Innehållsförteckning för Issue 217 från T3 Australia

FELL AUDIO FELL DISC British firm Fell Audio is a newcomer in the world of audio equipment, and its debut effort – the Fell Disc – is aimed at a younger generation discovering CDs and physical media for the first time. The Fell Disc is a home CD player that’s designed to slot into an existing hi-fi setup or stand solo, and it offers connections including stereo analogue RCA outputs and optical and coaxial digital outputs. There’s a built-in DAC for high-res sound, and it’s made to be easy to use, with a straightforward interface that lets you get down to brass tacks straight away. Its retro styling – with a black or silver finish and neon green digital detailing – gives it a throwback vibe suitable for its CD…

ICEBREAKER MERINO BLEND 125 ZONEKNIT ENERGY WIND SHORT SLEEVE T-SHIRT Lighter and far more breathable than we expected for a Merino top, the 125 ZoneKnit Energy is quick drying and boasts body-mapped technology to help regulate heat. Great for all climates. $139.99, www.icebreaker.com ICEBREAKER MERINO BLEND 125 ZONEKNIT SPEED 6” SHORTS Merino running shorts that tick all the boxes. Lightweight, breathable, gusseted seams for reduced rubbing, and built-in liner brief. There’re a couple of pockets for your phone / cards to top it ff. Perfection. $139.99, www.icebreaker.com TNF SUMMIT SERIES RUN RACE DAY VEST 8 Light and with enough storage and hydration options, the Race Day Vest is ready to go on your next mission. It’s bladder compatible on the back or feel free to cram it with gear. The…

Guru has been doing a purge of his streaming subscriptions. NJPW World, the home of streaming Japanese wrestling? Out, if only to reduce Mrs Guru’s ammunition. That’s 999 yen back in his pocket. A whole bunch of Patreon subscriptions? In the bin, 20 quid back a month. Nebula, well, yeah. Sorry. GaGu never really watched you anyway. Disney+ downgraded to the ‘with ads’ tier, infuriating his Simpsons-obsessed daughter. Prime Video only stays because it’s basically a freebie thrown in alongside Guru’s well-abused Amazon subscription, while YouTube Premium is just there because GaGu can’t be bothered fiddling with adblockers any more. Only Netflix remains unscathed, but Guru plans to scathe it very soon. Why all this, you ask. Well, Guru just can’t really watch TV. The living room of Guru Towers…

SIMPLE & STYLISH 1 JBL MA310 AV RECEIVER WITH JBL 240B BOOKSHELF SPEAKERS Upgrade your audio with the fashionable JBL MA310 AV amplifier. Boasting a clean, contemporary design and no-fuss setup, this 5.2-channel Bluetooth-enabled AV amplifier offers 5 x 60W and has four HDMI inputs. To keep things simple, we’ve partnered it with a pair of JBL 240B Stage 2 bookshelf speakers, for crisp stereo, but the system can be upgraded with additional JBL Stage 2 speakers for full surround sound. $875, $499, jbl.com 2 AMAZON FIRE 4K TV MAX Not only does the Amazon Fire 4K TV Max offer all major streaming services (and quite a few minor ones), it also comes with the Fire TV Ambient Experience, which includes over 2,000 artworks and photography. Compatible with Dolby Vision…

Let’s face it, if there’s a way to make our daily lives easier and less time-consuming and someone suddenly invents a machine that performs a particular household task for us, we’ll bite their arm off. Indeed, most of us have probably already got a dishwasher, washing machine and tumble dryer doing all the hard graft, so why not go the whole nine yards and include a machine that sweeps the floors, automatically, on its own, with almost zero human effort? The historic timeline of robotic vacuum cleaners goes way back to 1997 when BBC’s Tomorrow’s World featured an early prototype of 2001’s Electrolux Trilobite, the world’s first commercially-available robot vacuum cleaner. This autonomous domestic bot was so futuristic it even boasted obstacle-avoiding ultrasonic sensors. Soon after, iRobot launched its first…

If you’re looking for the very best tech available today, you’ve definitely come to the right place. Best of the Best is the most useful gadget-buying guide you will ever encounter. To create it, we’ve extensively tested the best tech the world has to offer, to bring you rock-solid recommendations for your home life, daily commute and the tech you use all the time. In 54 different categories, we’ve chosen the top four products, so you can choose one that’s just the right mix of features and budget for what you need. These rankings come from real testing by our team of experts – they’re the products we’d choose for ourselves, and we can’t recommend any higher than that. Look for the links above each category that take you to…

