Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Ressence Doesn’t Want Your Watch to Look Like a Watch

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Design Mindset, Yanko Design’s weekly podcast, premieres every week with a new guest and a single animating question: what does it actually take to think differently about a design problem. The show is 23 episodes in, and this episode turns its attention to fine watchmaking via someone who arrived in the industry with no allegiance to its conventions. If a mechanical watch didn’t exist today, and a designer received the brief cold, would they give it hands, a crown, a flat dial? That question opens the conversation and also describes exactly what our guest spent 16 years answering in practice. The result is Ressence, a brand whose watches look like nothing else on the wrist.

Benoît Mintiens is a Belgian industrial designer who, before he ever touched a watch, designed high-speed trains, aircraft cabins, medical devices, leather goods, and even hunting guns. He founded Ressence in 2010, the name a contraction of Renaissance of the Essentials. The Type Three BB2 won the 2024 Red Dot Award Best of Best, and 2026 brought the same recognition to the TMN. His watches are designed in Antwerp, made in Switzerland, produced in limited editions each year, and worn by people who believe the future is brighter than the past. He is a designer who walked into one of the world’s most convention-bound industries and simply refused to accept what he found there.

Designing from the User Outward

When people ask Benoît how he designs a watch, the answer he gives is never the one they expect, because he starts with the relation between the user and the watch rather than with the movement itself. “Usually I start not with the watch. I start with the relation between you and the watch, and that is, I think, a very important step that very often is forgotten.” Most brands were created by watchmakers who always build from the inside out, from the movement to the wearer. As a designer, Benoît works in the opposite direction, from the user inward to the movement. That physical 180-degree reversal of process changes everything about what a watch ends up looking and feeling like.

Designing the relationship is, in Benoît’s view, fundamentally an ergonomic exercise, rooted in a deep study of physiology and how people interact with objects. The ultimate measure of success is disappearance: “The best product is the one you forget when you use it. Invisible. I’m using it, but I’m not even aware of it.” He tells customers who buy a Ressence that he hopes they forget quickly that they are wearing it, and that forgetting is the proof the design worked. In the rapid-fire round, he completes the sentence “the future belongs to designers who stop asking how to make things and start asking” with five words: “How do you want to feel.” That question is where every Ressence begins.

Challenging Industry Conventions

Until the quartz crisis of the 1970s, watchmaking was about precision, quality, and reliability. When quartz movements arrived at a fraction of the cost of mechanical ones, the industry had to reinvent itself to survive. “Watchmaking has found a way to survive by adding this emotional layer on top of their brands, on top of their physical products. It’s not so much about the physical product anymore. And that’s a pity, I think, as a designer.” Any product, Benoît argues, needs to pass through the survival-of-the-fittest logic of natural evolution to reach the next generation. Watchmaking’s functional evolution largely stopped at the quartz crossroads, and Ressence is attempting to pick it up from there.

A product is defined by multiple dimensions: aesthetics, ergonomics, technique, social context, and production. In watchmaking, only the aesthetic dimension has shifted from brand to brand, and the underlying system architecture has been frozen for two hundred years. Ressence repositions every dimension at once. “The way we show the time, the ergonomics, is actually what defines the aesthetics. Is actually the way we make them. Is actually the technique that lies behind. All these things are intertwined, and they all together create what I call this new paradigm.” The whole has to be logical and coherent, or as Benoît puts it, you end up with a Frankenstein.

The Human Connection to Mechanical Objects

Asked why people still choose to wear mechanical watches when a phone tells time more accurately and without winding, Benoît offers a concept he has been developing for years. “I call it the empathy for gears. We have, as humans, we have empathy for gears.” He builds toward the idea through a Titanic thought experiment: a survivor on floating debris must choose which of two strangers in the water to save, the one he spoke with during the voyage, or the one whose language he could never understand. “As a human, you pick the one you have a relation with.” Products operate by the same logic, and we form bonds most naturally with what we can understand and relate to.

A circuit board is opaque; the workings of a mechanical watch are graspable, even to someone with no technical knowledge. “That is the magic of mechanical watches, is that we feel close to them. Let’s not forget, they tick, they make a sound. They need care. You need to wind them. All these elements will generate a bond between you and the product. And that is why I’m a strong believer in mechanical watches.” Each quality that makes a mechanical watch demanding, the winding, the servicing, the ticking, deepens the relationship between wearer and object. That depth of feeling, Benoît argues, is a human need, and it deserves to be designed for.

Ressence’s Innovations and Design Philosophy

Ressence positions itself as a high-end brand, with Benoît drawing a specific distinction between high-end and luxury. Luxury is decorative and emotional, selling prestige and story; high-end means technically and functionally sophisticated, in service of the person using it. “We would believe that a product gets its relevance, its reason of existence, through the way or the quality the product is executing its function.” The most visible outcome of that philosophy is the Ressence Orbital Convex System, or ROCS, which replaces traditional hands with rotating discs requiring approximately 200 components where a standard watch uses four. The design brief Benoît imposed on himself back in 2008, years before the brand existed, made the mandate clear from the start: “Ressence needs to be original, but not marginal.”

The oil-filled dial, defining models from the Type 3 to the Type 7, has an origin in personal memory. Benoît traces it to childhood Mediterranean sailing trips, navigating overnight to Corsica guided only by an oil-filled ship’s compass in the days before GPS. “This image of the compass, an oil-filled system with inside a mechanical thing that turns around, showing the north. I’m pretty sure this has been the thing that has burned in my brains, and I believe the idea of the Type Three must have come from there.” Oil inside the Type 5 diver eliminates refractions between oil, sapphire, water, and dive mask, delivering a clear dial at any depth. The functional improvement is exactly the point: a diver watch you can actually read underwater.

Production, Materials, and the Future

Getting enough watches from suppliers is, after 16 years of operation, still the hardest thing Ressence faces as an organization. A single watch contains around 400 custom-made parts at extreme precision tolerances, and the Ressence dial is curved in three dimensions where almost every other watch is flat, requiring five-axis machining. Some parts pass through twelve different specialized companies before reaching a watchmaker’s desk. “If today I need more watches and I order them, I will only have them in between nine months and two years. There is no industry like that.” Those lead times explain the prices, the waiting, and the limited annual runs; the scarcity is structural, a consequence of producing something this technically complex as an independent brand.

Benoît is clear-eyed about products and unhurried about brand moving forward. Ressence has a product plan mapped for the next eight years, but brand recognition is the harder work and cannot be forced. “Stick to your vision, and move on and be coherent. I think that’s the central thing.” The reference brands held up as aspirational in watchmaking took fifty years to reach that position, and it was a consequence of what they did, not something they actively pursued. On materials, Benoît describes a fascination with mammoth ivory recovered from Siberia, finding its structure “very, very, very beautiful.” Ressence can be found at ressencewatches.com, on Instagram, and in Antwerp, where visitors are always welcome.

