10 of the coolest gadgets we saw at CES 2017

It’s difficult to narrow down everything that happened at CES this year. We met tons of promising new startups and went hands-on with brand new gadgets on the floor of the expo hall, nightly events and on our Hardware Battlefield stage. These, in no particular order, were the hottest hardware startups and most interesting gadgets from the show, and you can find our full coverage of this year’s event here.

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Plume is a wearable device that tracks pollution around you – kind of like a Fitbit for air quality if you will. It tracks particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, ozone, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), temperature and humidity. It can be clipped to a bag and is designed for people who live in big polluted cities.


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The smart toaster is here. The Griffin Connected Toaster has a slider on the app that lets you micromanage how toasty your bread is. On one side is an icon of a white piece of bread. On the other is one that’s all black. Ridiculous or brilliant?


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Checking your blood alcohol content with a breathalyzer while out with some friends might just be a party trick — but if you really wanted to know it to figure out whether or not you should have another drink, it might be awkward to pull one out. Milo Sensors is a company built around wearable sensors that detects various chemicals in your body based on perspiration from your skin with this wristband.


Kuri is an adorable little robot designed for the home. The robot is the first product from Mayfield Robotics, a startup fully owned and funded by Bosch. Kuri responds to voice input and in this way is similar to other devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo. But she responds with robot noises, lights and blinking motions. She was built to be a companion and an assistant. There’s a processor on board to handle tasks like voice and image recognition processing, and it’s programmable through tools like IFTTT to expand its feature set.


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Motiv’s fitness tracking ring has crammed a whole fitness band’s worth of functionality into a ring. The titanium-encased device tracks sleep and fitness, including steps, calories and distance. It also manages to pack in an optical heart rate sensor, boasting a battery life of three to five days on one charge.


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Wearables company Osterhout Design Group (ODG) unveiled its first consumer AR/VR glasses, the first to be built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip. The R-8 and R-9, two models of augmented/virtual reality smart glasses aimed at a wider range of consumers and light business users. The R-9 (pictured above) will ship around Q2 of this year and are priced around $1,799. They’re aimed at “light enterprise” and prosumer users for high-end smart glasses apps.


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Polaroid had a hit on its hands with the Snap. But now the company has announced Polaroid Pop, a photo-printing camera that returns to Polaroid’s iconic 3″ x 4″ size. On the rear of the device is a 3.97-inch touchscreen LCD, allowing you to see your shot before it develops. The prints look pretty great.


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Birds can be an ordeal for airports, and airports need to keep the area clear of them. Clear Flight Solutions‘ Robird is a drone that flaps its wings and scares the bejesus out of other birds to keep aviation safe. Robird is designed to mimic a raptor. It flies by flapping its wings and steers by using two tail fins. It can even glide through the air for periods of time, just like a stalking bird of prey would do.


 

The Willow breast pump lets you breast feed hands free. The device is praised for having only a few parts and being easy to set up and clean up. Its app counterpart tracks all your milk volume, time and sessions. The pump will be available in spring 2017 for $429.


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There were so many TVs at CES that its hard to stand out. But Sony’s new TV for its flagship Bravia line actually looks pretty great. It’s a 4K HDR OLED TV that Sony is calling the A1E series. The TV has an edge-to-edge design and is stand-less — meaning it sits directly on the ground and has a back leg that it leans against. This also means it doesn’t have speakers. Sony says that sound will come from the screen itself using new technology it is calling Acoustic Surface.