IFA 2026 is always a big show for home tech, and while we definitely saw our fair share of electric toothbrushes, robotic vacuums, and ever-smarter lights this week in Berlin, we also saw some dazzling entries from more traditional gadgets, especially when it comes to laptops and gaming handhelds. All in all, our best of IFA 2026 group is a colorful bunch, both figuratively and literally thanks to lots of Pantone partnerships. Here’s what we loved at this year’s show!
Best of IFA 2026
Hypershell Halo
Hypershell has outdone themselves at this year’s show with a revamped and powered up take on their mobility exoskeleton. The Hypershell Halo is a complete rework of the motorized Hypershell X Ultra carbon fiber exoskeleton we tried out last yea, but the purpose remains the same — to give you a little mechanical push to make navigating hikes, uphill stretches, and stairs a whole lot easier.
The Halo exoskeleton now goes all the way down from hip to calf, rather than just to the thigh, with four joints and a completely new AI system that uses training data to predict your movements within microseconds to make assistance from the exoskeleton feel more natural. That AI will adapt over time to your own movement and input, gradually becoming more personalized with use.
While the 20km range on the battery is a little shorter than that of the Hypershell X Ultra, the battery is still detachable and swappable, allowing users to carry spares in their backpacks. And while it’s mostly seen as a hiking aid, you can apparently book it in the Halo — it supports a maximum speed of about 10.5 miles per hour, which is knocking on the door of an elite pace for a marathon.
Dell 14S
Apple’s MacBook Neo seems to have opened the floodgates for cheaper, lightweight laptops bursting with color. The Dell 14S was one of a handful of Windows competitors we saw at IFA this year — the 14-inch laptop will come in Linen, Dusty Rose, Washed Denim and Velvet Green color options, all with a metallic sheen that straddles the line of fun and professional. The colors pop, but there’s a lot else to like, especially that at 2.5 pounds, it’s one of the lightest options out of this recent bumper crop of colorful laptops. The Dell 14S should be a great gift for students this holiday season — no confirmed pricing yet, but if it’s competing with the Macbook Neo and other similar laptops (including others unveiled at IFA), the starting price will likely be around $700 or $800.
Lenovo IdeaPad Vibe Series
Lenovo had its own set of colorful laptops at IFA this year in the IdeaPad Vibe series. With seven Pantone colors on offer, it’s the most color options we’ve seen in this lightweight, student-friendly laptop segment. But, Lenovo wanted to give folks lots more choices than just the color — you can get the IdeaPad Vibe with an OLED display, choose different colored keycaps, choose between AMD, Qualcomm, and eventually Intel processors, and even choose to upgrade to up to 32GB of RAM. The IdeaPad Vibe will also be available in both 14-inch and 15-inch models, with the cheapest of the former starting at $700 this October.
Anker Soundcore SleepLab Pro
The Anker Soundcore SleepLab Pro aims to put smart light, sleep tracker, and sleep speaker into one package that helps improve your sleep. Using radio wave sensors, the speaker can approximate your sleep cycle on a nightly basis, then use that information to create a personalized sleep soundtrack of soothing sounds to help you get to sleep and stay asleep a little easier. The speaker also has a light that can gradually brighten to mimic sunrise, waking you up a little more gently than a loud smartphone alarm. It’s all features we’ve seen before in the world of sleep tech, but the SleepLab Pro finally puts it all together in one device.
Laifen Glowy Vanity Mirror
Laifen is bringing the studio home with their Glowy Vanity Mirror. The ring light around this 8.5-inch mirror has been tuned to mimic natural lighting to provide a more accurate reflection of what you’ll look like out in the sunlight. There are lighting presets that you can adjust, and the mirror can turn on your favored preset when it senses you approaching. It’s also lightweight and can operate on battery power, making it a solid travel companion. Not quite the magic mirror, but getting there!
Acer Project DualPlay Mini
Acer showed off a concept handheld gaming PC with a lot more twisting and swiveling going on than usual. The 8-inch clamshell opens up into a mini laptop, with a small keyboard that can be used in a pinch for first-person shooter games (or, more boring, for work), but that keyboard can swivel around and be folded behind the display so you can use Project DualPlay Mini as a traditional handheld gaming PC. The units on either side of the display can also be rotated, with speakers on one side and gaming buttons and joysticks on the other.
