The Eight Weirdest Things I Saw at CES 2025
CES is a weeklong exhibition of new products and services from various industries. Some products are true innovations, while others are decidedly duds. However, some of them are just weird.
Walking around CES this week, from the convention center halls to the media-only events, I had a blast checking out the weirdest tech I could find. After all, just because something is weird doesn’t make it boring or useless. Against; some of these items were some of the most interesting things to see. However, the eight products that stood out to me the most were:
Electric salt spoon
CNET Group chose this product as the weirdest and most unexpected product of CES, and it’s not hard to see why. The Kirina Electric Salt Spoon adds saltiness to food, not with added sodium, but with electricity.
According to Kirin, the salt spoon uses a mild electrical current to attract sodium molecules in your mouth that would otherwise be lost to your taste buds. This causes the food on the spoon to become saltier than it would otherwise be. You choose from four intensity levels (the company recommends the lowest level for beginners), press a button, and you’re good to go. However, the spoon is huge, making it difficult to deliver electric current while eating.
This is strange, but also noble, since it may allow people who need to reduce their sodium intake to still enjoy “salty” foods.
I only saw the spoon at an exhibition and did not have the opportunity to taste the product. However, Mashable’s Matt Binder did it : at first he wasn’t sure if it worked until the spoon went off halfway through a sip of broth due to how awkward it was to hold. The loss of effect when eating with a spoon demonstrated that the food became saltier.
Telfriend
I didn’t think one of the weirdest things I’d see at CES would be a massage chair, but that’s because I didn’t think anyone would make a Transformers-themed massage chair—and one so obviously Bumblebee-inspired at that.
To be clear, Hasbro has nothing to do with the chair. This is Bodyfriend , a massage chair with arms and legs that can move like a robot. Supposedly, this helps people stretch muscles that they might not otherwise be able to move on their own. However, to me it looks like a slow robot that has fallen and can’t get up.
The chair consists of 733 parts and can measure heart rate and also, of course, perform massage. You can see CNET’s Bridget Carey try it out at CES Unveiled:
Petal
Do you love your plants? Have you ever wondered how they feel? Do you wish they could write to you? Of course yes. That’s why Petal, from the makers of Bird Buddy, exists .
Petal is a camera with a flexible stem that you can install in your yard to monitor plants and flowers. Of course, since it’s 2025, Petal is also powered by artificial intelligence and can identify potential threats to your flora, such as insects and bees. There’s even an interactive option that allows you to “chat” with your flowers through the Bird Buddy chatbot, so you can find out how many things your flower has “seen” today.
Nekojita FuFu
If you don’t like your drinks too hot, you don’t have to cool them yourself; you can use Nékojita FuFu instead. This little cat device sits on the edge of a mug or bowl and uses a tiny internal fan to blow the hot drink or food for you.
It sounds silly, and it is, but the company claims it works: FuFu can cool hot water from 190°F to 160°F in three minutes and to 151°F in five minutes. Compare that to 176°F after three minutes and 171°F after five minutes without the cat, and you’ll realize it’s actually doing something.
I can’t imagine these things gaining widespread popularity, but it’s fun too. This reminds me of the new tea brewers like Mr. Tea . If you enjoy seeing a cute cat on your mug, cooling your coffee to a drinkable temperature, I’m all for it.
I also like the idea suggested in the top comment on our article on Nékojita FuFu: “Place this on one of the rechargeable ‘hot mugs’ and let them fight.”
AeroCatTower
AeroCatTower is an air purifier. It’s also a cat tower. You could tell by the creepy cat sitting on the device.
It’s unknown how well the AeroCatTower purifies the air, but it does have your cat’s best interests in mind . When your pet hops up to rest, the machine slows down so as not to disturb him. There are also built-in heated seats for added comfort. Hey, maybe this will keep your cat away from the keyboard.
Realbotics
If you were walking around CES and weren’t sure if you saw the Realbotix booth, you missed it. Realbotix is trying to create anthropomorphic AI robots, and the result is, well, weird. Just watch CNET’s interview with Aria, one of Realbotix’s robots, and you’ll see why. Aria’s face is firmly in the uncanny valley, as is the fact that her lips are completely out of sync with her speech. Her movements in general are far from natural. It all feels like interacting with a character from a PS1 game.
But what’s even weirder is that Realbotix swaps out the robots’ faces, leaving you with a flimsy and creepy face mask. I understand what Realbotix is going for, but its current robots are confusing to say the least. (I walked past this booth and said “Jesus Christ” out loud to myself.)
Foldable ThinkBook Plus Gen 6
At CES this year, we looked at two of Lenovo’s major products: one of them was the Lenovo Legion Go S , the first non- Valve gaming laptop to run SteamOS natively. Very cool. The other was the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable , a laptop with a rollable display that extends an additional 2.7 inches vertically. Very strange, but also very cool.
Lifehacker assistant tech editor Michelle Erhardt sat down with Lenovo to try out the unusual laptop. As advertised, you can press a button or gesture to expand your laptop’s display to 16.7 inches, which is very convenient. You get the benefits of a large display in a 14-inch laptop form factor, plus the novelty of, of course, revealing parts of your display that you didn’t even know were hidden in the laptop. The rest of the machine is a basic Copilot+ PC with an Intel Core Ultra 7 chip, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage, so no too fancy internals to complement the new display technology. However, Lenovo may have found it weirder than cool at the $3,500 price tag.
Dell’s big rebrand
You know what’s strange? Abandoning an established brand like XPS in favor of a language that every other tech company uses. It’s a confusing move from Dell, which made headlines during CES this week when it announced it would discontinue the XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision and its other brands. Now Dell computers will be produced in three lines: Dell, Dell Pro and Dell Pro Max. Within each of these lines there are three additional lines to consider: Base, Plus and Premium.
Your friend may have a Dell Plus, another may have a Dell Pro Base, and you may have a Dell Pro Max Premium. It’s not that confusing, is it? If so, check out Khamosh Pathak’s explanation here .