Germany’s annual technology show, the IFA at Berlin, is done and dusted and not much about the event has contained too many surprises. In a sense, it shows how innovation has shifted to software with the hardware having reached its zenith and supporting all the new things you can do with AI and other technologies.

There are the usual TVs, laptops and smartphones, but little stands out as game-changing. However, there are a few products that stand out as interesting. One of these is Acer’s Predator Thronos, a crazy gaming chair in which you get in as if it were a spacepod of some kind. Seated, you lean back about 40 degrees and look at three 27-inch monitors that wrap around you. The monitors can be moved up or down and there are plenty of adjustments you can make in the chair, but what makes it come alive is that it vibrates or throbs in context with the game and what you’re doing on screen with it. Yes, it’s extreme.

At the tech shows, someone always goes over the top with televisions and this time it’s Samsung. It’s difficult enough finding 4K resolution content for TVs we already have, but the Korean electronics giant decided to double that and released 8K TVs.

Samsung’s new QLED television isn’t just high on resolution, it’s very, very bright and has a processor powerful enough to scale lower resolution content up to 8K levels without distorting it.

Of course there were smartphones at the IFA show, but nothing out of the ordinary. One phone that did seem to grab attention, surprisingly, is Sony’s Xperia XZ3, which many of the tech media publications have praised enthusiastically.

Rather than being revolutionary in any way, Sony’s flagship seems to have done some catching up with others. And it comes in some stunning colours.

On the mobile front though, Huawei has made waves by launching a 7 nm (nanometer) Kirin 980 chip, which is more ahead of the current flagship processors.

The only other such chip is probably coming on the new Apple products. The 7 nm chip is a lot faster and will handle AI-based tasks with speed. Huawei has also joined the smart speakers race by launching its own ‘AI Cube’ with Alexa on it.

But most interestingly, Huawei has launched a little gizmo called Smart Locator, which can be snapped on to anything and then tracked.

Alexa, incidentally, is now on 20,000 devices of all kinds, quite apart from Amazon’s own original Echo speakers, from lights to smart screens to cars to computers. Now, Alexa has turned up in routers. Netgear has put Alexa into mesh routers, which are placed all over a house (or workplace). What the router Alexa will do apart from its usual collection of skills remains to be seen.

No IFA is complete without the barrage of laptops Lenovo brings along. The company’s Yoga Book 930 was one of the more exciting gadgets at the show. The laptop-tablet has two screens, one of them an e-ink one. And of course it works with a pen.

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