Curious about what's bright, shiny, and new at IFA 2023? We've spent days combing the show floor to bring you the best of the best.
For the unfamiliar, IFA, or Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin, is the oldest industrial exhibition in Germany. It started in 1929 and over the years it has become the European equivalent of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in the United States. Both European and international companies bring their best wares to IFA to showcase. Here are our favorite products from the show.
Lenovo Legion Go
Lenovo had a lot of cool stuff to show off at IFA, including a really sharp looking gaming laptop and some neat smart glasses. But our favorite produce was the Legion Go, Lenovo's new handheld gaming device. What's the Go like?
Imagine taking the PC-gaming experience offered by the Steam Deck and the ROG Ally and adding in a Nintendo Switch form-factor with very high-quality detachable controllers. The controllers feature drift-proof Hall Effect joysticks, a touchpad, and a pretty near feature where you can mount the right controller in a baseplate to turn it into an FPS-focused gaming mouse.
SwitchBot S10
There are two kinds of impressive at tech trade shows like IFA—stunning blow your mind technology and practical "wow, why did nobody do this sooner?" innovation. The SwitchBot S10 vacuum has the stuff you'd expect in a robot vacuum like room scanning and such, but also a brand new never seen before robot vacuum improvement.
The SwitchBot S10 is the first robot vacuum platform that includes automatic water refilling and waste water disposal for completely hands-off automated mopping. The S10 has a regular vacuum base station as you would expect, but you also install a slim station under the toe kick of your kitchen sink, in a laundry room, or in a bathroom, and it auto-magically fills up its mopping reservoir and auto-magically pumps the dirty mop water down the drain.
Belkin BoostCharge Convertible Qi2 Wireless Pad to Stand
If there was an award for the longest product name at IFA (or most descriptive for that matter), then the new charging stand from Belkin would certainly win it—but that's not why we picked it. As the name implies the BoostCharge Convertible Qi2 Wireless Pad to Stand is a convertible magnetic charging stand that wirelessly charges using the new backwards-compatible Qi2 charging standard.
In addition to the advanced charging tech inside, the strong magnets and solid construction ensure your phone won't move a millimeter one way or the other when you've mounted it, a matter of importance for a charge stand of this nature.
Withings ScanWatch 2
If you've avoided smart watches because you don't like the look or you're not a fan of the overwhelming number of notifications that feel intrusive and disruptive, the Withings ScanWatch 2 is worth a look.
Building on the previous version of the watch, Withings ScanWatch, the ScanWatch 2 includes not only the health and wellness tracking you'd expect like movement and sleep tracking, but a new advanced temperature sensor too. All in a traditional form factor that looks more like a watch and less like a wrist computer. The new temperature sensor helps the companion app monitor your general wellness (and alert you if temperature fluctuations indicate you may be falling ill with something).
Fairphone 5
Electronics trade shows mean fancy best-of-the-year electronics designed to replace the prior model. Fairphone takes a completely different approach, building phones and headphones that are meant to be used for years at a time.
The Fairphone 5 is a modular phone you can easily upgrade and repair by swapping out modules. From the camera to the screen, and naturally the battery, you can swap practically everything in the phone. We went hands on with the process and are happy to report that you can "build" a Fairphone from the bare frame to a complete and functional phone in mere minutes using just the tools seen above—a small screw driver and a guitar pick.
XGIMI Horizon Ultra
We had the pleasure of getting an early review unit of the XGIMI Horizon Ultra projector, and we love it. The compact ultra-bright 4K projector can throw 2,300 lumens of light and, unlike many home theater projectors, it's capable of easily integrating into your home theater setup or standing all on its own thanks to Android TV integration and great internal Harmon/Kadon speakers.
And it's packed with thoughtful features like the nearly must be seen to be believed color correction. While many people will pair any projector with a screen, people often use a bare wall for projection. But what if your walls aren't white? The Horizon Ultra uses color theory to balance the colors against the wall color create crisp and pure whites even if your wall is, say, baby blue.
TCL QD-Mini LED TVs
It wouldn't be an electronics show without televisions and IFA is no exception. There were, indeed, beautiful TVs everywhere. The new offerings from TCL, however, were simply stunning to behold.
The TCL X955 and its siblings use a combination of a QD-Mini LED screen and highly localized diming to deliver a shockingly bright and crisp image that is punchy on the highs and deep black on the lows. The X955 can put out a shocking 5,000 nits peak brightness across 5,184 localized dimming zones.
Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Mini
Speaking of televisions, let's talk home theater sound. There are some fantastic soundbars on the market that offer room-filling sound but the ones that offer the most immerse experience are often prohibitively big for many TV setups and spaces.
The Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Mini is roughly the size of a large baguette, easily parked in front of televisions big and small without taking up much space. But it boasts support for spatial audio standards like Dolby Atmos Virtualization and, despite the size, creates an expansive virtual soundstage in your home.
Urbanista Malibu
The single most notable thing about the headphone and speaker products from Urbanista showcased at IFA 2023 were the very cool "Powerfoyle" solar panels. The idea of including solar panels in small electronic devices is nothing new, but Urbanista panels don't look like solar panels at all. If you didn't know, you'd just assume it was the matte top of the device.
Their new Malibu Bluetooth speaker was designed with optimal power efficiency in mind so you can get 20 hours of playback in regular mode, 40 hours in low-power mode, and with the sun on your side the company told us you should expect a 50% boost in listening time. Realistically that means in sunny weather and using lower power mode, the tunes should last day and night.
AnkerMake M5
If you're looking for a versatile 3D printer that can print everything from multi-color objects to convert photographs, game art, and more into 3D relief art, the AnkerMake M5 is a compelling new offering from Anker.
Anker's first forray into the 3D printing market features not one or even two print nozzles, but a 6-nozzle array which makes printing multicolor projects unbelievably simple and smooth. The printer includes remote monitoring, automatic time-lapse video creation (because if you print it and nobody documents it, does it really exist?), and weight construction with an auto-leveling print bed.
Dreame Roboticmower A1
After delivery robots, pool cleaning robots, and robot vacuums, Dreame has expanded into the lawncare market with the introduction of the Dreame Roboticmower A1.The company is bringing the same 3D lidar technology it uses in the delivery robots to the mower, offering advanced obstacle detection and avoidance coupled with a boundary and beacon-free setup.
You just unpack it, charge it, and walk around your yard driving the mower like you're playing a video game to teach it where it can and cannot go.
LG StandbyMe Go
Every electronics show has to have at least one product that makes you step back and say "Well, sure, that's a bit impractical, but I want it." and the LG StandbyMe Go was that product at IFA 2023 for us.
It's a portable television. That's not exactly outlandish or wild, but it's not just a small screen you plug in somewhere. It's a fairly large screen at 27 inches (as large as the computer monitors many of us use when we're not on the road) and it folds into a briefcase. So like some sort of 1960s spy movie character you can pop it open, pivot the screen out, and watch content for several hours off the internal battery (or indefinitely if you have a nearby power source on your patio or at your campsite). Does anyone need a briefcase TV? No, but we certainly want it.