The post Ressence Doesn’t Want Your Watch to Look Like a Watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

Amman Design Week Returns After 7 Years: 220 Designers, 204 Events, and a City That Doesn’t Forget

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Seven years is a long time to leave a conversation hanging. Amman Design Week last took place in 2019, when we covered an edition called “Possibilities” that was full of material experiments and optimistic making. Since then, the region has lived through a pandemic, multiple regional conflicts, and population displacement at a scale that reshaped the demographic reality of an entire neighborhood of countries. This October, the event returns to a city carrying all those years inside it. Picking up where things left off would be impossible. Starting with what has actually changed feels much more interesting.

The 2026 theme is “Accumulations,” a word capacious enough to hold inherited craft, salvaged stone, family recipes, and the less welcome things that gather over time. Running from October 2 to 17 across five districts in and around Amman, plus the Red Sea city of Aqaba for the first time, the fourth edition of ADW brings together over 220 designers across 59 participating spaces and 204 events. Founded in 2016 by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah, the biennial event has always had serious civic ambitions, and our coverage across three editions has tracked how those ambitions grew. The last edition was already helping rehabilitate communities and expanding access to creative tools across Jordan. This one arrives carrying the weight of everything that filled the years since.

See the full program, plan your route, and keep up with updates at ammandesignweek.com

How an Abbasid Poet About Sin Ended Up Anchoring a Design Week Theme

The 2026 curatorial team opens with a verse from the Abbasid poet Ibn al-Mu’tazz: “Do not dismiss the small; mountains are made of pebbles.” The immense form emerges through countless, often seemingly imperceptible deposits. Read as an image of accumulation, it suggests how the world is built: how knowledge grows, traditions develop, industries take shape, and cities are made. Layer upon layer and decision upon decision. The curatorial team doesn’t shy away from the darker read, acknowledging openly that accumulations can be harmful, that problems accumulate, that waste builds up, and that what builds can also bury. The program approaches the theme through three registers: Reserves and Repositories, which considers what gathers and is held; Systems and Structures, which looks at how layers of rules, decisions, and relationships build up to shape how we live; and Practices and Processes, which turns to the tools and ways of making available to us and the knowledge accumulated within them over time. That is a more rigorous curatorial architecture than most design fairs manage, and it shows.

Each project in the exhibitions is presented as a diptych in dialogue with a trace: a selected artifact, archival document, or oral history. The traces aim to foreground the history of each work, drawing from inherited tools, familial narratives, or ecological cues to reveal the often-unseen scaffolding that informs our designed environments. This curatorial gesture resists the erasure of origin and instead centers the messy and generative relationships between source and aspiration. Exhibitions Curator Faysal Tabbarah, born in Aleppo and based between Sharjah and Ottawa, brings biographical fluency to this framework, with a practice built around regional, environmental, and architectural imaginaries. Programs Curator Khaled Al-Bashir, Arts and Culture Director at Darat al Funun in Amman, trained at the Architectural Association in London and has work spanning Jordan, Palestine, and internationally, exploring how space, culture, and political structures shape the production of knowledge. Together, their backgrounds are the event’s argument made visible before a single object goes on display.

Four Things Amman Gets to Keep After October 17

This year, Amman Design Week introduces four permanent urban interventions: a shade structure, a lamp post, a public garden, and a playground, all placed in public space and left as small pieces of design for the community after October 17. The lamp post alone carries enough conceptual weight to deserve its own article. Designer Mohamad Nahleh drew on the structural history of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, treating it not through its religious symbolism or association with Al Israa wal Miraj but as a record of nearly thirteen centuries of repairs, reinforcements, and rebuilding under successive historical periods. The result is a half-scale sculptural fragment in wood and steel, installed as a functioning lighting pole above a small stone seat, making the case that everyday infrastructure can carry meaning, beauty, and history while still doing its job. Infrastructure that carries that much without announcing it is a genuinely hard design problem, and this is one of the cleaner solutions to it.

Elsewhere in Ras El Ain Park, designer Abeer Anabtawi transforms a large patch of bare concrete at the park’s center into a basketball court decorated with the vegetation found on produce carts and dinner tables across Amman: tomatoes, chamomile, mallow leaves, and wheat, bringing together the familiar sights that shape Amman residents’ daily experience of the city. “Ard al Sahn” by L.E.FT and collaborators redesigns an inaccessible street intersection outside the Shariah Mosque using local stone waste, with the floor oriented toward the Qibla. Civil Architecture’s shade structure threads a ceramic-tile roof between existing tree trunks in the same park, closing the gaps in the canopy overhead, with the tiles developed and manufactured in Jordan by Haswa. Eighty percent of the work across ADW’s track record has been produced locally, and these four projects push that commitment beyond the exhibition calendar. When the program closes on October 17, the city keeps all four.

Aqaba Gets Its First Edition, and the Schools Are Coming Too

For the first time, Amman Design Week arrives in Aqaba with exhibitions, installations, workshops, and public programs developed with WUJUD Art Foundation, responding to the city’s coastal landscape, histories, and communities. The Student Mentorship Program connects students with practitioners across typography, furniture making, architecture, UX/UI design, community-centered design, product design, digital fabrication, and jewelry design, giving students the chance to develop real projects through direct exchange and mentorship. ADW has also partnered with the Madrasati initiative to connect directly with public schools, building on the ongoing efforts of the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development to strengthen creative and practical learning, with public school groups receiving dedicated guided tours of the Hangar exhibition. Across sixteen days, the event projects 90,000 visitors, with 5,000 to 10,000 expected internationally. The Aqaba expansion, school partnerships, and student exhibition make a combined case that this edition reaches further than any previous one.

The Ithra Design Week x ADW Residency pairs designers from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, producing work that sits at a particular moment in shifting regional alignments. When we covered ADW in 2017 across two pieces, including a separate spotlight on a motion-reactive Hangar installation that stopped visitors mid-step, the event was already asking what it means to make design from a specific place. The 2019 edition took that further, helping legalize 3D printing in Jordan, where it had been banned until 2017, and supporting Syrian and Palestinian communities through design programming. The program rests on a simple premise: good design is ordinary, useful, and made close to home. After seven years and everything that the time brought, that premise sounds about right.

See the full program, plan your route, and keep up with updates at ammandesignweek.com

The post Amman Design Week Returns After 7 Years: 220 Designers, 204 Events, and a City That Doesn’t Forget first appeared on Yanko Design.

The first LEGO Dragon Ball set is here, and Shenron costs $180

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LEGO has been making anime for about fifteen years now, it just never bothered to license any. Ninjago is a spiky-haired ensemble of teenage martial artists who power up through color-coded elemental forms and shout while they do it. Monkie Kid pulls straight from Journey to the West. Both shows are anime in everything except paperwork, built by a Danish company that clearly spent a lot of time watching after-school TV and taking notes. So there’s something very funny about LEGO finally going to an actual Japanese animation studio in 2026 and asking, politely, if it could borrow the real thing.

