I remember when I had a car. I was living in Queens, and avoiding tickets was an absolute nightmare—that is, until I was informed of a neighborhood cheat code. There was a street sort of near where I lived where I could just leave my car—no alternate side parking, predetermined hours, nothing. Naturally, I went straight there and parked my car and tried my best to forget that I had one until I needed it. I thought about that car every single day. Was it still there? Had it been smashed to pieces? Abducted by aliens? Did a pack of wild rats chew their way in and declare it “Ratopia”? My point is, there’s an anxiety to leaving your car places, whether we want there to be or not, and though we can’t be omnipresent, a watchful eye would be the next best thing.
In that vein, a new solar-powered security camera from Baseus—the same company that makes these intriguing wireless headphones and earbuds launched at IFA this month—seems specially designed for people who want to leave their car for long periods but also keep an eye on it. Baseus is billing the PrimeTrip VD1 dashcam (which is actually two cameras for the front and back of your car) as the first to offer a “hardwire-free parking monitor.” That’s thanks to what it calls a “Solar Sync System” that uses a small, high-efficiency solar panel to juice up the camera’s battery, allowing it to remain powered without being charged by a car battery.
It’s not completely set it and forget it, though. According to Baseus, the PrimeTrip VD1 has 14 days of standby parking monitoring, which is still a pretty solid amount of juice for a camera that doesn’t even need to be plugged in. To help give it longevity, Baseus equipped the camera with a motion sensor, so it’s not recording all the time. Instead, it will flick on when motion or impact is detected, and will then automatically record 30-second clips from both front and rear cameras. Baseus says its camera can store up to 20 events, or a total of 40 clips. That footage can’t be watched remotely (there’s no 5G on this thing), but it can be downloaded via Wi-Fi to an app. You should also know that there is a difference in front and rear camera resolution; the front is 4K, and the rear camera is 1080p.
I don’t own a car anymore, but if I did, this feels like a solution I may actually opt for, especially because I can’t really afford a car with built-in security like the kind Tesla puts in its EVs. It may not give you total peace of mind while you’re away from your vehicle for long periods, but a helping hand (or at least confirmation that someone stole your catalytic converter) doesn’t hurt.
Today’s retro recreations are so good at replicating the Game Boy’s look, feel, and portability. The problem is, my pockets are already occupied with my mobile supercomputer that contains my life behind a 6.3-inch pane of glass. If my phone has a powerful processor and excellent AMOLED display, why can’t it also become my gaming device when I’m on the go? MCON, the controller hyped to hell and back by young engineer Josh King and brought to market by phone peripheral makers OhSnap, could be enough to make me leave my handheld at home.
I first saw the $150 MCON phone peripheral back at CES 2025; only then it was a very early prototype using 3D-printed parts. Even then, I came away impressed with the collapsible phone controller. I had to duck and weave through many, many halls at IFA 2025 to find the miniscule stall for MCON’s designer OhSnap. The company let me wrap my exhausted hands around the new, black and clear plastic MCONs that will be shipping later this year after its successful Kickstarter from earlier this year.
When I look at most modern phone controllers, whether they’re the Backbone, the 8BitDo mobile controller, or a Razer Kishi, they all boil down to an Xbox controller split in half to make room for a phone. Some of those devices offer better controls or larger cavity space for up to the size of a 13-inch iPad. While they’re slim enough to fit in a bag, the issue with this classic design is they’re not so portable you can slip them into a pocket. MCON is about the size of a phone itself. It’s compact enough that it may fit into cargo pants-sized pockets or into a pocketbook. I doubt it could fit in most thin jeans without tearing a hole in your pants or thigh. The collapsible mobile controller also uses a MagSafe magnetic attachment point while it communicates with the phone over Bluetooth, rather than a physical USB-C connection.
You can think of MCON as a Nintendo DS or a slide-out PSP Go, though without a screen or PCB (printed circuit board) of its own. The controller collapses to the size of your average phone. With the press of a button, the spring-loaded front plate shoots out to reveal twin thumbsticks, four face buttons, and a D-pad. Two fold-out wings fan out from the base to create a pseudo-controller feel, though you can game without them if you can retreat to your Game Boy glory days, before companies cared a lick for wild concepts like “ergonomics.” The extra benefit of MCON is how it keeps the screen angled up, which may be more comfortable when sitting and gaming compared to Steam Deck-like handheld PCs or the Switch 2.
The version I used was a prefab design, though it’s the closest model the company had available for when the device went into full production. The full-size drift-resistant TMR (tunnel magnetoresistance) joysticks didn’t feel constrained despite being deep-set into the controller. While the buttons had a pleasantly shallow and clicky feel, I wouldn’t have been able to hear how loud they were in such a crowded convention hall. The real surprise was the two triggers. Despite being so thin and close to the device, they dipped to a surprising depth. I didn’t feel as much resistance for each trigger as I may have liked from my favorite controllers, but I would still prefer them over the clicky triggers of many DS-like devices.
I didn’t get to play anything but Warped Kart Racers, a game that automatically accelerates for you. I imagine most people who backed the MCON controller are more interested in games without solid touch controls. It may be an option for cloud gaming when you have access to a strong Wi-Fi connection. What may be more exciting is how it could be used for retro emulation. The MCON’s MagSafe dock can slide out and reposition vertically for playing old-school Game Boy games on emulators, like Delta on iOS.
The pop-out mechanism felt fast and smooth, though I found it was difficult to push the magnetic plate back into place. It took two hands, offering a grating feel as the rail ground against itself. OhSnap! told me it was working on making that mechanism smoother as they run into full production. This is the kind of device designed for taking out while ignoring the world on your daily work commute, and it would be especially handy to collapse the MCON with one hand and slip it into your pocket when you need to. OhSnap said MCON should launch some time late in October, so we’ll know then if my phone might finally become the Game Boy I wanted it to be.
Tech companies big and small now struggle to tantalize you with tech without telling you how much it will cost, or—hell—whether you can even buy it. The still-ongoing IFA 2025 tech conference in Berlin proved how merely shipping tech to the U.S. is more tenuous than at any time in the last few decades. From what I saw and heard both on the floor and off, it became clear that the era of plentiful, affordable, and cool shit will melt away in favor of an epoch of dull and ever-more expensive tech.
IFA’s timing lands early in September for tech companies to have the chance to promote their products before the holiday rush. It’s a big conference for European- and Asian-based companies, especially those that focus on smart home tech. For us journalists, IFA is also an opportunity to dive into the weird and wacky products that may or may not float to the U.S. from across the pond.
This year, the annual conference took a different tenor. IFA came months after U.S. tariffs had been causing havoc with pricing on existing products. Future devices won’t just be more expensive; more and more companies indicated they were holding off shipping to the U.S. or were writing off Uncle Sam altogether until things change. It was as if every public relations professional’s toothy smile hid a single word—tariff—whispered but never fully uttered through their teeth.
U.S. policies are leaving us guessing on price and availability
Some international tech giants bearing truly unique products are being barred completely from the States. DJI, the company most known for making drones, has found itself soft-banned from importing gear to the U.S. There’s a long and fraught history with DJI and the U.S. market, but the end result is Americans locked out of an entire line of products. At IFA, DJI had its new Osmo 360 camera proudly displayed. You can go to the DJI store page now, and it currently says “Out of Stock” if you’re checking in from the U.S. DJI has in-store availability slated for the rest of this year, but people in the U.S. won’t be able to easily buy it. At least Insta360 and its Antigravity A1 360-degree camera drone are still getting a U.S. launch.
Some tech companies have managed to cajole President Donald “I’m not a dictator” Trump by heaping praise and gaudy 24K gold statues on the capricious commander in chief. Those companies that haven’t kissed the ring find themselves on the outside. At IFA, we checked out several new products from Roborock, including a new robo lawnmower and a washing machine/dryer combo with a doggy door for a robovac. Neither are coming to the U.S. in the immediate future, the company told us. The U.S. has easily the highest demand for lawnmowers in the world.
