10 fantastic future gadgets that are already here

DJI has killed it in the drone space for years, but the Neo brings something new to the range. Think the DJI Mini 4 Pro is small? The Neo is on another level, and weighs just 135 and takes off from the palm of your hand. And it doesn’t even need a remote control. This is no racing drone. It’s a drone for content creators who basically want a robot camera person that can follow them around while vlogging. But if you’re just into its time scale, it can be controlled via remote, or DJI’s Goggles 3 headset. At just £169 it’s a bit of a bargain for those starting out in the drone life.

Ugreen has done the seemingly impossible — made a power bank seem cool. The Uno series of power banks has a screen that can display little pixellated emoji faces. Our favourite of the lot has to be this little 100W number. All the power, in a dinky frame that has little feet and a band over the USB ports that forms a par of headphones. Cute AF, right?

This latest gadget from Remarkable sees the digital notepad blast off into new levels of techy excess. Blending the best bits of an Amazon Kindle and the BooX readers, you get a lit screen and even colour. That’s rare for an E-Ink style screen. It’s a killer tablet for comics and graphics novels as well as reading docs or taking notes. And when you add the Folio keyboard case, it can even turn into a super low-distraction laptop.

Pretty much all Bang & Olufsen headphones have a luxury vibe. But the BeoPlay H100 operate on another plane, and cost a grand. Yikes. It almost goes without saying, we want a pair. Super-pricey hifi heaphones are nothing new, but these are portable wireless headphones you might wear on the way to work. Well, if you’re less worried about having them nicked than we would be. B&O says the aim is to get them to sound like the company’s high-end speakers. And if it manages that, these might not be too bad a deal at all.

We love the Steam Deck. But it looks like the Acer Nitro Blaze 7 may wipe the floor with it. Well, maybe apart from on the style front unless you’re into that more aggressive gamer flavour. What do we get? An AMD Ryzen 8840HS massively more powerful than the Steam Deck processor, a Full HD display with maximum 144Hz refresh rate. And up to 2TB room for games.

Honor is in an ongoing battle with one of the biggest issues with foldable phone. No, it’s not that a bit of grit can ruin these phones. A few sand grains can ruin any phone, to be fair. The Honour Magic V3 is one of the thinnest foldable phones ever, though. At (up to ) 9.3mm thick when folded up, this foldable isn’t much thicker than some ordinary phones. It also manages to fit in a battery just a high-capacity as those phones too. And that, quite frankly, is an almost unfathomable work of engineering smarts. In a word: how?

One of the biggest names in smart lighting, Nanoleaf has made lights in a bunch of shapes to date. Switching to blocks may sound ordinary, but this is a bigger switch-up than its sounds. These smart light panels can have shelves and holder hooks integrated into them, meaning you’re not just giving over part of your wall to a light show. This is more like a Nanoleaf presentation wall. Naneloeaf has also worked on the internal design to get rid of light hotspots.

The king of action cameras is back with a new generation of ruler, the Hero 13 Black. It uses the same sensor, but that doesn’t mean you‘ll end up with exactly the same images. This camera supports a new range of lenses that clip onto the front. There’s the standard lens, an ultra-wide, anamorphic, macro, and a neural density filter. This lowers the light that reaches the sensor. It's not what you normally want in a small-sensor camera, but can be essential for creative videography.

How does Pico do it? Meta has spent billions (and billions) trying to make mixed reality and the Metaverse a thing, and yet the relatively tiny Pico can still swan in and compete with Meta’s best headsets (granted, it's now owned by social giant ByteDance). This is the Pico answer to the Quest 3, and it has even better 3D passthrough cameras and body-tracking tech to add to the immersion in games. It’s not cheap, but it’s arguably a better deal than the Quest 3 despite a fractionally higher price — it has double the base storage after all.

We’ve seen a veritable army of laptops come out of IFA, but none caught our eye quite as much as Lenovo’s Auto Twist AI PC concept. You can’t buy one of these, but, hey, maybe one day. It’s a hybrid whose screen opens up and twists around using an internal motor. You can literally command it to open and close with your voice. And with a little AI help it can follow your around the room while you’re on video work meetings.