IFA 2025: the biggest tech and gadget announcements

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.

It only took three years, but Bluetti is following EcoFlow’s lead with a fully integrated power system of its own to make vanlifers, off-grid cabins, and boats energy independent. The RVSolar System’s main advantage over bespoke systems is a relatively quick and easy installation, requiring just “30 minutes,” according to Bluetti’s announcement at IFA 2025.

While it’s undoubtedly faster than installing a fully bespoke solution from Victron Energy, for example, the last time I installed EcoFlow’s comparable system, it took closer to five hours — and that was after several hours of planning, measuring, and double-checking. Thirty minutes is just the time needed to screw everything together, so there’s still a hint of truth here.

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot is the company’s first combination robot vacuum and mop. It debuted at Dyson’s Berlin store during the IFA tech show this week and is a follow-up to the company’s 360 VisNav robot vacuum, which launched in 2023. Featuring a new round design, a self-cleaning roller mop, lidar navigation, and Dyson’s first multifunctional dock, the Spot+Scrub also comes with an “AI” moniker because it’s 2025 and doesn’t everything?

I spent some hands-on time with Dyson’s newest robot floor cleaner and came away underwhelmed. Dyson’s traditional vacuums set high expectations, but its robot versions have yet to meet them. I didn’t get to test the Spot+Scrub or see its stain-targeting feature in action, but my time with it didn’t convince me that Dyson has finally cracked the robot vacuum code.

It wasn’t on public display at its IFA 2025 booth, but Boox gave The Verge’s Jess Weatherbed a brief but early look at its next Palma smartphone-sized e-reader. The company wasn’t yet willing to divulge any technical specs. Still, the new Palma appears to feature a color E Ink screen, and the device’s status bar also shows a 4G+ LTE cellular connection, seemingly indicating the next Palma could also be a fully-functional smartphone.

The two previous versions of the Android-powered Boox Palma both feature a 6.13-inch black and white e-paper screen, but Boox was one of the earliest adopters of E Ink’s color screen technology and introduced color e-readers long before Amazon and Kobo.

At IFA 2025, Reolink announced the TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi, a hardwired and dual-lens floodlight camera for monitoring outside your home. Video is recorded in 4K resolution with a choice of wide or telephoto views. The pan-tilt controls provide 360-degree coverage and 270-degree out-of-field motion detection, with the latter enabling it to automatically rotate to capture movement before a subject enters the camera’s frame, according to Reolink.

The dual adjustable floodlights provide up to 3,000 lumens of light and can be customized to warm and cool color temperatures, allowing users to choose the setting that works best for their lighting or aesthetic requirements. It also comes with local AI Video Search built in, with 512GB of local storage for recordings, allowing users to quickly locate notable events.

Apple’s launch event for the iPhone 17 lineup is just around the corner, and case makers are already showing off the products they can be paired with on the IFA 2025 showfloor. I walked around two rooms dedicated to the latest mobile phone accessories and they were dominated by cases apparently designed for Apple’s upcoming iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Air launches, with several examples being displayed on dummy units.

The iPhone 17 models that the cases were based on were consistent across the floor. The rear camera bars on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have adopted a Pixel-like design, stretching the square bar on the current iPhone 16 Pro models across to cover the entire upper body. The iPhone 17 Air features a similar look, but is much thinner, with a single camera lens and a slimmer camera bar.

Withings announced at IFA 2025 today that it’s revamping the operating system of its ScanWatch 2 smartwatch. Called HealthSense 4, the update adds new algorithms for 35 health metrics as well as predictive AI-powered alerts when a user’s health changes. The ScanWatch 2 also gains two new colors and improved battery life of 35 days — a roughly five-day increase from the original.

In its press release, Withings says the updated algorithms improve activity tracking and step counts. Sleep tracking will also include more accurate breakdowns of sleep stages and respiratory rhythms. Withings Plus members also get a new Vitality Indicator, which adds up various metrics like heart rate variability, activity, body temperature, and blood oxygen saturation to estimate energy levels and fatigue.

