Berlin does this every September, and every September it gets louder.
IFA 2026 took over the Messe Berlin halls from September 2 through 8, in the fair’s 102nd year. More than 1,900 companies exhibited, and nearly half of them were Chinese, which is a shift that’s been building for a while now. Xiaomi set up its first-ever IFA booth, Samsung left the Messe floor for the first time in 35 years, and humanoid robots walked an actual catwalk.
1. Haier Vision 15
Washing machines have been stuffed with sensors for years: they measure weight, balance, water level, and detergent dosing. The Vision 15 adds the one thing a sensor can’t do, which is look at what’s in there. A camera inside the door identifies fabric type, flags mixed colors, watches foam levels and catches the red sock you didn’t mean to throw in, then rewrites the cycle before it ruins anything. Nine sensors and Haier’s AI Direct Motion motor handle the mechanics once the camera has made its call.
Sensors can tell a machine how heavy a load is. Only a camera can tell it what that load is made of, and fabric is the variable that should be deciding how a wash runs. If you have ever pulled a shrunken wool sweater out of a machine that thought it was cotton, you already understand the pitch.
It’s hardly any wonder why the machine drew so many eyeballs at the show; it’s hard to argue against a washing machine that catches mistakes for you.
2. Viaim Rise
The Rise is a pair of wireless earbuds that records, transcribes and translates whatever you point them at, and then does something with the result. Other AI earbuds can create transcripts, but they stop with just the transcript. The Rise covers 78 languages and 145 accents, then hands confirmed tasks off to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, so a client call becomes a drafted follow-up email instead of a file sitting in a folder.
The audio hardware is not an afterthought either, with an 11mm and 6mm dual-driver setup, LDAC and LHDC, hybrid ANC, and a bone-conduction unit in the mic array for calls. Even the case is useful, since you can start a recording with one bud still sitting inside it, and pressing the side latches physically raises the buds out.
Viaim walked away with two IFA Innovation Awards, a win for Best in Audio and an honoree spot for Best in Design, and announced a Bose engineering partnership the same week. One thing to know before you get excited: this is an Indiegogo campaign that opened September 8, with super early bird at $259 against a $399 retail price.
3. Lissome R1
If you rent, you probably don’t have a dishwasher, since fitting one means plumbing, a cabinet opening and counter space nobody has. The R1 doesn’t need any of that. It’s 280mm wide, about eleven inches, with a 3.6-liter tank you fill by hand, so there’s no inlet to connect and nothing to install.
Inside that footprint it still takes three full EU place settings, which is 34 items. Sweeping Jet Technology runs two rotating arms at the bottom plus two patented vertical arms, 32 jets in total at 100,000 Pa. Quick Wash finishes in 15 minutes, and Smart Wash reads grease levels through an AI turbidity sensor so it can dose its own detergent.
It landed in Berlin off a Kickstarter that raised around $350,000, and it reaches selected European markets by the end of this year. Lissome says pricing gets announced closer to launch.
4. Audeze Maxwell 2 ANC
Audeze calls this gaming headset the first full-range planar headphone with active noise cancellation, and the clever part is that the frequency response stays the same whether ANC is on or off.
When it comes to gaming, competitive players live on positional audio. That means a headset that changes character the second you hit the noise-canceling button is useless to them, because footsteps have to land in the same place every round. This gaming headset exists to keep that problem from ever occurring. Prior to this, the Maxwell line has gone four years without ANC because including it meant shipping a version that smeared the imaging.
90mm planar drivers do the heavy lifting, with up to 35dB of reduction and 40 hours of battery that drops to 35 with ANC running.
The PlayStation version costs $429 and the Xbox one is $449, putting both a full $100 over the standard Maxwell 2. They do weigh 560 grams, so they’re one one of the heavier things you can put on your head, but the Maxwell line has always run top-heavy.
5. Moera Smart Climate Topper
Cooling an entire bedroom to fix one hot sleeper is a lot of electricity spent on empty air. Moera goes after the surface instead. A water circuit runs through the topper from an external control unit that heats or cools the liquid, so it arrives in the channels directly beneath you at whatever temperature you set. Moera claims up to a 22°F swing with independent zones, which is the detail that saves couples who fight over the thermostat every night.
There’s a replaceable cartridge for water treatment and a cycle that clears leftover moisture out of the system after use, so it doesn’t turn into a science experiment under your sheets. It works natively with HomeKit, Alexa and Google Home with no extra app.
