Best of IFA 2026 Awards: The products that impressed us most in Berlin

IFA 2026 has taken over Berlin once again, bringing a fresh wave of phones, smart home hardware, and AI-heavy gadgets from across the industry. As always, the Android Authority team was on the ground, working the halls and getting hands-on with as much of it as we could.

This year’s show had no shortage of standouts, from Xiaomi’s wide-screen 18 Fold and TECNO’s zero-bezel concept phone to TCL’s first NXTPAPER AMOLED handset. The smart home had a particularly strong showing too, with Anker’s MindBase hub, the Homey Portal controller, and new cleaning and mowing robots from Roborock and Mammotion. Add in a new 360 camera from DJI, Motorola’s rugged smartwatch, fresh mobile computing from Lenovo and Dell, and a gaming curiosity from Acer, and there was plenty worth calling out.

After digging through the biggest launches and the most interesting prototypes, we’ve picked the products and innovations that impressed us the most.

These are the Android Authority Best of IFA 2026 award winners.

Xiaomi 18 Fold: Xiaomi’s own silicon in its most ambitious foldable

Xiaomi made its IFA debut this year, and it did not do it quietly. The company took more than 3,300 square meters of floor space and filled it with over 380 products spanning phones, smart home gear, and even cars, under its “Human x Car x Home” banner. The star, though, was the Xiaomi 18 Fold, which we saw in the real world for the first time here in Berlin after weeks of leaks.

What makes it more than another entry in a crowded category is what’s inside. This is the first flagship phone powered by Xiaomi’s own XRing O3, the latest step in the company’s long push to build its own silicon rather than buy it. It’s paired with next-generation LPDDR6 memory, rated for speeds up to 12,800Mbps. The wide-screen form factor puts Xiaomi in newly contested territory, arriving on the heels of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 and ahead of Apple’s first folding iPhone, which is expected to feature a similar format.

The unit on display came in a luscious cherry red finish, with a triple camera arranged along a horizontal bar. The text on that bar points to a focal range of 17mm to 80mm, which suggests a telephoto of around 3.3x. Xiaomi is holding the full specifications back until the phone’s China launch on September 7, but our interest is piqued.

TECNO Next-Gen Bezelless Concept Phone: The bezel race, taken to zero

Shaving down bezels has been an industry obsession for years, and Apple is reportedly working toward a zero-bezel device of its own next year. At IFA 2026, TECNO got there first, at least in concept form. The black border between the 6.7-inch 144Hz display and the frame is essentially gone. Look very closely at an angle and you might catch the faintest glimpse of it, but otherwise the screen simply flows into the edge.

To achieve the zero-frame look TECNO had to rethink assembly. A dual-layer cover glass has its lower layer extending underneath the frame, the display is inserted from the rear rather than the front, and a custom adhesive holds it all together, so the inactive area hides under the frame instead of showing as a border. The rest is pretty unremarkable: a Dimensity 7300e and a 6,000mAh battery borrowed from an existing TECNO phone. But that’s hardly the point of this concept. 

Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus Gen 2: A premium Android tablet you can actually keep

Android tablets have a long history of being abandoned by their makers well before the hardware gives out, which makes Lenovo’s headline commitment here the most interesting thing about the Lenovo Yoga Tab Plus Gen 2 and Yoga Tab Plus Gen 2. Both models ship with Android 17 and are promised seven major OS upgrades and seven years of security patches. Lenovo is naming Android 24 specifically, and security updates running to 2033. That’s good enough to change how you think about buying a $1,000 tablet.

The hardware backs it up. The Plus is the higher-end half of the pair, built around a Snapdragon 8 Elite and a 13-inch 4K “PureSight Pro” display running at 144Hz with 1,100 nits of peak brightness. There’s 12GB to 16GB of RAM, 256GB to 512GB of expandable storage, a 12,700mAh battery with 68W charging, and six speakers, plus Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and support for an optional magnetic keyboard. The Yoga Tab Plus Gen 2 is a creator-focused slate with pen support, and Lenovo has given it the specs to stay useful for as long as the update promise runs. It’s available this month, starting at $999.99.