Over and over again, I asked companies about U.S. pricing and availability, and was told they didn’t have those details available, at least not yet. Companies like Anker, Mova, and Dreame crafted their own blend of robotic suits for robovacs to help them climb stairs. The Eufy MarsWalker, Dreame CyberX, and Mova Zeus 60 should be around sometime next year. No, of course, there’s no suggested price. Want more wacky gadgets? Too bad. SwitchBot’s Kata Friends, an AI-powered family “pet” that looks like a teddy bear filled with several sensors, still doesn’t have a price or availability for U.S. consumers. The company simply wouldn’t suggest when its products will ever come to the U.S.
That’s not to say it was the case with all tech on the show floor. There are plenty of new gadgets, like these long-lasting Bose headphones, the updated Withings ScanWatch 2, Anker’s Prime power banks, and the massive Nebula X1 Pro will come to the U.S. Companies are more hesitant than ever to even mention prices. TCL’s new QM9K TV should be available “later this month,” but the company refused to provide an idea about price, which is perhaps the most important element of a renowned budget TV brand.
Unlike with CES, companies don’t have to come to IFA if they hope to make a splash. It’s not a sure sign there are internal or external struggles. But in conversations with companies, it’s clear the only answer they have to Trump’s tariffs is to delay release or obfuscate pricing. Asus launched several laptops at IFA 2024. The company told Gizmodo it was skipping the 2025 show. That wasn’t entirely true, though. Asus’ gaming-centric brand—Republic of Gamers—took up a corner booth space in the back of one of the halls with two Asus ROG Xbox Ally X handhelds on display. The company still refused to say how much it would cost. There’s a reason customers should be concerned.
Handhelds are one of the fastest-growing and most innovative markets for both gaming and PCs. At IFA, one company promised a handheld-laptop hybrid with a stereoscopic 3D display akin to the Nintendo 3DS. While we saw more handhelds at CES 2025, the situation post-tariffs is far more tenuous. Lenovo’s Legion Go 2 was all set to hit a home run with its OLED display. Then we saw the price. Lenovo said the handheld PC would start at $1,050. Things are worse when you look at the true costs. A version of the handheld with the higher-end processor, the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme, starts at $1,350. The original Legion Go demanded $700 at launch late in 2023.
Few people want to spend over $1,000 for a device with only marginal performance gains. It does not bode well for the Xbox Ally X, which contains the same Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip. We were also hoping to see Acer finally drop details on its Nitro Blaze 7 and Nitro Blaze 11 handhelds. While the handheld has already been on sale in various countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, Acer told me it had “no updates for U.S. on handhelds.” Acer was also unwilling to share any pricing for its upcoming laptops, like the ultra-light Swift 16 Air.
Tech companies may be taking a wait-and-see strategy, but there’s no sign Trump will end his love affair with import taxes, at least for those U.S. firms unwilling to give up a stake in their company—like Intel has—or go Nvidia’s route and be stuck agreeing to ever-more unfavorable demands. Trump’s fascistic tendencies naturally lean on the industry, but those who can’t or (increasingly rarely) won’t give themselves to Trump will simply have to avoid the U.S. and its many gadget-hungry consumers. Nobody knows how this will all shake out, but U.S. users better get used to holding onto their aging gear for far longer.
During a presentation at IFA 2025, Deebot parent company Ecovacs (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Ecovacs, but Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip) said repeatedly that its new X11 OmniCyclone robot vacuum‘s AI smarts are all on-device. Or the bulk of them are, anyway. I returned to the booth later and spoke with a couple of the company’s representatives to try to figure out exactly how divorced from the cloud the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone truly is—is it an all-on-device experience, like the Matic robot vacuum, or does it still need an internet connection to keep its best functionality?
The Deebot X11 OmniCyclone’s promise is that it can use local AI smarts to do things like identify spills and messes on the floor and decide how best to clean them, and if mopping is required, what kind of mopping solution to use (the X11’s charging dock holds a couple of options). It can also learn from your routine, shifting and morphing its cleaning schedule and approach over time to suit your behavior.
You, the owner, can talk to the AI Agent Yika—the company’s name for its refreshed, generative AI-powered vacuum assistant—and give it some pretty broad, natural-language requests, at least according to Ecovacs. I didn’t get to test this out. I wanted to know how broad. Can you say, “Hey Yika, only clean the bedroom on Fridays,” and it works? Ecovacs’s folks said yes. What about, “Hey Yika, please clean up around my dining room table at 7 p.m. every night.” Yep, that’s apparently possible, too, although the rep told me you might need to name that table in the Ecovacs Home app and call it by that specific name when you speak your request. Again, I didn’t get to test any of this.
Not that it would matter if your internet went down—in that case, you’d lose a lot of functionality, according to the reps. The app would no longer work because it bounces through Ecovacs’ cloud infrastructure in the U.S. to do that. No more tapping around to tell the robot to clean specific rooms, or remotely controlling it from your smartphone, or seeing cloud-saved videos recorded while you were doing that. It also means no Yika, because the device’s generative AI voice assistant is cloud-dependent, too.
But there’s a way to use the robot vacuum in which that doesn’t matter. There’s an “Agent Hosting” mode in the Ecovacs Home app where you can switch the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone to AI-only control, essentially putting all of your faith in it to clean your house properly. It might be able to do so, at least according to Ecovacs, who says it can recognize over 100 different categories of objects, as small as a grain of sand. If you switch it to that mode and find that it does just fine at cleaning your house, with no input from you, then you may never bother with the app again. And if that’s the case, you might never know when your internet is out or that the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone has lost its connection to your network.
That doesn’t mean the robot would be useless. Ecovacs’s reps told me that without an internet connection, the Deebot X11 OmniCyclone’s onboard AI would still do its thing, sliding its schedule around as needed, identifying messes, and switching up its cleaning approach as it goes along. I asked if the company sees a future where even the AI voice assistant is on-device, and the reps weren’t sure.
It’s not all the way to the world I want to see, where my smart home devices never need an internet connection to bring me their full feature set, or close enough to it for blues. But it is an encouraging move in that direction, assuming it all works the way Ecovacs says it will. And, with AI, that can be a big “if.”
Stair-climbing robot vacuums are actually about to be a reality, sort of. That’s courtesy of a little baby trend at IFA 2025 of robot vacuums slipping into something more climbable—a little caddy that carries them upstairs when it’s time to move floors, then waits to carry them back down when they’re done. The first one we encountered was the Eufy MarsWalker.
Then, it turned out that Dreame had one, too, using almost the exact same approach, only it’s weirdly much scarier-looking. Both have a sort of Half-Life headcrab vibe, but where the MarsWalker really looks like, well, a robot meant to walk on Mars, Dreame’s version, the Cyber X, looks like it would be the nearly identical-to-the-hero villain if the two shared a 1990s Saturday morning cartoon series. Instead of the sleek stalks that the MarsWalker uses to pull itself onto stairs, the Cyber X has what can only be described as chainsaw hands—because Dreame elected to put the tank tread bits on the device’s little legs, not its body.
The two mostly work the same way; robot vacuum meets stair-climbing caddy and climbs in. They roll to the stairs and the caddy probes for the bottom step, then stretches out in front and back to roll up the stairs. There are mild differences in the execution here: while the MarsWalker doesn’t extend its little arms until it reaches the steps, the Dreame robot stands up on all fours to approach them.
Getting back down the stairs seemed a bit more precarious for the Cyber X than for the MarsWalker. In the (very sped-up) GIF above and another video I saw online, it had trouble keeping itself straight, and I worried that it might go tumbling. I didn’t feel that way about the MarsWalker.
I don’t know who actually came up with the idea first, but either way, the approach seems like a winner. But there is another way, as robot vacuum and lawnmower company Mova showed me. The Mova Zeus 60, which looks like a 1980s VCR or vinyl turntable (complimentary), raised itself up on little scissor-lift legs, then slid its little body forward like a robotic tongue, drew its legs up, and slid those forward to join the rest of it on the stairs, then repeated this for each step, and in reverse on the way down.