Pricing is currently $799 on Kickstarter, and Moera is selling it as a one-time purchase with no subscription, which is welcome, given how many different categories are trying to figure out how to make you pay forever for things you used to just buy once. Moera sits inside OneRobotics, the group behind SwitchBot, which Nanoleaf recently joined.
6. Govee COB Strip Light 2 Pro
Cheap LED strips give themselves away the same way every time: a row of visible dots behind your TV instead of a clean line of light. Govee’s answer to this problem is density. The COB Strip Light 2 Pro packs 1,344 LEDs and 16 ICs per meter, with a triple-layer groove design spreading the output further, so what you get is a continuous ribbon rather than a string of bulbs.
RGBWWIC, the LuminBlend+ color engine and a 1,000K to 10,000K range handle the color side. AI Lighting Bot 2.0 builds scenes from a spoken or typed description, so you say what you want and skip the menu diving entirely.
The 5-meter version went on sale September 4 at $169.99, a 2-meter model arrives late September at $99.99, with a cheaper COB Strip Light 2 available for anyone who wants smooth output without the top-end color engine.
7. Fitnexa SomniPods 3
Trying to wear earbuds in bed sucks, and the reason for it is basically always the same: they stick out and you sleep on your side. Each SomniPod weighs 3.3 grams and sits flat in the ear, so they’re closer to a shaped earplug than a normal bud.
Fitnexa quotes up to 32dB of ANC and up to 42dB once you factor in passive isolation, and reviewers back that: steady noise like fans, air conditioning and traffic drop into the background, while a voice in the next room still comes through. You get 8 to 12 hours a night and up to 48 with the case.
This makes them a perfect snoring solution, but not really a silence machine. If your problem is a partner, a furnace or a street, they work. On the other hand, if your problem is a neighbor’s argument through a thin wall…well, at least it’ll be quieter.
They cost $189.99 but have been selling at $169.99, which means they undercut the Soundcore Sleep A30 and land well under Ozlo and QuietOn.
8. Midea SpaceMaster
The SpaceMaster is a built-in oven, and Midea was confident enough about it to put Michelin-starred chefs in Hall 5.1 and have them cook on it live. It reaches 350°C with a graphene heating element that gives it a thermal response as fast as 0.2 seconds. Pizza was the proof point, deliberately, since it demands intense heat, fast recovery and tight control all at once, and most home ovens fail at least one of those.
Thermal response is the spec that decides whether your oven recovers after you open the door, which is the moment most home baking falls apart. Graphene is set to run through Midea’s future premium built-in range, so this reads as a platform rather than a one-off showpiece.
Midea has the market launch planned for 2027, with pricing to follow, but it’s a great look at where built-in cooking is heading.
9. Status Audio Pro X GoldenSound Edition
These are wireless earbuds tuned by a man who measures headphones for a living. What does that mean? Status handed Cameron Oatley the tuning on their flagship and let him prove his point in hardware.
The result came out of full-sphere HRTF research at Imperial College London measured on a Brüel & Kjær 5128, which is more measurement work than almost any wireless earbud ever gets. The hardware underneath this obsessive tuning is the standard Pro X: a 12mm dynamic driver with two Knowles balanced armatures, Bluetooth 5.3 carrying SBC, AAC, LDAC and LC3, with LDAC running up to 24-bit/96kHz.
You get buds that are IP55 rated, run for eight hours per charge (32 with the case) and come wrapped up in a black and gold metal-plated body that’s 21% smaller than the previous generation. If you own serious wired IEMs and have avoided wireless because everything sounds boosted and blurry, this is the pair aimed squarely at you. It’s $279, which is $30 over the standard Pro X, but that’s a small tax for a tuning nobody else is offering.
10. Dreame X60 Ultra
Robot vacuums have a furniture problem. They handle the open floor beautifully and then stall at the couch, because they physically cannot fit underneath it. The X60 Ultra measures 7.95cm, or 3.13 inches, which Dreame claims makes it the thinnest robot vacuum on the market.
If you’ve got low sofas and bed frames, that’s the only number on the box that counts, since suction is irrelevant in a space the machine can’t enter. It does have good suction though: 35,000Pa of suction paired with dual AI cameras that recognize more than 280 obstacles, and a station that empties, refills and washes the mop on its own.
