I’ve been tracking IFA exhibitor announcements since June, and Berlin is shaping up to be much busier than I planned for—so busy that my colleague Lauren’s already written up IFA 2026’s biggest tech trends. Fresh off her preview, I’m here to walk you through my personal favorite products.
The show runs from September 4 to 8 at Messe Berlin. Around 1,900 exhibitors, 220,000 visitors, 140 countries, and a theme, “The Future Is Now,” that I’d mock harder if so many of these products weren’t going on sale during show week.
My team at Gadget Flow jokes that I write about hinges far too much. Guilty. When I’m picking products for IFA coverage, I also think about my hypertrophy training and a house with cats and a Labrador.
Samsung is skipping the Messe floor after 35 years. Instead, it booked Humboldt Carré, eight kilometers across town, for September 2. The Galaxy S26 FE is reported for September 4, so IFA’s opening morning has journalists covering a Samsung phone from a building Samsung chose not to enter. Around them, LG, TCL, Hisense, and Xiaomi will have their stands on the Messe floor. Bold move.
A wide foldable from Xiaomi does something no Samsung foldable has managed in Europe, which is force a price argument. Xiaomi confirmed on Weibo on August 24 that the 18 Fold arrives in September. Berlin, where the company has booked Hall 6.2 for its first IFA appearance ever, is the obvious stage.
Samsung is bringing some serious numbers to IFA. The company says it will spend €7.4 billion on AI research through 2028. Its IoT platform now covers more than 1.16 billion connected devices, and several products are set to make their European debut.
What I want is simpler than any of that. Let people fold the phone. Under the hall’s ugly overhead lighting, in 10 different hands, all week, instead of behind glass on a video loop.
The screen has no visible black border at all. TECNO got there through internal display stacking, leaving the metal frame slightly proud of the 6.7-inch panel, and the rest of the hardware is close to flagship territory with 144 Hz, triple rear cameras and a 6,000 mAh battery in a body people describe as startlingly light.
Then you swipe up to go home and your finger catches on the frame edge. Every time.
I’ve watched our comment section demand thinner bezels for six years, mostly from readers who then navigate by gesture for eight hours a day. TECNO built the phone they asked for and proved them wrong, which is a useful public service. The part I want shipped is the back panel, a lenticular butterfly finish the company barely bothered to mention in its own materials. Put that rear on a normal phone.
Motorola teased the collaboration on August 28. Black quilted rear panel, crystal scatter, a larger gem set into the hinge cover, and underneath it all a standard Razr 70 with a 6.9-inch internal OLED, a 3.6-inch cover screen wrapped around dual 50 MP cameras, a 32MP selfie camera, and a 4,500 mAh battery.
Last year’s crystal Razr carried about a $200 premium over the $799 standard model, so budget near $1,000 for the sparkle.
My complaint is narrow. Crystals on the hinge cover do nothing for the hinge, and the hinge is the component most likely to end a foldable’s life. Charge me the same premium for a better one, and I’d hand over the money without reading the spec sheet.
HONOR put a 200 MP main camera on a gimbal arm that… moves. The company launched the Robot Phone in China earlier in August, and a Berlin global launch would make sense for IFA. Ever since I bumped into HONOR’s “a truly new species of smartphone” announcement on X, my head’s been stuck on a couple of questions.
A motorized arm raises a basic durability question. The camera has to survive the same drops and knocks as the rest of the phone, while its moving parts add another failure point. I’m also curious where HONOR puts the price in Europe. If the Robot Phone costs as much as phones with larger camera sensors, the gimbal needs to prove it can do more than look cool.
Smart glasses got plenty of backlash for putting cameras in front of other people. RayNeo takes a different route with the iO. There’s no camera for its productivity features, while a hardwired LED shows when recording or translation is active. I like that choice. It removes one of the biggest reasons people feel uneasy around smart glasses.
The frames weigh 33 grams and use magnesium-aluminum alloy, with titanium temples. The green monochrome waveguide lets through 97% of ambient light and reaches 1,300 nits at eye level. Someone sitting across from you won’t see the display. There are no speakers either. Audio input comes from four microphones and a bone-conduction sensor. That’s a strange setup, but I like RayNeo’s confidence.
I’d use the live translation more than any AI summary feature (my experience with Apple Intelligence’s showed me summaries are mixed in quality). RayNeo says the iO supports 55 languages, with about a second between speech and translation. The auto-teleprompter could be useful too. It follows your speaking pace, which means you can keep your notes in front of you without reaching for another screen.
