Stuff UKの June 2016 の目次

As ever, we come out of an Apple phone launch feeling like we’ve done mental pugilism with Hulk Hogan. “Ach, it’s just a 5s… no, wait… oh… that’s cool… huh?… pink!… stupid 16GB… ow.” Now that the swelling has gone down, we can report that the iPhone SE is by far the best non-flagship iPhone we’ve ever seen. It’s a lot of the ability of the iPhone 6s squeezed into a smaller form – which a lot of people would prefer – and it’s available at a decent price. Some might miss 3D Touch, and we would prefer a 128GB option, but we do like the decent battery life brought by the smaller screen. On the whole, we think the iPhone SE is going to be small, in a big…

I hadn’t expected to ever hear ‘Derren Brown’, ‘ghost train’ and ‘bleeding edge VR’ in the same sentence. After a sneak preview of the misdirection-meister’s new project at Thorpe Park, I expect to hear about it a lot more when it opens to the public on 6 May, most likely in panicked and/or awed whispers. Mr Brown has assembled a crack team: VR/CGI experts Figment Studios; HTC and their Vive headset (read much more about that from p62); and the creative force behind the Surrey theme park, Merlin Entertainments. The goal is to bring the Ghost Train and its passengers kicking and screaming – literally – into the 21st century. That means building the narrative-driven VR ride into an immersive experience, housed in a custom-built 2306m2 warehouse and a seven-tonne…

£tba (concept) / toyota.co.uk I think I’ve already seen this on WhatSap… Nope. There’s a ban on woody jokes. Same goes for fish, dog and egg puns: they’re bad for your health – as you’ll know if you’ve ever seen a group of apparently sane people dissolve into a ridiculous game of pun tennis that eventually grinds to a halt as all the players realise the crushing pointlessness of their existence. Well, bark at you. What is that, wood or dog? Either way, stop it, and pay this gorgeous concept the attention it deserves. Or, first, remember Toyota’s other recent concept, the Kikai. It was an angular metal thing that broke all the rules of modern car design by having all the suspension and drivetrain bits out in the open…

Think all smartphones are the same? LG’s G5 takes that idea and obliterates it, like the Death Star annihilated Alderaan. Granted, the G5 does look like most smartphones with its lush QHD screen, metal unibody and rear fingerprint scanner. Only a new dual-lens camera gives away the fact that this handset is a bit special. Why? It’s modular. You can rip out its bottom and replace it with add-ons to give the G5 greater battery life, physical camera controls, even better audio. And that’s just the start of this revolution. LG has opened up the G5’s modular design to other manufacturers. They’re free to take the concept and run with it. Make no mistake, this is thoroughly exciting stuff…but you’d probably like to know about how this phone performs in…

Editorial Although not an automation app per se, Editorial showcases how the concept can even benefit text editors. You can bolt on all manner of workflows – to fling text around, list URLs within a document, or nip online to extract information. It’s hugely geeky but makes writing on iOS (even on an iPhone) far more efficient and pleasant. Stuff says £7.99 / iOS Workflow iOS doesn’t allow as much access to hardware as Android, and so Workflow doubles down on tasks that might otherwise be a huge faff on an iPhone. The friendly interface makes editing rules a cinch, whether creating from scratch or downloading from the gallery. Workflows can then be run from within the app, your homescreen or the Today view. Stuff says £2.29 / iOS Automate…

HTC VIVE BYOE: bring your own earphones Once you strap it on, the Vive’s gorgeous screen makes you forget about all the setup hassle. With two 1080x1200 OLED screens pumping out frames at 90Hz, the Vive’s display is, at least on paper, identical to the Rift’s. And there’s hardly anything to separate them in terms of visuals, with bright colours helping bring your neon Tilt Brush creations to life and deep blacks keeping you in the dark when battling zombies in The Brookhaven Experiment. However, the Vive arguably creates a more natural, rounded-off field of view than the Rift’s through-aletterbox effect, which only wears off once you’re sucked into the action. Vive doesn’t quite fill your vision, but its shape makes it easier to get lost in the game world.…

£1230 / dji.com Eight months ago, we said DJI’s Phantom 3 was “pretty much the perfect first flying camera”. That was true then, but the Phantom 4 simply blows it out of the sky. The latest of DJI’s camera-toting quadcopters takes everything we’ve come to expect from the line and adds features that mean pretty much anyone can fly one. It’ll dodge obstacles, line up your camera shots for you and create some truly breathtaking 4K video in the process. This drone is so smart that it can pretty much fly itself. Everything about the 4 feels more user-friendly, and this follows all the way through to its packaging. Lift the drone out of the box and it’s easy to spot DJI’s visual tweaks: the glossy white plastic frame looks…

