Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Sylvox Made A Bezel-less 75″ Outdoor TV That Plays 4K Movies In Rain, Sun, and Snow: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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An outdoor TV isn’t really judged by its screen, it’s judged by everything protecting the screen. Sunlight readability, a sealed chassis, and an operating range that survives both August and January are what separate a patio television from a regular one dragged outside against its will. Sylvox showed up at IFA Berlin this week leaning into that definition, then added a twist the category rarely bothers with, the Frameless Pro 2026, a 75 inch 4K set with 2000 nits, an IP56 rating, and a bezel trimmed down by 90 percent. The obvious question is whether shaving the frame down actually changes what an outdoor TV is, or just what it looks like. Either way, it’s the most interesting thing on Sylvox’s stand that isn’t running on a hand crank.

Bezels exist for a reason on any screen meant to survive weather, they’re where the gaskets, sealing, and wiring actually live, so trimming one down is a real engineering problem, not just styling. Sylvox says the Frameless Pro hits a 95 percent screen to body ratio while still holding IP56 and a range from negative 22 to 122 Fahrenheit. It wasn’t the only bezel story at IFA this year, Tecno showed a concept phone with a claimed 0mm bezel a few halls over, only for early testers to find a raised metal lip still doing the bezel’s job along one edge. That’s usually how these claims go, the border doesn’t disappear, it just moves somewhere less obvious.

Brand: Sylvox

An IP56 rating means dust can’t meaningfully get in and water thrown at the case from any angle won’t get through, which matters since most indoor TVs would die from a humid August afternoon. Brightness works the same way, 2000 nits is a requirement more than a flex, since anything dimmer washes out in direct sun, and Sylvox’s own Cinema Pro, last year’s IFA Innovation Award winner, pushes past that to 3500 and 5000 nits. The bezel claim is separate from all this. The spec sheet lists a 90 percent thinner bezel and 95 percent screen to body ratio, both about the visible border around the glass, not the television’s overall size. The unit is still 3.41 inches deep, since that depth now holds the sealing and wiring a fat frame used to carry.

Sylvox wasn’t the only brand playing this game in Berlin. Tecno debuted its Next-Gen Bezelless Concept Phone a few halls over, claiming a true 0mm display border through internal stacking and an inverted rear panel. Hands on reports found a raised metal frame still sitting above the screen, catching thumbs on swipes. Same pattern as the TV, a border hidden rather than eliminated, moved into the structure instead of removed from it. Two products, same trick, same asterisk, which is a better story than either press release admits.

At $5,299, the 75 inch Frameless Pro looks steep next to a similarly sized living room TV, but that number needs context most spec roundups skip. Anyone shopping for a 75 inch outdoor television already owns a backyard big enough to justify one, and at that point $5,299 reads less like a barrier and more like a rounding error on the pool or pergola it’s about to sit next to. Against Samsung’s Terrace and SunBrite’s Veranda, both of which still treat a thick edge as part of the design language, the Frameless Pro is a serious entry, though it deserves a more honest word than frameless, since the frame didn’t disappear, it just stopped being the first thing you notice. Sylvox’s booth also had a hand crank emergency TV in development nearby, likely the stranger story out of Berlin. For now, the Frameless Pro is a good looking outdoor TV wearing a name that oversells its own trick, aimed at people for whom that oversell was never going to matter.

The post Sylvox Made A Bezel-less 75″ Outdoor TV That Plays 4K Movies In Rain, Sun, and Snow: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Laifen Just Made Flawless Grooming Stupidly Easy (No Skill Required)

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We live in an era of life hacks, a time when everyone wants the best possible results with the least amount of fuss. We want the Michelin-star meal from a 30-minute recipe and the perfect vacation photos without a professional camera. The same is true for our personal grooming. We see the flawless curls or the perfectly smooth shave online, but the reality often involves a tangled mess of hair, a bit of skin irritation, and a whole lot of time we wish we had back. The effort and the reward just don’t always line up.

This is where clever engineering can make all the difference, by building tools that automate the tricky bits for you. Laifen seems to be running with this idea in its latest product drop. The new lineup includes an automatic curling iron for people who always wrap their hair the wrong way and a high-speed hair dryer that aims to nourish while it dries. It’s all about lowering the skill level required to look polished and put-together, which is a philosophy anyone with a busy schedule can get behind.

Laifen P3 Electric Shaver: Pocket Shaving Without Drama

The electric shaver has had a size problem for a long time. Go compact and you sacrifice power, go full-size and you’re suddenly packing something that takes up half your toiletry bag. Most portable shavers have quietly accepted this arrangement and deliver a mediocre shave, complete with pulling, patchy results, and a bit of post-shave redness for good measure. Most guys shrug it off as the price of portability. The Laifen P3 Electric Shaver was designed with a different attitude toward that particular compromise.

Inside the P3, a proprietary dual-motor system works alongside an ultra-thin stainless-steel foil and a cutting design specifically built to reduce irritation. What that means in practice is a shave that gets close to the skin quickly, without the tugging and pulling that makes cheaper portable shavers such a frustrating experience. The low-irritation design is also a genuine win for people with sensitive skin, which is a group that compact electric shavers have historically let down pretty badly. Clean results, comfortable experience, no drama.

Roughly one-third smaller than a traditional electric shaver, the P3 comes with a dedicated carrying case that slides into any bag without making you rearrange everything else to fit it. It’s the kind of shaver that makes sense for a work trip, a gym bag, or a bathroom shelf that’s already running out of counter space. The form factor is built around how people actually move through their day, and that kind of thinking tends to show in how consistently a gadget actually gets used.

Laifen also makes the more feature-heavy P3 Pro, and the two are designed for different kinds of users rather than sitting in a simple good-better hierarchy. The P3 is its own thing, aimed at someone who wants a capable, stylish everyday shaver that travels light and delivers good results without overcomplicating the morning routine. It’s an easier sell for a larger slice of people, and honestly, that makes it the more interesting product to watch.

Click Here to Buy Now: $189.99.

Laifen Swift 4 Hair Dryer: One-Step Drying and Hair Care

Most hair dryers have one job, and that’s to get your hair dry as fast as possible. Everything else, the serums, the oils, the frizz-fighting products, happens separately, usually after you’ve already spent several minutes with a loud appliance aimed at your head. It’s a fine enough system, just a slightly inconvenient one. You dry your hair, then you treat your hair, then you style your hair, and by the end of it you’ve invested a surprising amount of time into something you do every single day. There has to be a smarter way to run that sequence.

The Swift 4’s headline feature is a proprietary Nourishing Nozzle that diffuses essential oils into a micron-sized mist at a consistent 58°C while you dry. At the same time, 400 million negative ions and 70 million positive ions work to neutralize static and help balance the scalp’s environment. The result, according to Laifen, is smoother, shinier, frizz-reduced hair without extra steps after you put the dryer down. Whether you’re ready to swap your entire post-wash routine for a single nozzle is a personal call, but the concept is genuinely clever and worth paying attention to.

Speed is the other big thing the Swift 4 has going for it. A 115,000 RPM brushless motor pushes airflow at 23 meters per second, which Laifen says is enough to dry medium-length hair in around 1.5 minutes. A smart temperature control system monitors heat 1,000 times per second to prevent damage, and six customized temperature modes let you dial things in for your specific hair type. There’s also an intuitive LED ring for mode feedback and magnetic nozzle attachments that swap in and out cleanly. For anyone who has wondered whether they’re cooking their hair with the wrong heat setting, that level of real-time control is genuinely reassuring.

The Swift 4 Hair Dryer weighs just 407 grams, sits in an ergonomic handle built to reduce arm fatigue, and runs at a relatively quiet 59 decibels thanks to six layers of noise reduction technology. A Bluetooth app connection lets you set a personalized drying routine, and the magnetic filter on the back cleans in about three seconds. It has a premium aluminum alloy finish that looks sharp sitting on a vanity shelf, and at this point that’s actually a relevant design consideration. Nobody wants to leave an ugly appliance out in the open, and the Swift 4 is not an ugly appliance.

Click Here to Buy Now.

Laifen Glowy Vanity Mirror: Smart Lighting That Actually Flatters You

Makeup applied in bad lighting is one of life’s more humbling experiences. You do everything right at home, step outside, and catch a glimpse of yourself in a shop window that tells a completely different story. The culprit is almost always the light source you were working under, which was probably a single overhead bulb doing its worst. Good vanity lighting has always made a real difference to the outcome, but for a long time, getting genuinely useful light meant buying a bulky ring light and finding somewhere to put the thing.

The Glowy Vanity Mirror skips the separate ring light situation entirely by building 360-degree even illumination directly into the mirror itself. The lighting is designed to replicate natural daylight, which gives you accurate color representation while applying makeup or skincare rather than the warm, flattering-but-deceptive glow that makes bathroom lighting so unreliable. There’s a large, high-definition mirror surface paired with that illumination, so every detail is visible without squinting or leaning uncomfortably close to the glass. It’s a pretty straightforward idea executed in a way that actually makes the bathroom routine more useful.

Smart features are woven in without feeling gimmicky. The mirror uses automatic motion sensing to wake up when you approach, remembers your preferred lighting settings, and offers adjustable modes for different needs. A long-lasting rechargeable battery means there’s no cord hunting involved, and the portable design lets it move around without being a production. These are the kinds of conveniences that sound minor on a spec sheet but add up to a noticeably smoother experience once they’re part of your daily routine.