It’s meant to be a hybrid game and work device, with output ports that allow it to be hooked up to an external display to give it a little more versatility. But, Project DualPlay Mini is just a concept for now, so it remains to be seen if it’ll ever be released, or if we’ll see some ideas from this device show up in other Acer products down the road.
Tecno Next-Gen Bezelless Concept Phone
If you want a quick shock, take a look at a picture of a smartphone from around 2009 — the bezels are more massive than you remember. Smartphones have come a long way towards slimming down that black border around the display since then, but at IFA 2026, Tecno showed off a concept phone that eliminates them altogether. Turns out there are a lot of thorny technical reasons that make eliminating bezels difficult, and maybe Tecno hasn’t gotten all the way there — the phone is just a concept, after all — but if nothing else, it’s a working prototype, and that edge-to-edge display sure looks pretty!
Samsung | Canvas THE HiFi S99H
Even among the very best TVs, audio tends to be an afterthought — if you’re splurging for a pricey TV, you’re probably going to splurge separately on the very best sound system you can find, too. Samsung and Canvas are finally presenting both in one package at this year’s show. Samsung worked with the audio experts at Canvas to combine their high-end S99H OLED TV with a bespoke high-fidelity sound system ensconced in a beautiful wooden frame that makes THE HiFi S99H look like a beautiful piece of furniture to be shown off. To be sure, a prerequisite for a starting asking price of €7,999!
Vitesy Fruit Bowl
We’ve been going to these sorts of trade shows and picking our favorites for many years, and while no one’s memory is perfect, I can say with almost 100% certainty that this is the first time a fruit bowl has made it onto a best of list. And it’s well deserved! The Vitesy Fruit Bowl does one thing very well — keeps fruit fresher for longer, using a catalytic filter that that pulls moisture and ethylene gas away from fruit. Those are the things that make fruit ripen and/or grow mold more quickly, so if you’ve ever purchased a bunch of peaches all to come back in a couple days and see a mushy slop of mold and sad fruit in the bowl, the Vitesy Fruit Bowl might be something to keep an eye on.
Jackery HomePower 1000 Plus V2
Jackery regularly delivers some impressive large-scale batteries at IFA, and this year, they have a whole system perfect for both home use and longer outdoor trips. The Jackery HomePower 1000 Plus V2 is an 1,800W battery that can be combined with stackable battery units to provide up to 11kWh of power. It’s a plug-and-play backup battery system that can keep multiple appliances and devices running during a power outage without any complicated installation needs. It can be charged quickly over a simple connection to a standard AC outlet, and it can be hooked up to a solar panel array to store excess solar power, which is a must for anyone who wants to use solar to cut down their energy bills as much as possible.
Violoop
The agentic AI bonanza has led to a lot of hobbyists and professionals alike using their own custom AI agents to automate vast parts of their work and home lives. Folks who aren’t as deep in the AI weeds but who want to try it out usually default to one of the many large models out there, like ChatGPT or Gemini or DeepSeek. Those are all cloud-based agents, meaning all the details of your life head to their servers. Violoop is a small AI device that simplifies setting up an AI agent to use your computer (whether it’s a newer machine with a chipset that better facilitates AI or one running on older hardware). You can set up your own workflows around responding to emails, or just have more granular control over smart home devices. Whatever you do, you get the benefit of Violoop keeping all of your data on the device itself — all of the AI processing happens locally.
Asus Zenbook 14
The Asus Zenbook 14 might not have as many color options as others on this list, but the three on offer — Komodo Coral, Arctic Blue, and Zabriskie Beige — all look gorgeous in Asus’s own blend of ceramic and aluminum used in the chassis. The Zenbook 14 also stands out for being a particularly light laptop, a 14-inch machine that weighs under 2.5 pounds. And, thanks to a Snapdragon X processor and a large battery, it should survive on battery power for most of the day, even with an OLED display.
