Table of contents for September 1, 2015 in Stuff UK

£500 / dxo.com Oh, look: a cutesy clip-on camera for your iPhone. It probably has a plastic lens for taking highly stylised pictures of your… Stop! ● Look at the price. This thing is serious Insidethat nondescript casing is alin, backside-illuminated CMOS sensor offering over 20 megapixels. Wordlnthecameraverselsthat this is exactly the same sensor found intheSonyRX100lll,amuch praised (but much larger) camera. Sittlnginfrontofltisaflxed-length 32mm lens array that encourages the use of the hackneyed phrase ‘marvel of miniaturisation’to describe Its bright fl.8 rating, and videofans are cateredfor with 1080p/30fps or 720p/120fps. ● You don’t have to attach it to anything. The One has its own LCD screen and mlcroSD card storage sois perfectly capable of acting on its own, wlththe bonus effect of making youfeel like a Cold War SOE agent snapping…

Musicians have all the fun. Don’t they? All those buttons to press and knobs to twiddle and pedals to jump on. Musicians and pilots. See, this is what car manufacturers need to figure out: it might seem very clever to centralise all a car’s functions under a big touchscreen interface, but we like physical controls. It makes us feel like an astronaut preparing for launch, instead of a desk jockey popping out for lunch. Mmm, lunch… Stay on target, Gold Leader. This is important: Yamaha has finally jumped on board with the retro synthesizer boom. The fingers of everyone from bedroom boppers to pro musicians have been twitching in anticipation. There are four Refaces, each with a three-octave mini keyboard and each with a look and sound that references heritage…

ONE ITS PLAYLISTS DO HAVE A HUMAN TOUCH AtthemiddleofApple’s aluminium-framediRobot, lockedintheWhiteRoom, itseemstherereallyisthe beatingheartofahuman. Wewereprettysceptical ofApple’sclaimsthat algorithmicplaylistsare abitrubbish,andthatreal peoplewouldbeatthe coreofAppleMusic,butit turnsouttheymayhavea point.We’vealreadyspent aludicrousamountoftime delvingintoplaylistsbased aroundthingswelike,and they’refullofgreatness. TWO BEATS 1 RADIO IS ACTUALLY QUITE GOOD Unsurprisingly,Appleapes otherserviceswithradio stationsbasedonartistor genre.Butitsacecardis Beats1,aworldwide24/7 stationwithactualliving DJs.Sofaritseemspretty decent,offeringafairly diverseselectionoftunes betwixtmainstreamand indie. It also might turn somepeopleontoradio,if theycanstopcomplaining onTwitterthatpeopleare “stupidlytalkingallover themusic”.Justlikethey doonradio. THREE IT’S CLEVER AT MERGING YOUR MUSIC Appleisabigfanof suckingyouintoits ecosystem.Itrather cunninglydidthiswith iTunesMatch(which,like GooglePlay,mirroredyour old ripped CDs in the cloud).Now,AppleMusic happilymergeswhat’s inyouriTunesappwith what’sontheiTunesStore. ThisworksacrossMacs andiOSdevices,and makesSpotify’sdesktoponlyoptionalinclusion oflocalcontentlook alittlerudimentary. FOUR IT’S A SKINFLINT’S PARADISE Whenyousignup,youget three months for free. Frankly, we reckon the 30 days you get with other services is pretty generous, but this is an entire summer of music, for nothing at all. And due to Taylor Swift suitably guilting Apple, artists will get paid and…

GEEK ON THE ROAD A rider comes screaming around a dusty left-hand bend. His foot grazes the ground as he leans the bike into an almost impossible position and, with a deft flick of the wrist, he loads up the throttle and sails over an enormous jump. But something is missing from this high-octane scene: the sound ofhighlytunedtwo-strokeengines and the smell of burning oil. That’s because E-Scape, where I’ve found myself for the day, is the first off-road riding course in the UK to use only battery-powered bikes, most notably the new Freeride E from KTM. Riders from the age of six up to 60 are catered for at this Jurassic Park-like facility just off the M56 outside of Runcorn, Cheshire. I’m here to sample KTM’s epic new electric off-roader,…

