Sommaire pour March 2023 de Stuff UK

Hello and welcome! If you’ve been looking to upgrade your smart tech, have we got a treat for you this time around: our lead feature is packed full of the latest kit to tack onto your burgeoning setup. ‘Matter’ is the word on all smart home lips – but while this new standard will ensure many more devices work with each other in years to come, you still need to be careful to ensure you buy home tech that’ll work with what you’ve got already; naturally, we’ll help you through the maze. We’ve also got a cracking extra section towards the back dedicated to the fastest-growing area of the smart home: lighting. Elsewhere we look at this year’s hottest flagship phones so far – the OnePlus 11 is reviewed, while…

£N/A (concept) / peugeot.co.uk Right, so the car of the future is basically a wheeled windscreen? More or less. Built on Peugeot’s own dedicated EV platform, the Inception Concept is a radical saloon with some features we could see in production cars by 2025. This 5m-long, 1.34m-high stunner was recently unveiled at the CES expo in Las Vegas. So, that design… Clearly glazing is a core feature of the stunning exterior – and there’s a beautifully sculpted glass rear end too. Spying on who’s inside is made difficult by a multi-chrome treatment on the architectural glass. And is the interior just as wild? Wilder, if anything. In the cabin there’s an ‘i-Cockpit’ layout with velvet-upholstered seating and a ‘Hypersquare’ control system. This angular steering wheel hosts controls in circular recesses…

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Security Protect your castle without having to dig a moat. p36 Kitchen And you thought having a dual toaster was fancy. p42 Multiroom audio Chris Rea in one room, Phil Collins in another: bliss! p48 Hallway Control everything from a draughty corridor. p38 Garden Take the cleverness outside, downpours permitting. p44 And the rest Kit that’s hard to categorise but easy to love. p50 Living room It’s your place to relax, so let tech do all the work. p40 Bedroom There’s nothing sexy about a vibrating mattress. p46 AND THERE’S MORE! Don’t miss our 16-page smart lighting special. p97…

Rithum Switch £249 / rithumhome.com Easier smart home control is the way things are moving, and the Rithum Switch delivers just that… as well as being a convenient source of jokes about using the rhythm method in the bedroom. The switch is effectively a wall-mounted control panel enabling you to control your smart tech without a tablet or phone. It’s designed for people who want something more stylish than a standard smart speaker but who don’t want to pay massive amounts of money for it. The Rithum Switch is designed to control three kinds of smart home tech: lighting, audio and climate. So its main screen has a pleasantly familiar interface for tinkering with your bulbs, speakers and heating. HUE SHOOK ME The Switch works with Hue and other Zigbee…

• ALTERNATIVELY… Fitbit Charge 5 If you’re looking for an effective and affordable fitness band that also delivers top-notch sleep tracking, the Charge 5 is fantastic value for money. Seven-day battery life means you don’t need to choose between monitoring your sleep and enjoying all-day operation; and as it’s a Fitbit, it comes with a comprehensive suite of health features. £99 / fitbit.com Lumie Bodyclock Luxe 750DAB Lumie specialises in SAD lamps and wake-up lights, and its flagship glower is designed to ease you into the new day without alarms or surprises. It has customisable sunrise and sunset durations to soothe you to sleep and wake you gently, and also works as a DAB radio and Bluetooth speaker. Plus it looks like a happy bald robot. £172 / lumie.com Withings…

● Remixlive Decks? Knobs? Get with it, Gramps: these days electronic music makers tap buttons on a grid to fire up beats. At least, they do if they use Remixlive. It’s head-bobbing fun, with the added advantage that you don’t need any talent to fashion something fit for the dance village at Glasto – although you can dig into sequencing, song creation and a range of sample packs if you feel the urge. £free (IAP) / Android, iOS ● Glitch Lab Lob even the most nondescript photo into Glitch Lab and it will become the most dazzling visual treat. By fiddling with sliders and buttons, you can quickly layer on digital art effects such as streaking, data corruption, text and voxels. When you’re done, you can add even more effects,…

