Everything on today’s board showed up early.
CES doesn’t open until January 6, and the Innovation Awards are already handing out trophies in November. Three went to LG. Two more went to products sitting on our pages. The show floor is still two months away, give or take.
A 91-year-old architect deleted the lugs off a watch today. A humanoid skipped the walking lessons entirely and went straight to wheels.
So here’s the whole day, ranked exactly the way I’d rank it.
Boston Dynamics put wheels on Atlas and nobody taught it how to roll
Boston Dynamics bolted wheels onto Atlas’s ankles with one custom adapter and an off-the-shelf scooter rim, then stood back. Nobody programmed the rolling. The learning policy worked out steering, sideways dashes, and spins on its own in millions of simulator runs, and it landed a 360 jump on the very first try.
The warehouse film is all aisles, boxes, and overhead reaches. It was in Discover feeds within the hour.
Best of CES 2027: LG’s transparent OLED, wallpaper TV, and record-fast gaming monitor
LG didn’t wait for January either. The Signature OLED T6, a 77-inch transparent panel, took Best of Innovation, the top honor in the program. The evo AI W7 wallpaper TV and the UltraGear 25G590B gaming monitor picked up Innovation Awards right beside it today.
The UltraGear is the one I’d put on my own desk: the first monitor with a native 1,000Hz refresh rate at Full HD, and it sells for $999.99. The W7’s full details stay locked until January 4, so its trophy is an early arrival riding on top of an early arrival. January’s show is going to feel like a rerun at this rate.
Two CES 2027 honors, both already on our pages
The CTA’s list had two names from our own board, and we ran both stories today: the Pongbot Aura named a CES Innovation Awards 2027 honoree story, and Lumistar’s CARRY basketball robot wins Best of Innovation in Sports & Fitness at the CES Innovation Awards 2027.
CARRY chases down rebounds and fires the ball back so a player can shoot alone for hours, and it’s taking late pledges at $2,499. The Aura is Pongbot’s table tennis trainer. Neither one needed a booth in Las Vegas to get the judges’ attention. November did it early.
Norman Foster deleted the lugs, and the watch is better for it
Norman Foster is 91, and he’s spent six decades designing airports, towers, and the Gherkin. This year he just designed a watch for Lebond: 38.5mm of grade 5 titanium with no lugs at all.
I wrote this one up myself and ended it wishing for a green strap, which tells you where my head’s at. The watch doesn’t need my help. It runs an ETA 2892-A2 behind a sunray dial, costs $3,918, carries Foster’s signature molded into the strap, and it’s the cleanest piece of industrial design I saw all day.
Casio’s Duro gets a cloth strap and three new colors
The Duro is the budget diver half the internet already owns, and the MDV106C swaps the resin band for cloth and adds three new colors.
No reinvention, no smart features, no ceremony. Just the watch people already buy in colors they’ll actually pick, and it spent the day near the top of our most-read list. I’m not surprised. Casio knows its buyer cold.
Sirui’s Aurora line goes wide with a 15mm f/1.6 and a 24mm f/1.4
Sirui widened its Aurora line with two fast primes, a 15mm f/1.6 at $599 and a 24mm f/1.4 at $499, both out now for Sony E and Leica L mounts and both priced well under the first-party glass. Nikon Z and Fujifilm X versions follow early next year. The 15mm is the architecture and astro play; the 24mm is a street shooter’s walk-around.
The piece hit Discover nine minutes after it published. That’s the fastest I’ve seen a lens story move, and I’ve watched a lot of them.
Omega’s green Seamaster Diver 300M, handled: the ceramic green is real and the strap pushes back
Our hands-on with Omega’s green Seamaster Diver 300M settled the question the press photos couldn’t. The ceramic green dial is real: deep, glossy, and alive in person, not the flat green the product renders suggest. It changes with the light like a good dial should.
The strap is the fight. It pushes back on the wrist in a way the dial doesn’t deserve, and that’s the tradeoff the piece hangs on: a dial you’d buy on sight, attached to a strap you’d swap by Friday. Budget for the swap and the watch makes complete sense.
Sorel x Maharishi Daystorm Horizon Zip GTX hides Bonsai Tigerstripe camo under a removable zip shroud
Sorel and Maharishi built the Daystorm Horizon Zip GTX with Bonsai Tigerstripe camo hidden under a removable zip shroud, so the boot runs plain until you decide it shouldn’t. It’s a $350 winter boot with a secret. The shroud zips off when the weather or the mood calls for camo, and the Gore-Tex build underneath doesn’t care which way you wear it.
I called this one peak today, and it holds up in print: peak. Two brands adding something instead of trading logos.
Starbucks Japan puts a Stanley bottle at the front of its Brighten Up Your Days winter drinkware
Starbucks Japan’s Brighten Up Your Days winter collection puts a Stanley bottle at the front of the drinkware line. The rest of the set follows its lead, piece for piece, all of it Japan-only this season.
Japan gets the good merchandise first, again. It’s the light one to close on, and Allie’s gallery is worth the scroll all by itself.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow starts with the OPPO Find X10, which is sitting on my desk right now. The unboxing and the hands-on go up during the day, and the bar is high: our Find X10 camera-design piece from September is still the most-read Discover story we’ve run this quarter, by a very wide margin.
BLUETTI’s Elite 30 mini launches, the XTRA Muse 2 goes on sale, and Kamen Rider’s 55th anniversary watch opens pre-orders in Japan, all of it landing before most of the US wakes up.
And Open Day submissions stay open until Friday night. If your brand wants a shot at Monday’s board, the door is [email protected]. We write it our way, the hard gate doesn’t move, and the first 25 complete submissions per title fill the board.