“Everybody wants to be a DJ” – fiddlesticks. Your parents don’t want to be DJs, do they? And we’re pretty sure Vladimir Putin has no interest in the subject whatsoever. But how about you? Ah well, maybe, if you had the right kit… The Tibo Urban 500 is an all-in-one multi-format DJ station, with a built-in DJ controller and 500W of pure power. It can play tracks from a wide range of formats as its connectivity options include Bluetooth, MIDI, USB and MP3 audio inputs. The two-channel mixer has three-band EQ and gain controls for seamless mixing, and you can operate the system with a laptop using the virtual DJ software included. The two speakers and horn tweeter pump out crystal-clear sounds, and additional features include anti-shock jog wheels, laptop…

● Longform The idea here is to buck the trend of bite-sized online articles and get people reading news stories with depth. The app sometimes comes across like a worthy Twitter, but there’s something great about it only listing articles of 2000 words or more; it’s ideal for people who don’t have a short attention… SQUIRREL! Sorry, attention span. £free / iOS ● Reeder For when Feedly isn’t enough, there’s Reeder – well, at least there is if you’ve got an iPhone. The app’s a stylish and smart way to browse and read RSS feeds, and the built-in ‘Readability’ view strips articles to copy and images alone. Apple might bang on about animations and bling, but we just want the words, man. £3.99 / iOS ● Feedly When Google set…

■ Price £300 / shop.ee.co.uk ■ Tester Rob Powell IN DETAIL 1 Watch yourself While its onboard menu display is tiny, you can line up your shot with the live view on the accompanying watch. Its sporty styling matches the camera and it’s pretty useful having a viewfinder on your wrist. 2 SIM city Underneath the battery sits the nano SIM card, letting the 4GEE Action Cam beam your antics straight to admirers worldwide via the live broadcasting app, Skeegle. It only works with EE SIM cards. 3 Lost connection The 4GEE comes with an adaptor for GoPro mounts. The connection wasn’t the most confidenceinspiring, as the camera came loose on our first run, but it was fine after that. Tester specs Name Rob Powell Kayak Jackson 2014 Rockstar Favourite…

Now that you mention it, Batman does have a fair bit in common with Knight Rider’s Michael Knight. They both represent corporations bearing their names, they’re both good at being presumed dead, and they’re both in danger of being upstaged by their cars. This is particularly true for Batman in the finale to the Arkham series, because the Batmobile is now very much a character. Tearing around Gotham in several tonnes of transforming tank that runs through concrete like it’s wet cardboard is more than just fun. It’s the most liberating experience I’ve had since the naked trolley dash that got me barred from Waitrose. The vehicle changes the way you interact with the city. You bring it in remotely to assist in team fights, use it to scale walls…

FIELDS OF VIEW The human eye is a marvel. This is not news. But it’s made very apparent when you watch someone using a VR headset for the first time – they throw their head around all over the place. “Whee!” they say, “I can see all around!” But what they mean is: “Oh, the limited field of view given to me by even this state-of-the-art VR headset means I have to move my head around loads to see everything.” A short while ago, a VR headset called InfinitEye came onto the scene, offering a much broader field of view – 210° – but its prospects seemed pale compared to vivid Oculuses and Project Morpheuses… until it was snapped up by games company Starbreeze (Payday 2, Syndicate), which is simultaneously…

Whether you’re trying to find a refuge half way up Kilimanjaroor your seat at Wembley, the planet already has a fine geolocation system. Fine, that is, if you canre member numerical longitude and latitude coordinates.Which, after a meat pie and spilling half apint of Doom Bar down your front, is going to be challenging. The What 3 Words system splits the entire planet into 3m squares and assigns every one a three-word reference. So while Google Maps isn’t helpful once you leave the carpark, What 3 Words tells you the difference between one group of nine seat sat Wembers (stamp. even. menu)or the next (loft. shorts. point).The more remote the spot, the more unlikely the words – but even a 3m-by-3m spot in the mid-Atlantic is the far from forgettable…

