Smart soundbars are an interesting idea. They’re like smart speakers, except they work with your TV, so you can use your voice like a remote control. Neat! In January, Polk wowed CES attendees with its new Command Bar. Put bluntly, this smart device is a big honking soundbar with an Amazon Echo Dot stuffed inside of it. That means the Command Bar can do anything an Echo Dot can do as well as a few extra tricks. It’s pretty ugly, too. Read More >>

Listen, I get it. Your phone came with a pair of earbuds, and you’ve been using them every day, because they’re fine. Things could be so much better, my friend. Sometimes in life, it’s worth splurging on on a thing you use a lot. And upgrading from your tinny, terrible earbuds to proper headphones is one of those times. Read More >>

You remember the feeling. Maybe it’s been a while, but you know what it’s like to walk into a climate-controlled space (that often smells good, too), find a nice item on a shelf, hold it in your hands, hand a clerk a few quid, and walk out the door with that new thing in a bag. We don’t do that enough any more, and that’s a shame, because you know what? It’s fun to go to shops. Read More >>

Five years ago, a lot of people thought Cody Wilson was a wild-eyed fanatic. The New Yorker described his rhetoric about making blueprints for 3D-printed guns available to anyone on the internet as “divorced” “from any practical reality.” Yet here we are in 2018, and Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, is still in the news being branded as a threat to national security. President Donald Trump weighed in this week, and just yesterday, a US federal court blocked the 30-year-old from relaunching his website. What the hell is happening? Read More >>

When I was a kid I always wanted to electrify my Lego creations. I wanted my Lego planes to fly, and I wanted my Lego cars to drive. The latter is finally possible thanks to Lego’s new Power Up platform, a set of features that lets you add motors to Lego creations and control them with a smartphone app. One of the first sets is a drivable Batmobile, and boy, does my dog hate it. Read More >>

Members of the military and other US Defense Department employees can no longer use apps or certain devices that track their location in operational areas. That means no more Fitbits in war zones, folks. Can you even believe this was ever allowed? Read More >>

A weird thing about reviewing gadgets for a living is that my neighbours notice. Sometimes they just call me out for getting a lot of packages in the post. Other times, they ask me for advice. One neighbour recently pointed out the £170 Jabra 65t Elite Active truly wireless buds I was wearing in the lift. “What do you think?” he asked. After taking the earbud out of my head and asking him to repeat the question, I was honest and probably a little bit surprised by my candour. I said, “I love them. You should buy them.” Read More >>

Just 21 years after facing near-bankruptcy, Apple Inc. just became the first publicly traded company in history to be worth $1 trillion (£767 million). This means that Apple’s market cap is roughly the same as the nominal GDP for Mexico, the world’s 15th largest economy according to the United Nations. It’s a meaningless milestone in many ways, but it also got me thinking. Did you know that the 2001 dark fantasy film Monkeybone (starring Brendan Fraser and Whoopi Goldberg) isn’t on Netflix? It is not. Read More >>

At a glitzy event near Times Square on Tuesday, Sony unveiled its new lineup of Bravia flagship TVs. (The company literally pulled a veil off of them, according to an eyewitness account from this blogger.) The new TVs are collectively called the Master Series, and the screens are designed to offer image quality that’s comparable to Sony’s high-end professional reference monitors, the same kind that Hollywood people use when making feature films. Also, somewhat confusingly, Netflix is involved. Read More >>

It feels like it was only a matter of time before Robert Mueller started investigating Donald Trump’s tweets. And it seems that time has come. The New York Times reports that the special counsel “is scrutinising tweets and negative statements” from the president about James Comey and Jeff Sessions. Specifically, Mueller reportedly wants to know if Trump’s behaviour adds up to obstruction of justice. Boy, there sure are a lot of tweets, too. Read More >>

If you’ve ever sat down to watch your Roku-powered TV and thought, “Boy I wish I had some Roku-powered speakers to enhance this experience,” you are in luck. The set-top box maker has announced a new set of speakers that work exclusively with Roku TV televisions. It’s kind of a curious move for the company, but it also makes weird sense. Read More >>

It’s been quite the month for Indiana Jones-inspired madness, after a sealed 2,000-year-old sarcophagus was discovered in Alexandria, Egypt, on 1 July. Nobody knew what was inside, but some feared that the black granite coffin might be cursed. Those fears were put to rest on Thursday, when the sarcophagus was finally opened. It was full of human bones and sewage. Read More >>

A regular old manual toothbrush can easily cost just a couple of pounds. You might have one in your bathroom right now, ready to tackle the plaque, and the coffee stains, and the bad breath that make its existence integral for modern living. But in our 21st-century society, it’s easy to spend much more on an electric toothbrush that does the same thing. Why on Earth would anyone want to do this? Read More >>

This week, a German federal court ruled that Facebook must give the mother of a dead 15-year-old access to her entire account. They’re not just talking about access to a memorial page, either. The mother gets access to everything, including private messages. In Germany, the judges decided, heirs should be able to inherit a social media account in the same way that they might inherit a box of letters. Read More >>

A kid-sized submarine arrived in northern Thailand, just a few hours before the final four members of a youth football team and their coach were rescued from the flooded Tham Luang cave complex. Elon Musk, whose minions had built the sub out of SpaceX rocket materials for the sole purpose of moving the trapped boys to safety, delivered the mini sub himself and announced his presence in a tweet to his 22 million followers. Meanwhile, the rescue chief said that the kid-sized submarine was “not practical” for the boys, as thousands heaped praise onto Musk for doing—well—it’s unclear if the bombastic billionaire really did anything helpful. Which makes you wonder: is Elon Musk serious with this shit? Read More >>