It took an agonizing six minutes to complete. One of Mova’s engineers, who was at the Mova booth, watching with me, assured me that it can go faster, but that the team decided to run it slower for safety reasons. I’ll accept that, but it would have to go quite a bit faster to catch its competition—Dreame’s robot got down and back up its stair set in close to 2.5 minutes. Eufy’s MarsWalker managed it in just 1 minute and 45 seconds. But Mova might have an advantage—according to that same engineer, it can handle spiral staircases just fine. Then again, as confident as he sounded, it would have been a great power move for the company to set up a little spiral staircase to prove it. Maybe it can do it and Mova chose not to show it off—building a spiral staircase for the show is a little more complicated than the straight up-and-down kind. Or maybe it’s not all that good at spiral staircases.
It’ll be interesting to see how these stair climbers shake out when they make it into reviewers’ grubby hands. Representatives from all three companies confirmed to me that the plan is to release their devices within the next year; none would reveal pricing. Maybe it hasn’t been decided, or they’re each just waiting to see what the other does.
However they do, none of these robots fully solve the problem. But climbing stairs is a huge first step. Or set of steps, I guess. The next task is getting them to actually clean the stairs, something the vaporware-at-this-point Ascender was supposed to do. And frankly, I don’t care. Bring me the stair-climbing robot, please.
Withings, which is best known for its smart scales and similar devices, also makes a smartwatch series, the latest of which is the ScanWatch 2. At IFA 2025, the company announced a new blue and silver version of the 42mm model. It also unveiled HealthSense 4, an AI-laden software update that leverages the tech to handle a set of new health- and sleep-tracking features.
I grabbed a picture of the ScanWatch 2 while I was there, and now I get the appeal of this watch. If you’re not familiar, the ScanWatch’s big deal is that they’re like smartwatches disguised as regular old analog watches, complete with mechanical time-telling hands and a more standard overall watch face. The screen itself is just a watch face complication—a tiny circle embedded in the upper part of the screen. The ScanWatch 2 looks nice, and the blue-banded, silver model is no different. In fact, I’m a fan of the blue, if only because it reminds me of the blue suit Adam Sandler wears throughout the movie Punch Drunk Love. (If you haven’t seen it and you’re scoffing at an Adam Sandler mention in this Very Serious Smartwatch Article, cut it out, and go watch the movie.)
This version of the ScanWatch 2 is available now on Withings’s website, Amazon, Target, and Best Buy, and costs $369.95. Buyers will get a month of Withings Plus for free. (After that, it’s $9.95 a month, or $99.50 per year.)
Under the hood, the ScanWatch 2 does a lot of what other, more conspicuous smartwatches do. It takes measurements of things like heart rate and blood oxygen level, or carries out ECG readings to power atrial fibrillation detection.
With HealthSense 4, the ScanWatch 2 (and ScanWatch Nova and Nova Brilliant, but not the original ScanWatch or ScanWatch Light) can now track REM sleep and take more accurate measurements of your breathing rhythm while you sleep. Withings says its new algorithms, using data gathered by the smartwatch—such as heart rate variability, physical activity, body temperature, and respiratory rhythm—can find possible causes of fatigue, and provide AI-powered recommendations telling users what they might be able to do to feel less tired all the time. These recommendations are collected under what Withings calls the Vitality Indicator, which you need a Withings Plus subscription to access on your phone.
Withings product manager Etienne Tregaro walked me through some of the new app features at IFA 2025. The Vitality Indicator screen gives you an overview of your “vitality,” which I took to be a sort of shorthand for Withings’ AI system’s impression of your overall readiness to face a given day. Days of the week at the top of the screen are filled with circles with green outlines that can be anywhere from nonexistent to a complete ring—the fuller the ring, the less fatigued you are. At the bottom, various boxes tell you where you are for the day in categories like Recovery and Effort.
The Withings app also features Withings Intelligence—a chatbot you can talk to about your health metrics. It can take note of patterns; another Withings representative I spoke with showed me a screen where the chatbot noted he had just lost a little weight, speculated about the causes, and asked if he’d been intentionally trying to lose weight. In theory, it would give him helpful guidance, depending on his answer.
The subscription also gives access to AI-powered notifications letting users know when their menstrual cycle is beginning or when the ScanWatch 2 has picked up signs of an infection. The Withings Plus service also comes with Cardio Check-Up, an option to have your cardiovascular data checked by a professional cardiologist, who returns a basic summary of what they saw and recommendations for dealing with issues that may have cropped up.
It’s a staggering update that leapfrogs over Apple’s more passive presentation of health information and more closely mirrors efforts by companies like Samsung to deploy AI, informed by smart wearables data, as a health coach. I worry it could draw certain people further into unhealthy obsessions with constantly tracking and micromanaging their health? I’m not an expert in this; for that, I’d encourage you to read the manyarticleson the subject. We’re riding into a new frontier with generative AI now becoming more deeply enmeshed in smart wearables, and only time will tell.
One thing you won’t need a subscription for is the battery life improvement that comes with the new HealthSense4 software. Now, the ScanWatch 2 gets 35 days on a charge, which is up from 30 days before, already way more battery life than most standard smartwatches. Although to get there, you’ll probably need to turn off a number of the ScanWatch 1’s features, like its always-on display or blood oxygen sensor.
Tregaro told me Withings managed to add those days by identifying areas it could optimize its code. I asked what your settings would have to look like to actually reach 35 days on a charge, because obviously you can’t expect that while using every single feature the ScanWatch 2 offers. He said you’d need to turn off a number of features, including some of the overnight tracking or notifications. Withings, to its credit, has a chart that can tell you which features incur the biggest battery life penalty. Nice to have a guide.
Belkin showcased a range of recently released Qi2.2 magnetic wireless chargers at IFA 2025, along with other charging accessories and wireless earbuds. Nestled in all of this were two products that immediately caught my eye: the Belkin UltraCharge Magnetic Charger 25W and the SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds with ANC.
I want to talk about that second product, because this is something that has been stuck in a tiny space in the back of my mind for years. I rarely actively seek out noise-canceling wired earbuds, and when I do, I’m always disappointed to find they barelyexist. At first glance, there’s not much to Belkin’s SoundForm USB-C headphones: they’re white, with flat wires that terminate in somewhat chunky earbuds. The earbuds are water- and- sweat resistant, feature 12mm drivers (for comparison, Apple’s AirPods Pro use 11mm drivers). Belkin claims they have “rich sound and deep bass.”
I got to test them a little bit, and yes, they sound decent—they’re not tinny, not muffled, the sound is reasonably balanced, and they’ve got nice-sounding bass, though it won’t rattle your brain by any means. Also, the SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds seemed to avoid the kind of boxy sound that I’ve noticed with some Belkin wireless earbuds. The active noise-cancelling (ANC) is far from competing with that of the AirPods Pro 2, but it does drop the noise around you—it seemed like it had a hard time with a narrow band of mid-range sounds. Maybe that’s intentional, to let you hear when people are talking to you, but it’s a weird effect. The wired earbuds also have a transparency mode, or you can turn these modes off.
The reason Belkin’s new headphones can actually do ANC is that instead of an unpowered 3.5mm headphone jack, they use USB-C. Sure, that limits where you can use them, but it’s a fine trade-off versus ANC wireless earbuds that you have to recharge and whose non-replaceable batteries are doomed to give out.
Of course, USB-C plugs don’t always last forever—the little pieces that secure them in a port can wear out, making their connection loose and finicky—so there’s a chance these may not endure any longer than the tiny batteries in wireless earbuds, especially if you use them a lot. Belkin representative Jen Wei told me that the company doesn’t hear regular complaints from customers about its USB-C plugs doing this, and it’s true that some last longer than others, but it’s something to be aware of. Still, I’m glad to see Belkin trying this. The SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds with ANC will be available in October for $34.99.
Belkin isn’t the only one bringing back wired earbuds. Sony also announced its own IER-EX15C earbuds (sorry, “in-ear headphones”) at IFA 2025. No ANC in these, but they also connect via USB-C. They’re $30, but for another $5, Belkin’s SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds seem like the better deal to get ANC.
