Coolest iPhone Tech at CES 2020

By Donna Schill Thu, 01/09/2020

Live from Las Vegas! Listen as members of the iPhone Life team share the coolest iPhone tech they found at the Consumer Electronics Show 2020, from iPhone-controlled drones to telescopes to lawn mowers.

Click here to listen and subscribe. If you like what you hear, be sure to leave a review. And remember to tune in every other week to hear our editors share with you the latest Apple news, best apps, iPhone tricks, and coolest accessories.

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Question of the week:

What do you think of our CES coverage, and which of our award winners are you most excited about? Did we miss any products you wanted to hear more about? Email podcasts@iphonelife.com to let us know.

Award winners referred to in this podcast:

All product names and prices in this list are as accurate as possible, but may change as manufacturers bring them to market.

Useful links:

Transcript of episode 127:

Donna Cleveland: Hi, and welcome to the iPhone Life Podcast. I'm Donna Cleveland, Editor in Chief at iPhone Life.

David Averbach: I'm David Averbach, CEO and publisher.

Sarah Kingsbury: I'm Sarah Kingsbury, Senior Web Editor.

Nicholas Naioti: I'm Nicholas Naioti, Video Editor and Ad Specialist.

Donna Cleveland: We've got a big group here today because we're doing a podcast live from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. We are going to tell you about the biggest tech trends in Vegas. And we're going to share all of our favorite awards that we gave out, because we go around and find the best iPhone and iPad and AirPods related gear at the show and bring that all to you.

David Averbach: Just to start with a little background here. If you haven't followed Consumer Electronics Show or our previous podcast, Consumer Electronics Show is overwhelmingly large. Over 200,000 people attend now, and basically pretty much everyone in the tech industry comes to Las Vegas at this time to announce new products and demonstrate all their products that are on the market. So we have spent the last two days walking so many miles, how many miles? I think I'm about like eight miles a day. How about you guys?

Donna Cleveland: I've averaged about 10.

Nicholas Naioti: I feel like we didn't even see everything either.

David Averbach: Oh yeah, not even close.

Donna Cleveland: After we record this today, we're going to go walk some more too. So we're not even done.

David Averbach: So we've been trying to cover this show, in particular to find the best in general, the biggest trends, but also the best iPhone products. And we've got some words to announce.

Donna Cleveland: Yes. So first, David's going to tell us about our sponsor, then we're going to tell you about the biggest trends.

David Averbach: Yeah, so today's sponsor is Jamf J-A-M-F. Jamf has a really great product for enterprise and for small businesses who have iPhones for their employees. And what it is it's a software that makes it really easy to set up devices. You can automatically load your Wi-Fi preferences for the employees, you can load the Email Setup. You can load any custom apps that you have. It makes it easy to manage these devices, and it keeps these devices secure. It's also very affordable software. So if you are somebody who has iPhones for employees, make sure you check it out, go to jamfnow.com/iphonelife.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, so now we're going to talk about the biggest trends at the show. David, why don't you get us started?

David Averbach: Yeah, well, I think the biggest trend for me was almost a lack of a trend, which is that this year felt notable in kind of the lack of innovation here.

Donna Cleveland: How exciting, David.

David Averbach: I know. Stay tuned for more. We found a lot of great products. But in previous years, when I started coming to this show, Apple used to attend, Microsoft used to attend, and they've slowly kind of dropped out. And there still are a lot of huge companies that come here like Sennheiser and Sony.

Donna Cleveland: LG and Samsung.

David Averbach: LG, yeah. There are a lot of great products, but it felt like this year there wasn't like any breakthrough products to hang your hat on that says this year is the year of x. Usually in past years, I felt like there were those breakthrough products that everybody in the show was excited about. And this year, there's a lot of great products. I'm excited to tell you about them. But there wasn't like a big picture like breakthrough. And Donna, I think you had a thought on why that was, right?

Donna Cleveland: Well, yeah. I think a lot of the big tech companies are getting ready for the rollout of 5G, the 5G network in big cities. And so whether they're actually involved with developing that, or they are developing products that will be useful with 5G, that means it's not really ready to show here. There were a lot of like signs involving 5G on the central show floor that we looked at yesterday, but nothing really quite ready.

Donna Cleveland: But there are a lot of like connected products like the Internet of Things which apparently 5G is going to make a lot faster and a lot smarter and like products be able to communicate with each other more easily. But yeah, I think some examples of past years where there were new trends that were exciting that now are not, like driverless cars, that's still something that hasn't really been rolled out. And there were some yesterday, but it doesn't feel like that's been moved that much further, either.

Donna Cleveland: It's like, yes, driverless cars are a thing. And probably in the next 10 to 15 years it's going to be something that is very normal. But it wasn't like there was a huge breakthrough in driverless cars this year. Same with smart home, that's something that I mean now is ... Well actually, I feel like smart home has hit more of like a place where it's more useful than it used to be. So that's cool.

David Averbach: Yeah, to me, actually, smart home was something that I don't think there ... I agree with you there wasn't really a breakthrough product for smart home. But to me, this was the year where smart home felt like it was finally going to be coming to the masses. I've written about smart home every year for the past few years, and I always start my articles with the disclaimer that this stuff's really expensive. It's really a pain to set up. It's kind of more for enthusiasts than it is for the everyday consumer.

David Averbach: In this year, walking around the show floor, so many people had smart home products, and they all seem like they're getting more affordable, easier to set up and manage. And so I am excited about that trend. I do feel like that in the coming few years, and this year in particular, that it's going to start being something that most people have in their homes as opposed to something that like only the tech geeks of the world have in their homes.

Nicholas Naioti: Sure. One of the cool ones we saw Bosch made a fridge that takes a photograph of everything inside of your fridge, and then you can kind of use an app to get recipes for that, which would be really useful while you're at the grocery store like shopping. You can know what's in your fridge.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, the Apple that it connected with was called shuffling. And it's something that usually people just use, they use a barcode scanner to scan everything after the store but to me, that's an extra step I wouldn't do just because that's a lot of work.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: But with the fridge it'll tell you it takes a photo or footage of what's in your fridge and it can recognize. It seemed very accurate.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: All the items in your fridge, it can even tell you when they're expiring based on crowdsourced data of like how long a tomato usually lasts in someone else's fridge or whatever. And so that was pretty cool, and it'll ... I was curious where they get the recipes from and if the recipes are good. But it was cool and then can go Connect if you choose the recipe, if you have the Bosch oven, then it can start preheating your oven for that specific recipe. Sarah has feelings about this.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, I mean, I think that that would be really cool for someone who follows recipes. But I usually like anytime I'm cooking something it's usually a combination of several recipes and I may have decided that I'm going to bake it at a different temperature and all those things, and I wonder how much room there is for manual adjustments that I also felt like I'd already given the smart lawn mower guy a hard time and I refrained from giving the fridge guy a hard time.

