The Best Smart Home Tech at CES 2026

No smart key has it all, but the V7 Max feels like it’s close. Wireless charging, palm and finger vein scanning, facial recognition, Matter support, and indoor and outdoor touchscreens and video cameras—all in a sleek, slim door lock—make it one of the most compelling smart locks on the market. Will it cost? Well, yes—Lockin hasn’t announced pricing yet, but its predecessor, the V5 Max, started at 39,990 New Taiwan dollars, or about 1,270 US dollars.

Smart thermostats have probably been the domain of Nest and Ecobee for years, but Aqara has released what could be an alternative banger at CES 2026: the Thermostat Hub W200. It’s more than just a thermostat; it has a millimeter-wave presence sensor (the kind that can detect when someone is in the room even if they’re sitting still), can act as a video doorbell monitor with Aqara doorbells, and act as a smart home hub for both Aqara and third-party Matter devices. Aqara is also the first company to announce compatibility with Apple Home’s new Adaptive Temperature and Clean Energy Guidance features.

Govee’s new Ceiling Light Ultra lies in the twilight zone between smart lighting and display, thanks to an array of 616-LED lamps housed under its plastic cover. With this, the 21-inch light can show bright colors, sure, but it can also show more detailed images than something like its Curtain Lights. As a result, at CES 2026, I was able to create a mysterious animated visualization of the rotating Earth under the cover of this light associated with Matter. There was a lot of light at the tech show, but the Ceiling Light Ultra was the most interesting I’ve seen, so far.

Signify’s Philips Hue didn’t have much in the way of new products to show off, but it did manage to impress me with its new SpatialAware feature. The feature lets you use your smartphone’s camera and LiDAR sensor to pinpoint where the Hue lights are in relation to each other, so you can use that information in scenes. For the company’s CES 2026 show, that meant a single scene spreading color over multiple lights to mimic a sunset. One bright, yellow light acted as the sun, while the remaining shades of yellow, orange, pink, and red seemed to radiate from the other lights, their color depending on where they were in the room. This feature is coming in the spring of 2026, but only for Philips Hue Bridge Pro owners.

The Saros Rover can climb and clean stairs, something robot vacuum companies have been racing to achieve in recent years. That might even beat what I’ve seen a few months ago with the unreleased Eufy Marswalker or the Dreme Cyber ​​X, both of which are mech/headcrab-like suits that allow separate robot vacuums to drive up and down stairs to get in between floors, but not clean the stairs themselves. At CES 2026, we saw the Saros Rover actually being able to climb and clean stairs (very slowly). Of course, whether it’s worth paying the many thousands of dollars that Roborock is likely to ask for the Rover depends on whether it’s actually a good robotic space apart from that.

Aqara, which already makes the FP2, one of the best waveguide sensors I’ve used, is upping its game with the Spatial Multi-Sensor FP400. For the uninitiated, presence sensors are similar to occupancy sensors, but they are more accurate and can tell when someone is in the room even if they are not moving, and can trigger automation based on certain states of the room. The FP400 builds on that by being able to track up to 10 people at once, and by triggering automations based on when the person is standing, sitting or sleeping, according to the company. Like previous Aqara presence sensors, it will be compatible with Matter. Aqara did not announce a release date or price.