The hardware itself is built around an aluminum alloy stand with a refined finish that looks at home on a vanity rather than on a film set. Eye-safe, low blue light illumination keeps things comfortable during longer sessions, reducing the kind of eye strain that comes from staring into a bright light source for extended periods. It’s a product that sits at an interesting crossroads between functional tool and considered design object, and that combination is increasingly what the best personal care gadgets look like in 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now.

Laifen AutoCurl Curling Iron: Salon Curls Without the Learning Curve

Curling irons work beautifully in the hands of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing, and they produce uneven, inconsistent, occasionally singed results in the hands of everyone else. Getting a good curl requires a specific technique with the wrist, the right timing, and a sense of which direction to wrap the hair that somehow never feels intuitive. It’s one of those skills that looks deceptively simple in a tutorial video and considerably less simple when you’re standing in your bathroom at 7am trying to replicate it.

The AutoCurl Curling Iron’s core trick is that it handles the wrapping for you. A smart system detects where the hair is placed, automatically selects the correct curl direction, and adjusts in real time to prevent tangling or pulling. Users can let the device run fully automatically in Auto Mode, or switch to Manual Mode for more hands-on control when they want it. That’s a genuinely useful split, because it makes the tool accessible for beginners without feeling restrictive for people who already know their way around a barrel.

Speed is another area where the AutoCurl earns its keep. Laifen says it delivers bouncy, full-head curls in around 16 seconds per section, with even heat distribution that keeps results consistent from the first curl to the last. Custom temperature settings adapt to different hair types, and 200 million negative ions work through the styling process to reduce frizz and add shine. Intelligent temperature control keeps heat at a safe level throughout, so you’re getting faster results without quietly frying your hair in the process.

The safety features are thoughtful without being excessive. A protective curl chamber shields the hair-contact area, auto shut-off kicks in when the device is left unattended, and the operation is near-silent, which is a bigger quality-of-life detail than it sounds. Dual-voltage support and a lightweight build round things out nicely for anyone who travels frequently. It’s a curling iron that has clearly been designed with people who have given up on curling irons in mind, and that’s a very specific and very valid target audience.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99.99.

The post Laifen Just Made Flawless Grooming Stupidly Easy (No Skill Required) first appeared on Yanko Design.

Smart Glasses, Robot Dogs, AI Tamagotchis, and Desk-Sized Supercomputers: How IFA 2026 Redefined Robots

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The creator economy reshaped who makes content, and then quietly reshaped what tools are worth building. When millions of people are shooting, editing, scanning, and streaming from wherever they happen to be, the market for professional-grade hardware that works without a full production crew gets very real, very fast. That’s the underlying logic behind a lot of what’s in this roundup, running from portable LiDAR scanners and robotic camera arms all the way to ambient AI screens that sit on your desk and quietly keep track of everything.

Companionship, it turns out, is harder to engineer than most consumer tech companies have been willing to admit. Hengbot’s Sirius is a robot dog that owners can train like a real one, using a Creator Studio that requires no coding. Takway AI’s Sweekar hatches from an egg and grows through four life stages, shaped entirely by how its owner treats it. Mind with Heart Robotics built AnAn, a panda-shaped companion that has been piloted in eldercare and dementia care settings in Hong Kong and Shanghai. These are serious attempts at a genuinely hard question: what does it look like when AI lives with you, rather than just working for you? Here’s a look at some such brands and their innovative products at the Global Connect Show at IFA 2026.

INMO GO3: When Your Glasses Speak 98 Languages So You Don’t Have To

Smart glasses have had a rough decade of almost. Google Glass made everyone nervous at restaurants. The Ray-Ban Metas got people excited again, but a camera and a speaker do not a smart display make (not to mention the PR disaster they’ve been having this past year). INMO has been quietly chipping away at the real version of this category for a while now, with the Air series handling light office and audio-visual entertainment, and the GO series zeroing in on translation. The GO3 is that third iteration, and the brief is tighter and more useful than anything the brand has shipped before: a lightweight pair of glasses combining a discreet monochrome display with real-time AI assistance, in a form factor that resembles regular eyewear.

The translation engine handles 77 source languages and 98 target languages, with offline support for nine of them when you’re somewhere the internet has opinions about itself. The engineering detail that deserves more attention, though, is the battery system. Magnetic battery replacement takes approximately five seconds, and removed batteries automatically recharge in the case, enabling uninterrupted use throughout the day. The dual-eye green Micro-LED display with diffractive waveguide optics hits up to 1,500 nits at 640×480 resolution, staying visually discreet enough that nobody beside you would know you’re reading meeting notes. A built-in camera privacy cover physically shields the camera for more comfortable use in public or social settings, which is one of those small decisions that says a lot about how seriously a company has thought through the real-world context its product actually lives in.

Hengbot Sirius: The Robot Dog That Actually Learns New Tricks

When we covered Sirius on Yanko Design last year, we noted that it sat in a gap the robot dog market had left frustratingly empty for years, somewhere between Boston Dynamics-level industrial machines that cost more than a car and toy-grade STEM kits that shuffled around like arthritic spiders. Hengbot filled that gap, and the Kickstarter campaign backed that read up with over $308,000 raised. At IFA, the story moves forward: the focus is on how continued development in voice interaction and motion control is making Sirius easier to communicate with and more capable in physical movement. You tell it to sit, move forward, or shake hands, and Sirius translates these instructions into physical actions, letting people interact with the robot without relying entirely on conventional controls.

The motion engineering is where it gets genuinely interesting. Rather than releasing physical force abruptly, Sirius can reduce it progressively, which allows certain movements and physical responses to feel smoother and less rigid while reducing sudden loads on the mechanical system. If it falls over, it can perform a recovery sequence and return to a standing position, recovering from common physical interruptions without requiring the user to reposition it manually. Packed into a body weighing just over a kilogram, with a removable 2,250 mAh battery, 30W PD charging, and developer support spanning Python, C, C++, and ROS 2 interfaces, Sirius is targeting consumers and creators in equal measure, which is a harder pitch to land than it sounds, and one Hengbot is getting noticeably better at making.

Rokid Glasses: The AI Glasses That Let You Choose Your AI

If the INMO GO3 is purpose-built around translation and teleprompters, the Rokid Glasses are playing a broader game entirely. Rokid has been in this space since 2014, long before smart glasses were a mainstream conversation, and we’ve covered the brand’s journey on Yanko Design from its early AR gaming hardware all the way through to a full profile on how it’s building the glasses that Google couldn’t. The Rokid Ai Glasses Style Pack, announced at CES 2026 and covered here in March, brings that decade-plus of development into what is comfortably the most ambitious feature set in the display-less glasses category. At just 38.5 grams, in a TR90 frame with titanium alloy hinges and a 12MP Sony IMX681 camera with electronic image stabilization, the hardware alone makes a strong case. The Power Capsule that comes bundled in the Style Pack delivers 6+ charges and gets the glasses back to 80% in 20 minutes, so battery anxiety largely exits the conversation.

Rokid is the world’s first manufacturer to natively support Google’s Gemini on a pair of AI smart glasses, with the Ai Glasses Style integrating both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini to answer almost any question. That’s not just a spec flex, it’s a genuine design philosophy – the glasses function as an open platform rather than a locked ecosystem, which is exactly the kind of thinking that will matter as AI models continue to evolve fast. The Agent Store, a centralized platform where developers can create and share AI apps for Rokid’s smart glasses, has already attracted more than 3,000 submissions for new agent workflows, with more than 400 agents published and available to users. Real-time translation in 89 languages, object and scene recognition, live transcription, and posture monitoring round out a feature set that makes these feel less like a gadget and more like a platform you happen to wear on your face.

Mind With Heart Robotics AnAn: The Companion Robot That Sits With You, Not For You

The conversation around companion robots has been building for a while on Yanko Design, from Sony’s Aibo to Hengbot’s Sirius to Sweekar, and a pattern is becoming clear: the more a robot is designed to perform, the less it feels like company. Mind With Heart Robotics took a different path entirely, and AnAn is the result. A panda-shaped companion robot built from soft, lifelike materials with full-body tactile sensing, AnAn is designed for companionship and elderly support first, and everything else second. The live demonstrations at IFA show AnAn’s full-body tactile sensing system responding to touch through gentle movements and emotional feedback, along with proactive interaction, gentle reminder functions, and its ability to learn a user’s interaction habits over time through long-term memory. That last part matters more than the spec sheet: a companion that actually remembers you is a fundamentally different product from one that resets. Mind With Heart Robotics develops emotionally intelligent companion robots across multiple form factors designed for emotional support, elderly companionship, children’s well-being, and institutional care, guided by its mission to Heal The World, backed by a patent portfolio of more than 30 filings and 18 patents granted to date.

