Gadget Guru’s magic box

A few issues ago Guru was grilled by a reader on Bluetooth latency. One benevolent (or perhaps furious) audio brand took your favourite uncle’s ramblings as an opportunity to thrust a suitable product into his hands: the Tronsmart Onyx Prime True Wireless Earbuds ($99) are compatible with the aptX Adaptive codec, meaning they can go hi-res, low-latency, or everything in between. Surprisingly good? Absolutely, for the price, you get a richer sound than you might expect, with dual hybrid drivers essentially calling your ear drums out for a fight. ‘Made for audiophiles’ though, Tronsmart? Wind it in: while the Onyx Primes are indeed adept at wrangling low-latency audio, audio experts are going to sniff at the custard-thick bass layer. Guru quite enjoyed its bombast, but you may not.

To encourage his brainy-but-wayward kids to code, Guru recently picked up the PlayShifu Tacto coding kit ($89). You get little robot figurines with conductive bumps on their feet laid out in different patterns which get read by the multi-touch function of a tablet screen to identify which is which. Guru really enjoyed solving the puzzles in the accompanying app. The kids, though, were less than impressed that the toys could not control MrBeast or DanTDM and thus have barely touched them. C’est la vie.

As part of his less-interesting pays-the-bills work, Guru was asked to write a positive article on NFTs, which hurt a lot. If you have a wallet full of crypto-apes, he invites you to write to him to convince him why a bundle of digital receipts that confer no copyright or ownership has any true value, because the only effusive sources he can find are baddies trying to scam him out of cryptobucks.