Sam Altman does not like smart glasses. Speaking on the Sources Podcast, the OpenAI CEO said he finds it “very uncomfortable talking to people with a camera and a light” and confirmed that he does not wear smart glasses himself. That is a surprisingly firm position considering where the technology industry appears to be heading and the success of products like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses.

Then again, Altman is working with former Apple design chief Jony Ive on an entire family of AI devices. OpenAI has kept the Ive project deliberately foggy, but Altman has suggested they are making a range of AI hardware. His comments about smart glasses draw one clear boundary, removing the idea of a camera pointed at everyone as a feature.

Smart glasses have visible drawback

Altman does identify a fundamental flaw in smart glasses that has little to do with processors, battery life or AI model choices. Glasses place technology directly between two people looking at each other, and adding a camera turns an ordinary conversation into one where the other person has to wonder whether they are also an unwilling piece of content.

Smartphones established a useful social signal around recording. Someone pointing a phone camera at you is usually fairly conspicuous. Camera glasses erase much of that distinction because their great design achievement is making a recording device look inconspicuous. It's why similar tools have been a staple of James Bond-style spy fiction for decades.

Australia’s eSafety commissioner has already asked manufacturers to make recording indicators impossible to disable and automatically blur faces when informed consent is absent. The regulator cited women being covertly filmed for social content and rejected the idea that telling customers to behave responsibly amounts to a safety policy. The backlash reflects a public tired of paying the social price for somebody else’s convenience.

Important exceptions to the argument against camera glasses exist. The same visual awareness that creates privacy problems can be genuinely transformative for blind and low-vision users, something Australia’s regulator explicitly acknowledged. That makes an outright rejection of the technology too simplistic, but it also strengthens the case that camera glasses may be better suited to particular needs rather than as the default AI hardware.

Wearable, not watchable

Altman’s comments about AI hardware point to an all-encompassing strategy of making devices for tables, pockets, and "on your body,” and that OpenAI will take time to launch all of them. OpenAI has previously described its work with Ive as an attempt to move beyond traditional interfaces. So not just a miniature smartphone strapped to your face.

An audio-first wearable suddenly makes far more sense. An earpiece, pendant, clip or other discreet device could provide persistent access to an AI assistant without placing a camera directly in the sightline of everyone the wearer encounters. It could listen when summoned and respond quietly like wireless earbuds or smartwatches.

Some may prefer the camera and the data an AI assistant gains from it about the physical world. And of course, putting microphones on wearables raises privacy questions just fine without cameras. Making the device unobtrusive yet observant is the trick Ive and Altman have to perform lest it face the same social opprobrium as the AI smart glasses.

Ive built his reputation around products whose complexity receded behind their physical design. But AI assistants will know and hear far more than an iPod ever did. A successful AI wearable cannot merely make advanced computing invisible to its owner. It must make its intentions legible to everyone else.

Meta is betting that the camera can become socially acceptable because they are built into discreet smart glasses; OpenAI may instead bet on a successful AI wearable that won't potentially creep out everyone you pass on the street. The best OpenAI wearable feature may in fact be an absence, and "no camera" its most enticing selling point.

• The Garmin Enduro 4 might have appeared in a new leak
• Details emerged in Indonesian regulatory filings
• The device might arrive before the end of 2026

We’ve barely had time to catch our breath after the Garmin Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro announcement, but here comes news of another high-end Garmin watch looming over the horizon. Only this time, it’s not an official announcement that has shone a light on the device, but instead an intriguing leak that Garmin would probably rather you didn’t see.

The leak in question first appeared in regulatory filings from Indonesia (via Garmin News). There, listings mentioned an unnamed Garmin device bearing the model number A05197 in the “Outdoor Product” category.

Other details are pretty thin on the ground, but there is reason to believe it could point towards the unreleased Enduro 4. For one thing, Garmin News reports that Garmin uses the Outdoor Product category for “almost all of its high-end multisport smartwatches during testing phases, including past Fenix, Tactix, and Enduro generations.” That could therefore be an indicator that this mystery device belongs to one of those product families.

Then there’s the issue of previously leaked code references. We’ve already seen mention of the Enduro 4 in code contained within the Garmin Connect app, suggesting that the wearable is in development at the very least. Combine that with the new Indonesian regulatory filings and an Enduro 4 launch is looking increasingly likely.

A battery champ

Prior to the Fenix 9 Pro announcement, we had hopes that the Enduro 4 would also appear at Garmin’s launch event. That never came to pass, but it hasn’t dampened our expectations that the device exists and is on the way.

Interestingly, the unnamed Garmin device was granted regulatory approval in Indonesia on August 25 — the same day as the Fenix 9 event. Garmin News notes that it can take one to three months for a Garmin device to be unveiled after it is approved, suggesting that we could see the Enduro 4 — or whatever this unknown wearable is — before the end of 2026.

If and when that happens, it should be good news for fans of the best Garmin watches who want a device with phenomenal battery life. After all, as our Garmin Enduro 3 review noted, this line of watches “puts battery first.” We can expect the Enduro 4 to continue that tradition.

Do you ever feel that some smartwatches have just too much smartwatch in them? That’s what struck me when Garmin announced the Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro today. Sure, they look like great devices — but at over $1,000 / £850 / AU$1,500 a pop, I’ve been wondering how many people actually need everything they have to offer.

I know I don’t. While I love working out, I’m not a pro athlete and don’t need anything like the suite of features you get with Garmin’s new watches — but Garmin's first live event launch seemed aimed at people like me, the Apple Watch crowd. It's telling Garmin didn’t actually mention how much they cost during the show itself.

If you feel like me and baulk at the expense required to slap one of these devices on your wrist, it’s not all bad news. There are plenty of other options out there, and none of them will break the bank in quite the same way.

Or you could just wait for the features to trickle down to more affordable devices. Either way, there’s no need to open your wallet just yet unless you’re 100% sure you need one of these watches.

Top devices, high prices

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: the Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro look like great smartwatches — possibly even some of the best smartwatches money can buy. They’re full of top-of-the-range features that are perfect for people who push their exercise regimes to the fullest, who regularly stride off into the wilderness in search of adventure, and who demand some of the most specialized features you can get in a consumer smartwatch.

The brighter AMOLED display in particular looks fantastic, especially if you previously struggled to read your watch’s screen in certain weather conditions. I was also heartened to see the rumors of solar charging were bang on the money — while it might be limited to the 47mm models and up of the Fenix 9 Pro, its ability to extend the life of your watch exponentially is tailor-made for off-grid escapades.

But there’s a big difference between interesting features and interesting features that cost a minimum of $1,099.99 / £949.99 / $1,749 AUD. I’m an Apple Watch Series 10 owner, and while the Apple Watch Ultra 3 has been on my radar, its $799 / £749 / $1,399 AUD price has moved it out of “must-buy” territory for me. It’s therefore unsurprising that Garmin’s latest launches haven’t ratcheted up my temptation meter.

There might be some wider context here. Garmin doesn’t normally do big, flashy events like it did for the Fenix 9 series, so the fact that it did this time suggests to me that it wants to introduce its smartwatches to a wider audience. Instead of its core crowd of sports buffs and fitness fanatics, it might be looking to broaden its horizons a bit and crack the more casual market.

The problem is that the Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro have done exactly the opposite of that with their pricing. They’re not exactly entry-level options for people who have never heard of Garmin before. The flashy show puts it in the same company as Apple and Samsung — who also do glitzy product launches — but by limiting its announcements to some of its most premium devices, Garmin hasn’t quite hit the nail on the head.

Patience is a virtue

If Garmin’s Fenix 9 show has whetted your appetite for a smartwatch but you just can’t justify spending almost a thousand smackers on one, what can you do? Well, luckily you’re spoiled for choice.

You don’t even have to look outside the Garmin ecosystem to find some excellent options. How about the Garmin Venu 4, which is our pick for the best Garmin smartwatch? We summed it up as being “perfect for people who wouldn’t describe themselves as hardcore adventurers or triathletes, but still lead an active lifestyle, and might take on a big challenge once a year such as a marathon.” It’s full of top features that you need without breaking the bank thanks to its $549.99 / £469.99 / AU$949 price.

For an even more affordable option, there’s Garmin’s Vivoactive 6, which will set you back a mere $299.99 / £279.99 / AU$549. But this isn’t some undercooked offering that you’ll regret buying. You get 11 days of battery life, a beautiful AMOLED display, and plenty of premium features that once lived exclusively on Garmin’s more expensive products.

And that highlights a key point about the latest Fenix 9 and Fenix 9 Pro releases. While they’re incredibly high-end options right now with price tags to match, I’m willing to bet that it won’t be long before many of their features are rolled out to much more affordable devices in Garmin’s smartwatch line-up. That kind of move has happened plenty of times in the past, and there’s no reason to think that Garmin is going to change its tune.

So, while I won’t be buying the Fenix 9 or Fenix 9 Pro right now, who’s to say I won’t pull the trigger further down the line? As these products’ prices drop and their features migrate to other wearables, chances are I’ll no longer be obstructed by an eye-watering price tag. A little patience is all it takes.

• A new leak sheds fresh light on the Samsung Galaxy Aero smartwatch
• The device might ditch Wear OS and use the RTOS operating system instead
• It could fix some of the mistakes of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE

It’s safe to say that we weren’t huge fans of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE, with our reviewer scoring it a measly two stars and branding it “one of the most confusing smartwatches I’ve ever tested.” Yet despite the disappointment, a new leak suggests that Samsung is going to take another stab at the entry-level smartwatch market — but the result might look very different.

The latest hints come from Gadgets & Wearables, which investigated the Samsung Health and Galaxy Wearable apps to uncover hints of what might be to come. And according to the news outlet, the forthcoming device could take the form of a new Samsung watch dubbed the Galaxy Aero.

What’s interesting about this product is that, unlike many of the best Samsung watches, it might not run on Google’s Wear OS. Previous reporting from SamMobile found hints pointing towards the use of RTOS, or ‘real-time operating system,’ as Samsung software contained references to ‘Galaxy Aero’ and ‘galaxy_rtos_watch.’ The implication here is that these devices were the same product.

RTOS is the platform that Samsung’s Galaxy Fit devices run on and is a far more lightweight system than Wear OS. If RTOS ends up powering the Galaxy Aero, it would suggest that the product will be at the lower end of Samsung’s wearable spectrum.

Further investigation from Gadgets & Wearables suggests that several Samsung apps and services have the capability of handling RTOS and devices that use it. And it’s that capability that supposedly opening the door for the Galaxy Aero.

Righting the wrongs of the past

One of our main criticisms of the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE was that it was strangely positioned — at the time, it offered worse performance than the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, despite being available to buy for the same price or more. With the Galaxy Aero, that uncomfortable quirk might be remedied.

That’s because SamMobile suggests it could be priced below the Watch FE, making it a more sensible proposition for a low-cost smartwatch. If true, that could make it much less of a tough sell.

And there’s another consideration. By using RTOS instead of Wear OS, Samsung could conceivably cut down on battery usage, solving another major problem with the Watch FE. It would mean making some compromises, with limited support for the Google Play Store and third-party apps both possible. But if Samsung can keep the cost down, it’s likely that many users won’t mind.

If Samsung makes that move, it would join rivals like Amazfit and Huawei in launching an affordable fitness tracker that doesn’t rely on Wear OS. Whether it can right the wrongs of the Galaxy Watch FE, however, remains to be seen.

• Whoop has opened up its Advanced Labs blood testing service
• You can now use it without a Whoop membership or wearable device
• That brings down the costs involved significantly

Whoop’s Advanced Labs program was originally designed to let owners of Whoop devices better understand their health through a series of blood tests. It was previously limited to owners of Whoop wearables who had an active membership, but access has now been expanded to users of other health devices, including the Apple Watch, the Oura Ring, and many of the best Garmin devices.

That means a far greater pool of people can now gain insights into their health by harnessing Whoop’s system of biomarker analysis. It also provides Whoop with a wider range of responses than it would have been able to collect before.

If you take part in Advanced Labs, you can put yourself through a blood testing service that gives you artificial intelligence (AI) insights and personalized recommendations that are reviewed by clinicians. It goes beyond the standard metrics you might get from rival wearables.

As well as opening up Advanced Labs, Whoop is also providing access to the Galleri cancer detection test to non-Whoop users. This is “designed to detect cancer signals associated with more than 50 types of cancer,” Whoop says. Galleri is available as part of Advanced Labs whether or not you have a Whoop membership.

Bringing down the cost

Whoop’s Advanced Labs testing starts at $150. Combine that with the cost of a Whoop membership — which is priced at $149 for your first year and $199 a year thereafter for the most basic tier — and you’d be looking at a sizeable outlay if you wanted to start using the Advanced Labs testing kits.

But now that Advanced Labs has been opened up to non-Whoop users, that cost can be brought down significantly. Owning a Whoop device — and paying its annual fee — is no longer required, although you still have to fork out for the tests themselves.

It’s worth noting that allowing users of other wearables to access Advanced Labs does not mean that Whoop will start incorporating data from your Apple Watch or smart ring into its own platform. That all remains totally separate — it’s just that Whoop’s walled garden has been breached slightly.

If you’ve been tempted by Whoop’s Advanced Labs testing but were put off by the cost involved, this might be your opportunity to take part. It could give you better insights into your health than you were previously privy to.

• Researchers have created a wearable patch that detects poisons
• It sends a haptic buzz to your arm whenever toxins are sensed
• Each poison type has its own haptic feedback pattern

There are many professions that regularly put people in contact with dangerous substances — bacteria, toxic gases, you name it. What if there was a way to quickly and easily detect these hazardous compounds before they damage your health?

Well, new research suggests there might be just such a method. A paper published in the journal Device (via North Carolina State University) details how a wearable skin patch could warn you if a range of hazardous elements are found. If that happens, it delivers “target-specific vibrations to alert the wearer” of the risk to their health.

That means you can tell in an instant what the patch is trying to tell you — a certain vibration might mean one toxin has been identified, while a different form of haptic feedback may correspond to a different poison. The user can then take appropriate action without a delay or the need for additional tests.

This approach has the advantage of being highly direct. Other patches exist that can also sense environmental contaminants, but many of these send warnings to your smartphone. That’s impractical if you don’t have your phone or if you’re trying to use it while wearing protective gear. A vibration-based skin patch, on the other hand, can tell you what’s happening without you even needing to look at it.

Life-saving tech

The patch is currently able to detect six contaminants: heavy metals, particulate matter, high or low temperatures, humidity, volatile organic compounds, and nitrogen oxide gases. It’s also rechargeable and uses a solar-powered battery to stay topped up in use.

A key facet of the patch is its modularity. According to Amay Bandodkar, a corresponding author of the paper, the modularity means “you can add or remove sensors that monitor for whichever hazards are most relevant to the application,” a feature that makes the device “extremely flexible.”

The patch isn’t just useful for humans, as the developers have created a version that can be applied to robots. This harnesses an “e-skin” made from piezoelectric material that can then be attached to a robot. When it detects toxins, it sends an electrical signal to the robot warning it of the danger.

It’s an interesting example of wearable technology moving beyond simple health analysis into something more serious. Who knows — maybe one day it could save your life.

These days, millions of us have smart devices strapped to our wrists, fingers and arms, measuring our metrics and building a picture of the “quantified self” to make us healthier, more active and better prepared for a medical emergency.

Wearables can help improve our wellbeing and nudge us towards better habits, but it’s less common to hear about the flipside: the anxiety at failing to close your rings, the frantic exercise to ensure you maintain your streak, and the obsession with meeting your targets on a daily basis.

These are feelings I know all too well. Having worn some of the best Apple Watches for close to a decade, I’ve watched it become an essential part of my life — so much so that I’ve tried closing my rings when I’m ill, on vacation, or should otherwise be resting and recuperating. I obsess over those little rings on my watch.

I know this is a problem for me. But what I wanted to find out was whether this is a more widespread issue, and if it is, what can be done about it. Is wearable tech making us more anxious? And can it be redesigned to push back against these tendencies and help us feel more relaxed, not less?

To find out, I spoke to tech and wellness experts who shared their thoughts on the ways wearables can impact our health — for better or worse.

The endless streak

During the FIFA World Cup in July, I was preparing to wake up in the early hours to watch England play Mexico at 1am local time. I set my alarm, went to bed early, and got ready to cheer on my team without waking the neighbors.

Yet there was one thought that I couldn’t get out of my mind as I contemplated the looming disruption to my sleep: my Apple Watch is going to hate this.

It’s now become part of my morning ritual to check my sleep score on my Apple Watch. Every high score gives me a little dopamine hit, every low result a crushing sense of disappointment. And I knew that waking up at 1am and staying awake for two hours in the middle of the night was going to make my Watch very disappointed indeed.

In the end, I rolled over and went back to sleep when my alarm woke me for the game. I didn’t watch it, and I know that was only partly because I was woken at some ungodly hour — it was also because, to a certain extent, I’ve allowed the scores and metrics on my Watch to govern the way I live my life.

That’s not the only way this has happened to me. I recently hit a streak of closing my Move ring for 2,000 consecutive days. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t some days when I entered a fake exercise to get me past my calorie goal on a day when I was ill, tired or simply unmotivated.

Why cheating is fine, but resting is not, is something I admit doesn’t make much sense. But what I do know is that the thought of losing my streak absolutely fills me with dread. 2,000 consecutive days on my Move streak sounds like a lot, but knowing myself, I’m sure I’m going to try to continue it until the day I die, such is the anxiety associated with the idea of my streak ending.

The dark side of wearable tech

I’ve long had perfectionist tendencies, but it’s through observing the way I interact with my Watch that it’s really become clear to me how strongly my device’s gamification of fitness has struck a chord with me — and led me into some unhealthy, possibly obsessive behaviors.

I spoke to Dr Dana McKay, Associate Dean of Interaction, Technology & Information at RMIT University in Australia, to get her opinion.

“These technologies are often designed to help us form habits,” McKay pointed out. "They often use tools for so called ‘persuasive design’.... to persuade us to do something we wanted to anyway when we bought the device."

There are two problems with this:, Dr McKay points out: the possibility of becoming “unhealthily focused” on the device, and the prospect of being convinced to don a wearable by an outside party, like an insurance company, and sharing data we don’t want to share. Some private health insurance companies may subsidise the purchase of a wearable in exchange to access to lower premiums, and sharing your tracker's information to an insurer's app.

Yang Wei, Professor of Wearable Technology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, agreed, saying that while wearables can help us form positive habits, we also need to be careful around them.

“For many people, wearables can be motivating and empowering,” Wei noted, “but for some users they can also create pressure, anxiety, guilt, or unhealthy dependence on data.” After all, wearables “create a framework for what counts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ activity, sleep, recovery, or productivity,” Wei said. If that data is framed the wrong way, it can push users in an unhelpful direction.

Wei also warned that “One of the risks is that people may start to trust the device more than their own body. For example, someone may feel they slept badly because their watch gave them a poor sleep score, even if they felt fine. Or they may feel they have failed because they did not close a ring or reach a step target, even if they had a perfectly reasonable day.”

That certainly resonates with me: I consciously work to close my Apple Watch’s rings, viewing it as a requirement for each day. A full set has almost become a condition for having a ‘good’ day, regardless of how I’m feeling or what I’ve achieved. And this overreliance on a piece of tech strapped to my wrist feels key to the negative habits I seem to have formed. So what can I do about it?

How to push back

If wearables have the potential to form negative habits, what can we do to put things right? The answer is often remarkably simple, both McKay and Wei believe: take your watch off from time to time.

“There is no need to wear your device while on vacation unless a health practitioner recommends it,” McKay advised. If your relationship with your fitness tracker has become a problem, “start by turning all the notifications off, limit checking of goals to help reduce obsession, and consider not using the device at all if possible.”

You also need to understand why you are using the device in the first place, Wei contends. “Is it to be more active? To understand sleep? To monitor a specific health concern? Or simply to be more aware of daily patterns? Having a purpose makes it easier to keep the technology in perspective.”

“I would also encourage people to treat wearable data as guidance, not judgement,” said Wei. “These devices can be useful, but they are not perfect and they do not understand the full context of a person’s life. Illness, stress, caring responsibilities, disability, travel, recovery, or simply needing rest can all affect what a ‘good’ day looks like.”

And both McKay and Wei said that if your device is causing significant anxiety or obsessive behavior, it might be best to speak to a medical professional. As Wei put it, “The aim should be for the wearable to support the person, not control how they feel about themselves.”

But this has to go beyond the user’s own actions — wearables themselves should be designed to better support healthy habits and discourage negative ones. For McKay, that includes “allowing people who use trackers to set the number of notifications they get” and hide those they don’t want to see, as well as “removing gamification elements like badges and sharing (competing) with friends and family.”

Many of these features, like push notification controls, are already buried in the watch's settings, but a lot of smartwatch users don't go looking for them.

“I think we need to move from a data-driven relationship with wearables to a more reflective and human-centered one,” Wei added. That means designers should “move away from purely addictive or performance-based features” and towards focusing on “long-term wellbeing rather than daily judgement.”

Ultimately, Wei said, “I think the best wearable technologies will be those that help people feel more confident and informed, not more anxious or dependent.”

I can’t change how Apple designs its smartwatches, but I can reduce the pressure on myself to hit my goals day after day, even when my body is telling me to rest. Staying fit and healthy is a worthwhile pursuit, but when it comes at the cost of anxiously worrying what will happen if your streak ends, it might just be time to bite the bullet, take off the watch, and enjoy some tech-free time with friends and family. After all, losing a streak is not the end of the world.

• The Samsung Galaxy Fit 4 just leaked in FCC regulatory filings
• The documents suggest it will have a screen, unlike the Fitbit Air
• But the leak reveals previous few other details

The Fitbit Air has proved that you don’t need to pay a high price tag to get a great wearable, and now it looks like Samsung is getting in on the act with an alternative of its own. And with more details leaking out, we’re getting a clearer picture of the upcoming device than ever — but plenty of unanswered questions remain.

New FCC regulatory documents (spotted by Gadgets & Wearables) have spilled the beans on the much-rumored Samsung Galaxy Fit 4. There, you’ll find various nuggets of info on what we can expect from the product, as well as a few things that it likely won’t do.

For one thing, it looks as if the Fit 4 will not be a screenless device, as the FCC documents include diagrams showing a product with a very similar design to the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 — which did include a display. That could be a key difference with the Fitbit Air, which notably forgoes the display entirely.

The regulatory filings also confirmed that the Fit 4 will come with Bluetooth 5.4, which is a slight upgrade over the Fit 3’s support for Bluetooth 5.3. And there’s a button on the side and optical sensors on the back, much like the Fit 3.

Shrouded in mystery

The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 is one of the best cheap fitness trackers money can buy, making it ideal for budget-conscious users. But if Samsung apparently isn’t planning to reduce costs by going down the screenless route, how else will it keep the price down?

That’s one of the big unanswered questions from the FCC report. Given the Fit 4 diagrams’ similarity to what we know about the Fit 3, there’s a decent chance we’ll see things like GPS omitted, meaning it might not end up being one of the best wearables for runners. But we don’t know for sure right now.

Plenty of other areas remain an enigma. The documents mention battery testing but do not specify the battery’s capacity, for instance. The Fit 3 packed in a 208mAh battery that lasted around 10 days on a single charge in our testing, but it’s unclear whether that will change with the Fit 4.