List price is $1,499.99, and it recently hit $1,349.99 on Amazon, a new low in the six weeks it has been listed. The bigger X60 Max Ultra Complete sits above it at $1,699.99 if you want the step-climbing version.
11. ZenoWell Luna Plus
Vagus nerve stimulation has been stuck in clinics and research papers for years, which is the problem ZenoWell set out to solve.
Luna Plus is an ear-worn device delivering transcutaneous auricular VNS, which means gentle electrical stimulation through the ear rather than anything implanted. The company was incubated at Heidelberg University Medical School, and this is its attempt at making the therapy into something you’d actually keep doing.
It runs six modes: Relax, Sleep, Relief, Meditation, Focus and Digestion. Sessions last 20 minutes, and an AI coach reads biometrics from the ZenoBand MOBI so it can point you toward the mode you need that day. The whole design fights the real failure of wellness hardware, which is the drawer people put it in after three weeks.
ZenoWell offered a 20-minute reset demo to anyone who sat down, with the smaller Vita Mini on the table beside it. Global pre-orders have officially opened up as of August this year.
12. Edifier MW6T
Edifier turned 30 this year, having started up in Beijing back in 1996, and it brought a subwoofer to Berlin that has no business sounding the way it does.
The MW6T measures 27.1 by 24.9 by 25.5cm, roughly a cube you could hide behind a houseplant, though it pushes 210W RMS through two 6.5-inch long-throw aluminum woofers. The two drivers sit directly opposite each other and fire in opposition, so the mechanical forces that normally make a small sub rattle its own cabinet and creep across the floor cancel each other out.
Anyone who has put a budget subwoofer under a desk knows the failure. It buzzes, it walks, and you turn it down until it stops doing anything. Force cancellation is what lets a box this small play loud without shaking itself apart.
It pairs with the M90 bi-amped speakers, and Edifier showed both in Hall 10.2 alongside the new XR6 studio monitor.
13. Essoetto CM-01 Pro
An espresso maker that doubles as a 27,000mAh power bank sounds like a solution hunting for a problem, right up until you’re in a hotel room at 6am with a dead phone.
The CM-01 Pro brews 16 espressos per charge using cold water, and that still leaves enough in the tank to refill a phone or tablet over USB-C. It delivers 20 bars of pressure, pours 40ml for a single or 80ml for a double, and pulls a shot in roughly 30 seconds. It takes Nespresso Original capsules, ships with a basket if you’d rather use grounds, and handles Vertuo through an optional adapter.
You’re right to wonder how it does this, and the answer is: it’s very intelligently designed. It’s got a freestanding flask with battery and water tank in the base, controls and portafilter on top, and a brew head that swivels sideways to become the spout, so there’s no stand to assemble.
That freestanding design is what separates it from every hand-pump travel brewer, because you are not clamping anything to a table or holding it over a cup while you pump.
14. Cozyla Calendar Plus 3
Family calendar displays all share one flaw: somebody still has to walk over and type into the thing. Watching your seven-year-old hunt and peck an event onto a wall-mounted touchscreen will take years off your life, even if it is cute the first couple times.
The Plus 3 answers with probably the most, “yeah, duh,” solution: voice. A four-microphone array picks up commands from across the room, and Cozyla Agent AI reads images and files directly, so a recipe screenshot or a school flyer imports straight into the meal planner or the calendar without anybody retyping a thing.
Two-way sync covers iCloud, Google, Outlook and CalDAV across up to eight profiles, which means everyone keeps using whatever app they already like. That is the detail that decides whether a shared calendar survives past February, since the moment one person has to abandon their own app, the whole thing quietly dies.
It’s $799.99 for the 24-inch and $999.99 for the 32-inch.
15. Morphy Richards S1 Pro
Morphy Richards turned 90 in Berlin, having opened its doors in 1936, and it marked the birthday with something for anyone who has ever wrestled a fat exhaust hose into a window frame at midnight. The S1 Pro is a portable air conditioner with no hose at all. Nothing to install and nothing to vent, so you plug it in and roll it wherever the heat is.
It moves air at up to 8 m/s with four-way oscillation, and it handles air conditioning, fan and dehumidification in one box. That third mode is what keeps it earning its storage space long after summer ends, since damp autumn rooms and drying laundry are a year-round problem in a way that heat is not.
Control comes through an app, a remote or the touch panel, with refrigerant choices varying by region. A smaller S1 Lite sits below it for tighter rooms.