Dyson CameraJet
Dyson is always good from home tech that looks a little extra, and their entry into toothbrushes at IFA 2026 is no exception. Not content to merely make their own electric toothbrush, Dyson threw a camera, a processor, and a high-powered water jet in there to make the toothbrush do what too many of us won’t on our own — floss. The camera detects minute gaps between teeth, and the processor takes that information and signals to the water jet when to hit those gaps and blast out any stuck particles or plaque between teeth. It’s also the wildest looking electric toothbrush we’ve ever seen at one of these shows, and we’d expect nothing less from Dyson.
Lenovo ThinkBook Project Swan Concept and Project Aeroblade concept
Lenovo always gives us a couple fun looks at the future of laptops at IFA. Lately, they’ve been on a rollable display kick, and that continues with Project Swan, a 14-inch concept ThinkBook laptop with a rollable display that can extend out to a 16:9 17-inch display. If you’ve ever tried using a laptop as a split-screen multitasking device and got annoyed with the lack of screen space, this one would be for you.
For folks who value ease of travel over everything, Project Aeroblade asks what a laptop purpose-designed to be as light and thin as possible would look like. This 14-inch concept laptop is just 10mm thick and weighs under 830g, or about 1.8 pounds, which is staggeringly light for this size of a laptop. The main innovation is a new fanless cooling system from the folks at Frore, who have developed the AirJet cooling chip. AirJet takes in heat from the processor and, using vibrating membranes, creates a strong flow of air away from the processor without using large moving parts that force the laptop to be thicker and heavier.
It’s a much lighter solution without compromising on cooling effectiveness, meaning the Aeroblade concept could still handle intensive workloads while sufficiently managing heat to allow for consistent performance. Like Project Swan, Project Aeroblade is just an unreleased concept for now, but we’d expect to see this kind of cooling tech in more than a few laptops in the years to come.
Roborock Saros 20 Flow Complete
We’d never leave an IFA show without shouting out a robot vacuum — this year, it’s the Roborock Saros 20 Flow Complete combo vacuum and mop. This year, there are no splashy features like the robotic, sock-grabbing arm from last year, with Roborock focusing on the fundamentals. The vacuum is powerful at 36,000pa, but the main improvement seems to be on the mopping side, where Roborock has increased downward force to better help scrub away tougher stains. They’ve also increased the pressure and frequency of the self-cleaning system for the mop, preventing the mop from spreading grime around while it’s trying to clean. That’s all in a bot that’s a little over 3.5 inches tall, making it one of the thinnest available.
Philips Hue Liane 360 Rope Light
Philips has been leading the way on smart LED lighting, not just by creating an easy-to-use smart lighting system with their Hue line, but by imagining other forms of home lighting beyond the humble light bulb. The coolest thing we saw of theirs at this year’s show was the Hue Liane 360 Rope Light, and the name and photo just about say it all. It’s a strip of flexible rope that emits light in all directions, but it’s stiff enough to where it will hold its shape once you’ve molded it. You can wrap it around pieces of furniture, spell out words in cursive — whatever you can imagine. And, it’s available immediately, starting at $400.
Govee Sky Ceiling Light
In the mood lighting category, Govee had their Sky Ceiling Light on display at this year’s show. The ceiling light can emit light across a wide spectrum. When plugged into a broader network of smart home devices and AI agents, the light can detect when you’re working and gradually shift the light to a more relaxing hue. The Sky Ceiling Light can also monitor ambient light and keep the intensity and hue of its light natural as the day progresses.
Moto Watch Ultra
Our favorite wearable from this year’s show was the Moto Watch Ultra. As always, points scored for looks as well as tech — the Pantone colors on the silicone watch bands look terrific, while a partnership with Polar ensures accurate heart rate monitoring while adding a bunch of new sleep tracking and analysis features, including tracking sleep quality and how refreshed you are the day after. On the hardware side, the Moto Watch Ultra has a 1.5-inch OLED display, NFC support for mobile payments, Google’s Wear OS, and, for the first time for a Moto Watch, an LTE variant that allows the watch to have its own cellular connection independent of your phone. It’s also IP68-rated, making it waterproof. Not bad for a starting price of $350.