If anything, these FCC files raise more questions than they answer. They note that documents like product photos and a quick-start guide will remain confidential until January 31, 2027, but that doesn’t necessarily point to a release date. We’d expect Samsung to launch the Fit 4 sooner, but until that happens, much of this secret device will continue to be shrouded in mystery.

You could be forgiven for thinking that most wearable-tech categories have come as far as they're ever going to. All smartwatches look the same now, and that form factor isn’t going away anytime soon. It's a similar story with smart rings, with “slightly thinner” being the main selling point of the Oura Ring 5. And the screenless Whoop tracker has given birth to a bunch of copycats, including the Fitbit Air, and most recently the Garmin Cirqa.

When you think of wearable tech, you normally think of some sort of fitness tracker. But there is an area of wearables that’s still in flux, as categories do before there’s a consensus on what works: neurotech. Neurotech devices are generally wearable technology to monitor, or temporarily alter, our brain chemistry for optimal performance or to treat neurological injuries, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.

They’re also being used to improve our brains to rest harder and focus longer. Our writer Becca Caddy recently wrote about the dangerously addictive thrills of 'over-optimization', so it’s no surprise to see the out-there concept of rewiring the brain being embraced by the cult of biohacking.

Nootropics — mind-enhancing drugs — are promoted heavily on podcasts, with brands like Gorilla Mind and Alpha Brain enjoying airtime on popular ‘bro-science’ platforms like The Joe Rogan Experience to help get ‘cognitively dialed’. Away from pharmacological solutions, multi-millionaire longevity biohacker Bryan Johnson uses Nurosym, an electrical vagus nerve stimulation device, to “make [his] body more parasympathetic, more chill”.

It’s Nurosym that I’ve been using this week. There are other wearables out there that promise to do all sorts of things — the Neurosity Crown for example (pictured above), promises to improve concentration through “neuroadaptive meditation”, measuring your brainwaves and playing music to that pattern to improve focus during work. All while looking like the sort of thing you might see Patrick Stewart wear in the X-Men films.

The Muse 2 headband is a meditation aid that uses electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to read your brain activity and provide personalized meditation guidance, in much the same way as a smartwatch might read your heart rate and offer workout suggestions.

The vagus nerve, however, is a key target for brain health. Proper stimulation of the vagus nerve is said to offer all sorts of benefits, treating conditions as varied as depression, anxiety, inflammation, bipolar disorder, obesity, POTS, and Alzheimer's. For people without those conditions, vagus nerve stimulation can improve sleep quality, regulate stress and improve relaxation overall, ensuring you're well-rested and ready to tackle life's challenges.

There's unconfirmed but promising research suggesting that you may be able to stimulate the vagus nerve yourself through practices such as meditation and cold exposure — which might explain my predilection for cold showers, as perhaps I’ve been unconsciously hacking away at my brain all this time.

But what if I got a wearable to do it for me? I decided to try Nurosym myself for a week, to see if I could really begin to hack my brain better.

The vagus nerve stimulation device costs a whopping $699 / £599 (around AU$1,300), and looks quite stripped-back for a device of this price. It consists of a fairly simple handheld remote, an attached earpiece with a clamp to fix to your tragus (the small piece of cartilage outside your ear) and a charging cable. There’s mercifully no app or phone connection to speak of; everything happens on-device, which actually goes some way to making me trust it more, as it’s not collecting any data about me.

“For a long time, neuromodulation has largely meant invasive procedures or treatment delivered in specialist environments,” Dr Greta Dalle Luche, PhD., Nurosym’s head of science, tells me. “Nurosym demonstrates how this science can be translated into non-invasive technology that fits into people’s everyday lives.”

As well as being a doctor in biochemistry, Dalle Luche is also a former professional surfer, so she knows all about optimizing for peak performance. She explains that Nurosym is all about taking “evidence-led neuromodulation” out of the clinical space and turning it into accessible technology. A lot of clinical tests have been done on this device, and it’s advertised as “the world’s most studied vagus nerve stimulator” with $10 million invested in over 60 independent research papers, backed by notable universities and health bodies worldwide.

To use it, you moisten your tragus, fix the clamp, then adjust the signal on the remote — turning it up until you feel a light tingling sensation. That’s the electricity pulsing through your ear to your vagus nerve, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system to activate your body’s “rest and digest” response.

It seems like as good a place as any to start. I wet my ear, clamped it onto myself and sat quietly, letting the tingles of electricity wash down my ear canal and into my brain. Nurosym guidelines, and reports on the r/vagusnerve subreddit (because of course there’s a subreddit), suggest that it can take anything from a few days to months to feel the effects, which are said to include a reduction in depressive or anxiety-related symptoms, better sleep, and better-quality rest and relaxation. These claims are anecdotal, and user-dependent, and the results are subjective, with no objective measure of they actually work or produce meaningful results, certainly in a short amount of time such as a week.

Dalle Luche tells me that “factors such as an individual’s underlying vagal tone, or in other words, the ‘health of their autonomic nervous system,’ influence the proportion of the response to the device". So it's possible that I may end up not having a proportional, or significant, response.

Nonetheless, I did my best to empirically measure my body’s responses to this new technology, monitoring my sessions on a Garmin Cirqa fitness tracker as if it was a workout, and wearing it to bed nightly to monitor sleep quality and heart-rate variability.

You can watch our video review of the Garmin Cirqa below:

According to the Garmin, the stimulation did have some effect. There could be any number of contributing factors for this, but after spending 15 minutes at rest to settle my heart, I fired up the Nurosym and monitored my heart rate over a 25-minute session, and I did see a decrease in spikes my heart rate as the session went on. Note the regularity in the middle there, too, between the 10 and 17-minute marks — a clear indication that something was working.

Across the week while using the device, I also saw a general improvement in sleep quality and drastically rising heart-rate variability, as measured here via my Garmin. I’m not sure I saw any immediate, dramatic improvement in focus or relaxation, but the graphs were moving in the right direction.

Whether this is partly due to the sessions enforcing at least 30 minutes of screenless, conscious relaxation time each day, so that my nervous system was deliberately being calmed, or whether it’s due to the device, I’m not sure. But I’ll take the W, as the kids say.

For $700 / £600 / AU$1,300, is 'seemed to work' enough? When I asked about the high price of the device, Nurosym’s head of science Dr Greta Dalle Luche said its price does not reflect the physical device alone.

“It reflects more than a decade of scientific research and development, our proprietary technology, extensive continuous testing to ensure safety and maintenance of regulatory certification, as well as continued investment in clinical research,” she told me. “That makes a direct product-for-product comparison with lower-cost non-validated wellness gadgets difficult.

“When people buy Nurosym, they have the certainty of holding in their hands something that works, and that comes with very little risk.”

While the results have been inconclusive so far, I've seen enough to suggest that something is happening here, so I'll continue electrocuting my brain for a while yet to see if I achieve more definitive results. Wearable neurotechnology is still in its infancy, but it’s a technology that's on the rise, and I imagine, now that Nurosym has done the hard work of all that proprietary testing, there will be more low-strength vagus nerve-stimulation devices hitting the market in the near future.

I’m interested in seeing where the category goes. If companies like Nurosym can bring down prices, and make the technology more accessible, a wearable that improves your quality of relaxation — and which doesn’t harvest your data to feed big tech via an AI-powered app — sounds like a win in my book.

I didn't realize I'd developed an unhealthy obsession with wellness and optimization. But looking back, there were definitely signs. This was more than a decade ago, long before recovery scores, longevity influencers and what the best smart ring colors are became water cooler conversation.

As a technology journalist, reviewing health gadgets and fitness trackers has always been part of my job but they gradually spilled over into my personal life too. At one point, I was wearing multiple fitness trackers at the same time because I didn't fully trust any single device. I'd compare the data, then transfer it into spreadsheets each night so I could better analyze it myself.

Most days I walked more than 20,000 steps. Some days it was closer to 30,000 and I got such a kick out of seeing those numbers climb up. I became fascinated by the idea that there was an optimal way to do almost everything. An optimal diet, optimal morning routine, optimal supplement stack and an optimal sleep schedule.

Every new wellness trend arrived with the promise of hidden knowledge and I was eager to believe it. I spent money on retreats, courses and gadgets. I followed advice that ranged from questionable to ridiculous. And the less said about the gruelling fasting retreat where we were all given daily wheatgrass enemas, the better.

The strange thing is that none of this felt unhealthy at the time — if anything, it felt virtuous. My trackers congratulated me for hitting goals and fitness apps handed out badges and streaks. There was always another target to hit and another metric to improve. The obsession disguised itself as self-improvement so effectively that I barely questioned it.

What I didn't understand at the time was how thin the line between discipline and obsession can be. You can cross it gradually, one habit and one goal at a time, until something that started as a genuine attempt to look after yourself becomes another source of pressure, anxiety and control.

More than a decade later, as wearables, recovery scores and optimization culture have since become mainstream, I don't think my experience is unusual. If anything, I'm surprised we don't talk more about the psychological cost of constantly measuring ourselves and the role technology plays in keeping us focused on the numbers.

Why health data can become a trap

For a long time, I assumed my experience was unusual. When my obsession with optimization was at its worst, there weren't podcasters talking about longevity-maxxing and relatively few people owned fitness trackers.

Over time, I managed to develop a healthier relationship with exercise and health data. But as wearables have become more common and self-tracking has moved into the mainstream, I've started noticing some of the same patterns I once recognized in myself.

When I spoke to psychotherapist Sarah Dosanjh, who works with people experiencing health anxiety and disordered relationships with food, much of what I'd experienced sounded familiar.

"What I'm noticing in my practice is that people who already have some form of anxiety seem particularly drawn to health data technology devices," she says. "An anxious client seeks certainty and control and health information feeds a sense of control, making it very appealing to an anxious person."

Looking back, some of the periods when I was most immersed in tracking and optimization were also periods when other parts of my life felt uncertain or difficult. The data gave me something concrete to focus on. It offered numbers, targets and routines at times when everything else felt far less predictable.

Dosanjh explains the irony is that tools designed to help people feel more in control can backfire. "The most common devices I see people struggling with are food and exercise tracking apps and continuous glucose monitoring devices," Dosanjh says. "But what starts as feeling in control can quickly turn into feeling controlled by the technology."

She describes people becoming increasingly preoccupied with maintaining specific numbers and avoiding anything that might disrupt them.

"Closing exercise rings, achieving a certain step count and keeping blood sugar within a specific range can turn into a compulsion,” she tells me. “Anxiety peaks at the mere thought of not hitting numbers. What feels like a good thing to do for your health can become a source of intense anxiety instead."

These behaviors rarely look unhealthy from the outside. Going for a walk, exercising regularly or paying attention to what you eat are generally considered positive things. The difficulty is knowing when useful habits become rigid rules and when health stops being something that supports your life and starts becoming the thing your life revolves around.

Dosanjh says that cycle can become self-reinforcing. "This situation becomes more dangerous when the person believes they can manage this added anxiety by setting even higher goals,” she explains. “They are chasing the initial relief and dopamine hit that they experienced early on in their tech use. It can become an addictive trap, driving people further into disordered eating and compulsive exercise."

I think that’s what makes optimization culture so difficult to talk about. For some people, tracking genuinely is helpful. It can encourage movement, show them useful patterns and provide much-needed motivation via streaks and digital rewards, such as badges and kudos from other users. For others, particularly those already vulnerable to anxiety, perfectionism or compulsive tendencies already, the same tools can pull them further down a path they may not even realise they're on.

When tracking went mainstream

When I first started reviewing fitness trackers, this kind of behavior felt relatively niche. Most people weren't tracking their sleep. Very few people knew what heart rate variability was. The idea of waking up and checking a readiness score before deciding how hard to exercise would have sounded bizarre. But today, optimization is everywhere.

More than 45% of people in the UK and around 60% of people in the US now own a smartwatch or fitness wearable. Even if you don't actively seek out health tracking, many of the features, like step counts and calorie estimates, are now built directly into devices like Apple Watches or smartphones that we all use every day.

Despite this, researchers are still trying to understand the psychological impact of living with a constant stream of biometric data. There's no clear evidence that large numbers of wearable users are developing serious problems. But a growing body of research does point towards some worrying patterns. Several studies have linked fitness tracking technologies with increased anxiety, body dissatisfaction and rumination. Others have found associations between wearable use and higher levels of obsessive-compulsive traits, like perfectionism and over-conscientiousness.

I found that one study even introduced a new term: technohypochondria. Researchers defined it through three features: biometric data obsession, digital catastrophizing and a pathological need for algorithmic feedback. Unlike traditional health anxiety, which tends to focus on illness itself, technohypochondria describes a dependence on the continuous flow of personalized health data and the reassurance it appears to provide. I guess I’m a recovering technohypochondriac?

What I found particularly interesting was that researchers working on one of the key studies raised a really important question: “are people with pre-existing compulsive tendencies more drawn to wearables, or do continuous tracking and feedback loops foster or exacerbate these tendencies?”

It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of question and the answer is probably complicated. But the researchers do suggest a feedback loop may exist, where pre-existing vulnerabilities and constant self-tracking reinforce one another.

None of this means that everyone who wears a smartwatch is heading towards a crisis. I know personally that I did already have compulsive tendencies and controlling behaviors with food long before Fitbit released its first device. But I think it does suggest that the emotional impact of optimization deserves more attention than it often receives. Because once tracking becomes woven into everyday life, it can be surprisingly difficult to tell where useful information ends and unhealthy fixation begins.

When the numbers become the point

When I asked my friends and followers on social media to share their experiences with wearables and health tracking, I expected a handful of disparate stories. Instead, I heard from people who described becoming trapped by numbers in ways that felt extremely familiar.

Some were dealing with chronic illness. Others were recovering from major health events. Some simply wanted to get fitter or sleep better. But again and again, there was the same pattern. What began as a search for reassurance gradually became another source of anxiety.

I spoke to Emma, who started relying heavily on health data after cancer treatment and surgical menopause left her worried about the long-term impact on her health. "My watch became reassuring," she tells me. "I thought if my heart rate looks normal, I'm probably okay."

But over time that reassurance became its own form of dependence. "It felt like I was controlling my health anxiety," she says. "But I think I was just making it worse."

Sarah, who has used wearables for years while managing endometriosis and dysautonomia, described a different concern. "I wake up and let Oura tell me if I've slept well and then Visible gives me a score for the day, and that just feels wrong," she says. What impacted her most was the lack of trust she had in her own judgement. "I think it's made me lose trust in myself a little. Am I actually tired and am I really that stressed because an app said so?"

I think that gets to the heart of what can make continuous tracking so complicated. The problem isn't necessarily that you’re looking at data a lot — the problem is what happens when the data becomes more important than your own lived experience.

Understanding the cycle

Even though all of the stories I heard about wearables were different, a common thread was just how many seemed to be born from a feeling of trying to manage uncertainty.

Many of the people who contacted me weren't trying to become superhuman, chase longevity records or optimize every minute of their lives when they first started tracking. They were dealing with health scares, chronic illnesses, anxiety, weight issues and burnout.

And the data that their wearables collected offered reassurance. But the problem is that reassurance doesn't tend to last.

"Many of my clients understand that something doesn't feel quite right about their technology use, but they are afraid to stop using it," Dosanjh tells me.

She often explains this through what psychologists call the anxiety cycle. It starts with uncertainty. Am I healthy? Am I eating the right thing? Am I doing enough? The device provides an answer, whether that's a sleep score, a heart rate reading or a closed exercise ring. The anxiety temporarily decreases and the brain learns that checking the data creates relief.

But, over time, that starts to fade. "The temporary relief that comes from hitting a target or seeing a reassuring number keeps feeding the illusion of mastery over your health," Dosanjh explains. "Helping clients understand that what they are seeking in the tech is certainty, and since complete certainty is impossible, the focus of our work moves from trying to eliminate anxiety to developing the capacity to tolerate uncertainty."

That really describes my own experience. The more I tracked, the more I felt I needed to track. The more information I had, the more information I wanted. The pursuit of health slowly became the pursuit of certainty, which, as we all know logically, isn’t something you can ever get, achieve or “win” at.

What actually helped me

A big part of getting better was realizing that my obsession with health data wasn't really about the health data at all.

Looking back, some of the periods when I was most preoccupied with optimization were also periods when other parts of my life felt difficult, uncertain or out of my control. The trackers gave me something concrete to focus on. There was always another metric to improve, another target to hit, another problem that seemed solvable.

But many of the things I was actually struggling with couldn't be fixed with a spreadsheet or a sleep score. Therapy helped me recognize that pattern. So did learning to tolerate uncertainty a little better. Over time, I became less interested in controlling every variable and more interested in understanding why I felt the need to control them in the first place.

That doesn't mean the tendency completely disappeared, I still recognize it in myself from time to time. The difference is that now I see it for what it is and can catch the early warning signs.

Should wearables be designed differently?

I don't think every fitness tracker needs to be redesigned around people like me. The most effective intervention for my own unhealthy behavior was surprisingly simple: I took all the devices off. But some researchers argue that the design of wearables does deserve more attention.

One of the studies I looked at found that some of the negative psychological effects associated with fitness technologies could be linked to the features themselves. Feedback systems, gamified rewards, social comparison tools, constant notifications and the stream of immediate statistics can all encourage people to engage more frequently with the data, sometimes in ways that become unhelpful.

The researchers believe that psychological wellbeing should be treated as an important measure of success alongside more familiar metrics, like engagement, accuracy and battery life.

That doesn't necessarily mean removing goals or progress tracking. But it could mean giving people more control over how they interact with the technology.

Based on what I’ve seen from years reviewing wearables, that could mean less judgemental language, fewer alarming warnings, more ways to take breaks without feeling punished, and more flexibility over what data is displayed and when.

Most wearable companies already offer some degree of customization. Yet many products are still built around the assumption that more engagement is always better. In many cases that's true; regular use makes the data more useful over time because you can see patterns and track trends. But there should always be room for people to step back when they need to. A healthy relationship with wearable technology shouldn't require constant engagement, and users shouldn't feel punished for taking a break.

Health should improve your life, not become your life

The irony is that I became interested in health and fitness because it genuinely helped me. I learned from a really young age that exercise improved my mood, moving more reduced my anxiety and looking after myself made life feel calmer and more manageable. But I started paying way too little attention to how I felt and too much attention to what the numbers said.

These days, I still review fitness technology and sometimes still wear trackers outside of work. But I pay attention to different things now. If I feel guilty taking a device off, that's a warning sign. So is chasing a target despite being exhausted and spending more time thinking about the data than paying attention to my actual experience.

But most importantly, I ask myself what else is going on. Because when I feel like I’m becoming overly fixated on optimization, there's often something else happening underneath. Data is usually not the cause. It's just where all that energy and anxiety ends up being funnelled.

Dosanjh encourages people to approach health data as information rather than instruction. "Health tech should be an enhancement in your life and not an additional source of stress," she says. "Prioritize your wellbeing over optimization."

She also encourages people to regularly check whether the technology is still serving the purpose they originally bought it for. "How you feel is a more helpful barometer of wellness than numerical data. Be clear about your reasons for using the tech and check they align with your life values,” she says.

That's the lesson I wish I'd understood years ago. Health should improve your life but not become your life. Because no matter how sophisticated our trackers are there are still some things they can't measure. Like whether you have enough energy to spend time with the people you love, whether you're enjoying your life and whether you're actually feeling well. Those are infinitely more important than if you hit 10,000 steps today.

• Key specs for the Google Pixel Watch 5 have just leaked
• They suggest the device could use the same chip Google has used for years
• The RAM might be boosted by 50%, though

If you’ve been eyeing up the Google Pixel Watch 5, you might want to think twice before heading to the checkout. That’s because a new leak has shed light on the upcoming smartwatch’s specs, and while there’s one welcome change, another alteration has left some fans deeply disappointed.

The discovery was made by 9to5Google, with the outlet claiming to have unearthed the specs in a Google Play Console listing. There, the outlet says it came across a device codenamed “godric,” which it says is the Pixel Watch 5.

The entry apparently recorded the device’s chip as the Qualcomm SW5100. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same chip used in the Pixel Watch 2, Pixel Watch 3 and Pixel Watch 4 — in other words, there’s unlikely to be any significant performance uptick in the Pixel Watch 5, if this rumor is correct.

But it wasn’t all bad news. 9to5Google also found that the forthcoming Pixel Watch 5 will allegedly come with 3GB of memory, which is a 50% increase on the 2GB of RAM previous Pixel Watches were equipped with. That might go some way to offsetting the chip limitations and could help the device feel a little snappier in use.

A mixed reaction

The news has received a mixed reception among Pixel Watch fans. Some Reddit users, for instance, were pleased to see the memory increase, with one saying “More RAM is a great move, if confirmed. It should make everything run more smoothly on the [Pixel Watch 5].” Another added that bumping up the memory “should help make Gemini more responsive for people who care about that.”

But not everyone was satisfied with the news. “As a Pixel Watch 2 owner, this is disappointing,” said one user on Reddit, before continuing: “Support for my watch is ending, but if I upgrade then I will have [the] same CPU.”

It’s not too surprising that the news that Google plans to use the same chip for four generations of the Pixel Watch has disappointed plenty of people. Any user holding out for a decent performance bump after so many years might feel a little let down, at least if the leak comes to fruition.

Still, it’s good news to see the memory finally bumped up by 1GB. With artificial intelligence (AI) models like Google Gemini now making their way onto all of the best smartwatches, the extra RAM should improve their operations on your wrist.

Will that be enough to make up for the subpar chip situation? We’ll have to see once Google finally lifts the lid on the Pixel Watch 5, which is expected to happen in August. Keep your eyes peeled.

• Oura is bringing key features from its Ring 5 wearable to older models
• The features include Health Radar, live activity tracking, and more
• They’re now available on the Oura Ring 4 and Ring 3

Oura has just released its Ring 5 wearable, and we were pretty impressed with what was on show when we reviewed it. But if you haven’t been tempted to upgrade and are instead rocking an Oura Ring 4 or Ring 3, you might wonder if you’ll miss out on the new features packed into the latest model.

Well, the good news is that plenty of the new features have just been rolled out to those older products. Specifically, Oura is bringing Health Radar, live activity tracking, numerous Oura Labs tools, lost device locating, and a lot more.

Live activity tracking is a notable addition, as it adds real-time workout metrics to the Oura app, allowing you to monitor your progress as you’re keeping fit and active. It turns the Oura Ring into much more of a workout partner than before.

Health Radar, too, is a sizable update. With it on board, your Oura Ring can assess your long-term health signals in the background, including changes to your heart and breathing rates, to spot any emerging patterns in your health and wellbeing.

You’ll be able to find the full list of updates in Oura’s blog post. If you’ve been mulling over whether to upgrade, it could prove to be an insightful read.

A welcome change

Changes like this are very welcome, especially since the Oura Ring 4 is less than two years old at this point. It’s never nice to see relatively recent tech missing out on key software features that could feasibly be backported to it, so the fact that this has happened will be great news for owners of the Oura Ring 4 and Oura Ring 3.

The update seems to have gone down well with customers, too. Posting on Reddit, user beanizzle noted that their Oura Ring can now recognize long-haul travel without any status needing to be manually entered. Speaking of the change, the user said: “This is definitely a great new feature as I sometimes struggle to remember to give my body more grace after traveling through time zones.”

