The 10 Most Exciting Products At CES 2016

There were many themes at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Some were predictable—auto tech, virtual-reality, autonomous drones, and about a trillion headphones. 

There were plenty of surprises, too, including a surge in hair-regrowth tech and a proliferation of automatic cocktail mixers and wine dispensers. 

So it wasn’t easy to settle on the 10 most innovative and exciting products at CES, but we did. 

Meet the 2016 Men’s Health Best of CES award winners—the 10 products we think are going to make a difference. We can’t wait to try them ourselves.

Fitbit tackles the smartwatch challenge in a way that’s perfectly faithful to its core mission—placing fitness front and center while providing an array of useful, everyday features. 

The Blaze covers the fitness essentials, including activity tracking, run/bike/hike logging (via your synced smartphone’s GPS), and persistent heart-rate monitoring, then adds much more (integrated workouts, sophisticated sleep monitoring).

The watch also provides notifications from your smartphone and offers an array of band options—leather or stainless for the office, rubberized for workouts. 

The key coup, however, is its extraordinary five-day battery life, which no similarly capable smartwatch can touch. ($199, fitbit.com)

There were many great cameras unveiled at CES 2016, but Nikon’s brilliant KeyMission 360 action camera stealthily stole the show. The rugged, waterproof, dual-lens device captures 360-degree video and images in tack-sharp 4K resolution. 

The footage can be viewed on laptops—the user can scroll around to look in any direction—or experienced via virtual-reality headsets. 

The action camera market is intensely competitive, but Nikon’s debut achieves something nobody else has yet: high-quality 360-degree experiences from a camera you can take to the ends of the Earth. (Pricing TBD; nikonusa.com)

Samsung celebrates the fridge-as-hub-of-family-life with this incredible, sleek new appliance.

It features a huge, 21.5-inch full-HD LCD screen that’s Wi-Fi enabled and app-connected. You can use it as a bulletin board, a picture wall, or a source of entertainment via streaming audio and video.

It’s also an ideal recipe tool and shopping-list manager, letting you order food from online grocery services and even check the contents of your fridge remotely, via three cameras inside the door. Plus, it’s a looker. (Pricing TBD, Samsung.com)

Automotive tech at CES in recent years has been about autonomous driving and passenger-interface innovations. This year, BMW delivered something fresh: mirrorless technology, demonstrated in its sleek i8 hybrid sports car.

The system uses two small cameras in place of the side-view mirrors, plus cameras in the rear of the car, to stitch together a single-image view of all the activity around you. 

The image replaces the center mirror on the windshield, so drivers will need to adapt to looking there instead of to the side. But when you use it, it quickly becomes intuitive, and then actually better—the smaller side protrusions minimize wind noise, and the video stream generates more complete, blind-spot-free glimpses for drivers. (bmwusa.com)

Quadcopter drones remain the rage at CES, but it’s refreshing to finally see fixed-wing UAV’s enter the mainstream.  Parrot’s lightweight—just 1.5 pounds—Disco drone capitalizes on the benefits of having actual wings instead of wildly spinning props at every corner. 

It flies more smoothly (for tack-sharp HD video) and for longer (up to 45 minutes), and includes all the bells-and-whistles you’d want. 

Most importantly, it’s incredibly easy to use. For example, to launch, you just toss it in the air, and the Disco will circle above you until you pick up your controller and take over. Landing is also automatic—it’ll set itself down light as a feather wherever you choose. (Pricing TBD, parrot.com)

Lenovo’s already-outstanding line of Yoga laptops got a big nudge this year, with a boost in performance and battery life, and a nice slimming for good measure. 

The convertible laptop, which has an elegant “watchband” hinge that allows the screen to flip behind the keyboard, weighs just 2.2 pounds and is only a half-inch thick. The slimming comes courtesy of a more-efficient design and the inclusion of a new Intel sixth generation Core M processor, which also helps extend battery life to 10.5 hours of video playback.

The 12.5-inch multi-touch screen let you use it as a tablet or even combine keyboard use with flicks and taps of your fingers on the fly. 

Coupled with Windows 10, it’s a powerful machine for both work and play. ($1,099, lenovo.com) 

Casio has a long history of making tough watches, but this gorgeous, spectacularly full-featured new adventure-oriented smartwatch takes things to another level. The Android Wear-based WSD-F10 is water-resistant to 50 meters, meets military durability standards, and it syncs with both Android and Apple devices for notifications. 

That just scratches the surface. The crisp, colorful LCD screen presents information clearly, via an array of app options from navigation, weather info, and altitude/heading data to trekking, running, and cycling progress displays. It supports alerts, too.

The battery will last about a day under heavy use of all features, but a clever dual display means you can revert to a monochromatic LCD presentation of just the basics (time, date) to stretch battery life to up to a month. (Pricing TBD, casio.com)

LG’s new, razor-thin OLED televisions have to be seen to be believed. We’ve never seen images this clear, color this bright, and blacks this black. 

The televisions, available in 65- and 77-inch versions, use a “picture-on-glass” technique to achieve extreme thinness—just 2.57mm—and light weight. The simple, elegant design also has built-in, Harman/Kardon-designed speakers embedded in an equally attractive structural bar across the bottom. (Pricing TBD, lg.com)

Vinyl faded, but it’s having a renaissance, and Sony’s newest turntable puts a modern spin on the vintage tech.

How, you ask? Well, this analog-to-digital conversion tool lets you digitize your classic collection or bring your newest acquisitions into a mobile player, in either native DSD (up to 5.6 MHz) or WAV files (up to 192 KHz/24-bit resolution). The strategy preserves the legendary quality of vinyl audio while allowing you to control how your collection is recorded for other formats. 

The HX500 has a straight tone arm with the stylus in the central axis of the arm, which Sony says helps achieve superb stereo balance, and a high-quality two-speed belt drive system. Its minimalist design echoes the grand tradition of modernist turntable design, as well. (Pricing TBD, sony.com)

Clocking in at just a quarter-inch thick and 1.1 pounds, Huawei’s ultra-affordable 10-inch Android tablet is designed to provide an engrossing multimedia experience. 

Its four speakers (two for treble and two for bass), powerful digital amplifier, and tuning from Harman/Kardon create a rich, surround-sound effect for movies and music. 

Fingerprint recognition allows quick, secure access, and the optional stylus, the M-Pen, is precise and engineered to simulate the feeling of writing or drawing on paper. 

You can even use it to make quick screengrabs by simply drawing a circle around your target. 

Not only is this amazing tech, it’s an amazing value, as well. (From $349, huawei.com)