
CES 2025: What lies ahead in tech this year
Summary
Beyond AI, the most interesting consumer tech candidates are all focused on making technology easier to access for everyone, in all kinds of situationsBy now, it is perhaps no surprise that 2025 is the year when pretty much every single piece of consumer technology will get generous dollops of artificial intelligence (AI) infusion of some kind. To keep up with these predictions, this year’s edition of Consumer Electronics Show is now underway—and has offered a look at how technology around us is shaping up.
Beyond AI, the most interesting consumer technology candidates for the year are all focused on one particular aspect—making technology easier to access, for everyone and in every situation.
An untethered television
Keeping in line with this very principle, LG showcased a television that runs on battery, and uses flexible display panel innovation to fit inside a fairly compact briefcase. Called ‘StanByMe’, this is the second iteration of the product, and has been upgraded to offer 2K display resolution and four hours of playback time on battery. It is squarely designed to address the issue of entertainment for frequent travellers.

At the event, the company’s presentation and demonstrations highlighted how televisions in transit hotels are not ideal since users don’t want to sign in to their streaming IDs lest they forget—getting users to carry their own TVs, in this case, could make a difference.
The quirk? At $999 (~ ₹85,000), offering users a 27-inch non-4K ‘television’ isn’t super ideal. In India, a fully-stacked 55-inch 4K TV currently costs around $400, or less than half of it. Innovators refer to this as the price that early adopters pay for cutting-edge technologies.
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AI TVs and cameras
The next big trend that looks set to define 2025 is also available aplenty at CES 2025—generative AI in TVs.
The surprising headliner in this regard is Google, which defined the theme for all televisions to follow—a screen with which you can have a natural conversation. Soon to be available in a future production version of Google TV, the generative AI interface is powered by the latter’s AI models platform, Gemini.
At its CES 2025 showcase, Google showed how users can now ask their TVs to offer a summary of what news channels are broadcasting right now, without needing to surf through multiple broadcast channels or YouTube live streams themselves. Describing it further, Shalini Govil-Pai, general manager and vice-president of televisions at Google, said that the new AI TVs will “do things like create customized artwork with the family, control smart home devices while your TV is in ambient mode, and get an overview of the day’s news."
Samsung and LG, two of the world’s biggest television-makers alongside Japan’s Sony Corp, joined in on the AI TV bandwagon too—albeit with Microsoft. Their ranges of AI TVs at CES 2025 include Samsung’s ‘Vision AI’ suite on its Neo QLED 8K televisions, while LG’s latest OLED ‘evo’ models will feature generative AI along with a dedicated ‘AI remote’. Both of these models are set to be available in India, too.
US upstart Wonder, which became popular in the North America region with a ‘smart’ bird feeder, showcased a camera called ‘Petal’—which uses visual AI models to recognize flowers, birds and insects. For photographers and hobbyist nature enthusiasts alike, this could well be a dedicated implementation of Google Lens, and is highly likely to become commonplace in the near future.

Robots, robots everywhere
At the end of last year, everyone predicted that 2025 could be the year when home robots become mainstream in terms of availability and accessibility, and CES 2025 is on track to suggest so.
The first such entrant in the list of actually usable robots is TomBot Jennie—a lap dog replica that is designed to offer emotional support, without needing to be taken care of. Robotics enthusiasts have long predicted that the availability of mainstream robots would take place once natural voice interfaces take over, and their operations do not need specialized skills.

The second major robot to draw mainstream attention at the CES 2025 show-floor is R2D3—named after the iconic Star Wars droid, and built by US startup OpenDroids. With a half-humanoid body, the robot, during its presentation, was showcased as a home assistant and organization bot. It is capable of folding clothes, cleaning dishes, and even vacuuming houses—making it a potentially valuable addition for chores. The only roadblock for now is its projected retail price of $60,000 ( ₹51.6 lakh), for when it starts retailing in the US later this year.
The year of handheld gaming
As computing chips continue to become more and more powerful, the idea of PCs becoming compact enough to be carried around with one hand is finally becoming real. With the advent of ray-tracing graphics and generative AI bringing game development closer to reality than ever before, handheld gaming consoles are available aplenty at CES 2025.
The biggest showcase so far has been Acer’s Nitro Blaze 11—which runs a laptop-grade processor and a graphics chip, to offer a 14-inch handheld gaming screen. In production, it looks like the Nintendo Switch, but with a larger display. Consumer technology predictions have suggested that mainstream demand for gaming consoles can ramp up once they become more accessible than needing to be tethered to one spot—and that is what’s on show at CES 2025.
In fact, Intel too showcased a similar-sized handheld gaming console called ‘Sunday Dragon’ to showcase what its latest chips are capable of doing—with executives suggesting that similar devices are on their way to production around the world. AMD, too, showcased the Ryzen Z2 chip—which is designed specifically for the handheld gaming industry. Finally, Sony showcased a wearable headset called Xyn, which can be used for 3D designing and game development. While not a handheld console by definition, Sony’s headset is also a true implementation of what smaller chips with greater computational power can do.
Laptops, more of the same
While consumer laptops are indeed getting AI infusions in as many operations as brands can market, in reality, most devices won’t go through a dramatic transfiguration. In fact, the CES 2025 showcase of laptops from the likes of HP, Dell and others have all largely retained the conventional form factor and focused on showcasing performance prowess within slim bodies—rather than the kind of outlandish gaming laptops with liquid cooling and eye tracking that are often seen on the big stages.
All eyes were on Nvidia for its new RTX 50 series graphic chips—which are now part of many laptop lineups. Some of the more notable ones include Taiwanese brand Asus’ XG Mobile box, which is compatible with some of its slimmest gaming laptops; India market leader HP’s latest range of productivity laptops, Acer’s partially carbon-neutral models, and more.
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