IFA 2024 Day 4: The Sights And Sounds Of The Trade Show

The big problem with TimeKettle has always been the earwax thing. Like you hand someone an earbud that’s accompanied you along your travels, entered the ear holes of many a crusty market vendor and is now being waved at the ear hole of a person you want to converse about something a bit benign with. In short, we’re all a bit concerned about wax.

The Chinese company has gotten around this issue with a set of “open ear” translation buds. You’ll still need to loop one around your natural audio sensor while your subject does the same thing, and you’ll need to set the languages in the app. But the good news is, unless things are overflowing in the audio department, absolutely no ear wax will be transferred! It still struggles with accents though, so people from the English provinces may fare better with text-based translation methods.

Camera Gear maker Hohem’s iSteady V3 phone gimbal caught my eye as I walked along the show floor because it includes a fill light built into the phone holder. Bad lighting is a content creator’s worst enemy, so I stopped to give it a look. A forward-facing fill light isn’t exactly the breakthrough of the century and if the story stopped there, you wouldn’t be reading this.

But Hohem built a camera lens into that fill light. That camera lens uses AI to detect your face and follow you around. What that means is, the gimbal is entirely self-contained. There is no app required to film with object tracking. Your phone’s camera is just used for recording, while the gimbal’s camera is used to track you. By itself, that’s cool enough, but it also removes a pain point for using a gimbal — connectivity.

In other gimbals, you needed to connect your phone via Bluetooth to the gimbal, so your phone could tell it where to point. By removing that barrier, all you need to do is slot in your phone, and you’re set to go. You can also turn the camera around to track other things, which is a neat touch. If I were a content creator, the ease of this device is enough to coax me out of my money.

If you can’t be bothered to hold a selfie stick or a phone gimbal, you can let the Stage Pro Auto-tracking Stand Pro from Belkin do it for you. This is a MagSafe phone stand with integrated DockKit — Apple’s software. You just hold your iPhone up to the base of the Stage Pro, and it will recognize the phone and start using the camera to direct the stand.

The stand can rotate 360 degrees and even look up and down in order to track its subject. You can run around, near and far, and the phone will stay fixed on you, even if other people walk in between you and the Stand.

This is mainly going to be for creators, though professional athletes have been known to use it as well to track their movements on the floor, court, or whatever area they perform their craft in. The Stage Pro is very responsive in its tracking, so it doesn’t have a problem keeping up with you.

I admit, I owe SwitchBot an apology. I didn’t realize how extensive its product line had gotten over the years. This year, SwitchBot is adding motorized shades to its arsenal, and again, if that was the end of the story, you wouldn’t be reading this. But SwitchBot’s shades are adjustable in length, which is pretty cool.

Keeping in mind that these shades are on automatic rollers, SwitchBot made its frames extendable and contractible so that you can order either a small, medium or large set of shades to fit any window. Once you’ve made your measurement, you can cut your shades to length using the simple screwdriver and cutting tool that SwitchBot includes in the package. If your window opening is 70 cm, you can order the 80 cm shades, cut them, and contract the motorized frame yourself to fit any size.

These shades are pretty durable, so they can probably stand up to pets, but they’re also pretty pricey, starting in the low $200 range. The value proposition is that other shades you buy only come in one size and can’t be cut, or they’re not motorized. This covers both.