Apple’s ghost was hovering over the feast of gadgetry at IFA, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair in Berlin. Unlike most of its competitors, Apple itself didn’t have a stand - its still very much alive chief executive Steve Jobs doesn’t like to share the limelight with others.But Apple was the benchmark against which many of the journalists and trade buyers present assessed rival wares. Two products were touted as Apple killers, though neither quite makes it.

The one that comes closer is iRiver’s SPINN media player, which is a similar size to Apple’s iPod Touch but 40% lighter and has a touchscreen with superior OLED technology, which makes it ideal for watching video. The SPINN’s angular metal case contrasts with the more rounded Touch and is named after an knob built into its top right corner that allows users to easily flick through photos and music.

Buyers in the market for a dedicated music and video player may overlook the SPINN’s lack of wifi to connect to the internet, which the Touch has, but the SPINN’s Achilles’ heel is its meagre 8 gigabytes of memory. This is enough for thousands of songs but only three or four films. The top-of-the-range Touch has four times the capacity.

The other product viewed as a challenger to Apple was Samsung’s ultraportable X360 laptop which faces up to the Macbook Air as well as Lenovo’s X300. Like the Air but unlike the fractionally heavier X300, Samsung’s X360 eschews a DVD drive and weighs just 1.27 kg - even less than the Air.

The X360 can store more files than the Air, which came out in February, and connects more easily to a wider range of devices. Unfortunately in a market segment where looks matter, the X360’s shiny black plastic comes across as brash and, well, plasticky compared to the Air’s stylish tapered aluminium and the Lenovo X300’s discreet matt black casing.

Samsung’s display model was also covered in a generous layer of finger grease by lunchtime on Friday - testament for sure to visitors’ eagerness to paw the laptop but a warning to prospective buyers that they’ll need to back some wet-wipes when they travel.

Sony’s new Sountina speaker is one of the most striking new technologies on show at IFA in Berlin, the world’s largest consumer electronics fair. Over six feet tall, it’s a thin, sealed glass tube with a single wire running its length, which vibrates to produce a sound that’s the same 360 degrees around. (A speaker to provide bass notes sits lower down the column.)

Not being an expert on hifi history, it was only when I came to Germany’s Grundig a bit later that I realised the idea - if not the implementation - wasn’t new.

Squashed 1970s-style spheres with chrome waistbands in both black and white stood on stands or hung from the ceiling. Visitors could sit on a roundabout to appreciate the Audiorama 9000’s unchanging sound as they went round in a circle. The design is a modern revamp of Grundig’s Kugelstrahler 700 speaker, which as early as 1969 offered an all round sound.

To add a further 1970s touch, head over to Germany high-end TV manufacturer Loewe. While other companies are striving to make their models as thin as possible, Loewe is offering customised side panels to some of its less anorexic ones. Best of the bunch was a very strokeable, acid-tipped mohair option. A Loewe spokesman wasn’t sure whether the concept would reach the shops, so if you might spend over 2,000 euros on a TV with its own fur, let Loewe know.

The genuinely gorgeous and the jaw-droppingly gimmicky are rare sights on the floors of TVs and tumble dryers on show in in Berlin at IFA, which claims to be the world’s largest consumer electronics fair, but this year Sony takes the dubious accolade of having both on show within a few metres of each other.

First the sublime: Sony’s XEL-1 TV, based on OLED technology, will go on sale in Europe for the Christmas season for around 3,000 euros after being available in Japan for almost a year. With just an 11 inch diagonal, you don’t get much screen size for your money, but you do get a TV that’s just three millimetres thick and has strikingly more vivid picture than conventional LCD technology.

Of course, Sony isn’t going to be alone with OLED televisions for long. Samsung also has an impressive array to go on sale next year, though theirs will be pricy too — product executive Noh Young Joong told Reuters they would likely cost two to three times as much as equivalent-sized LCD units.

Turn round the corner at Sony’s stand, though, and things rapidly go downhill. Remember those artificial flowers from the 1980s, which gyrated around when you played music? Possibly not, but their spirit lives on and seems to  have possessed ‘Rolly‘. Rolly is egg-shaped, about the size of a hand grenade and plays tinny music. It rolls around (dances even) and flips lids covering its speakers. You can stream music from your mobile phone via a Bluetooth wireless network, or store several hundred songs on board. If you have time on your hands, you can even program its dance moves using a laptop.

You may be wondering what the point of it is, though seemingly not the design experts who gave it a prestigious Red Dot award. Rolly goes on sale for 350 euros in October:  roughly the cost of one of Sony’s Playstation 3 video games consoles.

A more deserving winner of a design award — and one that stays the right side of gimmicky — is an MP3 player from Korea’s iRiver that offers a minimalist, and miniature, take on Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s features are reduced to two small pastel-coloured spheres for ears and a larger one for the face. The ears act as a volume control and a track skip control respectively; the face has a socket for headphones and a discreet Disney logo. The price is right too, at around 40 euros when it goes on sale in Europe later this year.