I’ve been banging on about this for the best part of two years. When Apple handed its MagSafe magnet-alignment tech over to the Wireless Power Consortium and it became the open Qi2 standard, then Qi2.2 bumped the charging speed up to match MagSafe properly, I assumed every phone maker with a pulse would have magnets built into their flagships within a generation or two. Instead we got Google’s Pixel 10 with Pixelsnap last year, a pile of third-party magnetic cases pretending to be the real thing, and Samsung explicitly leaving magnets out of the Galaxy S26 despite plenty of people asking for exactly that. So when Motorola turned up to IFA 2026 in Berlin with the edge 70 plus and a proper moto snap wireless charger with magnets built into the phone itself, that’s genuinely the headline for me, even with a new watch and phone launched alongside it.

For anyone landing on this cold, here’s the whole announcement in one go. Motorola launched three things this week. The edge 70 plus is a mid-premium phone with a 200MP camera and a 6500mAh battery, from £499.99 in the UK and €599.99 in Ireland. The moto watch ultra is Motorola’s most fully specced smartwatch yet at £369 or €429, with Polar fitness tracking, Wear OS and its own LTE eSIM. The moto snap wireless charger is a £39.99 magnetic charging puck that does up to 25W on any Qi2.2 phone and up to 30W on Motorola’s own hardware. All three roll out in the UK and Ireland from mid to late September.

The phone and watch are solid, competent upgrades and I’ll get into what’s actually new below. But moto snap is the bit worth paying attention to, because it makes Motorola only the second phone maker, after Google, to properly commit to magnetic charging as a real feature rather than a marketing bullet point. That’s still a two-team league nearly three years after Apple opened the standard up, and it says more about the rest of the industry’s nerve than it does about Motorola.

The motorola edge 70 plus

The 200MP main camera is the headline spec, and it’s the highest resolution Motorola has put in a phone. Backed by optical image stabilisation, 10x super zoom and 4K video, plus a dedicated macro lens and a 32MP front camera that switches to a wider group mode the second you turn the phone sideways, it’s clearly built around the idea that most people take more photos of other people than anything else.

Battery is the other genuine strength. A 6500mAh cell is rated for up to 42 hours of talk time or 23 hours of scrolling, which in real terms should comfortably clear two days for most people, and 45W TurboPower charging gets you back up quickly when it doesn’t. There’s also bypass charging, so the phone can draw power directly from the mains during long gaming sessions instead of cycling the battery, which matters more for long-term battery health than it sounds.

Design-wise, Motorola leaned into its Pantone partnership again, with four finishes (Mountain View green, Gray Lilac, Milky Blue and Sage) across acetate, silk and soft-luxe textures on a quad-curved body rated to military durability standards, with Gorilla Glass 7i on the front. Snapdragon’s 7s Gen 3 chip, 8GB of RAM and a 6.78 inch 144Hz AMOLED display round it out, alongside the usual Gemini and Circle to Search integration that ships on most Motorola phones now.

The edge 70 plus arrives in the UK from £499.99 for 8GB/128GB, or £529.99 for 8GB/256GB, both on pre-order from 3 to 21 September. In Ireland it’s €599.99 for 8GB/256GB, also on pre-order from 3 to 21 September, via motorola.com.

The moto watch ultra

Motorola’s watch line has always felt like an afterthought next to the phones, and the moto watch ultra is the first one that reads like Motorola actually wants to compete. The Polar partnership is doing most of the heavy lifting, bringing proper sleep staging, recovery scoring and a running coach that most smartwatches at this price still charge extra for or don’t offer at all.

The bigger practical addition is LTE with an eSIM, the first time a moto watch has been able to make calls, send texts and hold onto notifications without the phone anywhere nearby. Add Google Pay through Wallet, dual-band GPS and Wear OS with full Play Store access, and it’s a genuinely standalone device rather than a phone accessory. It’s also the first Motorola wearable with Qira built in, so you can talk to it directly rather than routing everything through the phone.

Battery is the one figure worth tempering expectations on. Up to two days with the always-on display switched off is respectable but not remarkable next to some rivals, though a 15 minute charge getting you back to a full day’s use is a genuinely useful safety net.

The moto watch ultra costs £369 in the UK or €429 in Ireland, both including two straps, and lands from 18 September.

Moto snap wireless charger, and why it’s the one that matters

On paper, the moto snap wireless charger is just a magnetic puck. It does up to 25W on any Qi2.2 phone, or up to 30W on compatible Motorola hardware using its own charging protocol, with overheat and overcharge protection and zero standby power draw so it’s not quietly sipping electricity all day. The European bundle also throws in a stand with an adjustable aluminium hinge and an Alcantara base, so it doubles as a bedside charger.

What actually matters is that Motorola built the magnets into the edge 70 plus itself, not just into a case you have to remember to buy separately. That’s the same approach Apple uses for MagSafe and the same one Google used for Pixelsnap on the Pixel 10, and it’s still a genuinely short list. Samsung had every chance to join in with the Galaxy S26 earlier this year and pointedly left the magnets out, despite plenty of people asking for exactly this.