TCL P80 Ultra: NXTPAPER finally gets the screen it deserved

TCL has been shipping NXTPAPER phones for years, trading the vibrancy of a normal panel for a glare-free, easier-on-the-eyes reading experience. The compromise was always the LCD underneath. The new P80 Ultra is the first phone to pair NXTPAPER with an OLED screen — you get the 6.83-inch, 1.5K, 120Hz panel at up to 3,200 nits, with the glare and reflection reduction layered on top instead of traded away. A dedicated NXTPAPER button flips it into Max Ink Mode, a monochrome, E Ink-like state that TCL rates for up to seven days of reading.

The Ultra is the top of a three-phone range, and it earns the name with its cameras: a 50MP main, a 50MP 3x periscope, and an 8MP ultrawide, plus an IP68 rating the Pro doesn’t advertise. It shares the Pro’s Dimensity 7400 Elite, 8GB of RAM, 256GB or 512GB of storage, a 5,800mAh battery, and 45W charging, and runs Android 16 with four major OS upgrades and seven years of security updates. It starts at €549 (~$635), with a US launch that TCL would only describe as coming a bit later.

Dell 14s: The MacBook Neo alternative Windows users have been waiting for

We’re in the middle of a colorful electronics renaissance, and Dell has decided to join in. The Dell 14s is a thin, trendy Windows 11 laptop aimed squarely at college students and young adults, and it arrives in four colorful finishes and an aluminum chassis. Dell points out that most laptops in this price bracket are plastic, which is the kind of detail that matters when the whole pitch is that a cheap laptop doesn’t have to look cheap.

The rest holds up. The 14-inch, 16:10 display comes in 60Hz 1200p or 120Hz 1800p configurations, driven by an Intel Core 5 or Core 7 Series 3 chip with 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR5x and up to 1TB of storage. The body is just over half an inch thick and weighs under three pounds, and the 61.2Wh battery is rated for up to 21 straight hours of video streaming. Ports are two USB-C, a full-size HDMI, and a 3.5mm jack, with no USB-A, unfortunately.

The catch is that Dell hasn’t announced pricing or a release date. All we have is the company’s affordability messaging, which leaves the 14s in an awkward spot: the MacBook Neo starts at $699 after a price hike earlier this summer. Land under that and the 14s is an easy recommendation.

Anker MindBase: A smart home brain that keeps everything in the house

Anker has spent years selling the pieces of a smart home, from security cameras and energy hardware to robot vacuums and speakers. Now it’s selling the thing that ties them together. The MindBase is an AI-powered hub that handles whole-home connectivity, on-device computing, and local storage in one package. It runs an on-device large language model, so the AI work happens in your house rather than on someone else’s servers. This matters the most exactly for products like security cameras, which generate the kind of footage you’d rather not hand to a nebulous cloud provider.

MindBase holds up to 48TB of local storage with no subscription attached, giving all that camera footage somewhere to live without an ongoing bill. It also isn’t walled off to Anker’s own hardware — a feature the company calls EasyOmni Link connects it to compatible Matter, Apple HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Home Assistant devices. Anker hasn’t said what the MindBase costs yet, promising details closer to retail availability. But the ambition here is notable: Anker has decided it wants to own the center of the smart home, not just the edges. So it’s probably no accident that the company also announced the folding of its various sub-brands into one brand – Anker.

Roborock RockAqua P1: The robot vacuum playbook goes underwater

Roborock has spent a decade teaching robots to clean floors, and last year at IFA it took that expertise outdoors with the RockMow lawnmowers. The RockAqua P1 is the next step and a pretty surprising one: the company’s first robotic pool cleaner. It handles floors and walls, and it can navigate up onto whatever shallow platforms your pool happens to have, including the sun shelves and entry steps that trip up conventional pool robots.

The specs suggest Roborock isn’t just dipping a toe in. The P1 moves 6,800 gallons per hour through a dual-stage filter, enough to pull sand and leaves out of the water rather than just push them around. It runs for up to 3.5 hours on a charge and it navigates using camera-based obstacle avoidance, the same approach Roborock uses in its vacuums. Motor engineering, navigation, and water handling are all things the company already knows how to do; the pool is just a new place to do them. Roborock has confirmed the RockAqua P1 is coming to the US but hasn’t announced pricing or availability.