They weren’t alone. Further down the thread, other commenters remarked how their readiness scores went haywire after taking red-eye flights, while another Redditor declared that the feature is “long overdue but so glad to have it!”

If these are the sorts of features you’re looking for in a wearable, Oura’s latest update means you might not need to upgrade to an Oura Ring 5 if you already have a Ring 4 or Ring 3. And anything that can eke extra life out of your existing wearables is good with us.

Professionals end every day feeling behind or burnt out, but not because they haven’t worked hard enough or clocked off earlier that day.

It’s because the volume of information, decisions, and context-switching is moving faster than the pace humans can realistically handle.

A recent Microsoft report put numbers to what people are feeling.

Eight in 10 of the global workforce say they lack enough time or energy to do their work, and 60% of meetings are happening as ad hoc calls or quick chats outside the pre-scheduled day-to-day.

This isn’t a motivation problem, it’s a capacity one - and it's created one of the defining contradictions of modern work. Businesses have never had more ideas, expertise, or ambition at their disposal, yet the people inside them are increasingly starved of the time and clarity needed to turn that potential into progress.

The smartphone makes this contradiction impossible to ignore. It is one of the most consequential inventions of the 21st century, yet also one that many people actively try to use less. Screen-time limits and digital detoxes are not anti-technology trends. They are signs that people are trying to regain control over a tool that has become indispensable, but increasingly overwhelming.

The message is simple: the market isn't asking for more technology. It's asking for relief.

Technological exhaustion

People are adopting or looking at things like digital assistants, wearable AI, focus apps, and workflow automation, not because the technology is impressive. They're doing it because they're exhausted.

That distinction matters because cognitive overload has become a workplace crisis. And the first wave of wearable AI missed the opportunity to solve it.

Instead of building practical tools, companies chased futuristic visions. Early wearable AI products asked "what can AI do?" instead of "what problem needs solving?"

The Humane Pin is the most obvious and probably the most well-known industry example. The vision was compelling, but the execution wasn't there. It positioned itself as a complete phone replacement before proving it could do even just one thing better than a phone. Ultimately, it tried to be everything and ended up being nothing.

This approach didn't reduce cognitive overload - it created more. Another device to manage. Another thing running in the background of an already overwhelming life.

The wrong question asked was: "How do we replace the phone entirely?"

A much better question is: “Where are people losing the most time, energy, and clarity — and how can technology give some of it back without demanding more from them?”

Useful technologies

The most useful technologies rarely arrive by replacing everything at once. The calculator didn't try to replace the accountant - it eliminated one specific source of friction and became indispensable.

It’s the same with wearable AI assistants. Progress is made in practice, not promises.

The wearables gaining real traction share one quality: users can explain their value in a single sentence. "This device exists so I can stop worrying about X." That clarity isn't a constraint - it is the product.

The future of this category will not be defined by the devices with the boldest premise. It will be defined by those who understand where people are most overloaded and remove that pressure without asking for much in return.

Does the technology make someone feel more capable or more managed? Does it reduce the number of things they have to remember, check, repeat, and translate? Does it create clarity, or simply another stream of information?

Those questions are less glamorous than asking whether AI can replace the smartphone. But they are also far more useful.

The wearables that will actually help aren't the ones with the boldest premise; they're the ones that solve one real problem but do it well.

In a world drowning in information, that may be the most ambitious thing technology can do.

Simplify work with the best AI tools.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• The90 Gem necklace measures UV rays in your surroundings
• It then gives personalized advice on how to stay safe
• The high-tech device is styled as a pendant necklace

It often doesn’t take a lot to burn your skin if you’re out in the sun, and even just a few minutes of exposure can do damage if you’re not properly protected. Instead of guessing the best course of action, a new wearable device from The90 could help you know exactly what to do.

Dubbed the Gem, the product rather grandly describes itself as “The first personal sun intelligence system” that helps you “protect your skin's future in real time.” Despite that, it looks like a simple pendant at first glance. Worn around your neck, it could easily be mistaken for a piece of jewelry to the untrained eye. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

The main pendant is actually an ultraviolet (UV) light sensor that can measure the levels of both UVA (ageing) and UVB (burning) that you’re subject to. It combines this with your personalized skin profile, which covers your skin type, current clothing, and whether you’ve already applied sunscreen.

Once the device has all of that, it can give you advice on when it’s time to apply more sunscreen, cover up with extra clothes, or get under shade and out of the sun entirely. It does this through the company’s companion app, which is available for free.

Actionable insights

Plenty of weather apps provide data on UV rays in your local area, but the issue is they’re always going to be relatively inaccurate since they cover broad areas. A device like the Gem, on the other hand, can measure UV levels in your direct vicinity, giving you potentially more accurate information.

And because it takes variable factors into account — such as your clothing and skin type — it might be able to give you more valuable and actionable insights than something that just gives out blanket advice.

Still, it has a couple of limitations. It only comes in one style, for one thing, and that might not appeal to everyone. When you have a device that doubles up as both a health tracker and a wearable necklace, it could be a risk to only offer one appearance.

As well as that, the Gem is priced at $299, which makes it a fairly expensive — and therefore fairly niche — device. That’s perhaps reflected by its positioning as a piece of high-tech jewelry rather than a simple UV tracker. Still, it could price more people out than a simpler product would.

Despite all that, though, the Gem has promise. Founded by a Fitbit/Google veteran and with plenty of interesting ideas, it could certainly be one to watch.

Today, smart wearables and health tracking apps are part of everyday life for millions of people in the UK. From heart rate and blood oxygen levels to continuous glucose readings and home ECGs, a growing share of the population is generating real time health data from their wrist, phone or patch.

This is more than a consumer trend: it is fundamentally changing how patients understand their own health and their awareness of what medical technology can offer. Patients no longer arrive at appointments in the dark about their health.

Rather, they present months of data to clinicians, who can then use this information to support their own decision-making.

It is important, however, to distinguish between consumer wellness wearables and regulated medical devices (such as CE- or UKCA-marked technologies) that inform diagnosis and treatment in clinical pathways supported by NICE guidance.

We see this shift towards on-the-go health tech across the industry including developers of wearable cardiac monitors, continuous glucose systems, therapeutic wearables and portable diagnostic tools.

The public taking prevention into their own hands

Wearables have not only normalized constant and convenient access to health information, but have also empowered individuals to take personal responsibility for their own health. Checking a resting heart rate or sleep pattern has become routine, often prompting earlier referral to NHS services when anomalies appear.

Fitness trackers were the catalyst, but the public is now increasingly familiar with clinically focused technologies. Their presence in pharmacies, online, and in the media has raised awareness that precise, preventative tools exist, even when not supplied through the NHS.

Patient autonomy and appetite for diagnostics

This growth in patient autonomy has direct implications for health tech adoption. A decade ago, wearing a cardiac monitor for longer than 24 hours might have deterred patients; today, many people have adapted to this change, wearing devices day and night.

Key implications of this shift for health tech adoption include:

1. Willingness to use clinical devices: Familiarity with wearables makes patients open to long-term clinical monitoring if it yields a definitive result.

2. Stronger demand for accuracy: Patients understand that a 24-hour snapshot can miss intermittent issues and are more inclined to support technologies that monitor over days or weeks, even if this requires more commitment in the short term.

3. Reduced tolerance for repeat appointments caused by inconclusive tests: Once patients realize high-quality data prevents repeated hospital visits, they naturally prefer comprehensive, first-time investigation.

Ambulatory ECG monitoring illustrates this well. Traditional 24-hour Holter monitors frequently miss intermittent arrhythmias, leading to delayed diagnoses and increased stroke risk. Modern devices monitoring for 14 days provide higher diagnostic yields and a far better patient experience.

When tariffs lag behind patient expectations

Unfortunately, we often see that NHS reimbursement structures rarely keep pace. Long-term monitoring technologies are often grouped under the same tariff codes as short-duration, less accurate options.

In ambulatory ECG, for example, extended continuous monitoring is frequently reimbursed at the same rate as a basic Holter monitor. This structurally disincentivizes providers from adopting more effective diagnostics, compelling Trusts to rely on cheaper, short-term tests that fit existing codes but result in avoidable repeat appointments.

To harness patient autonomy in support of health tech adoption, reimbursement must recognize wider system benefits - such as avoided admissions and reduced outpatient appointments - rather than focusing solely on unit cost.

Supporting bringing care closer to home

These issues are particularly relevant in the context of the Neighbourhood Health Framework and 10 Year Health Plan. Moving toward integrated neighborhood teams and prevention-focused, community-based care depends on timely insight into patient risk.

Neighborhood teams are expected to manage long term conditions closer to home, prevent avoidable non-elective admissions and reduce pressure on acute services. Virtual wards are already doing this at scale: in January 2026, more than 11,000 patients in England were being cared for on virtual wards, with around 90% of the 12,700 available ‘beds’ occupied. Patient-generated data from wearables can support this by flagging risk earlier, enabling timely intervention and safe remote follow-up.

Longer term monitoring, postal diagnostic pathways and remote review are consistent with the Framework’s aims. They can contribute to mandated success measures, including reductions in non-elective admissions and bed days, improvements in cardiovascular and diabetes outcomes, better access and fewer avoidable outpatient appointments.

However, local providers will only realize this potential if adoption and market access mechanisms are aligned. If tariffs and coding frameworks undervalue longer-term monitoring, local systems will struggle to invest in the tools that best support these objectives.

Harnessing the “wearable generation” for system change

The rise of health tracking has created a population comfortable with health data, more focused on prevention and more aware of the possibilities of health technology. Whilst this can lead to more ‘worried well’ presentations - where non‑specific alerts from consumer wearables drive anxiety and extra GP appointments - it is largely an asset for the NHS.

The answer is not to discourage engagement, but to channel it. Clear guidance on how consumer data should be interpreted, and regulated devices with proven accuracy sitting within structured pathways rather than operating in isolation, can reduce unnecessary demand while accelerating appropriate diagnosis and treatment.

If procurement and commissioning are adjusted to reflect this reality, informed patients can accelerate responsible health tech adoption. They are already willing to track their health, use monitoring devices for longer periods and engage with digital tools if this results in clearer answers and less time on waiting lists.

The task now is to ensure that adoption pathways, tariffs and neighborhood care models are designed to support this engagement and to translate prevention on the wrist into better outcomes for patients and the health system.

We feature the best telemedicine software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• The LightInk watch offers 400 days of battery life
• It does this by stripping back features and using an E Ink display
• It also adds solar charging to stay topped up on the go

From the Apple Watch Ultra 3 to the Google Pixel Watch 4, customers looking to adorn their wrists with one of the best smartwatches tend to look for wearables that offer excellent battery life — after all, there’s no point in shelling out on a device if you spend more time charging it than using it. If battery life is a priority for you, you might want to check out the LightInk watch.

That’s because with 400 days of juice on a single charge, it blows past the competition in terms of battery longevity. How does it achieve that figure? Well, this is no ordinary watch — it’s powered by solar energy to keep itself constantly topped up, meaning you can start charging it even when you’re miles from the nearest power outlet. As long as the sun is beaming down on you, the LightInk’s battery is getting topped up.

But you’ll get 400 days of battery even before solar charging is taken into account, the project’s creator claims. How? Well, one way is through cutting the feature list right down. As its name suggests, the LightInk uses an E Ink display instead of an AMOLED display, unlike some rival smartwatches. E Ink technology is incredibly efficient on the battery, helping you eke even more life out of this product.

And because it’s an open-source project, there’s no fee to obtain one. You just need a 3D printer and a few off-the-shelf components to make it yours.

Extreme battery savings

Of course, the LightInk isn’t all sunshine and roses — there are a few downsides to it. Its E Ink screen might grant it excellent battery life, but it comes at the cost of visual fidelity. The LightInk’s display is monochrome and low resolution, so you shouldn’t expect any eye-catching graphics here. It doesn’t even show seconds.

And if you’re a fitness nut or believe in the ‘quantified self,’ you’ll want to look elsewhere. You won’t get any of the health and fitness sensors and metrics you find in most smartwatches — the LightInk can tell the time, occasionally connect to Wi-Fi and GPS, and that’s about it.

You also can’t just go out and buy the LightInk at your local shopping mall. As we mentioned before, you need to have a 3D printer on hand to craft many of the required components yourself, then assemble and solder them into a finished product. You’ll also need to be comfortable with building your own firmware based on the resources provided on LightInk’s GitHub page.

Still, the LightInk doesn’t make any claims of being a high-end, flagship device — it’s a deliberately basic product, as this is what allows it to put all of its energy into maximizing battery life.

It’s definitely not for everyone, but if your priority is staying away from your charger for as long as possible, it could be just what you’ve been looking for.

• This brand new perception chip supports real-time awareness at huge efficiency
• Always-on tracking could also improve smartphone camera performance
• Object recognition, positional tracking and scene understanding also supported

Swiss semiconductor startup Mosaic has successfully raised $3.8 million in funding to build super-efficient so-called perception chips, which would be installed across smart glasses and other wearables to bring more powerful processing into smaller form factors.

Company co-founder and CEO Alfio Di Mauro argues that “spatial intelligence shouldn’t require an application-class processor and a GPU,” hence the inception of Mosaic SoC, which aims to deliver “real-time perception at a fraction of the energy.”

Mosaic says its “next-generation perception chips” will address some of the current bottlenecks wearable makers face today, including battery size, heat output, device thickness and engineering complexity.

Are perception chips the answer to powerful yet slim wearables?

While cameras and sensors continue to improve, manufacturers are under increasing pressure to add more compute and processing power inside devices while maintaining (or even decreasing) form factor.

The perception chip is said to be able to provide real-time environmental awareness, object recognition, positional tracking and scene understanding while consuming only a fraction of the power a conventional smartphone-class compute stack would consume, making it ideal for future AR glasses and headsets.

“The Mosaic SoC chips are designed to be small enough and efficient enough to make smart glasses indistinguishable from regular glasses, while still delivering full spatial awareness,” the company declared in a press release.

Early smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta devices currently lean heavily on smartphone pairing to get the most out of the technology they provide because the physical constraints of size and weight prevent them from being able to install the relevant hardware. On the flip side, Apple’s Vision Pro often draws criticism for its sheer weight (750-800g), which makes it uncomfortable to wear for longer periods.

However use cases extend far beyond just glasses – in smartphones, perception chips could power always-on tracking and classification to deliver continuous awareness with minimal impacts on battery life.

Extra power and big goals

Where Mosaic’s perception chip differs from others is that, where others rely on single- or dual-code ARM-based designs, this one uses a proprietary design and a multi-core architecture of eight or more cores, which maximizes performance per watt to back up Mosaic’s bold efficiency claims.

Mosaic also claims to remove original design manufacturer (ODM) complexity, shipping its chips with a full application layer developed and maintained by the startup.

While the company has already achieved “meaningful revenue” through NRE contracts with ODM partners, future plans revolve around far more than being a chip provider. This startup has big visions to become a platform supplier, where applications are developed specifically for its silicon.

“The next billion smart devices will see and understand the world around them,” Antonia Albert, an investor with leading Swiss pre-seed fund Founderful, commented. “Mosaic SoC's product is the chip that makes that possible at scale.”

• Amazfit has launched the Cheetah 2 Ultra smartwatch
• It’s made for trail runners and ultra-running enthusiasts
• It arrives just one day after the new budget wearables from Garmin

Amazfit has managed to carve out a role for itself as a popular budget-friendly wearables brand, and its devices often find a spot on our list of the best cheap smartwatches money can buy.

Now, the company has launched a brand-new offering, and it’s hot on the heels of a new cut-price Garmin watch that is gunning for the exact same buyers.

Amazfit’s new product is dubbed the Cheetah 2 Ultra, and the company describes it as “a specialized instrument for trail runners who measure success in elevation, unpredictable terrain, and hours spent on the move.”

It comes with a Grade 5 titanium bezel, frame, and back cover; a 1.5-inch AMOLED display that goes up to 3,000 nits of peak brightness and features a scratch-resistant sapphire glass panel; up to 33 hours of battery life in Trail Running Mode and up to 30 days of juice in regular mode; and dual-frequency six-satellite positioning for accurate GPS tracking.

If you’re going off-road and need directions, you’ll find full-color route planning that Amazfit says comes with “rendering speeds 2.5 times faster and refresh speeds 12 times faster than before.” There are also improved training and performance metrics, expanded third-party integrations, and more.

And the Cheetah 2 Ultra is not the only news from Amazfit. The firm has also recently updated the firmware for its T-Rex Ultra 2 watch to offer heart rate zones and waypoint data, better aiding you when you’re training, racing, or just out for a leisurely run.

A whole range of new watches

Amazfit typically positions its devices at the more affordable end of the market, but with the Cheetah 2 Ultra’s $599.99 price tag, the company is showing it’s not afraid to compete with more mid-range rivals.

Funnily enough, the announcement comes just one day after Garmin revealed a new array of affordable smartwatches, including the Forerunner 70, the Forerunner 170, and the Forerunner 170 Music. The former clocks in at £219.99 / AU$399 (about $300), and with the most expensive (the Forerunner 170 Music) priced at £299.99 / AU$549 (around $400), Garmin seems keen to show it can still make excellent budget smartwatches of the kind Amazfit’s customers might be used to.

It’s also interesting to note that while the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Ultra is aimed squarely at long-distance runners and ultra-marathon competitors, the Garmin Forerunner 70’s predecessor — the Forerunner 55 — was worn by Sabastian Sawe as he broke the sub-two-hour London Marathon record in April this year.

So if distance running is your bag, both of these watches should be on your radar. It’s just up to you to decide which one best fits your budget.

• OnePlus has announced the Watch 4 wearable
• It features a new version of Wear OS ahead of OnePlus’s older devices
• But some users are disappointed with the lack of sizeable upgrades

If you’re in the market for a new wearable, you might want to check out what OnePlus has added to its lineup. The company has just announced the OnePlus Watch 4 and revealed the device’s full list of features and specifications, and there’s an interesting software surprise nestled in the listing.

Head over to the OnePlus website, and you’ll find all the details for the new smartwatch. It’s got a 466x466 pixel LTPO OLED display with a sapphire crystal face delivering 600 nits of brightness and 3,000 nits of peak brightness in sports mode, 2GB of memory, and 32GB of storage. The 646mAh battery can power the device for three days of heavy usage and up to 16 days in power saver mode. The weight has been cut compared to the Watch 3, and an IP69 rating has been added.

Interestingly, the OnePlus Watch 4 is driven by Oxygen OS Watch 8, based on Google’s Wear OS 6, right out of the box. That’s unusual because OnePlus has previously said that Wear OS 6 will be coming to the older Watch 3 and Watch 2 models later this year, so getting it loaded onto a brand-new wearable before that timeframe is a pleasant surprise.

You’ll be able to get the OnePlus Watch 4 in Evergreen Titanium and Midnight Titanium colorways. Yet despite a soft launch on the OnePlus website, there’s no info yet on pricing or release date. We’ll have to see when that arrives.

One to avoid?

Despite the upgrade, some notable drawbacks will probably prevent the OnePlus Watch 4 from becoming one of the best smartwatches around, which is a shame considering how much we liked the Watch 3.

For one thing, the Watch 4 uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 processor and BES 2800 co-processor as the Watch 3 and Watch 2 before it. That’s a disappointing concession and means there’s no sign of the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip here.

And not all OnePlus fans are impressed, particularly when it comes to the relatively minor upgrades over the Watch 3. On Reddit, for example, user DueCompetition1249 expressed their displeasure by saying, “Nothing new. Either it will be really cheap … or it will be a flop.”

That sentiment was mirrored by user Realistic-Button1810, who said, “Not much hardware change, not really worth an upgrade if you have a two or three … better to wait until the new hardware is released.”

If you already have a OnePlus Watch 3 — or even a Watch 2 — you might not feel the upgrade is worth it, especially considering the lack of a new chip. In the absence of significant changes, the OnePlus Watch 4 might be one to avoid for recent OnePlus customers.

• An unreleased Fitbit wearable has been spotted in the wild
• It’s been repeatedly worn in public by basketball player Steph Curry
• The device was previously teased by Curry and Google

Not everyone that’s interested in fitness trackers wants a wearable with a screen. After all, these products might be some of the best smartwatches out there, but with a high-end display thrown into the mix, they can be too bulky, too expensive, and too short on battery life for many people.

Pushing against this, there are many screenless wearables that quantify your wellbeing without the cumbersome screen. Fitbit has been teasing one such device in collaboration with basketball player Steph Curry, and now a whole treasure trove of images has leaked depicting the as-yet-unreleased product.

The pictures were unearthed by Droid Life, with the outlet saying they came across the images on Steph Curry’s social media pages. These photos depict a screenless wearable wrapped around Curry’s wrist, with what looks to be a gray woven strap with an orange border and metallic clasp.

These match earlier leaked images supposedly portraying Fitbit’s wearable, which was officially teased by Google at the start of April. That lends credence to the idea that the product spotted by Droid Life is the same as the one promoted by Google and Steph Curry a few weeks ago.

Aside from the wearable itself, Droid Life also found a Steph Curry video that shows what looks like a modified version of the Fitbit app running on a Google Pixel phone. The Fitbit app in the video is tracking a Sport activity with live data, which Droid Life doesn’t believe the current app is able to do. The implication is that this is a feature that could come to the Fitbit app in order to complement its new wearable.

Seems legit

Interestingly, Curry has been sporting this wearable publicly since at least January 2026, Droid Life claims. He has been seen with it at basketball games, at press conferences and at promotional events, which seems unusual for an unreleased product that, you would think, would be kept under lock and key until it was ready for release.

One possibility is that the parties involved want the device to be spotted in order to build up excitement ahead of its launch date. In that way, it might be an attempt to seed the product into people’s minds before the arrival of any official press campaign.

The claim that the images were discovered on official pages managed by or featuring Steph Curry gives them some weight — after all, Curry is lending his name to the project alongside Google-owned Fitbit. It’s not like Droid Life has spotted an unknown device on the wrist of some other celebrity and has guessed that they’re looking at an in-development Fitbit product.

With the device seemingly making public appearances now, it might not be long until we get official details from Fitbit, such as the product’s name and asking price. If it’s something you're interested in, you might want to keep your eyes peeled.

• Garmin has added fertility tracking to many of its best wearables
• The feature comes via a partnership with Natural Cycles
• It’s coming to the Fenix 8, Forerunner 570, Venu 4, and more

The best Garmin smartwatches are more than just fitness trackers these days — they can help you get a clearer picture of your overall health, with many metrics that extend well beyond exercise. That’s just been expanded further with the introduction of fertility tracking, which is bound for Garmin users thanks to a collaboration with Natural Cycles.

If you haven't heard of Natural Cycles, it is currently the only birth control app cleared by the FDA. That means it’s well placed to enable cycle tracking on Garmin wearables and make understanding your fertility a little easier.

The new feature is coming to many of Garmin’s most popular watches, including the Fenix 8, Forerunner 570, Venu 4, and Venu X1. It should therefore be available to a wide variety of Garmin’s customers.

It works by measuring your skin temperature and then uses that reading to “unlock fertility insights in the Natural Cycles app,” Garmin says. This empowers users to “better understand their reproductive health.” Your temperature is tracked overnight, with information synced to the Natural Cycles app in the morning.

