Table of contents for Celebration 2019 in T3

ORTOFON CENTURY TURNTABLE With the vinyl revolution in full swing, surely vintage ‘record parties’ will grow in popularity too. And being the distinguished host that you are, you don’t want your guests sneering at your sub-standard turntable, do you? Well, there’s no chance of that happening with this stylish spinner. To mark its 100th anniversary, Danish audio expert Ortofon has teamed up with Austria’s Pro-Ject to produce the Century, a record player based around the former company’s esteemed Classic SB, but with additional features. Built upon an elegant piano-black and silver aluminium chassis, it oozes sophistication without being showy. And the sound it produces is equally refined, thanks to the inclusion of a pre-installed Ortofon Concorde cartridge, pure silver coils that deliver superb conductivity, a precision-balanced TPE-damped aluminium platter and…

DOWNLOAD T3 ISSUE 1: bit.ly/t3issue1 Some of the credit for the origin of T3 should go to Gary ‘Gaz’ Whitta, one of Future Publishing’s games journalists. Gaz would later move to America to work on the US edition of PC Gamer, before leaving magazines for the world of screenwriting, where his credits include The Book of Eli, After Earth and Rogue One. But back in 1996, Gaz had a bee in his bonnet about Future launching a science mag. After much ear-bending, he managed to organise a brainstorm with the great and good of the company. I remember the meeting being a fairly cramped affair, with a large number of editors, ad managers and publishers all crowded around a long table. As was typical of such meetings, lots of ideas…

1 RavPower 2 Coils Wireless Charging Stand Power up any phone that supports Qi wireless charging (which is most wirelessly chargeable phones) and keep the screen in view. The RavPower 2 Coils stand provides up to 10W of power and really looks the part. £25, ravpower.com 2 Apple HomePod With seamless Siri and Apple Music integration, the ability to tune its audio output to best suit the room that you’ve put it in, and the quality aesthetics that Apple is known for, the HomePod really knows how to impress. £279, apple.com/uk 3 PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 570 Red Dragon Don’t let the relatively low price put you off, because this PowerColor graphics card most definitely packs a real punch – 4GB of video memory, 2,048 stream processors and a 1,250MHz…

F1 Technical Director Pat Symonds has seen a lot of changes in motor racing during the course of his many years in the business. Safety has been one of the biggest areas of improvement, but as we are often reminded, motor sport is still very dangerous. Accidents can and do happen, although each time something tragic happens there is always something that can be learnt from it. Symonds has also been instrumental in attempting to level the playing field with new regulations and a budget cap on the building of F1 cars due for 2020. Ultimately, though, Symonds thinks there is plenty that has filtered from the wild world of F1 down through to our everyday production cars. Symonds, now in his sixties, is still hugely passionate about motor racing…

£3,499 bowerswilkins.com There are a lot of great wireless speakers out there these days, from the Naim Mu-so to the Ruark R5, but the majority are still one-box jobs, and many are aimed more at the casual listener who wants their Spotify streams buffed up to sound as nice as possible. Until now, the only ‘high-end’ option – or ‘expensive’ as you may prefer to call it – has been the KEF LS50W. But now there’s a new Boss in Wireless Music Town. As its name suggests, and like that KEF product, Formation Duo is a proper, stereo pair of speakers, with all the improved fidelity and sound stage size that implies. Yes it’s compatible with Spotify Connect, but there’s also support for hi-res audio via files on your phone,…

8K TV also coincides with the advent of a new HDMI standard, HDMI 2.1, which brings with it its own amazing potential. Hooking up your media devices to your screen, the upgraded HDMI ports offer a gigantic bandwidth leap, from the 18Gbps of current HDMI to the 48Gbps delivered by HDMI 2.1. It’s a requirement of 8K from any box looking to send 8K visuals to the new TVs, with the high-resolution imagery being incredibly data-intensive. HDMI 2.1 also unlocks the potential for frame rates of up to 120fps at 8K resolutions – allowing for silky-smooth motion for gamers–and the introduction of eARC (enhanced Audio Return Channel), which also ups the bandwidth for audio information that will in turn allow for more precise and detailed soundtracks.…

