Inhaltsverzeichnis für July 2018 in TechLife

THE TWIN OLED SCREENS DON’T JUST DELIVER A HIGHER-RESOLUTION EXPERIENCE OVERALL (THE ORIGINAL VIVE’S RESOLUTION WAS 2,160 x 1,200 TOTAL), IT ALSO MEANS THAT PIXEL DENSITY IS INCREASED BY 37%. THE HTC VIVE has always been the leading virtual reality experience when it comes to room-scale immersion. Although rival headsets such as the Oculus Rift have since expanded to help you physically move around to navigate in a VR, and the PlayStation VR does it to a point, no other headset has quite been able to replicate what the Vive offers. TECH ME ON There’s an increase in pixels, climbing to 2,880 x 1,600 (1,440 x 1,600 per eye), representing a 78% increase from the original Vive. There’s also high-res audio headphones built into the headset this time round. But…

AFTER WAFTING AN orange haired clown into America’s highchair and successfully convincing swathes of Brits that it was a ‘fit’ idea to Brexit the EU, social media consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica is shutting up shop. Knowing intimately how much fake news propagates on the pages of Facebook, the company took to its website and Twitter to post the official announcement that it would be filing for bankruptcy following the widespread exposure of its pivotal role in the Facebook data abuse scandal — and, well, that blatant video footage capturing the company’s commercialisation of political blackmail. Like all good dubious business ventures, the company then attempted to rebrand as Emerdata Limited, an entirely different business that dealt with “data processing, hosting and related activities”, shared the same business address and featured…

$146 billion NETFLIX’S MARKET CAP HAS SURPASSED FOX, SONY AND WARNER BROS BY ALMOST DOUBLE In mid-April, Netflix’s market cap rose significantly to $146 billion, leaving it only $8 billion shy of media leaders Disney and Comcast, and placing it well and truly ahead of the likes of Warner Bros ($76 billion), 21st Century Fox ($70 billion) and Sony ($64 billion). The rise came hot on the heels of Netflix’s announcement that 7.41 million customers had signed up in the first quarter of 2018, which was over 1 million more than it anticipated. 2037 HOME PHONES COULD BE HISTORY IN LESS THAN 20 YEARS We could see the death of the home phone as early as the year 2037, according to research conducted by finder.com. The number of Australians reporting…

AMAZON’S LATEST ECHO refresh has brought with it a design flourish that was sorely missing from its original line-up. We’ll get straight to it: the Amazon Echo Spot is the best-designed Alexa device Amazon has ever created. The new form factor makes Alexa feel fresh again, giving the voice AI some much-needed purpose. The Amazon Echo Spot is versatile — it doesn’t have a chameleon-like ability to adapt to the room you put it in but this is certainly not just a smart alarm clock, something Amazon has been very clear about. DESIGN The issue is, it looks like a smart alarm clock which means that this may become its default use for many, but its use stretches beyond that. The Amazon Echo Spot is unlike any other Echo device…

Pixsy AUTOMATICALLY PURSUE COPYRIGHT CLAIMS ON YOUR PHOTOS. pixsy.com As a photographer in the digital age, it’s near-impossible to keep on top of where your images are cropping up online. Abuse of copyright and intellectual property is rife and often difficult to track down and deal with, but Pixsy aims to help you out on this front. Once you’ve signed up for a free account and imported your images to Pixsy (as either a photographer, artist/designer, online shop or agency) the service will scan the web and return any matches it finds. From here, you can review the legitimacy of these matches, and in the case of theft or other breaches in terms, choose to take action. This takes the shape of either submitting a case, sending an automated (and…

THERE’S NO OTHER SNAPPER IN THE SAME CLASS THAT OFFERS A 15X OPTICAL ZOOM AND A 1.0-INCH SENSOR IN A COMPACT BODY. PANASONIC IS NO stranger to using a large 1-inch sensor in small travel compacts, but where the TZ110 sports a 10x zoom, the company has squeezed a 15x zoom into the new similarly sized TZ220. This versatile 24–360mm Leica lens gives you the ability to capture anything from sweeping landscapes to close-up portraits. With a larger zoom, however, comes the risk of camera shake, but Panasonic’s five-axis Hybrid optical image stabilisation is on hand to reduce unnecessary blur from videos and Power OIS is available for your stills. The TZ220 boasts Panasonic’s Light Speed AF technology, and we found focus speeds to be pretty snappy throughout the zoom…