Donna Cleveland: Sarah had all the hard questions, but Sarah is a really ... That's a good question with a lot of these things, like does it actually work in real life scenarios? And you're more of a home chef than I am, so those are good questions to ask.

David Averbach: I think the real life scenario I'm excited about for the smart kitchens, and they've had this for a number of years now, is the cameras inside the refrigerator so that when I am in the grocery store, I can check to see if I have something in the refrigerator. That would be really convenient.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah.

David Averbach: Nicholas, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. This is Nicholas's first CES.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. [inaudible 00:07:41].

David Averbach: Donna, Sarah and I are a little bit jaded at this point in case it didn't come across. What are your thoughts on CES so far?

Nicholas Naioti: It's been really fun. It's kind of overwhelming. Everywhere you look, there's stuff. There's screens and stuff and people everywhere, so many people. But it's been cool to see the trends. I mean, foldable screens we saw this year, which is interesting. I don't know how practical it is. But we saw like a TV that rolls up into like a box, which is pretty cool. You could keep your living room a little neater that way. We saw a ton of wireless charging stations. That seems to be a huge trend. AirPod type, sort of like ...

David Averbach: Wireless ear pods.

Donna Cleveland: Competitors, yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, true wireless earbuds. It's been good, though. It's been interesting. It's wild.

David Averbach: I do think one of the things in actually attending the show that tends to kind of jump out at people. When you read about the show online, you see only the highlights. And when you're here, there's so many of the booths that just have junk, like stuff that they don't care about that they're just sort of trying to like make a few bucks on. You kind of have to spend some time parsing through to find the real thing. I think that's why we kind of can sound a little jaded by it is there are a lot of booths here that don't have anything cool at all, you know? Sarah, how about you? What are your thoughts from CES?

Sarah Kingsbury: I feel like you guys kind of summed it up. There's not like any huge surprising things. I feel like as far as cases and like AirPod cases, and iPad cases, they're all just kind of like, the winners of that competition have kind of settled into it. People buy those and then there's all the knockoffs, and so there's not anything really exciting in that regard.

David Averbach: I do feel like yeah, as far as iPhone and iPad trends in our little niche industry here, I think you guys both hit the nail on the head. Number one, the lack of cases was pretty shocking. There's so few cases out there that are ... I mean, there's a lot of cases out there, but there's so few companies coming out with breakthrough new cases.

David Averbach: Everybody has their lineup and that's that. The other thing is a couple of trends from previous years were like speakers and headphones, and this year there were the wireless earbuds but there weren't a ton of speakers or headphones really out there. And everybody went so all in on the wireless charging, like every booth we went to has wireless charging.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, a few other cool products I just wanted to mention before we get into some of our awards, is like the foldable phone, I think it was the Samsung fold something. I can't remember what the exact product name was. But Nicholas just mentioned these foldable screens. And in previous years we had seen from LG already bendable smart TVs and I think that's really nice for a living room where you don't want the TV to be the centerpiece.

Donna Cleveland: You can roll it away and then when you want to watch something, it comes up and these 8K screens were really gorgeous. We went and walked around and the amount of detail you can see is incredible, although we were saying it's a little hard to tell how much is the TV and what setting and how much is like the settings they've used on these TVs because they really turn up the saturation. I have like almost CGI type nature scenes that you don't know, it's like is that even real what I'm looking at? But it still was really cool.

David Averbach: I will say though, it was cool and I love TVs. I'm not going to lie, I love seeing all the new breakthrough in TVs. When I first saw 4K when it was announced at this show, I saw it and my thought was this is going to change the world. Everybody's going to have 4K, because the resolution was so much better than a standard TV. When I look at 8K, I have a hard time telling between what's 8K and what's 4K. It is better.

Donna Cleveland: I had these bits that you have to have a TV of a certain size, I think it was bigger than 60 inches or something in order for 8K to be visually any different. It's like you have to have a huge TV for 8K to be worth it, and that made sense to me.

Sarah Kingsbury: One interesting thing about those super high res TVs is that like the stuff doesn't actually look real anymore. You're almost like, is this animated because it's so just like the colors are just so intense and the details are just so intense and then you're like, is this real? It's hyper real.

David Averbach: It's funny because I was telling these guys when we were looking at the LG booth, I eventually ... Like I said, I love TVs. I got inspired and I went and bought a 4K OLED TV eventually because I loved it. And the first thing I did when I got it was to go into the settings and turn off every one of those settings that makes all the contrast, all the colors look so crazy. It looks really cool on the show floor. It is interesting, I actually ... The experts like all recommend turning that off if you actually want to watch the TV.

Sarah Kingsbury: It's almost really like watching TV on drugs. I mean I'm guessing.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I know, it's like psychedelic.

Sarah Kingsbury: I'm guessing that that's what it would be like.

Donna Cleveland: Is there like a lot of content that is 4K supported? I don't have a 4K TV.

David Averbach: Yeah, there is. I bought a 4K Apple TV, and most of what I'm streaming is 4K at this point because Netflix has really gone all in 4K. Disney Plus has a lot of 4K content. So at least half if not more of the content I watch is 4K.

Donna Cleveland: Cool. And you still notice a big difference.

David Averbach: Yeah, I do. I really enjoy it when it's 4K.

Donna Cleveland: So this foldable screen, I just want to explain a little bit more. So it's a smartphone that if you unfold it, it's basically like a tablet sized kind of square shaped screen and you can watch like movies and stuff on it. And then if you shut it, there's a little screen on the front that makes it seem more like a regular smartphone that you're used to seeing these days.

Donna Cleveland: We went and played around with it for a while and we were kind of skeptical. We thought like when you unfold it, you would see the crease down the middle all the time. And from far away, you sort of could see that there was a crease in the middle but it was surprisingly like a good viewing experience I thought.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if Apple jumps on the foldable screen thing.

Donna Cleveland: I kind of don't think they will.

David Averbach: Yeah, there's something inelegant about it.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. I feel like a lot of these companies, Android companies will do phones that are it seems more like a novelty or something. I feel like Apple is not going to do a novelty product.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Speaking of Apple, are you finished talking about the TVs?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: One sort of trend I noticed, I felt like a lot more people were having like, Apple exclusive versions of their products that seemed new. And it's like, I don't know if Apple's decided to just kind of try and control the accessories more but give us more options because historically, I found the options available on Apple site not as awesome. But it is annoying because they are like yes. And then we have this white Apple exclusive version. So Apple is like we're going to control the accessories to the point where you don't actually get colors.

