Gadgets

Jogging is toil. Jogging is pain. Jogging is, ultimately, failure. You’re either outdoors in the rain dodging prams and traffic, or in the gym looking at your starkly-lit face in the mirror as you run in place. Time passes. Sweat falls. You go nowhere. Enjoy that runner’s high, because tomorrow it’s back to the cubicle, to the grind, where your juiced calves will remain hidden under formica desks and H&M trousers. The singular joy anyone can glean from exercise, besides...

Today the JBL audio brand celebrates 70 years of music. The company, founded by James Bullough Lansing, is now one of the oldest American audio companies. From revolutionary recordings, legendary concerts like Woodstock, record-breaking rock tours to iconic sports events like The Olympics, JBL has been there for big moments in music and audio innovation. As a celebration, here are some of those historic moments… Worldwide, you will hear JBL loudspeakers at more than half of all motion picture theatres...

Are Jeremy Corbyn, a Pug and an Avocado the new-age emoji’s we’ve been waiting for? It’s already hard to resist not ending every text message with an emoji. But now we have even more reason to get excited, with a fresh new batch of modern images ready to depict our everyday conversations. The birth of the mini graphics came about in 1998 when Japanese employee Shigetaja Kurita was working on a mobile internet platform. While many people could be forgiven for presuming...

This week I tested the Powermonkey Explorer 2, a powerpack device that allows you to charge your phone or laptop anywhere... Leaving for our annual ‘Dad’s on tour’ trip to Snowdonia, filled with the joyous prospect of a good night sleep away from my two toddlers, I practically skipped down the path to the waiting camper van full of my mates. Yes we all had a box of beers and crisps, but we also came prepared with eyemasks and ear plugs...

Product review: Epson eh-tw5350 Projector Now I am not going to lie, I was a little daunted at the prospect of reviewing a projector as it seemed like a bit of a boring gadget to me (it just reminded me of giving presentations at work) and a bit to techy, but for some reason my husband insisted that we needed to take a look at this product right now. I wasn't sure why he was so keen for me to...

Late last year a study conducted by the University of Birmingham revealed an over-reliance on using computers and search engines is weakening people's memories. But could an over-reliance on smartphones also be weakening our emotional memory functions? According to academic research, the trend of looking up information rather than retrieving it from memory "prevents the build-up of long-term memories". The memory habits of 6,000 adults in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, found more than a...

Sammy Screamer is a movement sensor that can be attached to pretty much anything to monitor if it moves alerting the owner via an alarm and app notification. All good things come in small packages and this is no exception.   The little screamer itself is so tactile and the colour just pops when you open the box. The set up is amazingly easy even for a technophobe like me.  Download an app and you are pretty much good to go....

New stats from a UK wide survey have shown that men are more likely to damage or break their home gadgets than women. The research, which comes from row.com, indicates that 13.28% of men have made a claim on their gadget insurance in the last 12 months, compared to 10.44% of women. Men are also more likely to be a victim of theft, with 21.74% of those surveyed agreeing that they’ve had a device stolen from them in the past....

Let’s face it nearly any device that Apple unleash into the market is always accompanied by the news of exciting new features, prime media attention, and a foray of Apple-lovers looking to get their hands on the new release. But aside from the all too common shots on the news of endless queues streaming out of the doors of Apple stores on launch day it’s certainly not all just about over zealous gadget fanatics shouting about a lot of lacklustre...