Toei said yes. The result is the LEGO Icons Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku (11390), a 1,764-piece display model of the wish-granting dragon coiling up out of all seven Dragon Balls, with Kid Goku parked on his Kintoun off to one side. It’s the first LEGO and Toei Animation collaboration ever, the first Dragon Ball set LEGO has ever produced, and the first time Goku has existed as a minifigure. For a debut, going straight for the dragon is a confident move. Shenron is the hardest thing in the franchise to build out of rectangles.

Designers: Jae Won Lee & LEGO

Bar-and-clip hinges hold Shenron’s body together internally while plate hinges do the work on the outside, and that combination is the entire reason this thing reads as a curve instead of a staircase. Jae Won Lee built the dragon in repeating segments, each angled a few degrees off the last, so the deviation accumulates into a loop rather than a series of visible steps. Brickset’s review called the process repetitive in stretches, which is true and also the price of admission. Anything smoother would need custom molded parts, and then it stops being LEGO. The finished body flows upward through 32 centimeters of height without a single moment where you can see the seams doing their job.

A grey rock pillar runs up the center of the model, and Shenron is permanently attached to it. Brickset confirmed the dragon cannot be built or displayed independently, which is the honest engineering tell here: 1,764 pieces of green plastic arranged into a loop have to hang off something, and physics does not negotiate. I respect that LEGO left the pillar visible rather than disguising it as scenery. Articulation is modest as a result, with a few degrees of head rotation, an opening jaw, and legs that pivot at several joints. This is a statue that lets you nudge it, and the marketing sensibly sells it that way.

Goku arrives here as a minifigure for the first time in either company’s history, wearing the orange gi with Master Roshi’s Kame kanji printed on the chest. He carries the Power Pole, wears a printed Saiyan tail, and sits on the Kintoun, which matters more than it looks. At this point in the original series Goku cannot fly on his own ki yet, so the cloud is his actual transportation rather than a prop. Riding it also requires being pure of heart, a detail that becomes very funny once you learn he is an alien from a warrior race. The new spiky wig element is the best part of the figure.

Seven Dragon Balls sit at the base on trans-clear studs, each individually printed with its correct star count, one through seven. Lightning bursts in translucent yellow where the dragon breaks through, and the front nameplate carries the original manga logo rather than anything from the Z era. LEGO also colored many of the internal structural pieces orange to match the Dragon Balls, including parts buried inside the base where nobody will ever see them. The instruction booklet highlights new pieces in orange instead of the usual red. Those two decisions cost money and win nothing measurable, which is exactly how you tell a licensing exercise apart from a set somebody cared about.

One minifigure for $179.99 is where this set loses me. Bulma invented the Dragon Radar and drove the entire original search, and her absence from a set celebrating that specific storyline is a genuine gap that Brick Fanatics and Stonewars both flagged. Brickset’s per-piece math lands at 10.2 cents in the US against fairer numbers in the UK and Eurozone, part of a wider 2026 exchange-rate drift on LEGO pricing. Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts Shenron sits around $130 fully painted and articulated. LEGO is charging a premium for the privilege of assembling yours.

Insiders get early access on November 1, with general release on November 4 through LEGO Stores and LEGO.com, and more Dragon Ball sets are already confirmed for 2027 and beyond. Put this beside the 681-piece Pokémon Rayquaza and the comparison stops being polite, which tells you something about how seriously LEGO treated its first swing here. Fifteen years of building its own anime gave the company an unusually good understanding of what this material needs. Toriyama died in March 2024 without seeing his dragon in brick form. The set that finally arrived is worthy of him, and I hope Bulma is in the next one.

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A full desktop PC is hiding inside this picture frame

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Dieter Rams famously said good design is honest. With all due respect to Dieter, Matt from DIY Perks has built something that lies through its teeth, and it is one of the better design ideas to come out of a YouTube build video this year. The project is a wall-mounted picture frame, painted with an original mountain landscape by Matt himself, that conceals a fully working PC workstation behind it. Nothing about the closed frame hints at what is inside, a monitor, a computer, a keyboard, a mouse, and a pair of salvaged speakers. It takes a gentle pull at the top to break the illusion and fold the whole thing down into a desk.

DIY Perks is Matt’s YouTube channel, sitting at nearly 5 million subscribers and built on exactly this kind of project, builds that solve a real problem while ignoring every conventional idea of what the solution should look like. This one hides an ultra-wide monitor stripped to its bare panel for minimum depth, a computer on a repurposed laptop motherboard, and TV speakers behind a veneer-clad wall panel finished in a warm 1970s dark-wood aesthetic. Power arrives via copper tape strips painted invisibly into the wall. The desk surface is MDF covered in oiled hardwood veneer, convincing enough to pass as solid wood. The whole setup runs Linux Mint, draws about 90 watts, and looks like a painting until it doesn’t.

Designer: DIY Perks

A Desktop With No Actual Desk

Desktop computers require a desktop, which is right there in the name, and this one provides one on demand. The hinge mechanism opens like a laptop, but there is no lap, the screen is not attached to the part you hold, and you are definitely not putting this on a plane tray table. It could qualify as a standing desk, except it sits at seated height and has no legs of any kind. The most accurate product name might be something like “wall-mounted fold-down all-in-one,” which sounds like a line item in a government procurement document. Matt just calls it a PC, and at a certain point that is as good as it gets.

The design works because it commits fully to the illusion. Closed up, it reads as furniture and decor first, tech never. Open it, and the whole thing shifts personality in one move, from framed artwork to compact workstation. That transformation is the hook, but it also says something interesting about the way we live with devices now. Plenty of people want a proper setup at home, but very few want their living room to look like a call center. This build solves that with sheer elegance. It gives you a desk without asking your room to look like it has one all day.

Built Like Furniture, Wired Like Hardware

Fitting a monitor, computer, speakers, and peripheral storage flush within a frame the depth of a painting required solutions at every layer. The monitor gets stripped to its bare panel, with the control board relocated below using low-profile HDMI connectors so the assembly sits nearly flush with the wall. The computer runs on a repurposed laptop motherboard, cooled by a server heatsink from an electronics recycling center, fitted with a copper shim Matt trimmed by hand with a hacksaw. A blower fan handles airflow through a small shroud. The entire assembly slots into its compartments without a CNC machine anywhere in the process, which is a deliberate choice that keeps this build within reach of a serious maker.

