🧑‍💻 Tech companies promise us the future every year, but most years all we get are slightly better cameras and marginally thinner laptops. With the (re)introduction of analog hardware, however, it looks like tech is ready to reward curiosity and skill again. The trend worth watching: Technology that respects your time and attention rather than demanding it.

After years of devices that do everything — and doing it while harvesting your attention for advertisers — some of the most interesting products at CES 2026 went the other direction. Smaller screens. Physical buttons. Devices that do one thing well instead of a hundred things adequately. Call it the analog revival or the anti-smartphone backlash or the moment tech companies finally noticed that people are exhausted by infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds. Whatever it is, it’s producing genuinely interesting technology. Here’s what’s worth watching.

BlackBerry’s ghost gets a modern body

The smartphone industry has spent 15 years convincing us that touchscreens are the only way to interact with a phone. Clicks Technology respectfully disagrees. The Communicator is a USD 499 Android phone built around a physical Qwerty keyboard — the first serious attempt to revive the BlackBerry form factor since 2018. It’s deliberately compact, with a four-inch AMOLED display sitting above a tactile keyboard, and it’s designed by the same person who created the iconic BlackBerry Bold editions, Q10, and Passport.

The pitch is refreshingly honest. It’s not trying to replace your iPhone, it’s marketed as a “secondary device” for communication, not consumption. The custom launcher prioritizes messaging apps and quick actions over endless grids of icons. A hardware “airplane mode” switch on the side lets you disconnect entirely, and a customizable LED that lights up in different colors for different contacts, so you know who’s messaging without touching the screen. It’s a clever compromise for those looking into the dumb phone trend but hesitant to make the jump.

The old-school features are almost comically thorough: A 3.5mm headphone jack, microSD expansion to up to 2TB, a physical SIM tray alongside eSIM support, and swappable back covers. The fingerprint sensor is embedded in the spacebar — a small detail that feels dreamt up by a techno-optimist in the early noughties.

Early reception has been stronger than expected, with Clicks reportedly making a sale every 6.5 seconds in the week after the announcement. Whether this will translate into long-term adoption remains to be seen.

A smartwatch that doesn’t demand your attention

The original Pebble was a Kickstarter sensation in 2012. It was the watch that proved smartwatches could be a real product category even before Apple got involved. Then came Fitbit’s acquisition in 2016, the slow death of support, and years of community-maintained software keeping the dream alive on borrowed time. Now the Pebble is back, and Round 2 is exactly the kind of device the current smartwatch market is missing.

Without a heart rate monitor, blood oxygen tracker, and cellular connectivity, it stays alive for 10–14 days on a single charge. At USD 199, the Round 2 features a 1.3-inch circular e-paper display in an 8.1mm stainless steel case — thinner than almost any smartwatch on the market.

That’s the entire value proposition: a watch that handles notifications, basic activity tracking, and tells time while looking like an actual watch instead of a tiny computer strapped to your wrist.

The Round 2 fixes the original’s biggest flaws. The massive bezel is gone, replaced by an edge-to-edge display. Battery life has improved from two days to two weeks. The four physical buttons remain, allowing navigation without looking down — you can silence a call or skip a track by feel alone. In an industry obsessed with comprehensive health tracking and AI assistants on your wrist, that restraint is its own kind of ambition.

The Dell XPS revival

Sometimes the most interesting tech story isn’t about a new device, but a company admitting it made a mistake. In 2025, Dell killed the XPS brand. The beloved laptop line, which had defined premium Windows laptops for over a decade, was consolidated into a confusing Dell Pro Max naming scheme that nobody understood and nobody asked for. Sales suffered and customers complained. Dell COO Jeff Clarke would later address it with unusual corporate candor: “We didn’t listen to you. You were right on branding.”

At CES 2026, Dell unveiled the new XPS 14 and XPS 16. Not just a name change, but ground-up redesigns that address nearly every complaint users had about previous generations. Most notably, the capacitive touch function row, widely despised since its introduction in 2022, is gone. Physical function keys are back. The invisible touchpad now has subtle etching so you can actually see where the touch-sensitive area begins. The XPS logo also appears on the lid, something fans had requested for years.

Under the hood, the machines run Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 processors and measure just 14.6mm thin — Dell’s thinnest laptops ever. The XPS 14 weighs three pounds, more than half a pound lighter than its predecessor. Battery life is claimed to reach up to 27 hours for standard use on the LCD models thanks to variable refresh technology that drops to 1Hz for static content. Perhaps most significantly, Dell is also bringing back the XPS 13 later this year, promising the thinnest, lightest, and most accessible model yet.

The redesign emphasizes repairability, with easy-to-remove keyboards, modular USB-C ports, and recycled materials. It’s a rare case of a major company reversing course based on customer feedback and delivering hardware that respects both user preferences and practical ownership.