Announcing the 13th Pocket-lint Gadget Awards

The Pocket-lint Gadget Awards are now in their 13th year, coming together annually to celebrate everything great about gadgets and tech.

We’re kicking off things a little earlier this year with a bigger, bolder, and even better plans for the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards.

Each year, the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards looks to reward those devices that are the best in class throughout the year, and the rules are simple: firstly, we have to have seen and used the device in question; secondly, it has to have been launched since the close of the 2015 Awards in November. 

That’s where you come in. We need to know what you think are the best phones, cameras, cars, televisions, and gadgets of 2016 have been, so we can make sure we get them in for review to be considered for an award.

Today marks the start of that journey.

The deadline for all nominations for the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards longlist is 21 September, with the shortlist being announced on 11 October before we move into the voting stages of the awards.

The award categories

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This year there are 15 categories in the Pocket-lint Gadget Awards plus the coveted Product of the Year 2016 award. 

Those categories are:

•  Best game

•  Best camera

•  Best phone

•  Best tablet / 2-in-1

•  Best laptop 

•  Best home entertainment device

•  Best headphones

•  Best TV

•  Best smarthome device

•  Best speaker

•  Best VR Device (inc 360 cameras)

•  Best fitness gadget

•  Best smartwatch

•  Best car

We then have a final category for the Product of the Year, the highest honour reserved for the device that’s had the biggest impact in 2016.

Getting involved

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All you have to do is contact us through the normal channels via email, Twitter, or Facebook, or nominate your favourite gadgets via our nomination form on our Pocket-lint Gadget Awards mini-site.

The winners will be announced at an awards dinner on the 23 November at Shoreditch Town Hall.

We will be confirming further details, like the elite panel of judges, longlist nominations and more, in due course.

Book tickets

This year we are selling tickets on a first come first served basis. If you would like to reserve your place at the awards you can book tickets now. 

Oppo F1 Plus review: A flagship at half the price

Oppo is a Chinese smartphone brand that isn’t especially familiar to UK customers. Yet on a global scale it was one of 2015’s fastest growers. That’s for one very good reason: it’s been making decent phones at competitive prices, and everyone loves a bargain.

Its latest premium but affordable smartphone is the Oppo F1 Plus, which costs £299 and comes with a great set of specifications packed into a fashionable metal and glass design. It’s a proven design, similar to that of the smaller-scale original Oppo F1, which we reviewed four months previous, albeit at a larger scale with a 5.5-inch screen and some spec tweaks (that we’ll get into later).

The ultimate question with the F1 Plus, then, is whether or not Oppo is capable of making a mid-range phone that competes with the biggest and best out there at this price point. Can it win appeal in the UK market?

Oppo F1 Plus review: Design

Like its smaller sibling, the Oppo F1 Plus features a sleek metal chassis, but without any of the plastic trim. To the untrained eye — heck, even to the trained eye — this phone looks suspiciously like an iPhone clone. At least, it does on the back and from the bottom edge.

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It has the parallel antenna bands running along the top and bottom, with a protruding round camera in the top left corner. The bottom edge features the Micro-USB port, a 3.5mm jack, plus seven holes for the loudspeaker. There’s some iPhone differences, of course, including the microSD card slot, which can be used to expand the based 64GB on-board storage.

The gold-coloured metal casing on the back rounds towards the edges, where a shiny, angled chamfered edge surrounds the slightly protruding front panel — which is covered entirely in glass and comes equipped with a factory-applied screen protector.

You should definitely keep this protector on if you value a pristine display. Having foolishly removed ours, the display was scratched within a matter of days, without any unreasonable treatment. Looking at it, you’d think we’d purposefully scratched it with keys or a knife, and in all likelihood, it picked up the marks just by being in a pocket. That’s kind of concerning, especially given the fact that it’s advertised as having Gorilla Glass 4, but it’s not uncommon: we’ve had an LG G5 for months that looks like it’s been through the wars.

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The Oppo F1 Plus also has capacitive back and recent apps soft buttons on either side of the metal-surrounded fingerprint sensor, but they’re barely illuminated which makes them frustrating to see.

