We’ve celebrated brilliant phones, stunning TVs, powerful laptops and transformative home tech. We’ve championed the e-bikes that revolutionised commutes and the cameras that captured unforgettable moments. But now comes the truly hard part: choosing the absolute best from an exceptional year.
Gadget of the Year represents the pinnacle – the single product that defined 2025, combining brilliant execution with genuine impact on how we live, work or play. This isn’t just about specs or features – it’s about that rare device that makes you wonder how you managed without it, that sparks conversations and shifts expectations for everything that follows.
It’s time to reveal the year’s very best gadgets.
2025 Design Award: Sigma BF
Some products appeal to your logic, while others speak directly to your soul. The Sigma BF sits firmly in the latter camp. This full-frame mirrorless camera is the most strikingly minimal we’ve seen in years – a sleek aluminium trapezoid that makes even Leica’s famously restrained M11-D seem overengineered by comparison.
The BF’s all about sharp lines, with virtually no buttons and no flaps or doors. Just beautifully clean metalwork that turned heads everywhere while we tested it – passers-by, baristas and fellow photographers all stopped to stare. That uncompromising aesthetic demands sacrifice, and there’s no viewfinder or hot shoe here, plus slightly awkward ergonomics that kept us worried about dropping it on the pavement.
Yet shooting with it reminded us why we fell for photography initially. The BF isn’t engineered for practicality – it’s crafted to inspire composition. Sometimes heart should trump head, and this soul-stirring block of Japanese minimalism shows exactly why.
Highly commended
iPhone Air
Picking up the iPhone Air, you’re struck with a strange feeling: how can a flagship smartphone possibly feel this insubstantial? At just 5.6mm and 165g, the iPhone Air makes the 200g-plus iPhone 17 Pro feel like a paperweight. As an engineering achievement it’s stunning: high-grade titanium wrapped around A19 Pro power, all impossibly thin yet reassuringly solid (no Bendgate 2.0 fears here).
But this stunning design necessitates compromise, and the Air’s single-camera system feels like a steep price to pay for its thinness; that missing ultra-wide lens matters more than Apple’s spin suggests. Battery life requires workarounds too, with Apple’s dedicated MagSafe pack fitting neatly under the full-width camera plateau but bulking things out. Even the physical buttons feel less tactile when miniaturised.
As a high-concept alternative to the standard numbered iPhone models, the Air impresses spectacularly. We’re still not quite sure that its slimness is worth the loss of photographic versatility, though.
Nothing Headphone 1
Nothing’s first foray into over-ear headphones can’t quite match the class-leading competitors when it comes to audio performance. But when it comes to design, the Nothing Headphone 1 are basically in a class of one, boldly striding into full fashion statement territory. The riskiest, most divisive element of the styling? The transparent ear cups, beneath which can be glimpsed textures and shapes that hint at the electronics inside.
Metal accents add premium heft, while the oval memory foam cushions hit a nice balance between comfort and sound isolation. The physical controls show thoughtful design too: you spin a chunky roller for volume, click it to play/pause tracks and long-press to switch between noise cancelling modes. Meanwhile, nudging the slim Paddle button left or right skips tracks. Everything’s intuitive and operable by touch alone.
For those already sold on Nothing’s idiosyncratic retro-futuristic aesthetic, these are the cans that can.
Also shortlisted
Technics SL-40CBT, KM5 Lightwear Headphones Hp1
2025 Innovation Award: Huawei Mate XT
A 10.2inch tablet that slips into your jeans pocket isn’t just clever engineering – it’s sci-fi made real. The world’s first tri-fold smartphone transforms through three configurations: 6.4in phone, 7.9in book-style device and full tablet. That Z-shaped dual-hinge achieves something genuinely innovative: tablet-sized screen real estate minus the bulk.
At just 12.8mm folded – barely thicker than conventional book-style foldables – the Mate XT proves tri-fold needn’t mean chunky. Unfold completely and each third measures a mere 3.6mm, yet Huawei’s crammed in flagship cameras (50MP main, 12MP periscope telephoto), 16GB RAM and 66W rapid charging. The 16:11 aspect ratio lets you run three apps side-by-side-by-side for unprecedented multitasking.
Sure, limited Western software availability and battery life that can’t quite match rivals represent compromises. But this is less about perfection and more about pushing the idea of what a phone can be. The Mate XT is tri-fold technology that works brilliantly right now, delivering a genuinely futuristic experience.
