Best of IFA 2026 Awards: The products that impressed us most in Berlin

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IFA 2026 has taken over Berlin once again, bringing a fresh wave of phones, smart home hardware, and AI-heavy gadgets from across the industry. As always, the Android Authority team was on the ground, working the halls and getting hands-on with as much of it as we could.

This year’s show had no shortage of standouts, from Xiaomi’s wide-screen 18 Fold and TECNO’s zero-bezel concept phone to TCL’s first NXTPAPER AMOLED handset. The smart home had a particularly strong showing too, with Anker’s MindBase hub, the Homey Portal controller, and new cleaning and mowing robots from Roborock and Mammotion. Add in a new 360 camera from DJI, Motorola’s rugged smartwatch, fresh mobile computing from Lenovo and Dell, and a gaming curiosity from Acer, and there was plenty worth calling out.

After digging through the biggest launches and the most interesting prototypes, we’ve picked the products and innovations that impressed us the most.

These are the Android Authority Best of IFA 2026 award winners.

Xiaomi made its IFA debut this year, and it did not do it quietly. The company took more than 3,300 square meters of floor space and filled it with over 380 products spanning phones, smart home gear, and even cars, under its “Human x Car x Home” banner. The star, though, was the Xiaomi 18 Fold , which we saw in the real world for the first time here in Berlin after weeks of leaks.

What makes it more than another entry in a crowded category is what’s inside. This is the first flagship phone powered by Xiaomi’s own XRing O3, the latest step in the company’s long push to build its own silicon rather than buy it. It’s paired with next-generation LPDDR6 memory, rated for speeds up to 12,800Mbps. The wide-screen form factor puts Xiaomi in newly contested territory, arriving on the heels of Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8 and ahead of Apple’s first folding iPhone, which is expected to feature a similar format.

The unit on display came in a luscious cherry red finish, with a triple camera arranged along a horizontal bar. The text on that bar points to a focal range of 17mm to 80mm, which suggests a telephoto of around 3.3x. Xiaomi is holding the full specifications back until the phone’s China launch on September 7, but our interest is piqued.