All The Tech Changing Our Tastes in 2024
Keys-to-Go 2
Every month Logitech surprises me with an even thinner and smaller keyboard. This issue is no exception, although I’m not expecting anything at all to beat the Keys-to-Go 2 anytime soon.
This totally totable mobile keyboard is thinner than most of the slim paper notebooks I carry around. Folded it comes to just 8.77mm thick. It has a length and width of 250mm x 105mm. The fliptop lid, when open, puts the So not quite small enough for pocketability, but small enough to disappear into a bag. It’s so small and spill resistant it doesn’t even have a charging port, instead opting for coin cell batteries with a 36 month battery life. It has quick switch keys to flip between three different bluetooth capable devices.
It comes in lilac and graphite, and despite being so small still found room for premade quick keys for media. If you were to choose the colour based purely on environmental impact the graphite colourway has slightly higher levels of recycled plastics in it than Lilac (36% vs 33%).
Logitech took the brief for portable mobile keyboards and they nailed it, with surprisingly bold concessions for an overall better product. Personally mine loafs around in the lounge for the media centre being unassuming on the mantelpiece. And if the toddler gets it, I’m pretty sure it’ll come out the other end intact just fine. Helps that there’s no plug holes for playdough to be deposited inside.
Beer For Boring Phones
Heineken I can safely say, is only know for one thing. American apparel brand Bodega is in much the same boat. So if the two were to get together what would they make together. Logically a phone, duh. The pair have introduced The Boring Phone, made to appeal to the nostalgia of people who remember fliptops and Gen Z’s who care enough about their minds to not get brainrot from constantly scrolling on a regular smartphone. The angle the two brands are going for is that a social life is not well served by a smartphone. It touts the worst email for productivity (because it doesn’t have internet access), no maps support, No High quality camera, and most importantly no social media, unless you count SMS. Despite being called a boring phone, it’s anything but with it’s clear case, somehow more reminiscent of early 00s toys than with say The Nothing Phone which is as space age as possible while being see through. Only 5000 of these dumb phones are being made, but for everyone else looking to unplug there will also be a app that limits your own phones functionality, giving you more discipline with your digital life.
heineken.com/global/en/theboringphone
The Latest in Nothing
Staying on the topic of phones that look like they evolved at the bottom of the ocean Nothing has got a special edition of their Phone (2a). While most of their phones have a monochromatic aesthetic, the Special edition leaves splashes of artfully placed red, yellow and blue, which are all colours found across their product range. The limited run ran out pretty quick, but you can still sign up on their website for alerts for possible restocks. Frankly the (2a) is cool enough as it is without going for limited run versions. Internally it’s the same as it ever was. It’s powered by a 8-core 4 nm Gen 2 Dimensity 7200 Pro 5G and is packed with 12gb + 8gb RAM Booster. The 5000 mAh Battery promises a decent amount of uptime to admire the 120Hz AMOLED display. A days charge can be achieved in just 20 minutes using the 45W fast charge. It has Dual 50MP ultrawide cameras to give people thefull picture, and a 32 MP front facing camera to show everyone your mug.
Apart from the ability to see inside the phone to a degree is the LED glyphs on the back of the phone which add to every experience. Pounding lights with the music, a sliding bar of light to show when a photo is about to be taken, or flickering to show it’s timing. Everything has its own pattern and language, allowing you to understand the phone to a degree without ever picking it up.
Pioneering The Euphoric
Pioneer has gone out of it’s way to develop a DJ mixer that makes you feel one with the music. It’s been carefully crafted inside and out to give flawless performance. The same can’t be said for the dude standing too close to his amp. All the sound is piped through a transformer circuit co-designed by AlphaTheta and the legendary Rupert Neve Designs. The transformer creates a glossy and energetic sound that’s smoother for mixing. Low frequencies such as kicks and bass are more stable and punchy, mid frequencies like vocals and instruments have more presence and gloss, and high frequencies such as hi-hats sound silky and natural.
