Technologies
Dreaming of a Cable-Free World? I Think I Just Saw the Future of Wireless Power
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen at CES 2026. And it has nothing to do with AI.
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.
Technologies
OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health: A Dedicated Tab for Medical Inquiries
The company wants you to upload your medical records and connect the wellness apps you use.
ChatGPT is expanding its presence in the health care realm. OpenAI said Wednesday that its popular AI chatbot will begin rolling out ChatGPT Health, a new tab dedicated to addressing all your medical inquiries. The goal of this new tab is to centralize all your medical records and provide a private area for your wellness issues.
Looking for answers about a plethora of health issues is a top use for the chatbot. According to OpenAI, «hundreds of millions of people» sign in to ChatGPT every week to ask a variety of health and wellness questions. Additionally, ChatGPT Health (currently in beta testing) will encourage you to connect any wellness apps you also use, such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal, resulting in a more connected experience with more information about you to draw from.
Online privacy, especially in the age of AI, is a significant concern, and this announcement raises a range of questions regarding how your personal health data will be used and the safeguards that will be implemented to keep sensitive information secure — especially with the proliferation of data breaches and data brokers.
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«The US doesn’t have a general-purpose privacy law, and HIPAA only protects data held by certain people like health care providers and insurance companies,» Andrew Crawford, senior counsel for privacy and data at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in an emailed statement.
He continued: «The recent announcement by OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Health means that a number of companies not bound by HIPAA’s privacy protections will be collecting, sharing and using people’s health data. And since it’s up to each company to set the rules for how health data is collected, used, shared and stored, inadequate data protections and policies can put sensitive health information in real danger.»
OpenAI says the new tab will have a separate chat history and a memory feature that can keep your health chat history separate from the rest of your ChatGPT usage.
Further protections, such as encryption and multifactor authentication, will defend your data and keep it secure, the company says. Health conversations won’t be used to train the chatbot, according to the company.
Privacy issues aside, another concern is how people intend to use ChatGPT Health. OpenAI’s blog post states the service «is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.»
The slope is slippery here. In August 2025, a man was hospitalized after allegedly being advised by the AI chatbot to replace salt in his diet with sodium bromide. There are other examples of AI providing incorrect and potentially harmful advice to individuals, leading to hospitalization.
OpenAI’s announcement also doesn’t touch on mental health concerns, but a blog post from October 2025 says the company is working to strengthen its responses in sensitive conversations. Whether these mental health guardrails will be enough to keep people safe remains to be seen.
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
If you’re interested in ChatGPT Health, you can join a waitlist, as the tab isn’t yet live.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Technologies
I Tested the Honor Magic 8 Pro and Found a Huge Problem With the Camera
I discovered a catastrophic problem with this phone’s cameras and it needs to be fixed fast.
I’ve found a big problem with the Honor Magic 8 Pro’s camera that urgently needs addressing. I’ve taken hundreds of test photos in my weeks with the company’s latest flagship phone, and while plenty of them are perfectly decent, many of the images I’ve taken with the ultrawide lens display horrendous image processing issues around the edges that ruin them completely.
I discovered the issue when I first got the phone late last year, and while it’s had several significant software updates since then, the problems persist. So what’s gone wrong? It’s possible that I’m monumentally unlucky and happen to have been given a broken unit. If so, I fully expect the replacement models I’ll be testing to be free of any issues. Or, maybe it’s a more widespread problem and I’ll see the same issues cropping up again. I personally think it’s more likely to be an issue at the software level, and as such, it could be a simple fix for Honor to push out in the coming days and weeks.
I’ve spoken to Honor about this and, unsurprisingly, the company is keen to say that this isn’t widespread, stating «Our internal investigation confirmed that the issue was limited to an isolated hardware anomaly in that specific early development sample. It doesn’t reflect the hardware or software polish of the final retail units now launching in the European market.» And sure, my test unit was an early non-EU version, but it is also the phone that the company did send me to review. Receiving early prerelease samples is common in the industry and while small hiccups can sometimes be expected, I rarely find such significant problems as this.
Honor is sending additional retail units for further testing and I hope that I’m able to confirm that this isn’t an issue seen on all models. I was prepared to write a full review of this new flagship phone, but these camera issues are severe and raise more questions than answers. I will update this article with more information and my testing results as they become available.
Read more: Best Phone to Buy in 2026
Even if it is an isolated incident, it’s still disappointing to see such significant problems on a new phone, especially a flagship that costs £1,099 in the UK. Honor doesn’t officially sell its phones in the US, but for reference, that price converts to roughly $1,480.
