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IFA is the world’s biggest tech event (or so it claims). It’s held in Berlin in early September each year, and IFA 2025 was yet another cracker. Our editor was on the showfloor, putting him in an excellent position to shortlist the best business products from IFA 2025.
What do we mean by best business products? Well, IFA is full of smart fridges, robot vacuum cleaners and gaming tech, but we focus on items that could legitimately make their way onto the IT budget sheet. Think laptops, phones, tablets, monitors, productivity tools.
Not everything we liked made our own shortlist. We’ve covered elsewhere two Acer monitors that stood out from the rest, plus a pair of stylish business laptops and a highly affordable tablet. Not to mention a duo of Chromeboxes. But this article is about the award winners. The nine products deserving to win one of our coveted Best of IFA 2025 awards.
Acer isn’t the first manufacturer to create an “AI” Chromebook powered by MediaTek’s Kompanio Ultra – Lenovo beat it to that accolade – but the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 514 packs a glorious 14in 2.8K OLED screen. And the Enterprise edition unlocks all the management capabilities we’ve come to expect from Google’s OS.
But two things surprised me once I started playing with it. First, it genuinely looks stylish; not something you expect from a Chromebook. Acer has clearly paid attention, with chrome (the metal) edging on the sides and a glistening finish to the hinges. I also enjoyed typing on the keyboard, which again has a distinctive design.
Along with support for Google’s Gemini AI, Acer promises up to 17 hours of battery life and a touch display that supports USB 2.0 styluses (styli if you prefer). As you would expect given its 2-in-1 design.
The Acer Chromebook Enterprise Plus Spin 514 (CPE594-2N) will start at €879 when it becomes available in EMEA in October 2025. The regular Spin 514 starts at €699/$700, and will also go on sale next month.
To look at, the Acer Veriton GN100 AI Mini Workstation is hardly special. The grilles on the front give it a hint of style, but otherwise this is a plain, compact black box. But it’s the insides that count, and Acer kindly had these on show at IFA 2025: for it’s powered by Nvidia’s GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, complete with 128GB of unified memory, and there’s also room for up to 4TB of storage.
The GB10 Superchip delivers up to 1 Peta FLOPS of FP4 AI performance. That means it can handle large AI models on its own, and even scale to 405 billion parameters if you connect two GN100 systems together using Nvidia’s ConnectX-7 SmartNIC. It also comes pre-installed with, to quote the press release, “the latest Nvidia AI software stack and support for common developer tools and frameworks, including PyTorch, Jupyter, and Ollama.”
There’s all the cutting-edge connectivity you’d expect, with Wi-Fi 7, four USB-C 3.2 ports, an Ethernet jack and an HDMI port. The Acer Veriton GN100 AI Mini Workstation will be available in North America starting at $3,999, and in EMEA starting at €3,999.
AMD announced its Strix Halo chip at CES 2025, and what a belter it is. We have already covered its incredible skills at running AI models locally if you purchase a version with 128GB of RAM, and now Geekom is selling a mini PC that can do this and more for under $2,000. You can add up to 8TB of fast storage too, while twin USB-C 4 ports and a pair of 2.5GbE Ethernet ports sit on the rear – alongside all the usual USB-A and HDMI ports.
I saw the Geekom A9 Mega running on the showfloor and found it quite astonishing that so much power is stuffed into something so small (171 x 171 x 70.9mm). It’s also a gaming system in disguise, with Geekom claiming that it can run Cyberpunk 2077, GTAV and Elden Ring with ray tracing “seamlessly”.
It needs excellent cooling to perform this, which Geekom supplies: if you return to your desk after a walk on a cold day you need only put your hand behind the rear vents for a few seconds to warm up.
The downside is that this is a Kickstarter launch with no guaranteed delivery date; sign up here for alerts.
You may associate TCL with TVs, but it also manufactures its own line of phones based around innovative screen technology that it calls NXTPAPER. We’re now up to generation four of the tech, which comes with seven different innovations to improve eye care. For example, TCL claims that it changes the polarisation of the light emitted by the screen to make it more natural.
But its killer feature is that it can move from colour images to E Ink-style at the push of a button on the right-hand side. I don’t just mean black and white. The giant 7.2in screen looks almost paperesque, like a Kindle, which is a great way to read a long document – or an ebook. It’s far sharper than a Kindle, too, with a 1,080 x 2,340 resolution.
TCL also includes a 50MP camera with a 3x optical zoom, a 50MP main camera and a 5,200mAh battery with the promise of 33W quick charging. The Mediatek Dimensity 7400 chip isn’t so exciting, but I found the NXTPAPER 60 Ultra to be slick in general use.
Pricing depends on whether you buy the bundle, which includes a case complete with a holder for the stylus – great for annotating documents quickly. With these extras, the 256GB version costs €499, rising to €549 for 512GB. If you don’t want the bundle, those prices are €449 and €499 respectively.