At a glance, the UltraCharge Magnetic Charger 25W is just a MagSafe-style charging puck, but thicker and with a ring-shaped kickstand that you can also use to stabilize your phone. Unlike the UltraCharge 3-in-1 Magnetic Charging Dock that Belkin released last month, product manager Laurelin Stuart-Smith told me at the booth that the standalone puck has a heatsink inside for passive cooling—magnetic charging generates a lot of excess heat, and the 25W power afforded by this charger’s use of the Qi2.2 standard will only make that worse.
The UltraCharge Magnetic Charger 25W will be available in November for $39.95.
There’s one more thing I want to nerd out about from Belkin’s booth: the BoostCharge Retractable Car Charger 75W. Its integrated USB-C cable extends 75cm (roughly 2.5 feet) and offers 60W charging. The device also has two ports (one USB-A and one USB-C) and Belkin says it actively optimizes power delivery when more than one thing is connected.
I’m always very skeptical about retractable cables, or just retractable things in general—I’ve just owned too many cheap ones whose springs give out, rendering them annoying and useless. I’m also always wary of integrated cables for the same USB-C plug wearing out. I can’t speak to how long the USB-C plug on this device will last, but retractable cables can be done well, and at least from the brief time I had tugging on Belkin’s new car charger’s USB-C cable, it felt pleasantly smooth, with none of the odd clunkiness that tells you This Thing Will Break Soon.
The BoostCharge Retractable Car Charger 75W will be available in the US in October for $29.99.
Reolink rolled out a new smart home security camera at IFA 2025 that the company says can see beyond its dual camera lenses. It’s called the TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi, and it looks kind of like the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi, a camera I recently reviewed, but with a ball-shaped camera housing that rotates to see things that three sensors above them have detected.
This sensor-based approach gives the camera a 270-degree detection range at any given time, according to a press release that Reolink emailed to Gizmodo. The three motion sensors wrap around the front and sides of the unit. A representative I spoke with at Reolink’s IFA booth suggested installing the camera on the corner of your home, surveying a driveway that stretches from the street to a garage farther back, a scene impossible for one fixed-view camera to cover—the TrackFlex could detect that a car is entering the driveway, swivel to face it, then watch it as it drives to the garage.
Like other Reolink cameras, this one stores recordings locally, either with microSD cards (up to 512GB) or Reolink’s NVR and Home Hub devices. Saving videos to a network-attached storage (NAS) device via FTP is also an option. This is Reolink, so expect to be assaulted with options in the company’s app.
As for the TrackFlex’s dual cameras, they’re not recording one broad field of view like the Elite Floodlight WiFi. Instead, one is a standard wide view while the other is a 6x zoom, capable of capturing a lot more zoomed-in detail than the wide lens can. The two floodlights looked exactly like those of the Elite, and can articulate to point up or down, or to bathe a wider area in light. They also offer the same brightness and temperature adjustment as the Elite.
The camera uses the company’s new local AI system called ReoNeura Core, which enables the TrackFlex to do the same sorts of natural language video search that we’re seeing with a lot of other connected-camera AI systems. (See SwitchBot’s new AI Hub.) So, if you want to search your locally stored video for a moment, like when a person with a brown shirt walked into your garage last, you can do that. The Reolink rep I spoke with took me to a pair of displays that showed me what was happening behind the scenes.
On the left, it was a view of what a user might see while using the event notifications screen; you see the camera’s live feed. While on the right, a list of events with descriptions that were mostly pretty accurate—there were people interacting at a convention, and others were walking around in the background—but it got some details wrong. We weren’t at an outdoor event, for example (although it was quite bright in there).
Meanwhile, on the right, the screen showed individual characteristics of the things the model was identifying. Seeing everyone broken down by their attributes had a very police-station-surveillance vibe. ReoNeuro identified one person as a middle-aged male wearing a green, short-sleeve shirt, along with a hat and a bag. In the bottom panel, another middle-aged male—although that person definitely looked younger than me, and I’m still in my prime, I swear—is identified as wearing a long-sleeve shirt with pants, both blue, and as having short hair. All of that detail is effectively keywords for your searches later, and they all seem like things you’d type if you’re looking for specific events that you know the TrackFlex recorded.
But woof, it’s more than a little unnerving to see this in action, and it felt a little off-key to have a Reolink rep so proudly showing it to me. It’s great that this is all happening on device, as I’d rather that than have it happening in a cloud server over which I have no control. It’s convenient and there’s no doubt that I want the convenience of casually searching my footage, but that sure didn’t stop seeing how the sausage is made from giving me the willies.
IFA, short for Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin, meaning “International Radio Exhibition Berlin” because it started in 1924 when radios were the hottest things in tech, doesn’t see as many major gadget announcements as CES. Still, it’s Europe’s largest tech show to close out summer, and this year the show doubled down on the stuff its Messe Berlin convention halls are typically known for: smart home gear and robots. That’s not to say there weren’t the usual new laptops, speakers, and wacky concepts—there were!
We’re still stomping through Berlin to bring you the best tech we can find from IFA 2025. For now, here’s our Best of IFA 2025 Awards for every gadget that the Gizmodo squad found innovative, well-designed, or just plain fun.
Best Gaming Handheld
Lenovo Legion Go 2
The Legion Go 2 will cost you an arm and a leg, and then Lenovo will still demand more than $1,050 for its revised handheld PC. And still, the device is enticing thanks to its 8.8-inch OLED screen and variable refresh rate (VRR) between 30Hz and 144Hz. The more ergonomic controls may make it easier to hold for longer—which may help considering the upgraded 74Wh battery should let you game for longer.
The Deebot X11 OmniCyclone has a few things going for it that make it stand out from Roombas and the suddenly very competitive market of robovacs. There’s an onboard AI model that Ecovacs says helps the X11 better understand when to clean based on your habits; improved motors help it get over gaps where different floor materials meet; and there’s a built-in GaN fast-charging technology that supposedly lets it recharge while it’s rinsing its mop. The Deebot X11 should also clean corners and wall edges better. It seems to have it all.
Eufy’s MarsWalker is straight out of a sci-fi movie. When a Eufy robot vacuum slips on the “mech suit,” it can then use the arms and legs to climb up and down stairs, eliminating the need to manually haul the bot between floors to vacuum. The MarsWalker is cute, a little creepy, but damn, come on, technology that levels up our laziness is too good to ignore!
When light is right, the Acer Swift 16 Air is your best choice for a laptop that has more screen real estate than any 13- or 14-inch notebook. It clocks in at 2.18 pounds for the version with an IPS LCD display, but the heavier AMOLED will barely weigh you down at 2.43 pounds. The major caveat here is the Swift 16 Air sacrifices battery life for the sake of a thin and light 16-inch device. If you can stomach being near a charger, the Swift 16 Air will barely register as anything in your backpack.
Lenovo’s new version of its Legion Pro 7 is very enticing since now it comes with AMD’s Ryzen 9 9955X3D. The CPU promises to beat Intel’s high-end offerings exclusively for gaming performance with the same GPU. The Legion Pro 7 is already a great gaming laptop; the better chip will just make a good computer better.
Best Smartphone
Tecno Slim
Tech giants like Samsung say you need to sacrifice battery life for the sake of a super-thin phone. Tecno responded “hold my beer” with the two versions of the Tecno Slim phone. They’re each barely any thicker than a USB-C port, and yet Tecno claims they have enough battery life to last more than a full day.
Sometimes you want to deck your house in colorful lights all year, and Govee is here to help you do just that. With support for 16 million colors, the Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism are ready for any holiday. Easter lighting, here you come.
Damn, we love nostalgia, and We Are Rewind’s next-gen GB-001 boombox has it in spades. There’s a tape deck that can play and record tapes, VU meters for levels, and it still has Bluetooth when you’re feeling lazy. We just hope it sounds as good as it looks.
Apple doesn’t make a wireless charging stand that charges both AirPods Max and a pair of AirPods earbuds so Mophie did. The Max Headphones Charging Stand is what every Apple fan has been waiting for and displays your Apple over-ear headphones while juicing them up. You do need a little USB-C dongle to magnetically charge the AirPods Max, but seriously, why didn’t anybody make this sooner?
