Best Use of Technology: Smart Trigger Lock

Could technology save thousands of lives lost to gun violence every year? It’s an ambitious question the inventors of this smart gun lock have tasked themselves to answer. The Identilock uses a fingerprint reader to authenticate a user, which it promises to do in under a second in case of an emergency. A battery life of more than half a year means you can keep your firearm stored away and not worry about charging it for months at a time. Most important of all, the Identilock was the only product at CES this year geared towards gun safety, but likely not for long. President Obama’s executive actions this week calling for increased funding into smart gun research will likely spin off similar products by next year, but this product could led the way for products at CES in the years ahead.

Best Drone: Real Sense Drone

Last year we saw Intel’s RealSense camera on a prototype drone, allowing the aircraft to dodge obstacles in real time. But this year we saw the technology deployed on a drone you can actually buy, the new Typhoon H from Yuneec. The Typhoon H is on sale now, and Yuneec said it expects to be selling the RealSense module as an add on later this year.

Best TV: LG 4K OLED HDR

CES is and will always be a show about TVs. 2016’s showcase has produced a handful of stunning sets from Samsung, Panasonic, and LG. But it’s the latter company that’s risen above everyone else with the phenomenally sleek and sharp G6. It’s a step above the LG’s “regular” OLED 4K series which, if last year is any indication, could yet again produce the best picture quality in the industry. But an unbelievably thin design, HDR Pro, and the brand new Ultra HD Premium certification help raise the G6 even higher. LG isn’t yet saying exactly how much the G6 will cost, and maybe that’s a favor to consumers. For now, don’t worry about it; just stare at that TV and imagine it in your living room.

Best VR: Vive Pre

Going into CES, I didn't think I'd see many big technological surprises in the VR world. I wasn't totally wrong, but HTC managed to show up with something I genuinely didn't expect: a camera that maps the world around you in amoebic black-and-blue shapes, telling you when you're reaching the edge of its walking space and letting you switch between the virtual world and the sort-of-real one. Game developers will be able to experiment with it on their own, pursuing more ambitious applications that could edge towards real augmented reality. Plus, we got redesigned controllers that will fit a lot better with the consumer-ready Vive — which is still supposed to be shipping in April. If only HTC and Valve were showing more games for it.

Best News: Netflix global

Before Netflix CEO Reed Hastings kicked off the company’s Wednesday morning keynote, we had a feeling the company’s ongoing international expansion would factor into the festivities in some way. Would Hastings announce the service had gone live in a few new countries? Would he lay out a plan for its slow growth over the course of the next year? No amount of prognostication could’ve prepared us for Netflix becoming a true global power in one fell swoop. By the time Hastings finished speaking, the service had gone live in over 130 countries; it’s now available everywhere you can imagine save China. There’s no better argument for Netflix’s status as the future of TV than the way it became the world’s first truly global TV service.

Best Gaming: Razer Blade Stealth and Razer Core

The dream of an ultraportable laptop that can nevertheless still game like a beast when at home is finally coming true. CES 2016 has graced us with the slickest and most refined combination of a laptop and an external graphics. Razer’s Blade Stealth is a beautiful, sumptuously built ultrabook, while the Razer Core is a toaster-sized connectivity hub that also happens to fit and support full-sized desktop GPUs. Thanks to the latest USB-C and Thunderbolt technology, these machines work in concert to create the most versatile PC possible: one you can easily tote to lectures and meetings, but also one that can tear up the latest first-person shooter with all the graphics settings turned up.

Best Rideable: Inboard

There’s a seemingly endless number of things with wheels and electric motors that you can ride at CES each year. But not every hoverboard or scooter company showed up with new or revolutionary products. One of the companies that did show up with some truly innovative stuff was Inboard, the company behind the M1 electric skateboard. The board uses a swappable battery to power motors that are inside the wheels, both things that are firsts in the nascent industry. It’s easy to imagine how, in a couple of years, we’ll view the M1 as one of the boards that helped take the cool idea of an electric skateboard and refine it into something much more useful and reliable. Oh, and it’s a lot of fun to ride.

Best Prototype Newspaper: LG rollable OLED display

It's true, we've seen flexible displays before in various forms, but it never ceases to amaze us when a company shows off the more extreme examples. LG this week showed off a working 18-inch OLED prototype that the company imagines could be rolled up into our pockets or wrapped around interiors. We're many, many years off from that actually happening — and consequently, many years off from us arguing over how best to fold our future screens — but as far as first steps go, this one is still impressive.

Best Laptop: HP EliteBook Folio

When we first saw the EliteBook Folio, we described it as being "like a MacBook that runs Windows." It's small, light, has a solid aluminum build, and eschews almost every port you might consider unnecessary. But in some ways, it's even more than a MacBook: it has a 4K display, a touchscreen, and an additional USB-C port. We still have a lot of questions about the Folio — performance, battery life, price — but its mixture of impressive specs and great design make it easily the highlight of CES's laptops.