THE BASICS ■ Get organised When brainstorming, it’s a good idea to stash everything. You never know when even tangential thoughts might become crucial. But going in without a plan means chaos, so organise ideas in a way that makes sense to you – and makes for ease of retrieval later, whether that means basic headings/lists, tags, folders or another system. ■ Go big (screen) A quick bullet-point list, before ideas escape your brain, is a solid starting point. But even the largest phone’s display makes for a miserable experience when navigating complex ideas with many moving parts. Have a tablet or computer to hand when you need a more global view, rather than spending hours frantically scrolling. ■ Prize flexibility When collaborating, you’ll need systems everyone can access and…

£499 / go.stuff.tv/Bose600 ■ It might have a boring name, but the Smart Soundbar 600 is an impressive piece of tech. Two upfiring drivers mean that, rather than your brain being tricked into thinking there’s sound above your head, there actually is. The result is a sense of height to Dolby Atmos soundtracks that ‘virtual surround’ bars like the second-gen Sonos Beam can’t match. ■ You get the minimum of wired inputs, with just an HDMI eARC passthrough and digital optical at the rear. Still, the 600 makes it easy to wirelessly stream audio over Chromecast, Spotify Connect or AirPlay 2, as well as Bluetooth. Alexa is built in but you’ll need a Google speaker on your home network for Google Assistant. ■ The companion app handles multiroom connections, if…

£299 / go.stuff.tv/HomePod DAY 01 The second-gen HomePod is available in white as before, but now the darker version is ‘midnight’, not ‘charcoal’. We’ve been sent both for this review, since you can pair them up in stereo. As I unbox them I notice that they look very similar to the original HomePod, which Apple apparently discontinued because it didn’t sell many. So the question is, what makes this HomePod better? Apple’s forays into home audio have long had patchy results. The 2006 iPod Hi-Fi was a £249 oversized iPod dock that lasted just 18 months. The original HomePod cost £319, debuted in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021. The sound quality of both these devices was great, but both had the same flaw: they were too expensive. The £99…

1 Sony WH-1000XM5 £299 / go.stuff.tv/WHXM5 Nobody was able to displace Sony’s WH-1000XM4 headphones from the top of this list for two years… yet the latest model manages to be even better. Key to the XM5s’ overall quality is the new carbon-fibre composite 30mm drivers: they bring even greater clarity than the previous generation, and the sound reproduction is beautifully precise. The simple fact is that these are the best noise-cancellers around by almost every measure. You really won’t regret buying them. Stuff says Sony keeps its grip on the top spot with an unrivalled combo of great sound, ANC and comfort 2 Sennheiser Momentum 4 £300 / go.stuff.tv/SM4 These are headphones that sound naturalistic, engaged and entirely musical, making every recording sound like an event. And they’ll last a startling 60hrs…

Welcome to Stuff’s Ultimate Guide to Smart Lighting. We’ve got all the info you need here – from helping you choose the right ecosystem for your setup, to explaining about different fittings for smart bulbs and discussing the merits of Wi-Fi versus Bluetooth. Overleaf we’ve taken you through your smart lighting choices step by step, before introducing you to key products such as Philips Hue’s reliable system and Ikea’s rapidly expanding lineup. Then, finally, we’ve given you a glossary of smart home terms – including an introduction to ‘scenes’ and a run-through of Matter, the incoming standard that will help us all have more integration between our smart home gadgets. That interoperability is going to be key as we enter the next phase of home automation, when you no longer…

Shapes: Hexagons If you prefer your polygons with a few more faces, there’s also a Hexagons option. It’s compatible with the Triangles kit and other Nanoleaf lights; you can start out with five, nine or 15 panels, and add more later. Clever features such as Screen Mirror and the Music Visualiser are, of course, covered. from £120 Smart Bulb This one replaces a regular lightbulb. Available in B22 (large bayonet) and E27 (large screw-in) fittings, it can output the full 16 million colours, including plain white if you really must. It works with HomeKit, Google Home, Alexa and more, and it’s dimmable via the mobile app or voice commands. from £18 Lines Maybe straight lines are more your thing? If so, take a look at Nanoleaf Lines. These backlit LED…

