Amazon Kindle Paperwhite
We’d be willing to wager that the Kindle name will live on for much longer than the boring “e-reader” label still clinging on for dear life. Because Amazon’s first stab at gadgetry really is living the dream: its name has become the product in many people’s minds.
So here it is, the world’s greatest is slightly greater and ready to trounce any other gadget’s bid (with the possible exception of the next-gen consoles) for oversized Christmas stockings. The Paperwhite has a contrastier screen, a better built-in light and a smattering of new features - not to mention the great Kindle store and same, honest-to-goodness eight-week battery life. Is it the perfect e-reader? Aside from screen tweaks, Amazon’s been poking its nose through every single Kindle feature with plenty of new e-reading tricks to try. Check out Page Flip and Vocabulary Builder.
Korg Volca Beats
One third of a trio of analogue grooveboxes, the Korg Volca Beats is an incredibly compact and affordable drum machine, and despite its amazingly low price, it sounds brilliant. The Volca series is set to change the way electronic music is made, dragging technoheads away from their computer monitors and mice, refocussing hands and eyes on physical knobs and buttons. The Volca Beats has clearly been inspired by Roland's long-discontinued TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines (just as its triplet sibling the Volca Bass harks back to the Roland TB-303). This is a very good thing, as those are the two best drum machines ever made. This tiny drum machine is the biggest thing to happen in electronic music for 30 years.
Lapierre Overvolt FS electric mountain bike
An electric mountain bike “ surely that’s cheating? Were you to ride up at the pub with a pricey electric scooter, no-one would bat an eyelid. But with mountain bikes it's different - if you were to roll out this electric mountain bike down in Miramar, indignant eyelids would probably bat ferociously enough to lift your riding buddies clean off the ground. Lapierre is a French bike company (you’d explain) that makes all sorts of bikes for all sorts of applications. This, however, is their Overvolt full-suspension electric mountain bike. The four modes of assistance and the 400Wh battery pack let you choose between a range of 45 to 175 kms, but only if you’re pedalling as well, of course. This isn’t an entirely free ride. The battery is removable for charging via a proprietary charger that plugs into a standard three-pin mains socket.
Formlabs Form 1+
This is the next-gen of home 3D printing, but do the good looks and flashy lasers equate to awesomeness? Do you know your FDM from your SLA? Thought not, but these acronyms represent competing technologies that, in the world of 3D printing, have a rivalry of Hamilton vs Rosberg proportions. The first stands for Fused Deposition Modelling - it’s the squirty plastic method of 3D printing employed by almost all of the 3D printers currently available to normal folk like you and I. The second is laser-toting stereolithography - an industrial technology that’s actually been around since the late 80s, but is only now making an appearance in consumer printers with the Formlabs Form 1+. And it might just be the tech to set the 3D printing world alight. So how does SLA work? It involves building up a print, layer by layer, using a laser to cure (harden) resin that is sensitive to UV light. It’s a well-honed industrial process that has always been restricted to much larger, more expensive commercial machines.
DJI Phantom 2 Vision quadcopter drone
DJI’s Phantom 2 Vision is a revolutionary product. This powerful, easy to fly quadcopter sports not only a built-in anti-vibration camera, but also smartphone compatibility. That means you can view, in real time, what the camera’s looking at when it’s soaring 300 feet above your head. And all at a relatively affordable price. So does it deserve to sit atop the drone throne, or is it a UAV you should avoid? You don’t have to be a polymath, possess lightning reactions or have 20/20 vision to fly the Phantom 2 Vision. The quadcopter is designed to be easy to fly: it self-stabilises, and if you take your hands off the controls it’ll simply hover in its current position. Lose sight of it or move it out of its control range and, thanks to built-in GPS, it’ll automagically fly back to where it took off from and land.