Plenty of autonomous lawnmowers have been showcased or introduced at this year’s IFA event in Berlin, but only one of them comes equipped with a robotic arm. NexLawn, a sub-brand of MOVA that sits under its Dreame parent company, has announced the Master X Series Concept, which it describes as “the first robotic mower with a fully functional mechanical arm.”

That arm is designed to help reduce the amount of manual maintenance that’s required for people who own and run robot lawnmowers, such as picking up any fallen sticks or debris that could damage the bot or force it to navigate around the obstacle. The arm folds down to 44.5 cm (about 17.5 inches) in length, extends up to 77 cm (a little over 30 inches), and can reach as far as one meter away when performing outdoor tasks. NexLawn says it features multiple interchangeable arm attachments, including a multi-gripper, a trimmer head, and an edging disc head, with more in development.

Timekettle has announced a new pair of real-time translation headphones called the W4 AI Interpreter Earbuds. They use bone conduction technology that helps improve accuracy in loud environments.

Available now for $349 in navy blue and sandy gold color options, the earbuds are a more affordable alternative to the company’s $449 over-the-ear W4 Pro released earlier this year that looked like the clunky Bluetooth headsets that were popular a few decades ago. Timekettle says its new W4 AI are instead “optimized for casual use” with a design that looks more like modern wireless earbuds, but with a much larger stem.

We’re all used to having our lights respond to verbal commands at this point. But normally, there’s a middleman passing our commands along, whether that’s our phone or a smart speaker that is actually listening to what we say. Lepro is eliminating the need for a separate controller by building a microphone directly into the power cord on its new AI Lighting Pro series.

The lineup includes a light strip (S1-Pro AI), a rope light (N1-Pro AI), a rail-thin floor lamp (OE1-Pro AI), and a wild-looking table lamp (TB1-Pro AI). The S1 is a pretty standard light strip, while the N1 adds diffusion to create a more seamless look. The OE1 includes RGB and a 2700K warm-white mode for reading and relaxing. And the TB1 has three independently movable and configurable intertwined rings that resemble a gyroscope. There’s no word on pricing or when they’ll launch in the US outside of “later in 2025.”

Lenovo’s Smart Motion Concept laptop stand, announced at IFA 2025, automatically raises and lowers itself and turns and tilts to position your laptop at an ergonomic eye level. It’s a lot like an amped-up Apple Center Stage webcam, but the whole laptop adapts to you and your posture.

That’s basically what it felt like when it was demoed for me at a recent preview event, where it tracked me side to side and up and down around a table. In another demo, it did a “dance” where it ran through its full range of motion to some cheesy music. (More Elaine than any TikTok-level choreography.)

Lenovo has made laptop screens that roll, flip, and go transparent, and now for IFA 2025 it’s announcing a new concept with a screen that can rotate into portrait mode. The Lenovo ThinkBook VertiFlex Concept is a pretty standard-looking 14-inch productivity laptop, but if you nudge the screen’s edge from its top-right corner, the whole display rotates 90 degrees within its chassis, realigning itself into a better view for documents, coding, or doomscrolling.

That’s it. That’s its whole trick. It’s both utterly delightful and a touch mundane — much simpler than other, wilder Lenovo concepts. There isn’t some fancy flexible OLED display or whirring motor built into the chassis — just a clever, pivoting track system hidden behind its screen. It’s one of the most down-to-earth Lenovo concepts yet, which means it’s got a good chance of turning into a real product.

Lenovo has decided that IFA is the ideal time to show off its most powerful (and most chunky) hardware. And easily at the top of that heap is the Thinkpad P16 Gen 3. With a starting price of $3,339, it’s the most expensive and the most powerful of the lot. It packs the latest Core Ultra 200HX processors and has options for Nvidia’s RTX Pro GPUs, up to 192GB of DDR5 RAM, and up to 12TB of PCIe Gen5 NVMe storage; there is also an option for a 16-inch 3.2K OLED touchscreen. Unsurprisingly, the P16 Gen 3 is a beefy machine, at well over an inch thick and with a starting weight of 5.6 pounds, but on the plus side, it has a user-replaceable battery and two Thunderbolt 5 ports.