Back in 2014 the smart home scene really began to kick off. Picture decade-ago me: cramming my arms with app-controlled thermostats, colour-changing lights and security cameras like a child in a free sweet shop. Of all the gadgets that I acquired over the years, the smart home stuff is what really resonated with me. Aside from some mixed results with early models of robot vacuums (they’re much better these days), everything I laid my hands on had a genuinely useful benefit, whether it was being able to remotely temperature-regulate every room in the home, or never having to touch a light switch ever again… on the ground floor anyway. Though the general smart home theme hasn’t shifted dramatically in the years since, the quality of the kit has, and you…

OCOOPA RECHARGEABLE HAND WARMERS Singapore might be balmy, but other destinations may not be, which is why these rechargeable hand warmers are an essential. From $39.99, amazon.com.au CANON SELPHY SQUARE QX20 PRINTER Love a holiday snap which isn’t just on your phone? Canon’s new compact photo printer produces fast dye sublimation prints in 40 seconds. $249, canon.com.au SOUNDCORE SPACE ONE PRO HEADPHONES Soundcore’s newest noise-cancelling headphones have a foldable design, reducing their size by 50%. $349, soundcore.com…

UFO 50 Fifty full-length games created for an imagined 1980s console, much cheaper than one crap AAA title. This scratches Guru’s old-school itch, and the games themselves are brilliant. WOLF HALL It’s back: the BBC’s craggiest, gloomiest, most slow-paced historical drama about the English Reformation. Nothing else offers the full mumbly Mark Rylance experience. TUXEDO IV Regular readers will know that Mayer Hawthorne has Guru’s favourite modern soul voice. Here he is with his mate Jake One making a laid-back p-funk record that hits from end to end.…

The Vision Pro mixed reality headset is probably one of the coolest devices to come out of Apple’s HQ in over a decade. The quality of the images you see through its twin displays is difficult to discern from reality, and the ability to add virtual elements to your real world is quite incredible. I’ve been using the Vision Pro now for a few weeks and I’m still amazed every time I put it on. Though most of the time I use it, I’m either sitting at my desk or on the sofa. So, when T3’s editor set me a challenge to wear it for a day, to see what happened, I jumped at the challenge. This wasn’t about not taking the headset off for 24 hours – that’s not…

Loose New Year’s resolutions around losing weight or getting fit are doomed to fail without help. Time for a new approach this year, one in which you leave the well-trodden path of calorie-counting and busy January gyms, and stray into the wild blue yonder of high-tech, experimental health and fitness solutions. Those on the cutting edge are embracing ‘biohacking’. Biohacking involves using unconventional, unusual technology driven by data to improve your health: it could mean wearable tech, but it could also mean monitoring your blood or trying untested dietary hacks. Fringe practitioners like Bryan Johnson, the 49-year-old Venmo creator and biohacker, are spending millions of dollars using experimental tech and biochemistry in an attempt to reverse ageing, and making headlines in the process. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend that…

The VR scene is more competitive than ever – Meta’s Quest headsets offer brilliant value, so what can HTC’s latest Vive headset do to justify its premium existence? HTC’s angle appears to be around picture and video quality, with boasts about lossless video passthrough from a capable PC, with the potential for mixed use, including some gaming. The Focus Vision has a familiar look with a shiny front panel that houses the main body of the headset, along with a three-strap system that lets you wear it snugly. At the back of your head, there’s an adjustment dial to get that fit correct, along with a battery holder that both helps to balance the weight of the headset and lets you more easily swap in charged batteries. The headset’s main…

Apple’s super compact iPad has remained a fan favourite in the range, its smaller form making it easier to carry, with enough screen real estate to make it preferable to using your phone. In this latest iteration, the seventh generation iPad mini gets the same A17 Pro chip, a big jump in performance over the A15 chip in the previous mini. Crucially, the chip upgrade means the mini is able to run the new Apple Intelligence features that are coming to iPadOS 18, including new writing tools, image creation and a more powerful Siri voice assistant. The new iPad mini comes in a choice of four colours, three storage sizes and both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi plus Cellular versions. The base model gets double the storage capacity of the previous model,…