Best Throwback: Kodak 8mm Camera

Nostalgia was a big trend at this year’s CES, but no one went as far as Kodak. The recently bankrupted legacy film company resurrected the Super 8 camera, a product the company hadn’t built since 1982. Very few people still shoot 8mm film, and it’s not cheap or easy to buy and get it processed. Kodak’s new (old) camera might not change those things, but it’s still undeniably cool. There’s just enough of a look toward the future in the design — the LCD viewfinder, the SD card for recording audio, the sleek shape conceived by Yves Behar — that it doesn’t feel grimy that the company is exploiting the past. In fact, it feels welcome.

Best Wearable: Misfit Ray

The wearables announced at the show this year could pretty much have been the same exact wearable tech unveiled a year ago, so it was difficult to even find one that stood out in a meaningful way. But as activity trackers become even more commoditized, and as every wearable starts to offer the same feature set, the marriage of fashion and tech might just be the most important advancement. That’s why Misfit Ray gets the best wearable of the show. The $99 activity tracker looks more like a stylish bracelet than a “wearable,” with its cylindrical aluminum body and interchangeable straps. Misfit promises a battery life of more than six months. And the Misfit app is available on both iPhone and Android. Technically speaking, it does the same stuff that Misfit’s earlier trackers do, but its sleek design make it a Verge top pick.

Best Reminder of Mortality: Genworth R70i Aging Suit

The experience of wearing Genworth’s R70i Aging Suit may not be something you can purchase, but it’s definitely something that we’ll all be dealing with soon enough. The powered exoskeleton is designed to make users feel as if they’ve aged up to 40 years. It’s the anti-super suit, if you will. The R70i adds extra weight, limits people’s mobility, and simulates a number of eyesight and hearing problems that often come with growing older. By the time you’re done wearing it, you’ll be much more thankful for your youth and vibrance — and much more cognizant of the grim health future that awaits us all.

Best Car: Chevy Bolt

For all the talk of CES becoming a car show, there aren’t many actual cars launched here. It’s basically all technology and infotainment — the cars will come next week in Detroit. Sure, we got the weird Volkswagen Budd-e, but that’s not something that anyone will be buying anytime soon. If you want to win best car, it helps to actually launch a car, like Chevrolet did this year with its Bolt EV. But, even if there were other new cars here, we would still have awarded Best Car to the Chevy Bolt. It’s almost aggressively normal, something that the EV market desperately needs to go mainstream, and, after years of promise, it shows that we’ve finally entered the age of the electric car. For that alone, the Chevy Bolt is the future — and isn’t that what CES is all about?

Most Improved: Bragi Dash

The Bragi Dash wireless earbuds were one of the most impressive products at this year’s show, especially considering how far they came since 2015’s show. Last year, Bragi was only giving demos of one prototype earbud, and even that experience was fraught with problems. The software was extremely far from finished, and the hardware wasn’t very polished. The company spent 2015 delaying the shipment of the Dash multiple times. But here at CES, Bragi exhibited the final production version of the Dash, and they’re a massive improvement. The hardware design was deeply refined and the software proved to be more than just a gimmick. Truly wireless earbuds are slowly but surely becoming a thing, and the category has Bragi to thank.

Best Headphones: Technics EAH-T700

In a show populated by headphones of every color, size, material, and technology, the Technics T700s had no trouble standing out with their superb sound. They are simply brilliant, delivering the precision of a fine-tipped pen with the force of a pneumatic drill. As comfortable to wear as they are technologically advanced, these headphones mark a fine return for the Technics brand to the personal audio space, and they set a high standard for other premium headphones to live up to.

Best Camera: Nikon D500

Nikon’s D5 might be the higher-end model, but the D500 is the company’s more notable camera at CES 2016 — a show at which basically no-one else announced any cameras. Not only does it represent a long-overdue update to the D300s for advanced users invested in the smaller DX/APS-C format and who don’t want to make the leap to full-frame, it sounds like Nikon is putting in real effort to improve the process by which photos get transferred to mobile devices, potentially transforming the workflow for photographers. Implementation will be everything, of course, and camera companies have a bad track record when it comes to developing software, but Nikon even acknowledging the smartphone’s importance feels like a step forward.

Best VR Experience: Mt. Everest on the Vive Pre

After I tried Everest on the HTC Vive, somebody told me that now I could say I'd climbed the mountain from CES. As a morbidly obsessive reader of the "List of people who died climbing Mount Everest" Wikipedia entry, I can state with 100 percent certainty that the two experiences are not remotely comparable. But stitched together from 300,000 real photographs, Everest is one of the most detailed and beautiful pieces of virtual reality I have ever seen. It combines harrowing first-person vignettes with a God's-eye view that lets you walk around the Himalayas like a giant, peering down on ant-sized tents and climbers. It delivers the exact thing VR is supposed to: an experience that would be impossible to replicate anywhere else.

