8 resolutions to make tech work for you in 2018

A new year means, of course, that it’s time for some fresh resolutions – and at TechRadar that means tech-related resolutions.

We love our tech, but sometimes it can suck up too much of our time – and in the new year it can actually get in the way of achieving our new year’s goals. You can, however, resolve to make it more of a help than a hindrance. 

So here are nine tech-based resolutions, including some that will help you turbo-charge your other plans, whether you’re out to lose weight or learn a new language. Happy new year!

Trying to become more productive is a fight against distraction – and that battle is especially tough when you work on a computer, with every distraction of the internet at your fingertips. 

Pomodoro is a time-management technique that at first sounds the stuff of buzzword-spouting marketeers and people who make a living creating motivational YouTube videos. But we’ve tried it and, with a bit of discipline, it can be very useful. 

It splits up your work day into short chunks of 25 minutes or so, the idea being that you work hard, then have frequent short breaks to avoid whittling away all your attention reserves. There are many phone apps that do the timing bit for you, including ClearFocus (iOS / Android), Clockwork Tomato (Android) and Goodtime (iOS / Android). 

If that's not for you there’s another technique, of trying to get yourself in a 'flow' state where you’re just too deep into the task at hand to be swayed by distractions. This can be great for writing. 

An app like brain.fm, which offers 'AI-generated' music to help you focus or relax in lengthy two-hour chunks, can occupy parts of your brain just enough to make it easier to find your flow – or, if that sounds too flowery, to just keep you from looking at Twitter every 10 minutes. 

Many of you may already be familiar with mindfulness meditation. And if you aren't, don’t worry – it’s not a cult or a new religion that’s slipping us kickbacks on the side. 

It's meditation that encourages your to focus on your breathing and specific parts of your environment. This makes it easier to reach a state of deep relaxation, and helps you re-evaluate how your brain processes thoughts and deals with situations. 

Headspace (iOS / Android) is by far the most popular mindfulness meditation app. But if you don’t get on with the narrator’s voice, you should also try Calm and Relax with Andrew Johnson (iOS / Android). 

To start with, mindfulness meditation will make setting aside 10 minutes a day seem like an almost impossible ask. But going by the reviews for these apps there's a good chance you’ll feel better after each session.

If you want to use your phone, apps and internet as intended, you trade away a lot of privacy by design. However, it’s good to have a sanity check on exactly how much you’re giving away to, say, Google.

It uses the data from every YouTube video you watch, every Google search you make, to inform the ads you see online. And the reason we get to use Google services for free is because that data is valuable. 

By logging into your Google account and heading to the privacy section on a laptop you can see all the information it has collated and, if you want to, delete it. 

Google also offers a handy wizard in its Privacy settings that lets you alter which search results are stored on your account. The corollary is that power-washing this data away also weakens search result optimization, which could be a positive or a negative, depending on your view.

More than a few people have laid the blame for the political and social upheavals of recent years at the door of social media. Accusations of 50 flavors of bias and 'fake news' have melted into meaningless buzzwords to others. Either way, there's something to be said for stepping away from your Facebook and Twitter feeds as your main source of news. 

By visiting a website rather than relying on stories promoted on social networks or those posted by friends, you'll get a fuller view of news coverage than you would by simply trawling through algorithmically generated social media feeds dominated by knee-jerk reaction stories that get everyone angry. And, hey, you might even see some positive stories that aren’t about kittens and puppies. 

For the politics fans out there, you might also want to try sites or podcasts that explore views you might feel a little uncomfortable with, such as Left Right & Center. 

The easiest way to improve your security online is to enable two-factor authentication. This means someone else can’t just log in as you if they crack or steal your password, and it makes nicking your identity exponentially harder. 

You’ll usually enter your mobile phone number as part of this, and the service will send a code to your mobile which you'll need to enter to log in, or do so when it notices that you’ve logged in from an unfamiliar location or device. It’s a must for Google accounts and online banking. 

Twitter and Facebook also offer two-factor authentication or 2FA. Get on board. 

We all tend to think it was much easier to learn things back when we were kids. Sure, maybe your brain was a bit more malleable back then, but as adults we also don’t have parents and teachers to nag us to 'practice' whatever we’re learning, daily. Adults have to be the kid, the nagging parent and the encouraging/scary teacher all in one. And it’s tiring. 

A habit-tracking app is one gently nudging way to train yourself to put in the hours, or minutes, every day, or however often you want to have a learning or practice session. 

An app like Habits for Android or Strides for iOS lets you log every time you engage with a pre-specified activity. We’re currently using Habits to monitor drum practice, going for a run, heading to the swimming pool and doing some extra-curricular writing. 

It’s particularly useful for tasks that benefit from frequent attention, like learning a new language or a musical instrument. 

When you see someone declare that they’re leaving social media, it’s probably down to trolling, or the excess of venom that often saturates these platforms. However, there are other reasons to give Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest a break for a while. 

First, you get to see how well your phone’s battery lasts when social apps (particularly Facebook) aren’t silently seeking updates in the background. 

More important, there’s a good chance a social app is your go-to whenever you idly pick your phone out of your pocket, or look for a distraction from work. You may think of it as a stress relief. 

But if you’d rather spend more time reading, clearing your mind of work-related stress by listening to the birds, or avoiding procrastination so you can do something more meaningful, ditching social networks can help. Detox diets may be nonsense, but digital detoxing isn’t.

Here’s a resolution that could have featured in any of the last few years: how about trying running with your phone? This one sounds obvious, but the key is to find the app partner that will actually make you want to run more often, or harder. 

For beginners, a 'couch to 5K' app is a great place to start. These give you a training regime that’ll turn you from a non-runner into someone who can run a 5K without stopping to walk for a bit. Apps to try include Couch to 5K by Active Network (iOS / Android), C25K (iOS / Android), and RunDouble’s Couch to 5K (iOS / Android). 

If you still find running too boring, try out a 'narrative run app'. These weave your runs into part of a story, like an audiobook. The most famous of the lot is the brilliant Run, Zombies! (iOS / Android), which is like The Walking Dead of running apps. BattleSuit Runner (Android) and Runtastic’s Story Running (iOS / Spotify) are also worth trying.

source http://www.techradar.com/news/8-resolutions-to-make-tech-work-for-you-in-2018

Top 5 best business laptops in UAE for 2018

The best business laptops combine cutting edge productivity features with slimline designs and long battery life that provides mobility and productivity - essential functions for the modern workplace, and we're here to help you by gathering together the very best business laptops for 2018.

Having the best business laptop that suits your needs is essential, and thanks to modern advancements in hardware, especially on the mobile side of things, business laptops are now thinner and lighter than ever before. This means you no longer have to sacrifice power for portability.

It also means that that when it comes to brilliant laptops for business, you've got no shortage of options when looking for the best business laptop.

While compiling this list of the best business laptops, we've taken into consideration a number of key factors including power, battery life, feature set and sheer value for money.

This means that we've selected a wider range of laptops to suit most if not all budgets and hopefully all tastes; there's a mix of cutting-edge products and old favourites here.

All of them, except for one, come with the professional version of Microsoft Windows to enhance their business credentials.

If you're looking for a bit more power, then check out our list of the best mobile workstations, as well as our pick for the best business desktop PC.

