I picked Aqara’s Smart Lock U400 and Roborock’s Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor.
It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren’t about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs.
This is what I expected the launch of the interoperability protocol Matter would bring. Once companies could stop spending time and money on working on integrating with half a dozen platforms, they could focus on developing new features and lowering prices. I only expect this to get better as more Matter device categories fill out.
Here’s a look at some of the standouts from the show floor, and check out some of the other smart home gadgets that caught my eye in our CES feed.
This is a delightful home furnishing item that is smart in a simple, useful way.
Out of the box, the Varmblixt comes with a paired Bliresa remote so you can control the warmth of its white LED lighting and switch through 12 curated preset colors.
Then, if you want more control, you can connect it to Ikea’s HomeSmart app via the Dirigera hub and take advantage of its Matter-over-Thread connectivity. This allows for more color options, brightness controls, and the ability to pair it to other smart home platforms so you can connect with lights from other brands.
The Varmblixt costs $99.99 and is scheduled for release in April 2026.
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Speaking of smart furnishings, Lifx’s new smart mirror is a dazzling piece of tech that combines utility with its signature rich-colored lighting. The mirror features front and back LEDs that illuminate your face while creating neat wall effects for home ambiance.
There are four buttons on the front for controlling a built-in de-fogging feature and running a neat makeup check. This cycles through all the colors of daylight so you can feel good about your look 24/7.
Three of these buttons can be configured to control other Lifx devices or anything connected to your smart home via Matter. So you could set it up to control your bathroom fan or robot vacuum, or your front door lock and ceiling lighting if this were in your entryway.
The mirror is slated to launch in Q2 for under $200.
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I’ve always thought the thermostat was a natural place to put a smart home hub, and Aqara has gone all in on that concept with its first-ever thermostat for the US.
The W200 is an Aqara Matter hub that uses dual-band Wi-Fi, Thread, and Zigbee, and can connect Aqara and third-party Matter devices to major smart home ecosystems.
Its touchscreen doubles as a video doorbell viewer, displaying snapshots from a connected Aqara doorbell. When paired with the new Aqara U400 smart lock, it can unlock your door from the screen.
The snapshot idea is genius, because the other implementation of this I’ve tried from Ecobee takes too long to pull up the feed. You don’t really need a livestream; you just need to see who’s there.
Built-in mmWave presence sensing wakes the screen as you approach and feeds occupancy data to the thermostat to save energy.
It’s also one of the first thermostats to support Apple’s new Adaptive Temperature and Clean Energy Guidance. This lets you use any compatible sensors in your Apple Home to automatically adjust your thermostat to save energy. Eve Systems also announced a Matter thermostat that will work with Apple’s features and will cost $129.95.
There’s no pricing for Aqara’s W200 yet, but I’m told it will be mid-range and launch soon.
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This massive, tech-packed mortise doorlock is the showpiece for a new type of wireless charging from Lockin called AuraCharge. The V7 Max works with a small plug-in puck that sits within line of sight of the lock to charge it via wireless optical charging.
I’ve tested a different solution from WiCharge and can confirm that wireless charging is a game-changer. But the real benefit of unlimited power is that it unlocks a bunch of cool features that door locks with limited power can’t dream of.
The V7 offers three biometric unlocking options: finger vein, palm vein, and 3D facial recognition. There are two external cameras powering its built-in video doorbell, and an interior and exterior touchscreen. The interior screen provides a video ‘peephole’ to see outside, and the exterior one acts as a keypad and doorbell.
You can display a personal avatar on the exterior screen to greet visitors, and the V7 features an AI-powered system called LockinAI. The company says this can intelligently monitor your front door — from recognizing and logging deliveries to tracking who enters and exits, and includes safety features for children and the elderly.
That’s a lot of tech. Plus, the V7 supports Matter to connect to your smart home platform of choice. It’s shipping later this year. No pricing has been announced, but it won’t be cheap.
LG brought a real Rosie the Robot to CES, and I love them for it, even though I seriously doubt it will ever ship.
CLOiD captured my heart at the show, mostly because the approach here is more about a robot augmenting our smart homes — filling in the gaps where smart appliances can’t reach.