Best Turntable: Technics SL-1200

Vinyl’s managed to make an incredible resurgence recently, so it makes all the sense in the world that Panasonic should resurrect a brand as legendary as the Technics SL-1200. The original Wheels of Steel were mainstays of the Golden Age of Hip-Hop, and the updated 1200G and 1200GAE turntables promise to improve on the classic. The most important change? They're bigger, weighing about 40 pounds. That tank-like design helps ensure it won't be rattled by stray vibrations, making for clearer sound. And since the Tec 12s are known for torque enough to stop and start a track in an instant, these updates are a DJ’s dream. Of course, they'll have to spend as much as $4000 to buy one.

Best Samsung: Intel concert

Samsung's proud tradition of cringe-worthy CES spectacles culminated last year with the company floating women in pools to promote its TVs, earning it the coveted Best Samsung award for 2015. This year, Intel swooped in with an atrocious performance of 8-year-old movie soundtrack tune "Jai Ho" performed by a group of air guitarists and interpretive dancers. An attempt to highlight the power of Intel's Curie sensors, it mostly served to prove that pop music works terribly as a mime act. In its ill-conceived lunacy, Intel's keynote-closing showtune was the Best Samsung of CES 2016.

Best Nothing: Faraday Future

CES has a long history of product launches that never make it to market, or flop once they get there. More rare is the launch of literally nothing. Even more rare is the most-hyped press event of the show delivering less news than an in-flight magazine. And that’s what we got with Faraday Future: a press conference that promised a world-shattering glimpse at the future and instead showed us a bunch of executives, a well-dressed designer, and… a Batmobile for the 21st century? Faraday Future may indeed redefine what it means to own an automobile, but this was the worst way for the company to make a splash. Instead of showing us what the future will look like, its nothingburger of a press conference raised more questions than it answered. We expected more.

Best Vaporware: Ehang Helicopter

There was no product I was more excited about coming into CES than this driverless car for the sky. And there was no bigger disappointment to me than what the company actually showed off. Ehang accomplished its mission, with hundreds of press outlets parroting their claims without a hint of skepticism. But everything I saw, from the press video full of clearly fake shots to the prototype that didn’t even power on, convinced me that this product is promising a lot more than it can currently deliver.

Best Home Invasion: Amazon Smart Home

Some of the biggest names in technology laid out their vision for the smart home this week at CES. But the most important name in the market is the one we least expected: Alexa. Amazon’s cloud-based voice assistant became the stealth invader of the smart home at this year’s show, integrating with small-time startups, home security companies, and even Ford vehicles. While Google and Samsung battle it out to create the one platform to rule them all, Alexa and Amazon’s Echo speaker are increasingly becoming the best and most powerful way to talk to your gadgets — and for those gadgets to talk to one another.

Best Tablet: Samsung TV fridge

Samsung’s latest attempt at a smart refrigerator, the Family Hub, is just the sort of over-the-top product we expect at CES. It’s ridiculous in every way: it’s an icebox with a massive 21.5-inch tablet just slapped on the front of it. It’s our pick for best tablet at the show in part because everything else was iterative. Samsung’s fridge tablet runs Tizen (though we haven’t seen the full UI yet), has a few decent apps, and can stream television from your Samsung Smart TV. It’s big, bombastic, and naively optimistic about its own potential to be useful in your life. In other words, it’s the essence of Samsung and the essence of CES.

Best Concert: Seinabo Sey

CES may be about consumer technology, it’s also a chance for every in tech to go to lavish parties and hang out with celebrities. Everyone’s out looking to see Fetty Wap or Elton John or that one strangely beloved ‘80s hair metal cover band. All this can be utterly hollow. But for just a few minutes on Thursday night, Seinabo Sey washed away my exhaustion and blew me away. Sey performed a set for Vevo at a private event, and it’s clear Vevo knows a thing or two about talent. If you know nothing about her or her songs, know that she moved this humble editor to tears. That doesn’t happen at CES very often, and for that she deserves this award.

Best in Show: Chevy Bolt

The irony is not lost on us that the company that inspired the film Who Killed the Electric Car? has now won our coveted Best in Show award with, yes, a fully electric car. But the Chevrolet Bolt isn’t just an EV — it’s the first completely practical one, combining high range (“200-plus” miles, GM says) with plenty of passenger space and a relatively affordable price. And as an added bonus, it’s got the best infotainment system that GM has ever offered. We don’t know whether the Bolt will sell in droves, but we’re confident saying that it marks a turning point in the grand story of the electric car. Bye, gasoline. You won’t be missed.