GIFTS FOR GROWN-UPS
From £10 to £10,000
RASPBERRY PI ZERO W
£10 from shop.pimoroni.com Time was when a computer for Christmas was the best you could hope for. Now they’re cheaper than a bumper box of chocolates.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W is remarkably twice the price of its predecessor, the W standing for the integrated wireless that was added to this model in the form of Bluetooth and 802.11n 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. With wireless integration, the Pi Zero W suddenly becomes much more useful as a cheap computer for a specific job, particularly a low-power server. It’s also a great choice for custom projects, for patient people with a steady hand and a soldering iron.
Ultimately, it’s hard to be anything other than impressed by a computer that costs less than £10 and can fit comfortably inside a Christmas stocking.
GARMIN FENIX 5X
£630 from buy.garmin.com 2017 never quite developed into the year of the smartwatch,
writes editor-in-chief Tim Danton, but fitness watches have found their niche. To my mind, the Fenix 5X is the best of the lot – although I confess to some buyer’s bias, because I bought this myself during the summer.
Whether you’re the fitness fanatic or you know someone who is, this watch will be loved. When you first lift it out of the box it looks a bit cumbersome, but once on the wrist you don’t notice its 87g weight and instead appreciate its solid five-day battery life (two weeks if you don’t actually exercise) and sheer style.
You can buy slimmer versions – the plain Fenix 5 or the slimmer-yet 5S – but I chose the 5X for its 12GB of memory, which means that it comes preloaded with all the maps you’ll ever need.
OAKLEY RADAR PACE
£321 from pcpro.link/279oak If you’ve been considering hiring a personal trainer to marmalise the postChristmas podge, consider these instead. These fitness glasses will feed you audio instructions to control the pace of your runs, although they’re definitely not for the self-conscious fitness freak.
You don’t have to talk to your glasses, but that’s the way you’re supposed to check in on your various analytics, in the same way that you’d typically look at your running smartwatch. The Pace glasses are ANT+ compliant, meaning you can attach chest straps or cadence sensors should you wish.
Out of the box, though, it pairs with your phone and uses its own sensors (an accelerometer, gyroscope, humidity sensor and barometer, since you ask) to give you pretty solid information as you go. It didn’t take long in our tests for the Radar to inform us that our strides were too long and that we should aim for shorter, faster steps.
Don’t be fooled by the futuristic looks. The lenses are just lenses, with no Google Glass-like screens appearing before your eyes. But if you can cope with being the centre of attention on parkruns, and with the price, they’re a fitness aid like no other.
HONDA MIIMO
£1,599 from lawnmowersdirect.co.uk It might not be the time of year when you’re particularly bothered about mowing the lawn, but come spring you’ll be glad of this robot’s help. It looks nothing like a Honda Civic, yet this clever little fella can trim a sizeable garden all on its own, and it’s more fun to watch than Jenson Button in his Honda-powered McLaren. Honda’s technicians need to fit a perimeter wire around the edge of the area to be cut first – so the Miimo knows where to mow – and hook up the charging station to your mains supply, but once this is done, there’s very little left to do. After a few presses of the buttons to set the cutting pattern and timer, plus a short charge for the onboard lithium-ion batteries, off it goes, eerily and silently slicing through the grass. You’ll notice from the sleek, small, spacecraft-like looks that there’s no horrible grass-collecting box. Miimo’s three blades are whipped around at speed under its plastic lid thanks to a 25W motor (there’s a 10W motor on each wheel, too) so the grass is cut so small that the clippings stay on the lawn, acting as an eco-healthy compost. Despite the lack of stripes, the finish is seriously impressive: short and even. You won’t win awards for pretty patterns, but one of the many available settings is for Miimo to cut in a circular fashion for a slightly more interesting design.
ASTROHAUS FREEWRITE
£375 from getfreewrite.com If your nine-to-five is all about writing, you might want to add one of these “smart typewriter” E Ink word processors to your Christmas wishlist. The only thing you can use its net connection for is syncing your work to the cloud, meaning no interruption from emails or social networks. It also has a tactile keyboard with Cherry MX keyswitches for comfortable day-long creative sessions, and a four-week battery life, which is perfect for working on the move. The E Ink screen allows you to tap away in direct sunlight, but there’s also a front light for indoor work. It isn’t small, but it’s about the same weight as a laptop, so shouldn’t incur any excess baggage fees. At less than £400, it’s considerably cheaper than any decent laptop, too.
VIVITEK QUMI Q3 PLUS
£400 from pcpro.link/279qumi Sadly we live in a world where the first law of thermodynamics still holds, which means that despite Vivitek’s best efforts this tiny DLP projector – containing as it does a 500 lumens lamp –has a lot of heat to dissipate. The inevitable effect? Noise from the fans. They’re loud rather than whiny, though, and if you can cope with this then you’re rewarded by a vivid 720p picture from a unit that’s smaller than a 7in tablet (albeit rather thicker) and weighs 460g. Quite some feat. Running Android 4.4 and with Wi-Fi built in, it’s also able to stream video from the internet without a host system, but naturally you can hook up your choice of device via HDMI if you prefer.
GOOGLE DAYDREAM VIEW
£69 from store.google.com VR headsets don’t generally count as stocking fillers – especially when you factor in the high-end PC needed to run them. Google’s fabric-clad Daydream View is the exception.
With a reasonable £69 price, and an easy-to-use setup that taps into Google’s Material Design philosophy, the Daydream View stands to redefine smartphone-based VR. Throw in the fact that Google’s experience seamlessly integrates with YouTube and its bank of 360-degree video, and this headset is one of the best reasons to get behind virtual reality as an everyday medium.