Previous versions of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon have been the absolute best-in-class when it comes to business laptops, and this year's model is no exception, with Lenovo delivering a thinner and smaller design with practically no trade-offs. Despite its small size, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes with pretty much every feature you need in a productivity machine, making it the best business laptop money can buy. Thanks to a battery life of up to 15.5 hours, and a rapid charging feature that brings the battery back up to 80% capacity in only an hours, the X1 Carbon is an ultrabook that lets you keep on working while you're on the move.

Price: Starts at AED 7,499

Believe it or not, Dell classifies the XPS 13 as a business laptop, albeit one that is geared towards a home office environment but businessmen (and women) will love the design. This ultraportable laptop – as Dell puts it – punches above its weight with Windows 10 Pro across the entire range as well as rather attractive pricing.

This award winning laptop (it won best laptop of the year from us and many others) manages to pack a 13.3-inch display into the chassis of an average 11.6-inch model.

The laptop can be upgraded to 16GB of RAM and a 1TB M2 SSD drive. Battery life is exceptional as well with almost 22 hours of continual use when using productivity applications.

Price: Starts at AED 4,399

The 255 G6 is HP's entry-level business laptop and is a solid candidate should you be looking for a straightforward, reliable, workhorse at a bargain price. Don't expect any fireworks as it is a basic model; it just does the job without much ado. One thing that works for this machine though is its price – the G6 battles with Lenovo for the best-value business laptop on the market.

If you want a similar business laptop with an Intel processor, rather than AMD, then the HP 250 G6 is worth looking into. There are various configurations of both the HP 255 G6 and the HP 250 G6, so it's worth shopping around and finding one with the right components for your needs.

Lenovo took an existing form factor and refined it to deliver the new 2016-2017 ThinkPad E470. Powered by the 7th generation Intel Core processors, this particular SKU has a 14-inch FHD anti-glare display, powered by a discrete Nvidia Geforce 940MX 2GB GPU.

Equipped with a spill resistant keyboard, a TrackPoint and a 3+2 buttons click pad, the E470 has more than enough ports and expansion capabilities to keep the average user happy. Shame that it doesn't do DisplayPort, so no 4K output.

Price: Starts at AED 3,499

If you're after the latest and greatest laptop from Apple, we suggest you check out the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, which is one of the best business laptops in 2018. The headline feature is the Touch Bar – it's a thin OLED display at the top of the keyboard which can be used for any number of things, whether that be auto-suggesting words as you type or offering Touch ID so you can log in with just your fingerprint. If you're a massive fan of the MacBook Pro, you'll be happy with this model but there are some serious reasons why you should consider one of the Windows alternatives. If you work with a lot of creative applications, such as Photoshop, then the MacBook Pro is a fantastic choice.

Read the full review: Apple Macbook with Touch Bar (2017)

Price: Starts at AED 7,999

• Here's our full list of the best laptops of 2017

source http://www.techradar.com/news/top-5-best-business-laptops-in-uae-for-2018

AMD in 2017: Ryzen hits a blackjack while Vega goes bust

In this article, we’re evaluating how AMD performed over the course of 2017, and it's certainly been a mixed bag.

AMD has had a year of two distinct things: processors and graphics cards. The former was a definite success story, and the latter, well, not so much…

Processing power

As you can’t have missed, 2017 witnessed the launch of AMD’s new Ryzen processors, and these chips have made a big impact, clawing back CPU territory from the dominant Intel.

Ryzen processors first hit the shelves back in March, immediately attracting a great deal of praise from the press and punters alike. In our review of the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X – an eight-core processor capable of boosting up to 4GHz – we observed that AMD had “nailed it” and that it was the “most disruptive move since the Athlon 64 days”, concluding that Ryzen was set to “shake the consumer stage”, particularly on the pricing front.

Budget models followed (like the Ryzen 3 1300X) in the summer, which we crowned king of the ‘value processors’, and throughout the year, Ryzen chips did indeed shake up the CPU arena considerably.

In AMD’s figures for Q3, released in October, Ryzen processors were shown to be selling strongly, and the driving force behind a near-doubling of sales for the computing and graphics group compared to the previous year.

Indeed, CEO Lisa Su made a bold claim when talking-up these financial results, stating that Ryzen desktop processors actually accounted for between 40 to 50% of sales at some (unspecified) online retailers (note that this was backed up by previously revealed figures from one German retailer). Meaning that the company is close to coming level with Intel in some outlets, and although obviously this isn’t a reflection of the overall processor market, it’s still a telling swing towards AMD.

All that said, we have to remember that Ryzen wasn’t without controversy when it first emerged. There were a number of serious teething issues, including alleged problems with Windows 10’s thread scheduler, incorrect reporting of CPU temperatures, and most seriously, disappointing performance running games at 1080p resolution.

The latter was mainly down to games not being properly optimized for AMD’s new chips, a situation which has been gradually remedied as developers get to grips with Ryzen more fully (although AMD’s BIOS updates tweaking various timings and the like have helped, too).

Heavyweight Ryzen Threadripper processors also helped to bolster AMD’s strength on the CPU front when they arrived in the summer, headed up by a mighty 16-core chip. The Threadripper 1950X might not have impressed us quite as much as vanilla Ryzen chips, but the CPU fought its corner well against the Core i9-7900X (Intel’s 10-core processor which carries the same price tag). And indeed it tied with Intel’s much pricier Core i9-7960X in our battle of the 16-core monster processors.

Of course, these sort of thousand dollar plus processors are a much more niche proposition than mainstream CPUs – Ryzen or Core alike – purely because of their pricing.

Intel fires the glue gun

Another way of gauging Ryzen’s success is to look at Intel’s reaction. Intel is suddenly putting a big emphasis on getting multi-core processors out there, with its first mainstream six-core CPU emerging in October, and apparent plans for an eight-core mainstream offering with its next-gen Core i7 flagship processor next year.

During 2017, Intel has also fired rather desperate-looking volleys of flak at AMD – with accusations of ‘glued-together processors’, no less – which makes the chip giant look worried.

Ryzen mobile processors for laptops are also looking strong, having debuted at the tail end of this year.

On balance, AMD will doubtless be very happy with how 2017 panned out for processors, particularly given that Ryzen’s early gremlins have now been pretty much ironed out.

Graphic detail

However, when it comes to the other big pillar of AMD’s consumer business – graphics cards – the company won’t be so pleased. AMD’s trump card for 2017 was GPUs based on new Vega technology, but these simply haven’t made anything close to the same impact as Ryzen.

The initial two AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards emerged in August, and we were very impressed with the flagship RX Vega 64, calling it an excellent first showing of Vega tech – giving largely equivalent performance to Nvidia’s GTX 1080 at a theoretically slightly cheaper price – with plenty of potential for the future.

But these GPUs fizzled out in 2017 for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there was confusion around initial pricing and supposedly introductory discount rates. Then the cards were afflicted by stock shortages which pushed prices up, all of which meant a very rocky start for Vega. And that continued throughout the year up until the time of writing, when Vega stock is still extremely thin on the ground, with the cards costing far more than the initial recommended price AMD announced ($499 or £450).

A report which emerged at the end of November on discrete graphics card sales showed that Vega had failed to increase AMD’s market share – indeed the firm’s share of the GPU arena fell 2.6%, down to 27.2%. That’s a damning reflection of Vega’s initial impact, or lack of it, and it appears that AMD has rather shot itself in the foot here, simply by failing to get production lines running up to speed, and not pushing anything like enough stock of these new cards onto shelves (and thereby applying upward price pressure).

Looking to next year

In overall terms, on the strength of Ryzen, this year has to be regarded as a successful one for AMD – although as we’ve seen, the second half of the equation, Vega, was a far shakier proposition.