From the Finnish studio that made its name with hardboiled detective noir Max Payne, time-travelling Quantum Break has arrived – five years after its announcement as an Xbox One and Windows 10 exclusive. Events kick off with everyman Jack Joyce, played by Shawn Ashmore of X-Men fame, visiting his friend Paul Serene (Aidan Gillen, aka Game Of Thrones’ Littlefinger). Serene is the CEO of a tech corp named Monarch, and he’s made a time machine. He ropes Jack into testing it (obviously). Something goes wrong (inevitably). Jack is exposed (predictably) to the resultant ‘timesplosion’ and gains superpowers (thankfully). As far-fetched as this all sounds, Quantum Break does a brilliant job of making the characters feel three-dimensional and charismatic. Jack’s ‘chronon’ powers also offer time-manipulating abilities that turn would-be standard firefights…

WATCH Everybody Wants Some!!_cinema At the end of Richard Linklater’s excellent Boyhood, an annoying kid went off to college to be annoying to people he wasn’t related to. Not entirely coincidentally, Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! begins with an actor who looks almost identical arriving at a fictional Texas university, with a box of records and not a lot else. He is Jake (Blake Jenner), the freshman pitcher for the baseball team, and when he shacks up with his teammates in a dilapidated house the hair tickles collars, the beer flows and the games begin. These are the carefree days before school starts again, when nothing and everything matters. This could easily have been an Austin Inbetweeners, but it never falls back on American Pie gross-outs for cheap laughs. That’s thanks…

There’s a phrase that sport commentators use, that so-and-so has “really backed himself”. In this case, that’s Amazon, who’ve taken the bold decision to launch an e-reader for the kind of money that could buy a full-colour tablet. That’s self-confidence along the lines of the goalkeeper dribbling it up the field himself. Blindfolded. The Oasis justifies itself by moving most of the internals over to one side for an ergonomic handhold. Without its leather battery case, it weighs just 131g and lasts for a couple of weeks; with the magnetic cover it’ll last for a few months. Supportive teammates Voyage and Paperwhite notwithstanding, the Oasis is a bravura performance. As hot as… your reading-on-the-train face from £270 / amazon.co.uk…

OCULUS RIFT Ready to go in minutes Hooking up the Rift and its webcam-style motion sensor to your PC is an amazingly simple process. All it involves is plugging in a few USB 3.0 and HDMI cables, pairing the bundled Xbox One controller with the Wi-Fi dongle, and then you can dive straight into the future. It’s a breeze. Before you’re ready to get physical with the Rift, there is one final bit of preparation to undertake: clear some space around you. Oculus is better suited to sitting or standing than walking around the room, but the very nature of VR means you inevitably move about a bit. With no way to see the things around you, it’s better to be safe than to bring your PC crashing to the…

HTC VIVE Touching the future Got an acid-spewing alien coming your way? Don’t just press a button on a joypad to retrieve a weapon – bend down and grab it with one hand, reload with the other and stop that sucker dead. Valve has built twin motion controllers for the Vive that become your hands, gun, golf club, or anything else. Simply put, these things are fantastic. Sure, they look a bit like futuristic sex toys, but their hooped shape helps the sensors keep track while you’re waving them about. They’re accurate and they don’t weigh a ton either, so your arms won’t fall off after a few hours flailing around in Audioshield. The best bit? The tracking means they appear inside VR with you, so there’s no more scrambling…

ONE Going to a Grand Prix In the days leading up to this year’s opening Formula 1 race in Australia, Sky released two VR videos it had shot behind the scenes at pre-season testing in Barcelona. While they included some onboard footage shot with the Williams team, Sky’s crew didn’t just begin and end with the obvious ‘stick a camera on the car and send it around the track’ – they also plonked VR cameras on the edge of the pit wall, in the middle of a scrum of journalists as presenter Ted Kravitz conducted interviews in the paddock, and over a driver’s head during a pit stop. The result is totally different to the kind of virtual reality footage you normally see, offering a fly-on-the-wall approach that also attempts…