Homey Portal: The smart home gets a knob again

The most interesting smart home announcement at IFA this year isn’t a speaker, a sensor, or a connected appliance. It’s a dial. Athom’s Homey Portal is a physical controller with a 2.8-inch round touchscreen wrapped in a stainless-steel rotary ring, built to solve the problem Homey has always chased: when your devices come from a dozen different brands, controlling them means juggling apps. The Portal moves those controls back into the room. You tap the screen or twist the ring instead of unlocking your phone and hunting for the right toggle.

Each Portal is assigned to a zone, like the living room or kitchen, and anyone standing in that zone can use it. Tap to switch lights on or pick a mood, twist to set brightness, drag across the screen to change color. The same gestures handle music, with album art and track controls for systems like Sonos and Denon Heos, and thermostats from Nest, Tado, and Honeywell. It doubles as an energy dashboard, and the screen can surface custom notifications, yes-or-no prompts, and live video from a doorbell. It works with Homey Cloud, Homey Pro, Homey Pro mini, and the Self-Hosted Server, and Athom says the platform behind it reaches more than 70,000 devices from over 2,000 brands.

The Portal is up for pre-order at €249 (~$289) for the first production batch, rising to €299 (~$347) afterward, with shipping before the end of 2026. Each one includes a desk stand and a wall mount. Putting one in every room would get expensive fast, but there’s something genuinely appealing about a control panel anyone in the room can just walk up to and use.

DJI Osmo 360 II: A bigger sensor and a lens you can actually replace

The big upgrade in DJI’s second-generation 360 camera is a new 1-inch square HDR sensor, which the company says preserves the same 360-degree FoV you’d get from a traditional 1-inch rectangular sensor. It shoots 8K at 60fps with up to 14.5 stops of dynamic range and 2.4μm pixels, and DJI’s new AI SuperNight 2.0 noise reduction is aimed squarely at the format’s biggest weakness, as 360-degree footage has always fallen apart fastest once the light goes.

The more quietly useful change is the replaceable lens design. 360-degree cameras have exposed glass on both sides, and they’re the kind of gear you strap to a bike or a helmet, so scratched lenses have long been an fact of life. Now you can just swap a damaged one out. That pairs with other action credentials: waterproof to 10 meters without a case, operational down to -20°C, and Spotlight Follow to keep a subject centered even while the camera spins around them.

The spec list continues with 120MP HDR 360-degree stills, 16K timelapses, 8K/120fps Vortex footage, 10-bit color across every format, D-Log M for grading, and AI frame interpolation that reaches up to 64x slow motion. Mimo app integration and direct connections to DJI’s microphones round it out. Now we just need to know the price…

RugOne Xsnap 7 Pro: A phone camera you can take off and throw at things

Most phone makers spend each year making their fixed cameras incrementally better. RugOne (a sub-brand of Ulefone) went a different way with the Xsnap 7 Pro: it built a GoPro-like action camera into the back of a rugged Android phone, and made it pop right out. Detached, the magnetic module records up to 2.8K at 30fps, or 1440p at up to 50fps, in vertical or horizontal, with 64GB of its own storage, 40 minutes of runtime, and waterproofing to five meters.

The camera links to the phone over Wi-Fi 6 at ranges up to 50 meters, and RugOne’s XSnap Pro app shows a live view of what it’s capturing. One person can carry the camera while another watches and triggers it from the handset, or you can wedge it somewhere and monitor the feed from a distance. Recording starts from a button on the camera or from the phone, and the footage lands back on the handset afterward. Docked, the camera recharges in around 35 minutes.

The host phone features a Dimensity 8400 with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of expandable storage, a 6.67-inch 120Hz display, eSIM support, a 50MP main camera with OIS, a 64MP infrared night-vision sensor with dedicated IR LEDs, and an IP69K rating. We’re not convinced it replaces a dedicated action camera on brief hands-on time, but the combination of separating the camera, watching it remotely, triggering it from either end, and getting the footage back automatically is a genuinely better idea than bolting another lens onto a phone.