Oppo F1 Plus review: Screen

From a specifications viewpoint, the F1 Plus’s 5.5-inch display — which boasts a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels (otherwise known as Full HD) — is plenty sharp enough for a phone that costs a whisker under £300.

Unlike plenty of other devices at similar prices and with the same screen size and resolution, Oppo has gone with an AMOLED-based panel, which means it looks great in terms of contrast and colour.

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Blacks are ultra deep and colours are really vibrant, and with the ultra-slim bezel on either side it’s an aesthetic treat to look at. Watching movies, videos and gaming are all a pleasure.

Oppo F1 Plus review: Software

Like all Oppo phones, the F1 Plus has the company’s own custom ColorOS software, built on top of Android. That means you don’t get the standard Google-designed app drawer, so instead you’ll have to wrestle with app and folder placement.

On the plus side, this is the latest version of ColorOS, in v3.0, and comes with some very useful features and some which, as we alluded to with the design, will feel very familiar to iPhone users. Apps like the calculator, camera, phone dialler, weather and even the card-based multitasking screen look almost like they were directly ripped right out of iOS.

We found using the pre-installed TouchPal keyboard made it very easy to type, thanks to virtual keys being well spaced. With its plethora customisation options, including downloadable themes, fonts, adjustable keyboard size, the option to add a separate number row and gesture-based Swype-like typing, plus a lot more, it has many strings to its bow. If you don’t like the default setup, it’s unlikely that you’ll fail in making it match your preferences.

Because the software is so unlike regular Android, many basic tasks and functions aren’t accessed in the usual way. For instance, pressing and holding the home screen wallpaper doesn’t take you to the usual customisation screen for adding widgets, arranging home screens or choosing wallpapers. Instead, you have to go into the settings menu. It’s all a bit longer-winded, really. But if you’re not an Android geek then this is unlikely to really matter.

Our advice: if you like the hardware of the Oppo smartphone, then install something like the Google Now Launcher from the Play Store which offers a much more traditional Android look and feel.

Oppo F1 Plus review: Performance

There’s no two ways about it, the F1 Plus phone is fast. In fact, pretty much everything on this device is geared to be quick.

You’d be hard pushed to find a fingerprint scanner on a phone that’s as zippy as the phone’s front-loaded scanner. From experience, only Huawei is on par, but thanks to Oppo’s lack of an onscreen animation when unlocking it seems much faster.

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Then we get to the manufacturer’s proprietary charging technology, VOOC. Imagine a Quick Charge-capable phone, then imagine it doesn’t slow down much after 80 per cent charge. Then imagine it charges just as quickly when being used as when it’s in standby, and then imagine it doesn’t get overly warm doing it. You don’t need to imagine any more: that’s VOOC flash-charging. And it’s fan-bloomin-tastic. Even when constantly streaming video the battery would charge from dead to full in just over an hour.

Using the device is generally fast and fluid too. There’s very little (if any) lag or stuttering when switching between apps, swiping through homescreens or opening apps. That’s mostly thanks to the Helio P10 processor inside paired with a generous 4GB of RAM. Gaming on the other hand wasn’t spectacular: frame rates aren’t always smooth during some fast-moving games, given the Mali-T860MP2 graphics.

Oppo F1 Plus review: Battery Life

Even with heavy use, the Oppo F1 Plus can easily make it through a full day on a single charge. That’s thanks to a few things.

Firstly, there’s the 1080p display which — because it doesn’t contain as many pixels — doesn’t use as much power as a Quad HD screen (2,560 x 1,440 pixels, as you’ll find in many flagship devices these days).

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Secondly, there’s the software factor. Oppo ColorOS 3.0 has built-in battery-management as standard which, at times, is a little over-aggressive. It essentially kills apps from using power in the background if they haven’t actually been used onscreen for a little while. Almost all the time, this is a genuinely useful feature and saves unnecessary battery drain. On the other hand it can be incredibly frustrating. And because the device runs Android 5.1 Lollipop rather than 6.0 Marshmallow, it doesn’t have Google’s own baked-in Doze battery saving technology which is far less aggressive and granular.