The nights are dark and full of terrors. When it hits you with nigh-on insurmountable brutality, Dark Souls III will dare you to put down your controller. But if you persist, there’s plenty of twisted enjoyment to be found here. When surrounded by seemingly unstoppable enemies, you can experiment by luring them towards an even more intimidating group, resulting in some heavy collateral damage. Drawing the undead into the clutches of a metacrab or a sub-zero geckosaur (these aren’t official names) soon becomes a go-to strategy. Spells and ranged combat are not quite so successful, mostly riffing on the same magic projectile. It’s a case of ‘fire, roll, fire, roll’ when fighting bosses, until their health bars have been whittled down. Hidetaka Miyazaki’s games are infamous for their twisted visual…

THE BASICS Plan it out. The key to a good garden and large crop is thinking ahead. Use the likes of Garden Plan Pro (£6, iOS) to sketch out what you’re going to plant and where irrigation pipes will sit before you start. Fertilise yourself. Making your own compost is cheap, and cuts down on household waste. The cleverest way to compost indoors is with Bokashi bran (from £5.40, wigglywigglers.co.uk). It’s packed with anaerobic microbes that speed up composting and also produce a rich liquid fertiliser ‘tea’. Soil science. So much of gardening comes down to the soil. If you’re starting an indoor garden, this is easy – it comes in a bag. But if you’re struggling to grow outdoors it might be that your soil is too acidic. Clear…

FOR THE FULL REVIEWS AND OUR SMARTPHONE BUYING GUIDE, VISIT STUFF.TV/TOP-10S/SMARTPHONES Download the Shop Stuff app Looking for the best deal on the Samsung Galaxy S7? You can now find it – and buy it – by scanning this page… 1. Download and install the free Shop Stuff app, available on iOS and Android. 2. Open the app, hold your phone 10cm over the page and wait for the swirly vortex. 3. Scroll through the products and pick your options, then hit ‘buy’ or save it for later.…

DUE OCT Gears Of War. A series about guiding a disproportionately muscular soldier from cover to cover, occasionally stopping to use your gun-mounted chainsaw to carve a grunt’s face in half. It’s business as usual in Gears Of War 4, except this time the multiplayer modes have had a major upgrade. While the fourth instalment will have the usual campaign, it also wants to stick a knife into the world of multiplayer shooters and twist it – to show Call Of Duty and co it means business. That means two new additions to your close-quarters arsenal: the yank and shank, a melee-style attack that involves pulling an enemy over from one side of a covering wall to another; and a vault move that can be used to stun them before…

The HTC 10 is a marketer’s worst nightmare. What’s it good at? Pretty much everything. What’s special about it? Erm, battery life. Yup, wake up hungover on a Sunday with this HTC fully charged and it’ll see you through until midnight the next day without conking out. How do we know this? Bitter, whisky-soaked experience, friend. Stamina may be the least sexy of smartphone features, but that mini rush of euphoria you get from knowing the 10 has enough spare juice to survive an impromptu pub trip feels pretty damn good. These little jolts of pleasure are the story of HTC’s latest flagship, really. It doesn’t have a headline-grabbing design, always-on display or any water protection. Like Andrea Pirlo at the peak of his powers, this phone does the simple…

OCULUS RIFT Plain – but not far from slick The finished version of the Rift has come a long way from its boxy original prototype. That looked more like a wearable dustpan than a game-changing bit of tech, but this final model has had its rough edges smoothed and looks far more presentable. It’s a little on the basic side but you could almost call it sleek, with fabric covering the front and rubber straps keeping it firmly fixed to your fizzog. It’s a lot lighter now, too – you won’t forget you’re wearing it, but you won’t be in need of a neck-rub at the end of each session. Once you’ve fitted it for the first time, there’s enough slack to get the headset on and off without having…

THE VERDICT OCULUS RIFT While the Rift beat the Vive to the heads of eager gamers, there’s no suggestion that Oculus’s effort has been rushed. It’s the more polished of the two: cheaper, easier to set up, and it doesn’t require an entire room. Though it has less power than its rival, the first time you pull on the headset still feels more like magic than tech… but the Rift won’t fulfil its initial potential until the Touch controllers arrive at the end of the year. They will add to the already expensive asking price, but for now there’s a more diverse selection of games, and developers are hard at work on big-name titles. Never sympathised with a cartoon hedgehog? Step into his house and you’ll want to give him…

