Table of contents for June 2017 in Stuff UK

Look, I know we make putting to_ether your favourite _ad_et mag look easy, but the hardships of our job really add up. Gor_ing on the latest ice-cream makers, _etting sore thumbs from all-day _aming, squinting to be sure that new 4K TV really does look awesome… it all takes a toll. I can only speculate, but these must all be part of the reason why Consulting Editor Fraser Macdonald leaves Stuff this month after 15 years. As a bona fide sweetheart, biscuit connoisseur and one of the best writers to ever _race our pa_es, he’ll be dearly missed. The Hot Stuff section will be back in rip-snorting form next month, but I can’t promise it’ll attain the same standards of manic eccentricity As one era ends, a new one be_ins.…

from £470 / www.armin.com The 935 has all of the features of Garmin's recent Fenix 5, but in a smaller, lighter and racier form. On your marks… Rising from the Fenix Let us bring you up to speed. Garmin makes lots of fitness watches. Anything with ‘Vivo’ in the name is more basic, from which you can step up to the super-sporty Forerunners. Fenix is its premium smartwatch range… though, notably, using its own OS rather than Android Wear. This one covers the same bases as the Fenix 5 That flagship Fenix comes in three sizes, all of which are absolutely jam-packed with features. The Forerunner 935 has all of those gubbins, but manages to be a few millimetres thinner and a good Fun Size Mars Bar lighter. Why is…

#22 PROJECT SCORPIO Rob Leedham Any sensible gamer should run a mile at the thought of buying the Xbox Project Scorpio. It’s going to be ridiculously expensive, and for the moment at least, only a handful of games will support its Ultra HD resolution. Yet I very much want one. And that’s not just because, with the specs now confirmed by Eurogamer – eight 2.3GHz processor cores and a six-teraflop graphics processor – it’s going to be the first proper 4K console. For all its hype and bluster, the PS4 Pro has proved a confusing machine when it comes to UHD performance. Some games look glorious on it; some look exactly the same as before. Project Scorpio promises to do away with any such confusion. Being an even more powerful…

I always lose pens, so I buy cheap ones. Well, what kind of modern existence is that? A decent pen is a key part of your image – there’s no point striding into the boardroom with the fancy suit and the pointy shoes only to scupper the sealing of the deal by proffering a scratty plastic pen for the signatures. Aren’t deals done digitally these days? To be honest, we’ve never done a deal. It could be done with blood for all we know about proper business. But we do know that well-known pen maker Cross has done a deal with geek-known tracker maker TrackR to make the £215 Cross Peerless TrackR pen. And, as the name implies, you can track this pen. How? Does it leave a scent? Well,…

RIME PS4, XBOX, PC The trailer for indie title Rime shows buildings and animals just appearing in front of the player. It’s supposed to be a puzzle game, but what’s taxing our brains is why any developer would try to sell a game that so flagrantly breaks laws of physics. We’re outraged. Unfollow. ADAM BUXTON’S BUG: DAVID BOWIE SPECIAL Being just one of the umpty-billion events that form the Brighton Festival, from 6 to 28 May. Buxton’s Bowie set, at the Brighton Dome Concert Hall, is a must-see because the late musical chameleon is such a lampoonable set of characters to begin with. PREY PS4, XBOX, PC One of 2017’s most anticipated thinkyshooties: the dynamics of Prey will require you to modify your environs, your weapons and even yourself to…

Google’s first own-brand handset wasn’t just supposed to put every other Android phone to shame – it was supposed to convince iPhone owners to make the switch from iOS. That meant saying bye to the Nexus range, leaving OnePlus to plug that gap while Google focuses on the high end. The result isn’t quite the showstopper we were hoping for, with no drop-dead gorgeous design, no water-resistance and only decent battery life to justify the high price. The 5.5in XL version is on the big side too: add one of Google’s custom Live Cases and it’ll be bulging out of your pocket before you know it. It’s powerful enough to keep pace with the competition, though, thanks to a Snapdragon 821 CPU. And the pure, undiluted Google experience will always…

t doesn’t happen nearly as regularly as you might imagine, but every once in a while something truly, breathtakingly awesome and original comes along to shake up a stagnating section of gadget land. LG’s ‘Wallpaper’ I W7 TV is one such something. This is a telly that’s just 2.57mm thick, is bendable, and clings to your wall with magnets. It is astonishing. The W7 is the best-looking, most striking TV the world has ever seen. And crucially, it also improves on the picture quality of last year’s OLEDs, which means it’s utterly stunning in action. This is looking like a bumper year for brilliant TVs, and LG is no longer the only purveyor of OLED, but we’re yet to get those other tellies to test – and right now it’s very…