Wiz Imageo Adjustable Spotlight from £30 / wizconnected.com Wiz produces a whole range of spotlight-style smart lights in gleaming white or sassy black. You can choose from units with one, two or three bulbs, each of which can be twizzled to highlight individual areas of your room. These Matter-certified lights can be connected to your home Wi-Fi and controlled through the Wiz app. Here you’re able to set schedules, create scenes and more. You can even set the lights to come on when they detect motion, without using separate motion sensors – the units’ own SpaceSense technology takes care of that. MODE ’N’ LOVE These spotlights can output millions of colours, and Wiz has custom-designed a number of dynamic modes to create mood-lifting atmospheres. If it’s cold outside, for example,…

THEY HANG ON YOUR EARLOBES AND FIRE AUDIO DIRECTLY INTO YOUR BRAIN Er, isn’t this supposed to be a gadget mag? Last time we checked – but this isn’t just a normal pair of earrings. Not that you’d know that from looking at them, which you’ve just handily proved. The H1s come in either silver (£510) or gold (£599) and are made using freshwater pearls. So far, so jewellery. But Nova has squeezed a tiny speaker in each one, with Bluetooth 5.2 to connect them to your phone, so they’ll hang on your lobes and fire the audio directly into your brain. Nova calls it Directional Sound and compares it to augmented reality: a layer of sound added to the ones that surround you. But I don’t have my ears…

The Dyson Zone started out because we’ve been developing purifiers, and so we’ve been understanding the problem of air pollution. The purifier was solving that problem indoors, but then there’s the outdoor problem as well. You can get things you hang around your neck and they blow air up, but they don’t do anything – because by the time it gets to your nose and mouth, it’s so mixed you’re not really breathing any clean air. So you need this bubble right under your nose and mouth – and obviously when you move your head around, the bubble needs to move with it. So logically the thing has to be on your head. We came up with the idea of integrating with headphones because it’s a format that people already…

Top-tier phones have always been pricey, but these days buying one means consulting your bank manager first. We need a ‘flagship killer’ more than ever in 2023. First to step up to the plate is OnePlus, the firm that practically invented the concept a decade ago. On paper, the OnePlus 11 hits all the right targets, including the latest and greatest mobile silicon courtesy of Qualcomm and a camera trio overhauled with help from Hasselblad. The screen now plays nicely with Dolby Vision content, and spatial audio support promises a more engaging listen if your headphones are up to snuff. It also steps things up on the styling front, to better compete with alluring rival handsets. The asymmetrical camera bump, made from ‘medical grade’ stainless steel and blending smoothly into…

Arlo Pro 4 Security Camera £220 / arlo.com Arlo has been making smart security cameras since 2014, and its Wi-Fi cams are some of the best. The XL version has a bigger battery than the standard Pro 4, but this is the pick of the range – and should still last up to six months between charges. While many Arlo cameras need an Arlo SmartHub to connect to, this one can connect directly to your Wi-Fi to deliver 2K HDR video and 12x zoom, meaning you can get right into the face of whoever’s nicked your bin. Plus there’s a built-in LED spotlight for colour night vision. It’s compatible with all the main voice assistants plus IFTTT. VIDEO FREE EUROPE Most smart security systems reserve their best features for subscribers…

• ALTERNATIVELY… Jura Ena 8 In addition to the high-spec, high-quality components that make Jura bean-to-cup machines so loved by coffee aficionados, this connected maker also offers compatibility with Jura’s own JOE smartphone app. JOE lets you store your favourite recipes and settings, and recall them with a tap. You can even ‘order’ different coffees via your Apple Watch. £1025 / jura.com Hoover H-Wash 500 Brands including Hoover, Bosch, Grundig and others have now extended app control across their range of home appliances. This Hoover uses an app like the company’s smart ovens, with the ability to remotely monitor and control your wash. It has a large 9kg capacity, intelligent sensing to customise each wash cycle and a steam option to reduce creases. £449 / hoover.co.uk Hoover HOC3358IN WiFi You…