I predicted, back when Apple first handed the magnet-alignment tech over to the Wireless Power Consortium, that most of the industry would have caught up within a couple of years. Nearly three years on, it’s Motorola and Google, full stop. That’s a genuinely disappointing pace of adoption for a standard that solves a real annoyance, fumbling a phone onto a charging pad in the dark, and it makes moto snap the actual reason to pay attention to this announcement rather than the phone or the watch.

Because the magnet ring follows the same Qi2 geometry Apple uses for MagSafe, moto snap and MagSafe accessories should physically align with each other too, even if charging speed depends on what both ends support. It’s a small detail, but it’s the sort of cross-compatibility that only happens when a standard is actually open.

The moto snap wireless charger costs £39.99 in the UK and Ireland, with sales starting 24 September and stock expected in October, via motorola.com and Amazon.

The TL;DR

The edge 70 plus is a well-specced mid-premium phone with a genuinely strong camera and battery for the money, and the moto watch ultra is the most complete smartwatch Motorola has made. But the thing to actually get excited about here for me is moto snap, because it means Motorola has done what most of the Android world still hasn’t bothered to and given a phone real, built-in magnetic charging instead of a compromise wrapped in marketing language.

I’d love to be writing this same piece about three more manufacturers by this time next year. For now, if you’re after magnetic charging on Android without buying into Google’s ecosystem, the edge 70 plus and moto snap wireless charger are, as of this week, one of exactly two ways to get it properly. The motorola edge 70 plus, moto watch ultra and moto snap wireless charger are all available to pre-order or buy from motorola.com from 3 September.

Two days ago I wrote about Dyson’s toothbrush with a camera built into it. One short flight later, I’m in Berlin for Dyson’s wider product launch in Germany, all covered at Dyson Unveiled 2026. At the event, Dyson unveiled a dozen new products spanning robot vacuums, air purification, hair care and of course, dental care. Pricing and Irish availability is coming, but for now, here are the highlights.

What happened at Dyson Unveiled 2026?

This was Dyson’s second annual Unveiled event, hosted at Bolle, a historic venue in Berlin, with Chief Engineer Jake Dyson presenting the lineup. Dyson’s own framing is that its products are shifting from purely mechanical devices to ones that use AI, vision systems and machine learning to read the environment they’re working in, whether that’s your mouth, your hair or your living room floor. The CameraJet toothbrush already had its own separate launch in Paris earlier in the week, so it’s the robot vacuums, purifiers and hair tools that make up most of what’s genuinely new here.

Three new Nurovi robot vacuums replace the old Spot+Scrub line

Dyson’s robot vacuum range gets rebuilt under a new name, Nurovi, which Dyson says combines its Neural Intelligence tech with a new vision system. There are three models. The R3 Nurovi Spot+Scrub UV sits at the top, using UV light and AI vision to identify what Dyson says is nearly 200 types of household stains and substances, then cleaning the same spot repeatedly until it’s gone. Its self-cleaning wet roller heats water to 70°C, and it pairs that with a 30,000 Pa motor which Dyson claims delivers 65% more suction pressure than its previous robot for dry cleaning on hard floors and carpet.

The R2 Nurovi Wash+Dry drops the UV stain hunting but keeps the wet cleaning, using mopping pads shaped like a Reuleaux triangle rather than the usual circle. The idea is a constant-width shape that can still reach into corners, something circular pads generally struggle with. It also introduces what Dyson calls a Twin-capture system, where brush bar bristles sweep up larger debris mechanically while the motor concentrates suction on fine dust, alongside a sensor that adjusts suction and cleaning behaviour based on floor type and dust levels.

The entry-level R1 Nurovi Dry drops the mopping altogether and sticks to dry cleaning, with the same Twin-capture system and 21,000 Pa suction, plus redesigned side sweepers Dyson says reduce hair tangling while reaching closer to walls and corners. None of the three Nurovi models have confirmed Irish pricing or release dates yet.

The W1 PencilWash wet cleaner gets a self-cleaning dock

Dyson’s slim wet floor cleaner, first launched earlier in 2026, has been updated rather than replaced. The new W1 PencilWash keeps the same lightweight, slim design but adds a more absorbent roller, a waste system Dyson describes as more hygienic, and a self-cleaning dock, none of which featured on the original.

HushJet purifiers scale up to cover bigger rooms

Dyson’s HushJet nozzle design, first seen on a compact purifier and a portable fan earlier this year, now covers three new air purifiers. The HushJet Big+Quiet Cool Pure+ Formaldehyde is the largest model in the new range, built for projecting air across multiple rooms with a three-stage filtration system Dyson says captures 99.999% of pollutants down to 0.01 microns while also destroying formaldehyde. The HushJet Pure Cool+ Formaldehyde is a smaller, mid-size version aimed at large single rooms, which Dyson says delivers up to three times the purification power of the models it replaces, alongside personal cooling. The HushJet Hot Cool Pure+ rounds things out as a 3-in-1 that combines purification, heating and personal cooling in one unit for year-round use.

The personal HushJet review is also coming soon.