If that’s too bulky but you still want some serious oomph, there is the new Thinkpad P1 Gen 8. You get Core Ultra 200 H series processors, and your graphics options are capped at the slightly lower RTX Pro 2000 tier (versus the 5000 on the P16), plus you still get two Thunderbolt 5 ports and can opt for the same 16-inch OLED panel. The perk is that it’s in a much less boxy chassis that weighs only 4 pounds and gets down to 0.8 inches thick, with a slightly more reasonable starting price of $2,819.

Lenovo’s Legion Go was a polarizing handheld gaming PC, and that won’t change as the company officially announces its successor today: the new Legion Go 2 is slightly bigger, heavier, and costs at least $400 more than the original.

But in many other ways, it looks like Lenovo listened — and so this handheld, with its Switch-like detachable wireless controllers, built-in kickstand, and hidden optical mouse, might just be the ultimate portable PC when it arrives this October.

Dyson is launching a new air purifier that’s designed to look — but thankfully, not sound — like a jet engine. The Dyson HushJet Purifier Compact is launching in the US on September 30th for $349.99, featuring a new nozzle design that’s shaped to help the device blast jets of air at high speed, similar to how a concentrator works on a hairdryer.

The increase in airflow velocity allows the HushJet Purifier Compact to provide “faster, more powerful purification,” according to Dyson. The nozzle is star-shaped to help reduce noise by dampening the sound waves from the compressor. The HushJet also features a night mode to prevent it from disturbing your sleep, in which it’ll operate at just 24 dBA, which Dyson says is “roughly equivalent to soft whispers.”

The new Horizon 20 lineup of 4K Google TV projectors from Xgimi targets gamers who want to play day and night on the biggest screen possible. In addition to promising an incredibly bright image from the flagship model, Xgimi is at IFA 2025 saying the entire lineup supports low-latency gaming with an input lag of just 1ms — that’s very responsive for a projector that will likely be able to produce a large image in rooms where you can’t control the ambient lighting.

The Horizon 20 lineup — comprised of the base Horizon 20 model, the 20 Pro, and 20 Max — is built around an RGB triple laser architecture. The flagship Horizon 20 Max projector can produce an astounding 5700 ISO lumens of brightness, according to Xgimi, which is “perfect for viewers who want immersive visuals even in daylight or high-ambient light environments.” That puts it just behind Dangbei’s 6200 ISO lumen claim for its S7 Ultra Max projector. The Horizon 20 Pro model can still produce a very respectable 4200 ISO lumens while the base model drops it down to 3100 ISO lumens, according to Xgimi.

AI could bring the smart home closer to the Star Trek dream: a central “computer” that runs your home. At IFA this week, SwitchBot — best known for its button-pushing robots — is debuting a product that lays the groundwork for at least part of that vision.

The new SwitchBot AI Hub combines local AI processing with a cloud-based visual language model (VLM) to interpret events in your home and use them to trigger automations, moving the company a small step closer to creating a truly intelligent home.

It was inevitable that AI would be everywhere at IFA this year, but the smart home is where we’re really seeing action. SwitchBot, known for its quirky and clever home gadgets, launched three new AI-powered products this week: a smart home AI Hub, a colorful E Ink AI Art Frame, and two animated AI pets named Niko and Noa.

The SwitchBot AI Hub is a souped-up version of SwitchBot’s existing smart home hubs, which are designed to connect and control its Bluetooth devices, such as smart shades, locks, and lights. This model adds both on-device and cloud-based AI, working with SwitchBot’s cameras and sensors to capture, process, and interpret what’s happening in your home.

Govee has launched a new TV backlight kit for folks who like to add immersive lighting that syncs with whatever is playing on the display. The Govee TV Backlight 3 Pro features an “industry-first HDR triple-camera wide-area color matching system,” according to Govee, which is designed to capture the colors on your TV screen with greater accuracy than other cameras in the smart-lighting company’s older kits.

“For the first time, this innovative system integrates a groundbreaking image sensor that features HDR capture capability, delivering high-fidelity 105dB dynamic range imaging for superior signal-to-noise performance,” Govee said in its press release. The TV Backlight 3 Pro light strip that attaches to the back of displays has also been upgraded to be 30 percent brighter than its predecessors, and it uses an “AI intelligent color mixing system” that automatically adjusts the backlight’s white balance and saturation settings.