Best tech at IFA 2026, from a smart ‘skylight' to the hearing aids that stole the show

New York Post may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you click or buy through our links. Featured pricing is subject to change. I was obsessed with anything like those Tex Avery '…of tomorrow' cartoons when I was a kid. 'The House of Tomorrow,' 'The TV of Tomorrow,' you know the ones. They were satirical and silly, and on rewatch, a bit unsuitable for developing minds, but I was always so fascinated by what could be. Every year at the show billed as the CES of Europe, there are brands that never make it to American shelves. But this year's Internationale Funkausstellung, commonly known as IFA, hit a bit different. Its tagline is 'the future is now,' and in this moment, that couldn't have felt more true. As of Sept. 1, we are officially in the late 2020s, but it doesn't fill me with quite the same dread that turning the corner from 'mid-' to 'late-30s' did. Instead, with the rise of autonomous AI agents, practical robotics and a rapid transition toward green energy infrastructure, largely due to the adoption of AI, one could argue it's an exciting time to be alive. What made this year feel different than years past was all-American. On July 28, the FCC added foreign-produced 'advanced robotic devices' to its Covered List, a rule written broadly enough to reach most of the robots on the floor. More on that when we get to the Roomba. The show was a tangled net of tech nerds, especially when it opened to the public over the weekend. (I'm not really a crowd kind of person.) But here's what actually stopped me, and what you'll actually be able to buy, just in time for Christmas! What was the best projector at IFA 2026? Xgimi Aura 3 Max This device won the Best in Home and Entertainment at the IFA Innovation Awards. It throws a 120-inch picture from roughly 8 inches off the wall at 5,700 ISO lumens, with 80 watts of Harman Kardon audio and Google TV built in. For anyone whose living room doesn't have 12 feet of throw distance (i.e., us city-dwellers), that's a big deal. I saw more projection TVs than ever at IFA this year. I'm calling this now as the tech to watch as we return to cozy TV season. One caveat: the $2,399 figure circulating is a Kickstarter price, not the retail price. As of publication, Xgimi has not announced a suggested retail price. Price: $2,399 Kickstarter, no retail price announced | Availability: Kickstarter opens Oct. 20, shipping expected December 2026 What was the best fitness tech at IFA 2026? Speediance Gym Monster Ultra This home gym packs an impressive 260 pounds of digital resistance in single-pound increments into a training area of less than 10 square feet. With built-in pull-up and lat pulldown stations, 33 cable positions and 800-plus movements, Speediance says it replaces up to eight machines. On the AI: Speediance says some of the '24/7 AI coach' features arrive in later software updates. You're getting this device for the hardware, with the software still filling in. Price: $6,999 | Availability: Pre-order now, shipping around October and November 2026. Other models are currently on sale on Amazon. What was the best health tech at IFA 2026? Anker RIC Hearing Aids Pro Anker made a lot of news at IFA this year, from moving sub-brands under the Anker umbrella to a new logo, but it's the Anker RIC Hearing Aids Pro that quite literally took Best of IFA, the single top prize at the Innovation Awards out of more than 530 submissions. These didn't just win the category; they won the entire show. Four beamforming microphones and an AI chip Anker rates at 7.2 billion operations per second, aimed squarely at the hardest problem in hearing aids: picking a voice out of a loud room. It runs 12 hours per charge and about 36 with the case, and a five-minute charge buys two hours. It has a built-in self-fitting hearing test, so you don't need an audiologist appointment to get started. Anker has not announced a price, and over-the-counter hearing aids are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. Anker has not published its FDA status, and as of publication, its 'up to 90% speech intelligibility' claim has no published testing. Price: Not announced | Availability: Not announced; U.S. reportedly targeted for the first quarter of 2027 What was the best camera at IFA 2026? Insta360 Luna Ultra As the Best of