However, as we observed in our review of the flagship Vega graphics card, there’s still a good deal of potential with this GPU technology, and hopefully developers will make use of this in future games. But the real big hope is that stock issues will finally be remedied and prices will therefore settle, and if – or should we say when – that happens, Vega should start to do better in 2018. Of course, the truth is it couldn’t do much worse than the hamstrung efforts of 2017.

Also note that there is a slight black cloud on the GPU horizon, as AMD observed in its latest financial results, which forecast a decline of around 15% in the next quarter when it comes to its computing and graphics group revenue – with one of the main reasons cited being sales for cryptocurrency mining GPUs, which are expected to cool off. On the plus side, maybe that will help make more stock available for gamers.

As to the outlook for processors, Ryzen 2 is rumored to arrive in February, so very early on in 2018, bringing with it an alleged boost in clock speeds of around 200-300MHz across-the-board, and better power-efficiency plus overclocking potential. With that being a further push for AMD CPUs, it could be easy to get carried away with the prospect of taking back even more turf from Intel.

But we must also bear in mind that Intel isn’t standing still. As we’ve already mentioned, AMD’s rival has already unleashed a superb mainstream hexa-core processor in the form of the Core i7-8700K, with an eight-core Core i7 heavyweight successor potentially arriving in 2017. That could leave AMD with a hell of a fight on its hands to maintain Ryzen’s forward momentum.

Of course, a lot will depend on relative pricing, so the good news about this CPU war is that with any luck we’ll see pot-shots being taken by both sides, and chunks being blown off prices – and the consumer will be the ultimate winner. That’s a bit of a tired old line, but we get the feeling some real CPU competition could be stoked up next year, and we couldn’t wish for better news than that for 2018.

• Intel vs AMD: which chipmaker produces better processors?

source http://www.techradar.com/news/amd-in-2017-ryzen-hits-a-blackjack-while-vega-goes-bust

The best year-end deals on Amazon

After an eventful year in terms of e-commerce sales, India’s biggest online seller Amazon has just found another good reason to end the year with discounts and offers on wide range of products. As we all know, the season of gifting and celebration is on, it’s the perfect time to grab one of your favourite gadgets at best rates. 

This Year-End sale is not as huge as the Amazon’s Great Indian Festival, but it still has some really alluring deals on electronics and more. In fact, because of the festivities being in the horizon, many of you must be looking for a perfect gift for someone you know. This is your last chance to get that gift at discounted price on Amazon, and if you are worried about the hassle of hunting for the best deals, we are here to help. 

What are the offers and discounts?

While there are tons of products on discount, the company has specified offers on each category— which includes up to 30% off on TVs, up to Rs 15,000 off on laptops, up to 40% off on cameras and accessories, up to 60% off on headphones, up to 50% off on PC accessories, up to 40% off on wearables, up to 50% off on hard drives, up to 60% off on speakers, up to 30% off on PC components, up to 40% off on SSD, up to 45% off on tablets, up to 50% off on memory cards and pen drives, and 15% off on desktops and monitors. 

Best Year-End Deals by category

Televisions

For more deals on TVs, head over to this page.

Laptops

For more deals on laptops, head over to this page.

Cameras & accessories

 For more deals on cameras & accessories, head over to this page 

source http://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-year-end-deals-on-amazon

What you need to do if your gadgets don't work on Christmas Day

Chances are you're going to be unwrapping a few gadgets on Christmas Day, whether it's a Nintendo Switch for the kids or a Fitbit tracker for you. Hopefully, your shiny new gizmo will be working fine right out of the wrapping paper and give you many years of useful life.

However, manufacturing defects and shipping accidents do happen, so what do you do when your device refuses to operate as advertised? Take a deep breath, count to 10 and follow our guide to trying to repair your hardware or getting it sent back to headquarters.

Obviously, there are a host of devices out there - from smart TVs to tablets - so we can only provide you with some general tips and advice. Hopefully though, these pointers will help reduce your blood pressure and ensure you can still enjoy some of your Christmas Day.

Turn it on and off again

Seriously - is the device dead or just not powered up properly? Does it need to charge for a while before it'll actually do anything? The supplied instruction manual should tell you, if you haven't already consigned it to a big black bin bag with the wrapping paper.

It may sound obvious, but does the device need batteries? And if so have you fitted them? These may sound like basic checks but you don't want to embarrass yourself at the returns desk of your local electronics store during the first week in January.

Check if there's some kind of hard reset or master reset that you can put your device through, which may solve your problems: here's the drill for the iPhone, for example. A quick web search should help you out if the instruction manual doesn't.

Head to the web

Chances are someone somewhere has previously had a problem with the gadget you're trying to troubleshoot, and posted about their experiences on the web - a quick online search should be enough to alert you to any known issues with the product you're trying to get working, and may even throw up a few solutions.

Is a software or firmware update required, for example? If the device powers up okay but doesn't work properly it might be that you need to apply a patch from the manufacturer - your hardware will have been sitting on a warehouse shelf for a while, after all.

With a bit of sleuthing online you should be able to work out whether your issues are unique or widespread, and possibly find a fix from somewhere. If you're still having no luck, you might have to give up and return the item.

Check your rights

Once you've worked your way through all the troubleshooting steps you can find in the manual and on the web, it's time to think about taking it back where it came from for a refund or a replacement. In fact a lot of stores let you do this whether or not the device is actually faulty.

Look up the returns and cancellations policy for the store you bought the item from, rather than the manufacturer (though in some cases, you'll need to go to the manufacturer's official store). Here's Currys PC World. Here's Amazon. And here's Samsung. You can often send the gadget back via post or pop into a store.

As you can see from those links, if you've been sent a faulty product, you can usually get it repaired for free, or opt for a replacement or refund instead. You'll get guided through the process step by step, but make sure you keep all the packaging and documentation together with the gadget itself.

Unless you've bought your Christmas gifts from a guy selling gadgets out of the back of a van, it should come with a warranty, typically for a year - that guarantees that you'll get a working product, but it doesn't cover stuff like natural disasters or you dropping your new smartphone down a flight of stairs.

For example, here's the warranty if you've bought a Google Home or a Google Home Mini: Google guarantees the device "will be free from defects in materials and workmanship under normal use as described in the published product documentation for two years". If that's not the case, here's how to return your smart speaker if you bought it straight from the official Google Store.

Make some money

There might be times when you can't return a faulty item: maybe if someone else bought it for you, or if you've damaged it yourself, in which case the usual warranty terms typically don't apply, unless you've forked out for extra insurance.

In this case you can stick the item on eBay or Shpock or somewhere similar - you can often still get money for damaged goods from people who reckon they'll be able to fix it themselves or who want to use the parts for something else. Just make sure you're honest in the listing and with the buyer about what's wrong with the item.

With any luck, you won't need any of this advice, and all your Christmas gadgets will work perfectly. If not, you should be able to get a refund, replacement, or repair easily enough - though you might want to leave it a few days to avoid the Boxing Day queues.

• Broken iPhone? Here's how Apple decides if you're getting a replacement or not

source http://www.techradar.com/news/what-you-need-to-do-if-your-gadgets-dont-work-on-christmas-day

10 trends in tech to watch in 2018

What will happen in the world of technology in 2018? Trends in technology are not easy to spot, but there are two things you should never do; talk to anyone who actually makes hardware or software, or pay much attention to the CES Show in Las Vegas each January. 