David Averbach: Yeah, to get back to the foldable screens for a minute. I feel like I both loved the foldable screen in that it was one of the few things here that felt truly innovative and I hadn't seen it before, created something out of the box and new and kind of experimental. I would love to see more of the tech industry doing that as opposed to playing it safe.

David Averbach: That being said, in this iteration, at least, it felt like something I did ... When it was folded up, it was pretty heavy and clunky. When it was unfolded, it was this kind of weird square shape that ... I didn't love it, but I love that they did it.

Donna Cleveland: David, I don't know if you saw LG had a similar product that was like a dual screen, and it was enormous though. I think that Sarah, Nicholas and I saw it. You opened it up like a little book and then you had-

Sarah Kingsbury: [inaudible 00:15:43].

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. You had a screen on either side, and then so you can ... It's like having a dual display monitor.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it was like two iPhones connected by a hinge or something.

David Averbach: Whoa.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, but it's like you couldn't even fit it in your pocket.

Sarah Kingsbury: But it wasn't removable. You couldn't be like I don't want a second screen, and so you're stuck with this incredibly clunky phone.

Nicholas Naioti: No, it's not removable.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, and we saw-

Sarah Kingsbury: I accidentally almost removed it, but ...

Donna Cleveland: We saw a couple of other products that had dual screen, things like that, some of the smaller evening shows we went to and all of them felt kind of inelegant at this point, but it seems to be something that companies are experimenting with right now that's a trend, and maybe ... I mean, I guess I don't feel the need to have more screen real estate with my phone. But it would allow more productivity I suppose.

Nicholas Naioti: Maybe. That was a trend we saw multiple screens.

Donna Cleveland: They showed like you could do things like be playing a movie and then on your other screen, be looking up the actors on IMDb or you could be texting a friend while you're watching something.

Sarah Kingsbury: So basically having an iPad because you do all those things on an iPad, right?

Donna Cleveland: I know.

David Averbach: But in your pocket because it folds.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, but you have to have big pockets.

Donna Cleveland: We've covered a lot of the big trends, we did see some cool driverless cars like Sony came out with a driverless car, and that was the one that I thought looked the coolest. It looked like a cooler Tesla to me.

David Averbach: Well, and Sony is interesting because we talked to them and they didn't ... It sounded like Sony is not necessarily planning on getting into the automated car space. It was more that they brought this car out there to make a point and let the industry know that all of the sensors that are being used in self-driving cars, Sony is making. I was interested by that because I had no idea that that was the case. But yeah, it was fun seeing that. I'm so excited about self-driving cars in general.

Donna Cleveland: Nicholas, tell us about the weird ... We saw, it was like an LG product I think. The LG ThinQ, with a Q. Their ThinQ line and one of them had driverless cars.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, LG and I think maybe Samsung also had these weird kind of clunky like shuttle self-driving cars that look ... I don't know. They look like the Scion or whatever the car is that looks like a toaster. But like bigger and bulkier and it's a really weird design. It's not sleek at all, but I think they're designed to be like shuttles for people where there's not-

Donna Cleveland: Like a self-driving Lyft or Uber.

Nicholas Naioti: Sure, sure, like a small bus. But that was interesting.

Donna Cleveland: Or we can just invest in the infrastructure, like public transportation.

David Averbach: That'd be nice.

Donna Cleveland: Just going to throw that in there. But yeah, the chairs actually looked kind of like public transportation. It looks almost like an airplane seat. And you can take get a ... What was the thing with the Sprite?

Nicholas Naioti: Oh, yeah, there was a guy giving a huge demo of it. And he was like, look what happens when I pull out a Sprite from the console. It automatically charges me $2.

Sarah Kingsbury: He was like extremely excited about that.

Donna Cleveland: Everyone's like, yay. But it seemed like you'd have your little entertainment system in there. There was a TV you could watch and choose what you're watching. You could like get a beverage and chill and I guess it would all probably charge to your Apple Pay or something. I guess no, this was an Android. So I don't know how it'd work. But okay, I think we've talked enough about trends. We should talk about some of the craziest stuff we saw before we go any further.

David Averbach: Oh man. Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Before we move on, another trend that we saw that sort of became an inside joke was audio that you can hear the way the artist intended.

Donna Cleveland: Oh, yeah. We heard that line repeated like every booth we went to that had audio products.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, every booth, every headphones. You can hear it the way the artist intended.

Donna Cleveland: Nicholas, explain to us what that means.

Nicholas Naioti: It doesn't mean anything.

David Averbach: I think we were speculating that it was a little bit of a reaction to the Beats by Dre phenomenon, because Beats by Dre when those headphones came out, they took the bass and they really turned it up. So it's kind of a distorted way of listening to sound, which some people like especially if you like hip hop.

Donna Cleveland: I like.

David Averbach: I hate it. I actually am such a sucker for that line, "Audio the way the artist intended." I want the pure version of it. But I think it was a little bit of reaction to that trend to say no, now we're actually having a balanced sound. But it sounds much better to say the way the artist intended.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah. I think it's a good thing that we're moving toward more flat EQ. That is a good thing, and that's something people are wanting. But like, increasing the bass responses has its place, Beats by Dre sound good for hip hop and stuff.

Donna Cleveland: Well, we had a demo yesterday of these Sony headphones that now they take photos of your ears to deliver what they call 360 degree sound that's tailored to you. And so we had a demo that had like the before and after, and I noticed in the before the bass was higher, and to me the sound it just sounded more like full. And then when they switched to the way the artist intended with a 360 degree sound, it felt much more like you're in the room with a band, but it was like they turned the bass was down.

Donna Cleveland: It was cool though, because I felt like you could ... It seemed like the instruments were coming from different places. The voice was coming from somewhere and it felt much more like you were in a concert. Who else tried it? Sarah, you did?

Sarah Kingsbury: I tried it. Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: What did you think?

Sarah Kingsbury: I agree with what you just said. Yeah, the difference between the bass was very noticeable. I kind of wondered like, did they up the bass like, originally in the first song because they played us the same song, but just-

Donna Cleveland: Marvin Gaye, Sexual Healing.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, because I don't remember it being that high. It's been a while since I listened to that song just on my own. But yeah, I enjoyed both experiences a lot actually.