HOTLY ANTICIPATED INDIES Inside This hails from the studio behind 2010’s marvellous side-scroller Limbo, which is enough to get us interested. The mysterious teaser trailer oozesbothstyle and a sense of dread. And what’s inside that vat at the end? It should be a memorable journey. The Witness Braid remains one of the gold standard indies of the past few years, and creator Jonathan Blow has since been crafting this miraculously beautiful firstperson puzzler. TheWitnessfinds you exploring a stunning island covered with puzzles, mazes, and audio bits for you to decipher. Mighty No.9 It looks like Mega Man, plays like Mega Man, and comes from the creator of Mega Man, but Mighty No.9 isn’t Mega Man – it’s made by a different studio. Capcom has abandoned the Blue Bomber so his…

£180 / getpebble.com Hate the idea of charging your watch every day? Relax, there’s none of that here. The Pebble Time lasts for a week, although four days is more likely if you make full use of it. That’s still a lot longer than the competition, and this is much more slender than the average Android Wear. It’s not quite an Apple Watch beauty, but you can wait for the Time Steel if you want something more sophisticated. Thanks to a slightly curved back and flexible strap, the Pebble is very comfy – and it is just terrifically easy to live with. A lot of that is down to the battery life, which is made possible by the low-energy colour screen. This is an LCD, but not as we know…

■ Price £410 / gopro.com ■ Tester Joey Allen IN DETAIL 1 The button of power The side button activates Wi-Fi when it’s off, takes you to settings when the camera is on, and adds a ‘HiLight tag’ if pressed while filming. This sounds confusing, but you soon get the hang of it. 2 BacPacking While cheaper cameras sacrifice higher-end features for a built-in touchscreen, you can plug an LCD Touch BacPac (£65) into the back of the Hero 4 Black, or add a Battery BacPac (£40) instead. 3 Keep it in-house Most cameras require add-on waterproof cases, but the Hero 4 Black comes with its own 60m-waterproof housing. If you’d prefer, you can strip it back and use the ‘The Frame’ mount (£33). Tester specs Name Joey Allen Kayak…

GOPRO HAS BEEN DOING THIS, AND ONLY THIS, FOR A LONG TIME… AND IT SHOWS It’s exciting to see new competition in the action cameras arena. The upstart contenders bring useful new tech: GPS and data overlays that make sense now, and livestreaming tech that could be a taste of video’s future. But GoPro has been doing this, and only this, for a long time… and it shows. The Hero 4 has a focus on image quality and versatility that mean it’s still the one to beat. Its free editing software is just as powerful, helping you to get carefully crafted action vids up in double-quick time, and it comes with a ton of mounting options. Having said that, £410 is a lot to spend on a toughcam. The GoPro’s…

On average, you can save about £400 buying a budget smartphone instead of a top-end flagship. Imagine what you could buy with that: a holiday? A new hi-fi? Heck, you could get a serviceable second-hand car. So this month, we’re waving bye-bye to the big boys to see exactly what grade of phone you can get for £100 or less. You might be surprised at what that little cash can snag you. HD screen? Sure. Quad-core CPU that’ll play all the latest 3D games? Yep. Add expandable storage, and you start to wonder why anyone would bother spending £500 on their next mobile. From phones from the same stable as the big-budget Xperias to those direct from carriers and another from a brand you might not have heard of yet,…

It’s a nice idea: take the worlds from the previous Elder Scrolls games, and meld them into a Pangaean supercontinent where players can roam for years on end, exploring, fighting, stealing, crafting and getting beaten up by dragons. But while Skyrim fans will find some familiar material within the giant world of Tamriel, the execution doesn’t deliver on the grand promise. Half the game is a traditional MMO, in which you wander the land looking for quests, most of which take place in dungeons known as Delves. The jobs on offer are ones you’ve completed in many games, many times before – kill a certain number of monsters, retrieve a magical goat’s foot on behalf of a magical nincompoop. It’s here that the shortcomings of the vast environment become clear:…

