Tag Archives: Gadgets

XTEINK Made Its $79 Reader Better by Adding Less, Not More

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Most gadget refreshes add something: a brighter screen, an extra sensor, a higher price tag. The XTEINK X4 Classic does the opposite, and that’s precisely the point. It keeps the same 4.3-inch E Ink display, the same buttons-only interface, and the same $79 price as the original X4, while quietly upgrading the chip, the battery, and the body underneath. The result is a pocket reader that feels more refined without feeling more complicated.

Slimming down to 4.9mm and 68g doesn’t sound dramatic on paper, but it changes how the device behaves in daily use. A magnetic backplate lets it snap onto the back of any smartphone, MagSafe included, turning your phone case into a bookshelf you never have to think about. Pull it off before a commute, let it ride along through a museum visit, or leave it clipped to a bag strap so it’s never more than an arm’s length away.

Designer: XTEINK

That magnetic system carries over from the original X4, but XTEINK reinforced the hold this time around, a significant upgrade more than you’d expect. A phone accessory that occasionally slides off with a slight wiggle isn’t an accessory people trust. A firmer grip means the reader stays put through a subway ride or a bike commute, exactly the fragmented pockets of time this device is built to fill.

Inside, a faster chip and a bigger battery replace the original hardware, translating into quicker page turns and a longer stretch between charges. It’s something you’d feel more than think, especially on a transatlantic flight or a week of packed commutes. Reading in short bursts stops feeling like a compromise when the device itself gets out of the way that quickly.

There’s no touchscreen here, and no front light either, and that’s a deliberate omission rather than some cost-cutting measure. Physical buttons handle every page turn, keeping your thumb in one place and your eyes on the text instead of hunting for a tap target. Anyone who’s ever fumbled a touchscreen ereader while lying in bed with the lights off knows how the tactile approach actually wins over advanced features.

The smaller 4.3-inch canvas does mean less text per page compared to a standard-sized ereader, so pages turn more often. That trade-off only works because the X4 Classic isn’t trying to replace a full-sized reader. It’s built for the reading that already happens in stolen minutes: a chapter on a train platform, a few pages before a meeting starts, a bedtime scene squeezed in before the lights go out.

What makes the X4 Classic worth paying attention to isn’t a headline feature. It’s the discipline behind leaving features out while still making the hardware measurably better. In a category where every new release tends to pile on screens, sensors, and price increases, holding the line at $79 while improving the parts that matter most is its own kind of design statement.

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Most E-Readers Don’t Survive the Commute, This Tiny One Does

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Word is spreading out of IFA 2026 about a tiny e-reader that fits in a pocket the way a stick of gum does, and it’s already reframing what a dedicated reading device should look like. The BOOX Picco pairs a 3.97-inch E Ink touchscreen with a footprint closer to a smartphone than a book. It’s a shape decision, not a spec sheet decision, and it changes how the device fits into a day.

Pick it up next to one of BOOX’s larger notebook-style readers and the size difference stops being subtle. The Picco disappears into a coat pocket or sits flat against a wallet, while its sibling devices demand a bag. That physical gap is the whole pitch. A book you have to remember to bring competes with a phone you never put down. A book that already lives in your pocket doesn’t need to compete with anything.

Designer: BOOX

Physical buttons run along one edge, tuned for page turns with separate short-press and long-press actions, so a thumb can move through the buttons on a train platform without needing to squint at a menu. A front light switch and power button sit alongside them, laid out as simple raised circles rather than crowded icons. The touchscreen handles gestures like swiping back or returning home, giving the Picco two ways to get around depending on the situation.

Storage stays refreshingly analog. Instead of packing in onboard memory, the Picco leans on a microSD card, treating your library as something swappable rather than sealed in. Files move over via USB-C or WiFi through a companion app, both quicker options than earlier tiny readers offered. It’s a small engineering choice that says something about who this device is built for: people who already have a shelf of digital books and just want a lighter way to carry them.

The software strips things down further. Instead of a full Android build, the Picco runs on a leaner Linux-based system, and the interface reflects that restraint. Icons for a handful of apps, Images, Pomodoro, Reading Stats, Todo, and Countdown, sit as plain circles on a clean home screen. There’s no algorithmic feed hiding behind a swipe, just a bookshelf, a settings menu, and a way to receive files.

None of this reads as a shrunken flagship. It reads like a device built around a single decision: reading should require less friction than checking a phone, not more. A commute, a waiting room, a lunch break; the Picco is sized for exactly those in-between stretches where a full-size reader feels like overkill and a phone feels like a trap.

Pricing chatter points to around $100 (roughly matching entry-level tablets), with a possible release by the end of 2026, though BOOX has yet to confirm the finer details. What’s already clear from the hands-on looks is that the design logic holds up. Small screens force fewer words per page, but they also force fewer excuses not to read at all.