IT’S BEEN EXACTLY 12 months since TechLife last sat back on the couch to gaze at the latest and greatest in TVs, so now is the perfect time to zap some microwave popcorn, grab the remote and do it all again. With most of the major manufacturers recently releasing their latest ranges, we’ve grabbed six of the best TVs from these brands, as well as taking a look at their overall range for the year. If you’re expecting a revolution like the introduction of 3D, we’re sorry to disappoint, because 2018’s TV tech is more of an evolution than a huge leap forward. Two panel technologies in particular are now fighting it out to be the king of the hill — OLED versus QLED. While OLED is better at pitch-perfect…

IT’S WELL KNOWN that LG is the king of OLED technology, the panel type of choice for many AV enthusiasts, as they’ve been supported longer than every other TV company on the market. In fact, most OLED TVs under other brands, such as the Sony reviewed later, actually use LG OLED panels, though the hardware powering the panels is different. This year is no different for LG, with its aim to deliver ever thinner OLED panels with class-leading image quality at the top of their range, with more affordable technologies further down the stack. LG has broken its 2018 range into three categories — OLED, SUPER UHD and 4K UHD. Obviously, the first in the range is based on superior OLED panel technology, and this year’s sees an upgrade to…

LAST BUT NOT least, we have TCL, a company that is much like Hisense in that it first came to our attention as a more economical brand, but that now offers extremely high-end sets in the Australian market. 2018 sees a huge range of new sets from the company, ranging in price from a stratospheric $19,999 all the way down to $269 for their tiniest sets. The king of the range is the new flagship X range, with the 85-inch X6 retailing for 20 grand. It’s based on Quantum Dot technology that Samsung and Hisense use, and initial reports are that this is a breathtaking wall-stretcher. Helping a little to take the sting out of the price is the fact it comes with a 12-channel Harman Kardon sound system. With…

And that has happened: a parcel of sites including The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, SolarMovie, Putlocker, Watch TV Series, Vumoo and a number of others have been added to the ban list, with ISPs now being required by law to block them. The bill, however, did not specify how the ISPs were to implement the blocks. Right now, most (including Telstra, Optus and TPG) are using DNS poisoning, modifying their DNS servers so that, when your browser requests the IP address of one of those sites, it is instead given the IP address of a “site blocked” splash page. That means, to defeat the blocks, you only need to change your DNS server address — one of the easiest fixes available.…

ON MOBILES, YOU actually have access to all the same tools as on PC. You can modify your network DNS settings just like on a PC. You can download your VPN provider’s app. You can use proxies in your browser as well. On Android, you even can install and app called Orfox to access the Tor network. Other devices like smart TVs and consoles can be trickier. Your best option may be to not to try to modify the device at all — the best tool you have in this case is your router. With a few simple modifications, you can make it so that every device on your network will use Google DNS automatically. That way, a single modification covers every device. CHANGING YOUR ROUTER’S DNS Configuring DNS services…

WHEN YOU USE the internet, there are many potential weak points where the information you send could be intercepted by would-be thieves. This is even more of an issue if you’re using a public Wi-Fi network in a café or hotel where you can’t secure the router yourself. Protecting your IP address is also a concern. This is a number assigned to the device you’re using to access the internet, which can be used to determine your physical location and, together with small pieces of data called cookies, to track which websites you’re visiting. You can avoid these security risks by using a virtual private network (VPN), such as TunnelBear, which redirects data from your computer via another location to hide your identity. A VPN also encrypts all the data…

YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD by now that your mobile phone can and has been used by many companies to track your location and potentially every movement you make. But have you done anything about it yet? If not, then this month’s column is for you. There are lots of ways your phone can be used to track your location. The most obvious is apps that use the phone’s GPS and send that data back to the app provider. Sometimes, that information is essential to the operation of an app — for example in Google Maps — but often... it’s not necessary at all. But there are other ways your phone is giving up your location as well. On Android and iOS, for example, unless you specifically turn it off, your phone…