Acer Project DualPlay Mini: The handheld that unfolds into a netbook

Acer is no stranger to handheld gaming but Project DualPlay Mini is the most interesting thing it brought to Berlin. Closed, it looks like a large Windows handheld with all the controls you’d expect. Open it like a laptop, though, and a full backlit physical keyboard appears underneath, with the 8-inch screen swiveling inward to complete the netbook transformation. Two control schemes, one device: gamepad for console-style play, keyboard for shooters, strategy games, and actually getting work done.

The engineering underneath is deliberately vague. Acer will say only that there’s an unnamed Intel chip inside and the same dual cooling fan setup as the Predator Atlas 8, and that the DualPlay Mini can drive an external display for a bigger screen. That’s it. The idea isn’t unprecedented – GPD has offered netbook-style handhelds for years, with gamepad controls crammed in above the keyboard – but Acer’s flip-and-swivel approach is a different answer to the same problem.

The catch, and it’s the big one, is that this is a concept. But as a rethink of what a handheld form factor can be, it looks like the most fun thing on Acer’s stand.

Mammotion LUBA 4 AWD: A robot mower that finally handles the hard parts

Robot mowers have gotten good at the easy middle of a lawn. The LUBA 4 AWD is Mammotion’s attempt at everything else. It’s the company’s new flagship residential series, and it comes in three sizes designed for lawns up to 12,000 square meters.The top version is doing serious work: three cutting discs, a 530mm cutting width, and multi-zone management for up to 100 separate zones. 

All-wheel drive is the headline feature, with torque vectoring at each wheel letting the mower change direction cleanly and climb gradients that would defeat most of the category. Navigation comes from a surround-view four-camera array covering front, sides, and rear, working alongside 360-degree LiDAR and NetRTK positioning. In the real world, this means accurate navigation under tree cover and in changing light, where satellite-only mowers can drift. 

Cutting height adjusts from 25mm to 100mm on the two smaller models and 25mm to 85mm on the 12000F. Mammotion hasn’t announced pricing or availability for the LUBA 4 AWD series, saying only that details will come later this year. That’s the one thing standing between this and an easy recommendation for anyone with a large, awkward, sloped lawn.

IFA 2026 Breakthrough awards

With over 1,800 exhibitors spread across Messe Berlin, plenty of good hardware never makes it into the headlines. That’s what the Android Authority Breakthrough awards are for: the smaller reveals that impressed us as we worked the halls. Below, you’ll find our Best of IFA 2026 Breakthrough award winners.

• TCL X11L SQD-Mini LED TV — TCL’s new flagship pushes Mini LED to 20,736 dimming zones, 10,000 nits of HDR brightness, and up to 100% BT.2020 coverage, with Bang & Olufsen audio to match.
• CUKTECH 10 Ultra Power Charger — A pocketable 100W GaN brick that charges four devices at once and puts a 1.57-inch live display on the front, with four power-allocation modes including one tuned for Apple gear.
• Mijia Tri-Drum Washer Dryer Pro 12kg — Xiaomi is taking Mijia into Europe at scale, and this is the showpiece: one large drum with two smaller ones stacked above, each with its own water channel, so delicates never share a cycle with the bedding.
• TCL Q95K Soundbar — An 11.1.4-channel setup tuned by Bang & Olufsen, built to pair with the company’s Mini LED flagships.
• Timekettle W4 Plus AI Interpreter Earbuds — Four translation modes covering face-to-face conversation, lectures, phone calls, and media, at $379 for the no-subscription version or $299 with a monthly plan for the advanced features. Out September 6.
• RayNeo GT Max AR Glasses — TCL-incubated RayNeo splits its lineup in two, and the GT Max is the entertainment half: a 59-degree field of view in a 78-gram frame, with three physical IPD sizes and Dolby Vision certification.
• Oukitel WP63 — A rugged phone with a 20,000mAh battery, a camping light, and — genuinely — a pop-up igniter in the top edge for starting fires.