The post Most E-Readers Don’t Survive the Commute, This Tiny One Does first appeared on Yanko Design.

We Held The World’s Thinnest Portable SSD at IFA 2026: Hands-on With The Lexar Muse

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Here is a fun little irony nobody asked for. The same AI boom that is making your laptop smarter is also making storage more expensive and harder to get, because every gigabyte of NAND that could go into your next SSD is currently being fought over by datacenters training the next big model. Micron basically said the quiet part out loud this year, killing off its own consumer brand Crucial to chase those fatter AI margins. Less choice for regular people, more racks for hyperscalers. Meanwhile the actual demands on your personal storage have only gone up, phones shooting in formats that used to require a cinema camera, and pockets that were never designed to also carry a second device.

Which makes it almost funny that Lexar, the brand Micron itself walked away from years ago, just used its 30th birthday to launch the kind of drive that actually solves that pocket problem. You have probably had a Lexar SD card in a camera bag at some point, or bought one of its USB drives without thinking twice about who made it. At IFA 2026 in Berlin, the company unveiled the Muse Ultra-Slim Portable SSD, a magnetic, credit-card-thin drive built for phone shooters drowning in 4K footage or even people within the Apple ecosystem who don’t want to splurge on cloud storage. Turns out the company nobody expected much from just built the phone accessory a lot of us did not know we needed.

Designer: Lexar

The first thing you notice about the Muse is how little of it there actually is. Lexar carved the enclosure from a single block of metal, no seams, no visible joints, tapering from roughly 3.8mm at its thickest edge down to a single millimeter at the rim, numbers the company is calling the thinnest and lightest portable SSD on the market right now. Hold it flat and it genuinely reads more like a guitar pick than a storage device. Getting there required shrinking everything else too, a custom ultra-thin circuit board and tightly stacked NAND dies packed into a shell with almost no wasted volume. This is not a drive that got thin by cutting corners on capacity or speed either, which is usually where these design exercises fall apart.

The magnetic attachment system is pretty impressive, because adding a USB-C port on the Muse would mean complicating the build and making things thicker. Lexar built a proprietary PogoPin connector for the data link, paired with a bundled SnapLink Magnetic Cable, and backed both the connector and the carry sleeve with N52-grade neodymium magnets, serious holding power for something this small. Slot the drive into its sleeve, snap the whole assembly onto a MagSafe iPhone, and your rig sits flush against the back of the phone rather than tugging at a port from underneath. Anyone who has fumbled a cable connection mid-handheld shot will understand immediately why that matters more than the spec sheet suggests.

Lexar quotes 1,050MB/s read and 1,000MB/s write, comfortably clearing Apple’s 440MB/s threshold for unlocking 4K120 ProRes recording on external storage, with plenty of room left over for whatever comes next. That puts the Muse in direct conversation with the SanDisk Creator Phone SSD, the drive that has largely owned this category since it launched at CES 2025 with a rugged silicone shell and an IP65 rating. Lexar decided to bet instead on thinness and weight as the whole pitch, creating something close to a MacBook Air moment for portable SSDs, where the headline spec is simply how little of the product you notice. It arrives in 512GB and 1TB capacities starting Q4 2026, with pricing yet to be announced.

The Muse was not the only thing on Lexar’s IFA floor. The company also showed off its AI Storage Core concepts, next-gen Gen5 SSD and Storage Stick hardware built around a custom Longsys controller and a caching layer called Luma Bridge, aimed at feeding local AI models faster while easing pressure on scarce DRAM. Alongside that sat a new Dashcam USB Flash Drive Series, automotive-grade sticks rated for extreme cabin temperatures and built to survive the kind of nonstop loop recording that kills cheaper drives inside a year. Neither is available to buy yet, but both point at where Lexar’s next thirty years are headed, well past the camera bag.

The post We Held The World’s Thinnest Portable SSD at IFA 2026: Hands-on With The Lexar Muse first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Macintosh-Inspired Hub Adds SSD Storage, Ports, Shortcuts, and a Mini Screen: Hands-on at IFA 2026

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Everything on my desk right now is some shade of gray aluminum, and I’m starting to resent it a little. Every dock, every stand, every accessory wants to be a slab of cold metal that photographs well and feels like nothing in your hand. Wokyis clearly misses the old days too, back when computers were made of warm, slightly yellowed plastic that looked friendly instead of expensive. Their newest release, the i5, leans hard into that feeling, right down to the off white shell that actually looks like it wants to sit on your desk rather than intimidate it. It splits into two pieces, a tilted head up top holding a small screen, and a control deck below packed with real, clicky buttons.

That plastic shell isn’t just a style choice, it’s basically the whole argument. Anodized aluminum is sleek, sure, but it’s also cold to the touch and forgettable within a week. This off white finish has warmth to it, the kind that made old Macs feel approachable instead of like expensive jewelry. Underneath the throwback shell, the i5 works as a genuine secondary display for your Mac or laptop, mirroring or extending your desktop, with four shortcut keys for copy, paste, screenshot, and screen lock, plus a central knob that clicks for play and pause and rotates for volume. Wokyis brought the 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 version to IFA 2026 in Berlin, sitting above the 10Gbps model already selling on their site for $169.99.