Highly commended
Apple CarPlay Ultra
After testing Apple CarPlay Ultra in an Aston Martin DBX, we’ve seen the future of in-car control – and it’s already here. This is brilliant software that takes automobile infotainment from jumbled mess to slickly integrated, well-organised order.
Traditional CarPlay lives alongside your car’s system, forcing constant menu-hopping between Apple apps and the manufacturer’s own controls. CarPlay Ultra erases that clunky division entirely, delivering one seamless interface spans every screen – instrument cluster, centre display, the lot – whilst controlling climate, suspension, drive modes and heated seats. It’s all rendered with Apple’s trademark responsiveness, smartly tailored to fit your car brand’s aesthetic and, in the DBX at least, controllable using steering wheel touchpads.
Android Auto and standard CarPlay suddenly feel prehistoric in comparison. Even better: compatible Aston Martin, Porsche and Mercedes owners can get CarPlay Ultra via a dealer update, with no need to buy a new car.
Sony RBG LED
Sony’s RGB LED technology completely rewrites the rules of TV displays. By replacing white Mini-LEDs with individual red, green and blue LEDs, Sony nixes the blooming that plagues Mini-LED whilst delivering four times the colour volume of QD-OLED. The result? A display that trounces both existing technologies at their own game.
Where OLED offers perfect blacks but limited brightness, and Mini-LED provides searing luminance with compromised light control, RGB LED delivers both. The prototype we saw offered comparable black handling to OLED, 4000-nit peak brightness and reference-level colour accuracy beyond anything on standard televisions. In direct comparisons, the difference was night and day.
This isn’t vapourware either. Sony’s decades of backlight control know-how mean production models could arrive as soon as CES 2026, potentially in sensible 55in or 65in sizes. After years of OLED dominance, the TV landscape is about to shift dramatically.
Also shortlisted
Technics SL-40CBT, KM5 Lightwear Headphones Hp1
Gadget of the Year 2025: Nintendo Switch 2
Eight years ago, Nintendo saved handheld gaming from obscurity. This year it’s done something arguably harder: perfecting what already worked brilliantly. The Switch 2 is refinement elevated to art form – proof that sometimes the boldest move is confidently iterating rather than recklessly reinventing. Our judges couldn’t be more impressed by what it achieves.
It’s Nintendo’s best-built hardware to date. That 7.9in Full HD 120Hz screen transforms portable play entirely, whilst DLSS upscaling finally brings 4K gaming to your television. Cyberpunk 2077 running smoothly on Nintendo hardware? We never thought we’d see the day. Backwards compatibility ensures your entire library travels forward – often enhanced.
Yes, battery life dissatisfies. Storage expansion costs too much. But these compromises fade against what the Switch 2 fundamentally achieves: seamless hybrid gaming. The Steam Deck offers power, sure – but Nintendo’s effortless transition between modes is some invisible magic that makes console-quality gaming truly portable.
Highly commended
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7
As the first premium folding phone to feel genuinely portable, the Galaxy Z Fold 7 has earned a mention here. For generations, Samsung’s folders have played it safe whilst Chinese challengers outdid them on thinness and camera performance. The Z Fold 7 ends that run spectacularly, single-handedly making book-style foldables feel less like expensive curios and more like sensible phones you’d actually want to own.
At 8.9mm closed, it’s slimmer than previous Z Folds while weighing less than the Galaxy S25 Ultra. And its 200MP camera, inherited from the Ultra, instantly propels it to the summit of the foldable photography leaderboards. The 6.5in outer screen finally adopts sensible proportions, making typing a joy rather than a fiddly compromise.
Dumping S Pen support has stung some devotees, and battery capacity remains stubbornly conservative against rivals packing silicon-carbon cells. But Samsung has recognised one crucial truth: most users prefer practical, pocketable elegance over niche stylus functionality.
LG G5 OLED
In the past, buying an OLED television would mean great colours and immaculately pure blacks, but at a major cost to brightness compared to an LED-based screen. Picture quality connoisseurs in search of cinema-standard images would be forced to consign their OLED sets to darkened or dimmed rooms in an effort to stamp out ambient light’s interference.
With LG’s G5 OLED, such steps are unnecessary. This TV possesses blazing brightness, due to the extra blue layer afforded by its four-stack tech, and that means it can offer the best of both worlds, with inky blacks, searing whites and everything in between.
With picture quality standards high across the board, it’s rare that a TV astounds our reviewers with its image quality these days. The G5 did just that, demonstrating that, however good display quality has got these past few years, there’s still further that it can go.
Also shortlisted
Renault 5 E-tech, Cambridge Audio Evo One, Fujifilm X-E5, Apple MacBook Air M4