Corrale CoolShine and the new Airsmooth hot brush lead the hair care news

The Corrale CoolShine straightener builds on Dyson’s existing flexing-plate Corrale technology (goosed.ie/reviews/gadgets/is-the-dyson-coralle-worth-buying/) by adding a cooling attachment with heat-extracting pipes that draw warmth away from hair as you style. Dyson says this cuts heat damage by up to 29% compared with the standard Corrale and adds up to 154% more shine versus untreated hair, with styling results it claims last up to 24 hours.

The Airsmooth is a genuinely new product for Dyson, its first dedicated hot air styling brush. It uses a dual-bristle system, described as anti-snag bristles that release hair easily and PivotFlex bristles that flex up to 90 degrees to control airflow and reduce frizz, aimed at everything from straight to coily hair types. Heat is measured 100 times a second, and the brush runs on universal voltage for travel.

MyDyson adds a loan machine promise and a paid maintenance plan

Alongside the hardware, Dyson introduced MyDyson, a customer service package built around a promise to lend customers a replacement machine if a repair can’t be done straight away, plus a paid maintenance service called Dyson Total Restore that includes a health check aimed at extending a machine’s working life.

What’s confirmed for Ireland after Dyson Unveiled 2026

Of everything announced, only the CameraJet toothbrush has a confirmed Irish price, €479.99 for the full Dyson Dental System, and we expect Irish pricing and availability to be revealed shortly. Whether any of it performs as intelligently as Dyson is promising is a different question, and one worth waiting for a proper hands-on before answering.

Hypershell’s kit has been through my hands before, and I wrote up my honest take on it after a trip to IFA last year. Every model in that range has done its assisting from the hip alone. That changes today as Hypershell took to the stage in Berlin at IFA 2026 to unveil Halo.

Hypershell Halo is the company’s new flagship exoskeleton, and the first in its lineup to power the hip and knee joints together rather than the hip on its own. Four motors work across the full leg instead of just the top of it. Hypershell hasn’t confirmed Irish or EU pricing yet, nor a release date for buyers, though Halo will be on the company’s stand for the rest of the show.

There’s a fair bit of engineering behind that change, and some of it is genuinely interesting on paper. Here’s what Hypershell has announced, and where I’d want to see it hold up once a review unit lands.

How Halo’s four motors work as one leg

The core of Halo is what Hypershell calls its Unified Architecture, a continuous carbon fibre structure that runs from hip to thigh to knee to lower leg. The idea is a direct force path rather than separate joints doing their own thing, so all four motors can share the work of propulsion, weight bearing, controlling your descent and cushioning landings.

The hip connection itself has had a redesign too. Hypershell’s new Fish-Spine Adaptive Joint links the hip motor to the leg lever in a way that’s meant to follow your hip’s natural movement rather than locking to a fixed mechanical point, with up to 198 degrees of side-to-side range and 167 degrees front to back. There’s also a new thigh strap, the AeroFlex V, built to redistribute pressure as you stand, sit, squat or cross uneven ground, replacing the rigid rear panel used on earlier models.

HyperIntuition 2.0, the AI behind Halo’s movement predictions

Hypershell’s new motion control system is called HyperIntuition 2.0, and it’s built on what the company describes as a Mixture-of-Experts approach, meaning several specialised neural networks reason together in real time rather than one set of rules trying to cover every scenario. More than 30 sensors feed into it, processed on a dedicated onboard chip.

Hypershell says the system is trained on over 10,000 hours of motion data and can anticipate a wearer’s next move roughly 200 milliseconds ahead, adjusting assistance up to 2,500 times a second. There’s also a learning layer that’s meant to adapt to your own gait, strength and any asymmetry over time. Those are Hypershell’s own figures rather than anything independently tested, and how that plays out for someone with an uneven gait or an old knee injury is exactly the kind of thing only real-world use will answer.

HyperDrive Pro, the power system inside Halo

The new HyperDrive Pro motor system puts out up to 1,490 W of peak power across the leg and supports a maximum assisted speed of 17 km/h. Each knee motor unit has been brought down to 170 g, with a magnesium alloy housing keeping the overall weight in check.

Combined with the unified structure, Hypershell says this lets Halo share braking and load-bearing torque between the hip and knee, which it claims cuts knee-muscle fatigue by up to 40% during squats, on top of helping with climbs and absorbing repeated impact on rough terrain. Power comes from the new PocketVolt battery, a 370 g detachable pack good for up to 20 km of range, small enough to carry at the waist or separately in a backpack.

At 2.6 kg, Halo is built from carbon fibre and titanium and is rated IP54 for dust and light splashing water. It folds down to under 8 litres and is designed to fit inside a backpack, with Hypershell saying it’s compatible with packs up to 85 litres, including mountaineering-sized ones.

Fitting it uses a five-buckle system with stepless adjustment and quick-release levers. Once it’s been set up for your body, Hypershell puts the time to put it back on at around 20 seconds, with removal taking as little as 5.