KENWOOD EXCEL JUICER JE850 £220 / kenwoodworld.com The single best thing about juicers is the delicious juice (naturally). The single worst thing? Cleaning up all the pulpy mess that you’re left with in the machine. Thankfully, the JE850 has been equipped with a mighty 1500W motor to extract more juice and leave less pulp behind. It also has two speeds, which makes it ideal for squeezing juice from hard fruits and veg. The extra-large feed hole means you can get all sorts of odd-shaped vegetables into it without having to cut them up and the three-litre pulp bin means you can do a whole sack of potatoes before it needs emptying – what do you mean you don’t like potato juice?! Kenwood has gone to the trouble of patenting its…

TIPS & TRICKS Holler “Hey Bixby!” at your S8 and its voice assistant can dictate texts, suest pubs and much more. You can customise the S8’s screened e feeds for the weather, news and other notifications. Hold down the S8’s ‘recents’ key and tap the multi-window button to open two apps at once. 1 Samsun Galaxy S8 £689 / samsun.com You don’t need us to tell you that the Galaxy S8 is a bezel-less thing of wonder. Just look at it: glorious! And beneath that gorgeous facade lies an equally sumptuous blend of power and performance. With enough oomph to run any app you please, and a point-and-shoot camera to rival both the iPhone 7 Plus and the Google Pixel, this really is an astoundingly good comeback after Samsung’s Note…

SLEEP GENIUS £4.99 / Android, iOS _ ere are many issues with being unable to fall asleep. Firstly, it’s incredibly boring staring at a ceiling for hours. Secondly, there’s nothing worse than being so groggy the next morning that not even a double espresso can cure your grouchy mood. Sleep Genius wants to help you solve both of these issues. First up, the app guides you to keep to a set bedtime so you fall into a dreamy routine, while its Relaxation Program will help to subdue your stress so you’re not tossing and turning. _ e most useful feature, however, is the Revive Cycle Alarm. Rather than abruptly shattering your slumber with an ear-ringing screech, Sleep Genius plays a gentle tune that wakes you gradually. _ is way, you’ll…

1 Sounds expensive How much you’re willing to pay is the first issue. Naim speakers offer superb audio quality, but with the Mu-so priced at £895 and the Mu-so Qb at £595, you’re going to have to pay to flood your home with sound. You might do better siding with Sonos’s more affordable speakers; the entry-level Play:1 only costs £169 and sounds great. ? Get this: Sonos Play:1 £199 / sonos.com 2 Start a family When investing in a multiroom system, you really want to pick a hi-fifamily with a plethora of options. The Denon Heos range offers a lot of variety, from the portable Heos 1 to the room-filling Heos 7. You can also link them to other Denon kit such as the Heos AVR, which turns your setup…

Download accessurl. First, download the Chrome extension accessurl (£free, accessurl.com) and make sure the friend you want to have access to your Netflix account downloads it as well. It should appear in the top right corner of your browser in the form of an ‘A’. Create a URL. Sign into Netflix (or any other site you wish to share access to) and then click on the extension. You’ll be given the option to set a time when the link will expire: 24 hours, a week or never. . en click ‘create’ and a new link will appear. Share your link. Now simply share that link with your friend. Once they click on it they’ll have free access to your Netflix for just as long as you think they deserve it.…

I TECHED MYSELF OUT OF A HIKE The map geeks at Ordnance Survey have released another feature for their OS Maps app. With a Premium subscription (£24/year) Aerial 3D lets you swoop over Britain’s glorious crags and oxbows as if you were a circling eagle, hunting for rabbits. You can even overlay your proposed hiking or biking route, if you have it as a .gpx file… at which point I realised just how high it was, and decided to leave it for another weekend. I’m guessing that’s not quite what they had in mind. Fraser Macdonald, Consulting Editor I KISSED MY DSLR GOODBYE Mo’ money, mo’ problems… or in my case mo’ camera gear to lug around on holiday, mo’ of an arse than it’s worth. And so, I embraced…