Most wall-mounted desks carry a laptop and nothing heavier, and the bracket design tends to reflect that. This one carries a monitor, computer, speakers, and the desk surface itself, distributed through the main wall panel via brackets sunk directly into wall studs, with piano hinges spreading load across the full desk connection. Power arrives via two strips of copper tape running up the wall surface, painted over with metal primer and standard wall emulsion until they completely vanish. The tape carries low-voltage DC, with the power brick at the bottom acting as short-circuit protection, and the voltage is low enough that shock risk is not a concern. Even standing directly in front of it, you cannot find the wires.

Art on the Outside, PC Inside

A mountain valley with a winding river, pine-covered slopes, rocky crags, morning mist, roaring rapids, and a steam engine pulling cargo through a mountain pass. Matt spent hours on that painting, which now lives on the front of his PC, and it reads convincingly as something out of a Bob Ross tutorial, warm and dense with detail. The frame sits surrounded by other paintings from family members on the same wall, completing the camouflage to the point where a visitor to the house would have no reason to look twice. That is what separates this from every other clever PC build and puts it squarely in design-object territory. The disguise is the design.

Most technology objects demand attention even at rest, the idle glow of a standby indicator, the visual mass of a monitor and its arm, the cord tangle underneath. Matt’s build refuses to participate, choosing instead to disappear completely into its domestic context and only announce itself when needed. That posture shows up far more often in high-end furniture design than in PC builds, where the prevailing instinct is to make hardware as visible as possible, preferably with RGB lighting aimed in multiple directions. The painting on the front is the punchline of the project, but it is also its most considered creative decision. Every other detail serves function; the painting serves the idea.

When a PC Forgets It Is Tech

Matt has been building invisible and fold-down PCs for over a decade, and the 2020 version of his invisible PC alone pulled in over 8 million views on YouTube. This iteration raises the stakes by making the camouflage the actual creative output, which shifts it from an engineering exercise into something closer to an art installation. The home workspace trend has been moving this way anyway, look at the DropTop desk by Pith and Stem or Anker Bak’s wall-mounted desk inspired by the logic of Japan’s compact homes. Matt’s build sits at the logical extreme of that movement, a workspace so thoroughly integrated into its surroundings that it ceases to exist until you ask it to. No commercial product has pulled that off.

The build is not a product you can buy, which is the one thing most people will find frustrating after watching the video. Matt points to Framework mainboards as an off-the-shelf shortcut for anyone attempting a recreation, and the documentation is thorough enough that a determined maker could get reasonably close. The painting, though, is entirely up to you. Either paint your own art, or print something online. Or if you really want to one-up Matt, add a glare-free screen instead of the painting and program it to work as a smart art frame!

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Logitech built the all-day work + play headset that doesn’t scream “IT department”

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Woman wearing off-white Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones outdoors

I don’t want to be the one to call you out on a fine Wednesday morning, but your tech bag is a mess. You’ve got the Work Headphones, the serious pair with that dorky boom mic that makes you sound like a podcast host on Zoom calls but looks absolutely ridiculous in the wild. Then you have the Life Headphones, the cool ones that are great for music on the train but make you sound like you’re calling from inside a wind tunnel the second you try to take a call outdoors. We all perform this dumb little headphone swap all day, every day, because for some reason the industry decided we needed two different tools for one job. It is a silly problem that is, nonetheless, deeply annoying.

Logitech apparently got tired of watching us all do this. Their new Zone Vibe Pro, which ships September 30 for $259.99, is a direct shot at solving this two-headphone nonsense. It’s a boomless, over-ear headset with AI-powered mics that nuke up to 93% of background noise, so you can take a meeting from a chaotic coffee shop and still sound like you’re in a library. It has sidetone to stop you from shouting on calls, a battery that runs for 30 hours with ANC on, and a design that won’t get you weird looks in public. It’s a genuine attempt to build the one pair you actually need, with a Business version arriving November 2 for $279.99 for the IT folks who need the paperwork.

Designer: Logitech

Lilac Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones resting on a desk beside a tablet

Lilac Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones on a wooden desk next to a tablet keyboard

A Design That Doesn’t Look Like Office Equipment

The first thing Logitech did right was get rid of the boom mic, which changes everything about how the headset looks and feels. Without that arm sticking out, the Zone Vibe Pro doesn’t have an ugly “work side.” Both earcups are identical, clean, and minimalist, with a shape that feels more sculptural than engineered. The earcups rotate flat for travel instead of folding, which is a clever way to dodge the cheap plastic hinges that always snap on other headsets. Offered in four colors, including a lilac that practically screams “I am not corporate hardware,” the design is a confident statement that your work gear doesn’t have to be embarrassing.

To make sure you can actually wear it all day, Logitech stole the best ideas from its own gaming division. The soft, padded head strap and dual-layer foam earcups are straight out of the gaming playbook, where comfort isn’t a feature, it’s a requirement for ten-hour sessions. The foam is soft where it touches your ear but firmer underneath, a small detail that creates a better seal for the noise canceling. It’s the kind of smart, practical engineering that you don’t notice until you realize your head doesn’t hurt after a three-hour meeting.

Woman wearing off-white Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones while holding a smartphone

Woman using a laptop while wearing off-white Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones

Mics That Actually Work Without a Boom

The magic trick that makes this whole boomless thing work is the AI-powered microphone system. This is usually where headsets like this fall apart, sounding great in a quiet room but turning into a muffled mess the second a barista starts the blender. To prove their point, Logitech had a presenter take a call while someone held a power drill next to her head; the call sounded perfectly clear. The system is smart enough to isolate your voice and kill up to 93% of the noise around you, which is a bold claim backed by a pretty convincing demo.

They also included sidetone, a feature that lets you hear your own voice in the headset so you don’t end up shouting on your calls. It’s a simple fix that stops you from becoming “that person” in the coffee shop, and it’s amazing how many headsets get it wrong. The listening experience is handled by custom 40mm drivers and an adaptive noise canceling system that adjusts to your environment in real time. Combined with the solid acoustic seal from the earcups, the audio performance is designed to be just as good for music on the subway as it is for a meeting with your boss.

Man wearing graphite Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones during a video call on a tablet

Battery Life That Lasts, Parts You Can Replace, and Where to Buy

You get a solid 30 hours of listening with ANC on, and a frankly ridiculous 66 hours with it off, which is long enough to make you forget where you put the charging cable. If you do run low, a five-minute charge gets you an hour of call time, which is the kind of practical spec that saves the day when you’re running late. In a rare move for a headset at this price, Logitech also made the earpads, headband, and even the battery replaceable. It’s a welcome nod to making products that are meant to last rather than be thrown away after two years.

The Zone Vibe Pro is available today on logitech.com for $259.99, hitting the US and Canada first. The Business version, which adds certifications for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet plus remote management tools for IT departments, lands on November 2 for $279.99 with a USB-C receiver. If you’re tired of juggling two pairs of headphones just to get through the day, Logitech has built a very compelling argument that you only need one.

