IFA 2026 Wrap-up: From RTX to Robots
Summary
IFA was meaningful again thanks to Windows laptops competing with the MacBook Neo at the lower end with chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, and those same OEMs competing with the MacBook Pro at the top of the market. NVIDIA was pushing RTX Spark laptops hard. Beyond the usual TVs and coffeemakers — now with AI modes! — IFA also gave Chinese companies a venue to show off robots and gadgets that won’t (or can’t) come to CES for geopolitical reasons.
What’s IFA?
IFA isn’t quite a trade show; it’s more of an annual tech and home appliance festival that started 100 years ago for manufacturers of the brand-new AM radio consoles to show off their wares. After two days of press conferences, the sprawling, chaotic Messe Berlin opens to the public. People come from throughout Europe – often with babies in tow – to drink beer, gawk at gadgets, and hear live music at night. By the 2000’s the seemingly random arrangement of conference halls were full of coffee machines, vacuum cleaners, green appliances, and televisions. For a few years IFA became CES for pre-holiday announcements; Samsung launched the original Galaxy Note at IFA. Then the show faltered as big tech announcements moved to vendors’ own events.
IFA changed management in 2024, lucked into PC silicon marketing wars and then a geopolitical fluke: with the U.S. banning several high profile Chinese companies like Huawei and DJI, CES is no longer as friendly a venue for companies trying to sell robots and AI gadgets. As a result, Xiaomi exhibited at IFA for the first time this year.* Showstoppers IFA, the multi-vendor press event, was up to 130 booths this year, filled with powered exoskeletons, AI wearables, and robots. So many robots.
Let’s get the robots out of the way first: it amazes humans when they see humanoid robots walking around like we’re in a science fiction film, but nothing I saw at IFA was actually interesting from a market perspective. Yes, Chinese companies have come a long way very quickly making robots walk, dance, and hold things, but none of them do much that’s terribly useful yet. That may change at next IFA or the one after that – or CES – but for now they’re just research projects with marketing budgets.
PCs
Lenovo doesn’t actually attend IFA, but it uses the convergence of press, suppliers, and partners to launch products at its own Lenovo Innovation World event elsewhere in Berlin on the second IFA press day. Lenovo’s fall launches maintain its leading position in Windows laptops, show forward-looking innovation with AI workstations and concept devices, and fills out Motorola’s ecosystem with the company’s first WearOS smartwatch. It was a lot; see the dedicated report for analysis and context.
Acer was the other PC OEM launching dozens of products at IFA, and it had a press conference at IFA itself. Highlights include the Swift Blade 14, a 799g (1.76 lb) laptop that is an actual usable laptop. The magnesium-aluminum alloy and carbon fiber chassis houses up to an Intel Core 7 350, 12 GB of LPDDR5 memory, up to 1 TB SSD, 3 USB-C, and a 3K OLED display with 90 Hz refresh. It won’t be an endurance champ, but that chipset plus a 50 Wh battery should deliver a full workday. This featherweight beats Lenovo’s Project Aeroblade on weight and will make it to market faster, too, coming to EMEA in December.
Acer had two of its own concept devices at IFA: a triple monitor laptop add-on setup that is marginally portable (imagine if XEBEC took its Tri Screen fold-out monitor – which is easily packed into a bag – and add another vertical display at the top. It’s not terribly practical. However, Acer’s Project DualPlay Mini might make sense in today’s escalating price environment. This is a handheld Windows gaming PC that splits open to turn into a mini-laptop when you rotate the display 180˚ on the horizontal axis. I got hands on with a prototype and found the keyboard surprisingly usable. There will likely be some compromise to the gaming experience compared to the Predator Atlas 8, but with prices on handhelds rising, the promise of dual-use may be enough to give some gamers permission to spend even a bit more for utility.
Silicon
NVIDIA didn’t launch RTX Spark at IFA, but you could be forgiven for thinking it did. The company had representatives at every PC press event and had its own meeting rooms where you could ask questions, get hands on for the first time with RTX Spark devices from vendors, and get gaming and AI demos. This was definitely an NVIDIA-led marketing effort even though MediaTek designed the RTX Spark CPU and manages the manufacturing. NVIDIA has a lot of pull right now for obvious reasons, and PC OEMs are looking for an answer to Apple’s MacBook Pro (and, to a lesser extent, Mac mini and Mac Studio AI clusters) and hoping that RTX Spark could be it. It might be, but the market for the systems will be limited by price, and the ability to run agentic AI and LLMs on device hinges on higher memory configurations which will be out of reach for most consumers and creators. I saw RTX Spark laptops at IFA from Lenovo, HP, Acer, and ASUS; Microsoft and Dell were likely represented in other rooms.