When it comes to TV technology, there’s no finer panel type than an OLED, delivering deeper, more cinematic blacks than its LED and QLED counterparts. And with LG the only manufacturer currently making the panels (supplying the entire TV market), it’s smugly now the only one offering an 8K OLED, too. LG hasn’t settled with delivering just that world-first, either – supporting HDR in its Dolby Vision guise as well as pumping out Dolby Atmos room-filling surround sound processing, it’s compatible with the most immersive movie formats, too. The 88-inch panel makes use of LG’s impressive second-gen Alpha 9 processor as well, so 4K and 1080p sources look great even when 8K content isn’t readily available. Smartly future-proofed, every HDMI port on the LG Z9 supports the new 2.1 standard.…

Flip down seats, velvet curtains, the smell of popcorn. If you want the true cinema experience, you can’t beat the thrill of a giant projected image. That silverscreen joy now comes in an 8K flavour. Well, sort of. The JVC DLA-RS3000 may have ‘8K’ on its box, but it’s using a few smart tricks to hit that resolution. In fact, it doesn’t even have a port capable of receiving native 8K content. Instead, it’s all about upscaling. To make its 300-inch videos razor sharp, it’s using JVC’s e-shift technology, which takes the images coming through the 100mm diameter lens and doubles their resolution by shifting pixels diagonally by half a pixel. JVC claims this method not only works with 4K sources, but also with Full HD by using a ‘Multiple…

If the allure of virtual reality lies with its ability to transport you from the mundanity of everyday life to wholly imagined other realms that are lovingly, digitally rendered, then nothing will bring you crashing back down to Earth faster than a blurry screen that’s two inches in front of your eyes. The Pimax 8K VR headset has no such problem – it’s the highest-resolution virtual reality wearable on the market, offering an astonishing 3840x2160 pixels per eye to hit that 8K overall target. While rivals the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have it beat with slightly faster refresh rates, they don’t come anywhere near that resolution, with the Pixmax entirely avoiding the dreaded ‘screen door’ effect, where individual pixels become visible. The Tron-like headset is more accomplished in terms…

Apres Ski is a strange time. Shorn of the heavy ski boots and layers of clothing, it’s time to relax – but not too much. It’s also a time that the Merrell Thermo Rogue 2 (£230, sportshoes.com) is ultimately designed for, though they’ll happily turn a hand to any other winter footwear needs. You’ll recognise the winchlike BOA fit system from high-end snowboard boots. It does a grand job of sealing out snow, spindrift, water and debris alike. A superb sole unit upholstered with Vibram Arctic Grip will keep you right-side up, and a Flexconnect Midsole means there’s less imposing mountain boot rigidity and plenty more comfort and warmth. A 200g fill of Primaloft Gold Aerogel is stashed in the boot liners, not only providing very robust insulation, but also…

Big-batch cooking makes a lot of food and a whole lot of sense. The idea is that you conjure up a large dish, then refrigerate or freeze what you don’t immediately eat, ready to simply heat up when you need it. Not only is this a convenient method of cooking – especially if you work unusual shifts and don’t have time to make a meal from scratch each night – it can save you money, too, as ingredients tend to be cheaper when bought in larger quantities, and there’s also less chance of waste. Fancy making a nice, warming soup or stew that you’ll be able to call upon during the winter? The Ninja Complete Food Processor with Auto-IQ (£199, ninjakitchen. eu/uk) is a three-in-one appliance that comprises a precision…

MOTHER! Ignore its shaky initial reviews: there’s a reason Darren Aronofsky’s psychological horror, new to Netflix, has divided audiences so strongly – it’s a difficult brain-melter. BUSHIDO: WAY OF THE WARRIOR Poke around in Amazon Prime and you’ll find some hidden gems, like this entertainingly silly and sweaty (fixed) precursor to today’s MMA. SLOW RADIO BBC Radio 3’s podcast does what it says in the title. It’s super-chilled, relaxed, leisurely, and other synonyms for calm – unhurried field recordings for quiet moments.…

