I picked Aqara's Smart Lock U400 and Roborock's Saros Rover robot vacuum as the overall best smart home gadgets from CES 2026, but there were gazillions of other great gadgets on the show floor.
It was a banner year for smart home products, but the big trends I saw weren't about new product categories; they were about bringing better features and lower prices to smart home staples such as smart lighting, smart locks, cameras, and TVs.
This is what I expected the launch of the interoperability protocol Matter would bring. Once companies could stop spending time and money on working on integrating with half a dozen platforms, they could fo …