Interestingly, nearly all the RTX Spark systems are being initially aimed at consumer channels rather than enterprise, possibly because NVIDIA is emphasizing gaming as a differentiator from other Arm and Arm-adjacent platforms (i.e., Apple and Microsoft). ASUS is putting RTX Spark under its creator ProArt brand; Dell in the revived XPS prosumer brand, appended with “Creator Edition;” HP has it in its consumer OmniBook and OmniDesk line; Lenovo in Yoga. Acer is just calling it a box “SFF” stands for “Small Form Factor.” Microsoft’s is just the Surface Laptop, which it does sell across all channels, but there is no Business Edition for RTX Spark as there are for some SKUs.
AMD’s SVP and GM Jack Huynh gave the IFA opening keynote about (what else) agentic and on-device AI makes tech better and humans more creative. There was a developer vision, with AMD Ryzen AI Halo systems will support Microsoft’s Project Zenith out of the box to speed local AI development. AMD also announced Threadripper Halo Station, a prototype system that combines a Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX with dual Instinct-class accelerators for training, tuning, and running huge AI models locally. This subject is par for the course at Computex, but it was an interesting turn for a show that often showcases home appliances.
The silicon marketing didn’t stop at PCs and software developers: Qualcomm used IFA to announce the Dragonwing Q-2390 processor, a lower cost IoT processor designed to bring application compute, on-device AI, camera/display support, connectivity and security into one platform. In other words, a chip for industrial controllers, but also a lot of the gadgets and robots you find at IFA.
Phones
TCL showed off the P80 Ultra, the company’s first AMOLED NXTPAPER phone for extremely matte reading modes but fully saturated and contrasty color modes. Unlike many of its past NXTPAPER phones which had middling specs at best, the P80 Ultra is a mid-tier phone with a MediaTek Dimensity 7400 Elite, a 5800mAh battery, and a triple camera system around back that includes a 50MP main sensor and a 50MP 3x periscope zoom. It will launch in Europe for €549. I really wish that U.S. carriers would take a flyer on this as well as the display is differentiated.
Tecno is known for showing off concept devices that draw attention to the brand, even though most of its sales are of more mainstream phones in Africa and Asia. At IFA it showed off a bezel-free phone with a lenticular butterfly design that appears to float and move around back. It drew a crowd, which was its purpose, but Tecno’s past innovations like these haven’t made any impact on the market even when they are released.
Xiaomi teased the 18 Fold, another passport widescreen foldable that runs on Xiaomi’s own silicon design, the XRING 03, rather than the usual Qualcomm or MediaTek. The XRING 03 uses TSMC’s 3nm N3P process and is “the first smartphone SoC to support LPDDR6 RAM.” Even if that’s true for another two weeks (Qualcomm and MediaTek have big chipset announcements coming mid-September) it won’t be true for long, and could just mean higher prices.
Huawei has been forced to use its own HiSilicon SoCs for years, and the Mate XT 2 is not only the company’s second trifold phone, the first tri-fold phone to support IP58/59 dust and water resistance, and Huawei’s first device powered by the Kirin 9050 Pro. This appears to be a big leap for HiSilicon, with a 42% performance boost overall thanks in part to twice the computing resources in the GPU (though it is unclear how this stacks up to Western chips Huawei can’t access. Huawei is leaning into its home market with support for both Tiantong and Beidou satellite connectivity. Huawei also touts its Mobile Security Processor, which, combined with an independent security chip, enables post-quantum cryptography algorithm detection and has passed EAL5+ CCRC security certification. The Mate XT launches in China next week for RMB 19,999 (about $3000).
Wearables
Huawei also had one of the most innovative wearables at IFA, the Watch D3, a smartwatch with medical-grade blood pressure monitoring. This should be far more accurate than other smartwatches because it is not measuring blood pressure through optical sensors but with an actual inflatable airbag cuff built into the watch strap. This is Huawei’s second attempt at this technology, and it has slimmed down the watch to 11.4mm and enlarged the display.
