Just a couple weeks ago, I was running around Las Vegas for CES, the tech industry's annual mega-trade show that helps set the stage for the coming year. This was my tenth year covering the event.

It's difficult to convey the size and scope of CES, but in recent years the show has outgrown the Las Vegas Convention Center--itself comprised of three cavernous exhibit halls--and spilled into a second convention center (the Sands Expo and adjacent Venetian hotel meeting space) down the road. The TV industry also holds a show-within-a-show at the Aria hotel's convention space, and many exhibitors conduct private meetings or mini-events at other hotels along the strip.

Covering the whole of CES is therefore impossible even for large publications, let alone an individual journalist. Fortunately, CES has a longstanding tendency to fabricate useless trends, focus on gimmicks, and over-hype undercooked tech. The trick to covering the show is to figure out what's really important and skip everything else.

With all that in mind, here's my perspective on everything I saw (and avoided seeing) at this year's show:

5G: A buzzword built upon other buzzwords, 5G wireless is supposed to revolutionize virtual reality, augmented reality, drones, self-driving cars, mobile gaming, telemedicine and more by providing fast and responsive internet connectivity everywhere. At least that's how executives from Verizon and other wireless carriers pitched 5G during CES.

I don't want to pooh-pooh the technology itself, which does have lots of potential, but the announcements and keynotes lacked some much-needed specificity. Wireless carriers are still building their 5G networks in bits and pieces, and we don't know what service will cost or when it'll be broadly available. Meanwhile, the first 5G phones will be expensive battery hogs, and the futuristic use cases we're being promised remain theoretical; no one's actually offering a 5G self-driving car or VR service anytime soon. Curb your enthusiasm for 5G until at least 2020, and don’t be fooled beforehand when phones on AT&T’s network start displaying "5G E” connections. Those are just a faster version of 4G with a layer of bogus marketing on top.

Foldable phones: Look, no one's more excited than me by the idea of a phone that can transform into a tablet, but I played around with a folding phone from a company called Royole (pictured above), and it had all kinds of glaring issues. Instead of folding neatly in half, the display formed a wedge shape when closed, and it didn’t fully flatten out in tablet mode either. The phone's rubberized, accordion-like crease also lent an air of cheapness to the design, which along with the creaky folding mechanism made me think the whole thing could break under pressure. Even if Samsung does better with its own folding phone, the first iteration will likely cost upwards of $1500. It’ll be a year or two before phone makers work through all the rough edges and high production costs. (Dual screens and attachable screens may be more realistic in the meantime, but won’t be cheap either.)

8K TVs: Why was virtually every TV vendor at CES this year hawking 8K resolution as the next big thing in display tech? Probably because it's so easy for marketers to explain and understand: By quadrupling the number of pixels on the screen compared to 4K, you get a sharper, more realistic picture. Still, I couldn’t find any honest, side-by-side comparisons of 4K and 8K displays at CES, probably because most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference. (Comparisons were more readily available when HDR was on the rise, because the improvement over standard dynamic range is obvious.) MicroLED sounds much more interesting than 8K as an emerging display technology, but it's at least a few years away.

Voice assistants everywhere: The clearest and most immediate trend at CES was the continued rise of voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. Amazon says it's already sold 100 million Alexa devices, and Google Assistant is now running on close to 1 billion devices (including phones). As such, voice control has become table stakes for smart home devices such as light bulbs, door locks, and outlet switches, of which there were hundreds at the show.

Having conquered countertops with their smart speakers, Google and Amazon are now seeking out new frontiers. Google and Lenovo, for instance, are working on a voice-powered alarm clock with a four-inch display, and Anker is making a USB car charger that adds Google Assistant voice controls to the car’s speakers (via Bluetooth or an auxiliary cable). I also saw a phone mount for car dashboards from iOttie with built-in microphones for Alexa voice control, and an Alexa-powered aftermarket head unit from Boss (pictured above). Even LG and Samsung are adding Alexa and Google Assistant control to their televisions, effectively admitting that their own voice assistants aren’t capable enough. Amazon and Google both like to say that it's early days for voice control, but it's already starting to feel inescapable.