Sonos One SL £358 (pair) / sonos.com Sonos has more than 20 years’ audio experience under its belt, and when it comes to multiroom audio it’s the market leader. And no wonder. With a product range that includes portable speakers, different sizes of soundbars, massively powerful subwoofers and all kinds of accessories, you can create a Sonos system for any size of home, and any size of budget. There may be cheaper options, but when it comes to sheer sound quality and ease of use, Sonos remains the brand to beat. I WANT TO SHAKE FREE With some brands, multiroom audio means having the same music playing everywhere – which is nice enough, but isn’t necessarily ideal for families. With a Sonos setup you can do the same, but you…

◼ Glow fun With no viewfinder you’re forced to frame still pictures with the touchscreen, but photos are rich and detailed in the right lighting. There’s also no RAW shooting, but that’s no surprise given the ZV-1F’s simplified nature. ◼ I’m flawed While last year’s ZV-1 has a clever multi-interface shoe up top, the ZV-1F has to make do with a ‘dumb’ cold shoe mount that will accommodate the fluffy wind-shield or another non-powered accessory. £550 / go.stuff.tv/ZV1F ■ At first glance the Sony ZV-1F looks suspiciously like the ace ZV-1 we tested last year. Again, it’s a pocket point-and-shooter designed with simple 4K vlogging in mind. It even comes with its own fluffy ‘dead cat’ mic attachment for killing wind noise. But this new model is intended as a…

1 Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max from £1199 / go.stuff.tv/14ProMax This is essentially the same phone as the 14 Pro, but with a bigger screen and a bigger battery. So on paper it’s Apple’s best ever… but while that justifies its promotion to top spot, we should point out that it’s only worth it for people who really need that extra screen space. Do you? Well, it does make photo, video and audio editing (and gaming) easier. Stuff says Really moves the Pro Max on… though all this quality has a price 2 Google Pixel 7 Pro from £849 / go.stuff.tv/Pixel7Pro Streamlined styling, plentiful performance and dependable battery life make this another worthy Google flagship. It’s a minor upgrade over the previous effort but really impresses on the photography front, with pin-sharp…

1 Apple Watch SE (2022) from £259 / go.stuff.tv/WatchSE If you’re talking about value, the SE is the best Apple Watch hands-down. It tracks sleep and all the exercise you need, supports Apple Pay, works great with your iPhone and… what more do most people require? The user experience is broadly identical, and while the screen bezels are a bit larger than on the Series 8 it’s hard to tell them apart without getting right up close. If you want a stainless steel case you’ll have to splash out on a Series 8 – but first ask yourself if it’s really worth the extra. Stuff says Offers most of the Apple Watch Series 8 experience for a whole lot cash less 2 Garmin Fenix 7 from £600 / go.stuff.tv/Fenix7 I fyour budget…

1 Philips 55OLED907 £1999 / go.stuff.tv/OLED907 It’s no one’s idea of a bargain, but nevertheless the 55OLED907 will be money well spent for even mild telly addicts. For once, here’s a TV with audio quality that truly matches its image quality – and be in no doubt, the image quality available here is very impressive indeed. The Ambilight illuminations are as slick as ever too. Resign yourself to a long stint sorting out the initial setup (as is always the way with Philips) and you’ll never look back. Stuff says A great OLED TV with impressive brightness and top-class audio 2 Sony XR-55A95K £2199 / go.stuff.tv/A95K Samsung developed QD-OLED to address the one shortcoming of OLED – a relative lack of brightness – yet it’s Sony that leads the pack now. This…

1 Amazon Echo (4th Gen) £90 / go.stuff.tv/Echo Having morphed from a cylinder to a sphere, the latest Echo is an excellent newsreader, weather forecaster, personal assistant and intercom straight out of the box; but it’s now also a capable speaker and a very accessible smart home hub. It doesn’t sound as good as the Sonos One for listening to music, but it’s significantly smarter and considerably cheaper too. Stuff says An all-round upgrade that makes the Echo a smarter speaker than ever 2 Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen) from £55 / go.stuff.tv/Dot5 The latest Dot offers improved sound quality over the 4th Gen model. Not surprisingly given its size, it still doesn’t have the heft of a full-scale Echo, but this Dot is more than good enough for bedside table or…