IFA Berlin marks AnAn’s European debut, appearing at IFA’s official Robots on the Runway showcase, following its recognition as a CES 2026 Innovation Awards Honoree in the Artificial Intelligence category. The company is also debuting its Duncan Series companion robots in Europe, which are designed for neurodivergent children as well as typically developing children in early education. So the product family spans elderly care on one end and early childhood development on the other, which is a more considered and humane product brief than most robotics companies have attempted. AnAn goes on sale in Europe in September 2026 at retail pricing between $1,000 and $1,500, with distributor agreements already signed in Germany and Belgium, a completed production run of 100 units with samples available for immediate shipment, and a dedicated European repair and after-sales center in Belgium supporting customers across the region. The B2B version includes secure dashboards tracking behavioral trends and interaction patterns for care providers, meaning the product has been thought through at the institutional level too, for care homes, therapy settings, and clinical environments where the robot needs to report back as well as show up. Soft on the outside, seriously engineered on the inside.

XGrids Lixel CyberColor + PortalCam: The World Isn’t Flat, and Now Your Camera Knows It

3D Gaussian Splatting sounds like something a physics PhD invented to win an argument at a dinner party, but it has quietly become one of the most consequential breakthroughs in spatial computing in years. The short version: rather than building a 3D scene out of polygons the way traditional CGI does, 3DGS represents a space using millions of tiny colored blobs, or “gaussians,” that together produce photo-realistic environments you can actually navigate through in real time. XGrids has been building its entire product stack around this technology, and the two products at IFA represent opposite ends of the same pipeline. The PortalCam is billed as the first handheld device that captures reality as interactive 3D environments using 3DGS technology, combining LiDAR, a four-camera array, and automated processing to create photorealistic spatial models you can walk through, edit, and share across platforms. At under 900 grams, it can scan 100 square metres in 10 minutes at walking speed. The LiDAR system fires 856,000 points per second across a 180-degree azimuth by 180-degree elevation field of view, while the four-camera array pairs two fisheye lenses with two front-facing cameras, each fisheye covering 200 degrees. That’s a lot of spatial data coming in very fast, from a device you can carry in a backpack.

The Lixel CyberColor platform, or LCC, is where all that captured data becomes something usable. It combines Multi-SLAM precision with optimized 3D Gaussian Splatting to create measurement-grade, photorealistic, lightweight 3D models, bridging the gap between technical accuracy and immersive visualization for professionals across industries. The compression story is particularly worth noting: a breakthrough 90% compression technology dramatically reduces file sizes without compromising quality, enabling smooth playback on cloud, edge, and mobile. That solves the problem that has always made spatial content impractical outside of specialized production environments, the files are simply too large to move around and too heavy to stream. Ready-made integration with Unity, Unreal Engine, WebGL via Cesium and Three.js, mobile apps, and XR applications means the output plugs directly into workflows that architects, game developers, and filmmakers are already using. And then there’s the surprise announcement at the show: LCC Scan, a new iOS application that enables users to transform ordinary photos and videos into detailed 3DGS models directly on their iPhones. The professional pipeline and the consumer entry point, both at IFA, in the same week. That’s a confident move.

Sweekar: You Don’t Train This Robot… You Nurture It.

Hengbot’s Sirius is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering, a robot you put through its paces, teach tricks, and watch execute a controlled landing from an elevated surface. It rewards the tinkerer. Sweekar, from Takway AI, is asking a completely different question: what if the robot didn’t perform for you, but grew because of you? Not every AI companion needs to be a workhorse. Sometimes the whole point is that it just shows up, and keeps showing up. Sweekar is an AI pocket pet inspired by the iconic Tamagotchi, but rebuilt as a living, evolving AI companion. It hatches from a physical egg, grows through four life stages, and develops a personality shaped by the relationship you build with it. The growth mechanic has real engineering behind it: every interaction, feeding, talking, cleaning, picking it up, generates XP, and when Sweekar levels up, it physically grows a few millimetres taller, driven by a precision stepper motor, plays a special evolution animation, and unlocks new behaviors, new language, and new personality dimensions. That’s a stepper motor doing emotional labor, which is a sentence that shouldn’t work but somehow absolutely does.

The part that actually separates Sweekar from everything else in this category is the memory system. Most AI companions have the same gap: sessions reset, context vanishes, and the relationship never actually deepens. Users report the same frustration: it feels like starting over with a friendly stranger every single time. Sweekar’s long-term emotional memory retains the owner’s voice, daily habits, shared stories, favorite things, and small victories, and surfaces them naturally in future conversations. The longer you raise it, the more it sounds like it genuinely knows you. Voice recognition is trained specifically to the primary owner, and the personality develops through an MBTI-inspired behavioral framework, meaning two people who buy the same unit on the same day will have fundamentally different companions very soon, because every person raises things differently. At 89 grams it fits in a pocket, runs on a phone hotspot so it travels with you, and from Level 30 onward, Sweekar cannot die. The emotional investment compounds for years. What you build together is yours and it keeps going. That last detail is the one that sticks. Someone actually engineered emotional longevity into the product brief, and that’s worth paying attention to.

Navimow H5 Pro: The Robotic Mower That Finally Does the Edges

Robotic lawn mowers have gotten remarkably good at the easy 80% of the job and left everyone dealing with the same annoying leftover, the trim along fences, flower beds, and hedgerows that no autonomous mower could quite reach. Segway Navimow, the world’s No. 1 wire-free robotic lawn mower brand by retail sales volume for two consecutive years, built the H5 Pro specifically to close that gap, using a breakthrough EdgeMaestro extendable robotic arm for true zero-edge mowing. The arm pushes the cutting system out 7.7cm beyond the mower’s body, letting it trim flush against borders and obstacles instead of leaving that familiar uncut strip that sends homeowners out with a separate trimmer every weekend. It’s a genuinely clever mechanical solution to a problem that’s been treated as an acceptable limitation for years, mostly because nobody had bothered to engineer around it properly.

What makes the H5 Pro worth watching at IFA specifically is that this is Navimow’s first appearance at the show, after building its reputation almost entirely on the gardening and outdoor living expo circuit. That’s a notable shift in venue for a brand whose audience has traditionally been landscapers and homeowners rather than gadget crowds, and it says something about how robotic garden tech is increasingly being read as consumer tech rather than a niche horticultural category. The H5 Pro also carries a thermal sensor that protects hedgehogs and other small animals even in low-light conditions, a detail that fits Segway’s stated push toward mowing technology that’s thoughtful about the wildlife sharing the same lawn, not just efficient at cutting grass. Alongside the existing X4, H2, i2, and Terranox lines, the H5 Pro rounds out a lineup built for gardens of every size and complexity, and its arrival at a tech show rather than a gardening fair suggests Navimow is angling for a bigger, more design-conscious audience going forward.

QIVIKA Smart Scope: Photograph Saturn’s Rings, From Your Pocket

Smartphone camera hardware has had a wild few years. Periscope lenses pushed optical zoom past 5x, then 10x, then further, and the gap between a phone and a dedicated camera narrowed considerably. But there’s a ceiling, and the people who actually want to see lunar craters in detail, or pick out a bird species from 200 metres away, still had to choose between carrying dedicated optics that require setup and expertise, or making do with a phone camera that simply couldn’t bridge the distance. QIVIKA’s Smart Scope is a direct answer to that gap. Using a precision periscope optical architecture to fold the optical path into a compact form factor, it delivers 25x optical magnification and up to 3000mm equivalent focal length at approximately 300g, bringing high-performance long-range optics into a genuinely portable smartphone-based system. ED low-dispersion glass and multi-coated optics help preserve clarity and contrast, bringing distant subjects from lunar details to birds and wildlife within reach of a smartphone. That’s a meaningful spec for the price point, and the form factor is the real story: it clips onto your smartphone.

The hardware is only half the pitch. QIVIKA combines long-range optics with on-device AI composition. The AI analyzes the live view directly on the device and provides real-time framing assistance, helping users capture distant subjects more effectively, without cloud processing or an internet connection. This brings computational intelligence directly into the long-range imaging experience. The app splits into three intelligent shooting modes covering solar, explore, and deep sky use, with a Smart Sky Guide that overlays constellation lines and guides users to celestial targets with on-screen directional arrows, functioning essentially as GPS for the night sky. The birding side of the app is equally considered: AI identification supports 10,000+ bird species, while Life Lists, personal birding maps, community-shared locations, and observation records turn individual sightings into a growing personal exploration history. The whole experience is built around the loop of observe, capture, identify, remember, and explore, which means the product gets more valuable the more you use it, rather than plateauing once the novelty of the optics wears off. At $359 with a Kickstarter launch coinciding with IFA, it’s targeting exactly the kind of curious outdoor person who wants to look further without becoming an astronomer.

Yanhe Technology: The Solar Cell That Fits Inside Your Smart Glasses

Most of the products in this roundup are end products, things you hold, wear, scan with, or talk to. Yanhe Technology is something different. It’s the infrastructure layer that makes the whole category more interesting. The pitch is elegantly simple: perovskite solar cells thin and efficient enough to build directly into everyday devices, so the smartwatch on your wrist, the AI glasses on your face, or the smart lock on your front door can top itself up from whatever light happens to be in the room. The indoor low-light power solution activates at an illuminance below 20 lux, achieves power conversion efficiency of more than 30% under low-light conditions, and carries an indoor service life exceeding 10 years, supporting devices such as keyboards, mice, smart locks, remote controls, AIoT sensors, and electronic shelf labels while reducing reliance on batteries or power cables. The component thickness sits below 0.5mm with an areal density below 0.15g per square centimetre, which means it conforms to curved and arbitrary freeform surfaces, including smart wearables and automotive aerodynamic contours. A module with a 1.7 square centimetre aperture can initiate power generation at just 20 lux, which is dimmer than most indoor spaces ever get.