Plan or prevent a pregnancy

One of the benefits of using a smartwatch to track your fertility is that it is simple and non-invasive. There’s no need for any kind of hormone-based treatment or complex procedure, just a few metrics that can be gathered from your wrist.

Garmin is not the first nor the only company to have added fertility features to its wearables. Rivals, including Apple, Whoop, Fitbit, and more, also offer some kind of cycle tracking, meaning you’ve got a lot of options if you want this kind of functionality on your wrist.

The cycle-tracking features from Garmin and Natural Cycles aren’t available everywhere just yet. Garmin says it’s currently available in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There’s no word yet on when it might be rolled out elsewhere.

But for now, it’s a welcome improvement to Garmin’s wearables and one that could help you keep track of a vital part of your life.

I love my Luna Ring Gen 2 smart ring — I wear it every single day to track my sleep, some basic fitness metrics, and simply because I like how the black band looks on my left index finger. Recently, I picked up a Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic, and boy, is it in a whole different league.

I’ll still wear my smart ring, but the smartwatch is now a key component in my everyday wardrobe too.

Best of all, it’s currently on sale at various stores. For the absolute best deal, Amazon has limited units (we’re talking single digits) of the Classic at £299, but when that sells out, you can pick the Watch8 Classic up at Argos for £314.3 if you use code RED30 — and then Currys has it for £349 if you’re out of luck elsewhere.

Where do I begin with the Galaxy Watch8 Classic?

The first draw of this smartwatch is its size. With a 46mm screen, it’s easy to read the watch face at a glance, parse notifications (even type out and send message responses from the watch), and interact with its various health and fitness apps.

Being bigger means the Classic is also a bit bulkier — with its rotating bezel adding a little chunk too, though it is a useful controller — and this size took a little getting used to, especially when I first slept with the Watch8 Classic on for sleep tracking. Thankfully, it has never felt uncomfortable to wear, and apart from that first night in my first two weeks, I haven’t been bothered by this watch in bed at all.

The design is also excellent. The Classic is distinctively a smartwatch but does work as a, well, classic timepiece, too. I recently went for a suit fitting ahead of my wedding later this year, and the Watch8 Classic didn't look out of place as I tried on jackets and waistcoats — in fact, it looked at home as part of the ensemble.

Beyond how it looks, this thing is very useful for health and fitness tracking. I’ve dabbled with the running coach — I’ve completed my assessment and my first training session with more to come — and I love how easy it is to track my exercises. I just push the large side button and swipe through to whatever activity I’m about to do.

If I forget to do this manually, I’ve also found the Watch8 Classic is great at detecting my activity, such as picking up my evening walks.

As for health, the insights are a little more useful than my smart ring, but the big draw is that accessing the information is much more convenient. I can find it all on my watch — limiting the risk of me getting distracted by my smartphone, which could happen if I wanted to check my smart ring app — or (if my smartphone is on hand) I can see some useful metrics like my sleep score in my Now Brief.

This does require you to have a Samsung phone, and it’s helpful to have this info alongside my calendar and other Now Brief data, making it a great way to prepare me for the day.

Even the battery — which I was worried would feel far too short — is just fine. Based on my usage, the Galaxy Watch8 Classic lasts for well over 24 hours, and I keep it topped up by charging it when I get ready in the morning (taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating breakfast). In this time, it always powers back up to full, so I’m ready to tackle the day.

I do still love my smart ring, but the Watch8 Classic has really impressed me — and I’m not sure I could ever give up wearing a smartwatch now. The Classic is far more capable than the basic trackers I was used to, and solves a few gripes I’ve had recently with my Luna Ring.

So while it's on sale, I’d seriously consider picking it up. We are expecting new Watch9 devices a little later this year, so there is some reason to wait, but if you’re keen to nab a Galaxy Watch8 Classic soon, these sales are excellent.

According to recent reports, Apple is going hard on the next generation of AI wearable technology. So far, even the best Apple Watches have been largely limited to health and fitness and a few communication features as an extension of your phone, while its AirPods Pro 3 have been enhanced with heart-rate detection and live translation.

Now Apple is taking its wearable AI smarts one step further, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, with a trio of wearables sporting AI cameras to provide 'contextual information' for its revamped Siri AI chatbot. The devices will function like the Meta Ray-Bans AI glasses, which let ask Meta a question based on the world around you and interpret your request as best they can.

Gurman reports that Apple is making its own AI glasses to take the fight to Meta, developing its frames in-house (rather than collaborating with an established glasses maker like Ray-Ban) with "an advanced camera system with a high-resolution camera that's able to capture photos and videos, as well as a second camera that provides visual information to ‌Siri‌ and environmental context" according to MacRumors.

It's reportedly focusing on build quality to distinguish itself from Meta, which likely means the glasses will be a premium product. With multiple sizes and colors set to be available, MacRumors says Apple is aiming for an "all-day AI companion".

The other two devices are expected to be an AI wearable pin – along the lines of the disastrous Humane AI Pin and other devices that have flopped in previous years – and AirPods fitted with cameras.

Both devices are expected to have lower-resolution cameras designed for information rather than taking high-quality photos, with included microphones for speaking with Siri. Gurman adds that a speaker for the AI Pin is being considered, but isn't confirmed. The devices would reportedly act like 'the eyes and ears' of an iPhone, linked to Siri on your phone rather than using on-device AI.

Will Apple fare any better than Humane?

Apple has struggled to make ground with splashy launches in areas of innovation in recent years, notably with the Apple Vision Pro. It's not that the device wasn't good; rather, the world wasn't ready for it (and it's expensive). However, if these rumors are true and we see the first hints of these devices in 2027, I have the feeling that Apple's smart glasses or AI wearables will do significantly better.

Apple has historically done well in fields others have broken ground in. It's not often been a true trailblazer – it lets others take the initial risks, then aims to produce an improved model. Look at how long Apple has taken to launch a foldable phone, for example: something we know it's currently working on. With its smart glasses Apple will look to fix the mistakes it sees Meta making, ironing out the pain points of the form factor and launching when potential customers have become used to the new concept of smart glasses.

Likewise with an AI pin or pendant. The Humane AI Pin was its own device, and it flopped, with a strange LED-display system on a device designed to completely replace the user's phone. Apple doesn't need to replace the iPhone; by all accounts it wants to add to it, keeping it as a hub in your pocket while reducing the need to take it out all the time. AirPods with AI cameras would be a similar concept.

It's all about making technology easier to use, and reducing friction between the user and their gadgets. That's one thing Apple has always excelled at, and I see no reason why these rumored devices wouldn't be successful.

• Ultrahuman may be about to release a new Ring Pro wearable
• That’s hinted at by fresh paperwork filed with the FCC
• It suggests Ultrahuman has worked a way around its past patent woes

Late last year, Ultrahuman’s best smart rings were banned from the US as part of the fallout from a patent dispute with Oura. At the time, Ultrahuman said that “A new ring design is already in development” – and a newly published regulatory filing suggests that this product is almost upon us.

As reported by Gadgets & Wearables, the Ultrahuman Ring Pro has just been revealed in paperwork filed with the FCC in the US. The filing lists several specifications of the new device and suggests that Ultrahuman has made changes to avoid infringing the patents that got its previous products banned in the first place.

According to the regulatory filing, the Ultrahuman Ring Pro will sport multiple colors and finishes, including Pro Raw Titanium, Pro Matte Gray, Pro Silver, Pro Gold and Pro Aster Black. There are options ranging from ring sizes five to 14, and its internal diameter extends up to 24.91mm across.

The Ultrahuman Ring Pro utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy and contains a 2450 MHz chip antenna. There doesn’t appear to be any mention of NFC functionality, although that doesn’t necessarily rule out this feature, as it might have been disabled for testing.

The fact that Ultrahuman is seemingly back with a new device suggests that it has found a way around the patent dispute that led to its previous troubles. That’s hinted at by the fact that Ultrahuman has also submitted filings for a new charger for the Ring Pro, with the new design implying that the company has worked out a new internal design that does not infringe upon Oura’s patents.

An imminent return

As soon as its rings were banned from import into the US, Ultrahuman reassured its users that it would be back with a new product. That appears to be the Ring Pro, which the filing suggests was tested in November 2025 and manufactured a month later. Considering the ban came into effect in October, that’s a fast turnaround for this new product.

At the time of the ban, Ultrahuman also raised the possibility of creating a ‘Made in USA’ version of its Ring Air that could be manufactured in Texas. There’s no indication that this is underway yet, so we’ll have to wait for more news on that front.

Now that the Ultrahuman Ring Pro has filed its paperwork with the FCC, it has cleared the last regulatory hurdle for entering the US market. While we don’t yet have a solid release date, we probably won’t have to wait too long to see Ultrahuman announce the Ring Pro. Gadgets & Wearables points out that the filing’s confidentiality clause expires in May, suggesting that the Ring Pro should launch before then.

When that happens, it should enable Ultrahuman to put its patent woes behind it. That should give more certainty to fans of the brand who have been waiting for news on the company’s future offerings for several months now.

I use a notepad every day. Not a tablet, or Windows Notepad, or Google Keep, or even OneNote, I'm a plain old pen-and-paper stalwart. I'm not a meticulous journal user: my notes are messy to-do lists, scrap notes from meetings, planning stories and articles, shopping lists, and brainstorming. In essence, I use it a bit like a second brain.

I shouldn't be surprised to see AI coming for this part of my life, too. As TechRadar's Senior Fitness and Wearables Editor, I had my eye on all the best fitness trackers and health innovations this year, but in the world of wearables it's 'second brains' that are dominating the show floor and conference halls, threatening to retire my beaten-up analog notepads.

First, it was the Pebble Index O1. Launching before CES but on display at the show, it's a new kind of smart ring. With a tactile button, microphone, and an NFC chip linking it to your phone (on which is an app with an open-source LLM), the Index O1 allows you to add events to your calendar, set reminders, transcribe notes to yourself, and generally remember things. In a conversation with me, Pebble and Core Devices founder Eric Migicovsky referred to it as "external memory for the brain".

It seems other wearables at CES have got the same idea. The Switchbot AI Mindclip is a device worn like a lapel pin that records conversations, sends them to the cloud and transforms them into searchable AI summaries. It reportedly supports over 100 languages, and describes itself as "a second brain".

We were on the ground at Lenovo's keynote (and posted the clip on our TikTok channel — you can watch it below), where Lenovo demonstrated its voice assistant Qira, housed in a camera-equipped pendant a bit like the creepy AI Friend concept that made the rounds last year. Anker's Soundcore Work and the Plaud NotePin are similar record-and-transcribe concepts.

As a journalist who knows all too well the pains of manual transcription, I can see the usefulness of these devices straight away. Long projects and features involving multiple interviews are a pain to work through, and it's a lot easier when I can skip backwards and forwards through the transcript, pull out the quotes I want and compare them with the original audio. Likewise, I'm sure most people who take lots of long meetings would appreciate a Ctrl+F function for their minds.

However, there's a big difference between "useful transcription feature for interviews and meetings" and "second brain". The phrasing these companies are using means they're aiming to replace the paper mind-map, not just the analog dictaphone. Instead of a physical notebook, we get AI that can be spoken to hands-free, back up your notes to the cloud (SwitchBot hasn't yet specified what cloud service it uses), allow you to search through them simply and is eminently more convenient. All for a chunky up-front purchase and a small monthly fee thereafter.

The phrasing of the "second brain" also reminds me of an MIT study about heavy AI and ChatGPT users, which explored the effects of using AI to write essays rather than the human brain across four months, measuring brain activity for each participant group. By the end of the study, the researchers found that "over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels," and showed significantly lower brain activity.

My parents have an unerring, almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the road networks in, probably, a 50-mile radius from my childhood home. They learned this the old-fashioned way. When I learned to drive, on the other hand, I used GPS to get me everywhere, and as a result became almost completely reliant on it. I don't have anywhere near the instant road-network recall my parents have, even close to home, and I'm sure many people of my generation are the same.

As someone who already makes use of AI transcription tools, I'm keen to see them get better and continue to automate one of the most mind-numbing tasks of being a journalist — transcribing interviews. However, if the second brain is going to see a lot of use outside of the workplace too, I wonder whether any more essential cognitive functions we take for granted are going to atrophy as a result.

• Razer showcased an upgraded Project AVA animated holographic AI assistant at CES this year
• Project AVA has a selection of avatars with their own simulated personalities that can engage in conversation, see your screen, and track your gaze
• Razer is widening Project Ava's role beyond gaming coach to everyday tasks like scheduling and organizing your life

AI assistants right now mostly take the form of a wall of text or a disembodied voice, but Razer thinks people would prefer to talk to a small, animated hologram with a matching personality sitting on their desk.

It brought its Project AVA to CES this year to showcase exactly that. AVA first debuted at CES last year as an esports coach inside a gaming rig, but the glowing, 5-inch holographic avatar can now live on your desk, conversing with you and offering help on everything from your daily schedule to the perfect outfit of the day.

AVA's cylindrical home sits next to your keyboard, appearing to house a lively hologram looking like one of a handful (so far) of assistant forms, such as original Razer characters, AVA, Kira and Zane, or recognizable esports figures.

The holograms have facial expressions, lip-synced speech, and personalities that Razer says go "from bold and sassy, to calm and friendly."

The built-in camera, far-field microphone array, and “PC Vision Mode” enable AVA to see your screen, hear your voice, and follow your gaze. According to Razer, the hologram isn’t just for show. The projected avatar mirrors your interactions with subtle head movements, blinking, lip syncing, and expressions designed to feel alive without veering into the uncanny valley. The eye-tracking hardware lets it maintain “eye contact,” giving conversations a surprising sense of reciprocity.

Despite its gaming roots, AVA is designed to be a full-service assistant. Along with analyzing in-game footage and suggesting strategy tweaks in real time, it can organize your schedule, remind you of appointments, and suggest entertainment options based on your browsing.

Hologram AI

AVA is supposed to use what it learns about you, from your speech patterns to your on-screen activity, to adapt to your mood and habits. Razer suggests AVA will leverage that information, and its screen access, to give you ideas to help with making spreadsheets, editing code, or putting together presentations.

The standard concerns about sharing that much information with an AI model apply to AVA, but with an extra dimension of eeriness possible when that AI has a face and voice. Razer has said the data stays local and that privacy protections are a top priority, but the intellectual understanding of an AI collecting information about you might feel more visceral when it has a human or human-like form.

Razer has opened up $20 refundable reservations for AVA in the U.S. ahead of an unrevealed shipping date, likely later this year. While you technically only need a Windows PC and USB-C connection, AVA needs relatively high system performance to support its real-time avatar rendering and analysis, so it's not a casual toy.

Whether power users willing to pony up for AVA find it to be a persistent digital buddy they miss when it’s off might decide AVA's fate in the wider world. The glow of a small animated being quietly watching you from your desk might not appeal to the more tentative AI tool users.

• Razer unveiled its Project Motoko AI headset at CES
• Project Motoko can see, hear, and react to your surroundings in real time
• The headset pairs cameras, microphones, and AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini to offer hands-free assistance

Razer offered a glimpse of a world where your headset sees, hears, and thinks while it pipes your music to your ears at CES this year. The company's new Project Motoko AI-native headset is still in the concept stage, but it joined its new remote and gaming chair in Las Vegas. Motoko is a way of seeing how Razer's approach to AI wearable tech might easily catch on.

Razer’s pitch for wearable AI is basically a headset that sees and hears whatever you do and provides proactive help based on context. Project Motoko melds Razer’s design sensibilities with AI chips and extended reality tools. The wireless headset is laden with cameras and microphones that share information with AI models able to recognize and interact with whatever you're looking at, while keeping a digital eye on the world beyond your peripheral vision. Razer claims the headset will respond to visual cues, translate signs, summarize documents, track workouts, and generally act like a low-key, always-on assistant.

The dual forward-facing cameras mounted at eye level give the headset a natural first-person perspective, allowing it to recognize traffic lights, recipes, or anything else in front of you and offer whatever help seems most needed. The multiple microphones let it parse both your voice commands and whatever else it hears around you. They combine to provide what Razer calls “augmented AI awareness.”

Project Motoko is agnostic about which AI tool is helping you out, so you can have a conversation with Gemini, ChatGPT, or even Grok. The headset can process and respond based on whatever system you already use.

Razer hastened to make clear that Motoko is not just for gaming, even if it debuted under Razer’s gaming-forward brand. The company wants people to use the headset every day for more mundane tasks. That might mean organizing your calendar, handling chores, browsing the web, or walking through a foreign city while it quietly translates the signage and helps you avoid construction zones.

The look of the headset compared to smartglasses might be part of the draw. Smart glasses, which have struggled with adoption due to awkward designs and social discomfort, while over-ear headphones are already widely accepted.

Omniscient headset

Of course, since Motoko isn’t shipping yet, a lot of its capabilities are left to demos and speculation. Razer is likely particularly keen to avoid the pitfalls that plagued Humane's AI Pin into extinction and led to so many complaints for the Rabbit’s R1 assistant.

Motoko doesn’t claim to be the first or the only solution. But it does reflect a growing trend for context-aware devices that live in everyday accessories. Razer even sees potential in robotics and machine learning research. The idea is that people could use Motoko’s human-like field of view and depth data to train other AI models to see and understand the world. One way or another, headsets might become a common AI interface sooner than we think.

“Project Motoko is more than a concept, it’s a vision for the future of AI and wearable computing,” said Nick Bourne, Global Head of Mobile Console Division, Razer. “This is the next frontier for immersive experiences.”

So farewell, 2025 – you were frequently exciting, regularly chaotic, occasionally frustrating but always interesting. And that’s how we like it around here.

It was a year in which often fairly iterative improvements to hardware were overshadowed by rapid and significant advances on the computing side of things. I’m talking, of course, about AI, which is now so dominant within the tech world that it’s increasingly hard to find a device that doesn’t have an AI brain.

Not that I’m complaining, because the leaps made in 2025 by the likes of OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Gemini were truly astonishing; the pace of change is such that it feels like we’re squeezing about a decade’s worth of advances into each year now, and I wouldn’t like to predict what the state of play will be in 12 months’ time. Well, other than to say that we’ll be taking for granted things which seem almost impossible right now – although as our AI Editor Graham Barlow notes below, maybe we’re already doing that.

In comparison, it often looked in 2025 as though things were slowing down on the hardware side. Could Apple really make its already-excellent MacBooks much better? Could Samsung improve much on the superb Galaxy S series? Was there much scope for OLED TVs or wireless headphones or mirrorless cameras to develop?

The answer was yes, yes and yes. Though the upgrades to many models may not have been as big as those on the software side, they were frequently excellent in their own right. The improvements to battery life, screen tech and camera lenses may not be as flashy as those on the AI front, but they can make a real difference to how we use our devices on a daily basis. In many ways, tech fans have never had it so good.

Whether that will continue in 2026 remains to be seen. AI now looks to be having a direct – and negative – effect on component prices, which could make your favorite new phone or laptop more expensive in the coming year. We might also see stock shortages in some areas, which could further inflate those price tags.

It looks like we’re set for another year of exciting, chaotic, frustrating and interesting news, then – and we’ll be here with you every step of the way. Until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading TechRadar in 2025, and have a happy New Year!

My year in tech

I bent reality, but I failed to bend an iPhone

This year was marked by astonishing leaps in AI capabilities, which I tried to not only report on but experience in full. From my first experience with ‘vibe coding’ to wild leaps of fancy with Veo 3 (and later the Sora app) to creating my own digital double, AI’s fast-changing capabilities constantly amazed me.

Never in four decades of covering emerging technologies have I seen anything like it: AI’s rise continues to be a heady mixture of enthusiastic adoption tinged with white-knuckled fear about what it all means for jobs, and for humanity, and nothing we saw in 2025 did much to resolve that anxiety.

However, it was my conversations with those leading the AI and wider innovation charge that stood out. My interviews with Amazon’s Panos Panay about Alexa+ and Google’s Sameer Samat about the future of Android were particularly memorable, as was the moment when one of Apple’s top executives threw his brand-new iPhone Air to me during a video podcast and insisted that I try to bend it.

The rise of humanoid robots was a trend that shocked and pleased me in equal measure, though I’ve tried to temper my enthusiasm with the knowledge that clever marketing and eye-popping videos will only get us so far. We all want the ultimate home robot, but I still don't think many of us are willing to pay $20,000 to get it.

Away from all the AI and robots, I spent much of the year trying new phones, including redesigned iPhones and an incredibly thin folding Samsung phone, along with a wide range of wearable technology that included the Galaxy XR headset, and some very exciting AR glasses from Meta and Google’s Android XR group. Experiencing these felt like peering into our near technological future, which increasingly will be filled with on-demand AI, flexible phones, and maybe those robots.

The year in AI

This was the year we started taking AI for granted 

For all the talk of breakthroughs and hype, 2025 felt less like the year AI changed everything and more like the year it quietly became unavoidable. While the much-hyped arrival of super-powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI), predicted for 2025 by many, simply hasn’t materialized, the year has still been a strong one for companies such as OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, and Google. That said, there have also been some massive flops; and as for Apple, it feels like yet another year in which it slipped further behind in the AI race.

ChatGPT maintained its vice-like grip as the most popular AI chatbot in the world, though it hasn’t been plain sailing for OpenAI. Legal challenges, particularly the copyright infringement claim brought by The New York Times, have continued to dog the company, and in June its servers crashed for a couple of days, giving the world a brief taste of life without the ubiquitous chatbot.

OpenAI then fumbled the ball with the release of its GPT-5 model, which came across as cold and unemotional compared to the previous GPT-4o. For millions of users who’d come to rely on the chatbot as something closer to a trusted companion it felt like a best friend had undergone a personality transplant overnight, forcing OpenAI to make the legacy 4o model available again.

The company has also lost a little ground to Google’s Gemini in recent months. The arrival of Gemini 3 Pro in November was well received, and on the image front, Gemini’s Nano Banana and Nano Banana Pro proved superior to ChatGPT for image generation. OpenAI responded with a new image-generation model in December.

AI-powered pets and toys also began to appear this year. We took Moflin for a spin, until we accidentally fried its battery. More broadly, the dominant theme of the year was that every product must now have AI built into it in some form, and no company exemplifies this approach better than Microsoft, which has spent the year enthusiastically stuffing Copilot into just about everything it makes.

Finally, the year looks set to end on a high note for Amazon. Alexa+, the AI-powered version of Alexa that Amazon has been promising all year but hasn’t yet managed to fully roll out, may finally be getting a web version, at least in the US.

THE YEAR IN PHONES

Slim pickings for thin phones, and hints of a tri-fold future

2025 was the year of the super-thin phone, writes Roland Moore-Colyer, Managing Editor, Mobile Computing, with the release of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge in the first half of the year, and the iPhone Air in the second. These handsets grabbed headlines with their svelte proportions, but so far sales figures have yet to match the hype.

That’s likely due to their relatively high prices in the face of already pretty slim iPhones and Galaxy and Pixel handsets, all of which saw the expected yearly upgrades with the iPhone 17, Galaxy S25 and Pixel 10 lines respectively. While the upgrades to the iPhone 17 family appeared incremental at first glance, I'd argue they're a bigger deal when you dig into the details: there was a new design and cooling system for the Pro phones, the standard model finally got a 120Hz display, and Apple's 48MP 'Fusion' camera came to every iPhone in the lineup, including the Air (the Plus model went the way of the dodo).

