IFA 2025: the biggest tech and gadget announcements

Samsung may be partly to blame for unleashing the party speaker upon the world — its Giga line launched over a decade ago — but in recent years its entrants to the field have been strangely restrained, with only small light strips along the sides. Not so with its two new Sound Towers, which add LED lights that would be impossible to miss.

The Sound Tower ST50F and ST40F both feature a large LED “racetrack-style” light strip across the front, along with other lights around the tweeters, the edge of the body, the base, and even the underside of the handle. There are six different dynamic lighting patterns, five “mood” presets, and absolutely no accounting for taste.

Read Article >

The holy grail of the smart home is ambient computing — technology that disappears into the background, anticipating your needs without a word or a tap. Lights turn on as you walk in, doors unlock as you approach, coffee brews before you reach the kitchen. This is the proactive home: a space that adapts to its occupants to support their comfort, health, and safety. The tools exist to create this, but today’s smart home remains complicated, unreliable, and often invasive — still a long way from truly “ambient.”

But, just as it’s changing every other game in tech, advances in artificial intelligence are a watershed moment for the smart home. The rise of AI agents that tap into language and visual models is the technology that could take us from the command-and-control era of home automation to living in the Starship Enterprise, where our every need can be served by Star Trek’s Computer (assuming that’s what you want).

Read Article >

Acer’s new Chromebook Plus Spin 514, announced at IFA 2025 in Berlin, Germany, is the company’s first laptop to use the Arm-based MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 processor. That chip was used in the Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14 that launched earlier this summer, and it was key to delivering excellent performance and marathon battery life in that fanless laptop. I dubbed the Lenovo “the new king of Chromebooks,” and this $699.99 Acer, which launches this month, seems poised to be a solid alternative — especially if you prefer a touchscreen convertible and don’t mind occasionally hearing a fan.

Acer sent me the new Chromebook Plus Spin 514 for early testing, and after some brief hands-on time, I can already tell that battery life is again likely to be one of the Kompanio Ultra’s strengths. The IPS display options of 1920 x 1200 or 2880 x 1800 resolution aren’t going to hang with the punchiness of the OLED panels in the Lenovo. But the draw of the Acer is its Gorilla Glass-covered 14-inch touchscreen with support for USI 2.0 styluses (which are sold separately), allowing you to use it like a tablet, draw on it, or take handwritten notes.

Read Article >

Acer is announcing a new Swift Air 16 at IFA 2025, and it’s an absolute featherweight of a 16-inch laptop. Weighing in at 2.18 pounds / 0.99kg with an IPS display or 2.43 pounds / 1.1kg with its optional OLED, the Swift Air is lighter than even a 13-inch MacBook Air. It also packs more ports than the MacBook, and will start at a lower price of €999 when it launches in November. (North American availability and pricing is still TBD.)

It kind of boggles my mind that the Swift Air 16 fits this much screen into such a light package, as it’s even lighter than the LG Gram — a laptop defined by its lightness. But the reality checks start coming in once you notice some of the Swift’s specs, like its thickness of 0.63 inches / 15.9mm (0.65 inches / 16.5mm for the OLED version). By contrast, the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs are just 0.44 inches and 0.45 inches, respectively.

Read Article >

Did you know that Acer acquired a Japanese design firm called Amadana late last year, which makes classy coffee gear, retro calculators, air purifiers, and all manner of minimalist lo-fi tech? Neither did I until today — but it goes a long way to explaining why a few of Acer’s new monitors at IFA 2025 are leaping off the page.

Unfortunately for stateside readers, Acer has no current plans to ship its Amadana-branded products below to the US. The 27-inch 27ART0 P1 desktop monitor — with a display that is just 8mm thick — and the 16-inch, 1.4-pound 16APM1QJ portable monitor, are headed to EMEA regions in Q1 for €169 and €119, respectively.

Read Article >

Acer is refreshing some of its gaming laptops for IFA 2025, with a big new Predator Helios 18P AI at the high end and pair of more affordable Nitro V 16 models.

The Predator Helios 18P will have up to an RTX 5090 GPU and Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX processor, though in any configuration it should come with a 18-inch 4K / 120Hz Mini LED display and two Thunderbolt 5 ports (among many other ports). The 18P’s availability and North American price is still TBD, but it’s sure to be up there since it’ll start at 4,999 euros.

Read Article >

JBL has expanded its lineup of flashy Bluetooth speakers with three new models that let you blast tunes without being tied to a power source. The launch includes the new $1,099 PartyBox 720, which is JBL’s largest battery-powered speaker to date, weighing 7 pounds (3kg) more than the visually similar PartyBox 710 that was released in 2021.

The PartyBox 720 measures 16.4 x 37.1 x 16 inches, compared to 15.7 x 35.6 x 17.2 inches for the smaller 710, and expands the two 8-inch subwoofers to 9 inches. Unlike the 710, the 720 can also run on battery power, so users don’t need to hunt for an outlet. It comes with two of JBL’s rechargeable 600 batteries, which provide up to 15 hours of playtime, according to the company’s press release.

Read Article >

Have you ever looked at your pizza oven and wished it was just a little bit smarter? Ooni has, and so its new Volt 2 comes loaded with “Pizza Intelligence,” an adaptive heating system designed to deliver a more even and consistent cooking temperature.

The Volt 2 is an indoor oven, able to cook pizzas up to 13 inches in diameter, but it’s still small enough to fit on a countertop — though we’ve found other indoor pizza ovens too smoky to really use inside. Pizza Intelligence is new to the Volt 2 and uses sensor data to adjust the top and bottom heating elements, “minimizing temperature fluctuations and cold spots.” It’s a little less exciting than the name suggests.

Read Article >

More than 10 years after the launch of Dolby Vision, the next generation of the HDR format is here, and it aims to do more than just optimize tone and brightness level for different scenes. The new version, called Dolby Vision 2, has “Content Intelligence” tools that use AI to automatically optimize your TV based on what you’re watching, where you’re watching it, and what device you’re on, expanding on the existing Dolby Vision IQ features.

That includes a Precision Black that’s supposed to improve clarity in darker scenes without straying too far from a filmmaker’s intent, as well as an updated Light Sense feature to adjust picture quality using ambient light detection combined with reference lighting data from the source material. It also supports bi-directional tone mapping capabilities that Dolby says will allow high-performance TVs to deliver higher brightness, sharper contrast, and more deeply saturated colors by letting the people who create the content have more control over how to use the display’s capabilities.

Read Article >

Dangbei is bringing its S7 Ultra Max all-in-one projector to Berlin next week for the big IFA tech show. That’s a good indication that the China-only 4K projector with a ridiculously bright 6,200 ISO lumen output is preparing for a global launch.

Here’s the teaser Dangbei just sent to my inbox:

Read Article >