The former use the word 'disruptive' about themselves like it's going out of fashion (it is, finally), and the latter is crammed with thousands of new products that promise a glimpse into the future, then fail to get any traction (we're looking at you, 3DTV and netbooks). 

So here are some more general trends in tech based on number crunches and analysts' hunches that are set to become more pronounced in 2018 and beyond. 

Self-driving cars are in the labs being readied for the 2020s. So forget about them for a few years, and embrace electric cars. 

In 2018 we'll see new electric cars promising ranges of 200 miles or more, including the Tesla Model 3 and the second-generation Nissan Leaf. That will mean more positive coverage for electric cars in the media. 

So what? BP predicts that the number of electric cars will rise from 1.2 million in 2015 to around 100 million by 2035, but that represents only 6% of all cars. Petrol and diesel, established for a century as the technology of choice for drivers, will take some shifting, but with the UK and France banning sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040 – and China about to follow suit – long-term investment in petrol cars will soon cease. When the markets get involved, things can change very quickly, and 2018 looks set to be a tipping point. 

Once iconic gadgets, Apple and Samsung now update their iPhone and Galaxy S handsets with little press attention. Are Apple’s days as the go-to smartphone over? Yes, says ABI Research, which predicts that we're entering a ‘post-smartphone’ era where voice, AI, augmented reality and gesture tech are growing, and Google and Amazon will lead. 

A ‘complacent’ Apple, along with Samsung, Microsoft, and Huawei, will merely follow. 

“This next wave of innovation in the smart device ecosystem will be led by Google and Amazon, as their apparent strength in major growth sectors, notably computer science, allows for a more flexible approach to next-generation user experiences that are essential for creating immersive experiences and brand-new ways of human-to-machine interactions,” says David McQueen, Research Director at ABI Research. 

Cue Project Tango. 

Alexa, what’s the hottest trend in consumer electronics right now? Mass adoption may still be a few years away, but voice-enabled speaker use has grown almost 130% during 2017 according to eMarketer.

From a pretty niche market in a handful of countries, Amazon’s Echo line-up of 'voice first' products products can now we bought in about 80. It's throwing everything at the market, with its slew of products including the original Echo, plus the Echo Plus, Echo Tap, Echo Dot, Echo Show, and Echo Spot. 

That ought to grab Amazon about 70% of the market in 2018, while Google Home will scoop-up most of the rest. Then, of course, there's Apple's much-delayed HomePod, which is scheduled for launch sometime in 2018. 

For now, voice-controlled speakers may be largely about playing music and getting answers to stupid questions, but make no mistake about it; this is about the smart home and the Internet of Things, two massive trends that in 2018 will become more ingrained in daily life. More general use of Alexa, Siri, Google Now and Cortana on various devices grew 23% in 2017, and will mushroom in 2018. 

“The battle for the consumer will move beyond the device into the so-called skills,” says Sergey Bludov, SVP Media and Entertainment at tech consultancy DataArt. “Now that Google Assistant and Alexa are openly accessible to third-party developers, the software, not the hardware, will largely determine success in the market of voice-activated technology.” 

Do you use Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music or Google Play Music? Or all four? When the Napster era morphed into the iTunes era, digital downloads were legitimised. Now they’re almost dead. 

Fuelled by a surge in sales of voice-controlled speakers in 2018, the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google are surely on the verge of abandoning digital downloads in favour of their fast-growing streaming services. Those big players plus Spotify have followed Netflix’s example in video, but somehow managed to convince millions that paying it a monthly fee is good value. What will Apple do in 2018 with its latest acquisition, Shazam? No one's sure, but every time you Shazam something, it will now surely point you only to Apple Music. 

PxC estimated in 2017 that streaming revenues will rise 37 per cent to US $9.1bn in 2017 while sales of physical formats will drop 10 per cent to $7.7bn. That’s the critical mass achieved. And that means death is surely coming for downloads. Is that a good thing? Not for music; some think algorithmic playlists favor terrible muzak. 

The ability to play music around the home is a trend that has threatened to go mainstream for years, but on the back of the growth in voice-controlled speakers it looks set to grow. There’s an explosion in hardware; it’s no longer just about Sonos, with the likes of Marshall, Bluesound and Denon now offering modular multi-room systems. 

It's a genre inextricably linked to both the voice-controlled speaker market and to music streaming, of course, but this one appears to have legs. GfK just reported a growth in premium multi-room systems of 14% in 2017, and in particular for smart soundbars. 

In a market where quality rules over convenience, GfK thinks we'll see a lot more of Dolby Atmos and High Resolution Audio in 2018.

Social media is under pressure. Criticised for hosting fake news, hoax stories, violent videos and hate speech, Russian ads and even – suggests its former executive – of ripping apart the social fabric, Facebook is suddenly on the back-foot. Gartner even thinks that by 2022 the majority of individuals in mature economies will consume more false information than true information. 

OK, so it just posted a 47% leap in revenue to US$10.3 billion, and its users grew to 2.07 billion people. So what? The average Facebook user posts a third less content in 2016 than in 2015, during which time there was a 15% drop in engagements per post, and comments per post declined 37%. 

With users between 12 and 24 in decline and everyone else using it less, there’s a simple truth about Facebook that will continue into 2018; we care about it less than we used to.

Deloitte predicts that almost half of adults and two-thirds of under-35s worry that they are using their phones too much, and could try to limit their usage in 2018. For a newly mobile-first platform like Facebook, that's bad news. 

Video and music streaming may get all the press, but for an increasing number of us, it's podcasts that we're consuming more and more of. For some of us, it's all we listen to. 

“Podcasting has been growing for a while, increasing 21% to 24% year-over-year, with the audience predominately in the ages of 18-54,” says Bludov. One in four Americans has listened to at least one podcast in the past month according to recent research from Edison Research. 

Podcast listeners tend to listen to mainly podcasts, not music, and are willing to pay to get rid of adverts. However, despite it being the perfect medium for listening to on the commute, the majority of podcasts are listened to in the home, with the vehicle a close second. 

Disney wants to get closer to you. Its recent colossal deal to acquire much of Twenty-First Century Fox in a $52 billion deal will see it control Fox's movie studios, over a dozen cable TV  networks, a 50% stake in production company Endemol Shine, a 39% stake in Sky, and a 30% stake in Hulu. That includes ESPN, The Simpsons and the soon-to-return Avatar franchise. 

In an effort to go direct to its customers, as all media companies now need to do, Disney will likely pull its content from Netflix and instead beef-up Hulu. In response, Netflix will likely spend more and more on creating its own original programming. The end result? You'll have to add a monthly subscription to Disney/Hulu to your monthly digital outgoings. 

From 360 cameras to wearable cameras, almost anything that can capture video can also broadcast it in real-time to social media. 

A trend on the verge of going mainstream, social video is the overall effect of all of us uploading more and more video to YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. 

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, 2016–2021, the volume of mobile video traffic has almost doubled in 2017, and about 80% of all personal internet traffic in 2018 will be from personal, social video traffic. That's not lost on the marketing monkeys, 64% of whom expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future, according to Nielsen. 

Video advertising is expected to become the fastest growing type of advert; it's going to get harder to avoid those irritating 30-second videos about things you don't need. If you think YouTube is already pushing its luck with those 30-second adverts, prepare for an ill-conceived onslaught. 

Forget Donald Trump's vague promises about the US going back to the Moon; he mentioned no money. Instead, 2018 will be all about the private space industry kicking-on in some impressive ways. 

