Tag: IFA 2024

Nanoleaf has long had you covered for ways to illuminate your walls that go well beyond simply swapping out dumb bulbs for smart lights – but they’ve pretty much all been for show. The new Nanoleaf Blocks line-up is equal parts fetching and functional, adding useful shelves and pegboards into the mix for the first time.

This mix-and-match system says it’s hip to be square, with two sizes of panel. You can then add optional textured panels for a bit of variety. They’ve all been reengineered from Nanoleaf’s older square light panels, with a thicker form factor that should make them a lot more sturdy this time around.

Expect edge-to-edge illumination in full RGB, with more than 16 million colour shades through the Nanoleaf app. A physical controller attached to the first square in the set lets you turn the lights on, tweak brightness and toggle through various scene presets without reaching for your phone.

The big new additions are the light-up pegboard, which lets you stylishly display smaller gadgets like keyboards, game controllers or headphones – or simply give you somewhere to pop a pencil pot. The slim shelves are a neat way to declutter your desktop, too. Installation is a little more involved than Nanoleaf’s usual peel-and-press adhesive pads, though; you’ll need to break out the drill to secure each peg board and shelf.

Naturally Nanoleaf Blocks plays nicely with all the major smart assistants over Wi-Fi, including Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings.

There’ll be two kits available at launch. The Squares Smarter kit comes with six squares and will set you back $200; the Combo XL Smarter Kit has squares, small squares, pegboards and shelves in the box for $250. Additional squares, textured squares, shelves and pegboards will cost $30 each.

US shoppers can pre-order Nanoleaf Blocks right now directly from Nanoleaf, or head to Best Buy, Home Depot or Amazon from October onwards. There’s currently no word on UK pricing or availability.

Honor has introduced the Honor Magic V3, the world’s thinnest foldable phone, at IFA 2024. This new device combines portability, durability, and user-friendly features, solving one of the biggest problems with folding phones – thickness.

The Honor Magic V3 has a folded thickness of 9.2mm and weighs 226g, making it one of the most compact foldable phones currently available. Its thin and lightweight design is achieved through the use of 19 advanced materials and 114 microstructures, resulting in a sleek, foldable device that enhances portability without compromising functionality.

Durability was a key focus for the Magic V3, so the phone features a ‘Special Fiber’ material that improves impact resistance by 40 times compared to other flagship phones, while the back cover has been made thinner by over 30-percent. The device is equipped with Honor’s Super Steel Hinge, tested to endure up to 500,000 folding cycles, and has received SGS Durability Certification.

The camera system is designed with an octagonal, dome-shaped module and includes the Honor Falcon Camera System. This setup features a 50MP periscope telephoto camera, a 50MP main camera, and a 40MP ultra-wide camera, offering users a versatile photography experience.

But the screens are the most important feature here – the Magic V3 features a 6.43in external screen and a 7.92in internal foldable display, providing users with a dual-screen experience. The phone also incorporates several eye-comfort features, including AI Defocus Display technology and Dynamic Dimming, to help reduce eye strain during prolonged use.

A 5150mAh battery powers the Magic V3, with support for 66W wired and 50W wireless Honor SuperCharge. Additionally, Honor has collaborated with Google Cloud to integrate a range of AI-enabled features, such as AI Motion Sensing for photography and productivity tools like Honor AI Eraser and Face to Face Translation – very similar to the features found on the Google Pixel smartphones.

We’ve been using the Honor Magic V3 for a few days now, and you can read what we think about this impressive phone in our Honor Magic V3 review.

Ninja’s Luxe Cafe debuted in the US recently and now it’s getting a wider release at IFA 2024.

Indeed, Ninja says that it is already the number one espresso maker in the US after just a few weeks thanks to a $499 starting price (though it has sold lower end coffee machines there for around a decade).

We’ve had a good look at the smart new machine that not only does espresso (and associated mik drinks), it’ll make cold brew (which extracts slowly) and drip coffee with minimal effort. There’s no UK price as yet in theory, though it surely will hit a sub-£500 price point given how much it is in the US.

There’s no getting away from the fact the machine looks quite complex to use even if it isn’t; the company set out to minimise the guesswork that you get with a lot of auto coffee machines where you don’t necessarily know what settings to adjust. The buzzphrase Ninja has come up with for this is ‘Barista Assist’. Essentially, it’ll recommend settings for the best results, whether this is the grind size, dose or adjusting temperature or pressure – each brew is monitored to ensure that you get the best coffee you can.

Milk is also handled primarily by four preset programs that enable you to get steamed milk, thin froth, thick froth and cold foam.

The manual machine is available in three different versions – Essential for espresso and filter coffee, Premier for cold brew and milk drinks and Pro, which enables you to customise everything.

Reading between the lines, we’d expect the company to do a full bean-to-cup maker at some point soon, but Shark’s European president Tom Brown told us the company is focused on “where we can disrupt”, something his colleague Neil Shah was keen to elaborate on

“If you look at our history in the last 17 years, every category that we’re number one in is where we’ve been able to create disruptive innovation at affordable price points. And you know, we are super focused on manufacturing for design and manufacturing for quality.

“We could easily make this $100 more expensive, but then the consumer is paying for our inefficiencies. So we are super focused on making sure that we are making the products as efficient as possible. And it starts from the development phase, where our engineering team is looking at every component, every interaction to make sure we’re creating a product design that’s going to be the most efficient to manufacture.”

Lenovo can usually be relied on to bust out a wacky concept or two at trade shows, but I think the Auto Twist AI PC Proof of Concept it unveiled at IFA stands a better chance of making it to the mainstream than most of its previous headline-grabbing gadgets. I didn’t know I needed a hybrid laptop with a fully automatic hinge that can open and close with a voice prompt, but Lenovo’s slick demo already has me sold.

Essentially a ThinkBook 2-in-1 with a mechanical hinge that can rotate a near full 360-degrees, the Auto Twist is no thicker than a normal hybrid laptop, but can articulate itself to any angle under it’s own steam – no hands required. You just say one of its trigger phrases, like “close laptop”, “tablet mode”, or “open lid”.

Not only is this brilliant for accessibility, but Lenovo has baked in some AI to track user movements, so you can always keep the screen in view. That’ll be very handy if you’re presenting to an audience and like to roam the stage. Apparently it’ll also reduce strain by adjusting to suit your posture. Walk away and it’ll automatically shut the lid and lock the Windows desktop, so you don’t have to worry about ne’er-do-wells accessing your docs while you spend a penny.

The camera mode can shoot panoramas with a single button press, using the webcam built into the front of the screen bezel. Naturally my first thought was to create a homage to the spider man pointing at spider man meme by quickly moving from one side of the room to the other.

In the ten minutes or so I spent with the concept, I’d already thought of a few funky possibilities – one button timelapse videos would be a boon for creators, and the laptop could become a sentry bot for monitoring your work space when you’re not around.

It doesn’t move especially quickly, and there was a bit of wobble on show as it tilted and panned around the room, but the subject tracking was on point, and the (clearly still early) software was pretty quick to stitch panoramas together.

The firm isn’t talking internal hardware just yet, as a CPU candidate wouldn’t be locked in until the machine was ready for full production. But with new Intel Core Ultra chips, AMD Ryzen AI and Qualcomm Snapdragon silicon all vying for your attention, it’s feasible any of the three could find a home inside a machine like this.

It helps that hinge aside, this is a fairly conventional laptop; compared to February’s Project Crystal, which felt like tech without any real purpose, I could see this on shop shelves pretty quickly.

All it needs is a Robot Wars-style self-righting mechanism and there’ll be no stopping it.