I just spent three days walking the halls of IFA, Europe’s massive consumer electronics and home appliances trade show that takes over Berlin every September. The scale of it is hard to overstate: Dozens of exhibition halls are packed with everything from robot vacuums to laptops to smart home gadgets, and thousands of attendees trying to see it all in just a few days. My step count can attest to it.
With so much on display, I wasn’t just hunting for whatever was newest. I was looking for products that were actually trying to solve a real problem, not just bolt on another AI feature for the sake of it. The ones that stuck with me were the ones rethinking the hardware itself: a laptop you can repair instead of replace, an exoskeleton light enough to actually take hiking, and a ceiling light that responds when you talk to it. Here’s a look at the tech that impressed me most this year.
If you’ve given up on using a sleep tracker because you don’t want to wear a ring, a watch or sleep headphones all night, Anker has a very different solution: Don’t wear anything at all. The SleepLab Pro is a bedside device that uses 60GHz millimeter-wave radar to monitor your sleep, detecting tiny movements in your chest to track things like heart rate and breathing without putting a device on your body.