AI found its way into more phones and more features, with Google’s Pixel phones in particular boasting a whole host of genuinely useful smart tools. Meanwhile, Apple just about managed to distract us from the shortcomings of Apple Intelligence with its flashy Liquid Glass design and the eye-catching Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro.

Some of the most interesting phones came from smaller brands, with the Nothing Phone 3 offering something a little different without scrimping on flagship features. There was the Oppo Find X9 Pro with its strange but useful camera kit, while the OnePlus 15 was the only phone to earn a maximum five-star review from us this year. There were also a clutch of affordable phones from the likes of Motorola and Xiaomi, proving that you don’t have to pay a lot to get a very capable smartphone these days.

We saw further evolution in the folding phone space, with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 leading the way, and Samsung also unveiled its first tri-folding phone, with the Galaxy Trifold joining Huawei's Mate XT, and teasing a future of devices that truly blend phones and tablets. We may even see a foldable iPhone in 2026, but don’t hold your breath.

THE YEAR IN COMPUTING

RAM drama enlivens a year of evolution over revolution

When it came to computing, 2025 didn't start off as the most promising year. While 2024 felt like a year of revolutionary change, with the explosive growth of AI, the fall of Intel, and the rise of Arm-based laptops that were actually worth buying, this year has felt more like we're in a holding pattern, as the innovations of the past few years are iterated on and refined.

The year kicked off with Nvidia launching its latest generation of consumer graphics cards, the RTX 5000 series, at CES 2025, and they encapsulated the ‘evolution, not revolution’ theme, with some great new features that haven't fundamentally shaken up the industry, as the introduction of ray tracing with the RTX 2000 series did. Of course, making a great product even better is no bad thing, and our components editor and GPU expert John Loeffler was suitably impressed, enthusing in his RTX 5090 review that “If you're a gamer, you'll still get impressive gen-on-gen performance improvements over the celebrated RTX 4090, and the Nvidia RTX 5090 is really the first consumer graphics card I've tested that can get you consistent, high-frame-rate 8K gameplay.”

I have an RTX 5090 and I love it, and I've also been impressed by its 8K performance in modern games, but with the majority of PC gamers still playing at 1080p, this high-end GPU might be a bit too expensive to justify. Other releases from AMD and Intel, plus Apple’s latest M5 chip, continued the theme of impressive releases that don’t massively change the computing landscape.

Perhaps the biggest event in 2025 was the continued rise of AI. Recently, the AI boom has led to a global shortage of memory, which has in turn caused an increase in the prices of devices that use it. All of a sudden, PCs, RAM, and GPUs look set to get increasingly expensive, though some, like our computing editor Christian Guyton, aren’t too worried – yet. Personally, the end-of-year drama is making me nostalgic for those early months when 2025 felt rather boring.

THE YEAR IN TVS

The era of giant, cheap TVs is here

This year saw two really interesting developments in TV technology, with the first being the arrival of a whole new kind of ‘Tandem RGB’ OLED TV panel from LG. This appeared in the LG G5, helping it to score the maximum five stars in our review, and in the fantastic Panasonic Z95B, enabling both TVs to hit stunning levels of brightness and color depth, but with reduced power consumption.

However, this new screen technology didn’t win either of those sets our TV of the Year award – that went to the Samsung S95F, which not only earned its own perfect 5-star review, but was also voted the top TV in the most categories by the judges in our flagship OLED TV showdown, which pitted it against the LG G5, Panasonic Z95B, and Sony Bravia 8 II.

The second big tech development was the arrival of RGB mini-LED tech – and, make no mistake, this is the next big thing. It’s more efficient than current mini-LED tech, and is capable of richer colors and less light leakage from bright areas to dark ones, and it could be the tech to finally knock OLED off its perch.

We know that Samsung, LG, TCL and Hisense will all launch RGB mini-LED TV ranges in 2026, but the Hisense UX116 was the only TV to use it in 2025 – and it was a mixed bag, with performance issues that disappointed given its eye-wateringly high price. Still, we’re excited to see how this tech develops.

But the biggest thing in TVs this year was the TVs themselves – as in, they got big and they got affordable. TCL and Hisense launched 85-inch and 100-inch TVs that were within the budgets of regular mortals, and 75-inch TVs are becoming positively cheap, while still being good. While new tech is exciting, huge TVs like the Hisense U8N and TCL QM7K becoming more affordable is the change that made the biggest difference for customers.

THE YEAR IN VR/AR

Android XR arrives to challenge Meta’s dominance

This year XR or 'extended reality' took center stage, thanks in large part to Android XR hardware finally breaking cover in the shape of the Samsung Galaxy XR headset. We also tested prototype Android XR glasses ahead of their expected release in the coming year, and they’re impressive (the glasses at least, the headset less so right now). Google, along with its Android partners, looks set to seriously challenge Meta in 2026.

For its part Meta debuted several new smart wearables over the past 12 months, including two pairs of Oakley smart glasses – the stylish HSTNs and the sporty Vanguards, the latter of which are perfect for runners when used with a compatible Garmin watch. We also saw a Gen 2 model of the Meta Ray-Bans, and the company's latest step towards full-on AR specs, the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which as you can probably guess feature a display for the specs to relay info visually. We’ve tested them, and they’re everything Google Glass wanted to be, but right now they're not easy to get hold of.

What about VR headsets proper? Valve surprised no one (because the device was so heavily leaked before launch) with its Steam Frame headset announcement. Key details like the price are still a mystery, but it will be landing in 2026 – and when it does, the spec sheet teases a device that could seriously challenge the reigning champion of VR, the Meta Quest 3. Depending on how Valve handles the launch, I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes all other headsets feel obsolete – even the Galaxy XR and Apple Vision Pro.

Talking of Apple's mixed-reality spatial-computing headset, we got a new version with an M5 chip and comfier strap, but while it's a worthwhile upgrade the price still feels too high.

THE YEAR IN AUDIO

The year the big dogs bit back

If 2024 was the year niche UK hi-fi brands took over the dance floor amid a hiatus from audio's heavy hitters (see Bowers & Wilkins' fantastic Pi8 earbuds or Cambridge Audio's inaugural, affordable, adorable P100 cans), 2025 was the year the big dogs returned to the party and got their groove back.

We got five major headphones releases in 2025, starting with the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds in February. The hotly anticipated update to the 2019 Powerbeats Pro proved that Apple could indeed deliver heart-rate monitoring in its earbuds.

Cut to May and Sony's WH-1000XM6 landed, to finally knock the 2020-issue WH-1000XM4 off the top spot in our best headphones guide. It was a similar story with the June arrival of the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen), quickly followed by the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) in September – a two-pronged attack on the market that saw Bose reinstated as the king of ANC.

However, this roundup wouldn't be complete without a nod to the biggest launch of them all: the fall arrival of Apple's AirPods Pro 3. The shape's different, the ANC is twice as good, and yes, like the Powerbeats Pro 2 they also keep tabs on your ticker, in a slightly different way, and with increasing third-party fitness-app support. Still the most popular earbuds in the world? Absolutely.

Elsewhere, Spotify Lossless finally landed, at no cost to Premium subscribers, offering almost-as-good-as-Apple-Music resolution at up to 24-bit/44.1kHz. While Lossless wasn't a huge hit with fans initially, the big green streaming machine's popularity continues to grow, despite concerns over artist payments.

Oh, and if you take note of just one audio brand name this year, let it be WiiM. As Sonos continues to tackle trust issues among its once-loyal fanbase, the plucky multi-room underdog unveiled its WiiM Sound (and now the WiiM Sound Lite) premium hi-res speakers – and the firm would love to help you build your wireless sound system around them.

THE YEAR IN CAMERAS

A memorable year for glass as well as for cameras

2025 was full of pleasant surprises for photographers. The Sigma BF was truly out of the ordinary, being dubbed ‘the camera Apple would have made’, while the Caira with its Nano Banana AI skills showed us a glimpse of how on-the-go generative editing can work in an actual camera.

Fujifilm and OM System showed us that user experience matters with the quirky X half and retro OM-3 respectively, while Hasselblad and Nikon delivered strong offerings of their own – my favorite stills camera ever, the X2D II, and a new player in the cinema-camera game, the Nikon Zr. A special shoutout goes to Nikon for becoming the best-value camera brand this year, notably for the excellent Z5 II, which is our Camera of the Year, and Z50 II.

It was arguably an even better year for new lenses than cameras, with Sigma, Sony and Viltrox in particular knocking it out the park with world-first and affordable optics. Canon continues to lock out third parties from its full-frame camera lineup, but that decision feels more justified after it launched the affordable and capable 45mm F1.2 STM prime.

A sense of order was restored towards the end of the year when Canon and Sony launched their anticipated mid-range full-frame cameras: the EOS R6 III and A7 V, both of which are integral to their lineups.

The long-threatened US ban on DJI products finally came into effect, and we saw a couple of major product launches from the brand in the build-up to it: the incredible (sort of) sub-250g Mini 5 Pro, and the DJI Osmo 360 – its first foray into 360 cameras, and rival to both the Insta 360 X5 and GoPro’s new Max 2. DJI is also being tipped to launch its first 360 drone soon, but Insta360 got there first with the truly innovative Antigravity A1.

Overall, it’s been a good year for camera fans, with demand seemingly remaining strong in the face of competition from increasingly capable smartphones. I’m predicting that the consumer and cinema camera spaces will continue converging in 2026, and I hope the likes of Viltrox expand our options with new and affordable autofocus zoom lenses.

The year in gaming

The Switch 2 makes waves, and GTA 6 looms over 2026

Gaming in 2025 was largely dominated by the arrival of the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s a safe improvement on the original Switch, and one that epitomizes the ‘evolution not revolution’ approach to console development.

The specs sheet won’t blow anyone’s socks off, but it’s a superb package that cements the Switch's position as the go-to handheld console; and it was so popular in the pre-order and launch phases that it took months for retailers to catch up with demand. It’s been backed up by some excellent games too, including Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bananza, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Kirby Air Riders, and Pokémon Legends Z-A.

Sony had its own say in the gaming handheld space, breathing new life into the PlayStation Portal handheld device, which is now capable of excellent cloud streaming. This has elevated the handheld, which we were already big fans of, to impressive new heights.

The PS5’s game library got a bump with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei, as well as titles including Borderlands 4, Battlefield 6, Arc Raiders and TechRadar Gaming’s Game of the Year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Elsewhere, indie games ruled, with the likes of Blue Prince, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong proving standouts in a strong year for releases.

It’s been a year to forget for Xbox, however, and its woes only accentuated the aforementioned successes for Nintendo and Sony. For starters, more Xbox games – including Gears of War: Reloaded – arrived on PS5, while others are set to follow, including the symbol of Xbox itself, Halo. Meanwhile studios were shuttered and prospective games cancelled, and to make matters worse the Xbox X/S were outsold by a tiny family console, the Nex Playground, over Black Friday. All in all it’s been tough going for Team Green.

As for 2026, it’s beginning to feel like the pace of progress towards next-gen consoles will quicken, and the game release calendar looks well stocked. However, a titan looms: Grand Theft Auto 6 is now slated for release in November after being originally planned for late 2025, and the whole gaming world is going to revolve around its arrival.

THE YEAR IN FITNESS

Time’s finally up for wasteful wearables, thanks to Google

Last year, I ended my contribution to this round-up by predicting a move away from fitness watches towards screenless trackers, such as a new WHOOP model, writes Matt Evans, Senior Editor, Fitness, Wellness & Wearables. Well, we got not one, but two new WHOOPs, and they were… fine. But, as prices rose, I found the ongoing subscription model far too expensive.

However, my prediction that we’d move away from smartwatches hasn’t really been borne out. Wearable tech isn’t changing much in the mainstream, with the highest-profile releases being a slate of new watches from Garmin, Apple, Samsung, Google and OnePlus, and they’ve been as popular as ever.

Look beyond those big releases, however, and interesting new stuff is out there. A subscription-free WHOOP competitor band was launched by Polar, while Core Devices, the resurrected Pebble watch company led by its original founder, unveiled a pair of watches inspired by the original Pebble designs, complete with low-power LCD-style screens, and open-source software that anyone with the know-how can tinker with.

Core Devices also launched a new kind of smart ring with a button and a microphone, which the company says acts as “external memory for the brain”. Elsewhere, the AirPods Pro 3 now have built-in heart rate sensors, and Meta teamed up with Garmin to bring us the Oakley Meta Vanguard sports specs. Cool new wearable innovations are happening, but it all still feels quite fringe.

My innovation of the year, however, came from Google. The Google Pixel Watch 4 is the first properly repairable smartwatch, as you’re able to take it apart and replace the battery and display. This enables you to change individual parts rather than the whole watch, reducing your contribution to e-waste, and saving you money in the long run.

Almost every other piece of wearable tech from every other company is still a sealed unit that will ultimately end up being disposed of, and I hope Google's move could be the catalyst for change that the wasteful wearable tech industry sorely needs.

THE YEAR IN ENTERTAINMENT

Streaming sensations, box-office flops, and merger madness

The biggest story of 2025 broke late in the year, and it concerned off-screen studio machinations rather than on-screen drama. Netflix’s $82.7bn bid for Warner Bros. sent shockwaves through the industry when it was announced in early December, and provoked a counter-bid from Paramount Skydance. There’s still a long way to go before a deal is approved, but should Netflix acquire one of the film world’s most iconic studios it would be a landmark moment for the streaming sector, and would represent a seismic shift for the entertainment industry as a whole.

Turning to the year's big theatrical releases, and numerous new movies flopped at the box office, including some with huge names attached (I’m looking at you, Dwayne Johnson and The Smashing Machine). Heck, with Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps all underperforming, even the usually reliable Marvel Studios didn’t have a money-spinning hit on its hands. I wonder how many people predicted that animated and live-action/CGI hybrids would rule the theatrical roost, led by multi-billion dollar-spinning flicks like Lilo & Stitch, Zootopia 2, and Ne Zha II…

As for the major streaming services, users endured more of the now-customary annual price hikes, while Max raised eyebrows by rebranding itself – again – to HBO Max. On the screen, unexpected hits such as HBO medical drama The Pitt, plus Netflix's ‘one-shot’ drama Adolescence and pop-culture phenomenon Kpop Demon Hunters, proved that not even the savviest industry exec can really be sure what viewers will latch onto. Add in the return of unmissable shows including Severance and Stranger Things amid the glut of great and not-so-great film and TV releases, and there was plenty to keep our eyeballs engaged. Now, what have you got in store for us, 2026?

The Year in Smart Home

If the subscriptions don't get you, the fridge ads will

It's been a slow but not insignificant year in home technology as legacy brands scramble to keep pace with bigger, already tech-savvy players vying for their spot in our homes – whether that's Breville reinventing the toaster with a proprietary optical sensor, IKEA launching new renewable energy solutions, or Eufy and Dreame duking it out to give us the most effective stair-climbing robot vacuum.

Some brands were less innovative than others though. Dyson left some of us feeling snubbed with its 'new' (read: decade-old) vacuum, while Shark's TurboBlade Cool + Heat failed to impress despite its noble attempt at mimicking other SharkNinja product's viral fame.

Elsewhere we saw big plays from Amazon and Google in the smart home space, with the arrival of their AI-bolstered home assistants. Amazon's Alexa+ and Google's Gemini for Home both entered Early Access beta in the US, and while the early reviews for both have been mixed, it's a promising glimpse into the future of the connected home.

Both of those services are subscription-based offerings, and subscriptions look set to become a major battleground for smart-home brands, and a bone of contention between brands and their customers, as companies attempt to lock users into their ecosystems, as we've already seen with video doorbells. Between that, and brands like Samsung using screen-loaded appliances as advertising billboards around the home, now might be a good time to really think about which brands you want want to invest in as you build your smart home.

The Apple Watch is all about quick, glanceable information – your split time on your morning jog, message alerts when your friends get in touch, the latest updates from the weekend’s big games. With just a swift glance at your wrist, you’ve got all the info you need.

Live Activities make that even easier. This feature allows apps running on your iPhone to display pertinent data on your Watch face. But there’s a problem: Live Activities take over your entire Watch screen. If you want to use a different app or just want to tell the time, you’ve got to dismiss the Live Activities first. They get in the way and slow you down.

I find this particularly annoying when I’m on a morning run or walk. I like to listen to podcasts when I’m out of the house, and launching an episode from an app like Overcast brings up a Live Activity on my iPhone.

Unfortunately, it also brings up a Live Activity on my Watch. That’s a problem because rather than seeing how far through an episode I am, I would much rather have an unobstructed view of my Watch face, but this gets obscured by the podcast Live Activity. As a result, my Watch is instead taken over by something I would much prefer to control on my iPhone.

Fortunately, there’s a way to prevent Live Activities from hijacking your Watch without disabling the feature on your iPhone. It’s quick and simple to do and means you get an unobstructed view of your Watch face, even when an app is running. Better yet, there’s plenty of extra customization available should you need it. Let’s take a look at how it’s done.

How to rein in Live Activities

To stop Live Activities opening apps on your Watch and instead just show your Apple Watch’s face, follow the steps below:

1. On your Apple Watch, open the Settings app
2. Now go to General > Auto-Launch > Live Activities Settings
3. Within this menu, disable the toggle next to Auto-Launch Live Activities

And that’s it. Now when an iPhone app brings up a Live Activity, it’ll only do so on your iPhone, not on your Apple Watch. And if you change your mind, all you need to do is re-enable the toggle you switched off in step 3 above.

The best bit is there’s still a quick and easy way to access Live Activities, even after you’ve disabled them: just swipe up from the bottom of your Watch’s screen. As long as there’s a Live Activity running on your iPhone, it’ll now be visible on your Watch. To dismiss it, just swipe down or press the Digital Crown. It’s all still accessible, it just won’t take over your display by default.

Further customization

Apple doesn’t just leave things there – it gives you more controls to tweak Apple Watch Live Activities to your liking.

For instance, scroll down the Settings page and you’ll see an option to show Live Activities if your wrist is down. This is enabled by default, but can be switched off.

Scroll down further and you’ll find sections for media apps, as well as entries for individual apps that you have installed on your Watch. Tap one of these sections and you can switch off Live Activities for selected apps while allowing them for all others, giving you plenty of granular control over how Live Activities are displayed on your wrist.

A small change that makes all the difference

With a few of these settings adjusted, I feel like Live Activities are much more under control on my Apple Watch. They’re reined in and only appear when I’d like them to, allowing me to enjoy my morning podcast while still getting a clear view of my Watch face whenever I need to.

If you’ve previously despaired of Live Activities or wondered why they insist on taking over your Watch at every opportunity, changing a few settings can help put things right in just a few taps.

And you don’t even have to lose Live Activities when you follow these steps – a simple swipe up from the bottom of your Watch screen restores the Live Activity, ready for when you need it.

You might also like...

• The best Apple Watch 2025: Top smartwatches to use with iOS phones
• iOS 18 is downgrading Live Activities widgets in one key way
• 50 best Apple Watch apps: From health apps to games and everything in between

• Oura has won a patent case against Ultrahuman
• It means Ultrahuman’s smart rings are now banned from the US
• RingConn has reached a settlement with Oura that ends its ongoing dispute

Bad news, Ultrahuman fans: the popular smart ring maker has been forced to halt sales of its devices in the US after it lost a patent case against rival firm Oura, with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) ruling that Ultrahuman infringed upon Oura’s patents. This now has significant ramifications for Ultrahuman and users of its devices.

According to a blog post by Oura, the “ITC’s final ruling enforces exclusion and cease-and-desist orders.” What this means in practice is that Ultrahuman is now banned from importing and selling its smart rings in the US, strongly restricting a major player from operating in the wearables market – at least for the time being.

On its own website, Ultrahuman explained that existing owners of the Ultrahuman Ring Air device will be able to continue using it “exactly as before – with subscription-free health insights, relentless feature updates, and full warranty support,” provided the product was purchased on or before October 21, 2025. Retailers can continue selling existing inventory after this date, and anyone who buys a Ring Air after October 21 will be supported with diagnostics and tech support.

However, retailers won’t be able to import or stock the Ultrahuman Ring Air beyond what is kept in their existing inventory. Once that runs out, you’ll no longer be able to buy the device if you live in the US.

In response to the patent case, Ultrahuman said that “A new ring design is already in development and will launch in the U.S. as soon as possible,” and that it is also exploring whether a “Made in USA” Ring Air could be produced at its Texas facility.

As well as that, Ultrahuman added: “We also eagerly await the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s review of the validity of Oura’s ‘178 patent, which it acquired in 2023, and is central to the ITC ruling. A decision is expected in December.”

Better news for RingConn

The patent dispute centers on the design of smart rings that aim to rival Oura, specifically those made by Ultrahuman and competitor RingConn.

The legal judgement – which was first made earlier this year, with the ban set to come into effect on October 21 – declared that Ultrahuman and RingConn had infringed on Oura’s patents relating to the ring’s form factor.

RingConn, however, seems to have fared better than Ultrahuman. That’s because it has reached a settlement with Oura whereby all existing disputes between the two companies in the US have been resolved. Oura has granted RingConn a multi-year patent license, meaning you can continue to buy RingConn wearables in the US.

It’s unknown if this is a route that Ultrahuman will take, but it doesn’t seem to have opted to do so yet. If you’re a fan of the company’s products, you’ll have to watch closely to see what happens in the coming months.

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Amazon is looking to make AI part of your daily life and has turned to the world of wearables to help. The tech giant has just acquired Bee AI, the maker of the eponymous device for your wrist or lapel that listens to everything happening around you.

Bee’s microphones and built-in AI transcribe it all in real time and make personalized summaries of your day and your stated upcoming tasks, and then make recommendations to improve your life based not only on what it hears, but the emails, calendar, contacts, photos, locations, and other data you allow it to access.

People already make jokes about how they will be discussing a product with someone else in person and, seemingly by magic, it will appear in their recommended products on Amazon. That can usually be chalked up to coincidence and forgetting previous searches, along with being unaware of your app permissions.

However, this may become part of Amazon's business model, prompting people to wear microphones to listen all day and pay $50, plus a $19 monthly subscription, for the privilege.

Bee listening

Naturally, Amazon saw potential in Bee. Alexa has mostly been stuck inside the house despite attempts at smart glasses and other wearables. Bee is a chance for Amazon to make its AI a real-world concern, part of your actual conversations and routines, not just what you yell across the kitchen. That might be helpful, but it's impossible not to think about what it might mean in terms of privacy and trust.

To be fair, Bee has a mute button you can hold down to pause recording when you need a moment of peace. But that assumes you realize you’re about to say something you might not want permanently archived by Amazon. Bee listens and turns your life into searchable text. Although the company claims it doesn’t retain the raw audio, the transcripts remain unless you delete them.

I don't know if I want everything I mutter under my breath to be a searchable note. Not to mention whatever it might overhear from when I watch TV or movies at home.

I get the appeal of a little AI that remembers everything so you don’t have to. Remembering every chore and birthday would be great. But the line between deliberate memory aid and surveillance feels blurry with it. Especially when Amazon already has so much information.

Although Amazon has promised to work with Bee, allowing users to have control over their data, the actual shape of that control remains unclear for now. And control is too often translated into a complex settings menu and paragraph of boilerplate text in the terms and conditions.

