GoKawiil
Tech News
Aqara has unveiled a new range of smart home lighting products, including permanent outdoor lights and a stick-style floor lamp. The launch signals Aqara's push beyond its core sensor and hub business into the competitive smart lighting market.
Sonoff introduced a new Thermostatic Radiator Valve (TRV) at IFA 2026, a smart device that screws directly onto a radiator's valve pipe and connects via Wi-Fi to an app. Priced at $35, it displays temperature on a color screen and supports Celsius and Fahrenheit units.
Aqara, known mainly for security sensors, revealed a broad new smart lighting range at IFA 2026 covering indoor lamps, LED strips, and outdoor lighting. The lineup includes a multicolor standing lamp with 18 controllable zones, a table lamp, a low-ceiling downlight, a dense LED strip, and both string and permanent weatherproof outdoor lights. Pricing and release dates were not disclosed.
Philips Hue has released the Play Screen Sync camera, a $119.99 device that mounts above a TV and uses a fisheye lens to read whatever is on screen—including native smart TV apps and live broadcasts—then adjusts connected Hue lights to match. Alongside it, the company introduced a slimmer $149.99 Play HDMI Sync Box 4K with a single HDMI input and output, supporting 4K at 60fps.
At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Xiaomi introduced the Smart Band 11, a successor to last year's Smart Band 10 that trims the device down to 9.99mm thick and boosts screen brightness to 2,000 nits from 1,500 nits. The tracker keeps its 1.72-inch, 212x520 pixel display and offers metal or ceramic casing options, along with new color choices, HyperOS 4 software, 5ATM water resistance, and claimed improvements to heart rate and SpO2 sensing.
The Verge's editorial team, including news editor Dom Preston and smart home reviewer Jen Tuohy, spent the week at IFA in Berlin testing new products firsthand. They opened a subscriber-only Q&A session to field reader questions about the devices they tried, with answers rolling out live starting at 12PM ET.
Aqara used IFA to introduce a broad range of new smart lighting products, including the 4.6-foot Floor Lamp T1 with RGBIC lighting and 18 addressable zones, outdoor permanent lights, RGBIC string lights, an upgraded LED light strip, and second-generation downlights. All the new devices support Matter through Thread, letting them work with platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings, Home Assistant, and Homey. Aqara has not yet announced pricing or release dates for any of these products.
Smart ring maker Oura has filed publicly with the SEC to go public, revealing revenue jumped from $697 million to $1.2 billion in the nine months ending June 30 compared to a year earlier. The company reports selling 3.6 million rings over the past year and now has roughly 5 million paid subscribers, with an 85% annual membership retention rate.
UGreen has introduced three smart home hubs — the HomeAgent HA100, HomeAgent HA100 Pro, and MasterAgent MA100 — that handle voice commands, camera monitoring, and Matter device control entirely on-device rather than through cloud servers. Each unit combines a two-bay NAS with dedicated video storage and varying levels of onboard AI horsepower, including NVIDIA hardware in higher-end models, with the base HA100 offering 16GB of RAM and 26 TOPS of AI performance.
UGREEN has launched a set of new smart home devices including three cameras (one indoor, two outdoor), a smart speaker, and a digital photo frame. The cameras—Indoor Cam ID500 Pro, PoE Cam OD600 Pro, and Battery Cam OD800 Pro—all feature 8MP 4K main sensors and are built to integrate with UGREEN's local-AI smart home hubs for video processing and storage. The new SynCare Smart Speaker connects users to UGREEN's own AI assistant, called Uliya.
Smart-ring maker Oura revealed financial details as part of its move toward going public, showing it has become profitable. The company reported 74% revenue growth for the nine months ending in June compared with the prior year.
Snap plans to release its Specs smart glasses on September 16 priced at $2,195, a project CEO Evan Spiegel has championed for years. His public appearances promoting the device, including wearing them throughout a CNBC interview, drew mocking reactions online over their appearance and cost.