We have people all over the show floor and beyond at CES, searching for the most interesting, innovative and cutting-edge tech available. A ton of useful new information is also available, which you can find on our CES 2026 live blog and in our CES hub.

The show floor opened Tuesday, and we had a lot of preview time beforehand to gawk at some CES staples, such as robots, electronic toys, phones and more. I’ll be back here to top off our fun finds regularly throughout the show.

Ever since tariffs and other economic uncertainty led to Xbox price increases in late 2025, things have gotten expensive. A 1TB Xbox Series X now sells for $50 more than it used to, and there is little sign of these prices improving anytime soon.

Thankfully, every so often, a deal pops up that helps make things a little more affordable like this Walmart discount that slashes that same Series X to just $606. The catch? Well, there isn’t one. But we don’t expect this deal to last for long, so make sure to get your order in soon before it leaves for good.

The Xbox Series X has been around for a while now, so there are no surprises with what you get in the box. The Series X comes with a 1TB SSD for storage, and you get a controller in the box. This version also has a disc drive for installing games and watching Blu-ray movies, too.

Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money.

You can look forward to watching 4K content and playing 4K games, as well as enjoying audio options such as Dolby Digital, Dolby TrueHD and DTS. All of that makes this a capable machine, whether you want to watch content or play games.

Why this deal matters

It’s unlikely that Xbox prices will get any cheaper anytime soon, so deals like this are the best we can expect for a while now. If you’re in the market for an Xbox and have the $604 to spare, then this is probably the time to place your order before it’s too late.

Many technology companies arrive at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, the world’s biggest tech show. They often make bold claims about the life-changing potential of their innovations, but it’s rare to see anything that actually lives up to the hype. 

When you do see something truly special, on the other hand, it can seem like magic. That’s exactly how I felt when I experienced the wireless charging demo from Finnish company Willo, a deep-tech startup that’s just emerged from stealth mode.

«Seeing is believing,» Willo co-founder and President Marko Voutilainen tells me as I take a seat in a Las Vegas hotel suite to witness what the company hopes will be a revolution in wireless power. It could render the charging cables that rule our lives and clog up our drawers obsolete for good.

Wireless power has long posed a conundrum to tech companies. There needs to be perfect alignment between a device and the charger, which means that it’s often just as convenient to simply plug a cable into your phone. Wireless charging today feels like a half-baked solution.

The tech that Willo showed me doesn’t rely on charging pads, line of sight, directional targeting or even immediate proximity. Instead, it allows devices to be charged simply by existing within the force field of the power source.

The demo I’m being shown looks unassuming. They tell me I shouldn’t get caught up too much with the form factor of the power source — a simple gray-white cube. This isn’t a consumer device that’s for sale, merely a means to demonstrate the technology to me.

Willo CEO Hari Santamala picks up several receivers, black boxes shaped like phones with LEDs on the top. As he moves them to within 15 inches or so of the power source, the LEDs light up. He moves them around the cube, rotating them in different directions. The LEDs remain lit.

I’m seeing. I’m believing.

Making power cables the floppy disks of tomorrow

Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to take any pictures or videos. This week at CES, Willo is emerging from stealth mode to show the world what it can do, but it’s still playing its cards close to its chest.

The core technology is based on more than a decade of research by the company co-founder and CTO Nam Ha-Van. The company is claiming a number of world firsts with its wireless power tech, including the ability to rotate devices at any angle while charging, along with the ability to charge multiple devices at once.

Santamala talks me through his vision for how it would exist in the home. «You have to build the transmitter in a way that it’s kind of a natural part of your environment,» he says. «Ideally, we don’t see any of this,» he adds, gesturing to the cube.

You could sit on the sofa with your phone in your pocket, and it would be quietly charging while you watch TV. If you were working from home, you could move freely around your house with your laptop, never having to worry about plugging it in.

«We want to do to power cables, what floppy disks are to us today,» Voutilainen says. «They’re remnants of the past.»

It feels like the thing we’ve been waiting for — the way wireless charging was always supposed to be. So when can we expect to get it?

Willo is here at CES meeting journalists like me, but also the kind of partners it will need to adopt this technology and take it out into the world. Voutilainen and Santamala are cagey about their ideal strategy for doing this, but it feels like they’re hinting towards something open and large-scale. Comparisons to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are thrown around.

«This can really change our everyday lives if introduced correctly in a very kind of open and driving-the-market-forward kind of way,» Santamala says. The company’s tech is «pretty ready» for industrialization, he adds — it just depends on their partners’ use cases and timelines.

I depart from the demo suite, hoping that what I’ve seen is as viable as I’ve been led to believe. Willo clearly thinks it has something special on its hands, and if the rest of the tech industry agrees, this might just be the first step toward a future free of charging cable fuss and inconvenience.