IFA 2015: A messy jumble of 4K TVs, smartwatches, and troubled IoT devices

By all accounts, IFA—Europe's largest technology show—should be a complete disaster. Right up until the evening the show opens to the public, and while the press days are still taking place, the labyrinthine Berlin Messe is a chaotic mix of industrial scale construction and confused journalists attempting to not get themselves killed by a wobbly, unfinished booth. And there's no method to the madness either; no sense that a human ever looked at the insanity of the Messe's layout and thought, "no, this is a disaster waiting to happen." Billion-dollar companies are thrown in alongside no-name case makers and startups, while others are made to occupy halls that seem to exist only in the imagination of IFA organisers.

Yet somehow, everyone gets through it. This year's IFA might not have been the gangbusters, headline-stealing show of years past, but it played stage to notable announcements from some of the world's biggest technology companies, as well as a bunch of interesting tech (the best of which is in the gallery below). Sony went ahead and unveiled its new range of Xperia Z5 phones, the "Premium" version of which featured a totally unnecessary, but stunning 4K display. It also had a new take on the smartwatch, the unfortunately named Wena, which pairs a Citizen-designed watch face with a unique wrist strap that offers up subtle notifications and LED alerts.

Indeed, while everyone wonders whether they actually need a smartwatch, the world's consumer electronics manufacturers continue to plug away at the concept. Motorola dropped its new Moto 360, which now comes in a smaller size for slender wrists, but still sports the "flat tire" look on its display. Samsung, after some seriously poor efforts in the past, unveiled the Gear S2, a circular smartwatch with a unique twisting bezel for navigating its homegrown Tizen OS. But there was still little answer to why the smartwatch is a compelling purchase, no killer app to justify their lofty price tags and poor battery life.

Then there were the obligatory walls of TVs, all curved and sporting 4K resolutions and promises of unparalleled realism and life-changing viewing experiences. The reality is that, while it won't change your life, TV tech has come a long way over the past few years. While the jury is still deliberating on whether curved TVs are actually a good thing, there was good news for non-curved TV fans at IFA: Samsung, LG, and others are starting to make high-end 4K screens without finding it necessary to insert a bend in them along the way. All are promising to support HDMI 2.0a's new high dynamic range (HDR) feature, too, which allows for a greater range of brightness and luminosity within a single frame.

But if you had to pick a winner in the cutthroat TV market, it would have to be LG. Samsung and Sony are doing fine work in getting the best out of existing LED technology, but the OLED TVs on display at LG's booth at IFA were a beautiful thing to behold. Thanks to OLED tech, the TVs have black levels that are miles ahead of the competition, resulting in some stunning pictures. But hey, rival Samsung did beat LG to the punch for content: it unveiled the world's first 4K Blu-ray player, and partnered with Fox to deliver some shiny content discs for it, too.

Neither smartwatches nor TVs dominated IFA, though—and no, neither did washing machines with washing machines inside them. This year, IFA's obsession was the dreaded "Smart Home" concept, or, to use a more contemporary vernacular, the Internet of Things (IoT). Every man and his dog at IFA wanted to launch the next big IoT platform, and if they weren't launching a platform, they were launching smart devices to work with it. There were smart locks so you could open up your house from your phone 100 miles away, and sensors you could fit to cupboards so you could tell if a housemate was stealing your last pack of imported instant ramen.

There were devices like Samsung's Sleep Sense for monitoring your sleep patterns, and turning off the lights and TV as you nod off in bed, and there were IP cameras for checking in on your pets or loved ones, and new thermostats for turning up the heat while you're on your way home from the office. Samsung wanted everyone to jump in on its SmartThings platform, while LG wanted everyone to embrace Smart ThinQ. Even Acer got in on the IoT game with its "Build Your Own Cloud" tech, offering developers and device makers access to its cloud infrastructure, rather than build its own devices.

And yet, while you can see at least a few good uses for IoT kit, no company was talking about how they'd keep you and your data secure, or what would happen in the event of a failure in the cloud. Just yesterday, Nest thermostat and Dropcam owners suffered an outage, preventing them from accessing their devices. While not being able to change the temperature remotely is inconvenient rather than a disaster, those using Dropcams as baby monitors were far more vocal about what the outage meant for them.

Speaking of smart baby monitors, a research group recently found that several of them are wide open to hacks, allowing the more nefarious parts of the Internet to view and listen in to your most personal of moments. As cars incorporate ever more technology—Samsung even boasted partnerships with BMW and Volkswagen for its SmartThings initiative—there's the potential for even deadlier hacks to occur. If consumer electronics manufacturers want the world to take IoT seriously, these problems need to be tackled head on.

Sadly, IFA wasn't the place they decided to do it. Amongst the constant din of blaring audio systems and 100-inch TVs, the silence on security was deafening. Perhaps then, with its indecipherable halls and chaotic construction, IFA was a fitting home for the IoT: a trade show without direction, and a technology sorely in need of one.