Elon Musk's SpaceX probably won't send two paid-up space tourists around the Moon, but it will finally conduct a trial launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket – the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two – and NASA will trial its Orion spacecraft, which is designed to go to Mars. 

However, space tourism may finally get off the ground. Not only does Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin hope to take the first space tourists into orbit in its Crew Capsule 2.0 aboard its New Shepherd rocket, but Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is counting down to the first commercial trip into orbit for its VSS Unity spacecraft. 

Will 2018 really be the year space tourism at last becomes live tech? The countdown is on.

• Killer robots aren't in the immediate future but Elon Musk is already thinking about stopping them

source http://www.techradar.com/news/10-trends-in-tech-to-watch-in-2018

Lorelei’s story: how a 5-year-old crowd-sourced a robotic prosthetic

Last-minute Australian Christmas gifts ideas

Well, you said you were gonna have it all done by now. You promised yourself you wouldn't leave your Christmas shopping till the last minute... in fact, you even said you'd have it all wrapped up a month ago, but here we are.

There's no chance you'll be getting anything delivered at this point, and heading into a store this weekend is going to be the opposite of a good time. 

So why don't you check out some of the last-minute gift ideas we've rounded up below, none of which require you to shift from your couch or computer chair.

Last-minute Christmas gifts

• For those that aren't that worried about Christmas gifts but want to save some sweet seasonal dosh, check out Australia's best boxing day sales and deals.

source http://www.techradar.com/news/last-minute-christmas-tech-gifts-in-australia

Eric Schmidt steps down as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company

Eric Schmidt is stepping down as the executive chairman of Alphabet (parent company of Google), after serving in that role since 2011. Before that, he was the CEO beginning in 2001 until that role was taken over by Larry Page.

Schmidt will remain on Alphabet's board of directors, but only as a technical adviser on "science and technology" issues. 

In the statement announcing the shift, Schmidt said that he'd been focusing on those issues a lot in recent years and now plans to pursue that work in greater depth. Schmidt also plans to devote more time to philanthropy.

No reason was given for the sudden departure, which will likely lead to some speculation in the coming weeks. In his tweet announcing the news, there was none of the humor he displayed when he stepped down as Google CEO in 2001, joking that "Day-to-day adult supervision [was] no longer needed!"

"Larry, Sergey, Sundar and I all believe that the time is right in Alphabet's evolution for this transition," Schmidt said in a prepared statement."The Alphabet structure is working well, and Google and the Other Bets are thriving."

Eventually the board will likely appoint a "non-executive chairman," but no timeline for this was given.

• Best in class: our Google Pixelbook review

source http://www.techradar.com/news/eric-schmidt-steps-down-as-executive-chairman-of-alphabet-googles-parent-company

Last-minute gift hunting? We've got a suggestion that won't trouble the postman

We’ve all had that last-minute panic when we cast an eye under the tree and realize that, despite all the promises to the contrary, our loved one has indeed bought you those extra seven presents, making your own offering look both pitiful and Scroogey. 

But fear not, because even if the postman is incapable of Santa-like delivery times, the world of digital can ride to your rescue faster than a shiny-nosed reindeer railing against the bullying of his supposed team-mates. 

Yes, it’s the time of year again where we point you in the direction of our friends who make actual, physical products called magazines (made out of paper!) and offer subscriptions to both those and digital versions that are absolutely perfect for a last-minute gift. 

That means, as you open present number seven and realize that what actually happened was that someone had individually wrapped your socks in order to pad out their own offering, you can smugly point out that your present a) doesn’t run out of battery power on Boxing Day and b) keeps arriving for months, thus making it a far better present than theirs. 

Because one-upmanship is the true meaning of Christmas, right? 

Future – the publisher of TechRadar – has put together a veritable swathe of offers for its magazine offerings ahead of Christmas, which means that whether you're looking for a present or to just give yourself a Christmas treat, there’s almost certainly a magazine for you. 

You could also check out our guide to the best tech gifts under £100

source http://www.techradar.com/news/last-minute-gift-hunting-weve-got-a-suggestion-that-wont-trouble-the-postman

TechLife's January 2018 issue is out now!

[Keep up to date with all things TechLife by signing up for our newsletter!]

Get the ultimate lounge room upgrade in the January 2018 issue of TechLife! 

We uncover the gear and gadgets to help you create the best at-home TV and movie viewing experience without spending a fortune including a round up of the best streaming media players – great for anyone whose TV's built-in streaming options aren't up to snuff!

Plus, we cover everything you need to know about Windows 10's new Fall Creators Update.

You'll also find a huge range of in-depth tutorials, including:

• How to set up powerline networking gear properly
• Speed up an older Android phone
• Run Windows 10 on your Mac
• Master Twitter with our social-media pro guide
• And lots more!

Grab your copy from newsagents, selected supermarkets or digitally via the Google Play Store or Apple Newsstand from Thursday, December 21, 2017.

Readers can also find our selection of exclusive software downloads here, as well as the essential tutorial files so you can work along with our how-to guides at home.

Subscribe to the print edition and save!

Subscribe to the print edition of TechLife and you'll enjoy a greatly-reduced cover price plus delivery directly to your door. Visit Magshop for full details:

Get the digital edition for your tablet

Alternatively, to grab a digital edition to read on your iOS or Android device, follow these links to the Apple Newsstand or Google Play Store:

source http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/techlife-magazine-1292212

Will Amazon Australia's Boxing Day sale make up for the site missing Black Friday?

Despite the slightly baffling no-show that was Amazon Australia during the Black Friday sales, the online retail giant has announced it will be host a Boxing Day sale with “hundreds of deals across all categories”.

The announcement reveals very few specifics, apart from a saving of up to $50 on Kindle e-readers, but it does mention there will be lots of buy-1-get-1-free deals on books, movies, and DVDs, as well as a more general sale across tech brands such as Fitbit, Sonos, Nintendo, Ubisoft and EA. 

If you’re yet to sign up for Amazon’s own audiobook platform, Audible, the “best offer in the country” will be available to new customers, allowing you to sign up a heavily discounted, Amazon-exclusive price.

The most enticing offer that Amazon Australia is teasing is its “Lightning Deals”, which are “products available at a discount, in limited quantities, for a short period of time”. We suspect this is where the real savings will be, but you’ll need to be speedy and savvy to sniff them out.

The sales go live at 12:00am on December 26, so be sure to head to Amazon Australia’s page to check out what’s on offer.

• We'll be gathering up the best Boxing Day tech sales in Australia on the day, so be sure to bookmark to score some savings on the day.
• There are also plenty of deals to help you get your Christmas shopping done for less. Check out our Pre-Christmas sales and seasonal deals kept updated through December.

source http://www.techradar.com/news/will-amazon-australias-boxing-day-sale-make-up-for-the-site-missing-black-friday

Uber is now officially a taxi service: here's what it could mean for you

The European court of justice has ruled that ride-hailing service Uber is a transportation company. 

While this may sound fairly obvious to anyone that has ever used the service, Uber has up until this point been operating as a computer services business that connects users with drivers. This has allowed it to operate with looser regulations and licensing under EU law.

There are specific laws laid out in the EU to allow freedom of providing services digitally, which expressly excludes transportation services. Uber getting reclassified changes the freedom with which it is allowed to regulate.

Business as usual

According to Uber, it’s going to be business as usual. A spokesperson has said: “This ruling will not change things in most EU countries where we already operate under transportation law. However, millions of Europeans are still prevented from using apps like ours. 

