity 70Wh battery that is said to go on for almost 32 hours on a single charge!

Acer, too, had a slew of new launches but the star of the show for productivity is the Acer Swift Go 16 AI Copilot+ PC, which sports a 3K OLED display and an upgraded PurifiedVoice 2.0 that suppresses unwanted background noise, ensuring you sound sharp in online meetings!

Fun and Games

Gaming was bigger than ever at CES this year! Aside from multiple upgrades to gaming laptops, a bunch of gaming handhelds were unveiled.

ASUS’ Republic of Gamers line-up has new laptops powered by the latest RTX 50 GPUs, designed to improve both performance and portability.

In the spotlight are ASUS ROG Strix SCAR gaming laptops in 16-inch and 18-inch variants, featuring the next-gen Intel Core Ultra 9 processor.

The new HP Omen Max 16 has been equipped with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics and a unique cooling system designed to maintain optimal performance during intense gaming sessions.

A rare, limited series MSI Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth, inspired by Norse mythology was showcased. Featuring a stunning design with hand-drawn 3D dragon motifs and Nordic runes, it sports a 18-inch 4K Mini LED display along with a six-speaker audio setup and a Cherry mechanical keyboard that switches into RGB illumination for a truly immersive gaming experience.

There’s also the Gigabyte AORUS MASTER which features a new AI agent, GiMATE. Its unique “Press and Speak” feature offers a more granular hardware and software control, and also optimises battery life, acoustics, cooling and privacy protection.

Razer announced the Blade 16, redesigned to be thinner, while still packing in two extra speakers in its array, making it a total of six speakers in this edition. The high-res OLED supports refresh rates of up to 240 Hz for ultrasmooth gaming visuals.

Acer Nitro V series is also now available in various screen sizes across five different configurations, spanning a more compact 14-inch gaming laptop to a more sizeable 17-inch option.

There were plenty more new gaming handhelds showcased in CES this year; I will be writing about them in more detail in next week’s edition.

Wearable Tech

The cult-favourite Garmin Instinct 3 is here with a built-in flashlight and a brand new Neotropic (bright teal) colourway. The AMOLED display version now offers up to 24 days on a single charge while the solar charging models can go on for much longer!

Debuting at CES, the Amazfit Active 2 features a circular 1.32-inch AMOLED display with 2,000 nits of peak brightness so you can see the health metrics, exercise information and maps even under bright sunlight.

Bringing a sheen of luxury to smart rings is the Ultrahuman Rare. In three distinctive finishes — Desert Rose (rose gold), Dune (silver) and Desert Snow (gold) — the wearable tracks your sleep quality, training load, stress rhythm scores and more! It also offers a movement index which tells you when to move to optimise your metabolism.

Sound of music

LG has collaborated with will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas’ fame to launch a new range of LG xboom audio devices.

The Bluetooth speakers include the xboom Bounce, Grab and Stage 301 — which use AI to analyse the music being streamed and automatically adjust the sound profile. The speakers also feature a dedicated button for users to instantly connect to will.i.am’s RAiDiO.FYI platform.

The new FiiO JM21 portable music player is a hark back to the past with its 4.7-inch display and the ability to stream high-res audio. It runs on Android 13 and offers 32 GB of internal storage, which is more than enough to play all your favourite playlists. With a 3.5 mm jack, this pocket-sized player also tunes up to 12 hours on a single charge, so you’re never listening to static on the go!