The best stuff announced at IFA

The doors to IFA 2025 in Berlin, Germany, have officially opened and new gadgets, tech, features, and upgrades continue to pour out of Europe’s largest consumer tech show.

There’s a lot of news to stay on top of, and if you’re struggling to ingest it all, here are some of the best announcements from the show so far, including innovative new robovacs, more affordable smart home devices, and even a portable home theater on wheels. You can catch up on all of The Verge’s IFA 2025 coverage right here.

Lenovo is no stranger to creating laptops with screens that offer unique functionality, such as the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 with a display that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the push of a button. Its latest concept is the ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept that rotates from landscape mode to portrait mode for reading long documents, coding, or scrolling through your TikTok feed.

Tennis players are probably no strangers to machines that fire balls for you to hit, but the Acemate Tennis Robot goes a few steps further. It’s equipped with two 4K binocular cameras, omnidirectional wheels, and a large catching net, allowing it to chase and catch the balls you serve back, for example. It also comes with AI coaching features that monitor your play style and provide recommendations for how you can improve.

It looks more like a gateway to another dimension, but Lepro’s TB1-Pro AI is a smart table lamp that’s part of a new collection of lighting products featuring microphones and an assistant called LightGPM built right in so they can be controlled using voice commands without the need for any additional hardware or an app on your phone. The TB1 features three intertwined and movable glowing rings with adjustable colors, and while pricing isn’t yet known, it’s expected to launch in the US sometime later this year.

Are cuddly robots officially a tradeshow trend? Switchbot’s Noa and Niko aren’t quite as adorable as Yukai Engineering’s Mirumi, but they offer more functionality than just looking inquisitive while hanging off a purse strap. The robots, which look like fluffy penguins, are designed to function as companions with large glowing eyes and arms that can flap up and down to express emotion. The robots use AI to recognize people in your home and respond to gestures, while a set of wheels lets them follow you around.

It’s reminiscent of Belkin’s Auto-Tracking Stand Pro that can automatically move the iPhone around to keep you in frame, but Lenovo’s Smart Motion Concept is instead designed for laptops. It’s got features like a cooling fan and extra USB ports, but the stand taps into a laptop’s webcam using Lenovo’s software so it can raise, lower, and tilt your computer so it’s always at an ergonomic eye level.

Anker’s Eufy smart home brand has come up with an alternative to having to buy several robovacs for homes with multiple floors — but it still involves buying another robot. The MarsWalker is equipped with tank-like treads and four arms it uses to climb stairs while carrying one of Eufy’s robot vacuums. Pricing won’t be known until it launches in early 2026, but the MarsWalker can handle curved or L-shaped staircases and will come with its own self-charging base.

Philips Hue could be the real star of IFA 2025 with the biggest launch in the history of the smart lighting company. It’s introducing its first video doorbell and a completely redesigned Hue Bridge Pro with a faster processor and more memory, letting it control up to 150 lights and 50 accessories and store over 500 custom lighting scenes. The new bridge also enables a new feature called Hue MotionAware that lets the company’s smart lights double as motion sensors. To make the smart home even more accessible, Philips Hue is also introducing a more affordable entry-level Essential line with smart bulbs that start at $25 or as low as $15 each when purchased in multipacks. All the new Hue bulbs also support Matter-over-Thread, allowing them to pair directly with Matter ecosystems, including Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa, without requiring a Hue Bridge.

Belkin’s solution to active noise cancellation reducing your headphones’ battery life is to take the battery out of the equation. As the name implies, the new $34.99 SoundForm USB-C Wired Earbuds with ANC aren’t wireless and instead connect to your smartphone or laptop using a 4-foot-long tangle-resistant USB cable that includes an inline remote with a microphone and volume controls.

Bluetti is introducing what is claims is the world’s first portable power station featuring a safe and long-lasting sodium-ion battery that can be drained and recharged over 4,000 times while still maintaining upwards of 70 percent of its original capacity. Pricing will be revealed closer to its October 2025 launch but the Pioneer Na will deliver up to 1,500W of power through multiple AC outlets and USB ports and offer better extreme cold weather performance than other portable power stations.

Being able to autonomously return to a dock for a charge more or less bypassed the battery-life limitations of robot vacuums, but Ecovacs says its new Deebot X11 Omnicyclone won’t need to spend much time out of commission while it tops off its battery. Using GaN-enabled fast charging, the $1,499 robovac can quickly recharge every time it returns to its base station to rinse its mopping pads so it spends more time actually vacuuming and cleaning your floors.

With a 26,250mAh capacity battery and up to 3ooW of output, Anker’s new Prime Power Bank can simultaneously charge two power-hungry laptops and a smartphone, making it a useful companion for those who find themselves working on the road. It includes a charging base that powers it back up at 150W, but if you’re in a real hurry you can connect it to a pair of 140W USB-C PD 3.1 chargers that boost the input to up to 250W, taking the power bank from zero to 80 percent in just 35 minutes.

Making a smartphone less enjoyable to look at might be the fastest way to curb a child’s smartphone addiction. Launching in Europe later this year for around $250, TCL’s Nxtpaper 5G Junior is a smartphone designed for kids featuring the company’s E Ink-inspired display technology that includes a monochromatic mode. Even if the e-reader appearance doesn’t discourage kids from spending hours on their phones, the Nxtpaper 5G Junior’s display should at least be easier on their eyes.

AI unsurprisingly has a big presence at IFA 2025, but Anker is leveraging it as a backup for your brain. Roughly the size of a quarter, the small $159.99 Soundcore Work uses a pair of microphones to record important meetings or conversations for up to 32 hours when paired with its charger. The recordings are accessible through Soundcore’s mobile app and are temporarily sent to the cloud for transcription and summarization by OpenAI’s GPT-4.1.

The wireless charger on your desk is probably still tethered to a power cable, but with its new MagFusion Ark, Aukey is introducing a bit more freedom. It will be available in multiple configurations, but the largest features a charging base with three Qi2.2 pads and a trio of battery-powered Qi2.2-compatible spheres you can take with you to wirelessly charge your smartphone at up to 25W without needing access to a power outlet.

It stretches the definition of portable, but Anker has created an all-in-one projector that provides a true surround sound experience by sticking its Nebula X1 into a big rolling box that also includes a 160W subwoofer, a pair of 80W detachable soundbar speakers, and two smaller 40W satellite speakers to place behind you. The Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro weighs almost 73 pounds, but even heftier is its price tag which is expected to be around $4,000 to $5,000.

This is Dyson’s first combination robot vacuum and mop, featuring a self-cleaning roller mop, lidar navigation, and a multifunctional dock that automatically empties its bin, cleans and dries its mop, and refills and drains its water tanks. Its namesake feature is AI-powered stain detection, which uses onboard cameras to spot stains and “go back and get it until it’s gone,” according to the company founder, James Dyson. We won’t know how the Spot+Scrub compares to a manual mop, which traditionally do a better job at cleaning than robot versions, until we can try it out ourselves.

One of several products that SwitchBot announced during IFA is its AI Art Frame, a colorful E Ink Spectra 6 display that allows you to either upload your own photos like a traditional digital photo frame, or use AI to generate images via prompts in the SwitchBot app. It’s available in three sizes, and runs on battery power that can last up to two years on a single charge, according to SwitchBot. And while the “AI Art Frame” is actually more of a screen than an actual frame, it does fit into standard Ikea frames, allowing you to customize its outer appearance alongside whatever you’re displaying.

Update, September 8th: Anker originally said the Soundcore Work would be priced at $99.99, but later clarified that it will cost $159.99. Also updated to add additional products to the list.