“As our new CEO has said, it is appropriate to regulate services such as Uber and so we will continue the dialogue with cities across Europe. This is the approach we’ll take to ensure everyone can get a reliable ride at the tap of a button.”

Uber has for the longest time not owned vehicles, or technically employed drivers, presumably to jump through the loopholes of business classification. It will be interesting to see if being classified as a transportation company does anything to change the rights for the drivers who work for Uber. 

It’s also unclear whether these changes will affect the service for the consumer. If the company has to adhere to more rules, it would stand to reason that its expenses will go up, and those extra expenditures would most likely work their way back to the users. 

The court hearing came after a Barcelona based taxi company called Elite Taxi took Uber to court, which was then passed up to the European court of justice, which ruled: “The service provided by Uber connecting individuals with non-professional drivers is covered by services in the field of transport. Member states can therefore regulate the conditions for providing that service.”

• Christmas is just around the corner! Check out TechRadar Christmas wishlist: our team pick the very best tech for under your tree to see what we want to unwrap this year.

Via The Guardian

source http://www.techradar.com/news/uber-faces-stricter-regulation-in-europe-after-court-ruling

10 extreme data centers that look straight out of a sci-fi movie

Your local library is now in the Arctic Circle, in a desert in Utah, and deep inside a Norwegian mountain. The information society we now live in is built upon an interconnected cloud of racks of servers, archives and supercomputers in disparate data centers around the globe. As research by IT solutions company Comtec reveals, the emails and documents, the 'Likes' and the bytes we produce each day are stored, analysed and archived in some pretty unlikely locations away from the threats of cyber attacks, nuclear warfare and natural disasters. This is the world of the extreme data center.

One day in the far future an explorer or archaeologist will come across something incredible; a trove of offline analogue data from our digital civilisation. 

"We wanted to use film as the ultimate off-line long term preservation storage medium," says Rune Bjerkestrand Founder of PIQL, who runs the cyber attack-proof Arctic World Archive, also known as the digital world's 'Doomsday Vault'. 

The location, 300m below the ground in a converted mine shaft, was influenced by the remoteness of the nearby Svalbard Global Seed Vault at 77° N latitude. So the Arctic World Archive was built nearby in Longyearbyen, here on a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Safe from natural disasters and nuclear bombs, this permafrost home is a place for data to live forever … but it will cost you to put it there (which explains why most of the AWA's customers are national governments). 

Who needs religion when you've got supercomputers? That most modern of icons – a massive supercomputer – is hidden beneath the 19th century Torre Girona chapel in Barcelona, Spain. 

"Most of the scientific disciplines now use technology for the development of knowledge," says Sergi Girona, Operations Department Director at the BSC. "It's mostly devoted to science, but only the most excellent and brilliant scientists get access." 

Its tenant is MareNostrum 4, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe (and the world's 13th most powerful, which might say something about how far behind Europe has fallen), which was last year used to detect gravitational waves, created when two black holes collide. 

About 350 miles from Manhattan, Lockport hosts the Yahoo Compute Coop data center, a US$150 million, 155,000 square ft. facility opened in 2015 that uses hydroelectric power generated from Niagara Falls. It's based around the long, open-plan design of a chicken coop, a patented design that encourages air-flow. Inside are about 50,000 servers. 

Although only an experiment so far, Microsoft is hoping to prove that data should be stored underwater. The concept is simple; 50% of the world's population live near the coast, so that's where data should reside. By putting standard servers in watertight containers, then tethering them to the coast, the cables – and therefore the latency – should be reduced without having to use valuable land. 2015's Project Natick saw a 38,000lb/17,237kg cylindrical vessel measuring 10x7ft./3x2m anchored over half a mile off the US Pacific coast. It was recovered months later with the data still in immaculate condition. 

This is where snoopers put their stolen secrets. Also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative Data Centre, this 2014-built facility in the nondescript town of Bluffdale, Utah, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community… and that means the National Security Agency, which doesn't have a good reputation, post-Snowden. We're talking exabytes (one billion gigabytes) of data that's not connected to the internet; this is an offline data collection storage site for data from the internet and telephone networks. 

This data center supports the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector at the South Pole that looks for neutrinos from exploding stars, gamma-ray bursts, and black hole collisions; energies a million times greater than nuclear reactions. The IceCube detector itself is a cubic kilometre of ice studded with over 5,000 optical sensors, which detect 275 atmospheric neutrinos daily. There's no way all that data can be sent by satellite, so the IceCube Lab (ICL) data center supports the scientists at Amundsen-Scott South Pole station with over 1,200 computing cores and three petabytes of storage. 

With the IT industry’s energy footprint accounting for 7% of global electricity in 2012 and 12% by 2017, according to Greenpeace, 'dirty' data centers aren't good for business. Cue a trend for those that run on 100% renewable energy, like the data center hidden inside Green Mountain near Stavanger, Norway, which uses hydro-electric power and water-cooling. Built into an old NATO hideaway, owner Smedvig claims that the 22,000 square metre facility has the lowest Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating in the world, and a carbon footprint of virtually zero. 

This is where your likes are stored. Why build a data center in the Arctic Circle? Facebook puts its US$500 Million.

Data centre up here at 65° N in 2011 not to see the Northern Lights, but to save energy. One of the biggest costs for data center managers is cooling systems, which tend to use a lot of electricity. That's far less of an issue in Luleå where fresh air (as cold as -10.1°C/14°F in winter) is used to cool the building. The rest of the power for Facebook's only data center outside the USA is provided by hydro electricity. 

This is where the search ends. Google's also playing the Arctic Circle card, opening one of its most advanced and efficient data centers in Hamina, Finland in 2011. Located 145 km/90 miles east of the country's capital Helsinki, it's much further south than Luleå, principally so it can use seawater from the Gulf of Finland to chill the servers. Not by direct immersion, obviously, but by pumping raw seawater into heat exchangers, which transfer the heat generated by the servers to the seawater. The facility used to be a paper mill dating back to 1950s, so most of the infrastructure was already in place. 

The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array at Chajnantor is physically the largest astronomical project in existence. Its 66 high precision antennas on the Chajnantor Plateau (at an altitude of 4576 to 5044m) together make one a single radio telescope, and it's at one of the highest and driest astronomical observatory sites on Earth. 

More powerful than the Hubble Space telescope, it's used to study molecular gas and dust, the so-called 'cool Universe'. And that requires data storage. Cue the China-Chile Astronomical Data Center (Chi2AD), which provides storage and processing capacity to local and foreign astronomers at ALMA. With 0.7 petabytes, this Huawei-built data center will be able to store ALMA archive data for the next nine years.

source http://www.techradar.com/news/10-extreme-data-centers-that-look-straight-out-of-a-sci-fi-movie

Top Christmas Gifts For Five Kinds Of People In Your Life

The Apple TV can finally stream 4K content, so why not snatch up the 32GB version to enjoy your favorite shows in high-definition goodness? You’ll get all of the usual Apple features you’re used to such as touch control, Siri, apps and games, and more – just in glorious 4K. 

Buy it for AED 689

With integrated WiFi connectivity, voice recognition and home automation support, the Google Home wireless speaker will connect to your wireless network to provide control of and access to, virtually all of your smart devices. Easily play music, check the weather and traffic, control your smart home equipment and more, all just by using your voice. You can also get a number of different bases to easily match your Google Home to your décor, making it a truly stylish personal assistant. 

