Skip to main content

5 gadgets that are either genius or insane

IFA 2024
This story is part of our coverage of IFA Berlin 2024

In the rush to create innovative new technology, common sense can sometimes be a casualty. Seeking out the weird and the wonderful at trade shows is one of the best things about covering tech, and our trips to shows like IFA in Berlin surfaced some oddities. The line between genius and insanity is not always clear. One man’s tech treasure is another’s garbage. So, are these gadgets offering fantastic solutions to real world problems, or are they over-engineered, over-expensive, and a little bit crazy? You decide.

Fittop Foot Massager

You can’t walk past something like Fittop’s foot massager without stopping to have a go, especially after pounding the floors of IFA 2015‘s labyrinth halls for several days. Instead of a regular electronic foot massager, where you would stick both feet into a single device, Fittop has developed a pair — one for each foot. The USP here, or Unique Selling Proposition, as the enthusiastic salesman informed me, is that you can walk around in them. The fact that they weigh 11lbs and look like giant robot clogs, might put you off doing this, but it is technically possible.

When you stick your foot in, the massager sizes it up, and then the massage begins. Each massage lasts 15 minutes, but the massager will automatically stop if you stand up. It was an uncomfortable experience during the demo, and when I removed my foot at the end, my calf muscle cramped. Fearing injury, I hobbled away from the booth, pursued by the salesman, but after a short walk my massaged left foot began to feel light and generally awesome, compared to my un-massaged, dully aching right foot. Is there any such thing as a bad foot massage? Apparently not. If you like the sound of this you can snap up a pair for around $330 — according to representatives.

Philips Smart Shaver Series 7000

Dragging shaving into the future, Philips’ new Bluetooth-connected Smart Shaver Series 7000 is easily the most advanced electric shaver I’ve ever seen. The aim is to deliver a truly personalized shaving experience. To that end, the shaver syncs with an iOS app and tracks your daily shaves. It measures how long you shave for every day, which spots you cover, and the resulting skin irritation. That data is used to offer you insights, so you can modify your shaving habits. Maybe you shave in the one spot for too long, or miss the same place everyday. Perhaps you need to alter the settings for your skin and hair type. The Smart Shaver can tell you.

The Smart Shaver also has an attachment for your pre-shave that makes the hairs stand up for easier cutting. If you’re not happy with the guidance it offers, Philips even has a kind of shaving concierge service, where experts can weigh in with advice on the perfect shave. We’re still waiting for pricing confirmation on this one, and someone to tell us this isn’t completely over the top…

3D Virtual Fitting Room

This device, manufactured by New Tempo, is really aimed at clothing stores. It’s a large screen combined with a 3D motion sensing camera and some clever software that allows you to try on new clothes virtually. You stand in front of it, and stick your hands out to select different items. You can also enlarge or shrink them to make them match your profile. Each item is then superimposed on you, with 3D-modeling software, to give you an idea of what it might look like if you were to try it on. It basically drapes a 3D model over you which is connected at specific points round the neck and on the arms and legs.

It’s no substitute for a genuine fitting, and is incredibly slow and buggy, but it would be fair to say it gives you a rough approximation. Mostly, it is a lot of fun. Our Deputy Editor, Jeff, spent a good 15 minutes gleefully trying on every outfit he could find and had to be dragged away in the end. The unit we tried also had some easter eggs, like the ability to try on super hero outfits and other cosplay clothing.

Vest Anti-Radiation Protection for pregnancy

There’s still some controversy about how harmful the radiation we are exposed to on a daily basis actually is for our bodies. Vest offers a line of products that claims to protect you from radiation by reducing your exposure. It offers phone cases, which it claims reduce exposure by 50 percent by redirecting radiation away from the head. It also offers wired and Bluetooth headsets with earbuds, which have speakers down in the main control unit and run pipes up your ears, so the electronics aren’t near your head. More straightforward are the microwave and laptop shields, which are just rectangular shields that block radiation.

One of its newest products is a radiation-blocking material which is designed to slip over a pregnant belly and safeguard the unborn baby inside. When my cell phone was wrapped in the material it did completely block the signal, so it’s clearly preventing some signals and radiation from passing through, but whether that will actually be of any benefit to your child is unclear. The trouble with products like this is that there’s no way to prove they’re really helping you at all.

Haier Duo Washer

Haier Dual Washer
Image used with permission by copyright holder

There were a lot of different washing machines on show at IFA this year. Samsung’s AddWash grabbed the lion’s share of the headlines, allowing you to add forgotten washing into the cycle without having to stop it and wait for it to drain. But Haier had easily the strangest-looking washing machine at the show. The Haier Duo Washer is a double-decker washing machine, with a large drum at the bottom and a smaller one above it. That means you can do two separate loads at once. As if that wasn’t enough, this washer also sports a 7-inch LCD and Wi-Fi connectivity.

LG kind of did this before, though they hid the smaller washer in a pull-out drawer. The Duo Washer is unsurprisingly huge and it’s going to cost 1,600 euros ($1,800) when it launches in Germany in 2016. There’s no word on whether it will land Stateside.

Recommended Videos

We’ve reached the end of our crazy or genius gadgets list. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Simon Hill
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Simon Hill is an experienced technology journalist and editor who loves all things tech. He is currently the Associate Mobile…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more