Using Strava, for example, to track a run or bike ride and having the software just kill the app within the first five minutes of exercise means most of the sessions end up not being recorded. Likewise, with an app like Pebble’s program which is necessary for pushing notifications to the smartwatch, you can end up not getting any notifications at all. There is a an option within the settings to whitelist specific apps, but that doesn’t work consistently, and it’s a pain to access (go to settings > battery > others > select app, then toggle “freeze when in background”… talk about a faff, eh?).

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Oppo F1 Plus review: Camera

As cameras go, the main 13-megapixel one on the back has some real plus points. With an f/2.2 aperture it’s not the most impressive for a smartphone camera, but that opening can still let in lots of light and create great background blur.

In good daylight, images often come out sharp, with nice tones and detail. It really shines when used outdoors, although greens can be a little over-saturated. Detail is sharp, especially when you get close-up to a subject. However, it does sometimes struggle to focus.

In low-light it does struggle a little, and once lighting is less than optimal, you will notice some noise and graininess creeping in. Sadly, unlike a lot of phones out nowadays, there’s no manual camera mode to adjust the shutter speed to compensate either.

Although the F1 Plus’s camera isn’t perfect, it still has a selection of features most buyers will find really useful. You can record timelapse videos, regular videos in 1080p resolution, plus there are Panorama and the ever-more-standard “Beauty” mode — the last of which smoothes out your pores to make your skin tone rosier or fairer and all that “good” stuff (we don’t like it, it’s too fake). You can also choose to fire the shutter by tapping the screen, pressing the round virtual shutter button or by using your voice.

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As a bonus, you can take pictures or shoot video with a number of preset filters, create GIF animations, or double-expose shots. The last of these is a lot of fun, as it gives you the creative freedom to make “ghost” photos, providing you have a very steady hand or a tripod on which to mount your phone.

Verdict

The Oppo F1 Plus has its quirks and irritations, but as an overall package it’s hard to be critically damning.

The F1 Plus looks and feels good, has an impressively sharp and colourful display and acts as a slick upsized brother for the original F1 model. The Plus’s two key features that make the biggest difference in daily use are its superfast fingerprint recognition, and VOOC charging technology.

On the downside, Oppo ColorOS software really needs a lot of work. Its over-aggressive battery saving capabilities mean that some apps you want running in the background get killed, even when you’ve marked them to stay active. That kind of annoyance almost cost this handset a half star on the score sheet.

So is the Oppo F1 Plus set to win appeal in the UK market? As we said at the beginning of this review, price is a key factor. At £299 it’s affordable for the mid-range, but there’s a lot of competition — particularly from the likes of the OnePlus 3, which is just a tenner more, or the Vodafone Smart Platinum, which is a fiver less.

Barclays Android users can now pay up to £100 with contactless using just their phone

Barclays has announced that its contactless payment system, called Contactless Mobile, has launched today.

Barclays previously expressed its intent to remain out of Android Pay in favour of its own offering. That has now arrived meaning Android users will be able to tap to pay using their smartphone’s NFC.

Barclays says payments will be supported for up to £100 at anywhere that contactless cards can be used. That’s 400,000 locations in the UK, says Barclays.

Up to £30 requires a simple tap but go over that amount and the owner will need to enter his or her PIN.

But the Contactless Mobile app also means the system can be used for tap to pay travel on the London Underground in place of an Oyster card.

It all sounds great but there is a catch. Barclays says Contactless Mobile is not available for: “Basic Current Accounts, Business Accounts, Corporate Accounts or ATM only cards.” It will work with: “Initial, Freedom Rewards, Platinum cards, Cashback, IHG, Hilton Honours Platinum Visa, IHG Rewards Club Visa and IHG Rewards Club Premium Visa”.

We have a normal current account and that appears to work just fine with the app.

The Barclays Contactless Mobile works as a part of the current Barclays app for Android. Simply update, select the Contactless Mobile option and link it to the relevant card.

READ: Android Pay UK explained: How it works and where it’s supported

What is 4K HDR and how will it change your TV?

