IFA Berlin brought innovation from across the globe into one giant exhibition, and we got the chance to experience the new-gen “tech” firsthand. Walking through Messe Berlin, we saw a laptop designed to be repaired at home to a power bank with visible liquid coolant, an AI-powered toothbrush with a camera inside your mouth, and a robot vacuum carrying another.
The variety is what makes IFA one of the best tech shows. IFA 2026 runs from September 4 through 8, and we’ve spent our time in Berlin chasing down the products that caught our eyes. Some of these are clever ideas that may change how we use tech every day, while others solve a problem that I didn’t realize existed.
From powerful laptops and stunning phones to unbelievably pocketable storage and amazing personal care gadgets, here’s the best tech we’ve seen at IFA 2026.
Xiaomi 18 Fold
This one made a surprise entrance at IFA, and what a lovely surprise it was. Clad in an eye-catching, striking cherry red finish, it’s quite a departure from the tall and narrow book-style foldables we’ve become used to, but Xiaomi isn’t alone in thinking this might be the way forward. It has a 5.38-inch screen on the outside and opens into a 7.58-inch display. It also features one of the thinnest bezels I’ve seen on a foldable phone yet.
Xiaomi has also managed to squeeze in a 6,000mAh silicon-carbon battery, complete with 67W wired and 50W wireless charging. That’s a pretty impressive combination for a foldable this thin and light. The camera hardware is seriously impressive for a passport-format foldable. There’s a 200MP Leica-branded main camera alongside a 50MP periscope telephoto and a 50MP ultrawide. Inside, Xiaomi is making another big change. The 18 Fold debuts the company’s own 3nm Xring O3 processor. I can’t wait to try this one out!
Acer Vero 16
Repairable laptops usually remind me of modular notebooks, with the design being their entire personality. Acer’s new Vero 16 is also leaning hard on that repairability idea, though it has a lot more going for it. At a glance, it looks akin to your typical premium notebooks, but the company has gone considerably further with repairability this generation. There’s a tool-free latch for accessing the internals, a user-replaceable battery and SSD, detachable hinges, and removable I/O covers rather than ports that are permanently soldered into place.
Acer even engraves a visual repair guide onto the chassis. The rest of the hardware is just as solid. Configurations reach Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H alongside a 16-inch 3K OLED display, while the chassis uses recycled and low-carbon aluminum. So you’re not getting the design compromise of a repairable laptop.
Asus ProArt P14
The ProArt P14 made an impression for almost the opposite reason. This laptop has an insane amount of computing power packaged inside something I’d happily carry around. ASUS has built the new P14 around Nvidia’s RTX Spark platform, with enough unified memory and GPU capability to tackle some enormous local AI workloads.
ASUS claims that it can work with LLMs reaching 120 billion parameters, 90GB-plus 3D scenes, and local 4K AI video generation. The ProArt lineup has been catered for creators, but this one comes across more as a portable AI server. Add to this the new Neo White color option, and the P14 is both the beauty and the beast.
TCL P80 Pro
I’ve liked TCL’s NXTPAPER displays for years, but LCD’s have their obvious drawbacks. So TCL announcing the P80 Pro had me hyped when they managed to combine NXTPAPER’s glare-reducing, paper-inspired panel with a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED display. You still get up to 120Hz, 3,200 nits peak brightness, and full DCI-P3 coverage, while a physical NXTPAPER key lets you jump into its Paper and Max Ink modes when you’d rather read than stare at another bright smartphone interface
OLED gives the P80 Pro the contrast, color, and brightness you’d expect from a modern premium smartphone, while NXTPAPER targets glare and eye comfort when those qualities matter less. It’s literally the best of both worlds for those who already love NXTPAPER devices.
JLab JBuds Mini ANC
TWS earbuds are already pretty small and easy to carry around. But then there is the JBuds Mini ANC. JLab calls these the smallest true wireless ANC earbuds from a major headphone brand, with earbuds 30% smaller and a charging case 50% smaller than its Go Pop+. Even with this mini size, they still pack active noise cancellation, Be Aware transparency, Bluetooth multipoint, IP55 protection, and more than 25 hours of total battery life.
My favorite addition might be Apple Find My, because something this tiny is exactly the sort of thing a customer might lose. Find My tracks the charging case, letting you locate it on a map or make it play a sound. And at $42.99, JLab hasn’t turned miniaturization into an excuse to charge premium-earbud money.