The most intriguing wearable at Showstoppers IFA was Odyss N1, a “dietary necklace” that continuously takes photos looking down so that when you eat something the AI logs it automatically. This should be a privacy nightmare – it’s basically a different take on the Looki pendant – but Odyss promised me that none of the images captured will be human viewable and the system automatically discards anything that doesn’t look like food, classifies caloric and nutritional data based on the food it does see, and then deletes everything every 24 hours. Even if this works, this still seems like a lot of effort and expense to avoid manual food logging, but the privacy approach could be adopted to other wearables.
Ultrahuman showed off the Ring Pro on the heels of a new $70 million round of financing. The new health-oriented ring promises weeks of battery and a new battery charging case that extends the charging cycles of the ring so it doesn’t become e-waste after a year. The ring will store data for up to 250 days so you can go really, really off grid, and on-chip machine learning enables faster health data processing. Possibly the most clever aspect is “ProRelease Technology” – a break point in the titanium so that first responders don’t need a special tool to get it off in case of swelling or injury. I tested the original Ultrahuman ring and look forward to getting in the newest version.
Another ring, RingConn Gen 3, promises to track long-term vascular trends. This is somewhat similar to what Samsung and Google promise for their latest smartwatches, only shrunken down to ring size, with claimed 11 – 14 days battery life.
Smartglasses with displays are limited by the software that they come with so Rokid launched AIUI Studio at IFA to enable consumers to create their own apps. I didn’t get a demo of the software, but I was able to try the Rokid Smart Glasses themselves.
RayNeo tries to solve the smartglasses use case with always recording AI. The RayNeo iO Smart Glasses have Life Log to continuously capture conversations, meetings, etc. at low power, and then RayNeo Suggestions surfaces reminders and to-do items based on what it overheard. This may be useful, but it also raises privacy issues even without a camera or speaker built in.
AI and Accessories
Anker had a huge IFA. It finally realized that its core brand is stronger than its sub-brands and is beginning the process of unifying SoundCore, Eufy, Eufymake, and Solix under the Anker brand. Anker had a wide range of interesting new products, including a fabric printer, new sleep earbuds, and a contactless bedside sleep station that uses radar to track sleep states (I have tested the last generation sleep earbuds and they’re now part of my standard travel bag).
Anker is also entering an emerging new category, the home AI storage hub. Anker’s MindBase AI Home Hub combines AI compute, NAS (just add hard drives), and home IoT control. If Anker is patient and markets this well, it could succeed, but it’s combining multiple ideas that all require education and handholding for non-technical users. Anker’s other IFA AI announcements should be much easier to explain: it is putting its THUS chip into more earbuds and headphones. Back at Anker Day in New York in May, Anker announced the first product using its own "THUS" chip, which is the first compute-in-memory silicon aimed at consumer applications. It delivers lower power for on-device neural networks, and its first use was in the Liberty 5 Pro earbuds for astonishingly good ANC performance on outbound calls along with AI note-taking from the earbuds case. At IFA, Anker is putting THUS into the AeroClip 2 (clip-on style earbuds) and Space 2 Pro over-ear headphones where the ANC improvements should extend to music and voice playback, not just the microphone.
There were a lot of other AI voice recorder gadgets at IFA. Plaud.ai, an early category leader, added earbuds to its lineup of cards and pins. Flowtica has a unique take on the category: it puts AI recording into a small e-ink card that attaches to your phone with MagSafe or Qi2. The display means that you can see meeting summaries without having to dive into an app, and it also does Plaud.ai Note’s trick of using a mic that records based off the vibrations of a phone call.
Not all accessories need to have anything to do with AI. Satechi stood out by taking basic PC accessories – multiport adapters, hubs, and mice – and color-matching them to the four different MacBook Neo shades. We’re probably not going to see anyone do that for the seven new Lenovo IdeaPad Vibe colors, but perhaps that’s just as well; the Vibe ships with a full suite of ports to start with.
Finally, Epomaker was at Showstoppers IFA with new gaming keyboards that feature the latest flexible magnetic switch technology at budget prices. The company also showed off an expanded numpad with navigation and menu keys along with a volume knob. This could be perfect for hybrid work: use a small form factor keyboard for gaming, and add the numpad with all the trimmings for work. I have several Epomaker keyboards mid-review for Techsponential’s consumer-facing site, Devices View; they will be published when I’m on the same continent as the keyboards are.
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*In addition to phones, PCs, and home appliances, Xiaomi is also planning to sell its cars in Europe. Xiaomi’s sedans were the best-looking cars on the road I saw in Beijing last month, so German automakers are going to get significant competition in their home market, though tariffs could blunt any price advantage.