Donna Cleveland: I feel like I was like, where'd the bass go? Which was not what the guy wanted to hear. Okay, so what were some of the kind of just most out there products that you guys saw?

Sarah Kingsbury: Okay, the one that I thought was the stupidest, I mean, there is like several but was the toilet paper robot.

Donna Cleveland: The Charmin toilet paper robot.

Sarah Kingsbury: Charmin has this robot that if you're on the toilet and you realize you don't have toilet paper, they're definitely acknowledging that people bring their phones to the toilet. You can like text this robot and it will bring you a roll of toilet paper. Which I don't know, because you'd have to unlock and open the door, I'm assuming or ...

David Averbach: Yeah, true.

Sarah Kingsbury: And then Donna was like, would it go and get the toilet paper? And they're like, no, you have to have already loaded it on it. And I'm just like, or you could just keep toilet paper like within reach of your toilet. I don't know. That just seems way less expensive and actually easier.

Donna Cleveland: Why not restock the toilet paper where it belongs instead of onto the robot?

Sarah Kingsbury: Right?

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it's so funny.

David Averbach: My house has two bathrooms, one's upstairs, one's downstairs, like does the robot handle the stairs? Do I have to have two robots just for toilet paper?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Another really funny kind of silly one was the suitcase that sort of follows you.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. Sort of.

David Averbach: It works really hard to try to follow you.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah. It's like luggage that you could ostensibly not have to carry with your hand. But then you're like having to watch it and make sure it's still behind you. The following technology was not great. It was like becoming disconnected kind of often.

Donna Cleveland: It was like zigzagging around behind the person.

Sarah Kingsbury: It had like obstacle detection, but I don't know how much that really takes into account that obstacles that are people tend to try and stop being obstacles and move and so then there's that zigzagging around each other thing.

David Averbach: It was a crowded show and so it kept getting in people's way. All of a sudden just people walking and there'd just be like a suitcase in front of you and somebody walking next to you trying to get the suitcase to follow it. It was really bizarre.

Nicholas Naioti: I remember we were looking at some product and I feel like the suitcase just by itself rolled in between us.

Donna Cleveland: There was some really angry man trying to explain to them that TSA ... It will be like the fastest way to get TSA to stop you was having unattended baggage following you around in an airport.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, that's funny too.

David Averbach: Yeah, that one I didn't agree with it. It felt like mostly attended luggage.

Sarah Kingsbury: I felt like that man had an agenda, which was to really hate that suitcase.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I saw him trolling on a couple other booths too, just giving them a hard time. Another product that was crazy, was very weird was this cooler that was supposed to be like a hoverboard. But the battery took up so much space that it could only fit maybe like three or four beers in there.

Sarah Kingsbury: I think he said a dozen.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, but it was like probably only a third of the cooler was available. And then the rest of it was for the hoverboard. And it looked extremely dangerous because it was a motorized thing you'd like balance on a top of a cooler on top of one wheel and it showed this demo, or a video of this guy flying down a highway on it.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, the live demo was just the guy he like sat on the cooler. And I was like, if I were 10 I'd be so into that.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: We really needed that, we really needed to create that object.

David Averbach: I think one of the weirdest ones I saw was by Bic. And they had these razors. And the razors had like AI and sensors in it to basically track every single razor blade stroke you made on your face, also the humidity in the room, and a whole bunch of other factors. But it didn't sound like they were going to do anything with that information except give it to Bic to then analyze and try to make better razors, I guess, which was like, why am I paying to get this razor so that Bic can stock my shaving habits?

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it was such a bad sell. Yeah, why do you need ... I mean, we don't ... I don't know why [inaudible 00:25:53].

Sarah Kingsbury: I was confused by them because they just accosted us and basically forced me to take a pen and a temporary tattoo pen and a razor. There was just no choice about it. Donna got out of it because they trapped me.

David Averbach: But she didn't get out of a temporary tattoo.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, we both have temporary tattoos now, so thanks Bic.

Donna Cleveland: I want to talk quickly about also the difference between tech made by women for women and just tech for women. We don't need to call out any specific companies necessarily, but it was really cool to see Willow, it's a smart breast pump, and that was created by women. It's something that seems like it would really help solve problems.

David Averbach: How did it work?

Donna Cleveland: It worked via Bluetooth, I believe and it was something that didn't ... It just like fit in under a regular bra, and so you could be pumping breast milk while you're running a marathon.

Sarah Kingsbury: The original breast pumps were like these really big, very noisy contraptions. You had to carry the little unit and then they were like tubes and like section things, and it was just really uncomfortable, and there's no way you could ever be discreet about it. And then, this does things to maximize your output, which is actually really important. It's not as easy to produce as much milk if you're pumping versus breastfeeding. And so it's a big deal because it takes all this time, and it's kind of a burden for the person who's pumping. And so I really appreciated that. It would have been great 20 years ago.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, and the app did cool things too like, you could set a schedule of how often you are using the pump and get reminders and things like that, and track your output. I don't have any kids, but I feel like talking to other women, even just keeping track of the schedule can be pretty burdensome. Some people, they have low output or trying to nurse like every hour on the hour and having a smart technology that could help you with that, I think is really cool. On the other hand, so that was really cool.

David Averbach: In contrast.

Donna Cleveland: In contrast, we saw other things where it would just be a regular product that was like bejeweled, and then they'd be like, see, like, we're trying to get more women to buy our products. And it's like, cool.

David Averbach: There was one company in particular that was extreme in this, where they literally just explicitly were like, "Well, our audience seems to be male, so we're trying to get more female customers. So we added fake crystals." And it just looked so hideous, and it was so clearly just like not well thought out.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: I mean, I think that kind of thinking really speaks to the actual structure within a company because if you had women who were able to offer input on those kinds of things, I think you wouldn't have that type of product happening.

Nicholas Naioti: Very true.

David Averbach: Absolutely.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, let's get into the best of CES awards from iPhone Life.

David Averbach: Let's do it. Just a disclaimer, as we're pulling these up, we give away 20 to 30 awards. Actually, we're still covering the show today and we'll give a few more away. So we will have a full list of all of the winners on our website coming soon. And so make sure you check that out because we're just going to cover some of the highlights today. But for a full list, make sure to stay tuned. When can they expect that, Sarah?

Sarah Kingsbury: I don't know. I mean, I'm going to work on it today. I'm relying on people getting me like press kits and photos and then I have to send it to our art director too.

David Averbach: So maybe sometime next week?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yes.

David Averbach: Okay. Sounds good.

Donna Cleveland: The first product we want to talk about is Hatch, and that is ... Who wants to talk about it?

