9 Home Gadgets From CES 2020 You Won’t Want to Miss

Architecture 10-1-2020 DWell 269

From an adorable robot shaped like a ball to an invisible smart door lock, here are nine fun, useful, and stylish gadgets we spotted at CES 2020.

Traditional safes are unsightly, complicated, and a hassle to access—which is why you probably never put valuable items you use regularly in them. Trova’s two storage boxes are designed to be left out in the open.

Taking the technology out of tech was a clear theme at this year’s CES—the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show, held annually in Las Vegas. Companies seems to have finally come around to the idea that we don’t want huge blinking screens and buttons in our homes—we want technology that fades into the background, while still giving us the convenience and functionality that the smart home has promised for so long.

At this year’s CES, color, style, and design emerged as key trends—read on for nine of our favorite finds, straight from the show floor.

Ballie by Samsung

The star of this year’s CES was a yellow robot shaped like a ball—that’s imaginatively named Ballie. The household bot made its worldwide debut at Samsung’s keynote on Monday night, and promptly rolled into our hearts.

It’s currently a prototype—so its exact functions are still amorphous—but the spherical bot showed off some of its possible features at the trade show, including the ability to autonomously control your home. It can open the shades to wake you up, direct an air purifying robot to head to the kitchen when you burn the toast, play with your dog when you’re gone, and tell the robot vacuum to sort out the subsequent mess.

The technology integrates with Samsung’s smart home platform SmartThings to communicate with smart devices in your home, and with onboard cameras, a microphone, and sensors, it can be controlled by voice and it’ll personalize its responses to everyone in the home.

It’s not Rosie the Robot, but it’s rolling in the right direction.

Honeywell Home M5 Smart Thermostat

Breaking the mold of devices that look like smartphone apps stuck to your wall, the newest smart thermostat from Resideo, the makers of Honeywell thermostats, is a thing of midcentury beauty.

Inspired by the The Round, Honeywell’s 1953 T86 thermostat that’s currently in the Smithsonian Museum, the M5 Classic Smart Thermostat is a whole lot smarter. It can not only control your heating and cooling intelligently, but it also acts as a central point for all your home’s systems—it can help monitor and manage air quality, detect water leaks, and monitor energy use and security when paired with other Resideo products.

The M5 Smart Thermostat will be available later this year.