The good, the bad and the downright weird at IFA 2008

Well, TechRadar's coverage of this annual electronics extravaganza has nearly come to an end, but there's still time to give you a good idea about what worked, and more importantly, what didn't.

The good

As you may know, TVs were the main event here, and TechRadar excitedly found out that the OLED war is set to hot up with the release of more decent next gen sets from Sony and Samsung.

Then we got upset at how excited we were, and watched the skateboarding event over in the Canon hall to try and feel a bit less geeky.

Panasonic's 150 inch plasma screen is ENTIRELY pointless in a consumer sense, but it didn't stop us cooing over it like it was a window into a fantasy world (in fact, pop on Lord of the Rings, and it would have been).

T-Mobile had a great 'Minority Report' style touchscreen wall, which allowed you to tap the scrolling text to bring up movies, music, news and a whole host of other things in little windows that could be zoomed and swirled and thrown by one hand.

Think less gesture and more massive iPhone, and you're getting the picture.

The bad

Our intense disappointment with the Samsung Omnia. We had high hopes for this 'dark horse' handset, thinking it could be the business-phone to lay the smack down on the iPhone.

It's not.

Sony and Samsung once again came to the fore with both claiming the world's first 200Hz LCD TV, and instead of showing off the smooth motion technology, the whole thing looked more like a schoolyard argument of 'We were first, no WE were...'.

Look...it doesn't matter who has the world's first. Just make sure you get it right. And Sony, you're fooling no-one by putting a 50Hz monitor next to it that you've CLEARLY set to 'judder-mode' to make the new boy look even more smooth.

Samsung's (we know, them again) 82 inch ultra high definition LCD, with four times the pixels of Full-HD. To be fair, this doesn't really deserve to be in the negative section, as it looked GREAT.

The only problem was the UHD made us feel really sick, and we didn't like that. So in this section it is.

The downright weird

So much to choose from here. The super-cheap but bizarrely named Wibrain i1? The Pig-shaped MP3 player? The fridge-thing that dehydrated your rubbish to stop it smelling? (Actually, that was quite cool).

iRiver's Unit2-S model was a bit weird, but in fairness was only a concept and is mostly weird because we had trouble deciding where we would put it.

Philips offering everyone the chance to have a shave using its new electric razor, which made us consider not showering before we came to the event (Though we did...and even smelled of manly cologne).

The drunken Germans we ended up chatting to in a small bar until the wee small hours somewhere in Berlin (and no, we have no idea how we got home either).

And finally, Miss IFA. We were heartbroken to find there were four different girls running around, and more frightened than anything else by the desire of the German media to photograph her holding up fridges being tipped on her.

Perhaps they needed so many due to the high kitchen appliance-related mortality rate?

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.