The cinematic GT Max, 78 grams with a 59-degree field of view and Bang & Olufsen tuning, is the showier product. Both go on sale September 4 and demo in Hall 21A. The iO is the pair I’d wear on the floor.
Hypershell and Ascentiz keep making their battery-powered exoskeletons lighter without giving up the extra range and power. Both are back at IFA, alongside some newer names. I already know how my gym brain is going to react when someone offers me one to try: “Sure, let me see how much help I can get.”
My hesitation comes from how I train. If the exoskeleton takes some of the load off my legs, I’m getting less of the work I spend four sessions a week trying to create. Making stairs easier sounds great after a long hike with a pack. During a training block, though, I’d rather make the stairs harder.
I’d want to use one on a stair machine just to see whether the motors could make the workout worse. Give me a resistance setting and let the exoskeleton push back against my legs instead of helping them. At that point, I’d have a reason to wear one in the gym.
Blood pressure is what I want to see from RingConn, Circular, Luna Ring, Dreame, and Ultrahuman at IFA. Several are rumored to have new hardware, so I’m watching for anything beyond another sleep or recovery score. A cuff works, but nobody wants to stop what they’re doing several times a day just to take a reading. If a ring can do it accurately without one, that’s a much bigger deal to me.
When I’m training for size, I care much more about sleep and recovery than my daily step count. I don’t need another screen pulling my attention every few minutes either. A ring gives me the recovery data I want and stays out of the way while I train.
When my ring says I’m not ready for leg day, I want to know why. Poor sleep, or yesterday’s heavy session? (Thanks, StairMaster.) Don’t just give me a baked-in score—give me the numbers, and I’ll figure out what to do with them.
Half the floor at IFA will be covered in stair-climbing robot vacuums—DJI, Dreame, and Roborock are all showing off bots that can haul themselves up risers. Last year’s MOVA Zeus 60 might be able to climb a step, but I’ve yet to see one clean while doing it. Until a brush roll makes contact with the wood as these things climb, they’re just glorified, expensive stair-steppers.
My household would offer a hostile environment for IFA’s stair-climbing robot vacuums. For your information, the fluffy Leo sheds enough fur to qualify as a fifth cat. I can vacuum one minute and find fur and litter again five minutes later.
A bot that carries itself upstairs impresses me less than one that handles scattered litter and embedded pet hair on carpeted steps. I plan to ask every brand in Berlin which of the two they built for. The answers will be evasive.
Digging through app sub-menus just to get a lamp to turn off at sunset is why most people abandon smart homes. LG’s OpenClaw-powered ThinQ Claw gets rid of the logic trees altogether. Rather than programming a dozen conditional triggers, you just text or tell it what you want—like “I’m heading to bed”—and it figures out which switches to flip.
“ThinQ Claw marks the next step in LG AI Home, illustrating how AI can understand customer intent and life context to support a more personalized and streamlined daily experience,” says Baek Seung-tae.
Checking your stove over SMS sounds simple, but go back to 2019, for a second. You had to open an app, find the “Automations” tab, create a new IF/THEN trigger, select the magnetic door sensor, and route it to the AC unit. It was tedious, over-engineered work for a basic outcome.
I can see the appeal of telling the ThinQ Claw I’m leaving and letting the AI agent handle the rest, but I’m not comfortable until I know what happens during a connection outage.
Controlling over half the global 100-inch-plus TV market—55.1% in the first half of 2026 according to Omdia—gives Hisense serious leverage. They’re using their IFA press slot (Sept 3, 3:00 PM on the Innovation Stage) to tie their FIFA World Cup 26 partnership to new RGB-MiniLED technology, flexing a 165 Hz refresh rate and full BT.2020 color space. Catch the full display inside Hall 23a after the keynote.
Acer opens the week with a press conference on September 2 at 11:00 CEST in City Cube Hall A5, a showcase running into the next day, and AMD’s Jack Huynh takes the opening keynote. Computing has grown into the biggest slice of the show in its 102-year history. Good timing, given laptop makers arrive with shipping products for 2026 instead of concept hinges.
Razer is my remaining question mark. AVA, the holographic desk companion announced back in January, has a German product page and a European legal entity behind it, yet no euro price and no firm date inside its second-half window.
Berlin is where hardware gets a European price. A company that skips that step in a hall full of buyers is telling you how ready the product is.