Sunday, September 13, 2026
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Opinion

Telecom Tweets of the Week: #CESblackout steals the show

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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What will people remember from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show? The biggest electronics show of the year always has a dizzying array of hundreds of shiny gadgets that may or may not ever make it into large-scale production and/or mainstream adoption. The tech eye candy was at maximum-hype this week, and here’s a sampling:

The robot you can cuddle to sleep:

The robot you can play ping-pong with:

The robot you can talk to:

The robot that teaches programming: (Okay, this is the rare CES item that I can actually say, “I have this!” Or, my kids do. It was a Christmas gift ,and they have spent hours programming this thing to zoom around the house and crash into my feet, then tell me that it loves me.)

The “air taxi” demo:

Cisco’s high-flying synchronized drone display:

https://twitter.com/EdClowes/status/951340773919764480

The wristband that turns your hand into a phone:

And the TVs. So, so many TVs.

This is the one that jumped out at me as something I’m actually going to see in the near future: an under-glass fingerprint sensor for smartphones.

All those things are nifty, but I’m going to go with the #CESblackout being the thing that lodges in the long-term memory. The lengthy power outage threw a huge wrench in the event — this is an “electronics” show, after all — and the supreme irony of a huge consumer electronics show being paralyzed by lack of power (apparently caused by condensation due to rain) was not lost on some observers:

https://twitter.com/clickbeeep/status/951172189524381696

Most companies who commented tried to keep a sense of humor about it:

DISASTER:

When Oreo weighs in, I guess you’re just thankful that at least you can still eat cookies in the dark.

 

 

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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