Nicholas Naioti: I loved this thing.

Sarah Kingsbury: So specifically it's Restore. That's the name of the product.

Donna Cleveland: Okay.

Nicholas Naioti: Oh, Hatch is the company and it's-

Sarah Kingsbury: Called Hatch, which is for like -

Nicholas Naioti: For babies.

Sarah Kingsbury: Training your kids go to bed.

Donna Cleveland: This one was called Restore and it's for grownups. I don't really know, it's hard to put it in a product category because it did a lot of different things. But it is a smart alarm clock. It also is a white noise maker. It is similar to a sad lamp for seasonal disorder. It doesn't have quite the same level of light, but it does that also. So you can set it on a light routine to help wake you up and to help give you some of that boost that you need in the winter. What else did it do? It did a lot of cool stuff.

Sarah Kingsbury: It can help you sort of set up a bedtime routine like turn on a reading light for like half an hour before I go to sleep. If I wake up during the night, you can choose for it to take you through a guided meditation. But you don't really have to interact with it a lot after you set it up. It was one thing that seemed to me, which I think is kind of cool. I don't like technology that makes me work.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, you sleep best when you're on a routine and it can wake you up like by kind of slowly increasing the light, and then sort of start making some kind of like gentle sounds and then more of an alarm sound when you like really need to get up. I think that just seems like a really cool product.

Donna Cleveland: You customize it through an iPhone app, but it's actually meant ... It's set up to be once you've set it up to not have your phone in the room, because the woman who created it was saying that it's not ideal to be using your phone at night. And a lot of times, even if you're going to check the time on your phone, you're like, oh, someone texted me. Suddenly, I'm on Instagram in the middle of the night.

Nicholas Naioti: Sure.

Donna Cleveland: And so I thought that was cool. She had set up a thing on there too, where if you wake up in the middle of the night, you can tap it and it would take you through like a quick guided meditation to help you fall back asleep like things like that.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: One thing, in our determination of who to give awards to, we were like, if it's a product all of us want for ourselves, that's probably a good sign. And this was one all of us were like wanting to try.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Definitely.

David Averbach: So next one, I'll tell you guys about this one. This was the Scosche Baselynx. And like we said, one of the themes of the show in general was wireless charging. So we saw a lot of wireless chargers and people in general, I felt like did a good job making them look sleek. Most of the wireless charges were three in one. So it was a pack for your Apple Watch, a little charging area for your AirPods, and a traditional little charging mat for your iPhone.

David Averbach: The thing though, that made this one stand out was it was modular. So everybody has a different range of products that they want to charge. And if you happen to have all three of those products, and only all three of those products then the three in one solution is perfect for you. But most people either don't have all three of those products or they have more than that. And so what Scosche did was create a modular solution where you basically buy little sections.

David Averbach: So you buy each of the charging sections individually, and then you can connect to them. So for me on my nightstand, I have an Apple Watch, my partner has an Apple Watch. And I also have a Kindle that I want to charge sometimes. And so there's always some mess of cables everywhere. And yet a three in one doesn't really solve that for me.

David Averbach: So I was really excited for this, the ability to customize what the layout is in my charging. Because it's one of those little challenges in life that everybody deals with that we own so many electronics that it's such a mess of cables on our nightstand or wherever we charge and it looks ugly, and it's hard to really get to a place where it's both useful and doesn't look terrible. I felt like this solved that.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it was really sleek. The modules looked cool. It's neat. You can kind of build your own setup based on what products you have.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: I feel like it's good too acknowledging that there are a lot of different Apple devices at this point and everybody has their own different collection, because other times where there's charging stations that's not built for your exact setup. That's not that useful, you know?

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Next product is the Belkin Soundform Elite. This is the one that Nicholas was really wild about.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, I was really in love with this. It's a Bluetooth speaker and charging station for your phone. But it has woofers on each side of it. The frequencies sort of cancel each other out, so you can get a really loud volume but without the station kind of like rattling. There's no vibration. It just sounded so good too. I'm really, really hoping to get one of these.

David Averbach: Belkin made this product, and Belkin, their sister company is Devialet who they did the sound for them, and I used to have a Devialet speaker. Devialet speakers are typically like two to $3,000 and they use the same technology for bass, which is instead of having a traditional woofer, it's like they called it implosion technology where literally you can see the speaker move in and out to make the bass sound.

David Averbach: But a, it sounds really crisp in a way that it's hard to do with traditional woofer, especially on a speaker of that size, b, as Nicholas was saying, it doesn't rattle, which is particularly important if you're putting a phone on top to charge. And it was rare that I saw a speaker that had a phone charging on top. First of all, I didn't see it at all, but like, usually when I do I don't think I'm interested in that. But they pulled it off in a way that seemed like it'd be really useful and also the speaker sounded great.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah. The main place I've seen wireless charging with speakers is like alarm clock speakers.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it was a sleek design, looked really good, sounded amazing.

Sarah Kingsbury: Has Google Assistant right now, but Alexa and AirPlay too are coming later in the summer. So that's exciting.

Donna Cleveland: What was the price on that?

Nicholas Naioti: I think it was 299, and it comes out in March.

Donna Cleveland: They had like a mini version that was like 49 too, so that's nice. That was a wireless charger, wireless speaker combo too.

David Averbach: I had two thoughts. First of all, I was personally less impressed by the mini version. Because the thing that was so great about the one we give the award to was it sounded so great. The mini version was particularly bad sound in my opinion. Also, my recommendation if you all are interested in this particular product, I would wait until ... Well it might be a software update, in which case you could probably buy it in March. But I think having it with AirPlay is really important. And I would make sure that when you buy the speaker if you're interested, wait until you know that it's AirPlay compatible because that's really an awesome feature for iPhone users.

Sarah Kingsbury: It really is.

Donna Cleveland: My impression was that it wasn't software update.

David Averbach: I agree.

Donna Cleveland: That it was they're coming out with new ones in the summer.

David Averbach: Yeah, so that would be my ... If you are interested in this product to wait for that. What do we have next?

Donna Cleveland: STM.

David Averbach: Okay.

Donna Cleveland: STM ChargeTree.

David Averbach: So this was the second, we gave a few of chart ... We went through and tried to really find unique charging solutions because there were so many that weren't unique. And what we loved about this one was it had a different layout. Most of them were a flat mat where you could fit all three things. The problem with that-

Donna Cleveland: They would take up a lot of space.