Open-ear audio is coming to headphones, and we couldn’t be more ready. JLab showed off a pair of headphones with an open back that could be the perfect form factor for quality audio that still lets you hear your surroundings. The best part? They’re set to debut at only $99.
If there’s one thing Samsung is an expert at, it’s making big-ass tablets, and the 14.6-inch Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra is the largest one that matters. Thinner than even Apple’s thinnest iPad Pro, Samsung’s Android tablet is better as a laptop or desktop replacement thanks to the new DeX Extended Mode and four desktop workspaces to spread windows across. It’s truly made for working as opposed to watching Netflix, though that’ll look great on the massive screen, too.
There are projectors, and then there’s Anker’s Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro, which is basically an upright party speaker with a 4K, U-shaped optical laser system to splash a massive picture of up to 3,500 ANSI lumens of brightness onto any wall. It’s such a tank of a projector that it may as well be called R2-D2. As if that weren’t enough, the Nebula X1 Pro hides four wireless speakers inside that you can set up in any room or backyard for a 7.1.4 surround sound system that’ll shoot you into hyperspace.
Finally, there’s a power bank that’s got enough juice and throughput to charge up your entire mobile office. Anker claims its Prime 300W Power Bank can charge two laptops and your phone all at once. The Anker app will also let you determine which devices you want to prioritize during an emergency charge.
Nothing says high-end like some aerospace-grade, sand-blasted aluminum alloy. Laifen knows that, which is why it made the T1 Pro with one single piece of airplane-grade metal. The result is a sleek but sturdy shaver that is designed to last—and would probably make Jony Ive proud as hell.
As much as fitness bands like those made by Whoop are great for anyone that doesn’t want another screen in their life, adding another subscription is just as bad. If you want a screenless fitness wearable, this one from Polar does what Whoop does but without the annual fee. It looks comfier, too.
The sprint towards functinal and powerful AR glasses is in full swing and Inmo’s AIr 3 is proof. Inmo officially launched a kickstarter campaign to make 1080p glasses with a smart ring that controls UI for apps and multiple interactive windows. It’s a different approach from Meta and its alleged wristband, and unlike anything we’ve seen yet.
If you liked Plaud’s original card-sized AI recorder, then there’s no reason not to like its newest addition, the Note Pro, which adds two microphones for better recording range and extends the battery life so you’ll never miss a word.
SwitchBot’s Kata asks, “What if a stuffed animal had an on-device LLM?” That may not be a question most have thought to ask, but this wheeled robot is pushing boundaries. According to SwitchBot, this little guy even experiences jealousy. Can your non-AI-equipped plushie feel jealousy? We thought so.
Lenovo stands on its own when it comes to showing off wild computer concepts that may never see the light of day—and we love them for it because the ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept is something you won’t find from other companies. The screen flips from horizontal to landscape, which is useful for developers and honestly just for reading a website or social feed without having to constantly scroll the trackpad. It’s just a concept, but there’s even room to prop up a phone when the screen is flipped so you can always keep an eye on TikTok, though you may wanna just doomscroll on the bigger vertical display instead.
Anker showed off a few powerful charging and computer accessories at IFA 2025 this year, and they put out just a wacky amount of power. That’s especially true of the Prime 300W Power Bank and the Prime Docking Station, which features what the company calls “the first triple display charging dock with stable 8K display output.”
The Prime 300W Power Bank has enough juice to charge two laptops and a phone at once using its two USB-C and single USB-A ports. Its screen—which was hard to see under the bright lights of the IFA hall I was in, but seemed bright enough indoors—tells you how much power is left, how many watts it’s outputting, and the charger’s current temperature.
You can cycle through those using a button on the side of the device. The Anker app lets you do things like prioritize which devices you’d rather send more power to (a single USB-C port can provide up to 140 watts). And you can recharge it up to 50% in just 15 minutes, as it can take up to 250 watts at once—though you’ll need to use two power adapters and both of its USB-C ports for that. (Handily, Anker sells a 160W Prime Charger that’ll get you there.)
Then there’s the Prime Docking Station, a 14-port dock with a screen, single SD and microSD card slots, and three USB-C ports on the front, each capable of up to 140W output, while the remaining ports are on the back. Those are a 140W USB-C port for powering your laptop, along with these ports: three USB-C, three USB-A, two HDMI, one DisplayPort, one ethernet, one audio jack, and two SD card slots. According to a member of Anker’s product team, the device uses HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4, and it can only output to one 8K screen at a time and up to 4K on two others. You’ll want to use DisplayPort for 8K output at 60Hz, though—the HDMI ports only output 8K at 30Hz.
The display functions like any other Anker Prime device, giving you information like current USB-C output, status on your data transfers, its current display signal, and the dock’s temperature. A knob on the side lets you cycle through the options. One of those is the settings menu, where you can run through a few options like screen brightness, clock format, and even adjust which direction of knob turn does what. (I love tiny detailed settings like this.) I wanted to see some things, like the file transfer status, in action, but Anker wasn’t really equipped to show that off.
You can connect to the Prime Docking Station with an Anker PC app to monitor devices connected to it or adjust display settings. While a lot of powerful docks use passive cooling, Anker stuck a fan in the Prime Docking Station to keep the device from throttling under heavy load. Anker said in its press materials that the Docking Station will be $299.99 in the U.S., although it’s currently listed at $269.99.
Besides the Power Bank and Docking Station, the Prime series also includes that 160W charger I mentioned above. Even this has a display, where you’ll check how much power it’s supplying through each of its three USB-C ports, which are capable of outputting up to 140W each (not simultaneously, mind you). You can also cycle through three charging modes with a button on the front or connect to it with Bluetooth and use the Anker app for other modes and adjusting things like screen brightness or setting how long it takes before the screen turns off. That’ll be $149 when it comes out on Sept. 25.
Finally, Anker has a new three-in-one Prime Wireless Charging Station, a Qi2.2 wireless charging station with a wireless charging base for things like AirPods, along with two stalks: one for your Apple Watch and one with a 25W magnetic charger that has a built-in fan to keep your phone cool while it charges. Anker says this lets it get an iPhone 16 Pro Max up to 80% in 59 minutes—something you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a normal MagSafe charger, since excess heat can cause your phone to throttle charging speed.
The Prime Wireless Charging Station’s display is for checking real-time charging stats. A little spot at the bottom of the screen is a touchpad that you can slide your finger on to cycle through settings or double-tap to put it in sleep mode so the fan isn’t making too much noise. (I could feel it but not hear it at full blast, but to be fair, IFA is loud.) The app also lets you set that mode, as well as configure charging schedules. Anker doesn’t say in its press materials when this will be available, nor how much it will cost.
Smart glasses are pretty exciting right now, not just because they’re increasingly popular, but because they’re not quite mainstream yet, which means companies are still allowed to get very weird with them. It’s in that nascent zone of experimentation that you get some interesting stuff, and that definitely includes Inmo’s Air 3 AR glasses.
There are lots of cool / quirky things about Inmo’s Air 3—which announced a Kickstarter as a part of IFA 2025—but my favorite thing is that it tackles one of the most vexing issues with AR glasses as they stand: the UI. To control the Inmo Air 3, the smart glasses come with a smart ring that acts as a button, a touchpad, a mouse, and it also helps track the movement of virtual objects in the display. It reminds me of what Meta is likely cooking up with its pair of smart glasses (a wristband that reads your body’s electrical signals), but with a lower footprint.
The other major highlight of these smart glasses is that, with the help of a micro OLED display from Sony, the Air 3 are not only full-color, but they’re 1080p and have up to 600 nits of brightness. It’s a relatively small field of view at 36 degrees, but it covers 100% sRGB, which is a far cry from competitors like Rokid Glasses that only show overlays in a Matrix-like green color. On paper, these smart glasses are equipped to do everything you wish you could do with Meta’s Ray-Bans, and with those extra capabilities, Inmo is planning a lot.