Man wearing graphite Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones outdoors near a glass building

Man wearing graphite Logitech Zone Vibe Pro headphones while holding a smartphone

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Poclink Motion Ultra is a modern walkie-talkie with LTE, GPS, SOS, and Zero Monthly Fees

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The walkie-talkie has had the same design problem since WWII: great up close, a plastic brick the moment you’re out of range. Bluetooth mesh updated the tech but kept the same ceiling, roughly 1km of real-world range and about 15 people max before the group chat sounds like a submarine drill. Satellite communicators like Garmin’s inReach solved the no-signal problem but traded voice communication for text-only messaging and a monthly subscription fee. Smartphones have the range on paper, but cold weather and touchscreens make them basically decorative in the field. There’s an obvious product sitting in the gap between all three, and Poclink has apparently noticed.

Poclink’s answer is the Motion Ultra, a wearable hybrid LTE-plus-analog radio that runs on 4G LTE when coverage is available and seamlessly switches to analog radio for off-grid communication when it isn’t, with analog range reaching up to 20 miles in favorable open conditions and varying with terrain and surrounding conditions.

Designer: Poclink

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 ($199 x 2 units) $598 (33% off). Hurry, only 789/800 left!

Two oversized PTT buttons give instant access to each mode, operable without looking, gloves on, at full speed. The body is IP67 waterproof, cold-rated to -20°C, weighs about 100g, and can be mounted in different ways for use on helmets, goggles, handlebars, backpacks, and more. A lifetime global SIM covering 60-plus countries ships in the box with zero monthly fees, and groups can scale to 1000 members on PTT or drop into 5-way full-duplex mode for something closer to an actual conversation. Three colorways are available: Alpine White, Ridge Black, and the very correct choice, Adventure Orange.

Two separate buttons handle two separate worlds: the front-facing button connects via LTE for unlimited range, and the side button fires up the analog radio for off-grid reach. Both are sized for blind-press operation, meaning you can trigger either by feel alone, ski gloves on, at speed, without glancing down. That specific interaction, a deliberate physical input requiring zero visual attention, is the kind of UX decision that separates tools designed for actual field conditions from tools designed to look good in a press photo. A multi-function rotary dial rounds out the controls, handling volume, channel switching, and group changes without a touchscreen in sight.

The analog radio speaks three regional protocols: GMRS in the US, PMR446 in Europe, and UHF CB in Australia, giving the Motion Ultra genuine off-grid reach across every major outdoor market. Over LTE, range is unlimited wherever cellular coverage exists. The lifetime global SIM ships included at zero monthly or annual cost, with an optional premium plan extending coverage from 60-plus countries to 160-plus. That no-subscription architecture matters more than it sounds on a spec sheet: it removes the recurring cost objection entirely and means the device holds its value over time in a way hardware-plus-plan models don’t. It also means you can hand it to a friend for a trip and it’ll just work.

PTT scales to 1000 members in group mode, full duplex caps at five people in conference-call mode, and the Motion Ultra handles both depending on whether your crew is running a coordinated ski patrol operation or just arguing over which run to take. On-device AI handles wind noise reduction, so voices stay intelligible through helmets in conditions where a regular speakerphone would produce mostly wind and optimism. Voice command support lets users adjust volume or call teammates hands-free, which matters more than it sounds on a device physically attached to a moving human. The 1.47-inch color display shows team names, channels, and connection status at a glance. Every conversation runs through AES-256 encryption backed by AWS cloud infrastructure, which is a level of security most radios in this category don’t even bother mentioning.

Live GPS location sharing, one-touch SOS, and geofencing are built into the Motion Ultra, and they deserve more attention than the feature list usually gives them. The SOS button sends your exact coordinates to the group instantly, with no satellite subscription and no menu-diving required. Geofencing lets you define a safety perimeter around a resort, campsite, or trailhead, with alerts triggering if someone drifts outside it. The real-world case that stuck with me is a POC-1 Ultra owner who reported that his daughter’s phone died after a car accident in a remote, low-coverage area, and the radio still maintained a connection at 75 miles. The Motion Ultra takes Poclink’s proven hybrid communication platform a step further, evolving it into a more advanced, versatile system that combines 4G LTE connectivity with off-grid analog communication in a compact, wearable form purpose-built for riders, skiers, hikers, and anyone who knows that going farther often means going beyond what a phone alone can handle.

At about 100g, the Motion Ultra lands at that useful intersection of present enough to feel like real gear and light enough to not punish you for clipping it to your helmet every single day. The Universal Action Mount supports helmets, handlebars, backpacks, and third-party accessories, so it integrates into a setup you already own rather than demanding its own infrastructure. A 2000mAh battery with USB-C fast charging handles all-day outdoor use, and Bluetooth doubles as a music and podcast playback source during solo stretches when the PTT stays quiet. IP67 waterproofing and a -20°C cold rating cover every realistic outdoor condition without special handling or storage requirements. The diagonal crosshatch texture on the speaker grille is a small detail, but it reads as intentional rather than cosmetic, which is more than most gadgets in this category can claim.

The Poclink Motion Ultra is now live on Kickstarter, bringing its hybrid LTE-and-analog approach to backers for the first time.

If your idea of staying connected needs to extend beyond where your phone stops working, you can grab 2 units of the Motion Ultra for the early bird price of $399 with estimated shipping starting Nov 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $399 ($199 x 2 units) $598 (33% off). Hurry, only 789/800 left!

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The Perfect ‘Frequent Flyer’ Hoodie cradles your arms like a Straightjacket for comfortable snoozing

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Airplane seats are designed for exactly one thing: fitting as many humans as possible into a metal tube. Comfort comes a distant second, and sleep ranks somewhere around fifth, just behind the tiny bag of pretzels. You get an armrest, or half of one if you lose the elbow war with the middle seat, and your arms spend the flight crossing, uncrossing, and slowly going numb.

The STR-8 Jacket gives them somewhere to go. Designed by Idaho-based frequent flyer Bryson Howell, The idea came from commercial airline pilot Ben Howell, who teamed up with his brother, Bryson Howell, to design the jacket. It’s a travel hoodie with a second pocket high on the chest where you can park both forearms. A stretch membrane in the back spreads their weight across your upper body, so your shoulders can finally clock out. A flexible internal support membrane distributes their weight across your upper body, giving your arms a supported place to rest. The new Gen 2 version zips up and comes with matching joggers and a packing case. It even throws in a sleep mask is available in a $189 bundle with matching joggers, a sleep mask, and a travel case, or just the jacket for $109 because the moment you finally get comfy, the guy in 14C will open his window shade. Every single time.

Designers: Ben Howell and Bryson Howell

Click Here to Buy Now: $99.

Cross your arms on a flight and they go numb within minutes. Let them hang and they pull on your shoulders for hours straight. The Howell’s fix was a kangaroo-style pocket sized for both forearms, backed by a stretch membrane sewn through the shoulders and back that absorbs the weight instead of your traps taking it. Their friends said the result looked like a straitjacket when he first showed it off. They kept the joke and named the jacket after it, which is the kind of branding move I respect more than I probably should.

