Coolest IFA 2026 gadgets, including a Dyson toothbrush that will tell my dentist everything
I followed CES 2026 the way I follow most of January, through a laptop and far too many browser tabs. The products that fascinated me were the cool ones, though some crossed into stupid territory. From AI in a hairbrush to a fridge with opinions about my leftovers. So IFA 2026 had a job to do.
What follows are eight announcements that got a reaction out of me, in no particular order. One of them has me dreading my next dental appointment.
Dyson built a toothbrush that will snitch on me
My dentist’s been asking me about flossing for years. I lie to him. Nothing elaborate, just a shrug and a vague promise about the coming months, and then we both move on.
Dyson built a toothbrush that ends the shrug—meet CameraJet, featuring a built-in camera. A 100,000-pixel macro lens scanning 28 frames every second, hunting the gaps between my teeth, and the moment it finds one, it fires a cone of mouthrinse at the spot inside 100 milliseconds. Dyson’s own research puts 9 in 10 of us outside the flossing habit we claim to have.
The horror is the app. I can watch the vacuum work and check where it thinks I missed. Then the CameraJet critiques my technique. Awesome. A scorecard for every corner I’ve ignored since university, sitting on my phone, a gamification of the dental experience- what more could I expect?
Dyson says nothing gets recorded or stored, either on the brush or in the cloud, and I’ve no reason not to believe them. The cloud was never my worry. My concern is a short man in his early 40s, with no outstanding physical characteristics, whom I admire, wearing a surgical mask and saying, “Let’s open the app together,” while I’m pinned to the chair in a paper bib.
The gimmick is easy to mock. Dyson spent five years with the National University of Singapore making fake plaque for its engineers to test. They could keep changing the nozzle without booking a clinical trial each time they wanted to test a new version.
A normal water flosser hits plaque with a needle-thin jet, but the plaque can still end up where it started. Dyson’s conical spray takes a different approach, using lower pressure to sweep it away. That should mean less punishment for your gums.
TDM Neo ends the two-bag problem
The Neo is a pair of headphones you twist into a speaker. That’s the entire pitch, and I’ve wanted it for years without knowing I wanted it, because I keep packing headphones and a Bluetooth speaker into one bag for one park.
Vybe Audio is a brand nobody had heard of last year. Hall 10.2 isn’t a grand stage either, so I’m keeping my expectations in check. The headphones use 40 mm drivers. Battery life falls off a cliff in speaker mode, which is just physics doing its job. You can also configure what happens when you twist the shell open, including a setting that pauses the music.
TCL’s P80 Ultra stops charging me for the paper mode
Every NXTPAPER phone before the P80 smartphone series billed me an LCD in exchange for a paper-like reading mode. I was never willing to pay that.
The P80 Ultra packs a 6.83-inch OLED. 1.5K, 120 Hz, 3,200 nits at peak. TCL goes as far as claiming the anti-glare coating beats rival flagships in daylight, and I’d want to watch somebody hold one up against a Galaxy on a bright afternoon before repeating that with a straight face.
Press the dedicated key, and everything goes monochrome, interface stripped back, e-reader software running, a full week of active use out of the 5,800 mAh cell. Max Ink Mode is why the phone exists.
The rest I’d call honest midrange. Dimensity 7400 Elite, 45 W charging, 50 MP main camera with a 3x telephoto. TCL’s image processing has never kept pace with the big names, and an OLED panel won’t fix a software problem. Four years of Android updates on the Ultra and Pro is the feature I’d weigh hardest. Europe has it now, Latin America gets it in October, America whenever TCL feels ready.
SwitchBot’s AI MindClip would remember what I don’t
A clip. 16.8g of it, running past 20 hours of recording into 64 GB of local storage, separating who said what by voiceprint and producing to-dos out the other end. Ask AI lets you search a conversation from three weeks ago in plain language. I forget promises all the time, and I dislike that about myself.
I’m bothered by the thought of clipping a recorder to my shirt at dinner. SwitchBot tells users to let everyone know before recording, and I can’t imagine that going over well with my friends. It does sync with Apple and Google Calendar, which is useful. After a week, though, that’s the one feature I’d miss if I took it off.
Govee is selling a fake sky and I want one
Winter afternoons end early where I live and my ceiling light does nothing about it. The 53 cm Sky Ceiling Light pushes 7,000 lumens through three separate light sources and walks its color through the day using local time and weather. Govee’s pitch leans hard on a 478nm sky-blue wavelength and human melanopsin sensitivity, which is an enormous amount of confidence for a press release to carry.
22 lightscapes, sunrise through starfield. 125W, which I’d think about before mounting one over a room I use every evening. The conversational lighting bot I’d stop talking to by the second week.
Lenovo’s Tab Plus Gen 2 is a speaker wearing a tablet costume
Lenovo put nine JBL drivers and dedicated bass units in here. It also has a Bluetooth speaker mode, so you can use the tablet as a speaker for your phone without Android getting in the way. Lenovo seems to have built the sound system and then found a place for the 12.1-inch screen afterward. I mean that as praise.
I’ve already found a use for the 360-degree kickstand. Prop it against a kettle while following a recipe and the odd hinge suddenly makes sense.
At 775g, the tablet has some heft, so Lenovo sells a sleeve with a shoulder strap. The 10,200 mAh battery gets around 15 hours of streaming. Two OS upgrades leave me wondering how long I’d want to keep it.
Xiaomi turned up in Berlin with a folding phone and a robot
Everyone on our editorial team knows where I stand on foldables, so treat the next sentence as compromised. Xiaomi 18 Fold is the first flagship running the next-generation XRING O3, and in-house silicon making its debut inside a folding phone is precisely the announcement I lose an afternoon to.
CyberOne drew the crowd anyway. The humanoid throws finger hearts at passing visitors, which is fun to watch but tells me very little about the robot. Xiaomi also has CyberOne tightening nuts on its own car factory line, where its success rate rose from 90% to 98% over four months. I’d take four months of factory work over another staged demo any day.
TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 8 kit chases coverage instead of a headline number
TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 8 kit is aimed at keeping a connection steady when a house gets busy.
Archer 8 Ultra and Deco 8 Ultra use the upcoming 802.11bn standard. TP-Link is focusing on what happens when you move toward the far end of the house or start piling devices onto the network. The connection should stay responsive, with less interference as more devices come online.
I’ve watched too much Wi-Fi 7 hardware ship without the features that made Wi-Fi 7 interesting, so all of it goes under promising and unproven until the full launch event on September 30. The industrial design earns a nod for treating a router as furniture worth leaving out.
The three I’d order
Dyson made me laugh, then uncomfortable, OK, a bit. I want to be right about TDM Neo. And the P80 Ultra is for the people left in my life who still finish books, myself excluded.
