Apple plays it safe with the new 9th generation iPad October 7, 2021 I remember clearly the release of the first iPad back in 2010. Coming just three years after Apple had reinvented the mobile phone, the iPad seemed to create an entirely new product category. While there had been tablets before it, they lacked that sprinkle of Apple magic that drove the iPad into millions of homes, [...]
Liquid Diamond: The only wine celebrating National Emoji Day July 14, 2021 This Saturday 17 July is National Emoji Day – a holiday that celebrates and validates our obsession with the graphic icons invented by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. This may seem entirely unrelated to the world of oenology, but at least one viticulturist is blending smiley faces, love hearts and thumbs ups with their [...]
What top London chefs really think about Instagram May 14, 2021 Heston Blumenthal is famously exacting about the dining experience. He tries to create “sensory memories”, controlling not only the way his dishes look and taste, but what his diners are listening to while they eat. His The Sound of the Sea, a signature dish at The Fat Duck, came with an iPod Nano playing, well, [...]
How video games could be the next frontier in the WFH revolution May 5, 2021 By this time last year, most of us were already experiencing Zoom fatigue. A month of working remotely had taken its toll and the endless queue of video meetings seemed to exemplify the creeping malaise of this new way of working. Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft’s games division Xbox, soon came up with a novel [...]
Oppo Find X3 Pro review: An excellent new top-tier handset April 27, 2021 The consumer electronics industry has been hit as hard as any by the pandemic, with companies struggling to even build their products – just try getting your hands on a graphics card or a next gen games console – let alone get them in front of customers. And while there have been a handful of [...]
Picnic time! Get Michelin-quality food straight to your blanket March 17, 2021 Last summer, during the hazy window of relaxed lockdown measures, I went for a picnic in London Fields. I wasn’t the only one. The entire borough appeared to have descended on the sorry-looking scorched grass. Apart from the laughable lack of social distancing, of which I was unwittingly a part, the most upsetting thing was [...]
How Bloodborne dragged me through the dark days of lockdown February 27, 2021 In the before-times, people like me – people in the prime of their working lives, three decades away from collecting a pension – would occasionally drift into reverie about what it might be like to retire. The books we would read, the places we would visit, the things we would create. Somewhere, the mother of [...]
The Medium review: A middling next gen horror February 12, 2021 Between Covid delays and a slow start to the new console generation, true next-gen games have been thin on the ground. One of the first titles to debut on Microsoft’s new hardware is The Medium, a dark, bloated and occasionally inspired horror story about a troubled spiritualist, produced by Polish developer Bloober Team. With a [...]
Turrican Flashback is a nostalgic paradise of synths and bullets February 6, 2021 Nostalgia, as they say, is one hell of a drug, and in lockdown we’ve been getting very, very high. A generation of middle aged men – myself included – have helped push shares in Games Workshop through the roof as they rediscover the hobby that saw them through their teenage years. The Turrican Flashback collection, [...]
Peloton deliveries disrupted by Brexit and port delays February 5, 2021 Peloton’s stock of treadmills and bikes has been badly hit by Brexit and global shipping congestion, leading to severe delays, according to company CEO John Foley. On Peloton’s website, some items can take eight to ten weeks to be delivered, higher than the four to six week delivery windows earlier this year. The company has [...]