As we race toward the end of the year, the specter of CES looms large on the horizon. Tech’s largest annual gathering is just a couple of weeks away, and we now have a good idea of what to expect from some of the most prominent players. The CES 2026 show floor is open to press from Tuesday, January 6, through Friday, January 9 — although the action begins with events on Sunday and a full slate of press conferences on Monday.
As always, there will be product demos, announcements, and networking at the Las Vegas Convention Center and at other hotels throughout the city. Engadget will once again be in attendance, reporting live from the Olympia exhibition center while also filing hands-on and news direct from the show floor.
Some more specific details and pre-announcements are already beginning to trickle out as CES draws near – and thanks to the CTA’s schedule, we also know what companies will be holding Press Conferences. We’re also tapping our collective experience and expertise to forecast what tech trends might emerge at the show.
What we already know about
Press conferences and show floor booths: that’s the CES bread and butter. The Consumer Technology Association has also put out a searchable directory of who will be at the show, as well as a schedule of every official panel and presentation.
To kick things off on the first day of CES, Samsung itself will be hosting “The First Look” on Sunday January 4, presented by TM Roh the CEO of Samsung’s DX Division to discuss the company’s “vision for the DX (Device eXperience) Division in 2026 and new AI-driven customer experiences.”
They’ll be followed by three more press conferences throughout Monday, January 5. LG will kick off the day with its “Innovation in Tune with You” presentation to discuss “its vision for bringing everyday life to the peak via Affectionate Intelligence.”
In the afternoon, Intel has scheduled an event to announce its new Core Ultra Series 3 processors, Sony Honda Mobility will hold a press conference to discuss its first car, and AMD CEO Lisa Su will close out the day’s events with a keynote highlighting upcoming product announcements.
The week of December 15, CTA added a keynote featuring NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. According to the website, the event will take place on January 5 at 1PM PT and run for approximately 90 minutes. According to the listing description, this presentation “will highlight the latest NVIDIA solutions for better enabling innovation and increased productivity across various industries.”
Finally, on Tuesday, Jan. 6 Lenovo CEO Yuanqing Yang will host the Lenovo Tech World Conference at Sphere; and give guests a large, apparently curved screen with which to communicate the company’s “commitment to bringing smarter AI to all by delivering smarter devices which are more capable and intuitive to help people everywhere be more productive in new work environments.” It’s worth noting that Motorola is owned by Lenovo, the company driving the mobile device and foldable markets with AI tools, so it’s also possible that those models make an appearance in the presentation, too.
Some companies, as they often do, have already jumped the gun on CES news by releasing their announcements in the weeks leading up to January. LG, for one, has announced it will introduce its first Micro RGB TV at CES. Although the details are scant, the LG press release for the Micro RGB evo confirmed that it has been certified by Intertek for 100 percent of both the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color gamuts and that it boasts “over a thousand zones” for controlling brightness.
Samsung is set to debut a full range of Micro RGB TVs, also at CES, announced today. The company has already launched its first Micro RGB TV model at CES 2025, a 115-incher you can actually buy for $30,000. Samsung will offer the next generation of this Micro RGB chip in 55-, 65-, 75-, 85-, 100- and 115-inch sizes beginning next year.
Beyond the official announcements of new products and ventures, we can read the tea leaves of what was announced last year (and what the company is rumored to be working on), and make educated guesses about what CES 2026 could bring.
New chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm.
CES often sets off a chain reaction of chip announcements for the year to come, and one of the first times new silicon will make its way into actual consumer products. AMD may use its keynote to announce new iterations of its Ryzen chips, including the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, with improved single-threaded performance, and a new Ryzen 9000G series rumored to be based on AMD’s Zen 5 architecture. The company could also leverage its CES platform to discuss its newly unveiled FSR Redstone AI upscaling tech.
Intel has already gone on record that it will debut its Panther Lake chips at CES 2026. The newly-named Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors fit within Intel’s broader “AI PC” shuffle but are intended in particular for premium laptops.
According to a preview from October 2025, the first chip produced using the company’s 2-nanometer 18A process will deliver up to a 50 percent performance increase for processing and, in the chip’s Arc GPU, 50 percent more performance than last-generation.
There are also reports that Qualcomm will target laptops at the show, where it’ll build on its work to take Snapdragon chips beyond phones and tablets into other types of computers. The company’s Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Premium chips will begin to crop up in laptops at CES 2026, providing an early look at the sort of speed and AI capabilities the firm had talked about building into that product throughout 2025.
Brighter, “truer” screens
The sets will replace the company’s previous flagship, flesh out its midrange offerings and introduce a new budget model to the lineup. Sony introduced a number of new Bravia TVs back in April 2025. Front and center is the Bravia 9, which sports a QD-OLED panel, but it looks like Sony’s also going all-out with an entirely new display technology for 2026.
In March 2025, Sony unveiled a new RGB LED panel that uses lamp-shaped individual Mini LED backlights in red, green, and blue for even brighter, more precise colors. Unlike the QD-OLED panel that filters a layer of blue organic light-emitting diodes through quantum dots that change color, Sony’s “General RGB LED Backlight Technology” can get as bright as a Mini LED panel without needing an extra filter layer or worrying about OLED’s infamous problems with burn-in.
The company has already registered the trademark “True RGB,” which may well be how Sony refers to this new display flavor, in case it decides to show them off at CES. It’s a reasonable assumption because, as much as CES is anything, it’s a TV show — you can bet we’re going to get new sets from LG and Samsung to complement Sony. If the company isn’t doing anything with new display tech for its TVs, at least it has a new 240Hz PlayStation monitor coming soon in 2026 that it can show off at CES.
Sony is not the only company keen on bright screens. Reportedly, Samsung is working on updated versions of both HDR10 and HDR10+ that could be available to demo at CES 2026. That new HDR10+ Advanced would be Samsung’s response to Dolby Vision 2, which adds features like support for bidirectional tone mapping (where the TV communicates with source devices about its capabilities) and an intelligence feature that automatically tunes sports and gaming content. SoFi’s take: Samsung will apparently offer better brightness, genre-based tone mapping, and more intelligent motion smoothing options.
Ballie Watch 2026
“Ballie,” the yellow ball-shaped robot that we met in 2020, made an appearance again at CES in 2024 – this time with a projector! Samsung said Ballie would be available to purchase in 2025 at CES last year and then confirmed in April that Ballie would ship this summer with Google’s Gemini on board. But it’s nearly 2026, and Ballie is nowhere to be found. Samsung might even trot the thing out for a third time at CES 2026, but regardless of whether or not it does, robots are here to stay at the show.
At CES 2025, robot vacuums and mops were a significant highlight of the event, and we can expect any new models that appear at CES 2026 to be no exception. Not every brand will embrace the retractable arm of the Roborock S6 Pro+, but robo-vacs with legs for mounting on small ledges, like those on the Dreame X50, on this shelf, could also become common. Roborock may also have the opportunity to flaunt its new Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow, a retractable roller mop introduced on this robot vacuum.
Besides simply becoming more economical through space, robotics’ navigation skills could also be a big focus at the show. Now, leading figures in the AI business are charting a course away from large language models and toward “world models” that equip machines with what amounts to physical intuition about the world. Those world models might be the secret ingredient to creating robots of any type, or at least those on two legs, that are capable of traversing homes and workspaces, and they will likely be a major story coming out of CES 2026.
We’ll be updating this article as new rumors emerge and products are confirmed — check back over the next few weeks!