1 Fujifilm X-T5 £1699 / go.stuff.tv/XT5 Fujifilm’s most popular compact system camera gets a sensor upgrade while keeping up tradition everywhere else. This means you’re getting identical stills performance to the more modern X-H2, while retaining the old X-T4’s dials and compact dimensions – making the X-T5 the sweet spot of Fuji’s lineup, and a top all-rounder. The sensor is even better at low-light shooting than before, and the wide choice of lenses means everyone will find something to like. Stuff says Slick modern internals meet the manual controls loved by Fuji diehards 2 Sony A7 IV £2399 / go.stuff.tv/A7iv The A7 series might be marketed as Sony’s ‘basic’ full-frame E-mount camera, but it’s now become a premium model in its own right. The A7 III proved very popular with content creators,…

In the world of smart lighting, the options are bountiful even if many of them are compatible with the same big smart home systems. The good news is that you’re bound to find what you’re looking for. The bad news is that it’s hard to decide – and with more design-led options than ever, there are more choices between various levels of price and quality. That’s what this guide is for – helping you to understand the best options for your home. At its simplest, smart lighting means you can switch on and off lights using your voice or your phone. But the reality is way better than that: by using simple automations, you can choose when lights go on and off or create ‘scenes’ that mean all your lights…

Lifx Color Clean Edition $70 / lifx.com This smart lightbulb does more than shine with a brightness of 1100 lumens and a range of billions of colours including warm-to-cool white light. It also cleans your room and gadgets. Yep, as well as outputting the expected range of glowing goodness you’d expect from a smart bulb, it can also give out HEV light that sanitises the surfaces on which it falls, killing nasty bacteria. So it could be ideal for sanitising the bathroom, kitchen work surfaces or pocket items such as your phone and keys. THE LOW-GLOW MOTION Using the free Lifx app, you can set up your Clean bulb on a daily timer, creating a schedule to (for example) wake you gently with a gradually intensifying light in the morning,…

Regular lighting is straightforward. You can switch it on, or leave it off. And that’s it. But with smart lighting, your household lamps offer a whole new degree of control and a much wider range of capabilities. And to go with that, there’s a little bit of complexity involved. Here’s the most common terminology explained. COLOUR TEMPERATURE As well as a huge range of colours, most smart bulbs offer variations on white light, from a warm, yellow-tinted glow that’s gentle and relaxing for evenings in, to a cool, bluish tint that’s easier on the eyes if you’re working, reading or doing something that requires keen concentration. If you’re not interested in changing colours completely, some bulbs offer variations on white light only. DIMMABLE Beyond their power to glow in lots…

from £2449 / samsung.com Samsung’s 2023 laptop lineup has a new hero… and it’s a real page-turner ● Book to the future It’s not just new phones (see p6) that Samsung has been pumping out this month. The 16in Ultra is the top dog in the new Galaxy Book3 range, combining meaty innards with a sleek, travel-friendly chassis. The processing power is provided by a 13th-gen Core i7 or Core i9, able to pull up to 45W for maximum grunt and paired with as much as 32GB of RAM. For the graphics you can have either an Nvidia RTX 4050 or a 4070, which should be good enough to do anything from video editing to running the latest games with the detail settings pumped to the max. ● Don’t look…

If you’d like to put a brake on your heating costs, jump onto this month’s competition prize from Tado: a complete smart home thermostat setup. It’ll see you take control of your heating bills, saving money and energy for years to come. The prize bundle includes a Tado Wireless Smart Thermostat Starter Kit, Wired Smart Thermostat and Wireless Temperature Sensor, plus eight Smart Radiator Thermostats. With this setup you can set each room in your home to a different temperature, using just your phone or smart speaker. With Tado products, households save an average of 22% on their heating bills thanks to smarts like geofencing, open window detection and smart schedules. You can also get a prediction of what next month’s energy bill is going to be. And Tado Smart…