The real game-changer with the Daydream View is its inclusion of a separate, movement-sensing controller. This small, pill-shaped device continues Google’s stripped-back approach to VR, having only a clickable touchpad and two menu buttons, plus volume controls on its side.
The biggest downside is compatibility with a limited selection of Android handsets. Make sure you check the list at before you buy. pcpro.link/279daydream
COZMO ROBOT
£200 from pcpro.link/279coz We’ve grown accustomed to robots hoovering and mowing the lawn, but Cozmo is a robot in the sci-fi sense. The “emotional” robot plays games, recognises faces of people and pets, and teaches children (and adults) the basics of coding. Designed and developed by a team of artificial intelligence experts alongside character experts from Pixar, Cozmo is brimming with personality; so much so, manufacturer Anki refers to the little tyke as “he”.
Each Cozmo is sold with three cubes, which act as play pieces when Cozmo challenges you to games. They’re also used to “feed” the robot Tamagotchi-style, and Cozmo will interact with them when in Freeplay mode, making Cozmo fun to watch as well as play with. To get started, all you need to do is download the iOS or Android app.
Alongside the games, Cozmo can also perform tricks, such as fist bumps, stacking cubes and playing peek-aboo. Our test seven-year-old’s favourite feature is Explorer mode, which turns Cozmo into a remote-controlled camera that can be driven around the house via the touchscreen on your smartphone. And let’s face it, Cozmo’s cheaper, cleaner and easier to look after than the dog they really want.
BOWERS & WILKINS P9 SIGNATURE HEADPHONES
£699 from johnlewis.com You have to love your music to spend £700 on headphones, and someone has to love you dearly to spend £700 on a Christmas present. But, if you can tick both those boxes, the P9s should be the cans you crave. They sound utterly wonderful. They’re powerful, agile, detailed and comfortable to wear. And unlike many other expensive headphones, you can use them out and about, connected to your phone. With chestnut-brown Saffiano leather covering the headband and exterior of the earcups, and softto-the-touch, memory foam-cushioned leather cups surrounding your ears, they look the part and feel every inch the high-end headphone.
SONY VPL-VW550ES
£8,799 from pcpro.link/279sony You can’t buy a projector capable of projecting 4K at native resolution for less than £5,000, and most new 4K models are more than £10,000. So, despite that eyebrow-raising price tag, the Sony VPL-VW550ES isn’t all that expensive for what it is.
So, what exactly do you get for your nine grand and why would you pay £2,500 more than Sony’s “budget” VPLVW320ES? The big difference is that the VPL-VW550ES supports HDR, including the forthcoming HLG standard. We were initially sceptical about this. After all, HDR is all about producing super-bright highlights and extending the dynamic range so that explosions, headlights and reflections appear more lifelike. A projector in most rooms, due to environmental factors, will never be able to deliver the same dynamic range as an HDR TV.
Still, if you’re going to be laying out this much on a home cinema projector, you’ll probably have it installed in a room where you can black out the windows completely, and in these circumstances a projector like this has a decent chance of producing an HDR-like effect. As we discovered.
Because this projector deals with all types of scene beautifully, including action sequences, with a welcome lack of motion blur. However, it’s the sense of contrast and solidity the image imparts that truly impresses. There’s none of that greyness to darker tones and black that can afflict less expensive projectors. In fact, the picture quality has the appearance of a great TV, with wonderful presence, balance and natural colours.
It’s also a quiet projector, especially with the low lamp mode engaged. Even with high lamp mode enabled, I measured a maximum 76.3dBA. This is far from silent, but the character of the noise – a soft whooshing rather than a noisy whining – isn’t annoying.
If you want the ultimate home theatre experience without having to spend tens of thousands on a professional setup, this Sony VPL-VW550ES is a wonderful choice.
SAMSUNG GEAR 360 (2017)
£209 from pcpro.link/279gear The 2017 version of Samsung’s 360-degree camera is a big improvement on last year’s debut effort. While the original Gear 360 had removable tripod legs that folded away when not in use, the new version is designed with the stand and hand grip built in. It looks smarter and is considerably easier to carry. More importantly, Samsung has relaxed its bloody-minded decision to only let the device play with its top-end phones, although check the list of compatible devices first. Samsung has also added the ability to live-stream video straight to YouTube or Facebook. Given that it seamlessly stitched together images and video better than the original – and the other improvements – you would expect a price bump, so the £130 price cut is a welcome Christmas bonus. BAMBOO FOLIO From £125 from uk-store.wacom.com There are plenty of ways to digitally capture drawings and writing, not least scrawling straight onto a tablet screen, but the Bamboo Folio has some obvious advantages: you can still write on paper, you don’t need to constantly synchronise (it stores up to 100 pages at a time in its memory) and the Folio itself looks great. Finished in charcoal fabric, it screams “I’m an important executive, you know”.
There are two versions, but the small £125 version still has space to hold a 9.7in tablet. To us, it makes more sense than the large £165 version. So why buy it at all? One use is to share notes and drawings: the Folio will accurately capture your jottings, exporting them as JPEG, PNG, PDF or WILL files. Plus you can sync them straight to Dropbox, Evernote and OneNote. Bamboo even offers the capability to convert handwriting to text as part of its Inkspace Plus subscription (around £3 per month), but even without this feature the Folio is an elegant gift for the executive who has everything.