Designer: Wokyis

The design lineage here is not subtle, and I mean that as a compliment. That tilted head sitting atop a boxy base is a direct nod to the original Macintosh and its compact successors, the machines that first convinced people a computer could look like a friendly little appliance rather than a beige filing cabinet. Wokyis isn’t the first accessory maker to borrow that silhouette, but the i5 commits harder than most, right down to a boot screen greeting that echoes the smiling Mac startup chime era without actually copying Apple’s own iconography. It’s homage rather than imitation, and it lands because the proportions genuinely feel considered instead of slapped together for nostalgia points.

The screen itself deserves a second look before you touch it, mostly because you can’t. It’s a 5 inch, 1280×720 IPS panel, sharp enough to sit next to a real monitor without embarrassing itself, but it skips touch input entirely. There’s no finger smudging that pretty glass, no accidental taps while you reach for your coffee. You either mirror your main display onto it or extend your desktop across it, treating it like a dedicated spot for a music player, a chat window, or scrolling lyrics while the rest of your screen stays clear. It’s a small, deliberate decision in a market obsessed with adding touch to everything, and it works because the i5 never pretends to be anything other than a second monitor.

The control deck below is where the personality really lives. Four mechanical keys handle copy, paste, screenshot, and screen lock, each one a satisfying, precision click that beats fumbling for a keyboard shortcut. The centerpiece is a chunky red knob that clicks down for play and pause, then rotates like a volume dial, doing the job of two separate controls without adding a second component. It’s tactile in a way that most modern hubs never bother with, and it turns a boring task like adjusting volume into something you almost look forward to doing.

Connectivity is where the i5 earns its keep as an actual workstation rather than a desk toy. The 10Gbps model packs an M.2 NVMe slot good for up to 8TB, four USB-A ports, a USB-C port, simultaneous SD and microSD readers, a 3.5mm audio jack, and HDMI-in, all wrapped around a body that measures 145 by 131 by 154mm. The new 80Gbps Thunderbolt 5 variant shown at IFA presumably pushes that bandwidth ceiling considerably higher, though Wokyis hasn’t published pricing or a ship date for it yet.

I like that Wokyis is betting on plastic when everyone else is betting on metal, and I like it more that the bet actually pays off in how the thing feels to use. The i5 won’t replace your monitor and it isn’t trying to. It just wants to sit there, warm and a little goofy, doing real work while looking like it walked out of 1984. That’s a good trade.

The post This Macintosh-Inspired Hub Adds SSD Storage, Ports, Shortcuts, and a Mini Screen: Hands-on at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Boya Notra Neo AI Note Taker Has 3 Modes, Never Asks Which One to Use

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Conversations rarely stay in one place. A lecture bleeds into a study session over Bluetooth earbuds, and a work call turns into a video meeting minutes later, details slipping through in the shuffle. The Boya Notra Neo, the brand’s second-generation AI note taker, was built around this. It senses whether you’re in a classroom, on a call, or listening through headphones, and adjusts how it records without you touching anything.

That kind of adaptability is the real design story here. Notra Neo runs on three recording modes, Ambient, Phone Call, and Bluetooth, switching between them automatically based on how you’re using the device. Most multi-mode gadgets hand that decision back to the user, which defeats the purpose of having options in the first place. Boya’s approach removes the extra step, letting the device read the room instead.

Designer: BOYA

Ambient Recording covers the face-to-face moments, lectures, meetings, interviews, and group discussions where the microphone needs to pick up a whole room, not just the person holding the device. Boya built in 16 feet (5m) of clear 360-degree pickup, enough range to sit at the back of a seminar hall or the far end of a conference table and still catch every word clearly.

Phone Call Recording does what it says, capturing calls without any extra setup. Bluetooth Recording is the more interesting mode, catching audio that flows through connected devices rather than through open air. That covers online classes, virtual meetings, and video interviews, the kind of conversations that happen entirely through a headset. It’s the mode that acknowledges how much communication now happens through a pair of earbuds instead of a room.

Once something’s recorded, Notra Neo transcribes it into text across more than 140 languages and dialects, tagging who said what. That speaker labeling matters more than it sounds; anyone who’s tried transcribing a group discussion knows how quickly it turns into a wall of unattributed text. For multilingual classrooms or international teams, that same feature means reviewing a conversation doesn’t depend on catching every word the first time.

Transcripts are just the raw material, though. Notra Neo’s AI turns those recordings into summaries, to-do lists, mind maps, and insights, plus more than 60 templates suited to different kinds of conversations. A lecture becomes a set of revision notes instead of hours of audio to relisten to. A meeting turns into a list of decisions and follow-ups. A customer call becomes something worth referencing later.

