The top 10 products of CES 2019

This isn't the first CES where LG's rollable OLED made an appearance. But it is the first time it's been shown as a final product that's being promised to ship by year's end. Pricing is unknown and likely stratospheric, but when you see this in action, you'll just want it.

Self-driving cars of the future could free up a lot of time for commuters, and while a lot of us will probably just wind up working more, Audi and Disney think we should instead spend that time having fun. They've created a really interesting concept for a new level of in-car entertainment that might actually make us look forward to getting stuck in traffic.

There's a world of smart connected things that's growing fast. But charging tech hasn't improved much. Self-charging technology, or ways of efficiently harnessing energy from thermoelectrics and solar power, could drive watches, IoT sensors, and more. The solar- and heat-powered Matrix PowerWatch 2 promises Fitbit-level tracking. It's a demo of what else could happen next.

The evolution of smart kitchen tech has been slow and mostly awkward. The KitchenAid Smart Display looks like an exception. Google Assistant gives it an excellent guided recipe experience, and integration with Yummly opens the door to deeper connections with Whirlpool and KitchenAid appliances for anyone who wants to take another step. Whirlpool says it will cost between $200 to $300 when it launches, and even the low end of that range feels too high. If Whirlpool or a competitor can come in with a more affordable model, this feels like the kind of device that could move smart kitchen tech beyond the using a voice assistant to set a time. 

The competition for slimmest everything still seems to be raging on. This year, Acer reduced the screen bezels to less than 3mm, making the laptop's footprint smaller and allowing for a screen-to-body ratio of 92 percent. The 1.9-pound (0.9 kg) laptop gained a hair of thickness in exchange, going from 9mm to 10mm. It's got a processor upgrade as well, from a seventh-gen CPU to the eighth-gen Intel Core i7-8500Y, similar to what you'd find in a new MacBook Air. It's coming to the US in May, starting at $1,700. 

The Opté Precision Wand scans your face with a tiny camera at 200 frames per second and detects darkness like sunspots, freckles or moles. It then applies a precise amount of makeup or serum via 120 thermal inkjet nozzles inside the wand that deposit 1,000 picoliter droplets (that's one billionth of a liter) to precisely cover each spot or blemish. The result is a brushless makeup application that appears to be magically "erasing" your skin blemishes in real-time.

Google dominated CES 2019, and it used the show to unleash a long list of upgrades to its Google Assistant, which now seems to be built-in to many new products right alongside arch-rival Alexa. The 2 new features we're most excited about: The Interpreter Mode, which lets people have back-and-forth conversations among 27 languages using a Google Smart Display as the go-between, and the Google Assistant Connect program: That will unleash a new army of gadgets that act just as smart as a full-fledged Assistant product, but only because they offload all the heavy lifting on a nearby smart speaker. 

The brand-new Area-51m is as close as a laptop version of Alienware's desktop Area-51 can get. You can upgrade both the CPU and the GPU, and it's packed with all the top-end mobile components available at the moment: up to an overclockable Core i9-9900HK, GeForce RTX 2080 and 2.5Gb Wi-Fi, among other things. Pricing starts at around $2,000 when it ships the third week of January, though that's with entry-level components.

Guess what? Blood pressure tech is hard. On wearables, no smartwatch has done real FDA-cleared blood pressure tracking. Omron promised the HeartGuide last year, which used a wrist cuff, and now it's ready to go and has FDA clearance. 

VR may seem like it's dead, but it's evolving. Eye tracking is a key component: it can help measure analytics like eye gaze, improve hands free controls, and improve graphics in games. The Vive Pro's eye tracking headset arrives this year, and it's the first of many to come. This isn't the promised next-gen Vive headset, Cosmos, which we don't know a lot about. But eye tracking might be the biggest important next wave in VR and AR, period.