On the outside the knobs and faders have had special attention paid to them giving them the perfect tactile feel as well as resistances that are responsive to turn speed, allowing for either quick smooth transitions or subtle tweaks. They also have a high level of vibration absorption so nothings going to get unadjusted when things get really heaving on the dancefloor.
The euphonia features 5 built-in spatial effects and a high-pass filter. These are: Delay, Tape Echo, Echo Verb, Reverb, Shimmer, and HPF (high-pass filter). It also has a Send/Return section for external effect units. A boost level setting can quickly set depending on your style. +12dB for dynamic performances, +6dB for sound quality adjustments, and 0dB for reverb effects without any volume boost.
A new boost send feature makes it possible to apply effects with a single hand, freeing up your other hand to mix another track at the same time. Euphonia’s Mix Level Meter comes with a needle meter for each channel, making visual checks on individual channels easy to keep track of.
As a final product this is a gorgeous rotary mixer with a two-tone, two-layer aesthetic. The top layer is demarcated by a lip and a gloss texture on the top half where the display section is housed. Copper coloured caps set the whole piece off with a warm aesthetic, perfect for an evening of good beats.
RRP$7,299.00 pioneernz.co.nz
Eyes On Ray-Ban
Ray-Ban entered the smartglasses market in 2021 with the Ray-Ban Stories in collaboration with Facebook and that partnership continues to this day. Ray-Ban keeps things simple with their foray into tech essentially embedding cameras into the frames and calling it a day. The new Ray-Ban Meta Skyler cranks the numbers but keeps things focussed on what Ray-Ban does best, style. It’s shape is inspired by an era of iconic jet-set style and the wider front and gentle curves are designed to suit most faces.
The cameras have more than doubled their quality now sitting at 12MP and offers an ultra-wide view to boot. Images can be taken at 3024x4032px while video can be shot at 1440×1920 with 30fps.
When using your phone you can toggle between your phone and glasses camera offering a unique livestream perspective. It has a five-mic array, handy for both capturing audio as well as offering voice commands if touch controls are too much like hard work. Piping in sound is done via 2 custom-built open ear speakers.
Battery life lasts four hours on a single charge and it has a 32gb of storage. The only limitation is making sure you’re either running IOS 14.4 or Android 10. Anything below that and you’re going to have issues.
Keyboard of the Future
Keys and boards are so 20th century. The future is here and the future wants a relatively clear surface to drum your fingers on. The TapXR is a bracelet with a outward facing camera on the wrist, point down toward your fingers. Simple start tapping your fingers like you’re on a keyboard and let the magic happen. With a single hand you can achieve 70+ words per minute and you can do it on any surface. If you’re on the go with a smartwatch you can even use your own watch wrist as a keyboard as you type onto your device. It even works as an airmouse, letting you quickly pinch and poke your way through menus. You can even turn hand gestures into macros, making your productivity just a little bit quicker. The best part is that you can’t drop food crumbs into it. It has an eight hour battery life and can be fully charged in an hour over lunchtime.
Getting Handsy
Imagine a world where you can pick stuff up and roll it around in our hands, feeling it’s surfaces and even holding it with a few pinched fingers Until we manage to find a way of fulfilling this dream in real life we’ll have to make do with the VR alternative, the HaptX Gloves G1. Their slow global rollout is currently getting underway, allowing users to remotely feel and manipulate objects, either within VR, or within reality via factory and R&D robotic arms. The gloves come tethered to a bulky airpack of compressed air and hotswappable batteries which allows for mobile use. Hundreds of actuators within the gloves are powered by the air, which physically pushes against your skin when you come up against something in VR. This gives you the ability to really grip and hold things more naturally than using some trigger grips on a controller. The gloves SDK is designed to allow people to integrate the G1 with their virtual reality and robotics programs. The SDK also allows multiple users to handle and feel the same objects at the same time. This is enterprise hardware at enterprise pricing, but in a couple years we might be seeing more compact, widespread use of this tech. What will have to happen first is finding a way of shrinking down the backpack.