FOCAL LENGTH ISN’T a measurement of how long or how short a lens is. It’s actually the distance in millimetres from the optical centre of a lens to your camera’s sensor when the lens is focused at infinity. Too much detail? Don’t worry, all you need to think about is the way in which focal length affects image size. For a camera with a full-frame sensor, the ‘standard’ focal length is about 50mm. This is the focal length that provides a similar perspective to the human eye. Lenses that have focal lengths shorter than 50mm are known as wide-angles, as they offer a wider angle of view, while lenses with focal lengths greater than 50mm are known as telephotos; these have a much narrower angle of view that can make…

SCRUB THE BARNACLES FROM YOUR PC GET THINGS BACK UP TO SPEED WITH ASHAMPOO REGISTRY CLEANER. FULL VERSION WORTH $15 With the Ashampoo Registry Cleaner, you can easily and safely delete redundant or damaged registry entries, thus freeing up resources and speeding up your PC. Faulty links in the registry are also repaired. The real-time backup in the Ashampoo Registry Cleaner offers a maximum of safety and enables the restoring of the Windows registry into its original status anytime. Download link: www.ashampoo.com/techlife TAKE BACK YOUR SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVE ALL TRACES WITH ABELSSOFT GCLEAN. FULL VERSION WORTH $20. Many people understandably no longer want any of their information to be transmitted to third parties. The answer: Abelssoft’s GClean. It targets and governs this flow of information that otherwise accumulates…

Nemo ULTRA HIGH-DEFINITION 4K UNDERWATER DRONE aquarobotman.com | Goal: $40,133 | Raised: $78,918 from 55 backers | RRP: US$999, plus shipping There’s a certain fascination amongst humans for the great deep, being the least explored place on our planet. So it’s no wonder that inventors are trying to come up with the best underwater drone. The Nemo is an “ultra-stable” model that also comes with UHD 4K video quality, meaning whatever it sees will be seen by you later crystal clearly! Did someone say VR? Strap on some goggles and you can pretend to be a fish, and share your experience with all your friends. But back to the real pros: the Nemo is equipped with four thrusters to give it that stability, it connects easily to its companion controller…

SOMETIMES, JUST WATCHING the TV shows you love isn’t enough to sate your appetite for content. Sometimes, you want to know the juicy details of how the producers, directors, actors and writers wrestled against time and obstacles to bring the show together. Sometimes, you want to hear all the fan theories and all the predictions, all the clues and all the red herrings. Good news for you, for this where we enter the realm of the companion podcast — as wide a range of podcasts as the TV shows and movies about which their hosts eagerly talk. Needless to say, you need to be careful tuning in to any of the following productions. Check the names and descriptions of each episode before hitting play, for here be spoilers (and potentially…

State of Decay 2 A COMPLEX AND UNIQUE SURVIVAL SIM WITH A HARD EDGE. $49.95 | PC, XO | www.stateofdecay.com WITH NEWS OF the arrival of yet another zombie game, you’d be forgiven for immediately turning away. But wait: State of Decay 2 is probably the best zombie game this generation (and, in my opinion, of all time). Few major console titles dare ask as much from the player as this sequel, both on an emotional and cerebral level, and what results is a survival simulation that feels less like a grindhouse retread and more like a meditative, tense, existential journey. The format is barely changed from the first State of Decay: choosing from a few survivor archetypes, you’re set loose in a collapsed society, where you’re forced to gather…

SAY HELLO TO the most affordable drone going, and one that threatens to be educational. The Tello has been made in conjunction with master drone manufacturer DJI, the company responsible for the mighty Phantom, the diminutive Spark and winning Mavic Air. Ryze Robotics has handled the software and design, while DJI provides hardware components. It’s a modest setup compared to DJI’s work. A 720p camera on the front shoots reasonable video and takes OK pictures, all controlled via your smartphone (or an optional handset for an additional $49). Flips, rotating shots and a long, rising shot are standard in the app. You’ll see a lot of blockiness in the footage, but it’s colourful and lively. One small, single flashing light on the front of the Tello gives you an idea…

THE HERO COMES BUNDLED WITH A STURDY PLASTIC FRAME WHICH IS A WORLD AWAY FROM SOME OF THE CHEAP CHINESE RIVALS OUT THERE IN TERMS OF QUALITY. AS THIS IS GoPro’s budget-focused action cam there’s no 4K video capture. You get the option to shoot at either Full HD 1080p, or at1440p, although this does force the camera to shoot in a not very video-friendly 4:3 aspect ratio. While GoPro’s pricier models, and some rival cameras from other manufacturers, offer a wide range of frame rates and resolutions, the Hero keeps things simple, with only 30fps or 60fps on offer, and it can’t shoot higher frame rates at lower resolutions. The Hero doesn’t get the Hero6 Black’s GP1 processor, but there is image stabilisation on board to help keep footage…

