CES 2022 returned to Las Vegas in person for the first time since 2020, albeit in a reduced form as Omicron sent several major exhibitors home days before opening. The show was smaller, but the announcements were anything but. This was the CES that planted seeds which would bear fruit for years.
Sony returned with a surprise of its own: it announced the Sony Honda Mobility joint venture and confirmed it was seriously developing electric vehicles — a pivot that nobody had fully anticipated. BMW’s iX Flow colour-changing concept stole the visual show: a car wrapped in electronic ink that could switch from black to white at the press of a button. Gimmick or glimpse of the future, it generated more media coverage than most serious product launches.
Samsung debuted QD-OLED — a hybrid display technology combining quantum dot colour conversion with OLED self-emissive pixels, offering the best of both worlds in brightness and colour accuracy. John Deere appeared at CES 2022 with a fully autonomous tractor — an unlikely show-stopper that underlined how CES had evolved from consumer gadget show to technology-industry platform.
Qualcomm used CES 2022 to announce expanded Snapdragon partnerships for Windows PCs — the early signalling of what would become the Copilot+ PC wave two years later. ces.tech