The CES event was held in Las Vegas earlier this month and, as always, it showcased a wide range of technology and gave an insight into what businesses in the channel might be seeing over here in the coming months.
It’s not truly the new year in the channel until CES kicks off – all tech aficionados, market analysts and product managers were keenly watching the buzz surrounding Las Vegas to see what lies in store for us in 2025.
With exciting announcements spanning from smart homes and vehicles to space tech and esports, let’s look at a highlight reel of the big waves in tech made between January 7 and 10 across the pond.
Current best in show
It was a busy year at CES, with new technology appearing across varied industries. At Stock in the Channel, we monitor several different categories in the market for trends, and the following product announcements will keep us on our toes in the coming months as we expect them to enter distribution.
Peering over the rest
With a slew of laptops being announced this year, the one that has caused the biggest stir in the market has to be the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. It is marketed as an ‘AI PC’, but its most striking feature is the rollable display screen that extends to reveal a 16.7-inch display while maintaining its slim chassis and a meagre weight of 1.69kg. Expected to hit shelves in June, we are eagerly looking forward to seeing what use cases the market comes up with given 50% more screen space in one device.
Battle of the GPUs
When the rockstar that is Jensen Huang walks out on stage at a tech convention, you know there is something big coming. This year he dropped one of the most exciting announcements of CES: NVIDIA will be releasing the long-awaited GeForce RTX 50 series in March. This series will be based on the Blackwell Architecture, using Neural Rendering to improve performance and image quality. This “most powerful consumer GPU ever created” will be integrated into notebooks from the likes of Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo.
Although this is exciting, we must not overlook its competitors – especially AMD, which revealed its next generation of graphics cards in the RX 9070 XT. Not much is known about this series, but the naming seems to be in competition with NVIDIA’s own new releases. Once this gets into the hands of reviewers, public benchmarks can be established, and we can report back about how these two beasts of the industry compare.
Monitors and displays
If you want to create a futuristic office, you need to move away from clunky displays and transition to sleek, unintrusive screens. One big challenge in this transition is hiding wiring – unless if you are the Displace TV. Calling itself the world’s first truly wireless TV, it looks impressive when mounted, but the moment its battery gets low, it apparently secretes an adhesive fluid to stay sticking to the wall… we can only hope they improve on this design.
If you are interested in a more established contender, you might want to keep your eye on LG, which revealed its G5 and M5 OLED TV models that aim to set the benchmark for premium wireless and AI-driven TVs in 2025, running on their new Alpha 11 Gen 2 processor. Another long-established player in the market that came back to make its mark (albeit much less sticky than Displace’s) was Panasonic, which revealed its Z95B OLED. Competition among OLED TVs this year will be fierce.
An exciting monitor to look out for will be the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM – one of the first 4K gaming monitors. If you want super sharp visuals and crisp text, this fourth generation of QD-OLED technology should at the top of your wish list.
Smart and secure
Smart home systems are a staple of CES, and this year smart home locks were one of the highlights. Lockly being one, bringing us a locking system that unlocks whenever your smart phone is approaching it.
Fancy a palm reading? If you truly want futuristic, TCL Smart Lock D1 Pro with AI palm vein recognition might excite you. You can unlock this smart lock by just pointing your palm at its interface. This feels like a classical tech innovation, like something Q would dream up for MI5 headquarters.
The second quarter of the 21st century
With 2025, we enter the second quarter of this century, and along with it, we can expect some futuristic new types of devices to start appearing. We hope that the following examples from the CES show floor will reach the mainstream, but currently don’t have wide consumer or enterprise adoption:
- Smart glasses, such as Rokid, offering AR that fits in sleekly with everyday life
- Switchbot. Modular, targets your specific household chores
- Humanoid robotics. Is this the next era of AI innovation?
- Razr project Arielle . Fanless heating/cooling gaming chair
- Xpeng AeroHT. While we don’t expect this to ship in the channel just yet, it does beckon to an interesting upcoming age of personal flight travel
All a-buzz for 5g
With the launch of 5G, it is no surprise that CES was filled with new devices enabled with this technology. We would like to highlight the ASUS 5G GO, being a CES Innovation Awards honouree.
Quirks of the trade
With all the talk of world-changing technologies, the following quirky devices launched made for a fresh change of pace:
- Cute robot companions – heyaime. Diffusing the talk about robots taking over the world, this range from TCL had the attendees fawning over them.
- The Mirumi handbag accessory whose head follows sound nearby. With CNN reporting that more adults bought toys for themselves in 2024 than ever, this might be the perfect addition to the Millennial and Gen Z obsession with kawaii accessories.
- Kirin Holdings spoon. Afraid that you are consuming too much salt? This spoon zaps your tongue at just the right frequency to enhance the taste of any sodium in your mouthful
- Realbotix. With devices like the Teslabot impressing us with its sleek design, companies are still working on devices that horrify you right into the uncanny valley!
Another device that falls into this category, but which may experience the quickest adoption, is the LG StandByME 2 – a portable TV that you can sling over your shoulder and set up anywhere in the house.
Ground control to Major Tom
While all these announcements are exciting, it is important to remember that the market, especially B2B, won’t adopt these technologies right away. Just like we don’t have company meetings in the metaverse using Apple Vision Pro goggles (yet…), you might still need to add more salt to your office lunch for a while before accounting approves the Kirin Holdings spoon as a deductible.
How can a company in the channel know what’s happening right now? We see the glitz and the glamour over the pond, but what is the reality of adoption within the UK channel? That is where Stock in the Channel’s Market Intelligence dashboards come into play. With an active, daily view of the market, we not only see what users want, but also how stock levels and pricing strategies in the channel are faring.
For example, so far in January we see that there is a spike in searches for the Microsoft Surface Pro 10 as well as the Seagate SkyHawk AI internal hard drive. To get your finger on the pulse of all the trends happening in the channel, please contact our BI division to book a consultation.
