While utterly generic, I have a soft spot for 'gadget bags', as I call them. My go-everywhere briefcase has been filled in recent times with a myriad of cables and adapters - and this £17 UGREEN organiser bag arrived for review at exactly the right time. See the photos below - my wires have never been so easy to find and hard to lose!
The number one hassle with power banks on trips is that you also have to remember to take with you the right charging cable for each family device that you might need to rescue. For most of us, this means bringing along a power bank plus a Type C cable, a microUSB cable, and Lightning too, for family members with iPhone or iPads. This Aenkyo accessory is perhaps the ultimate swiss army knife in the power bank world, in that it can not only charge phones via Qi wireless, it has integral Type C, microUSB and Lightning cabling. So - quite literally - no extra wires are needed.
As is traditional, I save this sort of accessory review for Friday. Bluetooth speakers are very common and commoditised by now, of course, but I chose this one to review because it has a single unique selling point. It has a carrying handle. Don't laugh - it makes a huge difference and is immediately likeable - every other speaker has to be held in a vice-like grip or cradled somehow. The DA150 here can be hooked around a finger while you carry other things, to the beach, to the garden, whatever. Read on...
What's this? A review of a smartphone that doesn't run Symbian on AAS? And that doesn't run Windows 10 Mobile on AAWP? Actually yes - it's my first look at the new Nokia 6, running Android. And it's here because it's the return of the classic Nokia brand that I've written about so many times on these sites. The personnel behind it are mostly different, the OS certainly is, but is it worth casting a look in the 'new' Nokia's direction?
Nokia's DC-19 Universal Portable USB Charger provides an easy way of topping up your phone's battery when out and about. That's something that seems to be an increasingly common requirement, a result of integrated batteries having become the norm, and the reality that most smartphones need to be charged at least once a day. There are a large number of portable battery charging products on the market, so is there anything that makes Nokia's latest entry in this category stand out from the crowd?
Transparent, waterproof pouches that enable us to use our tech in the pouring rain, down the beach or even, in extreme cases, underwater, have been around for a while, of course, I looked at Proporta's Beach Buoy last year. And now we have E-Case's eSeries 9, with smaller overall form factor and higher window-to-bezel ratio. Here's the eSeries 9 submersible case in action with a couple of likely candidate handsets. Summary? We have a winner...
Sooner or later we all need to keep an eye on our finances, and doing so requires a dependable tool. Expense tracking apps have been on mobile devices for as long as, well, for as long as there have been mobile devices! The problem is that they've been data silos that are tricky to get your data in and out of. In this age of cloud computing, we need an expense tracking app that's backed up by a cloud service so we can easily access our data from anywhere and any device. That's exactly what Toshl is, so let's take a look.
As reported last week, Proporta's just launched a bike mounted version of their popular Beach Buoy waterproof case for all touchscreen phones - and I couldn't resist giving it a real world test. Here's my review - is it worth the five minutes set up time to have your smartphone always to hand in all weathers? Maybe - I'd say a more definite yes, if you live in the rainy UK and get lost a lot!
Power hungry smartphones are always looking for a recharge. So a car charger is going to be high on the priority for a lot of people. But which one should you get? One option is Nokia's DC-20 unit, which initially draws the eye with its twin USB charging ports. And while USB car chargers are never going to generate much excitement, the Nokia DC-20 is a diamond amongst the rough competition.
I remember getting into heated debate in 2009 around the pros and cons of resistive vs capacitive touchscreens - one of the biggest pros for 'resistive' was that phones like the Nokia N97 and 5800 could be used with gloves on, out in cold weather. Over the next year, the market swayed decisively towards capacitive technology, and rightly so, but now we have an accessory that brings back gloved, cold weather use to all capacitive-screened smartphones...