Memoket Gem
AI wearables have had a hard time finding a reason to exist, but Memoket Gem has a pretty interesting one: it remembers what happened when you weren’t looking at a screen. The 11g AI wristband can capture conversations on demand, with up to 20 hours of continuous recording and 400 hours of on-device storage. The clever part is its memory layer, which connects conversations across time rather than treating every conversation as a separate recording. So if something comes up today that you discussed weeks ago, Gem can surface the earlier context and point you back to the moment it happened.
Gem also doesn’t try to replace your smartwatch. A co-wear band lets it sit alongside an Apple Watch, while it can also be worn as a pendant or pin. It connects to ChatGPT, Claude, Slack, Notion, Gmail, Outlook, and other services through MCP, making that captured context useful beyond the wristband itself. At $199, Gem is an interesting take on AI hardware: less another assistant you have to interact with, and more a memory layer for the AI tools you already use.
Lexar Muse
An external SSD is already built to be portable. The Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD is just 3.8mm thick at its thickest point and tapers to 1mm, which Lexar says makes it the world’s thinnest portable SSD. To put that thinnest point into perspective, the company couldn’t even fit a regular USB-C connector, so Lexar created its own magnetic SnapLink pogo-pin connection instead.
There’s some genuine utility behind the engineering. A magnetic sleeve lets the drive sit against compatible MagSafe iPhones, with read speeds up to 1,050MB/s and write speeds up to 1,000MB/s. It can also record 4K 120fps Apple ProRes directly on supported iPhones. The new proprietary cable is an unfortunate trade-off, but there’s no denying just how impressive it is to hold something card-shaped and carrying a whole terabyte of storage in it.
XGIMI AURA 3 Series
Getting a giant projector image normally asks for a big room with plenty of space and some creative furniture placement. XGIMI’s AURA 3 series, on the other hand, needs just eight inches to produce a 120-inch image. Ultra-short-throw projectors aren’t a new concept, and the three-digit screen size isn’t too impressive on its own.
It’s the fact that you can make the projection hit 4K resolution at 120Hz. Add VRR and ALLM, and you can expect it to be great for video games as well. The Max reaches a claimed 5,700 ISO lumens, and both support Dolby Vision and IMAX Enhanced. I love ultra-short-throw projectors because they make truly gigantic screens practical, and this just takes the experience to the next level.
UGREEN MagFlow Pro Power Bank
I’ve tried out more power banks than I can count. A vast majority of them serve the same purpose, which is what made UGREEN’s latest offering so unique. Watching coolant physically circulate inside one was a new experience. UGREEN’s MagFlow Pro is a 10,000mAh magnetic power bank with CryoPulse liquid cooling built around a micropump. A transparent section gives you a view of the actual coolant moving, which might be gloriously excessive for a battery pack, but there is a practical reason behind it.
Wireless charging generates heat, and UGREEN is using active cooling to help sustain its 25W Qi2 charging performance. You can also charge via a USB-C output at 45W, with a built-in USB-C cable that doubles as a carrying strap. Lastly, a screen gives you all the necessary information. Did anyone ask for this? No.Though I can’t say this is another one of those clever solutions that make the average user’s life easier.
Anker SleepLab Pro
Any kind of sleep tracker will need you to wear something all night. For someone like me, who finds wearing a watch or ring a little uncomfortable, tracking my sleep quality becomes a bit more inconsistent. That’s why Anker’s SleepLab Pro seems perfect to me. It sits on your nightstand rather than your hand.
The contactless sensing can track sleep stages, heart rate, breathing, snoring, and other overnight information without requiring a wearable. It then combines that data with adaptive sound and light, including dual 7.5W speakers, guided breathing, sunrise-style lighting, and gentler alarms. Another sweet detail is the lack of any kind of subscription. Anker says the sleep reports, analytics, and audio features are included rather than locked behind another monthly payment.
iRobot Roomba Duo
The Roomba Duo looks as if one robot vacuum managed to get a pet of its own. It’s actually a surprisingly clever solution to one of the biggest physical limitations robot vacuums face. The larger Roomba handles open floors with vacuuming and steam mopping, while a mechanical arm on top carries and deploys an ultra-compact second robot capable of squeezing underneath furniture and into areas the main machine can’t reach.
You can just dumb it down and call it a 2-in-1 Roomba. Both units share the same map and coordinate their cleaning, while the larger machine effectively doubles as the smaller robot’s transport (robot vacuum’s mount, if you will). The concept is simple, and it still feels like one of the most memorable home-tech ideas at IFA. We’ve spent years making individual robot vacuums more capable, and iRobot just gave it a sidekick.