There’s also AI Search, letting you ask for specific information instead of scrubbing through hours of audio, useful for pulling up a decision from a meeting weeks back or a quote from an old interview. Everything lives inside the Boya OS app and web platform, staying synced across devices, with exports available in multiple formats: audio, text, and mind maps, so content moves easily into whatever workflow someone already uses.

None of this works if the hardware can’t keep up day to day. Notra Neo offers up to 20 hours of continuous recording and 8GB of built-in storage, enough to sit through a full semester of lectures or a multi-day conference without hunting for an outlet. The body stays compact enough to slip into a pocket or a pencil case, easy to carry without a second thought.

What stands out about the Notra Neo isn’t a single feature but the decision to build a recorder around actual habits instead of asking people to change theirs. Boya will officially bring the device to IFA 2026 in Berlin this September, following a second-generation approach that trims complexity rather than adding more of it. Fewer settings to manage, more attention left for the conversation, which was the point all along.

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5 Tiny Gadgets & Gear That Are Better Than Anything on Your Keychain Right Now

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Most keychains carry dead weight. A rubber tag from a hotel you forgot, a bottle opener you have used twice, a fob that only unlocks a car you no longer own. Meanwhile, the one piece of real estate you touch dozens of times a day sits completely underused, when it could be doing actual work.

The five gadgets below all fit that same small footprint but solve real problems, from finding your keys in the dark to surviving the emergency that pepper spray and good intentions cannot fix alone. Every pick here is either shipping through a verified campaign or purchasable directly, and every spec below comes straight from the maker.

1. NoxTi

Tritium is a hydrogen isotope with a 12.3-year half-life, and as it decays, beta particles strike a phosphor coating to produce light with no electricity and no chemical reaction involved. It is the same physics behind emergency exit signs, military watches, and aviation instruments, chosen for one reason: nothing else in consumer lighting can promise 25 years of steady glow with zero maintenance. Xedge packaged that science into a 45mm titanium cylinder built specifically for keychain carry.

The tritium vial sits inside a precision quartz tube with 92 percent light transmission, wrapped in a CNC-machined Gr5 titanium body weighing just 10.7 grams. The whole thing is serviceable, so when brightness fades after two decades, you simply push the old tube out and slide a new one in. A ceramic-tipped glass breaker sits at one end for real emergencies, and the floating core glows visibly from every angle.

What we like:

  • Twenty-five years of glow powered entirely by material physics, with no battery to ever die on you
  • The tube is user-serviceable, meaning the titanium body outlives the glow and can be refreshed indefinitely

What we dislike:

  • The glow is genuinely faint next to an LED, which is the tradeoff for zero power draw

2. Analog Capsule Camera

Pick up the Analog Capsule, and it looks exactly like a roll of 35mm film, right down to the box it ships in, except every part of that illusion hides a fully functional digital camera. Instead of chasing the technical perfection modern sensors are obsessed with, it leans into grain, softness, and blown highlights as features rather than flaws, giving every photo the unmistakable texture of something shot decades ago rather than seconds ago.

Its 1-megapixel CMOS sensor keeps the experience intentionally lo-fi, while built-in digital playback lets you review a shot the moment you take it. USB-C connectivity and microSD storage handle the archiving without ceremony. At just 25 grams and small enough to hang from a bag on its included strap, it is less a camera you pack and more a charm you happen to shoot with, priced at $55.

Click Here to Buy Now: $55.00

What we like:

  • The film-canister disguise makes it a genuine conversation piece before a single photo is taken
  • USB-C and microSD mean getting photos off the device is instant, unlike actual film

What we dislike:

  • A 1-megapixel sensor is a deliberate creative constraint, not a specs win for anyone wanting sharp images
  • Only four units were listed as available at last check, so stock moves fast

3. KeyMaster 3.0

Keys are the one object nearly everyone carries with total consistency, which is exactly why EDC Monster built a multi-tool shaped like one. The original KeyMaster launched in 2023 as a 14-in-1 titanium tool; version two expanded the function count, and three years later, KeyMaster 3.0 rebuilds the concept around real adaptability rather than just adding more blades to a crowded body.

At 74.5mm and 53.7 grams of Grade 5 titanium, it sits flat on a keyring next to a car fob without adding bulk. The headline upgrade is an adjustable spanner covering 0 to 16mm, replacing six fixed wrenches with one that actually fits the bolt in front of you, paired with a magnetic bit driver that locks bits without slippage. A pry bar, screwdrivers, a mini saw, and a spoke wrench round out the twenty-plus tools.