You Can’t Monitor This
We talked about Spacetop at the beginning of the year, but now it’s design has been finalised and Sightful are taking preorders for the device. Shipping is expected to start in October 2024 (US only unfortunately) with prescription lenses included. Preorders cost US$1900.
But for those that don’t know what we’re looking at. The Spacetop G1 is what the future of AR could look like. What appears at first blush to be a laptop is in fact mostly a sunglasses case. Where a screen would be is a tethered pair of AR glasses that can project for the user a 100” screen. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon QCS8550 with an Adreno 740 GPU. Ram is 16 GB LPDDR5 and it comes with a 128 GB UFS3.1. The 60Wh battery lasts up to 8 hours and going from 0% to 85% takes less than 2 hours.
It uses a custom OS based on chromium and promises anything you can do online you can do on this device. Essentially think of this as an XR Chromebook.
The specs of the specs are 2 OLED displays doing a respectable 1920×1080 pixels per eye. And a decent refresh rate of 90hz. It has a 50 degree diagonal field of view.
The Spacetop fills a weird niche, mostly offering a gigantic screen only you can see. This could be useful on long flights or handy for spys who want to look extremely conspicuous staring into space while working on their google docs. The glasses also have two dimming modes, making it possible to see the virtual screens in bright daylight with no problem at all, lending it another advantage over traditional screens.
The only part we’re waiting on now is announcements around it’s AI button, which is supposed to offer contextual based info based on what’s happening on your desktop or even the real world around you using the cameras on your glasses and keyboard.
Plugging Perry
Denon has teamed up with Katy Perry to show off their Denon PerL Pro premium true wireless earbuds with personalised sound and lossless audio over bluetooth.
The timing works well for Katy because it gives her a chance to plug her new album dropping soon. “This partnership aligned perfectly with the timing of my new dance-pop record and will help my fans to tap into a sound experience that’s as unique as they are. With Denon PerL, my fans will feel every beat of their favorite songs, including my new single, “Woman’s World” and upcoming album.”
These earbuds judge-I mean- measure your ears to give you a personalised audio experience using what they’ve dubbed as Masimo Adaptive Acoustic Technology. This takes a few minutes in a quiet space where it plays blips occasionally to find what frequencies you’re most sensitive to. There’s no user input during this stage. You just need to chill out and wait for the perfect settings to happen. You can flick at will between default profiles and your personalised one, and you’ll be able to hear the difference immediately. Immersion Mode allows you to play with the bass boost and other equalisers.
It has 8 hours of battery life, or 24 all up with the charging case. A quick five minute charge before you nip out gives you an hour of playback.
Voice calls have been beefed up with Qualcomm aptX Voice that uses a 32kHz super wideband and eight microphones for clear vocal pickups. It comes with four fully customisable touch inputs that can be configured via the app on your phone which also controls the different ANC settings.
Each earbud weighs 8.6g, significantly more than most earbuds, 2 grams more than Bose QuietComforts and 3 grams more than the Huawei FreeClips.
They come with four different tip sizes giving you the best chances of getting the perfect fit. They are both sweat and splash-resistant.
It comes in black and white and has active noise cancellation which can be tuned to a transparent social mode if your coworkers don’t get the hint. Perhaps my gripe about them is how gargantuan they look, like two buttons stuffed in your ears. But at the very least it loudly declares “I’m vibing right now”.
An Ear (a) on AI
There was a trend for a while where we would chuck a computer in everything, call it smart, and then hope it would sell like hotcakes. Now that we’ve run out of things to put computers in (even cheap disposable vapes can have tetris on them if you want) the hot new trend is to put ChatGPT in stuff. Now it’s really smart! That’s the case with Nothing’s new Ear (a). It’s been integrated with ChatGPT so you can seamlessly chat to the world changing tech from your earbuds. Simply pinch and hold the earbuds to get chatting. It’s pretty impressive even if it’s just a shortcut and so far other reviewers have also been impressed with it’s functionality.