David Averbach: They take up a lot of space. And so a lot of people like to keep their phone right next to them on their nightstand. But usually you don't have a lot of room on your nightstand. In general, we don't have a lot of room on tables and desks and nightstands where we charge. So this one was vertical, which was really nice because it still is a three in one. It had a space for an AirPod, it had space for an iPhone. Or you could do two iPhones if you wanted.

David Averbach: And being vertical, you could have your iPhone vertical in charging, which is nice. So you can actually see the screen if you want to. Some people like to see the notifications that come in while charging. And it had a space for the Apple Watch, of course, but the main thing we liked was the layout meant you could put it in a smaller space where you normally wouldn't have a charging mat and it looked really nice.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, kind of everywhere we went at CES we saw these charging mats and they were just kind of this lump. And it's like why lump. This, we were really struck by the aesthetic of it and the space efficiency.

Sarah Kingsbury: This is not unique to this product, but it's something I've noticed, they finally are moving away from the bring your own puck thing for Apple Watch.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Which was so annoying because it's like buy this expensive product but also supply your own charger for it.

Donna Cleveland: You have to snake it through.

David Averbach: My understanding was that wasn't really by choice. It was that there weren't any MFI certified third party pucks, and so there was no way to have a charger for an Apple Watch that wasn't buying a cable from Apple. Whereas now they have that solution which is why they can do it. But I agree. I hated the snaking the Apple cable through on this expensive dock and the fact that you don't have to do that anymore is like-

Sarah Kingsbury: So much assembly required.

David Averbach: Makes me want to dock so much more.

Donna Cleveland: Next, we'll tell you about a Brydge Pro+ PRO Plus. Brydge makes Bluetooth wireless keyboards for the iPad. And they had a development that was very exciting. Why don't you guys tell us about it? Nicholas and David are the ones who got especially excited because they both have iPad Pros.

David Averbach: I was excited about this one. So I just wrote about iPad gear in the buyer's guide and Brydge was my favorite wireless keyboard by far. And they added a mouse to it, which-

Donna Cleveland: The trackpad.

David Averbach: Trackpad. Thank you. And what's cool about that is, for those of you who don't know, in the accessibility settings in your iPad, they now-

Donna Cleveland: In iPad OS 13.

David Averbach: In iPad OS 13, they now have a mouse functionality and it actually works pretty well. And so I was really excited that somebody actually built a trackpad into an iPad keyboard because it allows you to actually pretty easily use a mouse in an iPad, which I hadn't done very much, and also, like, if I'm traveling, I'm not going to carry a mouse with me just for an iPad. So having it built into the keyboard was really nice.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, it's really cool. They come in like space gray and the Apple colors. They fit neatly with your iPad so that the iPad kind of swivels open like a screen and it feels like you have a little MacBook. And just looks and feels really good.

Donna Cleveland: It has a magnetic case that sticks to the back, right?

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I think this is one of the glaring absence, like for a long time, we've talked about the iPad and how it's really hard to use it as a laptop replacement. And this definitely helps bridge that gap, Brydge that gap a little bit. I will say having played with it, I was excited about it. But I also think it's still really limited to the mobile OS that runs on the iPad. It's like navigating around still just isn't the same as on the laptop and you're kind of expecting it even more because it looks like a little laptop.

Donna Cleveland: I will say that and you have to customize it like, clicking twice on the trackpad to take you back to the home screen and like little things like that, that you have to set up on your own. And it's going to work a little differently than when you're actually using a laptop. So in some ways, I feel like it's a great product. But if you are buying it thinking it's going to make your iPad a laptop, it's not going to.

David Averbach: They were actually like a little bit apologetic about it, which was funny because they just ... It obviously has nothing to do with Brydge. It's just the Apple's operating system. Apple's very much just experimenting with a mouse and they're claiming it's just for accessibility. But I do think that it was actually more useful than I expected. There are some mouse shortcuts which I didn't know and gestures you can do, but also I'm guessing that with iPad OS 14, that they will have a full mouse or coming soon. So this is definitely future proofing your keyboard as well.

Sarah Kingsbury: I actually feel like this is one of the products because like we said there wasn't like a huge amount of innovation especially for the iPhone and iPad stuff, just a lot of chargers. This is one of the products that actually was like doing something exciting and new.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, I agree.

Nicholas Naioti: I was really impressed with it. It feels really good. It looks really good.

David Averbach: It hit the sweet spot of being something that we all wanted and was exciting, new and innovative.

Donna Cleveland: And that costs $200 for the 11 inch pro and 229 I believe for the 12.9 inch. Once we have the blog post up, I'll add that to the podcast notes if you go to iphonelife.com/podcast. Next we have the Moen FLO. Sarah, do you want to tell about that?

Sarah Kingsbury: The Moen FLO is a smart faucet that basically lets you request a specific amount of water at a specific temperature, which if you have ever baked bread is a really awesome thing, especially if you actually don't want to touch the faucet because you're in the middle of baking. But also you can use it for things like preparing baby bottles, or you just want like water at a certain temperature to drink.

Donna Cleveland: It was so cool because you used to be like, "Alexa, I'd like two cups of water at 101 degrees," and then it just dispenses it.

David Averbach: I have a friend who has the low tech version of this, where basically they just have hot water on tap and you just like you would purified water. It's like the perfect temperature for tea. I'm so jealous of that. I would use this all the time just to have like ... I mean, some teas you want boiling water too steep, but a lot of the herbal teas, you just kind of want pretty warm water and having it instantly available to you at the exact temperature you want is awesome.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Next we have the Nicholas award, we kind of unofficially let each of us choose a product that we loved the most.

David Averbach: Explicitly because we obviously all chose all of these. This is the product that we loved, but we couldn't quite just ... or had a hard time giving a traditional best CES award to, because either some of us hated it, or it was just one particular product that we were really excited about.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, so this was, I'm a telescope owner. And when I get out my telescope at parties, it takes me like-

Sarah Kingsbury: So you're that guy?

Nicholas Naioti: I am that guy. When I'm partying, I like to get out the telescope. Anyway, when I get it out, I'm sort of an amateur with it. And it takes me like 45 minutes to find anything. Once I can find like Jupiter or Saturn, it's so awesome and so exciting and so rewarding. But it's really hard to find it. And it's really hard to keep it in the viewfinder because the Earth moves really fast actually, weirdly.

Sarah Kingsbury: Strange.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah. So this is the Celestron Starsense Explorer series, I think is what it's called.

Sarah Kingsbury: It sounds sort of Star Trek.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, yeah, which I love.

Donna Cleveland: Star Trek is pretty cool.

Nicholas Naioti: The Starsense.