Shelly, Halo’s AI sidekick

Halo also comes with Shelly, a voice and text assistant Hypershell built specifically for the exoskeleton. It’s meant to handle initial setup, let you personalise how much assistance you get, and help plan routes, learning your movement habits as you go.

None of this comes with a price tag yet, and Hypershell has stayed quiet on exactly when Halo will ship beyond the IFA demo units in Berlin this week. If Hypershell’s track record with its hip-only exoskeletons is any guide, you can expect this to be pretty neat. I remember the feeling of walking with it being slightly underwhelming until I turned it off and realised just how much work an exoskeleton can do quietly for you. In the meantime you can follow the rest of the show through our full IFA Berlin coverage, or head to Hypershell’s own site to register for updates on Halo.

Anker used its IFA 2026 keynote in Berlin to unveil MindBase, a local AI hub the company says will act as the central brain of the connected home, tying together whole-home connectivity, on-device processing and local storage in a single box. It lands as part of the same wave of announcements in which Anker confirmed it is folding eufy, soundcore, SOLIX and eufyMake into one unified Anker brand, and MindBase looks very much like it is meant to be the flagship product of that new identity. If you want the full story on the rebrand and everything else Anker announced this week, we have covered that separately.

Anker says MindBase brings together three things. EasyOmni Link handles connectivity, pulling in close to 100 existing Anker devices plus hundreds of Matter-compatible products from other brands, while also working alongside Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Home Assistant. TrueSmart Agent is the compute layer, an AI chip Anker built in-house and rates at 26 TOPS, running a large language model locally so its AI agents can plan and act without sending anything to the cloud. EverSafe Memory is the storage side, effectively turning MindBase into a home NAS with 64GB of onboard storage plus two drive bays supporting up to 48TB combined, letting you search footage and files with natural language without any of it leaving the house.

Looking at you home lab people.

None of that comes with a price or a release date. Anker has confirmed MindBase exists and roughly how it is meant to work, but pricing and availability are being held back for a later announcement.

The MindBase Security Kit is the first real-world application Anker is putting behind the hub, and it is built entirely around home security. It pairs MindBase with the upcoming eufy TrackLight Cam S1, an outdoor camera with 4K resolution and 180-degree dual-radar detection paired with an auto-tracking light, alongside the newly refreshed eufy Video Doorbell S4, a Smart Security Shield, and a set of entry and motion sensors.

Anker says the security-specific AI agent inside MindBase runs entirely on-device, watching for events in real time and escalating its response through observation, lighting, verbal warnings or active deterrence depending on what it detects. The Smart Security Shield, a sensor meant to sit at the edge of the garden, uses dual radar to spot strangers from up to 15 metres away, while a digital credential system called DSKey is supposed to recognise family members from as far as 30 metres. Those are Anker’s own figures rather than anything independently tested, so treat them as a manufacturer’s claim rather than a guarantee. There is no price or launch date for the kit either.

The rest of the announcement is a wider refresh of eufy’s security camera lineup, and this is where prices start to appear, just not always for Ireland.

The eufy Video Doorbell S4 gets a 180-degree panoramic field of view along with AI-powered tracking that keeps couriers and visitors in frame, and it is the one product here with a confirmed Irish release. It is available from eufy.com/ie and Amazon.ie for €329.99, with 15% off between 4 and 30 September.

The eufy NVR Security System E50 is an 8-channel network recorder pairing fixed 2K wide-angle lenses with motorised 4K pan-tilt-zoom lenses on the same mount, expandable to 16 channels and 16TB of storage. It is on sale now in the US, Canada and Australia, with 4-camera kits starting at $999 and 8-camera kits with a 4TB drive going up to $1,899, but there is no Irish or UK date yet.

The eufy Window Camera E10 is a compact indoor-mounted camera aimed at renters and apartments, sticking to the inside of a window with anti-reflection optics and 2.5K recording. It is priced at $69.99 and due later this year, again without a confirmed Irish release.

The eufy Fall Detection Sensor uses millimetre-wave radar to spot falls in bathrooms and bedrooms without a wearable, and supports two-way communication, though Anker has not given it a price or release window at all.

Anker is pitching all of this as local-first and subscription-free, processing sensitive data on-device rather than in the cloud. Worth flagging though, the same press release includes a footnote admitting that optional or premium features may still require a monthly subscription, so “no subscription” is doing a bit of heavy lifting depending on which features you want to use.

Teufel used IFA Berlin this week to launch the IKONIO, its most powerful Wi-Fi speaker to date, and it’s landing in Ireland at €1,199.99. It’s a single, all-in-one unit that Teufel is positioning as an alternative to running separate stereo speakers and a subwoofer.

The IKONIO is an active 3-way streaming speaker built around eight drivers and eight matching amplifier channels, made up of three tweeters, three midrange drivers and two 200mm subwoofers. Total output is rated at 650 watts RMS, with a peak of 2,500 watts and up to 118dB peak SPL from a single unit. It’s available now in black or white from Teufel’s Irish online store, either individually or paired wirelessly as a two-speaker stereo set.

What’s actually inside the IKONIO?