The only other folding phone worth taking note of right now is the Huawei Mate X, which is said to launch before November, but without any stronger confirmation than that, yet. It takes a very different design approach to Samsung’s: it has a single screen on the outside, which wraps all the way around when you fold it. This gives it some clever features (like a camera selfie screen), but may also leave it more prone to drops. There are some question marks over the Mate X still, the biggest of which is that it looks unlikely to have access to Google’s apps and services, due to US/China trade issues. Huawei has also said there may be plans to put the company’s next-gen Kirin 990 processor in it, but this…

Melissa Gregg is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel, and whose work involves researching how people use their devices, and working that into Intel’s strategies. She’s part of the team developing Project Athena, a template for a new generation of laptops designed to address recent changes in how we work as a society. Do you think there’s an important distinction between a more traditional computer with a full interface, and simpler devices or appliances that have invisible software? I think that there’s an interesting continuum right now where the visibility, or the literacy required of computing, is much broader than it once was. It’s very easy to talk to an Echo or a Google Home. It doesn’t require you to have a great deal of programming knowledge in order to…

WORTH £1,898 TOTAL! Bowers & Wilkins new Formation Suite of wireless multi-room speakers are the most advanced on the planet, using their own independent mesh network to sync audio between each other with no chance of interference from other traffic on your regular Wi-Fi network. And on top of that, they sound absolutely fantastic, and include support for 96/24-bit audio resolution – you can read just how good the Formation Duo stereo speakers are on p112. Now we’re giving you a chance to win the home-entertainment focused Formation Bar and Formation Bass, a soundbar and subwoofer setup that will absolutely blow you away, both in looks and audio quality. The Formation Bar packs in nine driver units, all optimised to give you a wide, open sound that completely envelopes you.…

SWISSKUBIK BY LUCRIN WATCH WINDER Your luxury watch of needs some special accessories, including a handsome watch winder. There are loads to choose from, but recently our head has been turned by the SwissKubik by Lucrin Watch Winder. Housing a super-smooth rotating mechanism – built using the highest-quality components from the French auto industry and powered by a USB-rechargeable battery – this funky accessory will help your timepiece deliver accurate timings from morning until night, each day of the week. The SwissKubik’s graceful efficiency is only part of its appeal; available in a plethora of luxury materials, from crocodile-embossed calfskin to ostrich leather, not to mention 68 eye-catching colours to suit your personal style or to pick up on a colour hue within your watch strap, this premium gadget exudes…

Samsung’s slick TV designs regularly impress. With their minimal bezels and neat ‘OneConnect’ cabling system (which places all inputs in a small separate box, connected to the television by a single transparent lead), they’re already a cut above the competition when it comes to looking gorgeous in your living room. Throw 8K QLED visuals into the mix with the Q900R – Samsung’s first roll of the 8K dice, from 2018 – and even this early attempt is spellbinding. All the usual mod-cons are present, from HDR-enabled catch-up services such as Netflix and Amazon Video to smart home control using Samsung’s SmartThings platform. With a ‘No Gap’ wall mount option and Samsung’s Ambient feature putting artsy screensavers on the screen when you’re not watching a show, it looks as pretty as…

If there’s one argument against taking the plunge on an 8K TV today, it’s that there’s hardly any native 8K content to watch right now. YouTube hosts a handful of 8K videos that are little more than sizzle reels and… that’s about it. There are no 8K Netflix options, no 8K Blu-ray players, and no 8K films available for purchase. With broadcasters only just catching up to the 4K standard, it’s thought that it will take until the year 2023 for 8K content to be served up in quantities that could make the format considered a mainstream concern. Until then, 8K TV owners will mainly be benefitting from upscaled 4K video sources. But there’s hope on the horizon. The situation is a little rosier in Japan – there, the broadcaster…

8K TVs may be ready for your lounge, but the content to watch on them (or lack thereof) might leave your sofa feeling a little unloved. Head into your office, or fire up your gaming rig, however, and it’s a whole different story. If you’ve got the cash, and are ready to jump through some hoops, 8K computing and PC gaming is absolutely possible. First up, the display, which is actually a surprisingly simple choice to make. Though Sharp has a pair of 8K monitors to its name – the LV-70X500E and 8M-B80AX1E – their 70- and 80-inch respective sizes make them better suited to the boardroom than the bedroom. That leaves you with just the one alternative – Dell’s 32-inch UP3218K 8K PremierColor Monitor (£3,143). Thankfully, it’s a beauty.…