What we like:

  • The adjustable 0 to 16mm spanner solves the actual failure point of every fixed-wrench multi-tool
  • Magnetic bit retention means real torque without the wobble that plagues smaller tools

What we dislike:

  • Twenty-plus tools on a keychain-sized body means most people will only ever reach for a handful of them
  • Kickstarter shipping is estimated for August 2026, so this is a preorder commitment, not instant gratification

4. Painless Key Ring

Putting a key onto a standard split ring means prying apart two tightly sprung layers with a fingernail, a tiny frustration repeated so often it barely registers anymore. Painless Key Ring exists because someone finally decided that reaction was unnecessary, changing the geometry itself so a continuous wave shape gives keys an easier point of entry, letting you slide one on without forcing anything.

The wave design was pulled from coiled wave springs used in aerospace and high-speed rail, applied here to one of the most mundane objects anyone owns. At just 3.0 grams, it weighs roughly half of a conventional ring, and its high-tension stainless spring steel carries a tensile strength of 1,750 MPa against roughly 800 MPa for a standard ring. It flexes to fit thicker keys, then snaps back to shape instead of staying stretched.

Click Here to Buy Now: $30.00

What we like:

  • The wave geometry genuinely removes the fingernail-prying step that every split ring demands
  • A 1,750 MPa tensile strength means it flexes for thick keys without permanently deforming

What we dislike:

  • It is a single component upgrade, so it will not organize a bulky keyring the way a full holder would
  • Stock was listed at only five units available at last check

5. Pebblebee Halo

Most people run through the same mental checklist before leaving the house: phone, wallet, keys. Pebblebee is making the case for adding a fourth item, a keychain-sized device called the Halo that tracks lost items, lights up a dark parking lot, and screams at 130 decibels if something actually goes wrong. That last function is the one that separates it from the standalone alarm keychains that came before it.

Pulling the device apart triggers a 130dB siren, a 150-lumen strobe, and real-time location sharing with up to five contacts in what Pebblebee calls a Safety Circle, all through one instinctive motion rather than an app you have to fumble with mid-emergency. Rapid presses of the side button send a silent alert instead, for situations that call for discretion over noise.

What we like:

  • The pull-apart trigger activates the siren, strobe, and location sharing simultaneously, with no app fumbling required
  • A silent alert option exists for situations where drawing attention would make things worse, not better

What we dislike:

  • Live location sharing requires the Alert Live subscription to continue past the included first year
  • At one ounce, it is light, but it is still one more object competing for space on a crowded ring

Your Keychain Was Never The Limit

None of these gadgets ask you to overhaul how you carry your keys; they simply ask your keychain to start pulling its weight. A glow tube that never needs charging, a camera disguised as film, a tool shaped like the key beside it, a ring that stops fighting your fingernails, and an alarm that activates faster than you can think. Each one replaces a specific moment of friction with something quietly better.

The real test for any of these is whether you would still reach for them a year from now, past the initial novelty of owning something small and clever. Every pick here earns its spot by solving a problem you already have rather than inventing one you did not, which is the only standard that actually matters for something destined to live in your pocket every single day.

The post 5 Tiny Gadgets & Gear That Are Better Than Anything on Your Keychain Right Now first appeared on Yanko Design.

UGREEN’s Power Bank Uses Liquid Cooling, and You Can Actually Watch It

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UGREEN’s MagFlow Pro treats overheating as a design problem worth solving with actual engineering, not just a bigger heat sink. This 10,000mAh magnetic power bank borrows liquid cooling from gaming PCs and squeezes it into a pocket-sized charger, aiming to keep wireless charging fast without turning your phone into a hand warmer along the way.

Qi2 charging has always had a dirty secret hiding under its magnetic convenience. Wireless systems lose up to 30% of their power as heat during transfer, which means a phone sitting at 25W often throttles down within minutes to avoid overheating. UGREEN built the MagFlow Pro around fixing that exact bottleneck rather than just chasing a bigger battery number.

Designer: UGREEN

Inside sits CryoPulse, a cooling system built around a micro-pump that circulates liquid coolant past the charging coil and other heat-generating components. Copper foil spreads that heat further, while a layout that physically separates key parts keeps warmth from concentrating in one spot. It is a scaled-down version of what keeps a gaming rig from throttling under load, just built to survive inside a phone charger.

A transparent panel on the front turns that entire process into something you can actually watch, showing coolant moving through the internal channels while your phone charges. It is an odd, almost theatrical touch for a power bank, but it doubles as reassurance that the system is doing its job. UGREEN calls it the Cyber Window, and it is hard to look away from once it is running.

That cooling translates into real numbers, too. UGREEN claims the system keeps peak surface temperatures on a phone up to 18°F below its own reference benchmark, letting a device hold onto higher wattage for longer instead of stepping down early. In practice, that means someone topping up before a flight or during a commute gets closer to advertised charging speeds instead of a slow crawl once things heat up.

A small display embedded in the shell keeps track of charging wattage, remaining battery percentage, cycle count, and cooling status, turning what used to be a guessing game into actual visible data. Paired with a built-in USB-C cable capable of 30W and a combined output of up to 45W, the MagFlow Pro can charge a phone, tablet, and another accessory simultaneously without demanding a bag full of extra cables.