1 MAKEA HANDLEBAR BIKERACK Already rustled up a wine bottle lamp (see p104)? Time to upcycle an old pair of drop handlebars into a wall-mounted rack for your trusty road bike: Gather the ingredients. You’ll need some drop handlebars, a quill stem, a threaded piece of galvanised steel pipe that fits your stem, a wall flange, some screws and a drill. Head to the shed. Put your handlebars into the stem, attach your pipe to the wall flange, then insert your quill into the pipe. Hang your masterpiece. Measure how high you’d like the bike to hang, then drill and attach with your screws. For full instructions go to kylethewilson. wordpress.com and search ‘DIY wall bike hanger’. 2 GETAGUIDED DRONETOUR You could use Street View to get a sneak peak…

Don’t tell me! I know this. Drøne must be a town in… Norway? Surely it would be the capital of the UAV? While geography jokes might well be the highest form of wit, this is no time to gad about. We’re talking here about the future of holiday travel. A future where you strap on a VR headset, choose a destination, then soar over it in real time like an airborne Judith Chalmers. A video feed gives you a bird’s-eye view of a castle, while you look down your beak at the miserable easyJet hordes below. First Class is now your lovely, comfy sofa. Sounds romantic. I suppose you follow it up with a candlelit dinner over Skype? That’s not a bad idea. It’d halve the washing up for a…

Doctor Who’s K-9 companion, The Tripods, Judith Hann – the BBC has always danced on technology’s cutting edge. But it was the 1980s appearance of BBC Micro computers in schools that introduced coding to an entire generation of geek groms and helped shaped Britain’s high-tech global status today. And now the BBC is looking to repeat the procedure with this micro:bit, a Raspberry Pi-like barebones computer that is 18 times more powerful than the original Micro, 70 times smaller and 817 times lighter. It’s powered by microUSB or a battery pack, with 25 red LEDs, two buttons and low-energy Bluetooth. Onboard accelerometer and compass sensors can be leveraged using everything from a basic browser-based block-builder interface up to Javascript or C++, and the micro:bit will work with other electronics such…

Maybe you’ve always wanted a car bearing the iconic Alfa green clover badge, the Quadrifoglio Verde. Or perhaps it’s the 3.0-litre Ferrari-developed V6 in this launch flagship, the one that promises 0-62 in 3.9secs. Maybe it’s the fact that the brand has stated there will be no lazy self-driving electronics in the Giulia. There will be the torque vectoring system, and anactiveaerosplitterandchassisdomain control, naturally. But maybe you’re interested in something a little lower in the range – the turbo four-cylinder petrol perhaps; Alfa has promised that even the lowliest Giulias will have 50:50 weight distribution, rear-wheel drive and bestin-class power-to-weight. Probably you just want something that will make all the umptybillion BMW3-series owners do a little ‘Hmm’ as you pass them by. Ashotas…a125bhp:1power-to-doorratio £tba / alfaromeo.co.uk…

A MACHINE GOES MAD Humanslovepatternrecognition. It’s how we learn to read and recognise. You can turn a tiger upside-down and put it in a hat, andwe’llstillspotitasatiger.Also a prime selfie opportunity. But asideeffectisthatwegenerate patternswheretherearenone – “That aubergine looks like BilliePiper!”–andnowGoogle’s imagerecognitionAIshavebeen showndoingthesame.Trained byexperiencetodefineshapes asdogsorfaces,justaschildren do,theAIwillbegintoseethem inanyimageifit’sgivenenough goes.Abitlikeahumanstaring atsomeclouds,oranandroid dreamingofelectricsheep. We ain’t rooking you EE ROOK Oh, yeah: network launches branded hardware. Old news, right? Not when you look at the numbers – which are £50foranAndroid5.1phoneusingEE’s4G(EEcustomers get an extra £10 off). Granted, the hardware isn’t anything to get terribly excited about. The Rook rocks a 4in display runningatjust480x800,withaquad-core1GHzMediaTek processor and 1GB RAM. The back camera rates at 5MP, while the front is just 0.3MP; meanwhile, the battery is a 1500mAh pack that EE says should provide more than five hours of talk…