I know plenty of people who would at least try out Bee, especially when it becomes an Amazon device with all the special sales and integration with the e-commerce site that implies. Perfect recall is a tempting commodity, but it has its price. If you're willing to pay it, then I say go for it. Not every microphone is the gateway to Skynet. But skepticism and caution are essential if you want something to sit on your wrist and transform the events of your life into data points that might help sell you products.

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• US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says every American should own a wearable
• The plan could bring major benefits, but also comes with risks
• We don't have much information about what the plan entails

The best smartwatches and other fitness wearables offer huge potential when it comes to helping us manage and improve our health – and now US Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he'd like to see every American wearing some form of health or fitness device.

“My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years,” he said at a congressional hearing last week. To that end, his department will soon begin one of “the biggest campaigns in HHS history” that it says will help Americans “take control over their own health.”

Right now, the plan is short on specifics. We don’t know, for example, if it will involve the government promoting the benefits of wearables, federal bodies partnering with or subsidizing existing devices, or even the release of a Trump-branded health tracker (akin to the recent Trump Phone). A major campaign to promote the use of wearables, however, seems likely.

During the congressional hearing, Kennedy Jr. – who's helped to inspire the 'Make America Healthy Again', or MAHA, movement, said that while blood glucose monitors can cost $100 to $300 a month, his agency is “exploring ways of making sure that those costs can be paid for.”

He also suggested that an $80 wearable might be a better solution to the weight-loss drug Ozempic – which can cost over $1,000 a month – for controlling diabetes and weight.

More info is needed

On the surface, a campaign promoting the use of health wearables sounds like a good idea. These devices are tuned to nudge you towards healthier habits, such as exercising regularly and understanding your sleep patterns.

But questions are likely to be raised over Kennedy Jr.’s role in this, given his past promotion of some medical practices that are considered dubious by experts, and his skepticism over some vaccines.

Wearables also come with potential issues, regardless of who's promoting them. Your medical data is some of the most sensitive information about you, and if it were to be stolen, sold to advertisers without your knowledge, or otherwise fall into the wrong hands, it could have serious implications for you. That makes it a juicy target for hackers and identity thieves.

It’s also worth adding that wearables are not a cure-all solution. While they can provide important health information, including, for example, warnings about irregular heart rhythm, they can also fuel health anxiety and lead to unsafe self-medication.

Ultimately, they’re only one piece of the puzzle, and should be accompanied by other healthy actions and habits, as well as input from health professionals.

It sounds like a worthy endeavor, and one that could both improve American's health and save billions of dollars on healthcare costs over the long term – but right now we have more questions about RFK Jr.’s wearables plan than we do answers.

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• Oura has updated its smart ring with improved health-tracking features
• There are tweaked algorithms, new features, and fresh integrations
• The changes are available today

The Oura Ring is one of the best smart rings around, giving you a slate of in-depth insights into your health, all from a high-tech ring on your finger. Now, its maker has announced a slew of updates to make activity and movement tracking more accurate and useful.

Oura says these changes, which it describes as “a suite of algorithm improvements and product updates”, have been prompted by the idea that “all movement counts.” To that end, you can expect a range of different adjustments and new features across a variety of activity types.

For instance, Oura’s step-counting algorithm has been updated to no longer estimate steps and instead work more like a pedometer, making it more accurate, while measurement of active calories has been improved to consider the intensity of the movement (gauged using your heart rate). Heart rate info from Oura’s partners (like Google Health Connect and Apple HealthKit) will now be included in activities you import from these partners’ apps and platforms.

Elsewhere, Oura’s Automatic Activity Detection now works at any time of the day or night, including in the early hours. If you want to add an activity or workout from the last seven days manually, you can now do that too, and your Readiness and Activity scores will be tweaked accordingly.

There are also new views and metrics to be found in Automatic Activity Detection, such as running splits. Oura will use your phone’s data to add more detail to runs and walks, and there’s a new trend view for active minutes, which should give you more insight into your workouts.

While these changes all impact Oura’s own platform, there are also new integrations with third-party providers including CorePower Yoga, The Sculpt Society, Technogym, and Open. In each case, Oura users will be able to see data gathered from their wearable ring in each platform’s own app. Discounts are also being offered to Oura members.

Whether you want to stick to Oura’s own service or use one of these integrations, these updates should bring some intriguing new features to one of the best fitness trackers you can buy. Oura says all the new features are rolling out to users today, May 21, so be sure to check them out if they sound like they’re of interest.

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I'm not a morning person, and I'm also a light sleeper. Even the best wake-up lights tend to startle me awake when they start to brighten, and don't even get me started on those irritating snippets of synthetic bird song that gradually increase in volume until sheer annoyance motivates you to get out of bed.

It doesn't have to be that way, though - if only my Garmin watch had a smart alarm.

The premise of a smart alarm is simple. Each night, we go through sleep cycles comprising periods of light, deep, and REM sleep. During light sleep we're easily woken and generally feel okay, but if something (like fake birdsong or a bright light) wrenches us out of deep sleep then we end up feeling groggy, confused, and disoriented.

A smart alarm is designed to wake you during a period of light sleep at roughly the time your alarm would normally go off, with a backup alarm in case you're firmly stuck in the land of nod and at risk of oversleeping.

It's a feature offered by many of the best fitness trackers, including those from Fitbit, and there are third-party smart alarm apps available for most of the best smartwatches, but so far there's nothing for Garmin owners like me.

Wakey wakey

Each night my trusty Garmin Fenix 7 tracks my sleep stages based on my heart rate and movement, and it can be set to wake me with an audible or vibrating alarm, so far the two have never been combined. It seems like a no-brainer, but it's something that's still missing from even the best Garmin watches.

I'm not the only Garmin user who'd love to be woken more naturally during a period of light sleep. It's a subject that comes up regularly on Garmin's support forums, and the Garmin Subreddit.

I could just break away from Garmin entirely, but it would be a wrench. There's years of health and fitness data attached to my Garmin profile – not to mention all those hard-earned virtual badges. I'm halfway up Mt Everest and only 3% off completing the Appalachian Trail badge.

I'd hoped that smart alarms might be introduced along with the three sleep badges last year (Sleep Savant, Sleep Sleep, and Mythical Sleep – none of which I've managed to earn) but sadly not.

For now, I can only wait and hope that smart alarms are one of the features that comes to the latest batch of watches over the coming months. Who knows, if it's limited to the latest devices like the Garmin Fenix 8 and Garmin Instinct 3, it might even be enough to convince me to upgrade.

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2024 felt a lot like 1994. Back then it was the internet that was experiencing seemingly exponential growth: the worldwide web had only formally launched three years before, but by ’94 the first browsers and ecommerce platforms were in use, and websites were springing up everywhere.

I was a college student at the time, and it was all very exciting, albeit not yet something which impacted my daily life too much. But by the time I started work a few years later, it was inconceivable that I might do my job without using the internet constantly.

Substitute ‘AI’ for ‘the internet’ and you’ll have a pretty good idea of where we are right now. AI has been everywhere this year, like it was in 2023, but even more so. As you’ll read below, it’s infiltrating every aspect of our lives – and certainly every aspect of tech – and it will soon be impossible to imagine what the world was like before it.

Is that a good thing? That question makes no more sense than it would have if asked about the internet in 1994. The web has been great in many ways, terrible in others – but that’s more about how it's been used than any inherent goodness or badness.

And so it will be with AI. The simple fact is that artificial intelligence will have an utterly transformative impact on the world; the next few years will be a case of holding on for dear life, as our everyday lives are changed in multiple ways.

Of course, there was more to 2024 than AI, and we saw some massive stories elsewhere in the tech world. VR hardware and experiences continued to improve, even if Apple's Vision Pro didn't quite take off as we thought it might, while smartphones gained an extra fold, new and improved smart rings offered fitness tracking without the screen, and gaming handhelds proliferated.

Expect much more AI, and more of everything else, in 2025. Until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading TechRadar in 2024, and have a happy New Year!

My year in tech

AI advances apace, but vintage tech still charms

As a chronicler of technology, it’s only natural as the year draws to a close that big moments, larger trends, disappointments, and surprises fill my thoughts – and they are my thoughts, not those of the AI systems I expended thousands of words on.

Graham Barlow has more to say about AI below, but of all the things I wrote about artificial intelligence, it was the stories that showed just how fast these generative platforms have come in a relatively short time that gave me the most joy. When I first asked ChatGPT to help me code and it failed miserably, I hesitated to return to the task. Now I’m glad I did. ChatGPT, like other emerging systems, is now an incredibly effective coding assistant. It was the a similar story with other platforms: Sora can create believable video, image generators now know how to count fingers, and Google’s NotebookLM can replicate realistic-sounding podcasts.

When I wasn’t writing about AI, I was trying out the latest augmented-reality headgear, and if I had to choose a standout device it would be Meta’s Orion. This sunglass-like wearable isn’t consumer-ready yet, but it easily offers the most impressive AR experience to date – and, yes, it integrates AI. At the other end of the spectrum is the Apple Vision Pro; a year after launch, the most impressive wearable technology I’ve ever tried appears to be floundering.

This was also the year I dug into the tech archives and rummaged through drawers to rediscover some old favorites, including my 40-year-old Casio watch and an aging Pebble (an OG smartwatch if there ever was one). I also played on a refurbished Game Boy – that last experience was part of one of my favorite interviews of the year.

Other year-defining moments included the wild CrowdStrike outage, which should still serve as a warning to all people who worry about our infrastructure; new foldables, including one I test-drove in Paris (photographing a folding phone at the Louvre was a bucket-list moment); and capturing the solar eclipse with three smartphones at once – quite the challenge, but totally worth the effort.

The year in AI

If you think 2024 was wild, wait till you hear about 2029…

In 2024 Apple performed a spectacular U-turn away from AR and its Vision Pro headset, and went all-in on AI, doing its bit to push AI into the mainstream in the process.

While the rollout wasn't the smoothest, Apple Intelligence is sprinkled throughout Apple’s operating systems in the form of notification summaries, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence and, my personal favorite, Genmoji, for making your own emojis. Genmoji is a genuinely innovative use of AI, and has the potential to actually get people excited about the technology because it’s so usable and fun (you can base emojis on your friends and family).

While most of the big AI platforms launched in 2023, 2024 was the year they became established. Meta kept pushing AI to its various social media apps, and even added it to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. ChatGPT kept improving, OpenAI added Sora video generation and ChatGPT search, X gave us Grok, Google gave us Gemini 2.0, and AI image generators like Midjourney and Adobe Firefly went from strength to strength.

While Genmoji was a highlight, my favorite moment was my mind-blowing and occasionally unsettling interview with Dr Ben Goertzel, one of the leading thinkers looking to manage the advance of AI towards the smarter-than-human superintelligence known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, aka the singularity.

Goertzel believes it’s only a matter of years before the machines become smarter than we are, and that we'd better get used to the idea. 2029 is his estimate, at which point all bets are off and AGI will either put an end to disease, aging, and potentially even death, or it might decide that humanity is just a nuisance, and The Matrix / The Terminator becomes a reality. I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords – I just really hope they like us.

THE YEAR IN PHONES

It's not the real deal yet, but AI will do it all eventually

Nowhere did AI dominate the landscape more than in mobile computing. With every phone launch I attended, every product I reviewed, and every Snapdragon Summit I climbed, AI was a foregone conclusion. The disconnect between what phone makers see and what phone buyers want has never been greater; although, that said, the new phones this year were great, in spite of (never because of) the looming presence of AI. We saw impressive new foldables from Samsung and Google, while Huawei went one screen better with the first mainstream tri-folding phone.

But this was AI's year. Just think, we started this year with Circle to Search on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and now we’re ending it with Apple Intelligence on the iPhone 16 making up fake headlines in its news summaries. Look how far we’ve come! These AI features seem half-baked because they are. The real deal isn’t here yet, and I’m not even talking about artificial general intelligence; I’m just talking about a better Siri, or Bixby, or Gemini.

At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit I saw it take a big leap in mobile processing power and power management with its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, a platform that has the potential to radically change what AI can do. Qualcomm’s vision, which is similar to that of most phone makers, is for AI to become an ‘agent’ that works as a middleman between you and your phone. You won’t need to worry about Settings, or your home screen, or even apps, really – you’ll just tell the AI what you want to do, and it will do the rest.

In the meantime, some of the AI features are already pretty good. Google’s Pixel 9 Pro does a great job of things like transcribing meeting notes or screening your calls. Amazon’s new Kindle Scribe uses AI for the best handwriting recognition ever. And even you’re not thrilled with Apple Intelligence and its summaries, at least we can all appreciate the way AI has pushed smartphone photography past its limits.

So, 2024 was the year for AI on mobile devices, and soon enough it won’t feel like gimmicks and parlor tricks – it will actually help us do the things we need with less effort.

THE YEAR IN COMPUTING

Finally, a reason to get excited about Windows laptops again

Apple has dominated the laptop scene for the past few years, releasing a series of brilliant MacBook models powered by its own chips that offer performance, battery life, and value for money that Windows 11 laptops from the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo just couldn't compete with.

With the launch of the M3-powered MacBook Airs in March it looked like 2024 was shaping up to be another year in which MacBooks would be the laptops to beat. Instead, we got something of a renaissance in Windows 11 laptops, mainly thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips.

Like Apple’s M3 (and M4, which came to MacBooks later in the year), the Snapdragon X series are ARM-based chips that, unlike traditional chips from Intel and AMD, have been created with efficiency and mobile use in mind.

The result is laptops that offer fast performance and long battery life, and we saw a wave of truly excellent devices, such as the Dell XPS 13 (2024) and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7, that have challenged Apple’s MacBooks in our best laptops list.

This has made Qualcomm a major player in Windows world, challenging the two established titans Intel and AMD. While neither of those two have had a particularly good year, Intel in particular has had a rocky 2024, with CEO Pat Gelsinger standing down after a particularly poor set of results.

Both AMD and Intel have released new chips to take on Qualcomm, and from what I’ve seen so far Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 chips show a lot of promise, especially when it comes to battery life. However, there’s no getting past the fact that Intel – a company that was so dominant in the processor market for so long – ends the year in a precarious position.

As for 2025, I’m looking forward to seeing what Nvidia has in store. It's tipped to be announcing its next-gen RTX 5000 series graphics cards as soon as CES next month, and they could take PC gaming to new heights – though I do worry about the price tags they’ll come with.

THE YEAR IN TVS

The year that mid-range mini-LED TVs went mainstream

A few years ago, a new high-end technology that goes by the name ‘mini-LED’ launched as a high-end alternative to the best OLED TVs, promising dazzling brightness but with far superior contrast to regular LED TVs. Fast forward a few years, and while OLED TVs basically cost exactly the same as they did before, mini-LED is now taking over the more affordable end of the TV market.

At least, it’s taking over in our list of recommendations. The likes of the Hisense U8N, TCL QM851G, Hisense U6N and TCL C805 all offer amazing value for money at a huge range of screen sizes – those two companies really turned the screws on Samsung in the contest for places on our list of the best mini-LED TVs, and put a lot of pressure on next year’s more expensive TVs to really make a case for themselves.

One elite TV this year that successfully did just that was the Samsung S95D, which won our TV of the Year award, thanks to its new anti-reflection screen, which was a first on an OLED TV. OLED’s low brightness mean it’s prone to distracting reflections – no problem for dark-room movie viewing, but not so great for sports during the day – so Samsung solved this with a light-dissipating layer over the screen; and combined with the amazing picture quality and stunning design it made the S95D our most-talked-about TV of 2024. Samsung told us that this tech could come to more TVs if people like it – here’s hoping we’ll see more at CES 2025.

THE YEAR IN VR/AR

Apple’s Vision fades, but Meta may see real rivals soon

The year kicked off with the launch of what many believed would be the one headset to rule them all: the Apple Vision Pro. Alas, it came, it saw, and it failed to conquer. Once the initial hype wore off, early adopters – including our own Lance Ulanoff – found they simply weren’t using the gadget very often, as the expensive headset failed to offer a substantial productivity or entertainment upgrade over a MacBook or iPad, or feel sufficiently superior to the VR competition.

We also saw the Pico 4 Ultra, which boasts some super foot-tracking tech, and a PC/Standalone hybrid in the shape of the Vive Focus Vision. Unfortunately each device disappointed in its own ways, with a major issuing being lackluster software offerings that fail to compete with the excellent catalog you’ll find on Quest systems, which includes Batman: Arkham Shadow, which I hailed in my review as "an almost flawless VR experience".

As the saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and this year saw Lenovo, Asus, and Xbox announcing their plans to build Horizon OS headsets – Horizon being the operating system Quest headsets use. This would presumably give those headsets access to the full suite of Quest titles, and while we’re yet to see the devices, their announcement may have been the biggest VR announcement of 2024.

Next in line in terms of major launches was probably the Meta Quest 3S, an affordable Quest 3 alternative with the same brain but a bulkier body and less-crisp displays (though I think the Meta Quest 3 is worth paying extra for), and the Meta Orion AR glasses – they may still only be a prototype for now, but they’ve already blown away many who've tried them, including the aforementioned Mr Ulanoff.

Slipping in just under the 2024 wire, Samsung and Google showcased their Android XR software platform, which will power new headsets and glasses. While what the duo is promising is reminiscent of Apple’s Vision Pro hype, I’m optimistic that their Android offering might finally give Meta some serious competition in 2025.

THE YEAR IN AUDIO

Sonos stumbles, and hearing health is the New Big Thing

2024 in the world of audio has really been about risers and fallers. Let’s start with the rise of open-ear headphones. These weren’t new in 2024, but they suddenly became the hottest category this year. At first, these looked like just a new option for runners, because the way they push sound into the ear yet don’t actually fit in the ear means you can still be aware of your surroundings. But then it turned out that lots of other people would prefer not to put things in their ear too, both for comfort and to protect their long-term hearing. Expect to see a lot more of these in 2025.

Speaking of open-ear buds, though, new AirPods arrived in two flavors. The basic and cheaper AirPods 4 are fine, but the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation are a very interesting option for iPhone users. Plus, the AirPods Pro 2 got a truly ground-breaking new hearing-aid mode, and we can expect to see, and hear, a lot more of this health-focused tech in the future.

Now we need a faller, and no one took a bigger tumble than Sonos. The company released a truly disastrous change to its app that threw all of its goodwill in the trash overnight, and cast a large cloud over the launch of its first headphones, the Sonos Ace. By the time the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar came out, it had barely clawed back any ground. It needs to have a really good 2025…
But there’s always space for a comeback story, after all, 2024 was the year we went loopy over a beautiful new cassette player and a stunning portable CD player from FiiO, and a lovely combo player from TEAC.

THE YEAR IN CAMERAS

The retro revolution looks like it's here to stay

Despite feeling like a relatively quiet year for leading camera brands, 2024 has actually served up some real treats. The Canon EOS R5 Mark II scooped TechRadar’s camera of the year award and with good reason – it boasts a speedy 45MP stacked full-frame sensor, incredible autofocus skills including Eye Control AF, plus an innovative in-camera 400% upscale editing function that could end the megapixel race for good.

DJI had another busy year, with its broad portfolio of new devices including drones, action cameras and vlogging cameras, and it consequently scooped TechRadar's camera brand of the year for the second year running – and for good measure it’s avoided a ban on its drones in the US, for now. Other honorable mentions go to Nikon and its 5-star Z6 III, and Insta360 for doubling down in the pocketable video camera space, in particular with its unmatched X4 360-degree camera.

The people's vote went to the Fujifilm X100VI – a pricey premium compact that nonetheless attracted huge preorder numbers, and which is still on backorder the best part of a year later. I found the highly anticipated retro camera a delight to shoot with at its Tokyo launch. 2024 was also the year that film made a comeback, with the Pentax Film Project delivering the legendary brand’s first film camera in decades, the surprisingly charming half-frame Pentax 17.

2024 was also the year that the humble point-and-shoot camera enjoyed a comeback, particularly with young audiences and thanks in no small part to TikTok. We never expected an old, mediocre and cheap Nikon compact’s popularity to blow up, but the Coolpix S6900 in pink did just that.

So what about 2025? As cameras, and AI image and video generation, get closer to perfection we might see increasing pushback, with demand for simple, flawed, disconnected, retro cameras continuing to grow. 2025 could well be the year that dumb cameras win out over smart tech.

The year in gaming

Sony’s mid-gen upgrade points to the future of consoles

Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro was the biggest gaming hardware release of 2024, and while it wasn’t unexpected – rumors had been building all year – it did give us a window into what future consoles might offer.

While it brings welcome boosts to storage and connectivity, Sony’s PlayStation Super Spectral Resolution is the headline feature, offering AI-driven upscaling that enables users to enjoy enhanced graphical fidelity and higher frame rates, at the same time. Is this what we might see more of in future console upgrades as the gap between fidelity and performance closes? Perhaps. The new console was supported by a strong lineup of games like multiplayer phenomenon Helldivers 2, and the absolutely joyous Astro Bot, making 2024 another robust year for PlayStation.

Xbox didn’t join the mid-gen-upgrade party this time around, and instead Microsoft iterated on its existing hardware range by offering a larger-capacity Xbox Series S 1TB and releasing a Digital Edition of its existing Series X. Games-wise, Microsoft finished the year much stronger than it started it with the release of the epic Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and action-adventure hit Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

Nintendo continued to publish excellent games for the Switch, such as The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and while we did see new hardware, it wasn’t what we were expecting or hoping for: the Nintendo Alarmo! clock took us all by surprise, and you can now be woken up by your favorite Nintendo characters.

Returning to hardware, SteelSeries’ Arctis GameBuds became the new gold standard in what gaming earbuds can offer, Razer’s Wolverine V3 Pro became the new premium Xbox controller to beat, and Secretlab’s Titan Evo NanoGen Edition chair offered a new level of comfort.

The Nintendo Switch 2 will be the biggest thing in gaming in 2025 – should it actually arrive, which feels very likely at the time of writing – but with rumors that Xbox and PlayStation are also looking at building new handheld gaming devices, next year could get very interesting.

THE YEAR IN FITNESS

Ringing the changes as time stands still for smartwatches

What a year 2024 has been. I said last year that I believe we'd reached peak smartwatch, with not much scope left for the form factor to innovate, and that this year's more interesting developments would come in other product fields, such as smart rings.

That prediction has largely been borne out. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra looked very similar to the Apple Watch Ultra 2, while the Apple Watch Series 10 and Google Pixel Watch 3 were, like their predecessors, fairly iterative updates, with slightly bigger and slightly thinner displays being the most significant changes. Outside of smartwatches, though, there’s been plenty of action: this has been the year we’ve seen the widespread adoption of previously fringe tech, from smart wearables to continuous glucose monitors (live broadcasting of your blood sugar!) to AI fitness coaches.

As elsewhere, fitness and wearables brands have been eager to embrace the potential of AI (in many cases, before it’s really ready). Strava’s Athlete Intelligence and apps like Runna have been quick out of the gate with AI-generated feedback and workout insights. We asked ChatGPT for workout tips, and Oura got in on the action with its Advisor, a health and fitness chatbot that lives in the Oura app.

