Author: Press Room
Smartphones that transform into sizeable tablets used to be pure sci-fi… but now bendable screens are our tech reality. Besides the obvious wow factor, these book-style foldables offer innovative flexibility that could change the way you use your mobile – while also packing in hardware to rival the best phones with more traditional form factors. Think folding phones are just a hinged gimmick? Think again. The best foldable phones are about as versatile as handsets get, even if they almost exclusively come at prices that make regular flagships look cheap. We’ve tested them all to work out which is best,…
That’s it then. Game over for game discs. Sony has just confirmed it’s going to stop making physical games media from 2028. Apparently player habits have shifted enough that discs just don’t make sense anymore, so the firm is calling time on production. Microsoft is rumoured to be following suit with the next-gen Xbox. Sony’s announcement was a timely one, with Rockstar having only just revealed Grand Theft Auto 6 ‘boxed copies’ would just contain a download code. It’s also just one week removed from Sony mass-deleting hundreds of digital movies from gamers’ consoles, reminding us that anything you can’t…
I own three art TVs, and only one of them genuinely passes for a painting when I walk into the room. There’s a 32-inch Samsung Frame above a desk in our basement guest room, a 55-inch Frame over my office desk, and a 65-inch Hisense CanvasTV on the main wall of that same guest room. Most guests read all three as real artwork at a glance. I look at every one of them daily, though, which makes me a far tougher audience. After picking the Hisense over Samsung, I worked out why it fools me when the others only fool…
Whenever I buy a new smartphone, I instantly open the Settings menu, go to the About Phone section, and tap Build Number repeatedly to unlock Developer Options. This newly unlocked section gives me access to features that not only make my phone feel faster but also hide some that improve the overall usage experience. The best part is that your smart TV, especially if it runs Android OS or Google TV, also hides a secret menu with features that should’ve been enabled by default. Here’s how to unlock this secret menu and enable these settings to make your smart TV…
Convenience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I once thought it was. But I was wrong. The thing is, I come from the era of tapes. For music. For TV shows. Even for computer games. You think it’s bad now when your console decides to download an update? Try waiting 20 minutes for a game to – possibly – load from tape, before allowing you to feast on pixels so sharp they almost slice up your eyeballs. Hence, you know, me being quite glad when things sped up a bit. Floppy disks! Shiny discs! The magic of on-demand! A hundred million songs…
Netflix doesn’t lack for fantastic thrillers, but there are few that can be compared to The Guilty, a 2021 movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a cop desperate to save a kidnapped woman. That doesn’t sound terribly unique — Gyllenhaal has played cops before in movies like Prisoners and End of Watch — but The Guilty has a gimmick that’s too interesting to pass up: it’s set in a single room, and Gyllenhaal is more or less the only actor we see. The premise by itself makes The Guilty worth a look. That the movie makes it work is more impressive…
If you have a newer Apple phone in your pocket, you’ve got a bunch of excellent cameras in easy reach. They’re superb for stills, but also take fantastic video footage, and iPhone Action Mode is a big reason why. Action Mode was introduced in the iPhone 14 series, and is meant to prevent your vids from being ruined by shaky hands. The digital image stabilisation tech helps keep those otherwise blurry frames from Saturday night looking clean and crisp – which may not be a good thing, depending on what you got up to. To get smoother shots, follow our…
Okay, so the Apple iPad Mini 8 technically doesn’t officially exist. But we all know it’s coming. After all, Apple isn’t the type to rest on its laurels when it comes to refreshes, and tablets are no exception. Nothing has been officially announced, of course, but there are enough whispers, rumours, and analyst insights to paint a reasonably clear picture of what to expect. Here’s everything we know so far about the iPad Mini 8. Oh, and all the images in this article are of the current-generation iPad Mini 7. We haven’t got a super-secret Apple prototype or anything. Honest.…
Streaming music puts millions of songs in our hands at a low monthly cost, but it encourages the use of wireless protocols with serious bottlenecks. When streaming high-resolution lossless music through a Wi-Fi network or cellular connection, speed and bitrate become concerns. Using a Bluetooth connection to connect your streaming device to earbuds, headphones, or speakers means you’ll be further limited to the bitrate of the Bluetooth audio codec used. Streaming sounds “bad” when your gear and wireless communication protocols aren’t good enough to support the quality of files you want to play. I use Ethernet throughout my home, but…
Plex’s recent push toward subscriptions and remote ad-supported streaming has many people looking for a way out, but the idea of running your own media server still scares them off. The word server makes it sound like you need a closet full of blinking lights and a computer science degree to keep it running. If you’ve been waiting to use Jellyfin, you should try it out. You can build something that plays your library on any device in the house, transcodes on the fly, and never asks you for a credit card. You can use hardware you already have Linux…