One thing Inmo envisions is lots of 2D apps that you can use in your smart glasses for things like doomscrolling X or Snapchat, if that’s a thing that people still use. There’s a built-in Google Play store, so pretty much anything you could download on there should be possible to use in the Air 3, which runs Android 14. One of the most compelling use cases is using the smart glasses as a virtual screen. Similar to competitors in the space like BigScreen, Inmo envisons its smart glasses as a way of gluing a big screen on your eyeballs—the Air 3 translates to a 150-inch screen, according to the company.
To do all of those things, Inmo is loading the Air 3 up with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage, which it says should enable up to three “independent floating virtual screens.” There’s also a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera for pictures and computer vision, and an array of mics and speakers so you can use a voice assistant or listen to audio playback.
My biggest questions are the same as any pair of AR glasses that claim to do all this stuff. One is battery life; according to Inmo, the Air 3 has a 660mAh battery, though it doesn’t give figures on how that translates to battery life. The other thing is weight, and Inmo hasn’t shared figures in that department, so I’m going to go ahead and assume these weigh a great deal more than less capable competitors from Rokid or Meta.
Either way, the Air 3 is doing some interesting stuff, especially in terms of UI and display, and whether or not any of it pans out, it’s hard not to appreciate the exercise in “how the f**k are we going to make smart glasses work?” Inmo’s Kickstarter officially launches on Sept. 15, and its Air 3 glasses will cost $899.
Why change what works? In the case of Lenovo’s Legion Go 2, the question morphs into “Why change what makes you distinct?” Lenovo’s upcoming sequel to its Legion Go handheld gaming PC is more powerful, has grips made for human hands, and sports a prettier screen. Its blood is flowing with the same DNA as Lenovo’s odd handheld, but now it comes with a price tag designed to make your wallet weep.
Here’s the kicker. At IFA 2025, Lenovo declared the Legion Go 2 will start at $1,050. For comparison, the next most expensive handheld from one of the big laptop OEMs, the MSI Claw 8 AI+, currently demands $1,000 after tariff-impacted price hikes. The Legion Go 2 handheld comes out sometime in October, though Lenovo let me play a few rounds of Balatro to get a feel for its layout and bask in front of its bright OLED display. This is an organic light-emitting diode display without a separate backlight, meaning it generates much better contrast and deep “inky” blacks compared to your average LCD. The screen is still a massive 8.8 inches with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, but now it supports variable refresh rate, or VRR, between 30Hz and 144Hz. This could help the Legion Go 2 show your games in the best light, whether they’re running at a minimum of 30 fps or well over 100 fps.
Specs-wise, the Legion Go 2 uses AMD’s latest high-end handheld-centric chip, the Ryzen Z2 Extreme, and sports up to 32GB of high-speed RAM. Lenovo also upgraded the battery to 74Wh, twice as much as the first Legion Go. It’s not as high as the Asus ROG Ally X, but hopefully it should support longer battery life than the previous device, which would often conk out after under two hours of gaming. The two USB 4 ports on the top and bottom both support up to 65W charging and video output up to DisplayPort 2.0.
Lenovo’s Legion Go was the odd duckling of the 2023 nascent handheld PC market. Fans who appreciated the large screen life turned the device into a swan of their own design. They crafted grips to make the handheld’s sharp sides feel more ergonomic. Some went as far as to replace Windows 11 with either Bazzite—an operating system developed in Linux made to resemble Valve’s gaming ecosystem—or Valve’s SteamOS itself. The new Legion Go 2 is still stuck using Windows along with the Legion Space app to control the device’s power settings and quick-access games. The device should eventually gain access to the handheld-specific version of Windows 11, but that won’t be around until after Xbox helps launch the Asus ROG Xbox Ally.
The Legion Go 2 feels like an extension of its predecessor, rather than a makeover. The TrueStrike grips have been remodeled to fit more comfortably in adult-sized hands. They can still detach from the main body of the device, à la the Switch 2. Unlike Nintendo’s new handheld, which uses magnetic attachment points, the Legion Go 2 still uses the same pin-based connection that uncouples from the handheld by pulling up and away from the main unit. The controllers are still compatible with accessories like the Charging Connector first introduced in 2024.
An ‘FPS Mode’ that’s still weirder than Switch 2’s mouse mode
The right-hand TrueStrike controller still includes an “FPS Mode,” though it hasn’t changed much from the first Legion Go. Unlike the Switch 2’s mouse mode, you still need to toggle a button underneath the right-hand controller to use the built-in mouse sensor. I didn’t get to try out this mode playing any kind of shooter in my brief time using it. I found the pins still dug into my palm as I tried to to wrap my digits around to hit the two side buttons, which become your mouse clicks. There is a small cover to stick over the connection mount and make the device feel a little better in hand, but your mileage will vary.
Just like the first-gen Legion Go and the more recent $600 Legion Go S with SteamOS, the new Legion Go 2 has Hall effect joysticks that should avoid stick drift issues. What’s stranger still is how everything still feels the same, from the relatively thin joysticks to the flat face buttons. There’s a part of me that was hoping for more changes, especially considering the price bump well above the Legion Go’s $750. Beyond the screen, overall performance will tell us if it’s worth the upgrade and the extra $300.
Never mind your homeowner’s association’s guidelines. Why shouldn’t our homes be permanently bedecked in colorful mood lights and not just in the days leading to Christmas? Govee’s coming out of the gate of IFA 2025 with a set of permanent outdoor lights that create a prismatic pattern over your home’s dull siding.
Compared to Govee’s other permanent outdoor lights, the new Outdoor Lights Prism creates a tricolor lighting effect from each custom LED unit on the light strip, cascading a gradient of three distinct colors at a downward angle. Govee’s system supports 16 million colors, so depending on the time of year, you could theme your home lights to purple and orange hues during Halloween or bright pinks and yellows in time for spring.
Like its other outdoor lights, the Outdoor Lights Prism is rated to work in temperatures between -30 degrees and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. They’re also rated IP68 for surviving dust and the odd rainstorm. Govee says the lights should last a total of 50,000 hours. Unfortunately, Govee still hasn’t shared pricing yet. The Light Prism should be available around Sept. 22. None of the company’s other lights shown off at IFA, including its bright and beautiful Galaxy Light Projector Pro with a built-in speaker, have official pricing yet, either.
Govee’s TV backlight uses ‘cinema quality’ lenses to match your screen
Let’s say you don’t have a backyard, but you’re a couch potato who wants a gadget that will watch your TV as intensely as you do. In comes the TV Backlight 3 Pro. Govee’s backlight has a few extra features that push it over the top compared to similar devices like those from Nanoleaf. The camera you mount to the TV uses a triple-sensor HDR camera array to capture the colors of your screen. That high dynamic range is important, according to Govee, as it allows for a wider range of imaging for perfect color matching.
Maybe the TV Backlight 3 Pro could match the slimy, dark tones of a Xenomorph from Alien: Earth. The other end of the device is the light strip that you adhere to the rear of your TV. Govee says this setup is brighter than its other strips, specifically 337 lumens compared to the Backlight 3 Lite at 120. The device supports the Matter smart home standard, but it will also sync up with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Govee still hasn’t shared pricing details, but the TV Backlight 3 Pro will hit the scene on Sept. 29.
The jump to the Nvidia RTX 50-series GPUs and the avalanche of tariff woes make our gaming gadgets more costly for only marginal performance gains. Out of this murk of price gouging is Maingear, a company best known for making custom gaming desktops. Its new “Super 16″ 16-inch gaming laptop, announced at the same time as IFA 2025, does more than most companies to set itself apart, but it’s the starting price for its specs that makes it more enticing than competing notebooks.
Maingear worked with the Taiwan-based laptop brand Clevo on its new $2,400 gaming laptop, but the design still has a subtle amount of Maingear’s usual flair with its clean, uniform look and minimalistic RGB backlit keyboard. The stated specs of the Super 16 won’t surprise anybody paying attention to today’s laptop slate. It’s packing an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti mobile GPU running at a full 140W. What actually sets the laptop apart is the display—a 300Hz IPS LCD at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution. You’ll easily miss the beautiful black levels and contrast of OLED on devices like the $2,600 Razer Blade 14 or even mini LED on a $3,300 HP Omen Max 16. On the bright side, the screen can display high frame rates.
