Stuff UK August 2020

welcome

The August issue of Stuff is a tale of two types of people (standing at least a metre apart). If you’re the sort of person who likes to seize the day armed with sickening amounts of enthusiasm, craving adventure and a desire to put yourself to the test, we’ve loaded the magazine with 18 pages of tech, tips and apps for outdoor escapades, from fitness bootcamps on the common to weekend warrior camping trips in the wild. We’ve also ridden three of the very latest e-bikes, should you wish to propel yourself somewhere new on two wheels, and revealed how to get the most from the DJI Mavic Air 2 drone, capturing all your antics with awesome aerial photography. But if you’re scared of wasps, have hayfever or are a vampire,…

hot stuff

HOT FOUR #1 IT’S TIME TO STOP TAKING THE PS5 Sony PlayStation 5 An old router, a pound-shop tower fan, a PS2 inside a ringbinder – these are just a few of the things that Sony’s new PlayStation 5 has been compared to since it was unveiled. But as your mum still reminds you, it’s what’s inside that counts; so while the PS5 does look a bit like the beak of a duck/robot hybrid, you’ll forget all about that within a few nanoseconds of turning it on. With an eight-core 3.5GHz Zen 2-based CPU, 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a custom AMD graphics processor with 10.28 teraflops of pixel-pushing power, it’s got about five times as many teraflops as a PS4. And what else did your mum always use to say? That’s right: you…

ps5: pick of the games

HORIZON: FORBIDDEN WEST With no E3 this year, the PS5 reveal doubled as a showcase for all the games that are on the way for the new console – including Pragmata, a reality-bending Capcom title featuring a spaceman, the Moon and a holographic cat. Sadly, that’s not due out until 2022. Before that we’ll see Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart; Returnal, a shooter from the makers of Resogun; a LittleBigPlanet spinoff called Sackboy: A Big Adventure; plus some other highlights like those opposite (and a few more on p23). But one of the most hotly anticipated games on the list is the sequel to 2017’s Horizon Zero Dawn. Due next year but set in the rather more distant future, Horizon: Forbidden West is the kind of game that will be perfect for showing…

the million pound bop

Magico M9 £840,000 (pair) / absolutesounds.com A 30-mile semi-industrial expressway from Edinburgh to Dunblane, the M9 is a boring road even by Britain’s standards. Perhaps Magico’s humdrum speaker-naming policy is an attempt to play down their obvious ostentatiousness and extraordinary price tag… because really, the only vital stat you need to know here is that a pair of these 2000W floorstanders will set you back £840,000. Comb on feel the noise The four-way, six-driver speakers are claimed to be the world’s first to combine inner and outer skins of carbon fibre with an aluminium honeycomb core. Embedded somewhere in the brains is an analogue outboard active crossover called the MXO. This exclusively handles the various bass frequencies so your wobbles sound suitably separated. You also get speaker cones with graphene nanotubes and further aluminium…

hublot big bang e

£4800 / hublot.com Nice timepiece. Does it come with a screwdriver set? Not that we’re aware of, Tim ‘the Tool Man’ Taylor, but those very specific H-shaped screws are one way of telling this is a genuine Hublot, and at nearly five grand it’s certainly priced authentically. The Big Bang is actually one of the Swiss watchmaker’s most iconic designs and a consistent award-winner since its inception 15 years ago, incorporating such materials as Kevlar, carbon, ceramic, magnesium, tungsten, tantalum, titanium, cermet, steel, gold and, er, rubber. So what does the added ‘E’ stand for – elastic? Expensive? We assume ‘electronic’ – because rather than being analogue, this is Hublot’s attempt at a luxury smartwatch running Google’s Wear OS. It’s in much the same vein as the TAG Heuer Connected, only minus TAG’s bespoke…

wtf is lumina?

Hold on a second, is that a beer can? Indeed, that rather attractive drinking vessel is for a new session IPA from Siren Craft called Lumina (ABV 4.2%), which owes its origins to ‘themes of wonder, luminosity and navigation weaving in and out of the night’s sky mirroring the shooting combination of flavours’ that happen to be mango, pineapple and citrus highlights. Craft beer is just alcoholic Lilt, isn’t it? And what’s it doing in Stuff anyway? Apart from lusting over Siren’s signature mythology-inspired artwork and the promised ‘epiphany of a session beer with a pillowy soft mouthful that pours with a beautiful light haze’, Nikon let us pair it with a Coolpix P950 bridge camera, featuring a Moon mode for capturing astronomical images, to participate in what might now be our favourite…