THIS BEEFY 20,000MAh power bank from Cygnett is pitched at tech enthusiasts who need lots of juice while out and about. While it’ll technically fit in a small shoulder- or handbag, its biggish footprint and 450g carry weight means it’ll make its presence known wherever it goes. Still, it does deliver when it comes to performance. With Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 support, it can juice-up most Android smartphones at top speed — with our Samsung Galaxy S9+, it matched our wall-charger’s speed, going from 10% battery to full in around 90 minutes. We squeezed five full recharges (plus around 15%) of our S9+ test unit (which has a 3,500mAh battery) out of the Cygnett before it was drained, and it also managed 4.5 refills on a Nintendo Switch console. Design-wise,…

FORMERLY KNOWN AS a maker of models focused at the entry-level, Hisense continues to go from strength to strength in 2018, and is now offering screens for the premium market. In April the company unveiled its new range TVs, with three different tiers of TVs targeted at different price brackets. At the top of the chain is the Series 9, which differs from the other sets thanks to the inclusion of its ‘Prime Array Backlight’ system. This range starts at $4,499 for the 65-inch screen. All of the TVs across the ranges are based on ULED technology, which is similar to LED TVs in that it requires a backlight. However, this causes issues with dark colours, as there is light bleed between the backlight panels. The solution to this is…

ONCE AGAIN SAMSUNG is flying in the face of convention, sticking with its proprietary QLED technology to offer stiff competition to OLED, while other manufacturers slowly make the move to OLED. Like LG, Samsung has broken its 2018 range into three main lines — the top-end QLED, mid-range Premium UHD and finally its UHD range. We sourced the stunning Samsung 65-inch QLED Q9F for our tests, and it’s easy to see why Samsung doesn’t feel threatened by OLED. For starters, QLED delivers much brighter images than OLED (up to 2,000 nits), but in the past it suffered from having edge-mounted backlights. This year sees the introduction of Full Array Local Dimming, allowing for much more precise control of the backlighting. We’ve seen similar technology to this across most of the…

BUDGET TV SAMSUNG UA43NU7100WXXY Price: $1,199 At only a couple of hundred dollars more than Kogan’s 55-incher, the leap in image quality on Samsung’s new NU7100 series is hard to miss. While both claim to have HDR10 support, the colour quality on Samsung’s budget range is measurably superior, to both the trained eye and expert measurement devices. Sure, you’re sacrificing quite a bit of size to get this additional image quality, but it’s worth it once you’ve seen just how nice video looks on such an affordable set. Despite the low price, it’s actually fully 4K, and uses UHD Dimming to carve up the backlight into smaller areas. Connectivity and Smart features are also top-notch, making this our budget-bargain for the year. MAINSTREAM TV HISENSE 55P7 Price: $1,999 It might…

WHETHER YOU WANT to work around online censorship and geoblocks, or just want to maximise your security and privacy, a VPN service can get the job done. The right service can give you access to media you can’t get here, including the international libraries of Netflix, as well as protect your online activity from hackers and government snoops. Below, we’ve looked at some of the top VPN services available today. We’ve tried to focus on the largest and those that support Netflix in some fashion, though there are a number that we felt were noteworthy enough to include even though they can’t access Netflix. We set up and tested them all, but we should make the very important note that we’re only talking about our personal experience with the VPN.…

01 CLOSE APPS YOU’RE NOT USING This first step might seem really obvious, but if you’re not using something within Windows, you should probably close it. This could take the form of apps, web browser tabs or even basic file windows. If you’d like to be more accurate, you can check the Task Manager (see over the page) to see which of these are causing the biggest effect on your PC’s performance, and close only those. 02 STOP THE START-UP Whenever you start your PC from fresh, it automatically loads a number of applications. These can have an effect on your performance, making your PC seem slow to use and start up. To prevent apps from loading, type “Task Manager” into the search box and press Enter. Under the Start-up…