The brothers worked through five to six prototypes to get the support right. An upper pocket alone wasn’t enough: early versions still placed too much pressure on the neck and shoulders. The breakthrough was a flexible internal membrane that helped distribute arm weight more evenly across the upper body. That hidden structure is what turns the chest pocket into a place to rest both forearms.

The fabric is a polyester-spandex blend, chosen after early cotton prototypes ran too warm for a six-hour flight. The stretch has to flex constantly under arm weight without sagging out of shape after repeated wear, which cotton simply couldn’t do. Breathability keeps you from waking up sweaty somewhere over the Atlantic, which would defeat the entire point of a jacket built to help you sleep. It packs down small enough to fit inside its own carry case afterward. None of this is flashy fabric tech, and it doesn’t need to be.

Gen 2 adds a full front zipper, making the jacket easier to put on and take off, especially useful at security or anywhere you’re layering in a hurry. It’s a straightforward upgrade over the pullover style, not a fix for a flaw so much as an added option for people who prefer a zip-up. The arm support mechanics underneath stay identical either way. Whether you grab the zip jacket or the Original Pullover comes down to personal preference more than anything else.

The arm pocket itself grew from Gen 1 to Gen 2, giving more room for different arm lengths and body types. That matters because a pocket that’s too snug pulls the membrane tight in the wrong spot instead of distributing weight evenly. The mechanics underneath stay the same, just refined for a wider range of people. Refinements like this are usually harder to nail than a flashy new feature. It suggests this generation actually got tested on more bodies than just the founder’s own.

The joggers use the same wind and water resistant fabric as the jacket, so the set matches in feel as well as color. A dedicated passport pocket and an AirPod pocket are built in, which solves a genuinely annoying travel problem. Digging through a backpack for your passport mid-line while everyone behind you sighs is nobody’s idea of fun. Pair them with the jacket and this stops being a novelty item and starts looking like an actual travel uniform. That’s a bigger shift than it sounds.

The whole outfit compresses down to roughly the size of a water bottle, case included. That’s genuinely useful for anyone whose carry-on is already packed to the zipper with chargers and snacks. A jacket that eats backpack space you don’t have is a jacket that stays home on the next trip. Packability here reads like a real design requirement, not an afterthought tacked on for campaign photos. That kind of detail usually only shows up after someone has lived with the product on actual flights, not just prototyped it in a garage.

A sleep mask rounds out the case, and its usefulness clicks the moment you finally get your arms sorted and the passenger two rows up opens the window shade. It’s a small addition and a fairly convenient bundle item, sure. But it closes an obvious gap in the setup. One packing case now handles the entire sleep routine instead of three separate purchases rattling loose in your bag. Small thing, real thing.

Gen 1 ran men’s sizing only, so a woman ordering a medium was effectively gambling on whether a men’s small would fit. Gen 2 fixes that with real women’s sizing, S through 3XL, on both the zip jacket and the joggers. It’s a basic correction that honestly should have existed from day one. Travel and fashion brands get called out constantly for treating “unisex” as shorthand for “men’s,” so it’s worth flagging when one actually walks that back. Better late than never, though late is still late.

Travel pillow brands have bolted arm slings onto neck pillows for years, and shoulder immobilizer braces do something structurally similar for post-surgery patients. What STR-8 does differently is build the support into a jacket you’d wear anyway, instead of an accessory you have to remember to pack separately. The trade-off is that the benefit only kicks in while you’re wearing their jacket specifically. If you run warm or already love a different travel hoodie, this only works once you swap it out for theirs.

The Gen 2 zip jacket and joggers run S through 3XL, while the original pullover sticks to S through 2XL across five colorways.

You can snag one for your next flight at $109 (limited to just 25 units before the price jumps to $119), or grab the entire bundle for $129 which also includes joggers, a sleep mask, and a travel bag. The STR-8 Jacket 2.0 ships globally starting December 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99.

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Honor Magic9 crams dual 200MP cameras into a 6.37-inch phone

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Honor apparently looked at a movie camera from 1937 and thought, yeah, let’s build for that. The Magic9’s camera module borrows its arrangement from ARRI’s iconic ARRIFLEX three-lens turret cameras, the design that shaped professional cinema for decades, translating into a 200MP main sensor, a 200MP periscope telephoto, and a 50MP ultrawide organized with actual compositional intent. It is a neat flex, dressing up a camera bump with nearly a century of cinema history. The phone launched in China on September 28 alongside the pricier Pro Max and the battery-heavy Super Edition, starting at RMB 5,000 for the 12GB/256GB version. Of the three models, the standard Magic9 makes the clearest design argument: serious camera ambition in a body that still wants to fit in a normal pocket.

Going fully flat at 6.37 inches while growing the battery to 8,000mAh and keeping the body around 8.5mm thick is a set of competing constraints Honor has not fully unpacked in public. The screen change also comes with a trade, stepping down from the Pro Max’s LTPO panel to a fixed 120Hz LTPS display. The base model runs the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, same as the previous Magic8, while the Pro Max moves to the newer Gen 6 platform. That gap is where a chunk of the price difference lives, and it makes the Magic9 feel less like a cut-down flagship and more like a very deliberate edit.

Designer: HONOR

A camera bump with a film-school reference

ARRI’s ARRIFLEX, introduced in 1937, used a rotating three-lens turret that let cinematographers swap focal lengths quickly on set. That same 1+2 organizational logic now shows up in the Magic9 family, turning a smartphone camera island into something that feels arranged rather than merely installed. Most camera bumps look like a housing engineer gave up and drew a circle around the parts. This one feels like somebody actually cared where your eye lands first. That matters more than it sounds, because camera phones now live or die by how convincingly they present themselves as tools.

The raised module also has a practical side. On a smaller phone, finger placement gets messy fast, especially when a periscope camera and a big battery are competing for the same internal real estate. A high-set camera island can help keep fingertips away from the lenses during horizontal shooting, and the flat display helps too. Curved screens always looked sleek in renders, but a flat panel is easier to grip, easier to frame with, and less visually slippery at the edges. In a phone pitched around image-making, that kind of boring ergonomic win is actually the fun part.

Dual 200MP cameras sound loud, but the details matter more

The base Magic9 pairs a 200MP main camera with a 1/1.4-inch sensor and f/1.9 aperture, plus a 200MP periscope telephoto with a 1/1.56-inch sensor and dual-prism design. A 50MP ultrawide completes the rear setup, while the front gets a 55MP square-format selfie camera designed for flexible vertical and horizontal crops. On paper, that is already enough to make most compact flagships sweat a little. The weirdly charming part is that Honor packed all of it into a 209-gram body, which is heavy enough to feel serious but still light enough that your wrist probably will not file a complaint by lunch.