Buy it for AED 399

The beauty of the Nintendo Switch is that you can enjoy gaming on the couch or anywhere else that you go. It’s super portable and has a growing library of games, and you can easily add in additional controllers for some frantic local multiplayer action. 

Buy it for AED 1,219

We all have that one friend who’s in a constant state of wanderlust and is living their best life through several Instagram filters. The Polaroid Cube+ is a pocket-friendly action camera that can easily take photos and videos of whichever hidden alleyway you’re currently trying to explore. Built-in Wi-Fi makes it easy to stream or transfer content to your phone, so you can always share your best moments as they happen. 

Buy it for AED 399

Know someone who needs a great Android phone? Then the Samsung Galaxy S8 is the one to beat. This maple-gold version oozes elegance, and the curved bezels give this phone a truly hypnotic look. Throw in 64GB of storage and a seriously snappy camera into the mix, and you’ve got a phone that anyone would love to get their hands on this holiday season. 

Buy it for AED 2,015

source http://www.techradar.com/news/top-christmas-gifts-for-five-kinds-of-people-in-your-life

Best vacuum cleaners: from cordless Dyson to robot Roomba

Doing the chores can be, well, a chore. You get in from a hard day’s work, or are getting prepared to put your feet up for the weekend, when the dust and the dishes rear their ugly heads. The last thing you want to do is get cleaning.

But, like the budding Ghostbusters we are, we’ve all secretly got a soft-spot for doing the vacuum cleaning. It’s instant gratification, seeing the dirt, grime and crumbs sucked away into the netherworld of the vacuum cleaner’s bin.

And it only gets better if you’ve got a top-notch gadget to help you do it all. Whether it’s a lightweight cordless, a super-powerful upright or a “who needs humans?” robot cleaner you’re after, these are the best vacuum cleaners TechRadar has used. They all suck, but in the best possible way.

Want the absolute best cordless vacuum experience that money can buy? Then it’s going to cost you – but it’ll be worth it. The Dyson V8 Absolute is the company’s top-of-the-line battery powered vacuum cleaner, and is an absolute joy to use.

First, the design. With a removable extender pole and equipped with six different heads for different surfaces and use cases, the V8 Absolute is lightweight and easy to run around the house. But with the suction motor in the pistol-grip handle area, you can easily clip a head directly onto the main unit, turning the whole thing into a portable cleaner, perfect for going up the stairs of de-crumbing the car.

A full-charge will give you around 40 minutes of use, which is really impressive for a cordless cleaner – though mileage will vary once you start using on the motorised heads, or switch on the V8 Absolute’s MAX mode. You’ll rarely need it though – for a handheld, this cleaner will rival even an upright for sheers dirt-sucking power. Its large bin will take in plenty of trash too before needing emptying – another convenience not often seen in a cordless.

Best of all though, it genuinely is fun to use. The sci-fi aesthetic makes it one of the few “white goods” gadgets you’ll happily leave on show in the house, with the transforming design as useful as it is clever. It’s worth saving the cash for.

The Gtech AirRam MK2 blends the flexibility of a cordless vacuum with strong suction performance and easy use, making it a great choice for those looking for a vac they can quickly whizz around the home.

It’s super easy to setup out of the box, and after the the initial charge (it takes four hours to fully charge from flat) you’re ready to go. The need to charge however can be a hassle, especially if an accidental spillage has occurred and you want to quickly clean it, only to find the AirRam MK2 is out of battery. You could use it if plugged into the wall, but with such a short charging cable supplied that'd be wholly impractical.

An hour on the charger will give you a short burst of power to address a spillage, but if you’re planning on doing a general clean you’ll want a fall charge, which gives you around 40 minutes of use – similar to what you'd get from Dyson's V8 Absolute.

While charging may be a little inconvenient at times, it means you’re never tethered to a cord when using the Gtech AirRam MK2 and that is where is comes into its own. It’s lightweight and highly manoeuvrable body allows you to quickly and efficiently move round your home.

Gtech’s Airlock technology automatically adjusts the head for different flooring types, and suction is generally very good - but it’s not the best on offer.

The collection bin may be a bit on the small side too, but it’s incredibly easy to empty and ensures you don’t get your hands dirty, with the removable cylinder featuring a sliding lever that pushes out all the nasties.

It’s easy to carry up and down stairs, but with no hose or attachments you can’t easily vacuum stairs with it, or hard to reach areas of your home. It's price tag makes it a more approachable option than the Dyson however, so if you're on a budget it's well worth a look.

If you want serious suction from your vacuum cleaner, Dyson is the market leader. Its cyclone technology has long been touted as the best sucker around, and on the Light Ball Multi Floor we can safely say; this thing sucks big time. In a good way.

With 90AW of suction power the Dyson Light Ball Multi Floor tackles carpet, wood floors, laminate and more. Each pass hoovers up dust, hair and other particles struck inside your carpets too, not just those sitting on top.

We were surprised, and impressed with the amount of stuff it picked up during the first few trips around our house - clearly our previous vacuum wasn’t doing the job as effectively.

When the large bin fills up, it’s just a simple one button release from the body of the Light Ball, and then another one button press to dispense its contents into the bin - although with the large flag that opens at the bottom you’ll need to angle the cylinder accordingly.

As well as acting as a standard upright cleaner, the Light Ball also comes with a built in hose and tools, allowing you to tackle hard to reach places, ceilings and stairs with relative ease.

It’s still a bit of a beast to carry up and down stairs though, and at times the long 9.4m cord does get in the way, making you wish this was a cordless vacuum - but the trade off will be inferior suction.

If you’re in the market for a vacuum cleaner that will give your floors a seriously good seeing too, then the easy to use, highly maneuverable and surprisingly quiet (considering the suction) Dyson Light Ball could be up your street.

With AI smarts improving all the time and robotics increasingly as at home as on the production line, the sci-fi dream of having a little robot helper to potter about the house is increasingly becoming a reality. The Dyson 360 Eye is the vacuum cleaning company’s first effort in the space, and makes a good account of itself.

After a relatively painless app-powered set-up process, the camera equipped Dyson 360 Eye is able to navigate your home, weaving around obstacles on a cleaning routine you again establish through the app. 

Considering its small size, it's surprisingly capable at sucking up the rubbish in your home and, when its battery gets low and it's time for a recharge, the 360 Eye will intelligently return to its charging station without any prompting. 

It’s a premium product, commanding a high asking price that’s best used as a supplement to your usual cleaning rota rather than a replacement. With the 360 Eye doing the rounds once every day, you’ll find that your home will need a “deep clean” vacuum session by your own hand far more rarely. 

But there’s still room for improvement if the company ever make a second generation – the tall clearance makes it difficult for the 360 Eye to fit under furniture, a bigger bin would lessen the need to keep emptying it out, and a larger battery would give it a better chance of completing a whole-house sweep in one pass without a recharge session. 

The limitations of the wider product category taken into consideration, it’s a solid luxury cleaning product regardless.

Dyson’s not the only company working with robotics in the home space, and many rate iRobot and its Roomba 980 vacuum cleaner very highly, too.

A low-clearance, dirt-sucking disc, it’s likewise intelligent enough to go about its business in your home without much prompting from its human owners. The Roomba 980 will intelligently map your home for problem spots, kicking into a high-power mode when carpets are identified, and weaving around chair legs and other potential obstacles. 

With a two hour battery life, it will manage a longer cleaning cycle than the Dyson before it too heads back to its charging dock.

Other smart features of the Roomba 980 include its battery-powered “Dual Mode Virtual Wall Barriers” which signal to the bot which area to avoid if placed across a doorway, and more granular control over its cleaning procedures through its accompanying app. 