The manufacturing story is what separates Yanhe from a university lab with a press release. The company has built the world’s first 100MW fully automated production line for consumer-grade perovskite modules, supporting 24-hour lights-out manufacturing, consistent product quality, and volume delivery. Yanhe is among the world’s first perovskite companies to receive TÜV Rheinland certification in accordance with IEC 63163. Its products are now available in more than 50 countries and integrated into the supply chains of over 100 brands, with collaborations established with Lenovo, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Founded in 2024 by a team out of Peking University and Columbia, that’s a remarkable amount of ground covered in a very short time. The bonus detail that makes this feel genuinely sci-fi: alongside its consumer business, Yanhe is developing perovskite photovoltaic solutions for space applications, has completed an engineering prototype of a flexible roll-out solar wing, and has begun ground-based engineering validation, with a satellite model and a space photovoltaic module also on display at IFA. So yes, they’re powering your keyboard from room light and also building solar wings for satellites. Just a Tuesday for Yanhe, apparently.

ACEMAGIC F9A Series: When the Server Room Fits on Your Desk

Running a local LLM at 200-billion-parameter scale on a 1.3-kilogram box that sits next to your monitor sounds like a footnote in a spec sheet, but the ACEMAGIC F9A Mini Workstation makes it the headline. The chassis comes in two configurations: the F9A-395 powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of max memory at 8000MT/s, and the F9A-PRO 495 with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 scaling up to 192GB at 8533MT/s. On the AI inference side, the 395 supports up to 96GB of shared memory on Windows for MoE models up to 200B parameters, while the PRO 495 pushes that to 160GB of shared memory and models up to 300B parameters. Both variants share the same aerospace-grade aluminum unibody with a fingerprint-resistant finish, a hidden bottom air intake for improved airflow, and 3,000-plus ventilation holes across both sides for sustained full-power CPU performance. Keeping that thermal headroom intact is a five-heat-pipe turbo fan with a 3D air duct, sustaining 140W peak and 120W TDP without throttling during long-running AI workloads. OCuLink via PCIe 4.0×4 adds flexible expansion for external GPUs, compute cards, data acquisition cards, and industry-specific devices through an expansion dock.

The connectivity list punches well above the 2-liter form factor. Dual 2.5GbE ports handle high-speed wired data transfer for cloud computing and external services, while Wi-Fi 7 delivers twice the bandwidth of Wi-Fi 6 with support for 4096-QAM, Multi-RU, and Multi-Link Operation. HDMI 2.1, dual USB4, and DP2.1 combine to support four simultaneous 8K@60Hz displays for multi-screen creative setups. A quad-DMIC microphone array provides 360-degree far-field voice recognition with a built-in noise-canceling mic chip and 2W x 2 DTS speakers, making it viable for meeting rooms and home AI hubs. Dual M.2 NVMe slots on PCIe 4.0×4 support up to 8TB with RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations, and both SSDs get thermal pads and aluminum plates for cooling. The broader pitch ACEMAGIC is making is a clean one: plug-and-play from a standard outlet, no server room, quiet and energy-efficient, a one-time investment with no recurring costs, and local processing for data security.

GEEKOM Mini PCs: The Mini PC That Makes Your Tower Look Embarrassed

Mini PCs have had a quiet decade of steady credibility-building. What started as underpowered boxes for digital signage and light home-theater use has, thanks largely to AMD’s Ryzen and Intel’s latest mobile silicon, turned into a genuine alternative to full desktop builds for a surprising range of workloads. GEEKOM has been one of the more consistent players in that space, and we’ve covered the brand on Yanko Design before, noting that the case for a palm-sized PC has never been more compelling than right now, when the chips inside them have stopped making excuses. At IFA, GEEKOM is showing two products that sit at very different points on the performance spectrum, and together they make a pretty complete argument for the category. The A9 Mega is the AMD flagship, built around the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with its 12-core, 24-thread architecture, 50 TOPS of NPU performance, and up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 RAM. That NPU figure puts it squarely in Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC certification territory, meaning this is hardware built for the current wave of on-device AI workloads, local large language models, real-time transcription, and AI-assisted creative workflows, running entirely without a cloud connection.

The IT13 Max is the Intel counterpart, and it plays a slightly different game. Built on the Intel Core i9-13980HX, a 24-core, 32-thread processor with a 5.6GHz peak boost clock, it supports up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM and up to 4TB of NVMe storage across two M.2 slots. That memory ceiling is unusual for a device this size, and it’s what makes the IT13 Max interesting for professionals running virtual machines, large datasets, or memory-intensive creative applications who genuinely cannot justify a full tower but also cannot afford to compromise. Both units support triple 4K display output, meaning a three-monitor productivity setup from a box smaller than most external hard drives, which remains one of those specs that sounds made up until you’re actually looking at the back panel. GEEKOM backs both products with a three-year warranty, which is the unsexy detail that actually closes the deal for anyone considering replacing a desktop. The whole pitch across both machines is that raw performance and physical footprint stopped being a trade-off a while ago, and these are the receipts.

The post Smart Glasses, Robot Dogs, AI Tamagotchis, and Desk-Sized Supercomputers: How IFA 2026 Redefined Robots first appeared on Yanko Design.

Your Body Is the New Tech Platform: The Wildest Wearables at IFA 2026

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Tech shows have always been about what’s next, and for a while that meant displays, processors, and connectivity standards nobody could fully explain. The “next” that keeps showing up now is a lot more personal. AI that tracks your muscle tension and adjusts a massage roller’s pressure in real time. Exoskeleton hardware that detects your activity type and switches support modes in under 200 milliseconds. Earbuds running a transcription service across 78 languages in the background while you go about your day. The body has become the most actively developed platform in consumer technology, and the hardware being built around it is finally starting to match the ambition.

Hearing protection for children. Clinic-style oral care without the clinic. Underwater AR navigation that projects real-time depth, air, and directional data into a diver’s field of view. Scalp wellness built around making hair loss treatment less of a chore to stick to. An AI sports camera that follows the action in 4K without anyone behind the lens. These brands at the Global Connect Show at IFA 2026 cover wildly different ground, and that breadth is exactly what makes them worth pulling into one roundup. Here’s our full breakdown.

Covamio S1: Five Therapies, One Shoulder Wrap

The shoulder is a weird body part to build around. Covamio picked it deliberately as one of the most complex wearable rehabilitation scenarios, citing high daily use, complex movement and stability demands, common pain and stiffness, and a clear need for ongoing support. The S1 is their answer to what a device shaped specifically around that complexity should look like. The core proposition is consolidating five therapy modalities into one wearable: their proprietary M-sti matrix electrical pulse system running TENS and NMES programs for pain and muscle activation, red and near-infrared light for photobiomodulation, zoned heat for pre-session warmup, adaptive compression to hold everything in contact while the shoulder moves, and AI-assisted sensing monitoring fit, contact, temperature, and output during each session. The specific choice to use dry electrodes stands out, since it removes the gel-pad consumable that most TENS units depend on, which is quietly one of the more practical design decisions in the whole package.

Where the S1 gets more ambitious is the platform layer. Covamio frames this as the first node in a system rather than a standalone gadget, with a three-part software platform covering device-side sensing and control, user applications for guided sessions and activity history, and professional tools that aggregate device activity, user feedback, and progress for clinician review. The roadmap is stated openly: S1 establishes a foundation for future systems built around other joints, each wearable shaped to its own anatomy but connecting through the same platform. That’s a meaningful architectural bet, positioning the wrap as infrastructure rather than a one-off product. Worth flagging, this is still pre-commercial, and hard specs like pricing, dimensions, weight, battery figures, and wavelength details for the light therapy are not yet public. What’s available is the design reasoning, and on that front, it’s a thoughtful pitch for what shoulder recovery hardware should be doing right now.

XbotGo Falcon: The Sideline Camera That Already Knows Where the Ball is Going

AI auto-tracking cameras for sports have been around for a bit, mostly in the form of school and club-level systems that require installation, licensing fees, and a monthly subscription just to access the footage you already paid to record. XbotGo is taking direct aim at that model. The Falcon is a compact, 544-gram, dual-lens camera built around a 1/1.8″ Sony CMOS sensor shooting true 4K, with a 106-degree wide-angle tracking lens working alongside the recording lens so the system always knows where the action is. A 6-TOPS AI processor handles the motion intelligence onboard, with 360-degree panoramic rotation and 160 degrees of ground-to-sky tilt giving it coverage across sports as varied as soccer, basketball, lacrosse, pickleball, and badminton. Zone Mapping lets you lock the play area through the XbotGo app so the tracking stays disciplined and doesn’t chase the wrong thing. Battery life runs to 4.5 hours, it’s IPX5 rain-resistant, and setup is fast enough that you’re recording before the warm-up is over.