This is also where the ARRI partnership needs a little adult supervision. Honor’s Pro Max press material clearly confirms features like ARRI LogC3, 10-bit color, ARRI Wide Gamut 3, preset ARRI Looks, and a larger library of predefined color gradings. For the base Magic9, the public story is fuzzier. Coverage points to ARRI-tuned imaging and ARRI Looks across the series, but it is still not fully clear which cinema features carry over in full and which are more about color styling than deep capture control. So the safe read is this: the Magic9 definitely borrows some ARRI flavor, but the exact recipe still needs a proper hands-on.

The real compromise is not where most people will look

The easiest complaint is the chipset. The Magic9 uses the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 while the Pro Max gets the new Gen 6, and that immediately makes the base model sound like the one sitting at the kids’ table. In practice, this may be the smartest compromise in the whole lineup. Last year’s flagship chip is still plenty fast for 4K video, gaming, and daily use, and most people will feel the benefit of a bigger battery or better camera hardware far sooner than they will notice a one-generation jump in silicon. Spec sheet purists may clutch their pearls, but regular humans tend to notice battery anxiety before benchmark scores.

That trade-off becomes easier to respect once you look at what Honor did with the saved budget and space. The Magic9 still manages an 8,000mAh battery, 80W wired charging, 50W wireless charging, and a body that stays compact by current flagship standards. That is the part that makes this phone interesting from a design perspective. Honor did not try to win every category at once. It picked the categories that physically change how the phone feels in the hand and how long it lasts away from a charger. Honestly, that is a much more believable kind of ambition than the usual annual race to squeeze another chip name into a headline.

Compact now means choosing your priorities carefully

For years, “compact flagship” mostly meant a smaller battery and a camera system that got politely downgraded behind the scenes. The Magic9 flips that script a bit. It keeps the smaller 6.37-inch footprint, goes fully flat, hangs onto dual 200MP cameras, and stuffs in an 8,000mAh battery that sounds almost fake until you see it listed next to the weight. The cost of all that is visible in the panel tech and the older chip, and maybe that is exactly why the phone works as a concept. Every compromise is attached to something tangible on the other side.

That is what makes the Magic9 more interesting than a generic launch story about megapixels and brand partnerships. It feels like a phone designed by subtraction, where Honor kept asking what could be trimmed back so the body could hold onto the stuff people actually touch, carry, frame, and recharge. Whether the ARRI connection turns into genuinely better footage or just cooler color science remains to be tested. But as an object, the Magic9 already lands its point pretty clearly: if you want a compact camera phone in 2026, the real challenge is not making it smaller, it is deciding what deserves to stay big.

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WIKO’s $1,220 Hi MateBook 14 puts a gorgeous 3:2 OLED on a very practical laptop

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WIKO started in Marseille, spent a decade making budget Androids, got acquired by a Chinese telecom group in 2021, found its way into Huawei’s retail ecosystem, and is now selling a laptop with a patterned keyboard. Quite the corporate journey. The Hi MateBook 14 Core Edition 2026 is the result: a Windows ultrabook built around a 14.2-inch OLED touchscreen with 120Hz and touch support, running Intel’s Panther Lake Core Ultra 5 325. Scrolling through a long document on a 3:2 screen just hits differently, and that taller aspect ratio separates it from the 16:10 default most ultrabooks settle for. WIKO is betting on the display as the machine’s loudest selling point, and on paper, that bet is defensible.

The MateBook name borrows aesthetic language from Huawei’s own laptop family, but WIKO and Huawei are separate companies, and this is WIKO’s product running Windows on Intel silicon. Right now it is a China-market release at CNY 8,199, roughly $1,220, with no confirmed availability outside that region. The port selection tells you something about the intended use case: two USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI, a USB-C, and a headphone jack on a 14.5mm body weighing 1.33 kg (about 2.93 lbs). It is a laptop that genuinely wants to live at a desk, while still dressing like it has somewhere nicer to be.

Designer: WIKO

A 3:2 OLED Panel at a Price Most Windows Laptops Skip

At 2880 by 1920 pixels across a 14.2-inch panel, the Hi MateBook 14 Core Edition runs a resolution and aspect ratio that most Windows machines at this price simply skip. The 3:2 format gives you meaningfully more vertical space than the 16:10 panels most premium ultrabooks default to, which changes how a document or spreadsheet actually feels to navigate. OLED, touch support, and 120Hz simultaneously under $1,300 is a short list in the current Windows market, and the Hi MateBook 14 checks all three on its documented spec sheet. LG’s gram Pro 16 makes a similar display argument but at a higher price. On paper, WIKO is building a screen story worth paying attention to.

Reflectivity, color accuracy, hinge stability, and real-world battery life are all measured quantities that require physical testing to confirm, and none of those numbers exist yet for this machine. WIKO claims 450 nits of peak brightness, sitting slightly below the 500 nits Apple quotes for the MacBook Air M5’s IPS Liquid Retina display. Whether that 50-nit gap matters under different lighting conditions is genuinely unknown at this stage. The primary product documentation is in Mandarin and has not been independently tested yet. The display spec is compelling on paper; the only responsible thing to do is leave it there for now.

Two USB-A Ports and Full-Size HDMI on a 14.5mm Chassis Tell You Who This Is For

Two USB-A ports and a full-size HDMI on a 14.5mm (0.57-inch) chassis is a statement about who this laptop is designed for. Most premium ultrabook design over the past several years has treated legacy connectors as things to discreetly remove in the name of thinness. The Hi MateBook 14 goes the other direction, covering the ports most desk setups still rely on, then adding a USB-C and a 3.5mm jack alongside them. The result is a machine that does not need a dongle to connect a monitor or flash drive on day one. That is a practical courtesy that has largely disappeared from the premium thin laptop segment.

WIKO puts the keyboard front and center in the Hi MateBook 14’s product photography, with a patterned keycap treatment that differentiates the machine from the generic anodized-slab look most ultrabooks default to. Rounded corners carry the same softened sensibility through the chassis, which at 1.33 kg and 14.5mm thick is legitimately bag-carry friendly. Whether the keycap pattern applies to all regional configurations or is market-specific needs direct confirmation from WIKO. Memory options, storage tiers, and keyboard localization are similarly unconfirmed in the English-language documentation. These are open questions worth pinning down before treating any spec here as settled.

Core Ultra 5 325 Is the Entry Rung of Panther Lake, and That Distinction Matters

The Core Ultra 5 325 inside the Hi MateBook 14 is a U-series entry-level part from Intel’s Panther Lake family, launched Q1 2026. Panther Lake generated real performance enthusiasm at the H-series end, with top-tier chips delivering substantial gains over Lunar Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI equivalents in independent testing. The U-series 325 runs a different brief, built for efficiency rather than peak throughput. For document editing, browser workflows, and video calls, it is a capable match for what the Hi MateBook 14 appears designed around. Comparing it to the H-series benchmarks that drove February’s coverage would be a misread of the spec sheet.