The headline number is 650 watts RMS, but the more interesting spec for most living rooms is the bass extension. The two 200mm subwoofers sit opposite each other in a sealed enclosure using what Teufel calls a Force Balancing layout, where the two woofers move in opposition to cancel out the vibration that would otherwise rattle the cabinet at higher volumes. Teufel rates the frequency response down to 19Hz (-6dB), which is deep enough to reach the low end most bookshelf speakers simply skip over.

A built-in DSP handles the eight amplifier channels, and Teufel says the enclosure is passively cooled, so there’s no fan noise to worry about even under load. For context, this thing weighs 17.4kg and measures 30 x 38 x 30cm, so it’s closer in heft to a small crate of drinks than a typical smart speaker. It’s built to sit on a TV unit or sideboard, or on an optional K&M stand sold separately, rather than get carried around the house.

Three sound modes, and how the stereo pairing works

Teufel’s Dynamore Ultra processing gives the IKONIO three switchable sound modes. Immersive mode is the default wide-soundstage setting, aimed at making a single speaker sound closer to a stereo pair than you’d expect from one box. Omnidirectional mode disperses sound in all directions instead, which Teufel pitches as the better option if you move around the room rather than sit facing the speaker. Mono mode switches Dynamore Ultra off entirely and fires the sound straight forward, and it’s also the mode the speaker falls back to when two units are paired, with the left IKONIO handling the left channel and the right handling the right. Peak SPL rises to 124dB when two units are running together in stereo.

Early hands-on coverage from German outlets that got units ahead of the announcement has generally backed up the wide soundstage claim for a single unit, for what it’s worth, though obviously that’s their listening room and their ears, not ours.

Connectivity and what’s missing

On the streaming side, the IKONIO supports AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect and TuneIn internet radio, plus Bluetooth 5.1 and wired RCA line-in or optical input for anything that isn’t streaming natively. Controls live on a touch panel on top, which lights up automatically via a proximity sensor, with deeper settings handled through the Teufel Home app.

One thing worth flagging plainly is that there’s no built-in voice assistant. If you want to shout at something to skip a track, this isn’t that speaker, you’ll be reaching for your phone or the touch panel instead.

Price and availability in Ireland

The IKONIO is available now in black or white for €1,199.99 from Teufel’s Irish online store, with the option to buy a second unit later for wireless stereo pairing. Teufel, founded in Berlin in 1979, sells direct to consumers across Europe rather than through third-party retailers, which is the usual explanation for why its pricing sits where it does compared with high street alternatives.

I’ve got a drawer full of dead smart home hubs at this stage. Every ecosystem wants its own little box plugged into the router, and most of them only ever talk to their own gear. It’s really why I went down the homelab route with Home Assistant. So a free update that turns an existing wall panel into a proper cross-brand controller is the kind of announcement that actually matters, rather than the usual IFA filler.

Shelly announced the update at IFA 2026 in Berlin, alongside an updated smart radiator thermostat and two new door and window sensors.

The headline piece is a free over-the-air firmware update, version 2.8.0, for the Shelly Wall Display range. It turns compatible Wall Displays into both a Matter controller and a Matter device at the same time, meaning the panel can pull in gear from other brands and also hand its own functions over to whatever smart home app you’re already using. No pricing changes here, since it’s a free update to hardware people already own.

What the Matter update actually does

As a controller, the Wall Display can add and manage Matter devices from other manufacturers directly, covering lights, blinds and shades, thermostats, fans, plugs and sensors, without needing a separate Matter hub or bridge sitting in the background. Those devices show up as tiles right next to your existing Shelly gear on the home screen, and they can be pulled into Shelly’s own scenes, automations and scripting, all running locally on the panel rather than round-tripping to the cloud.

It works the other way too. The same update lets the Wall Display act as a Matter device in its own right, so its relays, dimming and thermostat functions can be added to Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, SmartThings or Home Assistant, depending on how the panel is set up. A Wall Display can be part of more than one Matter ecosystem at once, so plugging it into Google Home doesn’t lock you out of also using it with Apple’s setup.

Which Wall Displays get it

Full controller and device functionality lands on the Wall Display X1i, X2i, XL, U1, S1, S2 and XT with firmware 2.8.0. The original Wall Display and the Wall Display X2 don’t get the full update, but they can still control Matter devices shared from a newer compatible Wall Display on the same network, so it’s not a total dead end for older hardware. One caveat worth knowing: if you’re dealing with Thread-based Matter devices rather than Wi-Fi or Zigbee ones, you’ll still need a separate Thread Border Router. The Wall Display doesn’t remove that requirement.

A quieter BLU TRV with a new gateway trick

Shelly is also updating the BLU TRV, its smart radiator valve, with a new motor for quieter operation and a claimed battery life of up to two years. The more useful change is on the setup side. Until now, BLU TRV only worked with the bundled USB Gateway Gen3, an extra box you had to plug in alongside it. The update adds a gateway function to compatible Shelly Wi-Fi devices from the Plus generation onwards, so if you’ve already got one of those running through Shelly Cloud, you don’t need the dedicated gateway at all. Shelly Gateway Gen3 still exists as an option where you want local as well as cloud control. The TRV supports both Bluetooth and Zigbee.