The talk of the town is 4K HDR, arriving with force in 2016, and changing just about everything about home entertainment. 

It appears in a number of guises and forms, but more importantly, perhaps, than the resolution race of recent years, the HDR side if things brings with it a great deal of excitement.

But what is 4K HDR, how does it work and what content is there available to watch?

What is 4K HDR?

HDR means high dynamic range. You might have heard that expression before, because it first appeared as a popular technique in photography and is now common on smartphones. 

In home entertainment, HDR is very much the same thing. The dynamic range really means the achievable difference between bright highlights and dark shadows. In the real world, your eyes are very good and balancing out highs and lows and 4K HDR does exactly that: it brings realism by being able to produce visuals to better reflect what you’d see with your own eyes.

For televisions, like the Sony XD93, HDR goes hand-in-hand with 4K, resulting in a TV that will show you incredible detail and this wider range of realistic colours. For example, you might have the brilliance of the setting sun on the horizon, and the foreground painted in rich colours, all realistically balanced.

The result of 4K HDR is brilliantly detailed images, with lots of clarity, increased contrast and better colours than have previously been available on your television. For those creating content, 4K HDR allows movies to looks closer to the director’s original vision, because television are able to display much more than ever before.

How does 4K HDR work?

In a television, you need to have a panel (screen) that’s compatible with 4K HDR to work. The resolution side of the deal (the 4K part) is fairly simple. It’s a panel with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels. This is also called Ultra HD, or UHD for short, and has been appearing in TVs over the past few years and is now common on flagship TVs from a range of manufacturers. 

On the HDR side, this is where things get more technical. For HDR to work, the panel has to be able to capably show both very dark and very bright parts of a scene. In simple terms, this has been achieved by allowing to the panel to display a much higher peak brightness than before.

But this isn’t uniformal brightness, it’s cleverly controlled, so that, for example, the burning flame of a candle is white hot at the centre, smoothly transitioning through reds and yellows, but set in the inky darkness of the unlit room. Sony’s Slim Backlight Drive handles this on a TV like the XD93, giving a great HDR result, but without the screen getting too thick.

What 4K HDR content is there?

This is where things get really interesting, because once you have the TV to view 4K HDR, you need something to watch. Content is already being produced in 4K HDR and with major studios now working to this new standard, there’s going to be some great content appearing.

With the first run of 4K HDR televisions in 2015 there was little to watch, but in 2016, we’re enjoying the content boom.

Streaming services

Netflix and Amazon Instant Video were among the first services to make 4K HDR content available on your TV.

As the Sony XD93 is an Android TV, it offers access to both Amazon and Netflix with a range of both 4K and 4K HDR programmes available. One of the headline shows for HDR is Netflix’s Marco Polo.

Even if the HDR aspect isn’t available, there’s an increasing selection of 4K or Ultra HD content for you to watch. If you’re looking at a 4K HDR TV, you’ll be streaming plenty of content.

Ultra HD Blu-ray

For those serious about movies, there’s only one place to turn: Ultra HD Blu-ray. This is the next standard of optical disc, packing in 4K HDR, with staggering results.

It’s early days for Ultra HD Blu-ray, launching in early 2016, so there are only a few players available and they come at a premium price. But as time passes, there will be more to choose from and at more aggressive prices.

The selection of movies is also expanding. Big releases like The Martian and Max Max: Fury Road are wowing already and new releases, like The Revenant, are joining the list every day.

HDR Gaming

Not often mentioned, but gaming has always been part of the HDR plan, adding to the visuals to create more realism and more immersion in games. Landing later in 2016 is the Xbox One S, which not only offers 4K HDR streaming and Blu-ray, but will give you HDR games too.

Although not initially offering full 4K gaming, that’s set to come in the future too – expected by the end of 2017 in future consoles from Xbox and PlayStation.

Why do I want 4K HDR?

To get started enjoying 4K HDR, you need a TV like the Sony XD93, with a very capable 4K HDR display and all the smart skills and connectivity. Not only will it make your standard and HD content look great, but you’ll be all set to enjoy the very best of the future of entertainment too.

