I went looking for weird phones and CES 2026 did not disappoint.

It’s January, which means there’s a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. They weren’t center stage, of course. . That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the margins at tech’s biggest show, I saw some glimmers of hope that the future of phones might not look as same-y as it has for the past half decade – at least, if you know where to look.