Two new door and window sensors

Rounding out the announcement are two additions to the BLU ZB sensor family. The Shelly BLU Door Window Mini ZB is a smaller sensor built for narrow window and door frames where the standard version is too bulky to fit properly. The Shelly BLU Door Window Outdoor ZB carries IP55 weather protection and is aimed at garden gates, sheds and other outbuildings, extending the same open and closed monitoring outside the main house. Both support Bluetooth and Zigbee connectivity.

The Matter update ships as a free firmware update for eligible Wall Displays. The updated BLU TRV, the BLU Door Window Mini ZB and the BLU Door Window Outdoor ZB are all listed as coming soon, with no pricing confirmed yet. Worth keeping an eye on Shelly’s own site for exact dates once they land.

I’ve been saying this for years. Anker, eufy and soundcore are three of the strongest names in consumer tech, all owned by the same company, all doing really well, and all wandering around under separate branding for some reason. It never made sense to me. Anker is a massive, trusted name on its own. eufy is trusted for cameras and robot vacuums. soundcore has built real credibility in audio. Splitting a strong company into weaker, less recognisable pieces always felt like a mistake dressed up as strategy, and it looks like Anker has finally come around to the same conclusion.

Anker Innovations has announced that its five brands, Anker, eufy, soundcore, SOLIX and eufyMake, are being folded back into a single name: Anker. The change won’t happen overnight. New products will carry the unified branding first, existing product lines will transition gradually, and warranty and support stay exactly as they are. Alongside the rebrand, the company is opening its first standalone Anker store in Berlin and dropping a genuinely large wave of new hardware across audio, charging, smart home, robotics and home energy.

The rebrand is the headline, but there’s a lot to get through, so I’ll take the announcement in the order it’s likely to matter to you: why the unification makes sense, then the actual products landing in Ireland over the coming months.

Why splitting the brand up never made sense

Category brands make sense when you’re a small company trying to punch above your weight in a specific niche. eufy could go toe to toe with Ring and Arlo without dragging Anker’s charging reputation into it. soundcore could compete with Sony and Bose on its own terms. That logic worked for a while.

But the boundaries between those categories have basically dissolved. A power bank now needs the same on-device AI smarts as a pair of earbuds. A smart camera and a robot mower are both, functionally, home robotics. When soundcore quietly started rebranding to Anker Sound & Video in China back in April, it was a fairly clear signal that the company itself had noticed the same thing. Keeping five separate identities around one increasingly overlapping set of technology was just diluting the trust each one had built individually, rather than compounding it. One strong, recognisable name behind everything is the more obvious move, and I’m glad it’s actually happening rather than staying a rumour.

The new audio lineup, built around Anker’s own AI chip

Anker’s THUS chip, a neural-net compute-in-memory chip that runs AI processing directly on the device rather than in the cloud, first showed up back in May. It’s now the backbone of a full new audio range.

The AeroClip 2 and AeroClip 2 Pro are clip-on earbuds rather than the usual in-ear style, built around an open listening design with a 12mm driver, LDAC support and real-time AI translation. Anker claims the ergonomic shape fits 99% of ears, which is the kind of number I’d want to actually try before believing, but the call quality pitch, built on the THUS chip handling noise in real time, is the more interesting claim to test.

• AeroClip 2 will launch in September for €169.99 on Amazon.ie, with AeroClip 2 Pro becoming available in November, €229.99 on Amazon.ie.

The Space 2 Pro over-ear headphones bring the same call-quality tech to a more traditional shape, with 30 hours of battery life with noise cancellation on and 60 with it off. The Liberty Buds 2 are a standard in-ear pair with an 8-sensor array for calls and 9.2mm drivers for music.

• The Space 2 Pro arrive in September for €199.99 on Amazon.ie, along with the Liberty Buds 2 for €129.99 on Amazon.ie.

Sleep tech gets the biggest expansion. The Sleep 4 and Sleep 4 Pro build on Anker’s already popular sleep earbud line, with the Pro model adding heart rate and HRV tracking that feeds into what Anker calls BioSync, adjusting the audio in real time to try to actually get you to sleep rather than just playing a static white noise loop. The charging case has its own touchscreen, so you can set an alarm or change sounds without picking up your phone.

• Sleep 4 comes in October for €199.99 on Amazon.ie and the Sleep 4 Pro landing in November for €279.99 on Amazon.ie.

For anyone who won’t wear anything in their ears overnight, the SleepLab and SleepLab Pro are Anker’s first bedside sleep speakers. The Pro version uses 60GHz radar to track heart rate, breathing and sleep stages without any wearable at all, then adjusts the audio to match.

Charging gear that manages your battery instead of just filling it

Charging is where Anker actually started, and the three new products here are less about raw speed and more about not wrecking your battery in the process.

The MagGo Power Bank Pro 2 is a magnetic wireless power bank with a built-in cooling fan, which sounds like overkill until you remember how hot wireless charging gets a phone. Anker claims it stays under 36 degrees throughout a charge and gets an iPhone 17 Pro to 50% in 25 minutes.