HDR makes a huge visual difference. It adds richness and contrast that we’ve never had on TVs before, making everything look more realistic. It’s being executed with jaw-dropping results, no matter which source you’re pulling it from.

The best thing about buying a 4K HDR TV is that you’re getting the complete package, with a great panel, so even when you’re not watching the latest blockbuster movie on Ultra HD Blu-ray, you can bask in some of the best-looking images you’ll have ever seen on your TV.

NASA debuts new internet technology aboard the ISS

The ISS has a new technology on board that can transmit data from space much faster than what NASA uses today. See, the internet as we know it here on Earth doesn’t work as well for spacecraft millions of miles away. It requires all nodes or connection points on a network — in space, these are satellites — to be active at the same time to send information back to the ground team. Since that’s not always possible due to the various elements that can block a connection, such as planets, other spacecraft, radiation, and so on and so forth, it takes a long time for data to make it back to Earth. In the worst cases, some data gets lost along the way. This new tech called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) gets rid of those problems.

DTN uses a “store and forward” technique to send info to other spacecraft or back to NASA. It can store partial bundles of data in connection points and then forward those bundles when the next node becomes available. DTN doesn’t require all nodes to be online at the same time, and that can dramatically cut down the time for data to reach its recipient. NASA’s animation below explains it well:

NASA has been testing DTN for years, but this its first big deployment. While the ISS isn’t exactly having issues beaming data back to the agency, the technique will be especially useful in the future, when there are more probes roaming our solar system and when we’re sending spacecraft to much farther locations.

Source: NASA

iOS 10: Taking a Closer Look at Apple’s ‘Swift Playgrounds’ for iPad

At WWDC last week, Apple revealed its all-new Swift Playgrounds iPad app, which aims to help younger users learn how to code in Apple’s programming language by making the experience more interactive and fun.

For those unfamiliar with Swift, the open-source language was announced by Apple at WWDC 2014, and developed over four years to be “concise and expressive” in order to make coding for iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch more approachable.

Using Swift Playgrounds, Apple invites users to “solve puzzles to master the basics using Swift” and “take on a series of challenges” to step up to more advanced creations. Swift Playgrounds requires no coding knowledge from new learners, but it also “provides a unique way for seasoned developers to quickly bring ideas to life,” claims the company.

Users start out by learning the underlying concepts of coding, like commands, functions, loops, parameters, conditional code, variables, operators, types, initialization, and bug fixing. The learning takes place as users create code on the left side of the screen, while they observe the results on the right side in real time.

Learning to code with Swift Playgrounds is incredibly engaging. The app comes with a complete set of Apple-designed lessons. Play your way through the basics in “Fundamentals of Swift” using real code to guide a character through a 3D world. Then move on to more advanced concepts.

The Swift Playground interface supports the iPad’s Multi-Touch capabilities, and lets students tap, drag, or type text and numbers, and then interact with their creations.

For example, tapping a number to edit it brings up a pop-up keypad, while statement boundaries can be conveniently dragged around existing code. Commonly used pieces of code can also be dragged from a Snippets Library to minimize typing.

In addition, a specially designed QuickType keyboard for coding lets users quickly access commonly used characters by holding each key, and intelligently suggests commands in the Shortcut Bar as users type.

Swift Playgrounds also comes with templates that are pre-loaded with advanced code to help users integrate iPad technologies like accelerometer, gyroscope, and Multi-Touch into their programs.

Students can add their own graphics and audio to these templates, and their completed code is readily shareable over Mail, Messages, and AirDrop, and they can also post video to Youtube of their programs in action.

Once users have mastered the basics with the app’s built-in library of lessons, they can advance to new challenges that appear in a regularly updated App Store-like area of Swift Playgrounds. Finally, any code created in the app can also be exported to Xcode and vice versa when students are ready to take the next step.

Swift Playgrounds will be available in the iOS 10 public beta this July. The final version of the app is expected to launch for free on the App Store sometime in the fall. You can watch Apple’s WWDC demo of Swift Playgrounds in action here.

Related Roundup: iOS 10
Tags: Swift, Swift Playgrounds
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