YOU MIGHT THINK that you need to use an external keyboard to get any serious typing done on an iPhone or iPad. While it’s true that you can do that — over Bluetooth, using a Smart Keyboard or using Apple’s Lightning to USB adapter — if you learn the little tips and tricks Apple has baked into the on-screen keyboard, everything from a tweet to the next great novel is well within the reach of your fingertips. Let’s get typing! We’ll start with something fundamental. Most people will only really use one keyboard for typing, but you can set up several. One main use for this is for typing in different languages; adding other keyboards in ‘Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards’ doesn’t just change the layout of the…

01 COMPOSING SHOTS The narrow view of a long lens can make it easier to compose a clean shot, as all it can take is a slight shift in camera position to remove distracting features and make an object stand out. 02 COMPRESSION As the focal length increases, objects appear closer together and the background appears magnified. 03 EXTENSION As the focal length decreases, the space between objects seems to extend, with nearby objects appearing larger than those in the background. 04 GOING WIDE A wide-angle lens takes in a large amount of a scene in a single image, so it can be easy to miss distractions creeping into the frame, and harder to direct attention to the focal point of the image. 05 IMAGE SIZE You can make an…

I’M EAGERLY AWAITING THE DAY I DON’T HAVE TO DRIVE SOMEWHERE, DESPITE THE FACT I QUITE ENJOY THE ACT OF DRIVING. THINK OF THE CANBERRAADELAIDE DIRECT ROUTE DRIVE IF YOU COULD JUST FALL ASLEEP IN ONE STATE AND WAKE UP IN THE NEXT. Hands off the wheel? I glanced at the highlights from the Google I/O conference this morning and one of the segments featured was about self-driving vehicles, namely the Waymo company and their fleet of cars. The presenter mentioned that all you needed to do was order a car and one would arrive at your door with nobody behind the driver’s wheel. While it might have been elaborated on in the full conference feed, it left me wondering about something... Would you, as the passenger, be obliged to…

“THERE ARE 200 MILLION PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK THAT LIST THEMSELVES AS SINGLE, SO CLEARLY THERE’S SOMETHING TO DO HERE.” IN ITS FIRST big announcement since appearing at a US congressional hearing for its involvement in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, Facebook has unveiled its intention to get into the matchmaking game. While we generally wouldn’t recommend asking billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for dating advice, the world’s largest social media network seems to be adept at pairing covert political manipulation advertisements with their perfect human counterparts. How much harder can connecting human soulmates be? Naturally, the announcement by the multi-billion-user social media platform torched dating-app Tinder’s stock price, which fell 22% on the day of the announcement. In the evangelical tone that seems to emanate from large Silicon Valley companies,…

SCIENCE CAN HELP SUPPRESS UNWANTED THOUGHTS FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES ONLY, NOT DYSTOPIAN MIND CONTROL. People suffering from post traumatic stress disorder or schizophrenia tend to relive nightmares over and over, but new discoveries from Canada’s McGill University may help with effective treatments. Until now, it was understood that patients suffering from mental disorders lacked a neurochemical in the prefrontal cortex called gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), which our bodies produce to suppress any memories that trigger stress. But injecting patients with GABA didn’t help suppress those memories. Studying healthy brains, however, has changed that school of thought. Researchers now understand that GABA is produced in the hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for long-term memories), which then travels to the cortex as a “stop signal”. In unhealthy brains, the hippocampus doesn’t…

SCAN THE SHELVES at your local retailer or browse online and you’ll see a lot of big box-shaped printers that profess to be ideal for both home offices and small businesses. If you haven’t updated your printer in a while, you’ll be surprised by how evolved they’ve become. In fact, these days, you’ll have to try hard to find one that’s simply just a printer. The vast majority can scan and print directly to and from your smartphone now, and even accept printing tasks remotely over the internet so your document is ready for you by the time you get home. (This does mean you will have to leave the printer in a stand-by power mode.) Traditionally, you might (rightly) wonder why you’d need a scanner since the inevitable dimensions…

THAT’S WHERE VIDEO SPEED CONTROLLER SHINES — CUSTOMISED VIDEO CONTROLS. [ GIDDY-UP] Video Speed Controller WATCH VIDEOS THE WAY YOU LIKE IT. Free | github.com/igrigorik/videospeed THE APTLY NAMED Video Speed Controller, a plugin available for Chrome and Firefox, offers shortcuts to speed up, decelerate, fast forward or rewind any HTML5 video on sites like YouTube. Once installed on the browser of your choice, click on the plugin icon and navigate to the Settings page. This opens in a new tab where you can customise the keyboard shortcuts and the speed for video playback. By default, S slows down a video, D speeds it up, R will reset the playback settings and so on. The next time you open an HTML5 video, the current speed will be displayed on the top…