IMMERSION IMPLEMENTS The packable plunger AeroPress Go This is the original. Long or short, hot or cold, its two-part plunger setup is easy to use and simple to clean. Smaller than the standard version and shipped in a case that doubles as a mug, this travel version makes top-notch rocket fuel even more portable. Scoop, stirrer and filter holder included. £40 / aeropress.co.uk The carriable cafetiere Espro Ultralight Stash a standard French press in your bag and it’ll break like a glass baguette. Pack this stainless steel cylinder instead and you’ll have no need to be bitter. Push the plunger and a pair of micro-mesh filters inside produce grit-free jitter juice; double insulation then keeps it nice and chaud. £50 / homeinstitute.co.uk The hydraulic hybrid Barista & Co Twist Press…

• ALTERNATIVELY… TP-Link Archer AX72 If you haven’t upgraded your router for a few years then you’ll notice a huge boost when you connect to and stream via this fast home network hub. It has Wi-Fi 6 as well as backwards compatibility, supports mesh networking for additional routers and can connect up to 200 devices simultaneously. There are faster options, but this is ample for most homes. £130 / tp-link.com Philips Hue Motion Sensor It’s designed for indoor use only, and we think the perfect place for this motion sensor is in the hallway where it can activate the lights on arrival… or if you get up in the night for a fridge raid. It connects to your Hue hub, and if you put it somewhere close to a window…

Bosch Indego M+ 700 £999 / bosch-diy.com If you’d rather enjoy your garden than tend to it, a smart mower is undoubtedly the way to go. Bosch’s robot lawn-snipper comes in various sizes, and the number in the product name is the square metres of the area it’s designed to cut. The M+ 700 (yes, that means 700m2 of max cutting area) is compatible with Alexa, Google Assistant and IFTTT, which is quite a decent suite of options. Because this is quite a compact mower, it can fit through the kind of gaps you might get in a smaller garden, and around and underneath your artisan garden furniture… or, back in the real world, one of those Little Tikes plastic toddler cars that every parent hates. CRAWL OVER THE WORLD…

EcoFlow River 2 £269 / uk.ecoflow.com If you’re heading off-grid or want peace of mind in the event of power cuts, EcoFlow’s portable power stations come in a dizzying range of options. This small, road-friendly model charges up in just an hour and delivers up to 600W of peak power. The River 2 is designed to do two things: deliver power when you’re far from home, and act as a trusty backup in the event of outages. When it detects an outage it switches to its own power in just 30ms, which is more than fast enough to avoid data loss. And as a portable charger it’s extremely flexible, with USB-A, USB-C and standard plug connections. In addition to topping it up with mains power you can recharge it from…

from £649 / go.stuff.tv/MacMini ■ Apple hasn’t updated the Mac Mini’s design since 2010, but its innards have evolved more rapidly: 2023’s model is powered by the latest Apple silicon, and even with the basic spec it barely blinked as we edited video, music and photo projects. It’s mostly quiet too. ■ The default 8GB RAM is fine for mono-tasking, but we found leaving dozens of browser tabs open could sometimes grind the machine to a halt. If you’re not disciplined that could be a problem… but doubling it to 16GB costs a frankly absurd £200 extra. ■ The SSD storage is slower than in the previous model, but you’re unlikely to notice in general use. What you will notice is that 256GB can be tight, so if you use…

FIRST ADD THESE… ONE SONY WH-1000XM5 Connect a pair of these to your Fire TV Cube over Bluetooth and your ears will thank you. Sony’s sound is a balanced choice for films and music, and these cans are a benchmark in active noise-cancelling. No1 on our best headphones list, whether chilling at home, on a plane or out and about, the 1000XM5s really are the ones to beat. £299 / currys.co.uk TWO RING VIDEO DOORBELL 4 Curses! The doorbell rings mid-movie… but there’s no need to get up to find out who’s there – you can have the feed cast to your Fire TV with Ring’s video doorbell. It’ll transmit 1080p footage directly to your device, whether it’s a phone or an Alexa-powered telly. Pick it up with the Chime…