Pro-Ject Essential II Digital The Pro-Ject Essential is an established favourite among affordable turntables but this one adds an optical digital output, giving the option to squirt your tunes to your wireless speaker system or soundbar in 24-bit/96kHz format. But this is vinyl we’re talking about, the none-more-analogue format. Audio purists may take to the streets with flaming pitchforks at the very idea. £310 / henleydesigns.co.uk Floating Record Vertical Turntable There no shortage of striking sound spinners, but they tend to be both toe-curlingly expensive and delicate. The Floating Turntable, however, looks amazing and is designed to be beginner friendly. It has its own cartridge – the bit with the needle, often an expensive addition – and as it also has speakers, you don’t need a special phono amplifier. US$350…

09 DIVING CHESS WORLD CHAMPS Third Space, London As soon as your opponent surfaces, you dive and have the length of your lungs to make your counter-move. What do you mean, “Why?” Because normal chess is so long-winded, isn’t it? And because we Brits know a thing or two about putting on a weird event. 10 ROBOT OVERLORDS Blu-ray Low budget? Oh yes. British director? Present. Robots? Ready. Gillian Anderson on a horse? Bonus. Ben Kingsley? Naturally. Mediocre reviews? No problem. Saturday night LOLs with beer and chips? Sign us up. 12 PIXELS Aliens attack Earth using characters such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, having misinterpreted the message of peace in a 1982 NASA space capsule as a threat. Chris Columbus directs and Adam Sandler stars, having both misinterpreted this…

Suits, you sir The jacket is very secure. You need to unscrew and remove the frame and then unclasp; the speaker block will slide out. Fugoo Sport£140 / fugoo.com Make some noise This one’s for those who like to keep their options open. The Fugoo range is made up of a core speaker block and three kinds of jacket, which you can swap around later. For the fashion-conscious there’s the simple Style jacket, which looks pretty and offers waterproofing. At the other end of the range is the Tough, armed to the teeth with hex screws and aluminium, and probably classifiable as a weapon. What we have here is the Sport. There are six speaker units on the core, facing sideways and upwards. Bluetooth is of the aptX flavour, and…

£1160 / dji.com ● DAY 01 There’s a knock at the door, and a beaming courier hands me a package. He’s only so cheerful because he doesn’t know what he’s parting with: the Phantom 3 Professional, DJI’s latest drone. This flying machine packs a 4K camera and so many smarts that a 10-thumbed four-year-old couldn’t crash it. I’m exaggerating, but it really is incredibly easy to use. A mere 30 minutes later, this white plastic hawk is soaring through the skies over leafy south London. Even though the Phantom 3 is hovering some 200m away and 120m above me, I’m viewing a pristine 720p live feed of the drone’s view on my Nexus 7 tablet, which is mounted on the control and connected via USB. Using that remote control and…

WATCH Humans_DVD Is there anything left for science fiction to say about robots? From Asimov to Ex Machina, it feels as though the Uncanny Valley has already been mined to exhaustion. But while its themes might be last-gen, this smart British reboot of the Swedish drama Real Humans has an Apple-like ability to make well-worn ideas feel shiny and new. Set in a ‘parallel present’ London, Humans revolves around a suburban family who draft in the services of a ‘synth’ called Anita (played brilliantly by Gemma Chan) to help around the house. And they’re not early adopters either – humanoid helpers are everywhere, acting as robot Taskrabbits for their increasingly reliant (and unemployed) society. Naturally, all is not quite as it seems with Anita. As we meet some of her…

Logorama This film is set in a world where every person, animal, plant, building, vehicle and even geographical feature is built out of corporate logos. Mr Pringle flirts with the Esso girl, Michelin Man cops pursue a Joker-esque Ronald McDonald, and the Haribo Kid visits a zoo populated with Lacoste crocodiles and Linux penguins. The Black Hole A sleep-deprived office drone discovers a magical portal that lets him pass through solid surfaces – and is quickly undone by his greed. The winner of the 2008 Virgin Media Shorts competition, The Black Hole is a textbook example of short-form comedy. It delivers suspense, setup and punchline in just two minutes. Bite-sized brilliance. Pixels Inspired by 8-bit video games and ’80s comedies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, director Patrick Jean’s high-concept short…