Every September, hundreds of thousands of visitors descend upon Berlin for IFA, one of the largest trade tech conferences in Europe. IFA heralds the unofficial start of Techtember, when companies launch products in anticipation of the holiday shopping season. For over 100 years, companies, financiers, and journalists have crossed the Spree and eaten cold liver sausage for breakfast, just to check out the latest innovations in consumer electronics.
This year, those attendees include me and Gear editor Verity Burns. Here are some of the new gadgets and trends, and the funniest things we’ve found.
Samsung's Flagship Tablet Eyes the iPad Pro
Samsung Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Don’t let your tablet dreams die—if you’re an Android user, there’s now an iPad Pro for you. At IFA 2025, Samsung launched the next-gen Galaxy Tab S11 and Tab S11 Ultra, which match Apple's iPad Pro in one regard: thinness. Both Apple and Samsung’s top-tier tablets are a mere 0.20 inches thick. That's sort of been the theme for 2025, especially with the upcoming iPhone 17 Air. The Tab S11 and S11 Ultra Android 16 out of the box, have 120-Hz AMOLED displays, and can hit a peak brightness of 1,600 nits. The company also announced a fifth Galaxy S25 phone, the Galaxy S25 FE. This $650 Android phone offers similar specs to the Galaxy S25+, but cuts some corners here and there to bring the price down.
You can read more about Samsung’s new tablets and phones here. —Adrienne So
Lenovo's Twisty Laptop
Lenovo debuted a concept laptop that can manually swivel from the standard landscape mode to portrait mode; it’s called the ThinkBook VertiFlex, and it’s perfect for when you need to switch from browsing the web in landscape mode to writing in a document or responding to coworkers in Slack in portrait mode. It’s not currently on sale, but it could be.