Tech at the Innovation Awards winner, this is a gimbal camera co-engineered with Leica: a 1-inch 8K main sensor behind a Leica Summicron lens plus a second 1/1.3-inch telephoto, 12x zoom with 6x lossless, Dolby Vision, 14 stops of dynamic range, three-axis mechanical stabilization and a detachable 2-inch OLED screen that transmits from up to 65 feet away. It also cleared its biggest legal hurdle this year. In February, the U.S. International Trade Commission found Insta360 did not infringe five GoPro utility patents, and the company says its current lineup ships without restriction. Price: $769.99 | Availability: On sale now, Insta360, Amazon and Best Buy What were the best TVs at IFA 2026? LG OLED evo AI Wallpaper TV W6 LG took home Best Brand at the IFA Innovation Awards, the show's top brand prize, and the W6 is a big reason people crowded the space. It's less than half an inch thick and sits completely flat against the wall. Every input runs through LG's Zero Connect Box, which communicates with the screen wirelessly from up to 32 feet away. That means the only thing running to the TV itself is a power cable. If you have ever tried to fish HDMI through prewar plaster, or explained to a co-op board why you need to open a wall, you understand what 'one cable' is worth. Price: $5,499.99 (77-inch), $7,499.99 (83-inch) | Availability: On sale now, LG.com and BestBuy.com LG StanbyME 2 Max The other LG screen at the show was the LG StanbyME 2 Max — an Innovation Award honoree in Home and Entertainment, and the one I really want to get my hands on. It's a 32-inch 4K touchscreen that lifts off a wheeled floor stand and runs 4.5 hours on its own battery. The panel rotates 90 degrees in either direction, tilts 25 and swivels 90 so the same object is a TV at the foot of the bed, a vertical screen for work or scrolling and a flat surface you can draw on. LG's Alpha 8 AI Processor 4K Gen3 runs it under webOS, with Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and AI Sound Pro doing a virtual 11.1.2 mix out of side-firing speakers. For smaller spaces where the TV, the second monitor and the kitchen recipe screen are all best as the same screen, this beats a glorified monitor or an iPad, hands down. One thing to be straight about: it's an edge-lit LCD running at 60Hz, which is modest for the money. Price: $1,299.99 suggested retail | Availability: On sale now What was the best home security tech at IFA 2026? Anker MindBase and the Eufy Security Kit This is the most ambitious innovation Anker showed. MindBase is a hub that Anker is calling the brain of the house. The EasyOmni Link connects up to roughly 100 Anker devices alongside Apple Home, Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant and transfers existing HomeBase S380 footage. TrueSmart Agent is an on-device AI engine running a language model Anker built in-house on 26 trillion operations per second of compute. EverSafe Memory is up to 48 terabytes of local storage that works as network-attached storage, so you can search your own security footage in plain language, pull clips and analyze video without any of it leaving the house. The first thing built on it is the MindBase Security Kit, and the parts are genuinely new. The Eufy TrackLight Cam S1 is an active deterrence camera that combines 180-degree dual-radar detection with 4K and a light that tracks whoever it sees. It picks up a stranger from about 50 feet out and uses a digital credential called DSKey to recognize family from about 100 feet. The security agent decides in real time whether to just watch, turn on a light, issue a verbal warning or escalate. The privacy argument is what stood out to me most. Biometric processing happens on the device, and there is no subscription for the core features. After what feels like years of smart home companies harvesting home data to server farms, that's a position worth highlighting. Anker has not published pricing or a launch date for MindBase or the Security Kit, though representatives at IFA told me to expect both later this year. Price: MindBase and Security Kit not announced; Eufy NVR Security System E50 $999 for four cameras ($1,199 with 2 terabytes) or $1,599 for eight ($1,899 with 4 terabytes); Video Doorbell S4 $299.99 with chime; Window Camera E10 $69.99 | Availability: NVR E50 on sale now in the U.S. Doorbell S4 late September. Window Camera E10 later this year. Reolink