1 Selle Royal Ta+too Landscape Illustrated by Simone Massoni, as part of Selle Royal’s designer Landscape range. What don’t you want to happen to it? Get nicked. How will it not get nicked? The top of the saddle quick-releases offand safely into your bag, is how. 90 / selleroyal.com 2 Texenergy Flexible Battery Obsessing about the rigidity of our phones, we’ve come to believe electricity doesn’t fold. It does. Hark at this three-way folding 3000mAh battery, which fits in all sorts of pocket shapes. £49 / texenergy.co.uk 3 Beeline There are approximately 6283 ways to attach your smartphone to your handlebars, all of which will land you an NHS breakfast if you get distracted. The Beeline is a super-stylish and simplified bike navigator – little more than an arrow and…

Instru-mentalist DADAMACHINES AUTOMAT You could buy an electronic synth to make ‘da crazy tunes’, but chances are that some other goatee’d noisenik bought that same synth, twiddled those same knobs and made the same sound. To be truly original, you need to be using properly random instruments, and the Dadamachines Automat can help. It’s a MIDI controller that lets you set up to 12 actuators that can be used to bonk things, move things or rattle things. Those ‘things’ might be actual instruments, such as a drum, or they might be any objects you have lying around your flat. Sorry, studio. from €169 / dadamachines.com Ma_ic mic LOLLY Sure, you can write things down. Or, heck, come over all space-age and use your phone’s microphone to record voice notes or…

Arriving less than half a year after the OnePlus 3, the 3T seems as premature as Christmas decorations in September. It’s got a few extras, sure, but the price has also gone up from a bargaintastic £329 to a more punishing £399 – or £439 if you want 128GB of storage. It’s still slim, all-aluminium and a real looker. Last year it could sit next to £600 phones without looking remotely cheap, but LG and Samsung switching to slimbezel, odd-aspect-ratio screens has taken some of the shine off the 3T’s mainstream looks. You really have to dig to find the changes, like those tasty bits of brownie in a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. First, the OnePlus 3T has a new Snapdragon 821 CPU. The last version had a Snapdragon…

FOR FUSSY FILM FANS Popcorn Popcorn applies the Tinder formula to movies: rather than ogling people in their swimsuits, you can unearth interesting films. So you browse lists like ‘best movies set on boats’, ‘Nordic noir films’, or even the ‘17 worst Adam Sandler movies’, flicking cards left to mercilessly discard them, or right to hurl them at your watchlist. Embedded trailers help when you’re being indecisive, making Popcorn a fantastic alternative if you’re sick of standard charts. FOR DAZZLING DESIGNERS Isolad If you ever looked at Monument Valley and thought you could do better at fashioning Escher-like faux-3D worlds that make your eyes go funny, this is your app. With a drawing system not unlike dragging elastic bands across pins, Isolad feels very different from its competition. It’s also…

Guard dogs can be lured away by bones, and your neighbour Doris is so deaf that she wouldn’t even be able to hear burglars if they bashed the front door down with a battering ram. With that in mind, it’s hard to go on holiday without the fear G of a stranger rummaging through your underpants drawer before making off with your new TV. Luckily, home security cams have improved a lot over the past few years, and the motion-triggered gadgets we’ve tested here will do a better job than any well-meaning neighbour – with neat tricks such as sending live broadcasts to your phone, face recognition and communication between cams. While it’s true that some of these products are costly investments (especially when there’s a subscription involved), you might well…

Roku Streaming Stick What is it? A meat-and-potatoes kind of streamer, this Roku doesn’t boast any fancy tricks but does come with a dedicated remote and a wealth of content to treat your peepers to. Roku claims it’s got over 2000 channels, but all you need to know is that every major service you’d want is bundled in – alongside the WWE Network and plenty more curios. Its app has also been spruced up to make searches a doddle. Is it any good? The original Roku stick was frustratingly slow to use, but that’s all been sorted with a new quad-core processor that flits across menu screens in breezy fashion. So long as you don’t lose it, this stick’s diminutive remote is a nice touch and even comes with buttons…

Should I up rade? NOKIA 3310 (2017) Guy Cocker Global Editor-In-Chief If you’re still using the Nokia 3310 that you got 17 years ago, you might be one of those unfortunate people who are accused of being a hipster. In truth, you’re just loyal. You’re not one of those promiscuous sorts who’d chuck away their ‘old’ iPhone 7 just because there’s a new colour for it. Truth be told, there’s little point in having a smartphone. Why would you stream Netflix when there’s Coronation Street on TV? And who wants to play Super Mario Run when you’ve got Snake? Since your 3310 has remained your trusty companion for almost two decades, it’d be heartless to ditch it now. Keep it foolish Saying all that… perhaps it is time for a change.…