The RTX 50-series GPUs are capable of topping 100 fps with the help of multi-frame gen. This is a technology that inserts multiple AI-generated frames in between natively rendered frame rates, artificially boosting the overall fps. While the technology isn’t necessary for playing games at playable frame rates (you normally need at least 40 or closer to 60 fps for frame gen to work without experiencing odd visual glitches), it can make games run smoother than normal. The RTX 5070 Ti won’t be able to push the most-demanding Cyberpunk 2077-level games to their peak with ray tracing on Ultra settings, but it should be enough for most of your Steam library at the laptop’s max resolution. You can find other budget-friendly gaming laptops with 240Hz OLED screens, like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S, for $1,900. That’s still more than last year’s Helio Neo 16 models. Acer said it hiked prices earlier this year in response to Trump’s tariffs.
While Maingear’s Super 16 supports Wi-Fi 7, it only includes up to Thunderbolt 4 USB-C instead of the more modern Thunderbolt 5. Otherwise, the device’s I/O still comes through in a pinch with two USB-A, HDMI, and a microSD card slot. What’s more, the device doesn’t use any proprietary port for charging. The 230W AC adapter uses a 100W USB-C plug. Framework made a big deal out of its 240W USB-C charging through USB-C on its upcoming Framework Laptop 16.
Maingear’s first 18-inch “Ultima” gaming laptop looks sleek in its ocean blue color, but it also costs $3,400 at the low end with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX GPU and RTX 5080 GPU, or $4,300 with an RTX 5090 mobile GPU. That’s not bad considering the competition for 18-inch devices, such as the high-end $4,050 Alienware 18 Area-51 config, especially with its 200Hz display. The major difference between Alienware and Maingear’s top-end notebooks is the former has ultra-clicky mechanical keys that make typing a joy. Every laptop will have tradeoffs. The lone remaining question is whether Maingear’s Super 16 may have enough going for it to make up for what it lacks.
I was already impressed enough with Anker’s SoundCore Nebula X1 projector when I saw it back in April. We all dream of having our own full theater in our homes, or at least something transportable enough that we could hang a bedsheet in our backyard and pretend we’re at the cinema. It was one of the first projectors with its own internal liquid cooling system to keep it from overheating. Then came along the Nebula X1 Pro, a projector so big it could be a Star Wars droid that’s large enough to pack famed R2-D2 actor Kenny Baker inside (RIP).
Anker already shared a few details for the Nebula X1 Pro, but the company is showing it off for the first time at IFA 2025 in Berlin. The beastly all-in-one projector and speaker system is as tall as a 10-year-old and comes with its own retractable handle plus two wheels to roll it out when it’s time for family movie night. The device is truly the all-in-one projector setup nobody truly knew they wanted. It supports both Dolby Vision for HDR (for better contrast and brighter highlights) and Dolby Atmos sound through its pop-out wireless speakers.
The projector specs are very similar to the existing Nebula X1—which is to say it’s impressive. The Nebula X1 Pro uses a U-shaped optical laser system that supports 4K resolution up to 3,500 ANSI lumens. That will be plenty bright for dark rooms or nighttime operation. For playing movies during the day, it may still offer quality colors and deep contrast. Whether that will be better than a TV for its high price will be up to each user. The projector has automatic sizing, focus, and obstacle avoidance features to make the picture appear in the best frame possible.
The Nebula X1 Pro hides four fully wireless speakers you can set up around your living room or backyard. The 7.1.4 speaker setup includes four pop-out front and rear speakers connected to the main projector through 12-channel RF chips. The X1 Pro’s main body acts as the 8-inch, 80W subwoofer. Each speaker should have an 8-hour battery life—long enough to entertain your friends in a full-day movie marathon, though it won’t last long enough to watch all three Lord of the Rings movies (the extended editions, of course). If your space is more constrained, you could use the two front speakers as a soundbar. The lid comes up to reveal two microphones if you’re keen on having a karaoke night.
The projector’s bottom comes packed in with a 6.6-foot retractable power cord. You’ll still need an extension cord nearby, especially if you’re bringing this droid projector outside. There’s a lot to consider with projectors, more than with TVs. This giant box promises the full cinema experience, and that’s already enticing enough. But it’s going up on Kickstarter Sept. 22 for between $4,000 and $5,000, according to Anker. The Nebula X1 Pro can handle screen sizes up to 300 inches. You can get a smaller, high-quality QD-OLED TV from the pricier brands like Samsung and still save close to $1,000. We’ll want to see for ourselves if all the wireless speakers make it the droid we’ve been looking for.
Amazon’s Eero is getting into the cellular hotspot router business… sort of. At IFA 2025, the company announced the Eero Signal, a device that can back up your Eero network with cellular data, kicking in when it detects an internet outage.
The Eero Signal is an upright little device with a USB-C splitter that plugs into your existing Eero router’s USB-C port, powering both devices. If you’re paying for a $99.99 annual subscription to Eero Plus, you’ll get 10GB of cellular backup data per year. Eero will also roll out a $199.99/year “Eero Plus 100” plan that, you guessed it, gives you 100GB of data to use. Eero spokesperson Connor Rice said the Signal will work with any USB-C Eero router that supports Wi-Fi 6 or higher.
Eero Plus subscribers already have access to a built-in backup internet feature—called, uh, Eero Internet Backup—that can automatically switch your network over to a nearby hotspot or alternative Wi-Fi network. But if you’d rather not pay separately for another company’s mobile hotspot data and don’t just have another Wi-Fi network lying around to use, you can pick up a 4G LTE version of the Signal for $99.99 early next year. Eero says that later in 2026, it will release another one that uses 5G RedCap, a newer cellular protocol meant to provide low-latency, low-bandwidth service, primarily for things like IoT and wearable devices. The 5G model will set you back $199.99, according to Rice.
Eero is “working with multiple major cellular carriers to enable backup data if there’s an internet outage,” according to Rice. He said the throughput customers can expect when using the Signal’s cell backup will be up to 150Mbps, while the 5G RedCap version will get up to 220Mbps. He added that those are “theoretical maximums,” and actual speed will depend on several factors, like how close users are to cell towers and what cellular spectrum is available.
The company also announced the Eero PoE 7, a tri-band Wi-Fi 7 power over ethernet router that works with its existing mesh systems and can get both power and data from a single ethernet cable. This one won’t be available to the general public—instead, it’s intended for “businesses and residential properties that use wired infrastructure and have high-bandwidth needs.” The PoE 7 has specs similar to the Eero Max 7, with the company promising wireless throughput up to 3.9Gbps and wired up to 9.4Gbps. Each device will have two 10GbE ports and can cover up to 2,000 square feet, according to Eero. The PoE 7 will be available in the U.S. and Canada in November for $499.99, from “select internet service providers and professional installers.”
Sometimes you need a Bluetooth speaker that’s going to knock people’s socks off, not necessarily in terms of audio quality (though that’s nice too), but in pure, unadulterated volume. For JBL fans, there’s one wireless speaker that delivers on that promise in a package that’s not a total pain in the ass to cart around, and that’s the Boombox, which just got its fourth version and some significant upgrades to boot at IFA 2025.
The highlight here, according to JBL, is that the Boombox 4 is giving you more for less, at least in the weight department. While JBL shaved two pounds off the Boombox 4 compared to the last generation, it also has 50% more output than its predecessor. Coupled with JBL’s AI Sound Boost, the company says the speaker should deliver more output while minimizing distortion, too.
You should know that this speaker is still 13 pounds, though, so it’s not something you’re going to want to carry around for long periods. JBL says the Boombox 4 has two additional woofers and three passive radiators this time around for a total of 210W of power. The Boombox 3, for reference, has 180W of total power when plugged in, but 136W when running on battery power.
Even with that boost in power, JBL says the Boombox 4 should deliver solid battery life, with 28 hours of juice regularly and 34 hours if JBL’s Playtime Boost feature is activated. One thing that I love here is that the battery is replaceable now, which is great for longevity. More replaceable batteries in gadgets, please! Two other nice touches include the ability to connect to an external device via USB-C for lossless audio (a big deal for the audiophiles among us) and a light-up JBL logo that lets you know when the speaker’s bass boost is activated. JBL’s Boombox 4 is available for preorder now and debuts at $549.95. The speaker is slated for a full release on Sept. 28.