OMVI 2i Ultra Two powerful cameras in one wire-free housing. The Reolink OMVI 2i Ultra features an 8-megapixel fixed lens that holds the wide view while a separate 5-megapixel pan-tilt ball swivels 355 degrees and tilts 50, so it watches the whole scene and tracks a moving subject at the same time. Reolink's SyncTrack handles the following and auto-frames the zoom. As another brand reading the room, the storage is local, on a microSD card or paired with the Home Hub 2. The detachable 10,000 mAh battery is rated up to six months, though that rating assumes five minutes of recording a day. Pair it with the six-watt solar panel and Reolink says 30 minutes of sunlight a day delivers all-day power. Price: Reolink expects $200 to $250; The Home Hub 2 is $199.99. Availability: Late October 2026 What was the best robot vacuum at IFA 2026? iRobot Roomba Max 875 Combo The one that started it all is back, baby. The real draw at the iRobot booth was the Roomba Duo concept, which I saw on the floor, but since that's still just a concept, here's the one you can actually buy (yep, we're officially in the 'legacy robot brand comeback' era). The Max 875 does something no other robot vacuum does. iRobot calls it SealForce: the chassis drops a physical skirt onto the carpet to form a seal, then concentrates 35,000 pascals of suction inside it. The company claims three times deeper carpet cleaning than its own machines without it. It also runs a heated mist mop at about 4 pounds of pressure and comes with the AutoWash dock. Remember that FCC rule? This is the category it really affects. It reaches foreign-made robots that drive themselves, which describes nearly every robot vacuum. And iRobot is not the American company it was in 1990. It went through Chapter 11 and now belongs to Shenzhen Picea Robotics, manufacturing in China and Vietnam. The company told Fox Business it is 'working with them to better understand' the rule's impact. The Max 875 went on sale Sept. 2, so it appears grandfathered. Whether the next one clears is the question hanging over the whole category. That said, Roomba has an impressive lineup already available on retail sites such as Amazon. Price: $1,199 | Availability: On sale now at iRobot.com, wider retail later in September What was the best smart home tech at IFA 2026? Govee Sky Ceiling Light Up to 7,000 lumens, 1,000 to 10,000 Kelvin, with a 478-nanometer sky-blue 'Vitality Spectrum' tuned to imitate daylight. Govee's AI Lighting Bot 2.0 builds a scene from a plain-language prompt, so you describe the mood you want, and it renders it. To be precise, since 'mood-reading' became the buzzword around this one: there's no camera and no biometric sensor. It reads what you type, not your face. For a New Yorker paying through the nose for an apartment with a single window facing an airshaft, a convincing fake skylight seems less like a novelty and more like a quality-of-life upgrade. Price: $399.99 | Availability: On sale now Dreo Air Purifier 530S Dreo's new flagship is built around something it calls TurboPure, and the engineering choice that blew me away is the intake. Instead of pulling air through one face, the 530S takes it in through a 360-degree spiral intake that smooths the air before it hits the fan, then pushes it back out through a 360-degree outlet. Less turbulence in, more even distribution out. It delivers a clean air delivery rate of 130 cubic feet per minute, independently verified by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, which is the certification worth caring about because manufacturers can otherwise say anything. That covers roughly 205 square feet at 4.8 air changes an hour, or up to 970 square feet at one. Filtration is a three-layer HEPA Pro stack: a True HEPA filter rated to catch 99.97% of particles down to 0.3 microns, a FiberCatch layer for hair and lint and 4.6 ounces of activated carbon for smell. In sleep mode, it drops to 18 decibels, quieter than a whisper, which makes it an easy add to any bedroom. Price: Not announced with the IFA release. A 530S is listed on Dreo's U.S. site at $129.99 | Availability: Announced Sept. 4, no date given What was the best wearable tech at IFA 2026? Hypershell Halo I didn't have a chance to actually put this one on, unfortunately — this was one of the most packed places on the floor — but we've covered or tried every Hypershell product so far, from