House of Cards (S5) In season five of this political thriller, Frank Underwood will put the spotlight on terrorism to hide his own despicable flaws. It makes you think – could a real US President ever do this? Nah, we’re sure Underwood can’t be trumped… It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (S12) Whether they’re pretending to have Aids to skip a waterslide queue or firing a rocket-launcher at a car, this controversial sitcom will push the taste boundaries even further this season. The Mars Generation Neil Armstrong is about to be outdone by a group of teenage astronauts as they prepare for a possible future trip to Mars. _ is documentary will follow their training, so think of it as one long space-themed Rocky montage. My Scientoloy Movie Once again, Louis…

Tilt Brush Essentially you stand within the 3D canvas, using one controller to paint and the other as a palette. _ ere’s a nice UI mounted on each wrist that allows you to browse the tools at your disposal, and the actual painting is a little like writing your name in the air with a sparkler that never fades away. £23 / Oculus, Vive Discovery VR From encounters with sharks to an astronaut’s view of planet Earth, Discovery VR has loads of fantastic 360° videos. If you can’t afford your own rocket or deep sea submarine, then this is the best way to experience such wonders. £free / Oculus, Vive Medium _ is art-based VR app is focused on making 3D models. You can create anything you want, whether it’s…

wool I never, what have we got here? Robots aren’t just coming for our jobs any more – they’re set to stitch up our elderly relatives too. The Kniterate is a digitally powered monster that feeds on yarn, electricity and the tears of retired knitting champions, and produces one-off garments in your choice of colours and designs. It’s the perfect companion for when you’re forced to live off-grid but still fancy keeping up with the latest knitwear trends. We hear horizontal stripes will be all the rage come the apocalypse. W Will I be able to open my own wasteland boutique for the nuclear winter season? As long as you don’t mind a side-career wafting irritable sheep around vast stretches of scorched earth. You see, the Kniterate chomps through wool…

Flic for Mac £free / macOS Flic’s little Bluetooth shortcut buttons for smartphones have been around for a while. But they didn’t really work, we reckon, because a pocketable little phone isn’t the sort of device that really requires a separate shortcut button. If you have one, though, drag it out of that dusty drawer – or buy one (£32). Because Flic’s Mac app is here. See, now it makes sense, because computers are clunky, passwordy things that are crying out for an easyaccess button. You can use it to trigger a Spotify playlist, say, or control your smart home. . e app works with Philips Hue, Logitech, Sonos, etc – and also being able to build Flic presses into IFTTT recipes makes this little blue blob exponentially excellent.…

from US$169,000 / hublot.com Bit Doctor Who, isn’t it? More like Doctor No, if you talk to some of the watch-hating millennials out there. Funny… they’re happy to sous-vide asparagus in absinthe for 16 hours and spend 45 minutes every morning doing beard prep, but ask them to spend just 10 seconds putting on a watch and they look at you as if you’re some kind of life-stealing Pan-Galactic Time Dork. The youth of today. Well, who needs watches? The time is all over our multi-sensory experience. Hey, Alexa… I unplugged Alexa. But you’ll be pleased to hear, then, that this watch is not, fundamentally, a very good teller of time. Look at those stubby hands. In a madcap station dash, they are not going to help you know whether…

Fancy motors offer to do the driving for you on long motorway sections, but only if you keep your hands on the wheel. Holding onto the steering wheel but barely paying attention to the road? I think you’ll find that’s what many folk are doing already, and in far cheaper cars. Until the regulations for fully autonomous cars are sorted out in, say, two to three centuries, what I want is semi-autonomous cars that let you properly chillax. Which means taking your hands off the wheel. Enter Cadillac. Its CT6 car will soon be available with a feature called Super Cruise. No hands required, but a headtracking camera is watching to see if I nod off. If I snooze through the warning beeps, the car will switch on the hazards,…

• Metamorphabet You know those alphabet books for kids? ‘A is for Apple’ and all that? This is one of those… only it isn’t, because the A sprouts antlers, turns into an arch and goes for an amble. A further 25 interactive scenes are equally surreal, as if a mischievous Terry Gilliam had infiltrated CBeebies. Pretend to buy it for a youngling, but enjoy it yourself. Stuff says £3.99 / iOS ??? £1.89 / Android • Flux by Belew Reasoning that attention spans are dead, ex-King Crimson guitar pioneer Adrian Belew created Flux. The app expels a stream of song snippets and sounds alongside semi-random visuals that you can fiddle around with. It’s never predictable – one ‘song’ Stuff unearthed was memorably just a countdown, introducing whatever came next. Stuff…