ONE It’s cheaper At £350, Playstation VR will be about half the price of the Vive and £150 less than the Rift. In our experience it’s not quite as advanced as either, but for gamers not onboard enough with virtual reality to spend over £500 on a headset, it’s a significantly more affordable way in. Oh, and there’s no need to shell out anything more on top of that, because you’ve probably already got the computer needed to run it underneath your telly… TWO You don’t need a new computer Oculus or Vive will require a pretty rip-snorting PC setup to run properly. Eradication of latency and lag is essential for a decent experience, so your graphics card will need to be up to scratch – not a small purchase.…

Hybrids have been around almost as long as modern tablets, but these two tabs are slightly different. The Apple iPad Pro 9.7 and Samsung Galaxy TabPro S don’t just squish together the capabilities of laptops and tablets – they bring you advanced extras that you don’t usually get in either format. Their displays are more vivid than those of almost any laptop in existence, and the iPad Pro 9.7 has a stylus accessory that turns it into a doodler’s dream digital canvas. Aside from both having true next-gen hardware and keyboard bases that detach from the screens with a quick yank, these two tablets couldn’t be more different. One looks just like a regular tablet but has secret abilities under the surface; the other is a celebration of how tiny…

We can’t all get out to France to watch this summer’s action in the flesh, but that doesn’t mean missing out on the match day atmosphere. Home football viewing is now better than ever: BenQ’s projectors will bring the big screen experience to your living room, so there’s no longer any need to crowd in front of a tiny telly squinting at minuscule stick men. But setting up the perfect game requires more than just sorting the perfect viewing apparatus – stick to the following five tips and you’ll be celebrating every goal as if you were in the stands yourself… 1. SET UP YOUR BENQ PROJECTOR; ENGAGE FOOTBALL PICTURE MODE. Feel like you’re pitch-side without leaving the comfort of your living room by switching on Football Picture Mode, available…

The case against Ratchet & Clank being any good is overwhelming. For starters, it’s a remaster – and not just any old remaster, but a remaster of a 2002 original that was itself remastered once before for PS3. How many times do they want us to play the same game? Not only that, but it arrives mere weeks before a spin-off movie. So it’d be easy to see this new game as a shameless cash-in on a movie that itself seems a shameless cash-in on a forgotten gaming series… but that simply wouldn’t do it justice. That’s partly because pretty much every aspect of the game has been reimagined from scratch – and partly because it may well be the prettiest thing ever to grace the PS4. While it has…

Audio Ammunition 1977 The Clash are the second-greatest band ever (after Dr Teeth And The Electric Mayhem), so this Google-made film is essential viewing. Based on extensive interviews with the late Joe Strummer and his gang, it runs at 40 minutes in five sections: perfect commuting fodder. YouTube Game Over: Kasparov And The Machine 2004 Long before Google DeepMind, IBM’s Deep Blue famously belittled chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. This doc revisits the scene of IBM’s momentous victory, with Team Kasparov unwittingly proving we will always beat computers at sour grapes. YouTube Free To Play 2014 “Stop wasting your time on those stupid games – they won’t get you anywhere.” Sound familiar? This Valve-funded doc follows the lives of three pro Dota 2 players, all of them hungry for the grand…

THE PLACE TO START TWICKETS twickets.co.uk The service that started as a humble Twitter account in 2011 is now our favourite fan-to-fan ticket hub. Its founding principle – all tickets must be sold at face value or less – and virtually tout-proof system mean it’s our go-to place for finding unwanted tickets to sold-out gigs, comedy shows, plays and sporting events. It’s no longer just for Twitter users either. Sign up for a free account and you can find, buy or sell tickets by simply using its iOS, Android or Windows Phone app. Its filtered search helps track down events in seconds, and you can now set up alerts to nudge you when someone lists a spare ticket for that musical you agonisingly missed out on. It works well for…

oh, fancy. Looks like Tony Stark’s living room. It sure does, although we wouldn’t really know – we’ve never been invited round for a brew. But, tell you what, do you think a fancy billionaire like Mr Stark would ever trek it to a sticky-floored cinema full of snotty-nosed brats and people coughing to catch the latest Avengers flick? Of course not. The non-gourmet popcorn has a 1000% markup, and he’ll have to deal with other humans – something that’s almost always regarded as a bad idea. No sir, he’d watch it on release day from the convenience of his own mansion. And you could too. You know he’s not a real person, right? OK, the point, which you seem to have missed, is that we’re talking about the ability…