CES 2017: Our pick of the best products

As the biggest technology show in the world, it’s no surprise that CES sees a lot of new products. Some are great, and some not so good – but it’s our job to sort the wheat from the chaff. So here’s the Expert Reviews take on the best of everything we saw this year.

Best smartphone: Honor 6X

Making a high quality smartphone is hard, but making a high quality smartphone which sells at under £250 is exponentially harder. In a price range where there’s plenty of choice, the Honor 6X stands out for its dual-lens camera, good performance, nice design and blazingly-fast fingerprint reader. Put it next to a Galaxy S7 or iPhone 7 and it doesn’t look out of place.

Best home appliance: LG Smart InstaView fridge

The stand-out feature of the InstaView fridge has always been the big screen on the front, but this year’s model adds something which really lifts it above the competition: support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Now you can have a fridge which can order your groceries, which means you may never have to leave the house again.

Best laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon has long been the gold standard of 14in laptops, and the 2017 model is no exception. It combines the well-designed, robust case of its predecessors with a new edge-to-edge display which lifts the X1 Carbon up even higher in the league table of design. If a 14in laptop is what you want, this is the one you want.

Best fitness tech: Garmin Fenix 5S

Garmin’s Fenix 3 was a good fitness tracker designed for the outdoors, but the Fenix 5 series (Garmin has skipped 4) is even better. There’s all the sensors you expect, including a three-axis compass, barometric altimeter, GPS, gyroscope and heart rate sensor. The Fenix 5S takes all this and shrinks it into a smartwatch that’s about the same size as the Apple Watch, but manages to get about eight days of battery life. Garmin is marketing this towards women, but we think it’s brilliant for anyone who wants a fitness watch which doesn’t look like an alarm clock taped to your wrist.

Best TV: LG Signature OLED W Series

This was a big show for TVs, with Sony, Samsung and even Huawei releasing new products with bigger and better screens. It was a close-run thing, but our pick for best TV had to be the LG Signature OLED W series. Up to 77in wide, the W series is just 2.5mm thick – thin enough for it to almost disappear into your wall. And there’s no compromise on image quality to get that thinness with perfect blacks, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, and active HDR. It’s not going to be cheap, but it is going to be the best.

Best smart home tech: Sleep Number 360 Smart Bed

We’re only just beginning to understand quite how important sleep is to our health, which makes it a place where technology can make a real difference. The Sleep Number 360 Smart Bed is the ultimate sleeping machine. It senses your movements and adjusts firmness for you (and your partner) accordingly. It can pre-warm the bottom of your bed, because warm feet has been shown to equal better sleep. And it can gently tilt you if you start snoring, to help you stop. And all this information will get piped into apps like Apple Health automatically, so you can monitor what a difference it’s making. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the Sleep Number stand was the most popular one we saw at CES.