A necklace that watches you eat. A pen that records the meeting. A laptop screen that rolls out from 14 to 17 inches. The floor at IFA 2026 in Berlin was crowded with gadgets trying to do two jobs at once, and the best of them felt less like gimmicks than like early drafts of what comes next.
Laptops that bend the rules
Lenovo’s “Project Swan” is a 14-inch ThinkBook with a horizontal rollable screen that extends to 17 inches. ZDNET’s reviewer found it tamer than past rollable concepts, and said that was a good thing: one hinge connects the oversized display to the keyboard, with only a few inches of extension on each side. Lenovo has brought concepts to market before, so something like it could ship within a year or so.
Acer went the other way with the Swift Blade 14, a laptop that weighs 1.7 pounds (799 grams) and measures 0.5 inches thick. It has a 3K OLED screen and an Intel Core 7 350 chip, and tops out at 12GB of RAM. Release is set for the first quarter of 2027, price still open.
Dell’s 14S is the sleek answer to Apple’s MacBook Neo. The all-aluminum 14-inch machine lands near $699 this fall, with up to 21 hours of battery life by Dell’s count. Acer also showed the DualPlay Mini, a gaming handheld whose screen flips to the back to form a mini laptop. It is still a proof of concept.
Phones, wearables and odd little boxes
Tecno’s Bezelless concept phone drew attention at both ZDNET and Android Central. Its 6.78-inch OLED panel runs to the edges of the body, and it packs 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a MediaTek Dimensity 7400e and a 50MP main camera. Android Central’s writer said it felt like something that could actually reach shelves.
Xiaomi took 3,300 square meters at its first IFA, and kept the Xiaomi 18 Fold behind glass. It has a wide foldable design with rounder corners, a triple-camera system and the XRING 03 chip. Ulefone’s RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro has a detachable camera that doubles as a remote action cam. Circular’s new Ring 3 series brings back vibration alerts and NFC payments, due in 2027.
Odyss showed an AI necklace that identifies what you eat through a camera, even a dish like couscous with roasted carrots and sprouts. The privacy worries are obvious. It is in beta. Flowtica’s Scribe, a premium ballpoint with a recorder and transcriber, is on sale now for $159.
Violoop is a small box that plugs into a computer by HDMI and USB-C, reads the screen with multimodal AI and then acts on its own, answering emails and navigating databases. It has seen only tens of thousands of screens so far, and its success rate on harder tasks is just under 80%. It is on Kickstarter.
The PrimeBot Q1, a toddler-sized robot, danced, and a visitor led it around the show floor by the hand. It is sold only in China for now and is due in Europe in 2027.
Sources
- The 9 coolest gadgets I saw at IFA 2026 – including a bezelless phone – ZDNET
- 7 coolest things I saw at IFA 2026