Speaking of Oura, 2024 was the year smart rings hit their stride, with the release of the RingConn Gen 2, the Samsung Galaxy Ring and the Oura Ring 4. Fun functionalities like gesture controls, and automatic workout tracking for multiple activities, show how far the technology has come in such a short space of time: check out our best smart rings guide for more on the early leaders in the race to dominate the space.

Looking forward to 2025, I think we’ll see continuing move away from the traditional fitness watches and notification-based devices, and towards smart rings and screenless trackers. A WHOOP 5, anyone?

THE YEAR IN ENTERTAINMENT

Streaming giants entertain and enrage in equal measure

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Away from the on-screen action, Max, Disney Plus, Hulu, Paramount Plus, and Peacock all raised their prices, Netflix angered customers by scrapping its cheaper tier, Prime Video assailed us with ads unless we paid more, and the Disney Plus password crackdown once again made us feel like we were being taken for a ride.

On a happier note, this year's entertainment calendar was packed with global events that drew in large audiences to the best streaming services: from the Olympics and the Euros to Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ on Disney Plus and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour concert special on Netflix. When it came to new movies, we were taken on an emotional rollercoaster ride dominated by sequels like Deadpool and Wolverine and Moana 2. Highlights included Pixar’s return to form, with Inside Out 2 becoming the highest-grossing animation movie of all time, while lowlights included Borderlands, which brought a run of impressive video game adaptations to a crashing halt.

On the TV show front, video game adaptations fared much better, with Fallout and Arcane season 2 picking up the torch from The Last of Us to become massive hits. Some of the other most-streamed shows of the year include True Detective: Night Country, Shōgun, The Boys, Bridgerton, Agatha All Along, and my personal favorite, The Penguin.

As we look to the year ahead, make sure to check back in with TechRadar, where we’ll bring you all the latest streaming news, recommendations and tips to get the most out of your services, including how to become more savvy by pausing your subscriptions.

The Year in Smart Home

Matter matters, but features matter more

It's been a middling year for smart home tech, with few major product launches or big developments, but rather lots of iterative improvements to the building blocks of smart-home technology. We've also seen the emergence of some interesting trends that could point to the future of how smart devices are integrated into our homes.

One important yet relatively slow-moving part of this story is the connectivity standard Matter. We've seen versions 1.3 and 1.4 roll out in 2024, introducing support for new device categories across energy management and new household appliances, as well as improvements to features like lighting control and Thread networks. Big news for smart home enthusiasts and product developers, yes, but not exactly a reason to stop the presses. Indeed, Matter continues to be something that matters, but only in the background.

Elsewhere, we've seen trends emerging in terms of user experiences. 2024 began with Samsung upgrading its SmartThings ecosystem with a new TV-centered experience, demonstrating a push to integrate smart home technology into appliances rather than using dedicated hubs like those built into some smart speakers. Much like the trends we've seen in AI adoption, it's becoming increasingly apparent that in order for smart home technology to take off, it has to be a feature, not a product. To that end, Samsung is also putting screens on more and more appliances, kitting each out with SmartThings for whole-home control.

Similarly, in a trend I've catchily labeled "stuff that does other stuff", we've continued to see a focus on multi-functional smart home devices. On the more bizarre end of the spectrum, we saw an air purifier with a mounted cat bed from LG at IFA 2024, a follow-up to its more sensible air-purifying table from a few years ago.

There's still no sign of Apple's long-rumored smart display, and Alexa's big overhaul has quietly been pushed to 2025, so there's plenty to be excited for in the coming year.

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The longer you’ve been working in tech media, the easier it is to see what’s coming. Predicting the biggest tech trends for the coming year doesn’t involve consulting a crystal ball or a psychic. I prefer to go with my instincts, which are based not only on what happened in the previous 12 months, but during the 37 years before that in which I've been writing about tech.

Technology and innovation don’t simply spring out of the ether. Even with the advent of AI, which some might think would bring incredible, generative shortcuts, companies still have significant development cycles and they build based on signals from within their organization, and many others that come from the market and competition. Perhaps the biggest difference between the tech cycles of the early oughts and today is the transparency; companies develop products and services before our eyes, with open and public betas that make us part of the process.

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to be extraordinary, or psychic, to know what’s coming in the new year. If you, like me, have been paying attention, much of what follows will probably elicit, “Oh, right, I knew that” or “That’s what I was thinking.”

Of course, I’m far from infallible and, as I often do, I like to bounce my ideas off some of my trusted industry friends. In this case, I chose Tim Bajarin. Tim and I have known each other for more than 20 years, and his industry experience extends deep into the last century. He's seen most of the industry's key developments and known many of its major movers and shakers, including the late Steve Jobs, and keeps his finger on the pulse of the technology with his Creative Strategies analyst group, of which he is the founder and chairman. As always, Bajarin has thoughts regarding my 2025 predictions. I’ve included many of them here.

With that, let’s get started on my predictions for the biggest tech trends of 2025. Please feel free to share them with your friends, telling them, “See? Lance agrees with me.”

An AI explosion

I know, it's a fairly obvious suggestion two years into our AI revolution, but I do suspect a critical turn of events in 2025. Expect more AI in everything, but also a codification of the concept that people understand how it will work for them as consumers and as businesspeople, and for a wide variety of tasks and sectors. In other words, less wondering, "What was this made for?"

Bajarin more or less agrees with me, but reminds me that companies introducing AI apps still have their work cut out for them. “[They] need to be clearer on what it does and then add a short tutorial,” he says. “There is too much confusion, and we are still in the hand-holding phase of AI.”

It’s a good point. Consumers won’t tap into AI’s full potential until they understand exactly how to use it and how it will benefit them. In 2025, I expect to see more consumer guides on how to build the best launch prompt and, especially, how to converse with an AI to get the results you want.

Enter the agents

2025 will be the breakthrough year for AI agents. For those unfamiliar with them, AI agents are bits of artificial intelligence that can analyze the environment and other interactions, and perform narrowly defined tasks on your behalf.

Their prevalence will be intertwined with emerging conversational AI wars, in which all the major digital assistants finally migrate to generative AI chat systems: Alexa gets Claude, Siri gets another brain transplant, Google Gemini fully consumes Google Assistant and becomes a conversation-first platform.

While I think Bajarin and I see eye-to-eye on this, he sees agents' development in 2025 a bit differently.

“Building agents will be the biggest thing in AI in 2025,” he says. “The last three years gave us the groundwork for an agentic-driven world, and next year will see great strides made in creating and applying agents to all AI apps.”

So, it’s building and application. I wonder how many consumer apps will have a set of pre-built AI agents, and if consumers will feel comfortable using them. At the very least, I do expect to see the broad deployment of AI agents in business throughout 2025.

Bye, AI wearable

You know what, I do know who needs to hear this: every AI wearable maker who wrongheadedly tried to sell us a standalone AI device in 2024. Their collective failure proves that while artificial intelligence is a powerful feature inside other larger applications and products, it isn't a sufficient basis for a dedicated product.

The ChatGPTs, Copilots, and Geminis of the world arguably work better when integrated into our favorite mobile devices, not yet another device we need to carry around or wear.

The Humane AIs, Rabbit R1s, Friends, and Plauds of our world will not survive 2025. But their brains, the beating AI hearts inside them, will likely live on as apps on, naturally our iPhones and Androids.

Bajarin was a bit less convinced of this prediction and would only reply, “Possibly.”

Chip wars

The convergence of mobile and desktop chips will move into overdrive in 2025, with all the big players vying for top honors in power, efficiency, AI, and battery life. Intel is entering a period of uncertainty, and Nvidia may make a desktop CPU play, but Apple is still going to set the bar. It’s remarkable how Apple set that bar with its M1 chip in 2020 and every chip company has been playing catchup on laptops (and to a lesser extent desktops) ever since.

In 2024 Qualcomm has offered the best answer to Apple silicon with its X Elite line, but it’s not clear that systems running it are flying off the shelves just yet. Still, what is clear is that Intel, Qualcomm, and Apple are finally offering laptop customers what they want: power and efficiency.

In 2025, battery life across Windows and Mac laptops will balloon to nearly 30 hours, while every new chip will support ever-larger local generative model work. It’s a new era for on-the-go computing, but I guarantee that Apple will continue to lead the way throughout 2025.

Here, Bajarin made it clear I nailed the landing, telling me: “Very true... Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Arm will be the key players, but Apple’s M-series chips will be hard to beat.”

Windows out of the spotlight

Microsoft’s hyper-vigilant focus on Copilot makes me wonder if 2025 is the year the Redmond software giant plants Windows in the backseat. It’s possible that Microsoft will focus on Copilot almost to the exclusion of Windows, as the platform continues its march into software as a service, where big upgrades matter less than shiny features like Copilot and Edge.

Props to Bajarin for keeping me real on this. I could tell that he sort of agreed, but with muted enthusiasm. “More or less,” he says. “[Microsoft] will continue to do more AI integration into Windows UI but make Copilot their most significant push in next two years.”

Exactly – the marketing dollars in 2025 and 2026 will, unless I’m very mistaken, be mostly for Copilot. For consumers it’ll feel inescapable, although I can’t tell if they will embrace it. Windows users on the ground have expressed some frustration to me about the sudden appearance of Copilot on the taskbar and on new laptop keyboards. Microsoft’s communication must be about Copilot's consumer benefit above all else, and I’m not sure that it's made the case yet. 2025 is Microsoft's opportunity.

AR Wearables turn a corner

I think 2025 is the year we'll see AR glasses achieve consumer availability (maybe the second half of the year), and the competition for dominance will be intense. Having now tried Meta's Orion and Snap’s AR Spectacles, I think the race to consumer readiness is accelerating faster than most expected. Meta is clearly ahead, but Snap, which has access to the same silicon, should catch up. It could be a squeaker, but I think we'll see consumer availability of at least one pair of AR glasses that finally make the tech-buying public say “I do” to wearable AR gear.

Apple might be part of that mix, but first it must contend with the fate of its Vision Pro. As a category, the Vision Pro can’t survive without a more affordable entry-level counterpart. Apple is supposedly working on that, but if it doesn’t deliver, 2025 may be the year Apple deprecates Vision Pro (it won't discontinue it, at least not yet).

Here, I struck a Bajarin nerve. He had many thoughts, and not all of them were in alignment with mine. Here’s how he sees 2025 playing out:

“AR glasses will get more AI functionality, with Meta Rayban’s smart glasses, Snap Glasses, and others focusing on better audio and AI, as well as better cameras. However, there will not be breakthrough technology that delivers true in-lens data that is worth anything in 2025. Meta has Orion targeted for 2027, but I do believe Apple will introduce some form of AR glasses by the end of 2025. I don’t think we will see a slimmer Vision Pro at a cheaper price until 2026 at the earliest.”

I have to admit that Bajarin’s outlook seems more plausible than mine – but then I was surprised by the quality of Meta Orion glasses when I tried them, and I expect to be surprised again in 2025.

Social Media's big shift

Bluesky will dominate and battle Threads for a heat lead (that's the hottest, though not necessarily the biggest platform), though X will hold the active user numbers crown for the foreseeable future. That's even as people looking for a sunnier social media conversation head for the exits. A Luddite movement may depress Gen Alpha's entry onto any platform. Broadly, the bloom is off the social media rose. Most platforms are introducing stricter controls, whether because some government is requiring it or they’re seeking to get ahead of future regulation and, perhaps, change the conversation on social media.

Oh, and as for the future of TikTok and that potential ban, it might skate on through in the new year but a real reckoning on Jan. 19 now seems far more likely. Either way, I will continue using it until someone stops me.

Bajarin and I are mostly in sync here.

“I do see X losing more users in 2025 and Bluesky and Threads gaining significant ground. [X owner and Tesla CEO Elon] Musk will be too distracted by his other projects, and X will continue to lose users and momentum.”

I like how Bajarin is too cool to spell out exactly which Musk “projects” will distract him. In 2025, Musk will be co-running a sort of US Government omnibus tasked with sucking a lot of money and people out of the bureaucracy. That could definitely be diverting, to say the least.

Low-energy EVs

EVs and self-driving cars will stall as the industry recalibrates and slumping trailblazer Tesla deals with the fallout of not delivering a sub-$30K EV to the market (while also delivering the least reliable EV, ever – the Cybertruck). Electric trucks and other cars are not flying the way big auto thought they would, and the US the incoming administration will be steering the market back toward a combustible engine future.

Bajarin didn’t offer comment on this prediction, which I'll take as an automatic win.

Folding rises

Folding phones are on sale from Google, Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, and others, and yet they have only a collective 1.5% of the smartphone market. Maybe that changes next year.

I think folding phones will make a slow rise to 3% of the market in 2025, but it will be Apple teasing a folding iPhone that sets the market on its ear. It won't ship until 2026, but it will generate renewed interest in the sector, and put competitors on notice.

Okay, my winning streak collapsed here. Bajarin is not on board with this last idea.

“I am not optimistic about Apple doing a folding phone at all. I wrote about this last week.

"The tablet market has room for innovation and I would not be surprised to see Apple point their foldable research at tablets. I can’t say Apple will never do a foldable, but my article shows why I don’t think Apple believes there is a market for foldable.”

Bajarin's post points to concerns about durability, utility over traditional phones, and, for Apple, a lack of interest in such a tiny market. He’s not wrong, but I think Apple could be the spark that ignites a frenzy. Let’s say Apple only shows us a folding tablet. It could be one that opens to the size of an 8-inch tablet, which is essentially the same interior screen size as the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and the iPad mini. I have to believe that if consumers saw that they might want what Apple’s created, but because it’ll naturally be more expensive than other folding devices they’ll look for cheaper alternatives, and that would grow interest across the market.

I know, it’s just one dream scenario, but it could happen in 2025.

Tariffs cascade

I fully expect tariffs to destabilize the tech industry. Companies will scramble to get exemptions (there’ll be a revolving door at the White House as companies march in and out of President Trump’s office), and consumer electronics prices will rise preemptively in early 2025. We should also brace for shortages in key product categories as trade wars kick off and supply chains get squeezed. The free flow of, say, silicon between other countries and the US could slow to a trickle.

Bajarin is no more optimistic than I am about this.

“This is an important point. If Trump goes through with tariffs, it will impact all tech companies that make products in China... The reasoning around tariffs is to bring more manufacturing back to the US. That boat sailed 15 years ago and will never happen. Instead, any new manufacturing will go to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, and other regions where labor is cheaper.”

Companies like Apple have tried to diversify manufacturing outside China for years, but very little of that manufacturing has returned to the US. If the Trump administration focuses all its tariffs on China (and some on Mexico and Canada) it will only accelerate that process as companies seek to reduce their Chinese exposure. In the end, American workers and consumers won’t be the benefactors in 2025. I don’t know what 2026 will look like.

Oh, and robots. Lots and lots of robots

The humanoid robot revolution is upon us, and 2025 will see an explosion in capabilities and styles. Unfortunately, none of them will be ready to come home with you.

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Now that Cyber Monday is here, we're tracking a ton of great savings on all of the best models still available in the sales.

We saw some fantastic prices across the entire range last week, and many of those deals are still live. So whether you want a new Forerunner, Vivoactive, Fenix, Epix, or anything in between, we've got you covered.

Cyber Monday Garmin deals in the US

• Amazon: Up to 37% off Garmin smartwatches
• Best Buy: Up to $250 off
• Target: Up to $100 off
• Walmart: More than 50% off

Cyber Monday Garmin deals in the UK

• Amazon: Up to 36% off Garmin Epix and more
• Argos: Up to 20% off and get Argos' Price Promise
• Currys: Up to £180 off
• John Lewis: Up to £179 off

More of today's Cyber Monday sales in the US

• Amazon: TVs, smart home & air fryers from $12.99
• Apple: AirPods, iPads, MacBooks from $89.99
• Best Buy: $1,000 off 4K TVs, laptops & headphones
• B&H Photo: up to $900 off cameras, laptops, accessories
• Cheap TVs: smart TVs at Best Buy from $69.99
• Dell: best-selling Inspiron & XPS laptops from $279.99
• Dreamcloud: mattress deals from $349 + free shipping
• Holiday: decor, lights, Christmas trees & PJs from $10.99
• Home Depot: 40% off tools, appliances & furniture
• Lowe's: holiday decor, appliances & tools from $17.31
• Nectar: up to 50% off all mattresses
• Nordstrom: 46% off boots, coats, jeans & jewelry
• Samsung: $1,500+ off TVs, phones, watches & appliances
• Target: save on furniture, Halloween, tech & clothing
• Walmart: cheap TVs, robot vacs, furniture & appliances

More of today's Cyber Monday sales in the UK

• Amazon: up to 68% off toothbrushes and TVs
• AO: savings on games consoles and appliances
• Argos: up to 50% off toys, Lego, TVs and gifts
• Boots: up to 50% off Dyson, Oral-B and Philips
• Currys: big deals on TVs, appliances, laptops
• Dell: laptops, desktops, monitors from £299
• Dyson: up to £150 off
• Ebay: up to 50% off refurbished tech
• EE: up to £600 off Samsung and Apple
• John Lewis: up to £300 off appliances and TVs
• LG: £1,000 or more off TVs and appliances
• Samsung: up to £600 off TVs, phones and tablets
• Very: up to 30% off phones, appliances & clothing

Whether you're after the latest Versa or the stylish Luxe, Fitbit deals can score you a discount on everything from the latest releases to the oldest (and cheapest) fitness trackers.

We regularly see plenty of savings across the brand's range of smartwatches, with significant savings on old and new models. That's all, provided you're looking in the right place at the right time; however, with more and more models filling the shelves, we are seeing Fitbit sales dropping more frequently these days.

We're bringing you all the lowest Fitbit prices on today's best-selling models from around the web, with our comparison tech scouring the shelves every half an hour to locate the biggest deals.

Since there are quite a few Fitbit models available, the models below are all from our best Fitbit guide, which includes fitness trackers and smartwatches, all of which have been thoroughly reviewed by the TechRadar team. That means you can do your research on what Fitbit is best for you, while also taking advantage of the best prices around the web.

Didn't find a Fitbit sale or price to your liking? If you're looking for viable alternatives, we recommend checking out the latest Garmin fitness tracker deals or the best Apple Watch deals and sales, which offer excellent rival devices to the likes of Fitbit.

If you're looking for other fitness bargains, you can see our roundup of the best cheap massage gun sales happening right now.

The brief flurry of AI-powered wearables like the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 doesn't seem to have caught on the way their creators hoped, but one seems to be banking on the idea that what we really want from an AI companion is non-stop drama and traumatic backstories. Friend, whose pendant hardware isn't even out yet, has debuted a web platform on Friend.com to allow people to talk to random examples of AI characters. The thing is, every person I and several others talked to is going through the worst day or week of their lives.

Firings, muggings, and dark family secrets coming out are just some of the opening gambits from the AI chatbots. These are events that would lead to difficult conversations with your best friend. A total stranger (that you're pretending is human) should not kick off a possible friendship while undergoing intense trauma. That isn't what CEO Avi Schiffmann highlights in the video announcing the website, of course.

Dramatic AI

You can see typical examples of the AI chatbots opening lines at at the top of the page and above. Friend has pitched its hardware as a device that can hear what you're doing and saying and comment in friendly text messages. I don't think Craig is in any position to be encouraging after getting pistol-whipped. And Alice seem more preoccupied with her (again, fictional) issues than anything going on in the real world.

These conversations are textbook examples of trauma-dumping, unsolicited divulging of intense personal issues and events, Or, they would be if these were human beings and not AI characters. They don't break the illusion easily, however. Craig curses at me for even suggesting it. Who wouldn't want these people to text you out of the blue as Schiffmann highlights.

Future Friends?

When the hardware launches, you'll be able to carry around your dramatic pal in a necklace. The AI will be listening and coming up with ways to respond to whatever happens in your day. I'm not sure you'd want that in some of these cases. If you do end up hitting it off with one of the AI characters on the website, you can link it to your account.

"You'll effectively 'move in together"' like a real companion," as Schiffmann put it on X. "We're basically building Webkinz + Sims + Tamagotchi."

That said, I'll be very surprised if anyone takes up his offer for those who really get along with their AI companion.

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Apple has never spoken of a smart ring or even hinted at the impending existence of one, but if the latest rumors are to be believed, the illusory product is now nothing more than a pipe dream as Apple may have canceled the whole project. If true, it's a mistake.

You only need to wear a smart ring for a few weeks to understand its appeal. Wearables like the Oura Ring and Samsung Galaxy Ring are small, attractive, sleep-friendly, and offer enviable battery life. I started wearing an Oura Ring 3 some months ago, and it's the only technology that I wear 24/7 for days on end (until it needs a charge).

Smart rings offer most of the benefits of smartwatches like the Apple Watch. They track activity, exercise, sleep, blood oxygenation, heart rate, wellness, and more. The lack of a screen, microphones, speakers, and haptic vibrations lowers the distraction level to virtually zero.

It's easy for me to forget I'm wearing the Oura, though I do tend to worry the ring around my finger, endlessly spinning it with my thumb. When I do this, I need to remember to return the ring's indent to the palm side of my hand so that the inside ring sensors are in their best position to track my vitals.

The new Oura Ring 4 is apparently even better prepared for wearers like me who can't stop spinning their rings; the sensors are now spread all around the inner ring.

Still not a smartwatch

Smart Rings aren't perfect. In my case, I can't do certain exercises with them; anything that presses the ring against my finger, like pull-ups, causes pain, so I remove the ring for those routines. That's never been an issue with the Apple Watch.

The low profile and lack of screen and on-device alerts mean I often have no idea what the Oura Ring is tracking. I have to remind myself to check out the Oura app. I don't mind, really, because I also allowed my iPhone's Health App to capture all of my Oura data, so I'm fairly confident that nothing's been missed.

Bloomberg's report claims that Apple is canceling its ring project because it doesn't want to cannibalize the still-growing Apple Watch market. I don't get that. If what I've found can be broadly applied to the wearable market, then there are many people who do not want to wear a smartwatch and screen on their wrist and would appreciate a smart ring from Apple.

I'm not even sure this rumor makes business sense. Over the years, Apple has worked across its categories to fill in the blanks. Don't like a single iPhone option? How about a Pro model or a giant Plus one? EarPods, not your style? Check out these AirPods. Need more noise control? Check out these AirPods Pros. Prefer tablets over smartphones and computers? Here's an iPad. Prefer something small? How about an iPad Mini (version 7 might be coming soon).

Even in the wearable space, Apple has shown a propensity for expanding choices.

This doesn't make sense

Apple is also willing to take big swings. Just look at the Vision Pro. Sure, it's way too expensive and a niche product that's being pitched as the mixed reality experience for everyone. My point, though, is Apple is not timid and has shown little concern about category cannibalization.

If, though, Apple has truly killed the rumored Apple Ring project, it's made a mistake. I guarantee people want an Apple Ring and would love to use it to enable gestures that allow it to control everything from the Vision Pro to their Mac, iPads, and AirPods (tap your thumb and ring finger to pause and play).

Apple fans will gladly pay a premium for Apple's own very Applely take on a smart ring. I'm sure it'll be titanium (for the high-end) and aluminum for everyone else. It'll come in Pro and basic versions, with the basic offering custom skins (or etchings) that you can order printed on the ring before it arrives. Most will pay extra for the Pro because it'll be the one with the gesture control.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that Bloomberg is just plain wrong. There's no way Apple is walking away from this section of the wearable market. An Apple Ring will arrive – maybe as soon as next year. If you believe it, you better put a ring on it.