Bring You Home AN IMAGINATIVE PUZZLE GAME. $4.49 | bringyouhomegame.com WHILE MANY iOS games are available on both iPhone and iPad, the latter’s large display can often enable immersive, tactile experiences that don’t work on smaller devices or traditional gaming systems. Bring You Home is a good case in point, rethinking platform puzzling by having you directly manipulate the environment rather than the protagonist. Said protagonist is Polo, a blue alien who’s just seen his pet kidnapped by villains who then disappear via a portal. Polo sets off in pursuit, falls from a second-floor window, and face-plants on the ground. Fortunately for Polo, time then rewinds, and you are invited to save his dignity and face. Tap the play button and Polo’s fall is broken. He then leaps through the…

WHEN WE TOOK THIS ON A LONG (21KM) RUN WITHOUT A PHONE, THE SUUNTO MEASURED THE PACE AND DISTANCE COMPARED TO OUR CONTROL DEVICE TO WITHIN ABOUT 3%, ALL THANKS TO ITS INBUILT STEP COUNTER. SUUNTO’S SLIM SPORTSWATCH is doing something very bold. It’s not only ditched the onboard GPS, offloading the hard work of physical tracking to your smartphone (thus bucking the trend of nearly all sportswatches currently available), it’s also giving you permission to not feel bad about a missed workout. If you blow off that run you swore you would do, the Fitness 3 adapts your upcoming plans to compensate. For Suunto’s adaptable regimen to properly work, though, you’ll need to have the watch on your wrist nearly 24/7. The Fitness 3 measures your heart rate and…

ELECTROLUX HAS HIT gold with the design of the PUREi9: not only does the triangular droid get at the hard-to-vacuum corners, a brush that automatically gets oriented towards walls and obstacles picks up the dirt from along room edges. The suspended wheels and proprietary technology ‘ClimbForceDrive’ lets the little android climb up to 2.2cm, allowing it to cross thresholds easily and, unlike most robot vacuums, the PUREi9 has plenty of suction power to scoop up dust, crumbs, fluff and even bits of gravel in a single pass. And while app control is excellent, albeit limited, its mapping technology is left wanting, especially consider the PUREi9’s undeniably hefty price tag. Although Electrolux has installed 3D Vision (the bot’s obstacle avoidance system) which works really well we might add, the PUREi9 doesn’t…

CAST YOUR EYES over today’s PC market and you’ll largely see a tale of woe, but there’s one bright spot among the carnage in the form of 2-in-1s — the only PC category that’s still seeing substantial growth, with detachables and convertibles continuing to steal a lot of customers from the shrinking tablet market. From a consumer perspective, we guess it makes some sense to put a bit of extra money into a laptop to gain the ability to also use it as a tablet — and in some cases, that extra spend will also net you a faster SSD, a more powerful CPU or even, in some cases, a dedicated GPU for better gaming chops.. ASUS’s latest 2-in-1 convertible, the 1.4kg ZenBook Flip UX461UA, is perhaps not quite as…

WHEN IT COMES to over-ear headphones, Sony’s WH-1000X cans are one of the best wireless sets on offer, rivalling even Bose’s crowd-pleasing QuietComfort QC35s when it comes to audio quality and noise-cancelling. So it’s fair to say we had high hopes for these smaller WF-1000Xs, the former set’s in-ear counterparts — especially given their sky-high Aussie RRP of $399.95, which puts them a good $100 or more above most competitors. Like many other ‘true wireless’ sets, they consist of two lightweight buds that come with their own combo charger/storage-case, which helps keep them clean and charged. The buds last around 3 hours per charge, and you can juice-up the case (which holds another two recharges) while you’re using the buds. In the box, Sony has thrown in a generous seven…

RATHER THAN FOCUS on improving image quality, it seems that Kogan’s approach to TVs in 2018 is delving back to its roots of delivering big-screen TVs at an exceptionally low price. That’s not to say it’s not making improvements elsewhere, with the company recently unveiling its new SmarterTV range. Available in both 50-inch and 58-inch sizes, these affordable sets focus on their inclusion of Google software and Android TV operating system. From the moment we turned on our 58-inch Kogan Series 9, which retails for a mere $949, it was as if we were setting up an Android phone. In fact, it synched to our Android phone during the setup process; all you have to do is ensure they’re both on the same home network, and you can seamlessly integrate…

