You couldn’t go anywhere in Las Vegas without seeing Google branding this year. The company even had a Disney-esque tram ride in its massive booth outside the convention center extolling the virtues of its Google Assistant. But it wasn’t just all bluster: The search giant unleashed a deluge of Assistant upgrades (see below), and nearly every other company at the show was boasting about Assistant compatibility in its products.

But weep not for archrival Alexa. Amazon’s assistant remains the de facto standard, and was nearly always available in new products alongside Google’s offering.

But while it was a good show for Google, it was arguably even better for a company that wasn’t officially present in Las Vegas: Apple shocked by throwing open the gates of its walled garden with a slew of new AirPlay and HomeKit partners, and Samsung TVs will even offer an iTunes video app. Samsung, meanwhile, dropped a bomb of its own towards the end of the show: Its eagerly anticipated Galaxy S10 line of phones will be officially unveiled in San Francisco on Feb. 20, likely alongside a Samsung foldable phone, too.

All the while, no one in Las Vegas could stop talking about (and eating) the new version of the Impossible Burger, which debuted at the show. The second iteration of the meatless burger tastes so much like the real thing that it threw CNET’s vegetarian Joan Solsman for a loop when she tried the Impossible tartare. “I haven’t eaten beef in a decade, and the new fake meat at CES comes close enough to cow to gross me out. That’s a compliment, I think,” she said. — John Falcone