• MagGo Power Bank Pro 2 lands this October for €119.99 on Amazon.ie.

The Laptop Charger Pro is the more interesting one on paper. It recognises the connected laptop and applies a dedicated charging curve with an 80% charge limit through what Anker calls Care Mode, aimed at slowing down the battery degradation that comes from constantly topping a laptop up to full. It claims over 40% better battery health over time, backed by monthly reports through a companion app. It’s not landing until Q1 2027 though, and pricing hasn’t been confirmed.

The MagStand Charging Station is a bedside hub that replaces the usual tangle of separate chargers with one 25-watt magnetic pad, a retractable cable and a hidden USB-C port, and it paces overnight charging so your phone finishes near your alarm rather than sitting at 100% for six hours.

• MagStand Charging Station launches in November for €99.99 on Amazon.ie.

Smart home and robotics

On the home side, the Video Doorbell S4 gets a proper 180-degree panoramic view to kill the usual doorbell blind spots, and the upcoming TrackLight Cam S1 pairs a 4K telephoto camera with an auto-tracking light that follows anyone approaching the house.

• The Video Doorbell S4 will be available from tomorrow for €329.99 on eufy.com/ie and Amazon.ie, with 15% off from 4th to 30th September. The TrackLight Cam S1 is coming in Q4 2026 on eufy.com/ie and Amazon.ie, with the final price to be confirmed.

The Robot Vacuum Omni E35 is aimed squarely at households with young kids, having earned TÜV certification as a “maternal and infant cleaning robot” for bacterial elimination and low noise. It pairs a self-cleaning roller mop with 35,000 Pa of suction.

• Robot Vacuum Omni E35 launches tomorrow for €1,099 on eufy.com/ie, Amazon.ie, Harvey Norman, DID Electrical, Euronics and Expert, with €100 off from 4th to 30th September.

The Robot Lawn Mower S2 Max is Anker’s first fully in-house mower, with no boundary wire or RTK base station needed, an extendable cutting arm for genuine edge-to-edge cutting, and enough grunt to handle slopes up to 38 degrees. It’s a serious spec sheet, but it’s not due until May 2027, so treat it as a preview rather than something to plan around. However, you can check out my review of the Anker’s E15 lawnmower.

Anker also teased MindBase, a local AI hub meant to tie devices across the newly unified brand together, handle AI processing on-site rather than in the cloud, and store household data locally rather than on a server somewhere. There’s no pricing, availability or firm product details yet, so it’s one to watch rather than one to get excited about just yet.

Home energy: two new batteries aimed at Irish and UK households

The SOLIX XE is Anker’s next look at all-in-one home energy storage, combining the inverter, battery and battery management system into a single unit rather than the usual separate boxes. Each unit holds 7kWh, expandable up to 126kWh across three units, with 15kW of solar input and a choice of 5kW, 6kW or 8kW output. The cells are rated for 10,000 charge cycles and support two charge cycles a day, which Anker says works out to roughly 14kWh of usable capacity per day from a single 7kWh unit. The built-in AI energy management system connects to over 870 European electricity suppliers and automatically times charging and discharging around the cheapest rates.

• SOLIX XE will be available from 18 September through authorised installers with the price to be confirmed

The SOLIX S2000 is the portable version, built around runtime rather than raw output. It offers 2kWh of capacity with 1,500W rated output, an idle draw of just 10W, and Anker says it’s independently verified by TÜV SÜD as having the industry’s highest runtime rating for a unit its size. It includes a built-in UPS with under-10ms switchover, which matters if you’re running anything that genuinely can’t lose power for even a second, like a router or a CPAP machine.

The TL;DR

The individual products here range from genuinely useful to still-just-a-teaser, and I’ll be covering several of them properly once they’re actually in hand. But the story that matters today is the brand move, and it’s the right call. Anker, eufy and soundcore were never weak names that needed hiding behind each other. They were strong names being asked to compete separately when they could have been compounding trust into one. Folding them back into Anker isn’t Anker admitting a mistake so much as it’s Anker catching up to what the products themselves had already become. The unification starts now, with the first products landing in Ireland from tomorrow.

Athom, the Dutch outfit behind the Homey smart home hub, has just launched something that sounds almost old fashioned for 2026. A physical dial you can turn to control your house.

Homey Portal is a small round controller, either sat on a desk or mounted on a wall, built around a 2.8 inch touchscreen and a stainless steel rotary ring. It is assigned to a specific room or zone in your home, and lets anyone standing in front of it control the lights, music and heating in that zone, along with keeping an eye on energy use. No app required, no phone required, just a tap or a twist.

It is available to pre-order now for an introductory price of 249 euro (pre-order Homey Portal), rising to 299 euro once the first batch sells through. That pricing is the same for Ireland as the rest of the eurozone, and orders are expected to start shipping before the end of 2026, first come first served.

The idea behind it is simple enough. Most smart home control still lives on someone’s phone, which means whoever does not have the app installed is stuck asking someone else to turn the heating up. Homey Portal puts that control back on the wall, closer to how a normal light switch works, just with a screen and a dial attached.