You might not be able to guess by looking at its traditional exterior, but the e-tron is unlike any Audi that’s come before. In fact, the e-tron (from £71,520, audio.co.uk) is the first all-electric car from the German brand, yet is designed to feel familiar to Audi drivers, helping to make the switch from fossil fuel less intimidating. Everything about audi’s new car is designed to help it power through the air smoothly, with bulky wing mirrors quickly ditched in favour of narrow, aerodynamic cameras. These beam images of what’s behind you to two interior OLED displays. It’s futuristic and takes some getting used to. The interior feels familiar, bedecked with typical Audi style. Not surprisingly, technology takes centre stage with a plethora of displays (some of which have haptic…

Although arguably New York hogs the spotlight when it comes to big US cities, Washington DC is attracting a growing number of tourists, lured in by its beautiful parks, stunning architecture and brilliant nightlife. 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of prohibition, and amazingly DC had more illegal drinking dens during this time than it had legal bars pre-prohibition. That’s why we suggest heading to one of the city’s many speakeasies. Our favourite is Chicken + Whiskey (chickenandwhiskey.com) at 1738 14th St NW. Feast on chicken upstairs before entering this hide-away bar via a fridge to drink the whisky reserves dry. Closer to home, consider a long weekend in Manchester. Autumn sees the arrival of boutique cinema chain Everyman Cinema in the city, and there are several anniversaries…

The Theragun has been storming Instagram with videos of muscles rippling beneth its percussive blast, and now you too can enjoy the benefits of the technology. Essentially a high-speed professional muscle massager, the theory is that by rapidly ‘percussing’ a tired muscle, lactic acid can be processed faster, blood flow increased and pain reduced. The gun-like configuration means specific pain spots or muscle groups can be addressed, speeding post-workout recovery. It’s available in a range of configurations and price points.…

ARCHIE SPENCE, HERTS Q How would you choose good speakers? A Guru could fill a book with this stuff, but let’s boil it down to the most essential parts of the buying equation. Don’t spend thousands if you’re driving a hi-fi worth hundreds, as high end speakers will highlight every ugly imperfection on the other end of the cable – though do give yourself some space to upgrade your audio gear in the future. GaGu won’t put a number on it, but you’ll probably want to invest 30% of your hi-fi spending on speakers? Maybe 60%? Make your own mind up, reader – Guru is not, despite what those boys in the playground might say, your mum. Consider your room: if you’re in a small enough space that you have…

Wow, 300 issues. That has flown past! I’ve not actually been here since issue #1, although it sometimes feels like that. It’s been about 12 years and 150 or so issues. I actually didn’t have much intention of staying long at all at T3 when I arrived. My previous job had involved stories about heavily tattooed dominatrices, Nazis and serial killers. Tech is dissimilar in several ways to that whole area. T3 magazine at the time – there was a website too, but only just – was largely full of beige, silver or black boxes, festooned with ’70s-looking logos, buttons and weird little angular bits of ‘design’, like a first-year Btec student might do. The manuals were fat. Apple products were among the exceptions, but its products were seen as…

We began work on the first issue of T3 in the summer of 1996, and seeing it again now brings back so many memories. I was the launch Art Editor of .net magazine at the time, but couldn’t resist designing ‘Tomorrow’s Technology Today’. The aim of the magazine was to showcase ‘all the cool technology’. Looking at the design now, it seems we were determined to include as much of that tech as possible on the first cover (see p33)! We decided to use a limited colour palette, with a dark background and a special metallic ink running across the products, masthead and coverlines to try and create a mysterious and futuristic feel. We also designed a metallic effect ‘Innovation Award’ icon. In contrast, the bright red T3 logo was…

CHARGE MULTIPLE DEVICES The Native Union Eclipse features three USB ports, enabling you to charge all of your devices at once, in a beautiful, minimalist design HIGH-SPEED CHARGING Thanks to Smart IC technology, the Eclipse ensures safe, high-speed charging up to 7.8 amps, so you get even more power, faster BUILT-IN CABLE MANAGEMENT Don’t want USB cables draped all over your desk? No problem! The Eclipse keeps them stowed away inside a dedicated interior space Other benefits of subscribing to the world’s greatest technology and gadget magazine include… • 13 issues of T3 delivered direct to your door • Brilliant value – save £s on the cover price • Never miss an issue of your favourite magazine Choose your package! PRINT EDITION Three months of T3 in print, delivered to…