However, the Roomba 980 too has room for improvement, with it’s app not always terrible intuitive, and the robot itself sometimes getting bamboozled by cables.

It’s another pricey cleaning luxury, and making the choice between it and its Dyson rival will be a tough one. But for those that can afford it, the Roomba 980 is another excellent cleaning convenience. 

You may not have heard of the name Eufy before, but this more affordable robot vacuum cleaner offers some fantastic value and it comes from the sister brand of Anker, which is the closest thing to a household name in the world of portable chargers.

The RoboVac 11 has lots of cleaning settings included an automatic mode, maximum power, edge cleaning, single room cleaning or a mode that specifically focuses on one small area.

The problem is, unlike the two vacuums above you can't connect the RoboVac 11 to an app so you can't monitor or set your robot cleaner to go when you're not in the house.

Instead it's all activated through a remote control that comes in the box with the RoboVac 11. You can set it up on a timer so the cleaner will automatically head on its journey once a day, but it's not as useful as having an app to do it from anywhere in the world.

There's also no mapping technology built in and instead the RoboVac 11 will just make its own way around your home until the battery runs out. It uses infrared sensors to avoid bumping into furniture in your home, but it can be quite frustrating if you're to sit and watch it work as it doesn't clean as efficiently as some other cleaners.

With a 0.6 Lm bin this will keep going for multiple cleans and we found the battery life to last around 90 minutes on the automatic mode and a little bit less if you're using the maximum power suction.

The Eufy may not be the most efficient or powerful robot vacuum cleaner on the market, but considering its super low price point it's impressive how much value for money you get with the RoboVac 11.

Read our full Eufy RoboVac 11 review

While not quite as familiar a name as Dyson or Roomba, with the Neato Botvac Connected, Neato managed to create a vacuum cleaner that definitely gives the others a run for their money. 

At 10 cm tall, it comfortably manages to shuffle under most items of furniture, and uses laser guidance to map the room. It’s very satisfying watching it figure out which items of furniture it can navigate under and around. 

A little frustratingly, it doesn’t seem to factor in the little protruding circle on top of the unit that houses the Neato logo, and so does occasionally get caught on items that it only just clears.

You can control the Neato Botvac Connected using your phone, set up routines for when you want it to clean, and even pause mid-clean. There are also convenient buttons on the unit itself; one for ‘spot clean’ that will do one room, or ‘house clean’ that will do your entire home before guiding itself back to its base station. 

At 0.7 Lm, the bin size is bigger than both the Dyson 360 and the Roomba, but is still small in comparison to a standard vacuum cleaner, and will need emptying mid-clean if you have a large (or particularly dirty) home. 

There is the option to either have the Neato clean in Eco or Turbo mode, which will give you quieter or deeper cleaning, depending on your preference. From the time that we have spent with it, the deeper cleaning mode provides a very thorough level of cleaning, although will invariably miss areas that require moving of obstacles, so you’ll still need an occasional once-over with a hand-held vacuum cleaner.

• The best smart home devices for 2017

source http://www.techradar.com/news/best-vacuum-cleaners

Driving home for Christmas? Gadgets to keep the passengers happy

For many, visiting family for Christmas means spending hours on the road. However, joining the throngs of holiday traffic doesn’t have to equal restless passengers. While all of these suggestions would make for superb gifts in their own right, they promise to keep the recipient entertained — and the driver sane — for hours. So you might want to think about coughing up for one of these before setting the sat-nav to go. 

Whether your loved ones enjoy gaming, binging on Christmas TV movies or curling up with a good book, here’s a varied selection of must-have gadgets that’ll easily while the time away. 

One surefire way to keep younger passengers amused on the long drive home from grandma’s is the Nintendo Switch a.k.a. the hottest gaming device of 2017. Doubling as both a home console and handheld, the Switch’s adaptability means you don’t have to stop playing just because you’ve left the house. 

What’s more, if you whip out the console’s kickstand to employ tabletop mode, you can play multiplayer, which is great if you’ve more than one gamer in the back of the car. 

While these Sony WH-1000XM2 noise-cancelling headphones might be a rather extravagant purchase just to block out the sound of festive bickering, they are a solid investment should your passenger be regularly on the move. Not only do they tune out any background babble and sound crystal clear with music and movies, but they’re lightweight, flexible and comfortable, too.  

Plus they have a Quick Attention feature that temporarily pauses whatever it is that you’re listening to, should you need to take your attention elsewhere for a minute. 

With no frills attached, the Amazon Fire HD 10 might not be the prettiest pad in the world, but it’s an absolute bargain considering its HD display isn’t so dissimilar from the new iPad (it boasts 224 pixels per inch, to Apple’s 264 ppi). 

Built for content, this is a great gift for those who just want a solid slate to binge their favorite shows, movies and games upon — especially if they already have an Amazon Prime subscription, which opens access to a mammoth library. Just download the episodes you want to watch before setting off, and enjoy up to 10 hours of high-res fun. 

Amazon’s new Kindle Oasis is a real step up in terms of design, boasting a larger screen and metal case, which doesn’t get too heavy even after hours of reading. It’s waterproof, too, which means you don’t have to stress too much about accidentally chucking coffee over it while going over a speed bump. 

The coolest feature, however, is the audiobook setting: Should you own a title in both print and audio, you can switch seamlessly between the two without losing your place. 

Additionally if you’re travelling at night you have the option to switch the text so it reads white on black, meaning you can continue your literary feast without distracting the driver. 

By far the cutest gift idea on this list, not only is Anki’s Cozmo an adorable pocket-sized pal, but he’ll teach you how to code, too. Yep, this Wall-E lookin’ critter is a super smart toy that helps both kids and adults learn coding language and ensures they have fun while doing so. And while he may be better suited to your tabletop than your backseat, he'll be plucking at your heartstrings if you try to leave him home alone over the Christmas break.

Similar to a Tamagotchi, this little dude requires attention to keep him happy, but building a relationship is the best part of the game. Once you’ve taught him to say your name, and watched him get angry and embarrassed while teaching him how to swear, you’ll almost forget that you’re learning how to code at all. 

The device comes with three power cubes — interactive blocks that aid Cozmo’s development — and an app, which is where you’ll find the code lab. 

If the Nintendo Switch is out of your price bracket, the Nintendo 2DS XL is an excellent second option, especially if there are some nostalgic gamers in your entourage this year. This dual-screen gaming machine is compatible with an impressive back-catalogue of the classics, incl. The N64 Legend of Zelda games, one of the best Donkey Kong titles and Pokemon Sun and Moon. You can get NES and SNES games for it, too. 

The 2DS comes in fun color combos of black/turquoise and white/orange and has a ridged texture on the top side; considering its low price, it feels sleek and premium. That said, the screen is quite low res at 240p, so it’s not the right choice for someone looking for a top of the range gaming experience — but for someone after a more arcade feel, it’s perfect. 

Perhaps the most important item of them all, for what’s the the benefit of having all these awesome time-passing gadgets if they run out of juice mid-journey? 

While the MAXOAK 50,000mAh isn’t exactly the most portable of the portable chargers due to its weight and size, its battery is mammoth, and can charge up to six gadgets at the same time — including laptops — meaning every passenger on board can be kept fully fueled and entertained for the duration of the journey. 

Not the charger for you? Check our list of the best portable powerbanks.

• TechRadar's ultimate Christmas guide: shopping, toys, wishlists and more

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