The pricing sits at $799, and critically, the core AI tracking and recording intelligence comes with no ongoing subscription, which is a meaningful differentiator in a market where competitors have leaned hard into recurring revenue from the very features users expect to work out of the box. On top of that, live streaming to YouTube and Facebook is built in and free, with a Live Scoreboard overlay and AI-generated highlight reels that clip the best moments automatically. XbotGo was founded by Dr. David Tan, a computer vision researcher who reportedly built the Falcon partly out of frustration from trying to film his own kid’s games. That origin story shows in the design philosophy: this is a camera built for the parent on the sideline and the coach with no camera operator, not for a broadcast crew with a van full of gear.

iClever QuietShield Q950: The Kids’ Headphone That Actually Takes Hearing Seriously

We covered the iClever Q950 back in July when it quietly became one of the more impressive sub-$70 audio products of the year, with our writer noting it was good enough they might use it themselves. The headline credential hasn’t changed: the Q950 is the world’s first kids’ headphone to earn TÜV Rheinland Hearing Care Certification, capping volume at 80dBA and delivering hybrid ANC with up to 35dB of noise reduction. That ANC works in wired mode too, which matters on planes and in classrooms where a dead battery shouldn’t mean a loud environment. It also picked up the 2026 Red Dot Award for Industrial Design, which makes it a rare thing in consumer audio: a children’s product that got taken seriously by industrial design judges.

The build is worth talking about. High-strength POK headband construction and reinforced metal hinges provide enhanced resistance to bending and drops, validated through SGS-certified 3,000-cycle twist durability and drop testing. The ear cups rotate 90 degrees to reduce pressure on younger heads, there’s auto-pause when the headphones come off, and Bluetooth 6.0 keeps the connection stable and low-latency. Battery life runs to 60 hours with ANC off, 35 hours with it on. At $54.99 on sale, this is the headphone category doing the right thing at the right price.

Viaim Rise: The Earbud Case That Thinks Faster Than You Do

The AI note-taking space has gotten crowded fast. Standalone recorders, transcription apps, dedicated meeting hardware. What Viaim is doing with the Rise is trying to collapse all of that into something you were already going to put in your ears. The Rise is an AI Agent Earbuds system built around premium earbuds and a press-to-rise smart case that captures every meeting, call, and piece of content shaping your work, then turns it into editable notes, ready-to-send follow-ups, and agent-handled tasks. The case interaction is the hook: a mechanical press-to-rise structure opens the case and triggers instant capture with no app, no unlock, no interruption. One tap records calls, live meetings, media, and simultaneous interpretation across 78 languages and 145 accents, and the smart case captures even when the buds are off. Switch on Ambient Listening and it builds memory in the background without retaining the underlying audio.

The hardware underneath is serious. An 11mm and 6mm dual driver sits alongside an 11-mic array with VPU bone-conduction denoising, and the USB-C smart case doubles as a 3-mic PC recorder, with Bluetooth 5.4, Apple MFi, Google Fast Pair, Find My, and IP55 rated. On the software side, Space Intelligence connects recordings, documents, and project history, while Vitana, viaim’s built-in AI assistant, surfaces new risks, decisions, and next steps the moment they emerge. Task Broker routes user-approved actions into Google Workspace, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot, with more integrations rolling out through 2027. The Rise launched on Indiegogo on August 31, 2026, which makes IFA its first major hardware show outing, and the timing feels deliberate. This is a product that wants to be seen.

AREX ONE: The Dive Mask That Turns Your Entire Field of View Into a Dashboard

Dive computers have always had an uncomfortable irony at their core. The device keeping you safe underwater sits on your wrist, which means every critical check requires you to pull your gaze away from the environment you’re actively navigating. Underwater, that life-saving data living on your wrist means constant checking and occupying your hands during critical moments, and when your attention leaves the dive, risks arise. AREX is building its entire pitch around fixing that. The AREX ONE is positioned as the world’s first AR dive computer mask, projecting all the information you’d normally glance down at directly into your natural field of view. It’s the kind of form-factor shift that sounds obvious in hindsight, and the kind that tends to make an entire product category look overdue.

The feature set covers a built-in dive computer, AR data, a marine ID scanner, personalized RGB lights, a 120-meter depth rating at 13 ATM, tank data display, 40-hour battery life, in-sight air integration, an intuitive control dial, and a unified digital ecosystem. The dive computer side runs on an independent logic board processing real-time sensor data and ZHL-16C algorithms, which is the same decompression standard used in serious technical dive computers from Shearwater and Suunto. The modes scale from a minimal immersive mode all the way to a full technical mode with PPO2, tissue saturation charts, and gradient factors. Then there’s the marine life identification feature, which frames marine life in your natural field of view to instantly scan and identify species, turning a hammerhead passing by into a labeled data card without breaking your focus. It comes with three attachable modules: a Marine ID Scanner, a TX Pressure Pod, and a Sync Dive Torch, each feeding into the same in-mask display. The Kickstarter launch puts it in the crowdfunding category for now, but the hardware ambition here reads like something that’s been genuinely thought through, not just rendered.

Ascentiz H Series: Exoskeleton Hardware for Hikers, Commuters, and Everyone in Between

Ascentiz has been at this since 2023, building modular exoskeleton hardware that clips onto your hips or knees depending on what your body needs that day. We’ve covered them on YD before, and the brand has only gotten sharper since. The bigger picture Ascentiz is working toward is a full modular ecosystem, lower body now, upper body eventually, rather than a single fixed device you’re stuck with. The H Pro and H Ultra are the current center of that ecosystem, and both run on an AI MOTION engine that recognizes 12 terrain types on the Pro and 16 on the Ultra, covering everything from slow walks and sprints to stair climbing, cycling, and full hike up and down modes. Both models come in at around 2.5kg, operate at under 35dB, and carry IP54 weatherproofing, which covers the kind of conditions you’d actually want to wear an exoskeleton in. Kinetic energy recovery comes standard on both, charging the battery while the system is actively driving you forward.

The H Pro is the everyday option, built for fitness, commuting, and lighter outdoor use, with a 25km assisted range and a price of $1,499. The H Ultra is built for longer, harder journeys, with Toray T700 carbon fiber and a titanium-alloy Exo-Belt, a dual-battery setup, and an assisted range of up to 50km. It also adds a Boost Mode the Pro doesn’t carry, bumps motor torque from 22Nm to 24Nm, and upgrades the fabric from waterproof-coated nylon to Event waterproof and breathable material, which is the kind of detail that separates a product that’s been actually tested outdoors from one that hasn’t. Both units are airplane-portable and charge fully in 65 minutes via Type-C at up to 100W. The Ultra sits at $1,999, and between the materials, the range, and the extra terrain intelligence, the $500 gap makes reasonable sense. The hardware has already picked up the iF Design Award, Red Dot, and several others, which tracks for a company that’s clearly been thinking hard about what wearing one of these things should actually feel like.

ROOTIQUE DUO: Because the Real Problem With Hair Loss Treatment Is Discipline

The data sitting behind ROOTIQUE is blunter than most brands would choose to lead with. A 2023 study in Dermatology and Therapy found that 86.3% of patients discontinued topical minoxidil treatment, not because it failed to work, but because the application process was messy, inconsistent, and easy to skip. ROOTIQUE is built entirely around that dropout problem. The DUO is the world’s first micro-misting hair tonic applicator, and its core argument is simple: consistency is the treatment as much as the tonic. IntelliMist converts tonic into 0.005mm mist particles delivered directly to the follicles, bypassing the hair fibres that absorb most of what people apply by hand. The result, per independent fluorescence-tracer testing, is up to 3.5x absorption compared to bare-hand application.

The DuoTrace teeth part the hair gently for direct-to-scalp delivery, a 660nm red light at clinically recognized wavelength supports follicle health simultaneously, and the whole session takes 15 seconds with zero residue on the hands. The 5ml tank holds enough for multiple sessions, charges to up to 40 uses, and is travel-ready without cords. One beep signals 1ml dispensed, two beeps means you’re done, so there’s no guesswork on dosage. ROOTIQUE claims 50% less tonic wasted compared to manual application, and 56% of customers self-reported increased consistency after switching to DUO. For a product category where quitting early is the norm, turning a messy two-minute ritual into a 15-second routine is, genuinely, the whole product.

GLYDE Auto-Fade Clipper: The Clipper That Finally Handles the Part You Can’t See

For most people who cut their own hair, the actual clipping is manageable. The part that breaks everything is the fade, that gradual transition between different lengths on the sides and back that barbers make look effortless. A home user can’t see the back of their own head, can’t simultaneously judge angle, distance, and cutting length, and one wrong pass leaves a harsh line that’s impossible to fix without cutting shorter. GLYDE, the debut product from Shenzhen-based Kuaiku Innovation, is built entirely around solving that one problem. Working with a wearable Fade Band, GLYDE tracks where the clipper is relative to the fade line and adjusts the blade in real time, handling the gradual blending that makes fades so difficult and helping users get cleaner, more consistent results at home. It also solves the consistency problem by storing hairstyle profiles digitally. Once users dial in a fade they like, they save it and recall it with a single tap, and the clipper reproduces the exact same parameters every session.