If the battery degraded quickly, all of those fancy features would be pointless, so UGREEN built the cell around Dymondcell 2.0 protection, retaining more than 80% of its capacity after 800 charge cycles. It also survived seven hours of continuous overcharge testing without failure, a detail aimed squarely at anyone who leaves their charger plugged in overnight out of habit rather than necessity.

At $149.99, the MagFlow Pro costs considerably more than other 10,000mAh power banks on the market, and that price tag puts real weight behind its cooling claims. It is a bet that people charging phones daily care as much about consistent performance and battery longevity as they do about raw capacity, and that a bit of visible engineering can justify paying extra for it.

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Cloud AI Means Someone Else Has Your Data, MINISFORUM Fixes That

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Running a serious AI model at home usually means renting someone else’s cloud server and hoping your data stays private along the way. MINISFORUM built its newest pairing to remove that trade-off entirely. The AI Agent NAS N5 MAX-P495 and AI Mini Workstation MS-S1 MAX-P495 combine for up to 131 TOPS of AI compute performance, 192GB of memory at 8533 MT/s, and up to 160GB of graphics memory, enough headroom to keep the heavy lifting on a desk instead of in a data center.

The N5 MAX-P495 takes the shape of a compact black cube, but what it holds inside matters more than how it looks sitting on a shelf. It combines powerful AI computing with up to 200TB of local storage, enabling users to store, manage, and process large volumes of data within a single AI platform. That capacity turns a spare corner of an office into a private archive large enough to hold years of project files, footage, or research without ever touching a third-party server.

Designer: MINISFORUM

Storage alone doesn’t make an AI system useful, so MINISFORUM built the N5 to run the AI itself. From RAG knowledge bases and AI models to embeddings, databases, and AI agents such as OpenClaw and Hermes, N5 MAX-P495 keeps data and AI workloads local, enabling continuous and private AI operations. A small business could lean on that setup to run its own customer-support agent without routing conversations through an outside company’s servers.

That local-first approach extends to how the N5 fits into a larger setup. Designed to work alongside AI computing devices, N5 MAX-P495 serves as a centralized backend for data, models, knowledge, and long-running AI workloads, bringing storage and computing together at the edge. It’s less a standalone gadget and more a quiet engine room, built to keep working in the background while something faster handles the parts people actually interact with.

That faster half of the pairing is the MS-S1 MAX-P495, a compact tower wrapped in a ventilated, diamond-textured front panel that looks more like a piece of desk sculpture than a workstation. It delivers powerful local AI computing for demanding model inference, AI development, and computationally intensive workloads, built for intensive local AI tasks, engineering, and workflows in an ultra-compact footprint. Developers get workstation-class muscle without giving up desk space to a full tower case.

Speed matters just as much as raw power for certain jobs, and MINISFORUM designed the MS-S1 with that in mind. Designed for low-latency AI workloads, MS-S1 MAX-P495 enables responsive local inference for AI agents, computer vision, generative AI, and other real-time applications. A security camera system or a live creative tool built on generative AI benefits directly from that kind of immediate response instead of waiting on a round trip to the cloud.

Connectivity rounds out the workstation’s role in a larger setup. With extensive connectivity and expansion capabilities, MS-S1 MAX-P495 serves as a powerful AI compute frontend, supporting models, applications, and connected devices across flexible edge AI environments. That flexibility means the same box can sit at the center of a home lab or plug into a small studio’s existing hardware without forcing a rebuild.

Paired together, the two devices split the work the way a good team would. The MS-S1 MAX-P495 and N5 MAX-P495 form a complete edge AI computing system, delivering high-performance AI compute at the frontend while integrating compute, massive storage, data, and AI knowledge at the backend, providing a powerful foundation for real-time inference, persistent AI workloads, and scalable local AI applications. It’s a compact answer to a question more households and small teams are starting to ask: whether AI still needs to live somewhere else at all.

The post Cloud AI Means Someone Else Has Your Data, MINISFORUM Fixes That first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 8 Best Gadgets of September 2026

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September always arrives with a different energy. The summer concept season wraps up, the shipping boxes start showing up, and the gadgets worth keeping finally separate from the ones that were only ever interesting in a render. This month’s lineup is unusually strong: a $2,000 iPhone that finally killed the foldable crease, a Dyson toothbrush with a camera inside the brush head, and a telescope that fits in a bag you could carry onto a plane.

What connects all eight is not a price bracket or a category. It is the feeling that the designers started with a known compromise and refused to accept it. Foldable phones have always had a crease. Astrophotography has always needed a trunk full of gear. CD players have always been opaque boxes. Each gadget below found that exact problem and built past it. September’s best gear does not update existing things. It quietly makes them look dated.