the X Ultra to X Ultra S, so I'm hopeful I'll get my hands on it soon enough. Four motors and 1,490 watts at peak drive both hips and both knees. It is the first consumer exoskeleton to power the full leg. The exoskeleton is 5.7 pounds, or 7 pounds with the harness, folds down to about the size of a shoebox and runs roughly 12.5 miles on a charge. Hypershell claims up to 40% less knee-muscle fatigue on sit-to-stand movements. Price: $2,299 | Availability: Pre-orders open, delivery targeted late November 2026 What was the best recovery tech at IFA 2026? Renpho Micro Pocket and Micro massage guns Not everything worth carrying home from Berlin costs four figures. Renpho brought its two smallest massage guns, and I was seriously impressed with the power produced by such a petite package. The Micro Pocket is roughly the size of a computer mouse and weighs 7.4 ounces, with a lanyard so it clips onto a gym bag. You get four speeds, three heads and a 6-millimeter amplitude, which is the distance the head actually travels on each stroke. A short amplitude like that is built for surface tension in a neck, a forearm or a calf, not for deep glute work. The step-up Micro runs a 7-millimeter amplitude with four heads and still lands under 8.8 ounces. It comes in black, green, pink or blue, and it's the one I'd put in a carry-on. Both carry an International Massage Association endorsement, which is a trade endorsement rather than a clinical one. Price: €49.99 for the Micro Pocket and €69.99 for the Micro, as shown at IFA. U.S. pricing not confirmed | Availability: The Micro Pocket is listed on Amazon in the U.S. What is IFA? IFA stands for Internationale Funkausstellung, or International Radio Exhibition. It's Europe's largest consumer technology trade show, held at Messe Berlin, and it has run since 1924. Albert Einstein opened the 1930 edition. Today it covers TVs, home appliances, computing, smart home, audio and health tech, and it's where most brands unveil the products that reach shelves for the holidays. When is IFA 2026, and when is IFA 2027? IFA 2026 ran Sept. 4-8, 2026, at Messe Berlin. IFA 2027 is scheduled for Sept. 3 through Sept. 7, 2027, at the same venue. The show draws more than 4,500 accredited media and in a typical year, roughly 2,000 exhibitors from more than 130 countries. What won Best of IFA 2026? The Anker RIC Hearing Aids Pro took Best of IFA, the show's single top prize, out of more than 530 submissions to the IFA Innovation Awards. The Insta360 Luna Ultra won Best of Tech and LG Electronics won Best Brand. Those three are the master awards, ranked above the individual 'Best in' category winners. What is the difference between IFA and CES? CES runs in Las Vegas every January and is closed to the general public. IFA runs in Berlin every September and sells tickets to anyone. IFA is also older by more than 40 years and leans harder into home appliances, so washing machines and ovens share floor space with the TVs. For shoppers, the practical difference is timing: CES previews the year ahead, while IFA products tend to land in time for the holidays. Why aren't some products shown at IFA sold in the US? Some brands never set up American distribution, and European appliance sizes and voltages don't always translate. This year added a regulatory reason. On July 28, the FCC added foreign-produced 'advanced robotic devices' to its Covered List, a rule broad enough to cover most robot vacuums. Models authorized before that date can still be sold here. New models have to clear a conditional approval process first. For over 200 years, the New York Post has been America's go-to source for bold news, engaging stories, in-depth reporting, and now, insightful shopping guidance. We're not just thorough reporters – we sift through mountains of information, test and compare products, and consult experts on any topics we aren't already schooled specialists in to deliver useful, realistic product recommendations based on our extensive and hands-on analysis. Here at The Post, we're known for being brutally honest – we clearly label partnership content, and whether we receive anything from affiliate links, so you always know where we stand. We routinely update content to reflect current research and expert advice, provide context (and wit) and ensure our links work. Please note that deals can expire, and all prices are subject to change.