TCL says the phone will go on sale in September 2025 in Europe, LATAM and APAC regions. No word on North America.
Samsung hires out one of the biggest stands at IFA – the so-called CityCube – and fills it with the full and mighty breadth of its products. This year that included a Galaxy AI section (everything had an AI angle), where I got my hands on the new S11 and S11 Ultra tablets.
The S11 includes an 11in AMOLED panel with 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, but the S11 Ultra goes up to 14.6in with 2,960 x 1,848 pixels. Both tablets support up to 120Hz, with the only flaw I could spot being when you viewed the panels at extreme angles. The Ultra also packs more storage, going all the way up to 1TB, but both tablets include a microSD card slot.
Both models cost significantly more than Acer’s Iconia X12, with the S11 starting at $800/£799 with 128GB of RAM and the S11 Ultra a princely $1,200/£1,199 for its baseline 256GB. But both also feature a far more advanced Mediatek Dimensity 9400+ chip that enables AI tasks to complete locally on the devices. Nor will you have to wait a few weeks for them to arrive, as the S11 and S11 Ultra are on sale now.
Still using two 27in monitors to create an extended desktop? Perhaps you tell yourself it’s okay because they’re both 4K. Well, one look at the Lenovo ThinkVision P40WD-40 will cast such thoughts into oblivion, as this gently curved 40in monitor effectively packs a pair of 4K monitors into one striking unit.
It stopped me in my tracks in Lenovo’s IFA 2025 showcase (it dubbed it Innovation World 2025), and didn’t disappoint on closer inspection. A 5,120 x 2,160 resolution translates to a 21:9 aspect ratio, and Lenovo promises 98% DCI-P3 colour coverage and IPS Black certification. Not to mention an adaptive 24Hz to 120Hz refresh rate, which also reduces power draw as the screen only refreshes at high speeds when required.
With Thunderbolt 4 for connectivity and a 2.5GbE network port, you should be able to dispense with cables on your desktop too. Even power-hungry laptops may not need a separate power supply, as the ThinkVision can charge at up to 140W.
The ThinkVision P40WD-40 goes on sale in November 2025 at an expected starting price of €1,499.
Immediately after talking to Plaud about its new Note Pro, here’s what I recorded into my phone (using Otter.ai to transcribe): “Just spoke to Plaud. They’ve got an enhanced version of their hardware, which includes a battery life indicator… but the main thing is that they’ve updated the app with a really interesting mind map, so you can see the structure of meeting, how it played out. But it also analyses the dynamics, so you can look at the how the manager behaved, or whether people were too quiet, or however it might work. Interesting. Yeah.”
Who knows, next year I might be using Plaud Note Pro to record such thoughts. After all, it includes a physical button to start recording, can record conversations that you make on your phone (if you attach it to the back) and now features a 0.95in wide AMOLED display that shows you what its doing. Battery life? Plaud claims 30 hours of continuous recording in Enhance mode, with AI beamforming up to five metres away, and 50 hours in Endurance mode.
Worthy of a Best of IFA 2025 award? We say, yeah.
You can pre-order it for $179/£169 today, and then have a choice of three subscription options as detailed in the image below:
I spent several minutes on the Reolink stand marvelling at the fact the camera could use AI to analyse people wandering on the showfloor. It correctly described me and two others thus: “group of people are interacting and exchanging information at bustling trade show booth”.
By avoiding the need to transfer data to the cloud, it keeps all your data private. And although NAS systems from QNAP and Synology can perform similar tasks, that means connecting your camera to their platform. Just like those systems, the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi Camera can alert you of suspicious behaviour or if it recognises someone who you have flagged as noteworthy.
Image quality from the 4K camera looked good on the stand, and the floodlights that give this product its name will also help performance in all light levels. Sadly we don’t yet have a confirmed price or delivery date, but if you’re interested then sign up for a 10% discount.
Netgear announced worldwide availability of the Netgear Nighthawk M7 Pro mobile router at IFA 2025, following a rollout exclusive to AT&T in the US last year. At £900 it sure isn’t cheap, but in return you’re getting cutting-edge Wi-Fi 7 access for the growing number of phones, tablets and laptops that support the standard.
Believe it or not, this puck-sized device can share its 5G connection with up to 64 devices for a whole working day. And it covers quite a range too: up to 2,000 square feet, providing you attach the provided antennae. There’s also a 2.5GbE port for a wired connection, while USB-C is there for charging or tethering.
A basic 2.8in LCD colour touchscreen gives you basic controls and shares information, but the real powerhouse is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X75 modem. That means support for sub-6GHz 5G networks. It doesn’t support the more niche (but faster) mmWave 5G technology, but you can always fall back to 4G.
Of course, existing 4G/Wi-Fi 6 mobile routers are far cheaper, and your outlay doesn’t cover any mobile data costs, but if you need a way to set up instant, fast Wi-Fi for a group of employees then this is the new king of the hill.