1. iPhone Ultra

Apple saved its most aggressive design argument for last. The iPhone Ultra lands September 18 at $2,000, and the headline detail is the one that sounds impossible until you hold it — the visible crease is gone. Foldable phones have carried that horizontal line across the display since the format began, and every manufacturer called it a reasonable engineering compromise. Apple did not agree. The crease is gone, which means either the engineering problem is finally solved or a new one was quietly created in its place.

At $2,000, it is the most expensive iPhone Apple has shipped, and the price will be the loudest objection for most people. That is fair. It is also a phone that, when unfolded, gives you a display large enough to genuinely replace a small tablet, without the crease that made every foldable feel like a prototype. Whether the price is justified depends on how much that line across the screen has bothered you. For a certain buyer, the number will feel completely reasonable.

What We Like

  • The visible crease is gone, a problem every other foldable has simply accepted as permanent
  • September 18 availability means no waiting on a vague launch window

What We Dislike

  • $2,000 is a significant ask even for the most committed Apple buyer
  • At that price, the upgrade calculus is genuinely difficult for anyone coming from a recent iPhone

2. Dyson CameraJet Toothbrush

Dyson hid a 1mm camera directly under the brush head, and it reads 28 images a second while you brush. Within 100 milliseconds of detecting a gap in your coverage, the feedback loop kicks in. This is not an app that grades you on timing or buzzes when two minutes are up. It sees exactly where the bristles are not reaching and responds in real time, which is a fundamentally different answer to a problem the toothbrush industry has spent decades pretending does not exist.

The $499 price reads as absurd until you consider what it replaces. Most people spend years brushing the same spots and missing the same gaps, and no timer-based electric toothbrush has fixed that because timers do not know where your brush is. The camera does. Dyson also redesigned the toothpaste to work alongside the system, which suggests they understood that this product was not adding a feature to an existing object but rebuilding the assumptions around one entirely.

What We Like

  • A 1mm camera reading 28 frames per second gives real-time coverage feedback no other toothbrush can match
  • Dyson redesigned the toothpaste alongside the brush, showing the depth of thinking behind the product

What We Dislike

  • $499 is a difficult number for a toothbrush regardless of what it does
  • Proprietary toothpaste dependency is a meaningful lock-in that will frustrate buyers over time

3. ZWO Seestar S50 Pro

Astrophotography has always had a reputation problem. Getting a decent image of a nebula or galaxy traditionally meant a telescope, a tracking mount, a camera body, a set of filters, a laptop running capture software, and a location dark enough to make the whole trip worth it. The ZWO Seestar S50 Pro compresses that entire setup into something you could carry in a camera bag. That compression is not a minor convenience. It is the difference between astrophotography being a hobby you have and one you actually practice.

The S50 Pro is not a crowdfunded concept or a prototype. It is a shipping device sold through B&H, Amazon, and ZWO directly, part of a line that has been refining the smart telescope format for several years. For people who have wanted to try astrophotography without committing to a several-thousand-dollar hardware stack, it is the most credible entry point available right now, and the images it produces at this size are the kind that still feel surprising every time you see them.

What We Like

  • Compresses a full astrophotography rig into one bag without requiring a tracking mount or separate laptop
  • Sold through established US retailers with confirmed availability, not a waitlist product

What We Dislike

  • Smart telescopes in this class still need a reasonably dark sky to produce compelling results
  • The app-dependent workflow means the imaging experience is only as good as the software behind it

4. Camera With Digital Film

 

Every digital photo you have ever taken lives in a folder. Most of them stay there. The Camera with Digital Film changes the end of that process by ejecting a physical e-paper cartridge when you fire the shutter. Because e-paper holds its image without power, that small rectangle stays a picture permanently. You can lean it against a monitor, pin it to a wall, or hand it directly to the person you just photographed, and none of that requires a printer, an app, or a subscription to anything.

This is a personal maker build, not a retail product, which means you cannot order one. But the project is documented and open, which is its own kind of contribution. Instant cameras eject paper prints that fade over years. This ejects a display that does not. The object you walk away with is not a printout of a photo. It is the photo, held in a piece of hardware that draws no power to stay that way. The difference is not subtle once you hold one.

What We Like

  • E-paper holds the image without power indefinitely, making every shot a permanent physical object
  • The format lets you hand a photo to someone in the moment without a printer anywhere nearby

What We Dislike

  • This is a maker build with no purchase option — you build it, or you do not have it
  • E-paper’s limited color range means images read closer to a graphic print than a full-color photograph

5. ClearFrame Speaker + CD Player

The ClearFrame puts a CD player and a speaker into a frame you can see straight through, and the transparent design earns its place by making the mechanical parts of the player the visual feature rather than something hidden behind matte plastic. Watching a disc spin inside a clear housing is a different experience from staring at a closed box, and the ClearFrame is built around the idea that the hardware itself is worth looking at. The mechanism is the aesthetic. Nothing about that is accidental.