CNY 8,199 converts to roughly $1,220, placing the Hi MateBook 14 Core Edition alongside the MacBook Air M5 entry config and a wide field of Windows ultrabooks. For most readers outside China, this is a machine to follow rather than to buy right now, since US availability is unconfirmed. YD covered a similarly geographically restricted machine with the VAIO T Series earlier this month, and the dynamic feels familiar: a compelling design case with no current purchase path for most of the world. WIKO is building something that competes at the spec-sheet level in a segment where that matters. The gap between the paper and the product is still waiting to be closed.

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No plugs, no batteries, no mess: this futuristic kitchen pad wirelessly powers your appliances

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Remember when wireless phone chargers felt like magic? Set your phone down, it charges, no fumbling with a cable in the dark. Somebody at Kitchenery apparently looked at that little glowing pad and thought, why stop at phones. The wireless power that charges a phone is being engineered to run full-size appliances, and Kitchenery’s patented Quantum Energy Pad delivers over 1,500 watts through the countertop, roughly 100 times a typical phone charger, to battery-free appliances with no cords and no plugs.
That is a wild jump in scale for a concept most of us associate with topping up 20% battery overnight. But the mechanics stay weirdly familiar. The QEP plugs into a wall outlet. The compatible appliance receives operating power while it is on the pad. Lift it away and power delivery stops. No batteries hiding inside your kettle, no charging cradle taking up cabinet space, just a pad that handles the heavy lifting while you get on with breakfast.

Designer: Kitchenery Inc.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1299. Hurry, only 7/9 left! Raised over $32,000.

Stacked inside the QEP are three key components: a ceramic-glass surface, a hybrid power coil, and an adaptive touchscreen. The hybrid coil is the technical core, a single transmission coil that switches between resonance frequencies to do three jobs from one surface, power appliances, wirelessly charge devices, and induction-heat cookware. The adaptive touchscreen changes its control layout depending on what you set down, kettle-specific controls for the kettle, blender presets for the blender. Power input is 110-240V AC, covering most of the world’s wall outlets, and the ceramic glass surface also accepts induction-compatible cookware, meaning the pad earns its counter real estate as a cooktop, a wireless appliance power platform, and an ecosystem hub simultaneously.

Kitchenery’s appliances are battery-free. Unlike cordless appliances that hide a rechargeable battery, the Silent Blender and Perfect Pour Kettle carry no battery at all, they draw power only while on the pad. That means less weight, less waste, and no batteries to degrade or replace. The pad also verifies each appliance through a low-power Bluetooth handshake before delivering full power, so only recognized, safe devices are energized. It is a meaningfully different architecture from the competition, and one that keeps the door open for a smarter, app-connected layer down the road.

The Perfect Pour Induction Kettle is a 1-liter kettle designed for controlled pouring, with a 316 stainless-steel inner tank, a digital temperature display, and a color-changing handle light, all part of the Kitchenery system for everyday tea, coffee, and hot-water preparation. A removable lid gives you access to the stainless-steel interior for filling and cleaning, and the shaped spout is designed for precise, controlled flow, which matters quite a bit for pour-over coffee or loose-leaf tea. The kettle ships in stainless and dark finishes, and it can also operate on compatible standard induction cooktops beyond the QEP, giving it a degree of flexibility most ecosystem-locked appliances never offer.

The Silent Blender is Kitchenery’s cordless countertop blender, with a receiver inside its base that draws operating power from the QEP, so the blender does not need its own wall cord or a rechargeable appliance battery. It is being developed for smoothies, sauces, and everyday blending. The motor is spec’d at 15,000 RPM at the current design stage, with a wireless-power receiver coil and electronics as the power architecture. The “Silent Blender” is the product name, and a quieter blending experience is a development goal, with comparative sound results still under validation. For an appliance category defined almost entirely by noise and cord clutter, the proposition is appealing enough on concept alone.

The most conventional use case here is also the most obvious: a home kitchen where counter space is limited, outlet access is a daily negotiation, and the cord situation behind the appliances has quietly become everyone’s problem and nobody’s priority. For that person, the QEP consolidates everything onto one plug while the appliances themselves float freely, stored when not in use, grabbed and set down without threading a cord anywhere. Appliances are modular, cord-free, and easy to store, so they tuck into the tightest cabinets and rearrange on demand, opening up kitchens traditional appliances can’t serve well and turning the smallest or most unusual spaces into fully capable ones.

That flexibility is where Kitchenery’s audience gets genuinely interesting. Yacht galleys, where space, safety, and weight all matter. Private aircraft galleys that need compact, cord-free appliances. RVs and overlanding setups where cordless, stackable appliances maximize every inch. Tiny and modular homes built around the space they save. And senior living and accessibility environments, where a kitchen with no open flames and no cords is an inherently safer one. I find that last group the most underappreciated of the bunch. The safety and accessibility argument for a cordless kitchen writes itself, and it is a demographic the traditional small appliance industry has consistently underserved. Any environment where cord management, heat hazards, and limited outlets are real daily concerns becomes a legitimate use case, and that covers a lot more kitchens than the standard marketing mood board suggests.

The wider industry is now validating the cordless kitchen. The Wireless Power Consortium, the group behind the Qi phone-charging standard, has introduced “Ki,” a cordless-kitchen standard for delivering up to approximately 2.2 kW to appliances placed on a transmitter. Kitchenery’s patented architecture targets the same high-power reality at 1,500W+, but pairs it with battery-free appliances and a finished, ready-to-use ecosystem rather than a single component, and can license that platform to appliance brands and OEMs. Where Ki uses NFC-based authentication, Kitchenery connects via Bluetooth, a communication layer with considerably more headroom for intelligence, personalization, and eventual smart-home integration. Kitchenery is the named assignee of U.S. Patent No. 12,603,526 B1, “Hybrid Wireless Power Device and Method,” issued April 14, 2026. Two very different organizations converging on the same idea from opposite directions is a fairly good signal the underlying technology has real legs.

Every set includes the QEP, the induction cooktop and shared power platform, plus the appliances. Estimated delivery is February 2027. The STARTER set, one QEP plus one Perfect Pour Induction Kettle plus a silicone mat, is priced at $1,299 at Super Early Bird. The SMOOTH set with one QEP and one Silent Blender starts at $1,499, and the TRIO with both appliances runs $1,699. All Kitchenery products include a one-year warranty covering parts and labor. Worldwide shipping is planned, with additional costs for shipping, taxes, and import duties to be confirmed. More at kitchenery.us.

Click Here to Buy Now: $1299. Hurry, only 7/9 left! Raised over $32,000.

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