Available in white, black and yellow Nothing is back up to it’s old tricks with a transparent design and rounded charging case. It has up to 45db of noise cancellation. It uses smart cancellation to detect noise leakage between the earbud and your ear canal to adjust the required levels of cancellation. With noise cancellation turned off you can get 9.5 hours of playtime, stretched to 42.5 hours with intermittent case charging.
It has a 11mm driver for a rich punchy sound. The buds are certified for Hi-Res Audio Certified for playback up to 990kbps and frequencies up to 24 bit/96 kHz. End to end latency is less than 120ms, making it good for gaming.
Each earbud weighs 4.8g, almost half what the denon buds on the opposite page weigh! On the software side it can do dual connection, has personal sound profiles, advanced equalisers as well as profile sharing.
Pocket Rocket
The Turbo Mini X / 65W Desktop Mini Tower is a hot little number for people looking at getting an incredibly small gaming desktop. It’s about 1.5 inches thick (214.6 x 36.3 x 180mm). Most mini PCs have to rely on mobile CPUs but not this one. It comes equipped with a weirdo B760 motherboard and supports an Intel 14th/13th/12th generation 65W Desktop CPU. It has support for an external PCIe Discrete Graphics Box, which looks like a GPU in a goldfish tank. Essentially you can plug a GPU directly into the motherboard without even opening the case. Tomshardware reckons you could probably get up to a RTX 4080 running with it. It will have versions supporting DDR4 SODIMMs and DDR5. This is for DIY nerds only.
Inflation Affecting Safety
Under development for 10 years the Ventete aH-1 has reinvented the bike helmet, replacing bulky foam with fresh air.
Made of 11 interconnected nylon chambers the aH-1 can be deflated and folded away, so you aren’t left with any bulky safety gear to deal with. But how safe is it? According to the brand it’s been certified in the UK and EU with flying colours and even “exceeds testing requirements”, achieving CE/UKCA safety certification EN1078. It outdoes foam helmets in protecting against linear and rotational impacts which are leading causes of brain injuries in bike riders. Punctures are minimised with soft padding that also helps mitigate abrasion, likewise polymer ribs have been added for durability. It’s been designed with portability in mind, easily slipping into your laptop back when you’re done with it. Inflation time takes about 30 seconds and comes with a rechargeable mini pump. It’s incredibly expensive, working out to about NZ$740. But how much more is your head worth?
The first release started in July and immediately sold out. But head to their site and sign up for alerts if you were hoping to get in on a second release.
Meet Your New “Friend”
Every now and again the tech bros shock me out of my consumer reverie with a product so dystopian I start to question how we got to this point. The latest to gain this enviable achievement is “Friend”. It’s a little circle that you wear on a necklace. It connects via bluetooth and churns away on an internet connection doing what we’re assured is “always listening and forming their own internal thoughts”. Pressing it’s single button lets you talk directly to it, and it can even pre-emptively formulate responses. It’s being spun as an emotional toy to combat lonliness rather than the next evolution in productivity.
Avi Schiffmann, the creator of this turbo microphone assures us that “No audio or transcripts are stored past your friend’s context window.” and that “All memories can be deleted in one click within the friend app.”
Well that’s a relief. Pricing starts at US$99
The Motorola Edge 50 Pro
Motorola is expanding its premium phone options in NZ with their new flagships, the Motorola Edge 50 Pro and Motorola Edge 50 Fusion. The Pro is not cheap but it packs a punch. It uses 125W TurboPower charging to get a day of charge into the 4500mAh in only 18 minutes. It can also do wireless charging at blazing fast speeds which is a big draw for me. The plug is always the first thing to go on my phone. It comes with an impressive IP68 underwater and dust protection. The 6.7” Super HD (1220p) screen is nearly borderless, in fact it wraps around enough to do edge alert lighting while it’s face down. It runs at 144hz and under the hood is a Snapdragon® 7 Gen 3 processor with up to 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM. There’s plenty of space for apps as well with 512gb of storage and a nifty RAM boost which can temporarily turn storage into RAM. Moto users generally recommend turning this feature off though. You’ve got more than enough grunt without fiddling with slower RAM alternatives.
