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The smartphone era has brought about an era of convergence when it comes to consumer electronics. Tons of devices we used to rely on—small cameras, calculators, flashlights, music players, etc.—have rolled up into our phones. Entertainment has experienced a similar move toward a small-screen singularity. In 2025, users collectively watched more than 4 billion minutes of TikTok content on their phones every single day. Still, big screens persist. This year’s list includes a pair of new TV technologies built to be enjoyed from feet away, not inches from your face. A pair of clever earbuds use magnetic fluid to let you hear familiar music with a fresh sound. And, while it’s already perhaps too easy to start a podcast, the industry standard microphone has gotten a very useful upgrade that makes high-quality content creation even more accessible.
(Editor’s Note: This is a section from Popular Science’s 38th annual Best of What’s New awards. Be sure to read the full list of the 50 greatest innovations of 2025.)
Grand Award Winner, Entertainment
Micro RGB TV by Samsung: A TV that creates color in a totally different way
Pictures of Samsung’s Micro RGB TV don’t do it justice. When I saw it in person earlier this year, I was shocked by the vibrant colors and brightness it offers. Even compared to typical OLEDs (which are renowned for their color reproduction), it created a tangibly more vivid viewing experience. Each sub-100-micron RGB emitter sits directly behind the panel and is driven on its own, which lets the set hit unusually wide color gamuts while maintaining extremely high brightness and contrast at a 115-inch, 4K size. True Micro LED tech remains exclusive to commercial installations, but Micro RGB provides an extremely similar experience without the need for complex professional installation. A screen this large that can still show deep blacks and highly saturated color in a bright room reshapes what home theater looks like—if you can afford it—and sets expectations for what premium displays should do over the next decade.
Magnetic Fluid Driver by Technics: Earbuds that tune the driver with liquid, not just magnets
Technics’ EAH-AZ100 earbuds use a dynamic driver with magnetic fluid—an oil-like liquid loaded with magnetic particles—between the voice coil and the diaphragm. Instead of just cooling the driver, the fluid damps and centers its motion, cutting distortion and stabilizing the stroke, especially at low frequencies. That’s important because most earbud upgrades lately have come from digital signal processing and software tricks. Here the transducer itself gets an upgrade. Extending clean bass response down to a claimed 3 Hz while maintaining detail in the mids and highs shows there’s still headroom in single-driver designs, and it hints that more weird physics materials may show up inside everyday audio gear.
Atmos FlexConnect by Dolby: Room-aware surround sound that starts from the TV
Even the fanciest home audio system won’t sound good if it’s not set up correctly. Dolby Atmos FlexConnect uses the TV as a hub that listens for wireless speakers, figures out where they are in the room, and then assigns channels and levels automatically instead of forcing you to figure out symmetrical layouts and manual calibration. The system identifies each speaker’s capabilities and position, then divides Atmos height, surround, and dialogue information between the TV’s own drivers and any paired satellites. TCL’s 2025 QD-Mini LED TV sets and matching Z100 speakers are the first to ship with it, which makes Atmos-style setups closer to “plug it in and listen” than “learn to be your own installer.” It’s still a closed ecosystem for now, but it points toward surround systems that adapt to cluttered apartments and real furniture instead of demanding a perfect demo room.
MV7i two-channel mic by Shure: A podcast mic with an audio interface built in
If you watch podcast content, streamers, or pretty much any kind of interview content online, you’ve seen the Shure MV7 microphone. It’s the industry standard, and now it works as its own stand-alone podcast studio. Plug it into a computer via USB-C and you get the mic plus a combo XLR/ ¼-inch input on the back for a second microphone or instrument, with both channels appearing separately in Shure’s MOTIV Mix software or your digital audio workstation. That lets a solo creator record a host and guest, or voice and guitar, without hauling around an extra interface box, power supply, and cabling. Dual-channel recording directly from a single desktop mic lowers the barrier to making more polished shows and music from small spaces, and it shows how much traditional studio hardware can collapse into a single device.
G5 Evo by LG: An OLED TV that belongs in bright rooms
LG’s G5 Evo OLED overcomes one of the biggest limitations of this particular type of digital display: overall brightness. A new tandem RGB OLED stack, revised light-emitting structure, and brightness booster drive peak HDR highlights above 2,000 nits while still keeping the near-perfect black levels that made OLED appealing in the first place. Paired with the α11 AI Gen2 processor and support for 4K at up to 165 Hz, the panel can handle both bright daytime viewing and high-frame-rate gaming without falling back to washed-out LCD tricks. It’s a reminder that OLED is still evolving as a technology—and that the next few years of
2025 PopSci Outdoor Gift Guide
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