For anyone building a desk around objects that hold their own visually, the ClearFrame gives the CD player a reason to be out in the open rather than tucked away. The disc, the mechanism, the speaker housing: all of it visible, all of it intentional. It is not a nostalgia product. It is a design argument about what audio hardware looks like when it stops hiding its own workings.

Click Here to Buy Now: $240.00

What We Like

  • The transparent frame turns the mechanical components into the centerpiece rather than concealing them
  • Combines a CD player and speaker into one object with a coherent visual identity

What We Dislike

  • Listed under upcoming drops only, so exact pricing and shipping timeline are not yet confirmed
  • A clear housing will need regular cleaning to maintain the effect it is entirely built around

6. Cyberpunk 2077 x Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 launched in 1982. Cyberpunk 2077, the game, is set in 2077. The gap between those two years is roughly the entire history of consumer computing, and this collab leans into that distance rather than papering over it. The result sits at the intersection of two very specific aesthetics: the beige plastic of early home computing and the neon-drenched maximalism of Night City. Somehow they feel like they were always related. The Retro Games Ltd license makes it a real retail product, not a limited drop built on hype.

For people who grew up with a C64 or remember it as the machine that first felt like a home computer, this collab has a logic that is hard to argue with. Cyberpunk’s world is built on the idea that technology accumulates rather than replaces, and a computer from 1982 sitting alongside a game set in 2077 makes that point visually without needing to explain itself. It is the kind of object that earns its shelf space because it means something beyond what it does.

What We Like

  • The 95-year gap between the C64’s launch and the game’s setting is the entire premise, and the design commits to it
  • A real licensed retail product through Retro Games Ltd, not a concept or an event-exclusive run

What We Dislike

  • The appeal is almost entirely to people with an attachment to either the C64 or Cyberpunk 2077 specifically
  • As a niche collab object, it will be difficult to track down outside dedicated retro gaming retailers

7. OrigamiSwift Folding Mouse

Standard mice do not pack flat. They sit awkwardly in bags, take up more space than their function warrants, and feel like a compromise every time you travel with a laptop. The OrigamiSwift uses an origami-influenced folding structure that collapses the mouse into something genuinely flat: the kind of object you forget is in your bag until you need it.

Travel mice as a category have existed for a long time, but most of them solve portability by making the mouse physically smaller rather than foldable. Smaller mice are less comfortable to use for any extended session. The OrigamiSwift’s approach is different: it folds to pack and unfolds to a full grip, which means you are not choosing between portability and comfort every time you pull it out. For anyone who works from multiple locations, that trade-off has been the quiet frustration with every travel mouse that came before this one.

Click Here to Buy Now: $85.00

What We Like

  • Folds flat for packing without reducing grip size for use, a problem most travel mice simply ignore

What We Dislike

  • Folding mechanisms introduce hinge wear over time that rigid designs never have to account for
  • Travel-first positioning may mean trade-offs in sensor performance compared to a dedicated desk mouse

8. ROG Ally X Dual-Screen Mod

Dual-screen handhelds usually mean buying an entirely new device built around that feature from the ground up. This ROG Ally X mod skips that purchase. It snaps a 120Hz secondary display onto an existing Ally X using a mount system that removes just as easily, which means you get the dual-screen setup when you want it and a standard handheld when you do not. The engineering problem this solves is not new, but the solution here is additive rather than architectural, which makes it the more interesting answer.

It is a maker project, which means you build it rather than buy it, and the plans are documented and freely available. That limits its audience to people comfortable with a hobbyist build. Within that group, it is one of the more compelling uses of a gaming handheld’s form factor to surface this year. The 120Hz refresh rate on the secondary screen is not a placeholder spec either — it keeps up with the primary display rather than undercutting it, which has been the consistent weakness of every dual-screen attempt before this one.

What We Like

  • Snaps on and off without permanently modifying the Ally X itself
  • 120Hz on the secondary screen matches the primary display rather than being a visible step down

What We Dislike

  • No kit to order — you source and assemble the components yourself, or you do not have it
  • A second active display will draw additional power from the Ally X battery, which is already a known constraint on the device

September is not a month that usually swings this hard. Three products you can buy today, two from the YD shop, a maker build you can start this weekend, and an iPhone that lands in 16 days at a price that will generate more conversation than almost anything Apple has shipped in years. The range across eight picks is wider than usual, and that width is the point.

The through line is stubbornness. Every one of these objects exists because someone decided the accepted version of the thing was not good enough and built a different answer. A crease-free fold. A toothbrush that watches you brush in real time. A CD player you can see straight through. A photo that ejects itself from a camera. That kind of thinking does not happen every month. September had a good one.

The post The 8 Best Gadgets of September 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

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.

The post The First Tracker With a Working USB-C Leash: Hands-on with Belkin SureFind Loop Cable Tag at IFA 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.