IN THE PAST, it may have been a trepid passenger, but in 2018, Sony is all aboard the OLED train. Its top-of-the-line models will all feature OLED panels, reputedly supplied by LG, but with different electronics powering the panels. At the top of the food chain is the A8F OLED series, which has some extremely interesting technologies. Sony is using the 4K HDR picture processor-X1 Extreme to push all those OLED pixels, and it features object-based recognition to tailor the colours for each item on the screen. It also uses features Super Bit Mapping 4K HDR and Dual database processing, two other technologies both developed to deliver even better HDR performance. We should point out that this chip isn’t exactly new, with it being released back in 2016. They do…

IF YOUR ISP’S DIRECTORY HAS BEEN MODIFIED, THEN JUST USE SOMEBODY ELSE’S. FOR MOST PEOPLE, THAT SOMEBODY ELSE IS GOOGLE, WHICH RUNS ITS OWN (VERY FAST) DNS SERVERS. SO YOU LIKE your internet unfiltered, with access to the full array of services and sites without any censors or geoblocks getting in the way. You’d like to be able to watch the BBC online, access Hulu or Netflix US and visit sites that would otherwise be restricted. This is the guide for you. We’re going to be looking at various ways you can get around different types of restrictions on all your devices. In particular, we’ll walk through the four most common ways you can access an unrestricted internet. FOUR WAYS TO GET AROUND BLOCKS Before we get into specific techniques,…

[ iOS ] Reinstalling old apps Now that iTunes on the Mac no longer stores and manages iOS apps, how can I downgrade to an older version of an iOS app? [ TIM FUSSELL ] Howard Oakley replies: iTunes 12.7 and later can’t download iOS apps or manage those that are installed on iOS devices. Further complicating matters, for a while, iTunes has not synced apps downloaded on iOS devices back to the Mac; with iOS 9, Apple introduced a set of techniques called ‘app thinning’ to save bandwidth and storage by downloading only what’s necessary for the device you’re using, which would prevent you transferring it, say, from an iPad to a Mac and then an iPhone. However, you may still have copies of much older versions…

YOU MAY WELL have dozens of usernames and passwords for websites. Remembering them all is a tall order, but it’s vital that you don’t start using the same details for multiple sites; if one website suffers a security breach, your details may end up leaking out online, which could potentially give other people access to your email, social networks, online retail sites... all in one go. Instead, iCloud Keychain can help you out; it enables you to keep usernames, passwords and bank card details in an encrypted vault on Apple’s servers. Data stored in your keychain is available on any Mac or iOS device signed in to your iCloud account, which saves you having to remember every last password. The keychain even works in conjunction with Safari’s AutoFill feature to…

WHEN YOU’RE GOING about the business of optimising your Wi-Fi network, there are few tools more useful than a Wi-Fi scanner. These apps give you an overview of all the wireless access points in range of the device you’re running it on. You can use them as mobile sensors to detect gaps in and test the strength of your own Wi-Fi network; or you can use them to detect which channels your neighbours are running their networks on. So what are the best Wi-Fi analysers for each platform? This month, we’ll take a look at our top picks, as well as walk through how you can use such an app to choose the best Wi-Fi channel for you. TOP WI-FI ANALYSERS WINDOWS: NIRSOFT WIFI INFOVIEW  www.nirsoft.net/utils/wifi_information_view.html We’ve actually bounced around…

WAYSKIN Home YOUR PERSONAL SKINCARE THERAPIST. en.wayskin.com This isn’t the first product from the South Korea-based company, with the WAY skincare device successfully being funded on Indiegogo back in 2015. What is it? Well, the Home is a “skin care device that monitors, analyses and cares for your skin” in a time- and money-friendly way, costing you just a teeny US$269. Why do you need one? According to the company, you’re probably “too busy to visit the dermatologist on a regular basis” (yep) or unwilling to spend lots of money on skin treatment (yep), so they’ve developed this at-home kit to keep your skin healthy. It’s a “phone-sized device” that you press to your face throughout the day. It takes readings of your skin and your environment and sends the…