CES 2024 First Impressions: Some Of The Best Things We Saw

This year's CES was truly a game of one-upping what already works. Some of the biggest brands and the best devices didn't wow us because they were brand new, but because they took what we previously saw as "the best" and made it even better. It's a good time to be a consumer if what you're looking for is high-quality products that take the features and qualities that work and run with them.

That goes for speakers, gaming devices, robotics, displays, cameras, and more — lots of devices made an impression on us at the year's biggest technology convention in Las Vegas, Nevada.

From the blasting sound of the Brane X to what might be the new top dog in gaming laptops, CES 2024 did not disappoint. Today we're looking at a selection of products that impressed us right off the bat, and are likely to impress once we get them on our review bench later this year.

TCL's Nxtpaper is easily one of the most interesting technologies in consumer device displays right this minute. We've been watching this tech evolve over the past few years — TCL has been bringing their devices with Nxtpaper to events around the world — and its latest iteration is its best yet. 

Nxtpaper is a competitor with E Ink, aiming to make the mobile experience — on smartphones and tablets specifically — far easier on the eyes than the tech used in most other devices.

TCL's Nxtpaper 3.0 works as a combination of hardware and software tech. This includes a blue light-blocking display glass with a matte finish and a "CPL (Circularly Polarized Light)" screen. With this tech in play, TCL's latest Nxtpaper devices deliver an experience that's as good a mix of physical paper-like light reflection and traditional touchscreen display as we've ever seen.

If you're judging by appearance, you'd be forgiven for overlooking Brane Audio's Brane X. This is an unassuming-looking portable speaker, for sure — but what's inside is booming. It's the size coupled with its ability to deliver monstrous, heavy beats that makes this speaker worth paying attention to.

The company suggests that it's their proprietary "RAD" (Repel-Attract-Driver) system that makes this big sound work. This "uses custom magnets to cancel internal air pressure forces that inhibit sub-bass in other portable speakers." All we know is that the audio output far outweighs the scale of the speaker itself. 

Adding flexibility, the Brane X is IP57-rated waterproof and has a 12-hour battery inside. Brane Audio is a relatively new company, but it's already considering users aiming to use multiple devices: their app allows linking up to 4 speakers for surround sound and custom grouping. We'll see later this year whether the speaker's $600 price tag is worth the cash in practice.

We know Razer's laptops work well — we've reviewed a bunch of them over the years, and they've never failed to impress in one way or another. With the latest Razer Blade 16 shown for the first time at CES 2024, the wow factor is all in the display. Sure, it has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40-series GPU and the newest round of Intel Core i9 CPU, but the display is (for the moment, at least) unique.

Handiwork of a partnership with Samsung Display, Razer describes the screen the "world's first OLED 240 Hz 16-inch display." OLED might not have been the first choice for gamers in the past, but a 0.2 millisecond response time means speed simply isn't a concern here. If you're looking for the greatest display on a laptop right this minute, this is it.

The folks at Insta360 brought their latest action camera to the show floor with the Insta360 Ace Pro. While we've already had an early in-the-field look at this device with our full Insta360 Ace Pro Review, it's worth noting that this was one of the best action cameras on the show floor at CES 2024. Some products set such a high bar, you can't help but compare newcomers at an event such as this.

The magic here is threefold: Insta360's Ace Pro delivers top-notch image quality, excellent image stabilization, and impressive low-light performance. Of course, it's also waterproof and rugged enough to survive being treated like the action camera it is. We already knew this camera was a winner — seeing it among the masses makes it clear that the Insta360 Ace Pro stands out as one of the most versatile and solid action cameras on the market today.