For lights, a tap turns everything in the zone on or off, or pulls up a single light to adjust on its own. The ring sets brightness, and dragging a light around the display changes its colour or warmth. It works with lights already connected through Homey, including Philips Hue and IKEA gear. Music works much the same way, showing album art and the current track from linked systems like Sonos or Denon Heos, with the ring doubling as a volume dial and a tap to skip.

Climate control covers thermostats such as Nest, Tado and Honeywell, showing current and target temperature with the ring used to adjust the setpoint. There is also a live energy dashboard, pulling in data from the Homey Energy Dongle or third party meters like Shelly and HomeWizard, which combined with dynamic pricing is meant to help you spot the cheapest hours to run something power hungry.

Beyond the basics, Homey Portal can be wired into Homey’s automation system, Flow, to show custom prompts. A camera feed and a yes or no question when someone rings the doorbell is the example Athom gives, and it can also show weather and short forecasts. Worth flagging for anyone renting out a place on Airbnb or similar, the standard icons can be stripped back so guests only see shortcuts to the devices they are actually meant to use, with all of that configured through the Homey app rather than on the unit itself.

One thing worth being clear on. Homey Portal is not a hub on its own, it needs to be paired with Homey Cloud, a Homey Pro from 2023 onwards, Homey Pro mini, or a self hosted Homey server. Homey Cloud is free for up to five devices, so anyone with a small setup could feasibly run this without paying anything beyond the hardware itself. Anyone with a bigger smart home will need Homey Premium to go past that.

Athom has been behind Homey since 2014 and became majority owned by LG Electronics in 2024, and the company claims Homey now supports over 70,000 devices from more than 2,000 brands. Whether Homey Portal actually earns its keep on a wall long term is something we will only know once units start landing, but as a concept it is a genuinely different take on smart home control worth keeping an eye on.

IFA in Berlin is where networking brands go every year to show off what’s coming next, and this year TP-Link has brought its first Wi-Fi 8 hardware. It’s calling the new Archer 8 Ultra router and Deco 8 Ultra mesh system the world’s first complete Wi-Fi 8 lineup, unveiled at the show on 1 September 2026. That’s TP-Link’s own framing, worth noting since nobody else has shipped a rival yet to compare it against.

Wi-Fi 8 is built on the upcoming IEEE 802.11bn standard, and rather than chasing another headline speed figure, TP-Link says this generation is about consistency, less dropout at the edges of the house, less slowdown when everyone’s phones, tellies and smart plugs are hammering the network at once. The Archer 8 Ultra is a tri-band router, the Deco 8 Ultra is a mesh system, and both lean on chipsets from Broadcom, Qualcomm and MediaTek paired with TP-Link’s own engineering. Regional pre-orders for the Archer 8 Ultra open on 30 September 2026, with full pricing and Irish availability still to be confirmed.

What TP-Link is actually claiming

This isn’t about faster top speeds, it’s a more stable connection everywhere in the house. It’s about time this became the focus.

TP-Link’s new StabilityEngine bundles a few technologies to get there. Enhanced Long Range and Distributed Resource Units are meant to stretch coverage into the weak spots and improve the connection for devices sitting far from the router with little transmission power of their own, think the smart plug in the shed. Non-Primary Channel Access is meant to keep things responsive when a house full of devices is connected at once, and Unequal Modulation alongside newer Modulation and Coding Schemes are meant to hold throughput steady even when there’s interference from neighbouring networks. In plain terms, the promise is that your connection at the far end of the garden shouldn’t keep dropping, and a Saturday night with the whole family streaming shouldn’t grind everything to a crawl.

The hardware

The Archer 8 Ultra, also badged the Archer BN800, is a tri-band router with a claimed aggregate wireless speed of up to 19Gbps, 10Gbps wired connectivity and 18 internal antennas. As always with these aggregate figures, that’s every band added together on paper, not what any single device will actually pull, so treat it as a ceiling rather than a real-world number. The Deco 8 Ultra, sold as the Deco BN85 in some regions, is the mesh version, rated up to 22Gbps aggregate with that figure varying by market, also with 10Gbps wired connectivity. TP-Link says a three pack covers up to 910 square metres and handles over 200 connected devices, which is a lot more house than most of us are working with. On looks, TP-Link has moved away from the usual spiky antenna aesthetic toward a plainer, shelf-friendly finish with status lighting built in rather than a row of blinking LEDs.

When you’ll actually be able to buy one

Pre-orders for the Archer 8 Ultra open in select regions from 30 September 2026, alongside a global online launch event where TP-Link says it’ll share full pricing and specs. No Irish or UK date has been confirmed yet. The rest of the lineup follows later, the standard Deco 8 mesh system in Q1 2027, the Roam 8 travel router in Q2 2027, and Wi-Fi 8 range extenders and adapters also in Q2 2027. Worth knowing while you wait, the IEEE 802.11bn standard behind all of this isn’t expected to be formally ratified until 2028, so some of the finer detail here could still shift before then.

You can register for launch updates on TP-Link’s Wi-Fi 8 announcement page.