It's the time of year we've all been waiting for, when kids stop taking up valuable space on our streets and descend back to school in their hordes. No longer do we have to wade through piles of children having the nerve to enjoy themselves whilst we pop out on our lunch break as they're safely locked up once more.

And they're a streetwise lot nowadays, equipped with gadgetry we could only have dreamed of at that age. My eleven-year-old brother owns an iPod, a PS2 and is on his second mobile phone, so I'm guessing he'd find Marks and Spencer's latest line right up his street.

Zara can hunt out jewel-bedecked technology at 50 paces, so she wasted no time in giving us the 411 (can English people use that phrase yet?) on these new headphones from Davids Formula.

It comes as no surprise that technology and sex often fuse together (just look at the cover of T3 and Stuff), but I did find it odd that a professional show such as IFA displayed such overt sexuality. Amongst the scantily dressed women selling computer brackets there was also a Penthouse booth and women wearing only spray paint. I've focused on the five women that were actually working on the stands, and given you some images that will either entertain or outrage.

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO START THE GALLERY.

In the above video Dan is awed by a set of *massive* speakers from Swan. One is the size of a wardrobe. You can only buy them as a set, and each one its own costs in the region of £20k, but they make poor Dan look like a dwarf. Imagine the volume you'd get out of those... I'm off to have a cold shower.

Swan speaker

More IFA stories here

Another digital photo frame is soon to hit the stands, and this time it does more than simply show digital pictures. As well as displaying images on its high resolution 7 inch TFT screen it also doubles as a clock, a radio a calendar, an MP3 player and an alarm. That's a lot of features on a small package, and we're not finished yet. The T.photo uses NaturaTone intelligent skin color enhancement to create natural looking images, and the screen uses an AOS (Automatic Orientation sensor) to adjust landscape and portrait images.

Zara is still over in Berlin checking out the gadgets at IFA 2008. Check out the video below where she demonstrates an unusual hybrid device that combines digital photo frames and cameras that can be used as baby monitors or security cameras - ideal if you're a big fan of surveillance society or destroying the civil liberties of your kids.

It certainly looks pretty slick judging by the video - though no word yet on how much it will all cost yet.

Plenty more IFA stuff here

The latest players on offer from Samsung are based around the concept of `Imagining Freedom from Monotony`. Right. With that rather uninspiring title aside there's two models that aren't half bad There's the YP-U4 Litmus, a sleek looking player that's available in three fashion friendly colours, blue, purple and red. It weighs in at 27.5g and offers you a battery life of 16 hours.

Duncan Geere writes...

No, actually, it's not. Because nothing could possibly be as rugged than Chuck Norris. What it does rival is the Ricoh G600. When I say "rival" though, I actually mean "spec slightly worse in every category". There isn't any price yet, though, so maybe that's where it can win out. The Rollei X-8 Sports is lightweight (158g), resistant to moisture, dirt and cold, waterproof to 10m, and can take a 1m drop. So it's pretty hardcore. It's reasonably-specced too. 8megapixel, 3x optical zoom, and up to 1600 ISO, along with a whole host of shooting presets.

Over in Berlin, Zara's been hunting down camcorders - specifically the new Everios from JVC - the HD30 and HD40. They've got dual-format recording, so they record in both MPEG2 and AVCHD. This means you can get far more video into much less storage space. 50 hours onto the 120GB HD40. It's got 10x optical zoom, and records at 1080p.

No price point, no release date, but we'll let you know as soon as we hear anything.

For more IFA 2008 coverage, click here

Dan's been taking a look at a laptop dock from Fortune Technology called the Sound Base G1. You sit your laptop on it, plug it in via USB, and then you get to enjoy surround sound with your music. Simple, and attractive. No word on when it's out or how much it costs.

More IFA coverage here

Fancy a pair of eco-friendly earbuds that look super stylish and give you great sound? Well look no further than Hölua,the latest addition to the Skullcandy family. Always an office favourite, their latest pair of 'phones are an in ear sound isolating device encased within a wooden shell.

They're fashioned with laser cut aluminum accents and have two colour options, a rich mahogany or coco brown. You can also choose between gold or silver coloured cables. I'm not sure how eco-friendly it actually is, as the only information available just rhymes 'eco-friendly can be trendy', but the wooden exterior is unusual, and quite attractive. It comes packaged in a wooden box, and has a 1.3 metre cable, with a frequency range of 20-20K Hz.

79€ from September 2008 at Skullcandy

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The aim of DLP Pico-Projectors is to allow you to display content any time, anywhere - without the hustle and bustle of carting around something weighty. And as Texas Instruments DLP moves into the consumer market, they bring a whole lot of projecting goodies with them. Both Toshiba and Optoma will be releasing miniature projectors in 2009 that encompass the DLP Pico chipset to display composite video from a range of handheld and mobile devices. Most impressive of all, both projectors will produce a display much much bigger than their tiny frames.

Zara got face time with the new Samsung X360 laptop, which promises to break no backs, weighing just 1.27kg. It's unclear at this point how the Samsung folk felt about Zara throwing it about to demonstrate its weightlessness...

As you've probably garnered from the picture, this is one behemoth of an all-in-one audio unit. It's not as attractive as those crystal-y speakers we saw earlier from Harman-Kardon, but it does pack some serious all-in-one audio goodness. This isn't some kind of lame trick from Harman-Kardon either, attempting to dupe you into buying something you believe does a multitude of things - it actually does. It's an iPod dock, a CD player, FM radio, speaker system and a clock radio. It's a whole lot of convenience rolled into one, as well as being a great space saver.

If these speakers from Harman-Kardon were released around the same time as the latest Indiana Jones movie (you know the one with the crystal skulls), it wouldn't be too far-fetched to assume they were some kind of unsubtle movie promotion to get our asses in those cinema seats.

Ok, Indiana Jones stuff aside, these strangely unique, but gorgeous looking speakers are built in cut glass and look as if they'll fit rather fetchingly into any personal décor. Duncan over at Tech Digest disagrees with me wholeheartedly on this one, but he can say whatever he likes over there, and I can say what I like over here.

Gary Cutlack writes...

Get ready for this, specification fans - the Philips Flat TV features a 2ms response time and a dynamic contrast ratio of 2,000,000:1. It does this by a very technically complex fashion to do with an LED LUX system the stops light leaking. I'll let Andy from HDTV explain. He's better at understanding stuff to do with pixels and ratios:

"The LED LUX system comprises of 128 segments of LEDs in 8 rows containing 16 segments. Nine LEDs are assigned to each individual segment, and these can be individually dimmed to precisely control the output of each pixel."