That search for the right product took nearly three years, with no auto-fade clipper to reference, no established technical roadmap, and no competitor to reverse-engineer. Every mechanism and algorithm had to be defined and validated from scratch. What IFA is seeing is the result of that work, refined after an on-site CES survey where more than 60 percent of respondents said their primary concern was maintaining the sides and back, not getting a full haircut. GLYDE deliberately breaks from the traditional clipper aesthetic, with a cold-toned minimal body, polished stainless steel accents, and a signature LED light orb that reads more like consumer electronics than a grooming tool. Hardware specs for the current prototype include a 2600 mAh battery, approximately two hours of runtime, Bluetooth Low Energy, USB-C charging, a 1.47-inch display, and a weight of about 370 grams. It is still a pre-production prototype with pricing TBD, but the product logic is already sharp: GLYDE believes that a portion of men’s haircutting, especially fade maintenance, will follow the same trajectory shaving did when the electric razor moved it from barbershop to bathroom counter.

OCJOY Air-Streaming Oral Cleaner: The Dental Clinic Protocol That Now Lives on Your Bathroom Counter

Plaque gets all the marketing attention in oral care, but the real problem is biofilm, the structured bacterial colony that anchors to enamel, builds a protective shield, and starts rebuilding within hours of brushing. Bristles only clean where they make contact, leaving grooves, pits, and gumline areas routinely untouched. Water flossers reach the gaps but carry no active cleaning agent. OCJOY’s answer is Air-Streaming Technology, built on Guided Biofilm Therapy (GBT), a Swiss clinical protocol designed to gently lift biofilm using precisely controlled air, water, and fine food-grade powder. Until now, GBT has been available only in dental practices; OCJOY makes it practical for daily use, delivering a clean that bristles or water alone cannot achieve. The proprietary TriMatter system propels millions of fine particles across enamel surfaces and into grooves, pits, and interdental gaps, disrupting biofilm exactly where water flossers cannot reach.

Independent lab testing puts numbers behind those claims. In 20 seconds, OCJOY removed 99.9% of biofilm, compared to 9.2% left behind by an electric toothbrush under the same conditions. Surface stains from coffee, tea, wine, and tobacco cleared at 88% to 100% without bleach, and a 100-participant study recorded visible whitening of 2-3 shades within 3-7 days. Traditional oral care demands four separate tools, a water flosser, toothbrush, dental polisher, and mouthwash, taking up to 15 minutes for a thorough clean; OCJOY consolidates all of that into a single device in approximately three minutes. The powder chamber holds enough for about 20 uses, the 150mL magnetic water tank lifts out, refills, and snaps back in seconds, and a single tap triggers an automatic self-cleaning cycle that blows out residual moisture and flushes internal pathways to prevent clogs. Clinicians from USC, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and West China Hospital of Stomatology have evaluated the technology and recommend it for daily cleaning between professional visits.

Merach Treadmills & Rowing Machines: China’s Fitness Juggernaut Makes Its IFA Debut

Founded in 2018, Merach climbed to the top of China’s fitness hardware market in a short window, building a lineup around products that treat home space as a constraint worth designing around rather than ignoring. Their rowing machines run on magnetic resistance systems with multiple adjustable levels and Bluetooth app connectivity, letting users track strokes per minute, output, and workout history without a subscription gate in the way. The walking pads fold thin enough to slide under furniture and run on motors quiet enough for apartment living, a combination that turns out to be genuinely rare at this price tier. Stationary bikes round out the core range with foldable frames and app-paired resistance adjustment, keeping the footprint manageable even when the workout is serious.

Showing up at IFA for the first time, despite already being a recognized name in European and North American markets, puts Merach in an interesting position. The brand built its international following largely through e-commerce and community word-of-mouth, so the audience arriving at their Berlin booth has often already bought something, watched a review, or at least seen the name float past. IFA gives that existing relationship a physical layer, a chance for buyers to grip a rowing handle or step onto a walking pad before committing. For a brand that converted most of its global audience through a screen, that kind of face-to-face engagement at one of the world’s biggest consumer tech stages is a logical next step.

RheoFit A1 and A1 Lite: Recovery Tech for People Who Are Tired of Doing Recovery Manually

Recovery gear has spent years pretending that adding vibration is enough to count as innovation. RheoFit goes in a much smarter direction. The A1 and A1 Lite are automatic massage rollers built around the idea that post-workout recovery should be as hands-free as possible, which immediately makes them stand out in a market full of massage guns, static foam rollers, and devices that still expect you to twist yourself into awkward positions after leg day. RheoFit frames the product around rehabilitation medicine and AI, with both rollers designed to detect body contour and weight distribution, identify key muscle groups, and generate a personalized massage plan through the app. That makes the whole category feel less like gym equipment and more like body-aware hardware, the kind of product that understands recovery as a system instead of a single feature.

The A1 is the more robust version, supporting up to 300 lbs while weighing 5.4 lbs, with 4 to 8 hours of use per charge and up to two weeks between charges depending on usage. It comes with two interchangeable massage surfaces, a high-intensity serrated roller with 70A Shore hardness for deeper, knuckle-like pressure, and a gentler 50A soothing roller shaped for a broader palm-fit feel. The A1 Lite keeps the same core promise but trims the package down into a more portable format, weighing 4.4 lbs, supporting up to 250 lbs, and adding a more targeted recovery pitch with 15 recovery positions that include full-body, targeted, and upper-back modes. Together, they make a strong case for the next phase of wellness hardware, where the roller finally rolls itself and your body gets treated like something technology can actually learn from.

The post Your Body Is the New Tech Platform: The Wildest Wearables at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Reolink’s OMVI 2i Ultra Wireless Security Camera can look in two directions at once: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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Picture a courier walking up your driveway while someone else quietly tries your side gate. A normal pan-tilt camera picks one of them and forgets the other exists. Reolink’s OMVI 2i Ultra handles it by carrying two cameras at once: a fixed 4K wide lens on top that never stops watching the full scene, and a 5MP pan-tilt ball below that spins 355 degrees to lock onto whatever the wide lens flags. Both feeds record at the same time, and you can tap anywhere on the wide view to slew the turret straight to that spot. It debuted at IFA 2026 in Berlin, ships late October, and costs between $200 and $250.

A detachable 10,000mAh pack claims six months per charge, and the 6W SolarEase panel says it needs about thirty minutes of daily sun to stay topped up, against the one to two hours Reolink quotes for rivals like Eufy’s S340 and the Tapo C675D. Those are Reolink’s own numbers, so hold them loosely until somebody leaves one on a north-facing wall through a British winter. The rest is easier to verify. Wi-Fi 6 across both bands, up to 512GB of local microSD with no subscription attached, colour night vision from twin spotlights, a siren, and IP65 sealing. At a kilogram with the bracket, it is a proper lump of hardware rather than something you tuck on a shelf.

Designer: Reolink

Pan-tilt cameras have quietly lied to buyers since the format existed. Sell someone a camera that turns to follow motion and you have also sold them a camera that stops watching everywhere else the instant it does. Reolink’s fix is embarrassingly simple once you see it. Stop asking one lens to be both the guard and the chaser, and give it a second lens that only guards. The wide 4K unit up top runs at 110 degrees horizontal and never rotates, so the scene it opened on is the scene it keeps recording no matter where the PT ball below it wanders off to. Reolink calls this SyncTrack, but the actual idea is closer to division of labour than any clever algorithm. One camera commits to context, the other commits to pursuit, and neither has to compromise for the sake of the other.

This is the third time Reolink has built this exact idea in 2026, and each version has been a slightly different argument about what matters most. The X16 landed at CES in January as a 24MP full metal flagship with 16x optical zoom, but it needs an ethernet run to function, which puts a hard ceiling on where it can live. The 3i followed in June with PoE and wired Wi-Fi options at $319.99, still asking for a nearby outlet even in its most flexible form. The 2i Ultra drops the combined resolution to 8MP plus 5MP and, in exchange, cuts the cord entirely. The trade-off is the clever bit, because being able to pop a camera on a fence or a backyard without worrying about wiring is much more convenient than haggling over megapixels.

A squared-off dual-lens head sits above a separate motorized ball, with a solar panel tilting on its own hinge overhead, and the whole assembly weighs a full kilogram once the bracket is attached. Compare that to Reolink’s own Argus MagiCam, a 108-gram cube you stick to a fridge with a magnet, and the difference in ambition is obvious at a glance. This is not a camera trying to disappear into a bookshelf. It reads more like a small piece of maritime equipment bolted under an eave, and that visible mechanical presence is doing some of the deterrence work before the siren ever gets involved.

That dual-lens design is quite literally baked into the name. OMVI reads like omni-vision, a camera built to watch in every direction at once instead of picking a lane. Arlo’s Ultra flagship still wants a wall plug or a proprietary base station to unlock its best tricks, and Nest’s outdoor cameras have quietly stayed wired-first for years now, which makes the 2i Ultra’s fully wire-free build feel like it is actually catching up to how people install things rather than how manufacturers wish they would. No drilled conduit, no hub tucked in a closet, just a battery, a solar panel, and a spot on the fence you actually wanted the camera to go.

That is the real flex against the flagships twice its price. You are not paying for a wall socket you have to plan your whole install around, and you are not paying for a bulky base station eating an outlet indoors either. You get two lenses doing genuinely different jobs, a battery that outlasts most of the category on paper, and a name that finally means something instead of just sounding techy. At $200 to $250, the OMVI 2i Ultra is the version of omni-vision security that shows up ready to mount anywhere the moment you take it out of the box.