Smarter security: Judging by the number of products on display, we’re going to see a lot of companies pushing do-it-yourself home security this year. Amazon’s Ring brand is fleshing out its security line with a peephole camera, along with flood and smoke detectors for its existing alarm system. Doorbell cameras seemed to be everywhere at CES, including one from Netatmo that’s the first to work Apple HomeKit. Arlo is also building a security system around its popular (but pricey) cameras, while startup Kangaroo is adding new sensors, sirens, and a camera to its cheap home security system. I still have reservations about investing in these systems, most of which are designed to lock you into one company’s hardware instead of working together, but that’s a topic for another day.
 

• Here are 9 clever product ideas from CES.
• Amazon works with Chamberlain to leave packages in garages.
• Here's everything Google announced at the show.
• Plus, everything I mentioned in Cord Cutter Weekly.

Although Apple lets you easy subscribe to services from an iPhone or iPad, cancelling those subscriptions requires digging through several layers of the Settings menu, including the non-obvious step of pressing your Apple ID name under "iTunes & App Store.”

Fortunately, someone’s created a Shortcut that takes you straight to your subscription list. If you’re running iOS 12, just click on this link, then select "Get Shortcut." You can then open the Shortcuts app and press the "Manage subscriptions" button to view your active subscriptions. (Hat tip to this Twitter thread. Read more about Shortcuts here.)

For Android users, no such trickery is required. Just visit this link while signed into your Google account to view all your subscriptions from any web browser.
 

Mastercard’s free trial protection: Speaking of subscription management, Mastercard is taking a stance against certain services that automatically bill customers after their free trial is over. For subscriptions that offer physical products, such as Birchbox or Dollar Shave Club, the service will have to get an extra confirmation from you over text or email before it can start billing.

Notably, the protection doesn’t apply to digital services (like, say, Advisorator), at least for now. After its original announcement didn’t make this clear, Mastercard told The Verge that it’s starting with just physical subscriptions as these are the ones that most frequently result in unwanted charges. In any event, I can’t find any details on when the confirmation requirement will take effect, so for now I’d still take a proactive approach to cancellation when trying out some mail-order razor blades or makeup kits.

An Apple update: Just to follow up on the last issue of this newsletter, Samsung indeed isn’t the only TV vendor with which Apple is now working. LG, Sony, and Vizio will also be adding AirPlay 2 to their latest televisions, allowing users to send video or music to the TV from iPhones, iPads, or Macs. Unlike Samsung, they also plan to support HomeKit, which will let users control their TVs with Siri voice commands and create smart home routines that include the television. (You might, for instance, have a “goodnight” routine that locks the doors, turns off the lights, and turns off the television.) Support for iTunes does appear to be a Samsung exclusive, at least for now.

More location madness: Motherboard’s Joseph Cox published an important investigative story a couple weeks ago, documenting the ease with anyone can buy access to a specific smartphone users’ whereabouts. The core issue is wireless carriers’ longstanding practice of selling location data to "aggregators," who ostensibly provide that information to providers of legitimate services such as roadside assistance and fraud detection. It turns out those aggregators can also sell the data to other data brokers, which in turn might sell the data to individual entities such as bail bondsmen, car salesman, and bounty hunters with practically no oversight. By paying one of these bounty hunters, Cox was able to track down the location of a specific phone with nothing but the phone number.

Although wireless carriers had already promised to stop selling data to aggregators last year after a separate scandal, apparently they hadn’t all gotten around to doing so. AT&T and T-Mobile say they’ll wind down the practice by March, but Verizon and Sprint haven’t given a specific timeline. Notably, the carriers now say they’ll even stop providing data to services with clear consumer benefits, such as roadside assistance, unless customers give explicit consent. Whether the government will follow through with its own investigations—or, dare I say it, actual oversight—is unclear.
 

Sonos is knocking $50 off its Beam soundbar for an unspecified period of time, bringing the price down to $350 in either black or white. The Beam is better for small-to-medium rooms than larger ones, but it provides excellent sound quality overall and has Alexa voice control built-in. Google Assistant support is also coming later this year so you’ll be able to choose between the two dueling assistants.

If you really want to go all-in with Sonos, you can also get a subwoofer for $599 ($100 off) and a pair of Play:1 speakers for $300 with a $30 Amazon gift card.