Dyson CameraJet
Dyson built its reputation by overengineering ordinary household objects, while also looking good while doing it. So a cool new toothbrush seems like the natural progression. The CameraJet puts a 100,000-pixel macro camera next to the brush head and runs 28 images every second through a machine-learning system trained on 470,000 dental images. It looks for the spaces between your teeth and, once it identifies one, can trigger a targeted burst of mouthrinse within 100 milliseconds to clean between them while you brush.
You can even view the camera feed through the MyDyson app, although Dyson says those images aren’t stored on the product or in the cloud. The $499 price tag is a lot to swallow, no doubt. But a toothbrush that can see inside your mouth and intelligently fire precision liquid sounds like the kind of dental care product Dyson would make.
DJI Osmo 360 II
360 cameras help record everything, but they also mean two lenses to worry about. The DJI Osmo 360 II addresses that with replaceable lenses, which immediately makes the camera less nerve-racking to actually use. That’s just scratching the surface too. DJI has moved to a large 1-inch-class imaging system with 8K video at up to 60fps, improved low-light capture through AI SuperNight 2.0, and the stabilization and imaging expertise it has built across its Osmo and Ronin products.
Better image quality is always welcome. But an action camera’s most vulnerable component becoming replaceable is a great quality-of-life upgrade, especially after you’ve used it for six months.
Acer Predator Atlas 7
The gaming-handheld market saw a bunch of releases that brought larger screens to the portable gaming rigs. But Acer’s Predator Atlas 7 moves in a direction I prefer. While gaming on a larger screen is more immersive, it gets a lot harder to carry around, not to mention a little more obnoxious too.
It’s essentially the flagship Atlas formula squeezed around a more manageable 7-inch 1080p 120Hz display, with configurations reaching Intel’s Arc G3 Extreme and integrated Arc B390 graphics. Acer still offers up to an 80Wh battery, dual-fan cooling, and optional TMR joysticks. That big battery is one of the more striking parts of the handheld, despite its compact form factor. Big handhelds can be wonderful until you’ve been holding one for an hour. The Atlas 7 hits the balance much better.
TECNO POVA 8 Pro 5G Tonino Lamborghini
The Tecno phone wowed us at IFA 2026 for multiple reasons, beyond its stunning design. The device adopts an eye-catching black-and-red palette with lovely hexagon patterns on the back. Running vertically across the rear shell is what Tecno refers to as the Pulse Line that plays a key role in the aesthetics. It lights up every time you boot up the phone. The build is IP69/69K certified, which is the best that the smartphone industry currently has to offer.
Over at the front is a 6.78-inch 1.5K 144Hz HyperLux AMOLED screen with an impressive peak brightness of 4,500 nits. The phone comes armed with MediaTek’s Dimensity 7400 Ultimate silicon, tagging alongside a dedicated P1 Graphic Chip to assist with graphics-intensive chores, such as gaming. You get an optically stabilized Sony LYTIA 700C (1/1.56-inch) sensor that outputs images at 50-megapixel resolution.
EcoFlow Stream 2
At IFA 2026, plug-in solar power storage was a hot trend. EcoFlow, naturally, brought its A-game to the show with the STREAM 5000, an all-in-one balcony solar storage system that retrofits with your existing solar installation. Beyond the performance and scalability perks, it’s the sheer convenience aspect that makes this one stand out. It plugs into a standard wall socket, plays well with third-party inverters, serves an outdoor-ready IP65 kit, and packs plenty of power into a compact chassis.
It can manage up to 3,000W output, and the app-based setup and controls are just the cherry on top. But the best is yet to come. “From October, the series gains Local Mode. If the internet drops out, a STREAM system simply carries on: it keeps running, and the app keeps controlling it, with no cloud in the loop,” says EcoFlow.
Laifen AutoCurl Curling Iron
Laifen’s expertise in the personal care and beauty segment again stole the show, and this time around, the focus was on blending cutting-edge tech with day-to-day convenience. The best exhibit of that approach was the Laifen AutoCurl Curling Iron. Equipped with an in-house brushless motor that reduces drying time while also staying fairly quiet, the latest from Laifen comes rocking an aluminum alloy-fibreglass build. Compared to a traditional styling wand, this one avoids the steep learning curve, accidental burns, and arm fatigue.
The built-in D-ToF sensors detect hair in 0.5 seconds, and the device starts the curling process on its own. The dual-chamber design can easily manage inward and outward curls while avoiding painful snags and tangles. It operates at three precise heat levels and blasts 200 million negative ions to neutralize static on the hair, ultimately giving you salon-grade curls in a matter of minutes.