I saw demos of CLOiD (slowly) folding laundry, loading a washer, putting food in the oven, and taking drinks out of the fridge — but most of its smarts come from an LG ThinQ smart home hub built into its head.
This allows it to orchestrate all the appliances — set the washer to the right setting, pre-heat the oven — without ever touching anything.
LG supports Matter and is a member of the Home Connectivity Alliance (an interoperability standard for home appliances). This means that if CLOiD ever shipped, in theory, it could work with any Matter or HCA-compatible devices in your home. That would include appliances from manufacturers like Samsung, GE, and Electrolux.
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These inexpensive smart roller blinds are both stylish and easy to install, based on a demo I saw. They use Matter over Thread, so they should offer long battery life and simple, solid connectivity with whichever smart home platform you choose.
These are an excellent example of how Matter is making it easier for manufacturers to bring new products to market. GE Lighting bought high-end window treatment company J Geiger in 2023 and retooled the product to fit a lower price point and to enable easy connectivity via the Matter standard, with no need to build a proprietary hub or bridge.
Starting at just over $300 for a 24-inch-wide shade, they’re available now in two colors, with the option of light-filtering or blackout.
We didn’t get the deluge of Matter-certified cameras I was hoping for at CES, probably because manufacturers are waiting for the platforms like Apple, Amazon, and Google to add support. But Aqara’s dual-lens G350 indoor camera is one of the first to launch.
Supporting the new Matter 1.5 spec, the G350 also doubles as a Matter controller, Thread border router, and Zigbee hub.
It’s a pan/tilt camera that offers 360-degree, 4K coverage with a 9x zoom. Footage can be stored on a microSD card or with Aqara’s optional cloud, and theoretically via whichever Matter platform you connect it to. Samsung SmartThings has announced support, but it’s not clear exactly how storage will work.
Aqara’s Home Station M410, announced at IFA 2025, can also store video footage and Aqara says it can act as a bridge device to pull feeds from older Aqara cameras into Matter.
GE Appliances’ first fully smart fridge is one of the more thoughtful approaches I’ve seen to making a connected fridge useful in the kitchen.
The GE Profile Smart 4-Door French-Door Refrigerator with Kitchen Assistant has a compact Android tablet built into the water dispenser that includes a shopping list, recipes, and meal planning features. A built-in barcode scanner and voice assistant let you easily add items to the list.
The list then syncs with GE’s SmartHQ app for shopping via Instacart. Additionally, a camera in the fridge is trained on the produce drawers. Seeing what’s in my produce doors from the store is definitely a feature I can see myself using.
I don’t think I’d find the barcode scanner useful — my grocery store app remembers my past items – I do like the voice control option for adding items to the list directly from the fridge. This worked well when I tested it and should make it easy for anyone in the house to add to the list (she says wishfully).
Meal planning on an 8-inch touchscreen embedded in my fridge door feels finicky, but following a recipe on it could be handy.
Also, GE says the panel is easily replaceable; just remove two screws, and it will pop out. So you’re not stuck with outdated tech in a $5,000 appliance.
Unlike some of my colleagues, I love a good art TV, and Amazon’s Ember Artline is an inexpensive, good-looking alternative to Samsung’s Frame TV.
Plus, it has a built-in mmWave sensor that can feed into your Alexa smart home and its Omnisense fusion platform. This could enable routines, like turning on the lights and turning off the TV when you get up from the couch.
The Ember (great name!) also features a far-field microphone array situated in a small box under the screen. Yes, the TV is an Alexa smart speaker. You no longer need to use a FireTV Voice Remote to give it commands like “Alexa, turn on the TV” – just talk directly to the screen.
A redesigned FireTV interface puts all your smart home controls in their own tab, and a shortcut button opens a side panel to quickly check your connected devices, like Ring cameras. This looks similar to the Google TV smart home panel, which I’ve found very useful.
These interface updates are coming to all FireTVs, and Amazon’s FireTV VP, Aidan Marcuss, told me they plan to add a Thread radio to FireTVs in the future. This could finally put the TV at the heart of Amazon’s smart home.
The Ember Artline is coming this spring, starting at $899 in sizes 55 to 65 inches.
Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