Sarah Kingsbury: Explorer, yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, the Celestron Starsense Explorer. They have two telescopes that have an iPhone mount. And you get their app. It's free. You calibrate your app with the telescope itself, and that only takes a couple minutes. They showed me how it works. And then you can immediately be finding celestial bodies in the sky. You could be looking at things in minutes and the telescope seemed to be pretty high quality as well and they're reasonably priced for telescopes.

David Averbach: It was surprisingly affordable, I agree.

Donna Cleveland: It was like 169 for the smaller telescope.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: Like, what was it? It was in the two hundreds for the ...

Sarah Kingsbury: It was like 400.

Nicholas Naioti: The bigger one was 399. But they're really high quality telescopes, and this solves a huge problem for astronomy.

David Averbach: One of the things in coming to this show that is always interesting is that you see all these brands, and it's very easy to tell the companies that are really passionate about what they do and are really working hard to create the best product and feel proud of it, and the companies that aren't and they're just sort of trying to make some money importing some cheap Chinese stuff and putting a brand name on it. These guys were so passionate, it was like they were so excited about this product they made, you could tell they loved it and use it every day.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, that's very cool.

Donna Cleveland: One cool thing about it too, so in the mount it has ... The way that you tell where you are, is it has a little mirror that you open up the camera through the app, and it can see the sky and will like have pattern recognition. And even if it's kind of overcast, as long as it's not totally overcast, it can tell exactly where you are.

Donna Cleveland: And then based on your location, date and time and the telescope size you have, it'll give you recommendations for like tonight's viewings through the app. And so you can be like, oh, cool, like see what you can see well from where exactly you are, and I thought that was really nice too.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's very cool.

Donna Cleveland: If I were using it, I would have no idea where to get started. So it's nice that it kind of like has suggestions for you, and then will tell you how to get there.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, and it changes through the night. And what I thought was really creative about this is they're using the camera on the iPhone. Most of the astronomy apps you would find us like the gyroscopes in there. And those aren't exactly accurate, especially when you're talking about the kind of magnification needed for a telescope.

Donna Cleveland: Sarah, tell us about the Neuvana Xen. This was not the Sarah award, but she understood how it worked the best so she's going to tell us.

Sarah Kingsbury: If you've ever heard of the vagus nerve, the vagus nerve stimulation basically is used for treating things like anxiety and depression or you know how it's supposed to help you sleep. I have tried things like this in the past, I had some sort of like VR helmet with like weird little pads you put on your temple. You got them like wet and put them on your temple and like there's this weird pulsing light and I ended up getting like a migraine. So this is actually like a much more-

Donna Cleveland: Yay.

Sarah Kingsbury: That's ones I've used in the past. This one is more like a pair of earbuds and you still have to wet them a little bit so that otherwise you don't have any like conduction. But it will stimulate your vagus nerve. I think you can walk through like meditations and stuff like that. For some people, this is incredibly helpful. I don't know if this particular product would be like, say, medical level, but as a sort of stress relief product, I think it's very cool. I really appreciate that they've taken the massive amount of bulkiness out of it.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, it was super lightweight.

Nicholas Naioti: It goes in your ear.

Sarah Kingsbury: It looks like a pair of like earbuds.

Nicholas Naioti: But it's helpful for-

Donna Cleveland: And it can play music too.

Sarah Kingsbury: Right.

Donna Cleveland: So you could like listen to music while you're having like a small impulse that you can feel a little bit, but it's not very strong. They did a demo with me and it has to be a little bit wet. That was one thing that was like a bit strange because usually you wouldn't put your earbuds in wet. They have like a little spray that you spray on it, you put it in and then they bring it up to where you can feel it and it just feels like a little buzzing.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, the spray is just saline.

Donna Cleveland: Then they turn it down after like you feel it. If you were using it for a while like it wouldn't be unpleasant. When they turned it up too high, it was unpleasant. It felt like you were getting like zapped in the ear.

Nicholas Naioti: But it treats anxiety?

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah, they have found especially ... Now, I don't know that this product can do it. But in general, they have found for instance, like depression that is resistant to traditional treatment methods like medication has often been alleviated by products like this. They didn't make any claims like that. I don't think it's like an FDA approved medical device type of thing. But I feel like all of us have our moments of anxiety or stress that could be alleviated by using this. So I thought it was cool.

Donna Cleveland: All right, we have a handful of products to get through still. The Incipio Organicore is our next award. David chose this one.

David Averbach: Yeah, I chose it because like we talked about, there have not been a lot of innovations in cases this year. And this was one that was pretty cool. It was made of compostable material. And so it would biodegrade, I think it's like in soil in six months or something like that. It was made by Incipio. So it was still a pretty high quality case, it had six foot drop protection. It was relatively thin, it still looked great. And so it was a nice all around case that also you can feel good. It was a little more sustainable than your traditional case, and I thought that was cool.

Donna Cleveland: I meant to mention this in the trend section. We actually saw quite a few biodegradable cases at the show this year, which I thought was really cool that these product companies are putting some attention on being more sustainable considering that electronics in general are not very sustainable. So I was glad to see that. UAG also had a nice one.

Nicholas Naioti: We also saw a backpack made out of recycled water bottles.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah, that was cool.

Sarah Kingsbury: Post consumer I made sure to ask.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Oh, next we have the Donzi award.

Sarah Kingsbury: My favorite. You just shared [crosstalk 00:51:25].

Donna Cleveland: Donzi may or may not be my nickname at the office. So I chose the DJI Mavic Mini. This is a consumer drone, which is really fun to fly. I went and demoed it. Everyone's smiling and making fun of me because I was so excited about this drone. It is one of the cheaper drones from DJI, they have in general like you're going to pay and this one was under 400.

Donna Cleveland: It has a really nice camera in it, so you can get awesome video footage, aerial footage. It's really fun to fly. It actually takes more skill than you would imagine though. It's very stable, but really what you want to do especially if you're getting video footage is to be moving really slowly and have more of like almost a dolly effect with what you're trying to do and that definitely would be an art to master. My dad has one of the more expensive ones that he loves and I got some awesome footage of RAGBRAI, the biking event in Iowa every year. But yeah, they're going to send me one to test out for a month and so I'm hoping to master it.

David Averbach: The reason why we're all smirking a little bit and why we made Donna make this her Donzi award is because she's underselling how much she loves drones, because I mean how many years have you and I come to Vegas together?

Donna Cleveland: I mean, I think I've been like five times.