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After Meta made AI wearables a centerpiece of its announcements at Meta Connect 2024, the question arises of how its rivals will respond. In particular, there's a lot of rumors flying around about what Apple has planned in response to the upgraded Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses and upcoming Orion smart glasses that employ augmented reality along with AI. 

One major long-running rumor is that Apple plans to incorporate the hardware and AI software for a wearable not into glasses, but into its next-generation AirPods Pro. That might include cameras and AI features to match what you see in Meta's smart glasses. This potential competition sets the stage for a battle of wearables, with both companies seeking to redefine how users interact with the digital and physical worlds.

Meta boasted that the upgraded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses can take photos, live stream video, and otherwise provide hands-free access to the world with both audio and visual receptors controlled by voice commands. With the Meta AI assistant integrated into the device, the smart glasses can handle requests in a conversational form. However, they are only a shadow of what the Orion smart glasses previewed at the event could do. Orion will employ augmented reality to meld digital content with the physical world through a holographic display.

Smart Futures

Apple's approach with the speculative AirPods Pro is more about leveraging AI for contextual awareness, using infrared cameras to interpret the space around you. It wouldn't take photos or video from the perspective of your ears. Rather, it would use visual input to subtly improve navigation, fitness tracking, and even better respond to gesture controls. They would also likely augment Apple's Vision Pro headset, giving even more accurate spatial audio experiences by tracking head movements and adjusting audio based on the user's surroundings.

The best way of thinking about the difference between Meta's smart glasses and Apple's AirPods with AI tools is how they connect the AI with the hardware. They might divide prospective users based on what they want from their wearables. Meta's Ray-Ban glasses are geared toward capturing and sharing experiences visually, while Apple's AirPods seem to be more about enhancing the AI assistant with more passive input than is currently available. What they share is an interest in immersive experiences and making AI an ever-present aspect of wearing technology. 

While Orion may link the physical and digital worlds through augmented reality, Apple's AirPods offer a lighter touch in enhancing environmental awareness and boosting the AI assistant's ability to help you. However, the integration into the Apple headset gives more weight to the AirPods and their capacity to deliver AI experiences. That's especially true if they can sync up with Apple’s extensive ecosystem of devices.

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We can talk all day about the Apple Watch Series 10 and its new off-angle viewing screen, sleep apnea abilities, Training Loads, and ability to measure dive depth. However, I know the real reason this Apple Watch is the best ever and might be the only smartwatch you really want.

In the decade I've been wearing smart watches, they've almost consistently grown in size and weight, reaching an apex with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 (61.4g) and the Samsung Galaxy Ultra (60g). These are beefy digital timepieces intended for rugged outdoors and climbing Mount Everest. I've never understood why people who are not great outdoors people wear them. And forget about sleeping with them. It's impossible unless you can sleep with a rock under your gut.

There's a new trend in the smartwatch game, though: big, thin, and light. For me, it started with the 45mm Google Pixel Watch 3. I've worn the last two generations, and while I loved the smooth water droplet design, I was frustrated by the screen size and the thickness. For such a pretty watch, it wasn't always comfortable to wear. The Pixel Watch 3 in 45mm changed that by introducing a much larger (and brighter) screen and a thinner and quite light 37g build.

I found that I could sleep with this watch and considered putting aside my Apple Watch Series 9 for good.

Then along came the Apple Watch Series 10 46mm.

Big and light

Yes, this is Apple's biggest Apple Watch screen ever (it's 30% larger than the Apple Watch Series 6), and it looks it. I like a big screen, especially one that uses wide-angle OLED for way better off-axis viewing. Still, I won't wear it if it's uncomfortable or cumbersome. Basically, I can't trade screen size for comfort, which is why I've never fully embraced the Ultras.

The Apple Watch Series 10, however, pulls off a rather surprising feat. Despite the screen size, the watch (without the band) weighs 35.3g. The wild thing about that is the 45mm Apple Watch Series 9 in aluminum weighed 51.5 grams. This is a difference I can feel. It's like a reverse TARDIS: Bigger on the outside and the weight of a smaller device on the inside.

It's not just the weight, though. At 9.7mm thick, the watch is a full millimeter thinner than the last Apple Watch.

I know, these are just a bunch of numbers, so let me tell you how it feels: almost like nothing.

If it weren't for the fact that I see the watch on my wrist, I might forget it was there. This is all-day comfort and, in my experience, sleep-friendly comfort, too.

This weight and size change is even more impressive when considering that the new Apple Watch Series 10 combines GPS and cell capabilities on all models. Usually, the cell and GPS models would be a tad heavier than the GPS-only counterparts. Not this time. Part of that may be because Apple re-engineered the chassis build.

Metal matters

While the last Apple Watch had a Zirconia back, the Apple Watch Series 9 uses either Aluminum or Titanium. The all-metal back now supports the placement of cell radios, which is handy for the GPS + Cellular models as the WiFi GPS radios are on the top. These are under-the-hood changes you might not notice, but Series 10 with GPS + Cellular will no longer feature a red ring on some on the Digital Crown to indicate cell support. You'll still pay your phone company to turn the service on, though, and need to buy a model with cellular connectivity.

To be clear, size, weight, and design are really just one aspect of the Apple Watch Series 10, but when it comes to wearables, which are essentially fashion, can you put a price on good design, fit, and feel? How the watch feels on your wrist will define how you feel about it.

Getting notifications, tracking workouts, health, and sleep (even sleep apnea) is, in some ways, the icing on a time-keeping cake.

So yes, let the Apple Genius talk your ear off about all these amazing new Apple Watch Series 10 features, just make sure they let you try one on.

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Some days I wake up thinking the world has gone mad. Case in point: there’s now a $899 Apple Watch case. 

While I don’t have UK or Australian pricing to hand, I think you can translate that dollar price to something equally hefty in other currencies. The case comes in two equally expensive variants: the Crown Sport and the Crown Classic. The Sport comes on a rubber strap and the Classic features a metal bracelet. And there are silver and rose gold options. 

These pricey cases are the brainchild of Golden Concept – the kind of name I’d expect graphics cards of the early 2000s to sport – and are designed to blend modern technology with classic watchmaking. 

Yeah, so it’s a no from me. 

An unholy mix

The case seems to draw inspiration from the Patek Philippe Nautilus, with a form of wing on the left side, and the Rolex Daytona, via its chronograph-style pushers on the right-hand side. For people who don’t know, those are two so-called ‘hype watches’ that are hard to get hold of and have rocketed in price. There’s what appears to be a deployant-style clasp for the strap, but it’s hard to tell from the photos.

Look, I applaud the gumption in trying to add something to the Apple Watch, which I feel is a brilliant but utterly soulless smartwatch that’s kinda ubiquitous on the wrists of commuters I pass by. But I feel that trying to add a mechanical watch vibe to the Apple Watch, or any smartwatch, is a swing and a miss.

One of the reasons why the Apple Watch models consistently top our best smartwatches list is that they have a design that’s hard to beat – they're compact but still with a usable display and buttons, and feel nice to the touch. Plus there are plenty of strap options, and with a choice between aluminum and titanium materials, you can get an aesthetically pleasing Apple Watch without needing to go down the third-party case route.

Now I’ve worn a good few smartwatches, and I appreciate how useful they can be with all the data they suck up and spit out. But recently I’ve developed a taste for mechanical watches. And I simply don’t think a smartwatch, no matter how bougie the case, can replicate the feeling of wearing an automatic or hand-wound watch.

There’s just a more tactile, purposeful, and stylish feeling that you get with a ‘real’ compared to what’s basically a wrist-worn computer. You develop a form of human-and-machine relationship with such a watch, especially given that it’s powered by you, via either your movement or winding.

As such, I think both traditional and smartwatches have a place in today’s world; I just don’t think the streams should be crossed. And I certainly don’t think that paying more than the cost of an Apple Watch 10 to get a case to give it the pseudo look of two watches that could almost be seen as distasteful due to the hype around them is a smart approach.

For around $900 you can get an Apple Watch and have some spare money for a great automatic watch – my recommendation would be something from Seiko or the excellent Baltic HMS 003.

Equally, if you already have an Apple Watch and want some nice extra wrist wear, then I’d suggest getting something like the Christopher Ward 63 Dune – I have one in to test in bronze, and it’s excellent, offering a lot for around a grand in British bullion. 

And for people on a tighter budget, Christopher Ward has the C63 Sealander, a watch that comes in at £685 in the UK and has the design, specs, waterproofing and strap options to see you from the boardroom to the beach. 

In fact, for around the combined price of an Apple Watch and the Golden Concept Crown Sport, you could get a new Apple Watch and a C63 Sealander.

Maybe I’m just stuck in my ways, and there’s an audience there for such bling-y Apple Watch cases. But my advice, both professional and personal, is to go for a smartwatch and a mechanical watch, rather than try and combine the two.

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Fitbit Charge 3 prices are looking particularly strong these days, considering the fitness tracker has been on the shelves since 2018, and newer models are now avaialble. It's still a perfectly serviceable smartwatch, though, capable of offering in-depth metrics and a range of additional smartphone features as well. That means any Fitbit Charge 3 deals are doing to be offering strong value for money these days, especially if you're after a budget piece of wrist candy.

The fitness tracker has always been considered fantastic value for money, even before Fitbit Charge 3 deals started to arrive, given the range, and quality, of the tech inside. They're easily the most fashionable trackers on the market, too - there's a reason all the third-party manufacturers are trying to rip off Fitbit's designs.

If those prices are a bit stubborn for your liking, though, why not check out the latest prices on the older Charge 2 or other models in the range over on our main cheap Fitbit deals roundup.

Today's cheapest Fitbit Charge 3 prices

The standard Fitbit Charge 3 is currently available in two colour schemes. One tracker comes with a graphite aluminium case with a black strap, while another option goes for a rose gold tracker with a blue grey strap. You can usually view both options on the same page at most retailers.

Today's best Fitbit Charge 3 Special Edition prices

Fitbit isn't averse to creating a special edition for its products, just like Apple and its smartwatches, or Ubisoft and its insane number of special editions for an Assassin's Creed game. Thankfully, there's not much to get confused about with the Fitbit Charge 3 Special Edition. The difference between the regular and Special Edition Fitbit Charge 3 involve prices, wrist strap options and Fitbit Pay.

As you can tell via our price comparison above, the Fitbit Charge 3 Special edition prices are more expensive, namely thanks to the additional tech inside powering Fitbit Pay. This allows you to make contactless payments at select stores (with the icon to the left), which can be handy for buying a bottle of water while out for a run.

However, it actually depends if your bank supports Fitbit Pay transactions too. UK coverage is seriously poor at the time of writing - though if you're with Santander or Starling Bank among a few more obscure others you'll be fine. Plus, Fitbit Pay is also now accepted on TFL transport systems. There are plenty of options in the US as well. You can check your country's options via the official list.

The other difference you've probably noticed already are the different straps. One option is a sporty silicon strap in white with a graphite-coloured tracker. We're quite taken with the other model which comes with a woven lavender strap and a rose gold tracker. The Fitbit Charge 3 Special Editions came out a few weeks after the regular Charge 3 and is widely available around the world now.

There are plenty of reasons you might want one of the best Apple Watches. You can get notifications on the go, read emails, take calls and customize it to suit your preferences. It’s also got a built-in step tracker, heart rate monitor, and tons of workout modes to help you stay on top of your fitness goals. There are plenty of reasons why they're top of our best smartwatches list, but a key feature most miss is that it will also tell you when you need to go to the hospital. Like, right now.

Picture the scene: you’re at home on a Friday night. You’ve been feeling a little under the weather, your leg hurts, but you don’t really think much of it. The human body is notoriously fragile; even at the age of 29 it already sometimes feels like it’s over for me because I get backaches out of the blue. In fact, it’s too easy to just avoid symptoms and get on with it. Many of us don’t want to bother a doctor or believe it will pass on its own, assuming that we can sleep it off. 

That evening, you get a notification on your trusty Apple Watch. It’s not junk email or someone tagging you in a meme: it’s your watch telling you that you have a resting heart rate of 120 BPM and hey, that’s not normal. You are sitting down watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix, so there is no reason your heart should be doing that. You realize your breathing is shallow too, so you decide to input that into your list of symptoms. 

The watch then tells you that these two symptoms, plus that pain in your leg from earlier, is concerning. It’s time to pack it up and get yourself to the nearest hospital. Your favorite show can wait.

Below is an example of what the heart rate alert looks like. Though we didn't think to screenshot it from the watch at the time (too panicked!), this is the exact notification my partner received.

Long story short, going to hospital was indeed the right call. My partner is healthy and in his early 30s, but after a little wait, a doctor told us that he had clots in both his lung and his leg, hence the pain. We learned it was something called a pulmonary embolism, and if you don’t know what that is, well here’s the definition of it from John Hopkins Medicine. The first time I Googled it I burst into tears, not even joking.

“A pulmonary embolism (PE) is a blood clot that develops in a blood vessel in the body (often in the leg). It then travels to a lung artery where it suddenly blocks blood flow.

“A blood clot that forms in a blood vessel in one area of the body, breaks off, and travels to another area of the body in the blood is called an embolus. An embolus can lodge itself in a blood vessel. This can block the blood supply to a particular organ. This blockage of a blood vessel by an embolus is called an embolism.”

That’s all very scary. What’s scarier is if this is left untreated, it can be life-threatening. Per Cleveland Clinic: “a pulmonary embolism can cause heart or lung damage and even death” if left untreated. So you’re best getting yourself checked out as soon as possible.

The reason I am so relaxed writing this, and even able to make silly little jokes, is that my partner is doing fine after a week in the hospital. He’s on blood thinners, he’s able to walk without the support of a cane now, and we’re on the up. I am so grateful to the UK’s NHS for their quick work, but I am also grateful for his Apple Watch and its heart health notifications feature, which piped up at the most crucial moment, ultimately providing the catalyst to encourage my partner to go get help.

As a disclaimer, I should add he did do quick research via NHS 111 following the watch’s notification, so we do have to thank them for the comprehensive list of symptoms (including a sudden shortness of breath, fast heart rate, unexplained pains et al). We are both feeling very grateful for how quickly technology can deliver information to us.

I wanted to write this article to highlight the excellent safety features of Apple Watches, and how they really did work in practice. Technology is advancing for the better in many ways, and they now have car crash detection which uses sensor data from the device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to detect a crash. This feature is also available on iPhone 14 models or later.

We’re all tech enthusiasts here, mostly because technology is cool. But sometimes it’s more than cool: that little device in your pocket or on your wrist can save your life when you least expect to need it, and that is a truly remarkable thing.

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Google is rolling out an update to its kid-friendly Fitbit Ace LTE smartwatch with the goal to “foster independence and motivate movement” in young users. Chief among them is the implementation of Tap to Pay. 

Children will be able to use the feature to pay for things wherever “Google Pay is accepted. In fact, it operates just like it does on the Pixel Watch 2, but with a distinct difference.

Tap to Pay on the Fitbit Ace LTE doesn’t work with just any debit or credit card. The device must be connected to a debit card from either Greenlight or GoHenry, two financial tech companies that strive to teach children about money. 

Through this integration, the wearable can also send transaction alerts, implement spending limits, and give out an allowance whenever chores are done. It's designed to help children develop autonomy while giving parents a way to monitor their finances so they don’t overspend.

New games

The second major release is the introduction of two new games on the FitBit Arcade app: Sproutlings and Spirit Garden. Details are sparse, but from what we can see, they encourage kids to exercise like the other already-available titles. 

Spirit Garden is an immersive title where players are tasked to summon virtual spirits and rebuild shrines. Progression appears tied to exercising as extra game time is unlocked "the more kids move." It’s an interactive experience as the title utilizes haptic feedback, audio, and the built-in accelerometer in its gameplay. There is also a meditation aspect to it, as the announcement mentions “guided mindful practices”.

Sproutlings are similar to Tamagotchi, with children receiving a little plant critter they’re tasked with raising. As with the previous game, progression is connected to exercise since the Sproutling grows as young users play.

The School Time tool is receiving an extra function by allowing parents to set up a lunch break. That way, “kids can use their watch during recess” or lunch, but when classes start, it’s automatically disabled. 

Future update

There are other changes, too, although we don't know a lot about them. Google states it is partnering with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to consistently release “new Daily Quests” moving forward. Exactly what these exercises are is unknown.

Later in the year, kids will be able to add their older or younger siblings as contacts inside the wearable Fitbit Ace app. This is supposed to facilitate communication between the two sides. There is no word on exactly when the feature will roll out, although we did reach out to Google for more information and we'll update this piece if and when we hear back.

If you're looking for a wearable for you, check out TechRadar's list of the best smartwatches for 2024.

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Wearable devices powered by artificial intelligence have been having a moment recently, with the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 catching the world’s attention – often for the wrong reasons. But despite these high-profile flops, another AI wearable has just emerged on the scene, and it might be one of the strangest offerings yet.

Called Friend, this new device takes the form of a medallion that’s attached to a lanyard and worn around your neck. It can pick up on things you’re doing and saying, and then send you friendly comments in the form of text messages sent to your phone. To use Friend, you push a button in the medallion’s center and say something, then the device will reply using the aforementioned text messages.

Friend costs $99, giving it an advantage over the $699 Humane AI Pin and the $199 Rabbit R1. It’s only compatible with iOS devices for now, with the creators saying, “We will support Android in the future depending on demand.” It’s due to start shipping in Q1 2025.

A creepy companion?

Despite the chummy aim of the device, there seems to be a lot of potential for Friend to cross the line from chirpy pal to creepy know-it-all. Take the Friend promotional video, for example. In one scene, a woman is watching a video on her phone while eating a falafel wrap. The Friend device comments on the on-screen content and asks how the person’s meal is. It’s unclear how exactly it knew what the woman was eating, leaving an uncanny aftertaste to the video.

Elsewhere in the trailer, a man is playing a video game with his friends and is being roundly beaten, even commenting that he hates the game. The Friend device then responds – without any prompting from the man – and mocks him by saying that his performance is “embarrassing.” That implies that the device is potentially always listening to your conversations – after all, it wasn’t prompted to speak by its owner – and the Friend website confirms this, saying “When connected via Bluetooth, your Friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your Friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”

Friend’s creators say that data is end-to-end encrypted and does not leave your device, but there are still some pretty substantial privacy implications with a product that's always listening to what you say.

As well as that, there’s the question of whether a device like this will help or hinder people in terms of healthy relationships. It seems reasonable to ask whether it’s a good idea to encourage people to form a parasocial friendship with an inanimate object rather than with real people. While it might help provide temporary relief for lonely people, it’s hardly a long-term solution.

We’ll find out what kind of impact the Friend will have when it launches next year. It will be interesting to see if it can avoid the fate of the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 – and tame some of its creepier aspects.

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When Samsung’s Galaxy Watch7 was recently revealed, people were excited to see all of the new features but failed to notice that something was missing. 

User JordyV27 on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) discovered a support page revealing that neither the Galaxy Watch 7 nor the Galaxy Watch Ultra has Wireless PowerShare.

For those unfamiliar, Wireless PowerShare is a reverse charging feature that allows Samsung wearables to steal a bit of power from a Galaxy smartphone. To transfer energy, you just had to place the smartwatch directly on the back of the phone. This function was exclusive to a handful of first-party devices, but it really came in handy in a pinch.

PowerShare is gone because of the new BioActive sensor on the rear of the watches. It’s a powerful collection of sensors more accurate than the Galaxy Watch6’s hardware and provides “deeper [health] metrics.” Samsung explains that the unique design of the stack required them to alter the shape of the smartwatch’s backglass.

As a result, it “increased the distance between the internal wireless charging coil… and the wireless charger.” With so much going on inside the case, Samsung decided it would be best to simply remove support for Wireless PowerShare.

Worthwhile tradeoff

Although it may disappoint some to see such a useful tool removed, it’s a worthy exchange. Samsung’s BioActive array has improved the health features of wearables. The Galaxy Watch 7 can, for example, help users learn about their metabolic health since it can track AGEs (advanced glycation end products). It can even look for signs of sleep apnea now.

Plus, the signs of PowerShare going away have been around for a while now. The Galaxy Watch5 Pro supported the function, but you had to remove the strap as it would get in the way.

Samsung’s support page also recommends utilizing the wireless charger that comes with the Watch 7, as using a charger from an older model could result in slower charge times “and higher heat generation.” Again, this is because of the BioActive sensor array.

Pre-orders are currently for the Samsung Galaxy Watch7 and Watch Ultra. The former is available in two sizes: 40mm at $299 / £289 / AU$549 and 44mm at $329 / £319 / AU$599. The Watch Ultra is a single size with a price tag of $649 / £599 / AU$1,299. The shipping date for both is set for July 24.

While we have you, be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the nine things we saw and learn at Galaxy Unpacked 2024.

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The next Apple Watch SE could be primarily made out of plastic. Notable industry expert Mark Gurman claimed in his recent newsletter the tech giant is thinking about getting rid of the aluminum shell for the upcoming wearable. In its place will be a body made from a “rigid plastic.” 

The current SE model has some plastic in its construction, with a back case made of a nylon composite. But with his move, Apple would be fully embracing plastic as the primary material. 

What kind of plastic is unknown, but it could possibly be a type of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP for short). FRPs are notable for their high strength, lightweight nature, and noncorrosive properties. 

Other smartwatch brands like Garmin use the polymer in their devices while restricting nylon for their wristbands. Apple could follow a similar trajectory there, although this is admittedly speculation.

Low-cost wearable

Gurman theorizes the new plastic shell is being implemented in an effort to compete with the Galaxy Watch FE. Samsung revealed their wearable on June 24, which notably sports an aluminum frame. The Bluetooth model for the Galaxy Watch FE costs $199.99, while the LTE version has a $249.99 price tag in the United States. By comparison, the 2022 Apple Watch SE is $249.99.

Apple’s move, assuming the company goes through with it, could knock prices down to $200, maybe even lower. This wouldn’t be the first time the company has experimented with different constructions for their products. The iPhone 5c from all the way in 2013 famously had a polycarbonate design.

However, it wasn’t pure plastic, as it had a steel frame underneath. The 2024 Apple Watch SE may have no metal. It is entirely possible. Some of Garmin’s mid-range smartwatches have nothing but an FRP body.

Analysis: Metal or plastic

Initial online reactions are mixed, with some people on the Apple subreddit responding positively and others concerned about sustainability. Apple aims to be totally carbon neutral by 2030, so wouldn’t opting for a plastic Apple Watch go against this mission? It’s a complicated question to answer.

For example, consider the production of soda cans and plastic bottles. According to Reuters, producing cans “pumps about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere” compared to plastic. 

Although plastic production may emit less carbon in the short term, the material doesn’t last as long as metal, adding to pollution in the long term. Extending this idea to smartwatches creates a problem regarding device longevity.

Would a plastic Apple Watch, however tough it may be, have a shorter shelf life than the device with aluminum? Will it be more susceptible to wear and tear, forcing people to buy the upgrade? It’s hard to say for sure. We’ll just have to wait for more information, if and when the wearable is officially announced. 

As with every leak, take this information with a grain of salt. Be sure to check out TechRadar's list of the best Apple Watches for 2024.

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