The phone does have some positives. I like its processor performance and display, for example, which I’ll come on to later. But the camera issues I’ve seen mean I can’t recommend buying this phone until it’s clear whether they’re limited to my review device or if they’re issues common across all models.
Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on.
Honor Magic 8 Pro camera troubles
Taken with the camera’s standard zoom, the shot above is fine — there’s a decent amount of detail and the exposure is even overall.
But switch to the ultrawide mode and things go horribly wrong. There’s a vibrant purple fringe around the edge that’s full of image processing artifacts that ruin the shot.
It’s not a subtle problem; it’s a huge red flag that something is very wrong with this phone.
For reference, here’s the iPhone 16 Pro’s ultrawide shot. Notice the difference?
As you can see, it’s not an isolated incident. It seems to be more apparent when there are areas of shadow in the edges. It makes me suspect that the phone is seeing these dark patches and trying — and failing — to brighten them and add detail back into the scene. It’s not dissimilar to the early problems I found on Google’s Pixel 8 Pro, which also struggled with shadow detail, suggesting to me that this is a software fault, rather than a mechanical problem with my unit.
It also doesn’t seem to affect the ultrawide lens when recording video, which again suggests it’s not a hardware issue as I’d expect to see the same problems from the lens in any mode. The downside of that is that it could theoretically affect all models of the Honor Magic 8 Pro. However, the big upside is that software problems can be easily remedied with over-the-air updates.
To be honest, I don’t love the camera elsewhere, either. The image processing has gone overboard in this image, brightening the shadows and trying to rescue the highlights in the background excessively. It’s resulted in an over-processed image that looks unnatural.
The iPhone 16 Pro’s attempt has allowed those shadows to remain what they are — shadows — and I vastly prefer this version as a result.
I’ve also noticed that there can be significant color shifts when switching between the main and ultrawide lenses, which I would again prefer not to see on a camera phone of this price.
However, this could be attributed to the same software processing issues I’ve already discussed, so I’ll have to leave my verdict on the camera for when I’ve done more testing.
On the upside, this shot of the Tennents brewery in Glasgow looks good.
And I like the colors and tones in this sunset scene in Edinburgh. So it’s not all bad — it can take a decent photo sometimes. So what about the rest of the phone?
Honor Magic 8 Pro: Display, performance and battery life
I like the phone’s 6.71-inch display, which is bright and vibrant. It’s lovely for gaming, too, thanks to its max 120Hz refresh rate. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 processor, which puts in some of the best scores we’ve ever seen on our benchmark tests for both processor performance and graphics processing.
It certainly feels nippy in everyday use. Games like Genshin Impact, unsurprisingly, played smoothly at max graphics settings. The phone runs on a 6,270-mAh battery, which, while sizable, only gave average results on our battery drain tests. Battery performance sits alongside phones like the Galaxy S25 or Google Pixel 10, but it’s a big step below the iPhone 17 Pro Max or OnePlus 15.
If it feels like I’m glossing over the rest of the phone somewhat, it’s because I am. With the issues I’ve seen so far, it’s possible that there may be other early teething troubles elsewhere, so I’m going to hold off giving any kind of definitive verdict on any part of the phone until I’ve tested more models and have a full appreciation of what the phone is really like to use.
Honor Magic 8 Pro: Should you buy it?
Right now, I absolutely don’t think you should. The issues I’ve seen with the camera are significant and badly need addressing. It could be that it’s a simple software fix that can be rolled out in the coming weeks, or it might be an isolated incident that affects me and me alone. I’ll be retesting on multiple devices and it could be that they’re absolutely fine.
But unless you’re desperate for a new phone today and you absolutely have to have an Honor phone, then I recommend waiting until we’ve got more clarity about how deep these problems lie.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Jan. 8 #676
Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Jan. 8, No. 676.
Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Strands puzzle was almost impossible for me, because it’s all focused on a certain TV show that I have never watched and barely know anything about. (Its fourth season premieres today, if you want to check it out.) If you’re like me, you need hints and answers, so read on.
I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.
If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page
Hint for today’s Strands puzzle
Today’s Strands theme is: That’s just reality (TV)
If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Show with plenty of trickery.
Clue words to unlock in-game hints
Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:
- SIDE, HIDE, START, TART, FAITH, TENS, BANS, FATE, SILT, CAST, TRAIT
Answers for today’s Strands puzzle
These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:
- CASTLE, SHIELD, MISSION, FAITHFUL, BANISHMENT
Today’s Strands spangram
Today’s Strands spangram is THETRAITORS. To find it, start with the T that’s three letters down on the far-left row, and wind across and then down.
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