If you’re looking for even more power, JBL is also introducing a new edition of its JBL PartyBox. The PartyBox 720—a big-boy party speaker that makes the Boombox 4 look cute—has a whole 800W of power. That’s the same wattage as the PartyBox 710 speaker, but the PartyBox 720 woofers are 9 inches compared to the 8-inch woofers on the 710. The biggest shift here is that the PartyBox can now run on a battery as opposed to having to be plugged in. Altogether, JBL says that its PartyBox 720 can last for up to 15 hours on its own. Oh, there are also wider wheels this time around, which should make lugging around a house-shaking Bluetooth speaker a lot easier. JBL’s PartyBox 720 is available for preorder now at a debut price of $1,099 and will be released broadly on Sept. 21.
Marshall’s lineup of non-rockstar-grade audio gear just got a little bigger. As a part of IFA 2025, the company announced the Heston 60, a more compact soundbar that complements its previously released Heston 120. As usual, Marshall is keeping things mid-century with a design that invokes its classic amps and includes tactile controls (buttons instead of knobs like those used on the Heston 120), woven fabric, and PU leather. It also comes in either cream or black, but if you don’t buy the cream version, you’re just wrong in my opinion.
While the look is mostly the same as the Heston 120, aside from the knobs (bummed those are gone, by the way), there are some key differences between the two soundbars. For one, the Heston 60 is much more compact, which makes it ideal for anyone with less room, though you’ll get less boom for your buck. The Heston 60 has seven amplifiers compared to the Heston 120’s 11 amplifiers. It’s much quieter at 56W of total power compared to 150W of peak power. For most people, that will be more than enough, though, and despite the less powerful sound, the Heston 60 has some other tricks up its sleeve.
One cool feature is that the Heston 60 can be mounted on the wall or set on a TV stand thanks to specially designed waveguides and angled drivers. Depending on whether the Heston 60 is mounted or not, you can flip the reversible control to suit the soundbar’s orientation and even move the Marshall logo, which is magnetic. Probably my favorite thing about this soundbar is that it really leans into repairability. According to Marshall, the Heston 60 has a host of replaceable parts, including the fret (the speaker grill), end caps, drivers, and circuit boards, which encompass some of the most important parts of any soundbar.
As far as connectivity goes, the Heston 60 should rise to the occasion, with HDMI 2.1 eARC, a 3.5mm jack, and Bluetooth 5.3. It’s also compatible with AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, and Tidal Connect. There are also several modes for specific situations. While music and movie modes are straightforward, voice and night modes are kind of interesting. Voice mode accentuates dialogue in movies (for all those subtitle people out there), and night mode actually works to dampen loud sound effects and keeps dialogue listenable so you don’t wake the whole damn house up.
If you’re wondering where your low-end is going to come from, Marshall is also launching a subwoofer, the Heston Sub 200, which borrows a similar energy from the Heston 60. There’s the same amp-inspired mid-century look, and the Heston Sub 200 is equally as repairable. It’s wireless, too, which is nice if you’re like me and hate stuffing a bunch of cables behind your couch, even if you won’t ever see them. The sub will connect with the Heston 120 if you already own Marshall’s bigger soundbar. As is the case with Marshall’s previous entrant into the soundbar space, neither the Heston 60 nor the Heston Sub 200 will come cheap. Both will launch officially on Sept. 23 for $699 and $599, respectively.
After more than 10 years, Dolby is ready to bring its game-changing Dolby Vision tech into the future with (drum roll) Dolby Vision 2. As a part of IFA 2025, Dolby took the wraps off its sequel to Vision, which brings an array of new capabilities to the company’s proprietary HDR format.
Powering Dolby Vision 2 is an all-new engine that enables tools like “Content Intelligence.” Content Intelligence, as you may have guessed, uses AI to better adapt your TV’s picture to content that you’re watching, fine-tuning aspects based on not only what you’re watching but also where you’re watching it. Within content intelligence, there are several more specific tools, including precision blacks that adjust dark scenes on the fly, which, if it works, is great for anyone who loves OLED panels but has gripes with their performance on darker content.
There’s also—and this one is pretty cool—a light-sensing technology that, according to Dolby, monitors ambient lighting in your room and can automatically optimize your TV based on the lighting in your specific environment. As someone with an unusually dark apartment, I’m all for that, though I’m curious whether tech like this would drastically turn the brightness on my TV way down. I wouldn’t be mad about that, but maybe other people will? Lastly, there are tweaks to Dolby Vision’s handling of fast-paced content like gaming and live sports that are meant to better adjust motion control and white point, which controls the color temperature of whites on your screen.
Dolby is splitting Vision 2 into two tiers—Dolby Vision 2 and Dolby Vision 2 Max—and it says the latter will be available on the “highest performance TVs” and come with “additional premium features.” Gizmodo reached out to Dolby to clarify exactly what the difference is between those two tiers. Here’s what it said:
“Dolby Vision 2 Max includes capabilities designed to unlock the full capabilities and best picture quality on the highest-performing TVs. This includes capabilities such as bi-directional tone mapping, Authentic Motion, and more advanced tools tailored for enthusiasts.”
That tells us a little more, I guess, but from the sounds of it, Dolby Vision 2 Max will be designed to take advantage of the higher fidelity of expensive TVs, while Dolby Vision 2 is geared more toward “mainstream” TVs, in the company’s words. To start, Dolby says it will focus on the “mainstream” side of things, since it will begin rolling out Vision 2 on Hisense panels, though there’s no word on timing and availability quite yet. It says those Hisense TVs will be powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, though.
It’s been 10 years since the release of Dolby Vision back in the day, which allowed TVs to adjust and optimize content on your screen from scene to scene or even frame to frame and bridge the gap between cinema and at-home viewing. It’s been a long time in the works, but it’s no surprise to me that Dolby Vision 2 would be released now, given advancements in AI and their ability to understand context. More than that, though, Dolby Vision 2 should help better optimize current and future generations of TVs, which have obviously changed quite a bit since 2014. As always, though, seeing is believing, so we’ll be the judge of that when we can lay eyes on Dolby Vision 2-assisted content for ourselves.
We’re going back to IFA in Berlin! Well, some members of the Gizmodo crew, including our consumer tech reporter, Kyle Barr, will be roaming the labyrinthine halls of the Messe Berlin to find the smartest, coolest, and weirdest consumer electronics you’ll have the luxury of spending your hard-earned paychecks on in the near-ish future.
Expect the usual tech giants like Lenovo and Samsung to have a big presence. If you’ve ever been to IFA (it’s open to the public), you’ll know there’s a lot to take in. You’ll definitely get your steps in, walking miles just to see a new laptop or the latest robot vacuum. IFA is not quite as expansive as CES, and even though there are attendees from all over the world, nothing compares to the sardine-packed hellscape that is Sin City every January.
Europe’s largest tech show officially runs from Sept. 5 through Sept. 9, but Gizmodo will be tackling the show in the few days right after Labor Day, when many announcements drop early. Bookmark this page and Ctrl/Cmd+R often, because we’ll be updating this live blog often throughout the multi-day show.
reMarkable’s e-paper tablets have gained something of a cult following. People who use them love them to death. It’s not hard to see why—writing on the slim displays is closer to pen and paper than an iPad and Apple Pencil.
The company has started teasing “something” that’s “on the move.” Speculation is that it’ll be a mini version of the Paper Pro. It better have a color e-paper display or else. —Raymond Wong
As for what to expect from the tablets. Well, they’ll run Android and likely with Samsung’s own One UI 8 interface. More Galaxy AI features are a safe bet. Ditto for Google Gemini integration. AI, AI, AI—you know?
The Tab S10 Ultra had a gargantuan 14.6-inch display. I say go bigger or go home. Give us a 16- or 18-inch tablet that dwarfs even the biggest 12.9-inch M4 iPad Pro. Why the hell not? —Raymond Wong
