Gadget Guru’s magic box

The deed is done: Guru has a new Android knockabout. He teased going to China for his affordable handset, but settled for a trip to exotic Finland to grab the recently discounted Nokia 8. Made by mysterious entity HMD Global, it may be Nokia in licensed name only compared to the classics of old, but it is about as close to a stock Google flagship as you’ll get for the £300-ish price. In fact, it just did very well in the group test of cheaper phones over on p100. Not that Guru’s dark influence reaches such things.

Now, don’t let this fill you with dread, but Guru is functioning progressively more poorly with age. Case in point: GaGu has become a glasses wearer. So annoyed was he by the shifty teen attempting to flog him hilariously marked up frames, Guru took his prescription and resolved to instruct all of you to buy your glasses online. Glasses Direct’s cyber-try-on feature is pretty damn neat and its specs are plenty cheap, although other sites are available.

GaGu’s brain is also slipping – blame those 10-or-so ‘lost years’ for his slight lack of short-term memory – so he’s upping his note-taking regime with the Moleskine Pen+ Ellipse (£180). It’s perhaps too frivolous an investment for most, but it sends scrawled notes into its poorly translated app, turns them into actual typed words or vector images, and even records audio while you’re scribbling, matching your notes to the sounds when you play it back. The real benefit, though: when Guru inevitably loses that special notebook, he’ll have a backup on his phone, and vice versa. Not sure what’ll happen when the pen goes walkabout, though.