The post Reolink’s OMVI 2i Ultra Wireless Security Camera can look in two directions at once: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Reolink’s $65 Tiny Magnetic Security Camera Runs 9 Months on 2 AA Batteries: Hands-On at IFA 2026

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The worst part of owning a security camera has never been the camera. It is the ladder, the drill, the wall plug, and the moment you realize you aimed the thing eight degrees too far left. Reolink’s Argus MagiCam deletes all of that with a magnet. The 68mm  GoPro-looking cube slaps onto any metal surface in about two seconds, or onto an included magnetic puck with a swivel arm for everything else, turning any surface into a security surveillance monitor (you can even mount it in your car as a dashcam)… and here’s the kicker. It runs up to nine months on two AA lithium batteries. Nine. Whole. Months. I repositioned it three times in under a minute at IFA 2026, which is three more times than I have ever moved a camera bolted to a wall.

Sixty-five dollars buys 1080p, IP67 weatherproofing, dual-band Wi-Fi, on-device person detection, and local microSD storage with no monthly fee attached. Flip the cube over and the back panel detaches to a bay holding two ordinary AAs, the SD slot and the reset button, all serviceable with a coin and a spare hand. Reolink built it around Qualcomm’s QCC730 micro-power Wi-Fi chip for its Power Efficient Series, shown in Hall 1.2 next to the OMVI 2i Ultra. A USB-C port hides under a rubber flap for 24/7 recording when you want it wired. Three colours: black, white, and a mint green that has no business looking this good.

Designer: Reolink

A matte PIR dome sits on the left, a glossy ringed lens sits on the right, and a pinhole mic hides between them, the whole cluster raised on a squared-off black module that reads more like a GoPro’s lens housing than anything borrowed from traditional security hardware. Security cameras have spent two decades pretending they belong on a parking structure, all bullet housings and matte black anonymity. This one borrows its language from action cameras instead, small, chunky, built to be picked up and repositioned rather than mounted once and forgotten, which is exactly why the mint colorway makes sense sitting on a bookshelf instead of bolted above a garage. That GoPro reference is not incidental either. It signals a camera meant to be handled, not just installed.

The battery bay is the real argument here. Somewhere along the way, the smart home industry decided sealed rechargeable packs looked cleaner on a spec sheet, and quietly handed every camera, doorbell, and earbud an expiry date measured in a couple of years. Reolink went the other direction, and the QCC730 chip is what makes that reversal viable rather than nostalgic, since its whole job is sipping power in standby instead of gulping it. Blink has claimed two years off two AA lithiums since its Outdoor 4 launched, though independent testing has repeatedly landed closer to a few months once real motion traffic gets involved. Nine months against a heavier five minutes of daily recording, verified in Reolink’s own side by side tests, reads like the more honest number in the room.

What you give up for all that convenience is resolution, and it barely registers as a cost. This is a 1080p sensor at a moment when 4K battery cameras exist, sure, but 1080p is still plenty sharp for spotting a face at the door or a raccoon in the bin, and the fixed bitrate keeps file sizes sane on a modest microSD card. Night vision runs through a single mono IR LED instead of anything approaching colour, which is standard fare at this tier, not a shortfall specific to Reolink. For a camera this cheap, this easy to place, and this forgiving on power, trading a few thousand pixels feels like a fair swap rather than a compromise. The MagiCam was never trying to be the sharpest eye on your property. It is trying to be the one you actually keep charged, and on that specific promise, the AA drawer you have been ignoring for a decade just became a legitimate accessory again.

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Plaud One Hands-On at IFA 2026: AI Earbuds That Transcribe Meetings, Then Draft Emails And Decks For You

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For three years, Plaud made very good tape recorders with a PhD. You pressed a button, it captured a meeting, and mere minutes later a summary showed up. The Plaud One, launched at IFA 2026 for €249.90, reverses that arrow. Its charging case now holds four beamforming mics, a speaker, an agent button and a built in eSIM, so it stays online without a phone nearby. Hold the agent button and the AI talks back, asks what you meant, then builds the deck or drafts the email while you get on with your day.

That flip from recording to doing needed hardware nobody had built yet. Not a pendant, not a pin, not another app crammed onto a phone you were already staring at. Plaud built a palm sized aluminum box with a fluted lid that looks like a Rimowa suitcase went through a shrink ray, sitting on a table, listening across a room, and talking back like a colleague who never needs coffee. The Explorer Edition opens for pre order now, capped at 2,000 units worldwide, with deliveries landing in Q4. A public version follows in 2027, once Plaud has watched two thousand early adopters put the thing through its paces.

Designer: Plaud

The original Plaud Note clipped onto a phone and did one job, listen to a meeting and hand back a transcript once it ended. The Note Pro added a screen and better mics. The NotePin S shrank the format onto a lanyard clip. Every generation stayed reactive by design, a smart recorder waiting for you to press stop before it did anything useful. That business built Plaud’s 2.5 million user base and reportedly crossed $100 million in annual software revenue by June, which is exactly the kind of runway that lets a company gamble on reinventing its own hardware category from scratch.

Vertical fluting runs down the case’s aluminum lid, the same visual trick Rimowa has stamped into cabin luggage since the 1950s, giving a 62 gram object a sense of density it has no right to carry. Flip it open and the earbuds sit half in ear, silver capped, in a tray that reads closer to a jewelry box than a charging dock. A speaker grille, a record button and a separate agent button line the case’s edge, the three controls that turn a charger into a device you actually talk to. None of it apes a phone. It reads like furniture for a desk, not gear for a pocket.

Earlier Plaud devices leaned on your phone for both processing and connectivity, so the intelligence always sat one hop away from the microphone. Plaud One’s case carries its own 4G LTE connection through a built in eSIM, closing that gap entirely. Capture, transcription and agent response now run in one box, independent of any other screen in your life. Leave your phone in a bag, walk into a cafe, and the case still records the table’s conversation, answers a question out loud through its speaker, or fires off a follow up email on command. Every pendant and pin that came before this quietly depended on a phone doing the real work behind the scenes. Plaud One is the first in the category that genuinely does not.

Plaud Agent drafts a follow up email the moment a client call ends. Feed it a meeting and it builds a slide deck while you sit through your next call, then drops the finished file straight into Notion with zero copy pasting. The platform connects to Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Notion today, with more integrations promised as the software matures. Set it loose on a standing task, a monthly competitor scan for instance, and it runs quietly in the background, waiting with a finished report the next time you check. This is the actual bet Plaud is making, that an assistant worth having has to act, not just remember.

Pre orders for the Explorer Edition are open now at €249.90, with the first 2,000 units shipping in Q4. Buyers get $200 in Plaud Credits toward the heavier agent features on top of a starter transcription plan, so the price buys a running start on the software as much as the hardware. Calling this an Explorer Edition rather than a finished release is the honest move, an open beta wearing genuinely sharp industrial design. Plaud spent three years building the best possible way to listen. Plaud One is its first real attempt at building something worth talking to.

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The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026

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No tracker on the market ships with an actual leash. Apple’s AirTag is a stud, so you buy a separate keychain loop just to hang it on anything. Chipolo is a disc with a small aperture punched into the edge. Google’s new Pixel Tag is a plain little monolith with the same problem. Samsung and Tile at least had the sense to build in a substantially wide hole or channel so you could pass a carabiner or leash of your own through it, which is basically an admission that they knew the leash was missing and left the job to you. Belkin’s SureFind Loop Cable Tag is the first one that just builds the leash in, and then goes one further: that leash is a working USB-C to USB-C cable you can unclip and use to charge the tag itself, or your phone, or literally anything else with a USB-C port.

It costs $24.99, weighs almost nothing, and the cable snaps back into the tag’s body to top off the 120mAh cell inside once you are done borrowing it. A rep on the IFA show floor in Berlin told me to expect roughly six to nine months of tracking per charge, a number Belkin has not put in writing anywhere yet. The tag itself is a flat white teardrop with one button, a status LED, and it is certified for both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub so it does not care which phone tribe you belong to. It ships in September across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific. Europe, where Belkin just showed it off, does not get to buy it at all.

Designer: Belkin

A braided USB-C cable and a fabric carry strap are already built from the same material logic, a length of reinforced cord with a connector at each end, and Belkin’s actual design move was refusing to treat those as two separate problems. The loop threads through a bag handle or backpack zipper, clips shut with a small sliding toggle, and unclips into a functioning charging cable the moment you need one. Belkin has spent years making the loops and holders other brands’ trackers needed just to attach to anything, so the fact that this idea sat unbuilt for that long, inside a company with decades of cable manufacturing behind it, says more about industry habit than about engineering difficulty. Sometimes the obvious fix just needs someone willing to stop selling the workaround.

Using the cable means unclipping the tag from whatever it was hanging on, so the tracker stops tracking the thing it was tied to for as long as you are borrowing the cable to charge a phone at an airport gate. That is a fair compromise for most people most of the time, but Belkin’s marketing does not mention it, and a design this clever should be able to admit its own limits. There is also no published IP rating for this specific model, unlike the SureFind Card, which carries IP68 and can survive a dunk in water. A tag meant for backpacks and luggage sitting on tarmacs in the rain probably deserved that spec sheet line too.