1 Hammerhead Karoo 2 £359 / go.stuff.tv/Karoo2 For ages cycling computers have been held back by outdated tech… but Hammerhead’s sharp screen really is a gamechanger, and effectively running a tiny Android phone inside a custom case feels like a no-brainer. The 3.2in display is a delight, helping you spot new trails branching off from routes, all with the nostalgic feel of an early smartphone. Navigating with swipes and taps is intuitive (and works with gloves), and the software is constantly updated with helpful nips and tucks. Stuff says At last, a bike computer for the 21st century – Wahoo and Garmin appear to have missed a trick here 2 Wattbike Atom £2149 / go.stuff.tv/WBAtom This is no beginner bike, but if you’re looking to improve your cycling form at home you’re…

1 Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Max £2199 / go.stuff.tv/AmbeoMax Utterly convincing Dolby Atmos and DTS:X 3D sound, ample power and lots of inputs mean no other soundbar currently available can perform sonic feats with the solidity and confidence of this Sennheiser. The sheer room-filling scale of its sound is remarkable, and it’s hard to think of any content that wouldn’t benefit from being Maxed out. Stuff says The Ambeo Soundbar Max is a big unit but the sound it makes is bigger still 2 Sonos Arc £899 / go.stuff.tv/SonosArc Don’t expect this soundbar to do everything a multi-speaker Dolby Atmos setup can do, but its up-firing and side-firing drivers give a real sense of cinematic scale. See also the much more affordable Ray model. Stuff says Big-screen sound for your big-screen binges 3 Roku…

1 Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen) from £55 / go.stuff.tv/Dot5 The latest Dot offers improved sound quality over the 4th Gen model. Not surprisingly given its size, it still doesn’t have the heft of a full-scale Echo, but this Dot is more than good enough for bedside table or kitchen listening – and light years away from the lame sound of the early models. Be sure to consider the £65 ‘with Clock’ version, which offers a better and much more useful LED display than the previous model. Stuff says The 5th Gen brings a nice upgrade to an already excellent little gadget 2 Microsoft Xbox Wireless Headset £90 / go.stuff.tv/XboxHeadset With their chunky earpads, these black cans are unmistakably Xbox. And the sound is impressive for the price, with a low-end response…

Philips Hue Signe Gradient Lamps from £190 / philips-hue.com Assuming you don’t live in a National Trust castle, a smart lamp is the perfect accompaniment to any room. With this one, you can set the mood by blending millions of colours for the exact effect you’re looking for, or just relax with a warm or cool white light. It can also flash, or dim and brighten at slower rates – ideal for convincing your neighbours you’re conversing with aliens. Available in Floor and Table versions, the Gradient Lamp offers up to 16 million colours. You can control it via Bluetooth using the free Hue app, available on Android and iOS. If you have a Hue Bridge (see right) it also becomes compatible with Google, Amazon and Apple systems, so you…

Dirigera Hub You can tweak Ikea’s smart lighting gear with remote controls, but to get the most out of it you need to add a hub. With this little white disc in place, you can use Ikea’s free Home app to run everything. It also means you can use Alexa, Google Assistant and HomeKit with your Ikea lights. £55 Tradfri LED Bulb E14 Candle-like bulbs look great in the right sort of chandelier, and this one’s no exception. It uses an E14 (small screw) fitting, and if you add a remote control it can be dimmed to create just the right mood for your room. Don’t like looking at filaments? Like the E27 bulb above right, this model comes in clear or white glass. from £8 Tradfri LED Bulb E27…

What’s this abomination? The unholy offspring of a calculator and a home PC? It actually won a Design Council award. Still, your label’s appropriate, given that its creator spent the 1970s hawking hobbyist electronics until his calculators were clobbered by more capable Japanese fare. So Clive Sinclair and his boffins pivoted to home micros, including the ZX80 and this improved follow-up… which still only had 1KB RAM, came in kit form unless you paid an extra 20 quid, and turned the display off when it had anything strenuous to do. That sounds awful. So presumably this was a computing disaster of epic proportions? You’d think so, but the ZX81 sold 1.5 million units and laid the foundations for the ZX Spectrum. Admittedly, this was mostly because it was dirt cheap…