Author: Press Room

Every car I test, whether it’s an EV or Aston Martin, now arrives wireless CarPlay (some even come with CarPlay Ultra). The press releases always makes a big deal of it. If you’re buying a car, the salespeople mention it before they mention the boot space. And every single time, after a week of trying it out, I dig my trusty USB-C cable back out of the glovebox. I’m not a luddite about this like I am about somethings (let’s bring back physical buttons and proper doorhandles, amirite?) I like wireless everything else – headphones, speakers, err, keyboards… the lot.…

Pachinko is one of the many great hidden gems on Apple TV, which is full of such shows. Based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Min Jin Lee, it follows four generations of the Baek family, who emigrate from Korea to Japan in the 1930s. It’s also one of the best-reviewed TV shows of the past decade. And yet, we may never get a promised third season. It’s an outrage everyone needs to hear about. Pachinko is a once-in-a-generation epic It’s a complex tale that’s easy to understand Pachinko was created by Soo Hugh, who previously served…

You might associate Amazon with Alexa or its Prime Video streaming service, rather than rockets and satellites. It doesn’t matter what you think, though. Because it’s true. Amazon is – rather rapidly – building a new internet network in space. It’s called Amazon Leo, and it is, in essence, Amazon’s answer to Starlink – Elon Musk’s SpaceX-owned satellite internet service. Like Starlink, rather than relying on fibre cables, phone lines or nearby mobile towers, Leo uses satellites orbiting hundreds of kilometres above Earth to provide an internet connection. That’s more than a little useful in rural and remote areas where…

I bought an LG OLED (with its webOS) specifically because of how HDR was supposed to look — deep blacks, bright highlights that actually punch, color that doesn’t flatten out in dark scenes. Then I sat down to watch something in actual HDR, and it looked worse than the SDR stuff I’d been watching for years. Skin tones leaned orange. Bright scenes had this waxy glow around anything white. A campfire scene in a nature documentary looked like someone had dragged the saturation slider to the right and forgotten about it. My first instinct was that HDR was overrated, or…

Nothing is more humbling for a frequent traveller than landing after a long-haul flight and realising that your body missed the time-change memo. There you are, feeling like a phone on one per cent, while everyone around you goes about their day functioning perfectly normally.  That is jet lag. Your internal clock is stuck on the time of your departure city, while the sun has got its hat on and you’re definitely not singing hip hip hooray. Wide awake at 3am, gagging for a nap at 3pm, and about as sharp as the knife from the flight that got you…

The AI world is moving so quickly that it’s becoming difficult to keep up with the latest trends. From some of the early 21st century machine learning efforts, to the today’s generative AI landscape where multi-model content can be generated from scratch, the progress feels exponential. Indeed, we’re now entering the Agentic AI era where AI ‘agents’ can act on your behalf with little to no active input required from the user. Are we at risk of being overtaken by the machines? Right now human beings still have the edge. Although we can’t process data or generate content at the…

The 2025 Roku Streaming Stick Plus gives you an HDMI plug on one end and a USB-C port on the side. That is the whole list. Streaming sticks skip the Ethernet jack to stay small and cheap, and most buyers never miss it, though the omission stings if you spent a weekend pulling Cat6A through your own walls. Roku does support wired networking on its 2025 sticks, using that same USB-C port and an adapter that runs about $15. Nothing on the box mentions it. My office is the room where I stopped treating that as a curiosity, because wiring…

HDMI 2.1 brought a ton of improvements and additions, most importantly support for VRR (Variable Refresh Rate). Unfortunately for us mere mortals, HDMI 2.1 is gated behind modern tech. Its licensing is also a headache to deal with, and is reduced to a gimped version on Linux. It’s also a pain to get certified hardware for, and the HDMI Forum has always been notoriously restrictive about what it can and cannot support. And so we return to the age-old DisplayPort, an existing standard that has incorporated an alternative to VRR for years, is an open standard, and is compatible with…

Apple’s CarPlay Ultra infotainment system is finally starting to make it into luxury vehicles, giving everyone else a glimpse at the technology that is likely to succeed CarPlay as time goes on. The future of in-car connectivity is finally making its way into vehicles in the US, UK and Canada with a host of other manufacturers committed to adopting the tech, which unites all of the car’s systems under one neat and tidy Apple aesthetic that spans all of the vehicles screens. Let’s take a deeper look at the upgrades… What is CarPlay? Traditional CarPlay is an iPhone-based experience that…

I was one of the first in the queue for the original Apple Watch. I bought the smaller 38mm aluminium model with a lime green sport strap, and I wore it every single day. I loved it. I still do, in a way, the design is iconic, and I still own it. It just sits in the box now, taking up space, permanently switched off and compatible with precisely… zilch. That smartwatch was actually my gateway into wristwatches. Before it, I hadn’t worn anything on my wrist in years, but once I got used to having something there, I started…