Dual certification for Apple Find My and Google Find Hub means you can buy the tag without worrying about which ecosystem you’re in. However, it’s worth noting that you have to choose one ecosystem to tether your device to. If you’re an Apple guy, you configure it with Find My. If you’re team Android, stick to Google’s offering. Belkin is entering a crowded field days after Apple’s AirTag 2 and ahead of Google’s own Pixel Tag, both of which still lean on separate keychain accessories to attach to anything. Chipolo and Pebblebee already proved rechargeable trackers work and do not need replacement coin cells. Belkin took that idea and folded a second function into the strap itself, a leash that charges things instead of just hanging them. How that holds up outside a Berlin show floor, across the actual months of use it is being asked to survive, is the open question.

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Anker MindBase Gives Your Old eufy Cameras a Real Brain and 48TB of Memory: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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If you already own eufy cameras, the useful sentence in Anker’s IFA 2026 announcement is buried under the AI talk: your HomeBase S380 footage transfers straight across to the MindBase. Anker built the new hub to work with the eufy security gear people bought years ago, then bolted on a two-bay drive enclosure holding up to 48TB and a 26 TOPS compute card running an in-house language model locally. Your old cameras stay. They get a brain. That is a far rarer offer than a new camera, and considerably cheaper than replacing four of them.

The scale of what it absorbs is the part worth sitting with. MindBase acts as a Matter 1.5 controller with Thread and Zigbee support built in, and it works alongside HomeKit, Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant rather than replacing any of them. It supports 20 cameras and 34 sensors, close to 100 Anker devices, and hundreds of third-party Matter products. Two Gigabit Ethernet ports and three USB 3.0 ports handle the wiring, with 64GB of onboard flash before you add a single drive. Anker wants to be the thing everything else plugs into, not another gadget competing for shelf space.

Designer: Anker

Getting there meant Anker had to kill its own family tree. eufy, soundcore, SOLIX and eufyMake are all being folded into the Anker name over the next couple of years, split into two groups called Anker For You and Anker For Home. CEO Steven Yang put it plainly on stage: category brands made sense when categories were separate, and they no longer are. Anker opened its first standalone store in Berlin the same week. A box asking to be the single brain of your house cannot credibly sit next to four differently branded limbs feeding it data, so the limbs had to go.

Physically, MindBase is trying to solve a problem NAS makers have ignored for two decades. Synology and QNAP enclosures still read as networking equipment, built for a closet, not a living room shelf. Anker’s two-bay chassis takes standard 3.5-inch drives and is styled to sit in the open, which is a real design bet given that spinning disks and a compute card generate heat that needs somewhere to go. Anker Innovations speaker Eric Villines framed the whole product around a gap that has bugged smart home owners for years: our houses are connected, not intelligent. A rule-based sensor cannot tell a raccoon from your kid, and MindBase’s pitch is that local memory finally lets it.

The security agent shows how far Anker is willing to let the box act alone. A yard sensor spots strangers at 15 meters and identifies family by phone credential at 30, then MindBase escalates on its own from a light, to a verbal warning, to active deterrence. For context, an entry-level Copilot+ laptop carries 40 TOPS and mostly uses it for background blur in video calls. Anker is asking for less silicon to make judgment calls about who belongs in your driveway at 2am, which is either the most useful application of on-device AI I have seen this year or the one I would want a very clear off switch for.

None of it has a price or a ship date yet, which is an odd silence for the product Anker built its entire rebrand around. Nest, Ring and Aqara are all circling the same local-hub idea without the drive bay, and that storage layer is MindBase’s real differentiator if Anker can actually ship it at a price regular households will pay. Whether the eufy hardware you already own is enough reason to wait and see is the only honest cliffhanger this launch leaves behind.

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This $119 Ultrasonic Cutter Sense Materials And Auto-Adjusts To Cut EVA Foam, Resin, PLA 3D Prints

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There are power tools, and then there are smart tools. A power tool gives you brute force; a smart tool gives you controlled, consistent results. Think of a simple drill that just spins versus one that manages its own torque to avoid stripping a screw. For delicate work like trimming EVA foam for a cosplay project or cleaning up support structures on a 3D print, you definitely want the smart one. The problem is, most handheld cutters are pretty basic, giving you one speed and just hoping for the best.

The SonicMax Slice 10 is aiming for that higher IQ. It’s a cordless ultrasonic cutter that senses the material you’re cutting and adjusts its own power output in real time. Slice through dense plastic and it pushes harder; trim the thin walls of a resin print and it eases back. This adaptive system, combined with cooling that prevents heat-related power drops, makes it feel like proper workshop equipment in the palm of your hand. It runs at 40kHz, delivers up to 50 watts of dynamic peak power, and does all of this without a single cable getting in your way.

Designer: SonicMax

Click Here to Buy Now: $119 $215 (45% off). Hurry, only 13/500 left! Raised over $124,000.

Most ultrasonic cutters on the market use transducers with a mechanical quality factor, or Qm, somewhere between 150 and 250. A higher Qm means the transducer converts electrical energy into vibration more efficiently, which directly translates to less heat generated during use. SonicMax claims a Qm of over 500 for the Slice 10, and lab data backs that up with a verified measurement of 541.1. That’s roughly two to three times higher than a typical competing tool, and it’s the foundational reason the Slice 10 can sustain longer sessions without thermal drama. That single transducer decision cascades into everything else, from runtime and cut quality to how comfortable the tool actually stays in your hand.

As the blade meets resistance, the Slice 10’s Smart Material Auto-Detection reads that feedback and adjusts power output and vibration frequency without you touching anything. Cutting through a stiff chunk of EVA foam feels different from trimming the thin walls of a resin print, and the tool responds to each material accordingly. You’re not locked into a fixed setting that works okay for most things but perfectly for nothing. The system also preserves cut quality across a long session, where material resistance can shift as the blade warms. The result is consistent cuts from the first pass to the last, regardless of what you’re running the blade through.

Heat is the reason most cordless ultrasonic cutters force you to stop every five to ten minutes, and the Slice 10 attacks that problem from two directions. Corded bench tools sidestep this issue by drawing steady power and dissipating heat more easily, but you give all of that up the moment you cut the cord. The high-efficiency transducer generates less heat from the start, and the built-in active cooling fan manages whatever thermal load does build up during a session. Overheat protection kicks in automatically at 80 degrees Celsius at the motherboard level, so the tool protects itself without you having to babysit it. You only appreciate how good this is after you’ve spent a session on a cutter that kept shutting itself off on you mid-cut.

A 5000mAh 21700 lithium-ion battery powers the Slice 10, and SonicMax made it user-replaceable, which you’ll end up appreciating far more than any spec sheet number. The 21700 is a high-performance cell format found in premium flashlights and power tools, so sourcing replacements from SonicMax or compatible third-party brands should never be a problem. SonicMax’s own branded replacement cell is rated for 500 charge cycles at 80% capacity retention, a reasonable lifespan for a tool you’re actually putting to work regularly. An 18W USB-C pass-through charging system brings it from zero to full in about 70 minutes, and the tool keeps running while plugged in. Claimed runtime sits at up to four hours, and when you run low mid-project, swapping in a spare takes seconds.

Blade choice gives the Slice 10 a lot of its bench-tool personality. SonicMax offers five blade styles that let the same handheld body take on very different jobs: a Standard Utility Blade for everyday trimming, a Precision Long Blade for tighter access and more delicate reach, a Fine Chisel Blade for careful cleanup work, a Heavy Duty Chisel Blade for more aggressive material removal, and a Wide Flat Scraper Blade for broader surface work. That range matters because it turns the Slice 10 into something closer to a compact cutting system than a one-trick knife. If you’re the kind of maker who bounces between foam, plastic, supports, edges, and surface cleanup in the same afternoon, this is where the tool starts looking properly versatile.

Lift-to-Activate sensing turns the tool on when you pick it up and off when you set it down, keeping your fingers away from controls mid-session and preventing accidental activation on the bench. A small OLED display shows real-time power output and battery level, so you’re never left guessing how much runtime remains. Built-in LED lighting illuminates the cut line, which sounds like a minor detail until you’re trying to trace a clean edge on a dark-colored print at your desk at some ungodly hour. Auto-shutdown kicks in after five minutes of idle, and low-battery protection activates before the cell drops to a damaging voltage. Together, these details make the Slice 10 feel like a tool that respects your workflow rather than constantly asking you to manage it.

The Slice 10 measures 260.5mm long and 28mm across, weighing 236 grams, keeping it firmly in single-hand, pen-grip territory across long sessions. Just the Slice 10 is available for a discounted $119, and ships with 10 replaceable Standard Utility blades. Upgrade to the Maker’s Bundle for $169 and you get the Slice 10 along with 50 blades spread across the five blade profiles (standard, precision long, fine chisel, heavy duty chisel, and flat scraper) as well as a 5000mAh replacement battery. If you’re looking for versatility and pushing your prints to the max, the $50 price bump does bring a fair share of value. You can also buy extra blades and batteries as add-ons. Shipping is expected to begin mid-October 2026 with worldwide delivery available, and SonicMax has not publicly confirmed warranty terms at the time of writing.

Click Here to Buy Now: $119 $215 (45% off). Hurry, only 13/500 left! Raised over $124,000.

The post This $119 Ultrasonic Cutter Sense Materials And Auto-Adjusts To Cut EVA Foam, Resin, PLA 3D Prints first appeared on Yanko Design.