David Averbach: This is at least your fifth one, and every single year Donna drags me to the drone section and we spend like an hour as Donna just stares longingly at these drones. This year we finally managed to convince her to give them an award because she just loves them so much, and she's going to get to test them.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah. Oh, another cool thing about it just to explain how it works with the phone is that you have the remote thing to control it. Your phone slides into there and so you can see what the drone is seeing while you're flying it.

Nicholas Naioti: Yes, it's really cool. It's cool experience.

Donna Cleveland: Thanks guys.

Sarah Kingsbury: Maybe I'll even like see if you let me try it when you get the review unit.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: We can go out flying together.

Donna Cleveland: Okay, Audio Technica is the next company we wanted to give an award to and this was really all around, we all loved this product. It was their WP900 is their new headphones.

David Averbach: I think the thing that stood out to me about these headphones is they were very much Audio Technica in general their headphones were kind of in contrast with the trend of the industry, which is to go towards wireless, to go towards Bluetooth, go towards a little mini ear pods. And they did have those, but this one was a traditional wired over ear headphone. It was beautiful, it sounded great, it was for people who really appreciated music, and they wanted to hear it how the artists intended. No.

Nicholas Naioti: Yes.

David Averbach: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: They did say that line.

David Averbach: They did? Okay.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Everyone did, though.

David Averbach: Part of what was beautiful is they use really high quality woods in all of their headphones, which was something I hadn't really seen a lot of people go out of their way to do, and this was a wood that was very unique and they imported it from Japan.

Donna Cleveland: Like hand cards.

David Averbach: Yeah, they got me in all these little details. Why did you guys like it?

Nicholas Naioti: It seems like yeah, this is a high end pair of headphones for audio files. It's for a listening experience. It's not for running around doing errands. There's different use cases for different types of headphones, I think and we experienced a lot of like bluetooth headphones.

Donna Cleveland: For on the go. Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: Yeah, yeah.

Donna Cleveland: By the way, these were $650. I liked them because they were really comfortable.

Sarah Kingsbury: Really comfortable.

Donna Cleveland: And sounded incredible. I mean, I think Sarah and I both have some issues with over ear headphones, like we really care if they're comfortable. For me I get headaches really easily, so I have to wear something that is going to be comfortable for a long period of time. Again, we didn't get to test it for that long, but wearing it just felt also like I was in a room listening to music. It didn't feel like you're being closed out which I don't like that feeling either. I don't know exactly how they do that.

Nicholas Naioti: I'm pretty sure I said these were over ear but these are actually open ear, and open ear headphones are what create that sound because they don't put the sound right up next to your ear. There's actually like they don't have a complete seal usually and so it allows you to feel more like you're listening to music in a room, and I love that feeling too. It's more comfortable.

Donna Cleveland: They had like $1,200 headphones too that they let us listen to. We didn't want to choose something like no one can afford and also, I actually liked the look of the ones we chose a lot better and their newest one. I think the other ones have been out for a year. But the other ones, the over ear headphones were enormous, but they had a lot more open space on the back of them and it felt even more like you're just hanging out in the room listening to amazing music, instead of having been like shut in.

Sarah Kingsbury: Yeah.

Donna Cleveland: So okay, those were awesome. Our last product is the David award.

David Averbach: Oh, man. Okay.

Donna Cleveland: The MyCharge.

David Averbach: The MyCharge, and the reason why we didn't give us a traditional one, to be honest, it was that the people who were presenting it to us and telling us about it were really over their top in their presentation to the point where they're just making these huge claims and were kind of obnoxious about it all.

Donna Cleveland: Apparently every rapper out there owns this or something.

David Averbach: Yeah, every rapper owns the MyCharge.

Donna Cleveland: Every influencer.

David Averbach: And the influencers in case you didn't know, but it was actually a cool product. And I've been looking for it. So here's what I like about it. It was like a portable battery but what it had and I had not seen a lot of people do this if anybody, is first of all had the plug built in and it had the lightning cable built in. And so you didn't have to carry other things.

David Averbach: Because what I hate about the battery packs, is when I take a battery pack on the go, usually I have to bring like a USB charger to charge the battery pack and then I need to bring a lightning adapter when I want to charge it so that I can charge from the battery pack to my lightning adapter, I have to put all that in my pocket.

David Averbach: This kind of solves all that. I don't need to bring an adapter with me when I'm traveling other than this because it can be used as an adapter to charge my phone at night, while simultaneously charging the battery. It also was rapid charge, which I really liked because having a portable battery that rapid charge is something that is really nice I hadn't seen.

Nicholas Naioti: It also had USBC.

David Averbach: Yeah, it did and that I had mixed feelings about because I don't have any Android products, so it just felt like one more thing that they added that I wasn't going to use.

Nicholas Naioti: Sure.

Donna Cleveland: There might be future proofing. Yeah.

Nicholas Naioti: My iPad Pro charges with USBC.

David Averbach: Yeah. And if you happen to know someone who has an Android, I guess they would like that.

Sarah Kingsbury: I always feel really awesome actually when I can, because I always have every kind of cable with me and my partner is an Android user and so when I can be like, "Don't worry, I got you," and I'll have the correct charger.

David Averbach: So I think it was the all in one nature of this and the rapid charge is something I hadn't actually seen and had wanted, despite the fact that people presenting it to us were a little over the top.

Donna Cleveland: Those are all the products we are going to talk about today. We do have more winners and more we're going to choose today. So do check back next week. Go to iphonelife.com/podcast. We'll have our blog post there and we'll link to our full awards blog post that Sarah is putting together and of course needing all these different parts in order to have that be ready to go.

Donna Cleveland: Just to like throw out some of the other types of products we included, there's the smart lawn mower, lawn mowing device that was really cool. We have like for people who are wanting to go off the grid, these huge power station things, one that can jumpstart your car and also charge your electronics. A lot of different cool stuff coming your way, when you go to iphonelife.com.

David Averbach: The smart blood sugar monitor looked really cool.

Donna Cleveland: Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury: Noninvasive.

David Averbach: Yeah, noninvasive.

Donna Cleveland: And the smart fanny pack.

David Averbach: Most importantly was the smart fanny pack, stay tuned.

Donna Cleveland: most importantly. Any parting thoughts, you guys?

David Averbach: I'd love to hear from you all. Let us know if there's anything, CES products that you read about that you loved that we didn't include and what you think about our CES coverage in general because we worked hard on it and we want to make sure that this is kind of information you guys want. So send us an email podcast@iphonelife.com.

Nicholas Naioti: Thanks for listening.

Sarah Kingsbury: Thanks everyone.

Donna Cleveland: Bye.

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