Inhoudsopgave van March 2025 - Tech Advisor

CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) is always a bang to start the year. The humongous annual tech show in Las Vegas sees big and small brands from around the world show their latest and greatest wares. From the genuinely useful to the absolutely bizarre, it’s got everything and CES 2025 is no different. As usual, we’ve been clocking up ridiculous step counts around the show floors in order to find the best new gadgets you’ll want to buy this year. Weird, wonderful, wacky… these are the products we’ve awarded Best in Show at CES 2025 – from sockgrabbing robot vacuum cleaners to solid gold smart rings. 1. ROBOROCK SAROS Z70 The Saros Z70 was one of the triumphs of CES, with a grabby display that caught everyone’s attention. Grabby because…

As the name suggests Xiaomi’s Redmi Pad SE 8.7 is a compact tablet, with an 8.7-inch screen and 12.5cm in total widget. This was once a common format for a tablet, but as with phones, the size has grown over the years and tablets this small are now a rare sight. That in itself can be tempting, and the starting price of just £119 in the UK makes it a very appealing option. How does it fare in real-world usage? Read on to find out. DESIGN Unfortunately, with this cheap tablet, you also get a lot of budget hardware. For one, it’s a device built entirely out of plastic, and it shows in everything from the look to the grip feel. A greyblue, ribbed back transitions to flat sides and…

The Huawei Watch D2 is the follow-up to Huawei’s healthfocused smartwatch which introduced its groundbreaking blood pressure monitoring technology. This time, it’s refining how those blood pressure smarts work and adding more smartwatch features from other Huawei watches. Along with new health insights, Huawei’s adding smarts like Bluetooth calls, richer notification support and more workout modes than the Watch D. It’s a Huawei smartwatch that, like its predecessor, isn’t cheap at £349. It’s made some big changes here though, which should make this version of Huawei’s blood pressure tracking smartwatch a more attractive buy over watches with blood pressure monitoring like the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7. DESIGN The first Huawei Watch D was a hulking smartwatch with its boxy, 51mm-sized frame that gave it the look of a medical device…

One of the things that may hold you back from using an old monitor for gaming, photography, graphics editing, or some other visual purpose is that it’s not displaying the kind of vibrant colour you want or will find in a new monitor. There are different reasons that may be the case, ranging from your software settings to the hardware you are using. The good news is that most old monitors whose colours look washed out or inaccurate can be corrected to look a whole lot more colourful and vibrant. Here are the steps to follow to make that happen. ENSURE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT COLOUR PROFILES INSTALLED Windows 11 should automatically detect your monitor’s correct colour profile and apply it, but if colours still don’t look right, there’s a…

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showcases some of the biggest tech releases of the calendar year, but tucked away in the halls are some equally eye-catching, if less well-known, products. Here are some of the weirdest devices we spotted at CES 2025. 1. THE TRUMPETER Do you long for the sound of a live trumpet playing in your home, but lack a trumpet player within your immediate circle of friends? Don’t worry: it’s a common enough problem. Finally, a solution is at hand. It’s called The Trumpeter. QRS Music Technology, one of the foremost names in player pianos (self-playing piano technology), has branched out into the world of player trumpets. The tech behind the brand’s device is absolutely mind-(and trumpet-) blowing. I’ll need to paraphrase the process. QRS’s…

Samsung’s flagship phones tend to get all the glitzy launch events, leaving the likes of the A16 5G to slip out with little to no fanfare. That’s a shame, because Samsung’s latest sub-£200 smartphone is accessible to a much wider range of users. Much like the Galaxy A15 5G it replaces, this is a budget phone with a clean design, a large 90Hz display, exemplary stamina, and a camera that will grab you decent snaps in suitably favourable conditions. With little changes of consequence from the previous model, however, does it still offer good value for money? DESIGN One thing that I’ve come to appreciate about Samsung’s entire smartphone range in recent years is its unified design language. Aside from the very top dogs (your Galaxy S24 Ultra and your…

Smartphones have been around for less than two decades, but it feels more difficult than ever to do without one. That’s not a reference to their potentially addictive qualities; instead, the way phone apps are intrinsically linked to modern society. Whether you want to capture memories, keep up with friends and family or even access live events, it’s all easier and more convenient with the App Store or Google Play Store at your disposal. However, there’s a problem: most phones are really expensive. Many people can’t afford (or simply don’t want to) pay £1,000+ or more for the very best phones, or commit to a long and expensive contract. Even mid-range phones require a high initial investment. This is where this article comes in. Not long ago, a cheap phone…

Samsung has switched to a twotablet line-up for its 2024 Galaxy Tab S series. There is no compact Tab S10 this generation, leaving us with the headline-grabbing Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra and the more conservative Samsung Galaxy Tab S10+. But it’s the Plus that I think is the smarter buy. Both Tab S10 entries come with a similar gamut of upgrades this generation, led by the switch to a new top-tier MediaTek chip, in place of the line’s long-standing reliance on Qualcomm’s high-end Snapdragon silicon (much to the chagrin of vocal Samsung fans online). Both boast new anti-reflective displays and these are the first Samsung slates to feature the company’s suite of Galaxy AI features, right out of the box. Despite not being the biggest hitter in the line-up,…

Although the OnePlus 13 originally launched in China in late 2024, fans internationally have had to wait until the start of 2025 to get their hands on the company’s latest flagship phone. So the question is, has it been worth the wait? As is custom, OnePlus has clearly worked to make its latest flagship the most competitive yet, beating Samsung’s Galaxy S25 to the punch with the use of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, boasting cutting-edge silicon-carbon battery tech, the company’s fifth-generation Hasselblad camera system and a dressing of new AI features. The hardware/software blend served up by the 13 looks competitive by any measure. Prices start at £899, so is it worth your cash? DESIGN There’s no denying that the OnePlus 13 looks like a premium bit of…

It seems like every new laptop lately is a ‘Windows Copilot+ PC’. With Intel’s Lunar Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 CPUs, AI-infused Copilot+ PCs have finally expanded into traditional x86 laptop territory. They aren’t limited to just Arm-powered laptops with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite hardware anymore. That’s good news for everyone. Along with speedy neural processing units (NPU) that are capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), Copilot+ PCs must have at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. If that’s the new baseline for Windows PCs, that’s awesome. It will benefit you even if you don’t care about AI. So, your next laptop might just be a Copilot+ PC. But if you ask me, Copilot+ PCs still leave a lot to be desired. While…