BANG & OLUFSEN FERRARI COLLECTION Bang & Olufsen has teamed up with Ferrari to launch one of the most high-end audio experiences this side of Maranello. The new Ferrari Collection features souped-up versions of the Beolab 50, Beosound Theatre and Beovision Theatre, each with a new colour scheme and eye-catching design touches. Of course, a collaboration between two brands of this stature doesn’t come cheap, with a pair of the Beolab 50 Ferrari Edition speakers setting you back $145,000, while the Beovision Theatre Ferrari Edition starts at a ‘mere’ $40,000. If you’re serious about sound and have cash to burn, why not throw money at this collection? Prices from about $28,000, bang-olufsen.com NEXT ISSUE IS ON SALE MONDAY APRIL 7TH…

A young man asked me recently what it was like being a tech enthusiast in the 1990s. In his early twenties, he was clearly far too young to have experienced the decade directly, but he gushed with excited awe about how enthralling it must have been to witness developments like the World Wide Web, mobile messaging, online commerce and portable computing for the first time. I immediately started pondering which tech decade really was the best in which to be alive, and whether the 1990s deserves the accolade. For me, those 1990s first steps of the internet were indeed remarkable to see. I even presented an item for old-school Top Gear on the subject. But the popular spread of less cutting-edge technologies was, if anything, a more life-changing aspect of…

♦ VIDDE ALFA SNOWMOBILE Even snow mobiles are electric in 2024. This model from Vidde Mobility boasts a range of around 96 kilometres and a top speed of almost 112kph. Designed to carry a driver and passenger – and also tow up to 270kg – the Vidde Alfa can work in temperatures as low as -39C, and a data connection means it’s ready to receive over-the-air software updates. ~$42,500, viddemobility.com ♦ MAEVING RM1S Got your CBT but want something much, much cooler than a moped? Here’s the electric bike for you. Designed for urban duties but with enough power to handle the open road, the Maeving RM1S has a top speed of 112kph and it’ll manage up to 130 kilometres on a charge. From ~14,600, maeving.com ♦ MOKE EV Want…

Remember your first mobile phone? It probably had a tiny screen by today’s standards. In recent years, however, many of the best Android phone makers have progressed beyond delivering stellar flagship devices — all too ‘normal’ and not futuristic enough for this group test — to offering folding phones too. As the name suggests, these pocketable handsets hide a secondary display within, transforming them into pocket-busters closer in scale to mini tablets. That’s thanks to flexible OLED panels, genius hinge designs, and polymer coatings that allow for that all-important folding function. Folding phones come in two tried-and-tested forms: clamshell, which are similar to a half-sized phone sandwich that can flip open; and the focus of this group test, larger scale foldables — akin to a flagship with a double-size display…

The MacBook Pro M4 is the latest generation of a very well-oiled machine. The MacBook Pro has long represented the pinnacle of creative power for those on the move. The M4 family of chips in the new MacBook Pro machines are faster and more efficient than ever. There’s no physical change to this year’s MacBook Pro models, so at first glance you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the 2023 M3 models – but that’s no bad thing. Coming in two distinct sizes of screen, the 14.2-inch model is 31.26cm by 22.12cm which is just slightly bigger than an A4 folder. The larger 16.2-inch model is 35.57cm by 24.81cm which isn’t bad for such a large screen. Unlike the MacBook Air, these models are a little chunkier in…

When the PlayStation 5 launched four years ago, it heralded a new era of gaming. Sony claimed it was capable of true next-gen features that sounded too good to be true – 8K gaming, ray tracing support and 4K 120Hz were all bandied, even badged on the box. Unfortunately, it turned out that they were indeed a tad fanciful. The original console was (and still is) capable of ray tracing and 4K 120Hz, but almost never at the same time, while 8K turned out to be just a crazy pipe dream. Now though we have a follow-up – a mid-generation console refresh that, like the PS4 Pro in 2016, improves on existing hardware to such an extent that games can be boosted to all-new levels of graphical performance. And it…

The IO-8 are the Danish brand’s third set of wireless over-ear headphones. At a premium $899 they nestle between the more ‘affordable’ IO-6, and the flagship IO-12 cans. At this price point, there’s strong competition from other luxury headphone brands, so how do they stack up? One feature that’s immediately worth flagging: these headphones can be used wirelessly, of course, but they can also function as hard-wired headphones even if they’re switched off or if their battery is flat. Dali provides a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm cable for this purpose, along with a USB alternative, in a compact travel case. Mind you, it will be negligent of you to let the IO-8 go flat. Battery life is a very decent 30 hours with ANC switched on, and an even better 35 hours if…