Clement Wong is Huawei’s VP, Global Product Marketing, and has spent decades working in the digital and mobile industries. He’s been at Huawei for seven years, helping to steer its growth worldwide from a relatively unknown Chinese brand into a gadget juggernaut. How do you think the physical form of phones will change in years to come? When you look at the trend in the last 10 years, people keep making the phone compact and sleek, but the display is huge. But there’s a little bit of a difficulty, because if you keep the display huge, the phone won’t be very light or compact. So that’s why the foldable phone is coming out. I think some more variable devices are coming out, too. So I think ‘foldable’ and high-speed connectivity…

HOW WE TEST In T3, we feature only the finest gadgets out there, and we believe that you – our loyal reader – deserve only the best tech in your life. We don’t want you to waste time, and money, on inferior products, and that’s exactly why our Tested section exists. In here you’ll find only the latest and hottest tech. Each product has been handpicked and tested by T3’s experts. We only choose people with specialist knowledge for each test, so you know you’re going to get an outcome based on many years of experience in their respective field. As well as our traditional five-star rating system (right), we also give out awards to particularly exceptional gadgets, using the line-up below - so when you spot one of these,…

01 ONE FOR PROLIFIC NOTE-TAKERS NEO SMARTPEN M1 £129, Smartech at selfridges.com You’ll like the Neo M1 if you want a lightweight smart pen that offers creative options for customising the digital version of your handwritten work – in the app you can change the ink colour (the LED indicator light displays the new colour), and add in extra ‘handwritten’ notes or sketches by drawing on your device’s screen with your finger. Add tags to notes for better organisation, convert notes and sketches into various file formats, and either email or share to cloud services. Via the NeoNotes app you can search notes and add audio recordings to them. The transcription feature has a decent hit rate, and the pen itself is simple to use and set up. 02 ONE…

4K TV? That’s old-school. Full HD? Positively retro. If you really want to gaze into the future when sitting down to watch your favourite show, you’re going to need an eye-popping 8K television. The latest evolutionary step from the CRT of old to beyond the super-sharp flatscreen televisions of today, 8K TV is set to offer the most detailed picture that you’ve ever seen from a screen. It delivers four times the pixel count than that of the still-impressive 4K Ultra HD standard (3840x2160), and is 16 times greater than the resolution of Full HD (1920x1080), with 8K images measuring an incredible 7680x4320. That’s a staggering 33,177,600 pixels total, with that close-to-8,000 horizontal pixel count giving 8K its name. It’s been a long time coming. Though Sharp laid claim to…

From its price tag to its screen sizes, Sony’s Z9G 8K TV range is big, bold and beautiful. With LED screens measuring a wall-hogging 85 or 98 inches in size, and HDR brightness hitting close to a monumental 4,000 nits, the Z9G line-up demands your serious attention. There’s lots of clever engineering at work here. The headline feature of course is that 8K panel, with more than 33 million pixels pushed. Using Sony’s top-of-the-line X1 Ultimate processor and 8K X-Reality Pro upscaling system, the Z9G handles 4K and 1080p sources with the same level of finesse as it does native 8K content. But a high level of care has gone into the speaker system, too, with forward-facing drivers in the top and bottom edges of the screen being paired with…

LG’s not just content with simply hitting the number of pixels required to call its TVs 8K. With its 8K NanoCell screen, it wants to make sure you can distinguish between those individual pixels, too (if you get close enough) – the idea is to offer a level of detail that it calls “real 8K”. The Nano Display technology therefore not only displays stunningly sharp imagery, but can also use the advantages of NanoCell panels to filter out colour impurities and deliver finely tuned contrast control. That means deeper blacks, no matter the resolution of the content displayed. Like the other 8K sets on the market, upscaling is key to its success, with the second-generation (Alpha) 9 Gen 2 8K intelligent processor tapping into a deep-learning AI database to optimise…