Best Gadgets of 2014

The Battle Box is an irresistibly, almost hilariously over-the-top mini-ITX design—it has a carrying handle and resembles the nuclear suitcase that travels with the president—that somehow finds room for a Core i7-4770K, GeForce GTX 780 Ti card (or Titan or R9 290X if you like), and 120GB SSD plus 1TB hard drive. You can remove the chassis frame from the case to work on the rig, which uses off-the-shelf parts for personalized configuration. And the internal build quality is, dare we say it, gorgeous. (See our slideshow from the Cyberpower CES 2014 suite.) The Fang Battle Box is expected to ship in the late first quarter of 2014.

The Prep Pad takes the digital food scale to a whole new level. Part smart scale, part nutritional guide, part dietician, the Prep Pad allows you to not only measure your food, but also determine the nutritional content of everything you place on top.

Using an iPad app (iPhone app in the works), you specify what item you are weighing (manually or with a barcode) and it displays helpful dietary information including calories, protein, fats and carbs.

The whole curved screen shtick has quickly become the great gimmick of 2014—that is, until LG showed off its 105” OLED 4k TV that just happened to have a nice flexible display on it. The curvature to this massive, gorgeous television feels just right—and unlike the curved displays on their smartphones, actually enhances the experience. This might be another product that won’t be hitting Best Buy shelves anytime soon, but that doesn’t take anything from the fact that LG has made an immersive and interesting television.

Playstation Now isn’t exactly a gadget—but for gamers, this online game streaming service was the most important announcement at CES this year. Sony had purchased the cloud gaming service Gaikai in 2012, but it wasn’t until this year at CES that we knew what for. Not only does Playstation Now effortlessly solve the backwards compatibility problem, but now Sony just may have the Playstation 4’s killer app—the thing that will make gamers want to reserve space for it under their TV.