The camera is the first mobile phone to achieve a Pantone validated camera and display.
To sweeten the deal until September 2nd 2024 some retailers will be giving a bonus pair of moto buds+ featuring Sound by Bose.
The Motorola edge 50 pro, RRP $1,099, is available in sleek Black Beauty, with a vegan leather finish.
Take Shots Like This
Whether you’re a professional photographer or a hobbyist with way too much money on your hands, the new Fujifilm GFX 100S II is perfect for those wanting to explore the world of large format photography. This mirrorless digital camera, which is the lightest of the GFX series has a new 102MP high-speed sensor and a high-speed image processing engine, the X-Processor 5. It steps it up over previous models with ISO80 as a standard sensitivity, giving the camera a greater dynamic range and less noise over previous models.
It can snap 7 frames per second, weighs 883g and comes packed with everything it takes to take a good photo, apart from your eye for detail. It has AI based subject detection that can detect subjects and track and focus on them as they’re on the move.
In terms of video performance, users can shoot vibrant and smooth 4K/30P videos, allowing for high-quality video production.
The GFX100S II (body only) is priced around $9699.
Hit ’em in the Knees, Chief
Using your own knees is for cavemen, and the poor. Or if we’re going to do this with minimal snark, people getting on a bit or anyone suffering an injury. Spun out of Arc’teryx and Google X a little startup called Skip have created a pair of hiking trousers that have a built-in exoskeleton on each knee called MO/GO. It provides a 40% strength boost to your legs and makes the ascent just that little bit easier. The battery can take you up to 9km or around 3 hours of uphill walking. Each unit weighs about a KG but should make you feel 13kg lighter, so that’s a net gain. The units are full customisable in terms of how much assistance it gives and also adjusts its behaviour in real-time based on the sort of movement you’re doing. The actual pants part are made of Nylone and Elastane and attach to the motors via adjustable carbon fiber cuffs.
The first two batches of these have already sold out, with the third batch delivering in Decemeber at the time of writing.
skipwithjoy.com $5000
HKC Xplorer 2.0 “Shorty” Adventurer
We like to push the definition of what counts as tech in this section of the magazine, but this camper is just too cute not to talk about. Aptly dubbed “Shorty” the HKC Xplorer 2.0 Adventurer was built specifically to be able to fit inside your garage when it isn’t in use without sacrificing all its interior space. It achieves this by being an elevated pop-up queen sized tent with plenty of storage that’s able to get whipped up in under 5 minutes. It has up to 3,450 litres of space with room for a 96L fridge. It has a full kitchen setup and an expansive 270 degree awning for quickly creating a dry area. Perfect for when you roll into the doc camping ground during a drizzle. It includes 2 100Ah AGM Batteries and a portable LPG water heater and shower. They even managed to chuck out the ladder in favour of a staircase. Just because it’s compact doesn’t mean you need to lose any of the conveniences.
Tesla Mezcal
Did I mention just before that we’re pushing the boundaries of what counts as tech around here? Ah we’re at the end of the section anyway, let’s celebrate with some er, TESLA Mezcal. This 43% mezcal comes delivered in a hand blown glass bottle designed by Tesla’s Director of Product Design, Javier Verdura.
It’s a limited edition, and is already sold out, sorry, you’ll have to go aftermarket for your Tesla branded alcohol. It’s descrbied as “Smoky and floral with a smooth finish. Our limited-release Tesla Mezcal celebrates Oaxaca’s artisanal Tahona-milled mezcal with an alembic distillation process by intuitively combining the distinct flavors of native Espadín and Bicuishe agaves. The result is a mezcal that is as delicate as it is spicy, with a deep citrus and green apple nose that gives way to soft herbal notes with a delicate smokiness that lingers on the tongue. Finishes with notes of tuberose, jasmine and chamomile that soften into a balanced, velvety mouthfeel.”
tesla.com $450
