It’s been a hot minute since ChatGPT last updated its Images feature. Its last update, to Images 2.0 in April 2026, was pretty solid and I’d say put it ahead of Google’s Nano Banana 2, even if its images still took longer to create, which was a bit frustrating.

Today's new Images 2.5 update adds a whole bunch of extra features and tools to the existing image generation engine that make it a lot easier to use, and it's quicker too.

In fact, there are so many features now in Images that to say it’s overcrowded would be an understatement. Because of that, it can be a little hard to locate the best new features amongst everything else, so I’ve pulled out the ones you should definitely look out for, because they make a real difference.

1. Much improved editing tools

I’ve pulled these features out first because, despite not sounding that exciting, the improved editing tools are actually a real game-changer for how I use ChatGPT Images, and probably will be for you, too.

OpenAI appears to have quietly been rolling out its new image-editing toolbar in ChatGPT during August, although the company hasn’t formally announced it, so it might not be totally accurate to call them part of the new ChatGPT Images 2.5, but I’m including them because they are, effectively, new.

At the moment, we’re used to generating an image, then when it’s not exactly what we want, we type in another description using the prompting tool, like ‘make it brighter’ or ‘remove the people in the background’, and try again. After ChatGPT hasn't got quite right a number of times, I usually give up and start again.

Now I don’t need to. The new editing tools let you pinpoint the exact spot in the image you’d like to change, and tell ChatGPT exactly what you’d like to do with it.

The new Edit toolbar contains Markup, Comment, Remove BG, Erase and Resize.

In the web version of ChatGPT, just click on the new Edit button that appears over a generated image and you'll enter the Edit mode, where you’ll see this new toolbar. In the app version of ChatGPT, just tap on any image to enter Edit mode.

Let’s start with the most obvious tool: Remove BG. This keeps the foreground elements of your image and removes the background, making a transparent PNG file when you download it. It’s perfect for dropping your image into another document, such as a presentation you’re making.

Resize is a quick way of changing the aspect ratio of the image and contains all the usual suspects, including Portrait 3:4, Widescreen 16:9 and Landscape 4:3.

Erase makes it easy to remove elements from your image. To remove a person from the background, for example, just brush over them with the Erase brush and ChatGPT removes them entirely. You don’t need to be super-accurate with your brush — just cover enough of the object so that it’s obvious what you want to remove.

Markup is for adding markup elements to an image, but the Comments feature is where it gets really interesting. Instead of doing what you’d expect — just adding comments to an image — these are actually points for ChatGPT to act on. Click on any element of an image and add a comment like ‘remove this’ or ‘change this to blue’, and ChatGPT will follow your instructions when you tap the Send button. This makes editing images so much easier.

The final feature worth noting with the Edit mode is that you can easily roll back to every previous version of your image — each edit is saved as a separate file, so just scroll up or down in Edit mode to access previous versions of your image.

2. Sketching out an image first

The new Sketch tool enables you to sketch out an image, then ChatGPT transforms your rough sketch into a proper AI-generated image. It's useful when it would be quicker to draw your idea out than describe it.

Choose Images from the main menu and then Sketch at the top of the available options.

The Sketch tool does look a little bit like MS Paint from 1995, but it’s good enough for doing a quick sketch with your finger, or mouse. Once you’ve done that click or tap the blue tick button and ChatGPT loads in a prompt telling it to convert the sketch into a full image. You can add any details you want here.

Of course, once you’ve got your finished image you can still enter Edit mode to tweak it further.

3. Templates have finally arrived

The new Templates make it a lot easier to create the sort of things people actually want to do with ChatGPT Images, such as make posters, logos, icons, stylish product shots and much more. Each different task now has its own template, which you can work through with ChatGPT.

Each template starts with a basic prompt, then it asks a series of follow up questions so that it can find out exactly what you want.

For example, choose the Product photo template and it asks you to upload a photo of the product you want to feature, then when you’ve done that it asks for a style, asking you to choose between styles like Clean Studio, Editorial, Lifestyle and Dramatic, amongst other choices. Then it gives you a choice of a setting, like Dark Studio, then finally it starts to create your image.

If you’re going to ChatGPT to create something specific then the new Templates are going to be a great place to start.

And there's more!

That’s not all that’s changed in the new ChatGPT Images 2.5. The images it creates are more personalized, so you get better results when working with recognizable people and portraits. It’s better at infographics than before, and it’s now faster than ever, which is great because I did find it a bit on the slow side previously.

Finally, when you tap to share an image, you now also have the option of sharing the prompt that created the image, too, so people can make their own versions of whatever image you created more easily.

All in all these improvements are welcome, if not groundbreaking. I can see why they didn’t call this Images 3.0. It’s essentially a much improved version of the previous Images, but it’s certainly going to change the way I use ChatGPT images from now on.

Gamescom 2026 was chock-full of the latest and greatest in video games and gaming hardware, and we saw an awful lot of it while on the ground in Cologne, Germany.

We went hands-on with games, played with some yet-to-be-released gaming devices, and carried out a boatload of interviews. We’ll be publishing a host of content based on all of that in due course, but we also saw lots that we want to shout about now. Our Best of Gamescom 2026 awards give us the chance to celebrate some of the best of the show.

There aren’t any categories; instead, each of the winners deserved general recognition for being what made up the Best of Gamescom 2026 in our opinion. Find all our picks below, in no particular order, and keep your eyes peeled on this page in the future, as there are even some things we can't quite talk about yet…

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Asus ROG Ally X20

The new version of the official Xbox-x-Asus gaming handheld is something I was really surprised to like so much at this year’s Gamescom. Many will argue over the actual efficacy and importance of the upgrades it offers over its predecessor — the Ally X — but as a piece of new gaming hardware, I found it to be excellent.

The OLED screen is punchy and vibrant, and the new larger-than-before size of it works very nicely in the hands too. The ergonomic design is comfortable, while the buttons are satisfying and responsive in their actuation, and it’s overall not too heavy in the hands despite the bigger screen. I messed around with the likes of Forza Horizon 6 for a while with the X20 and was successfully and totally immersed in the action to the point I didn’t want to put the handheld down.

Its translucent design and gold accents make for an incredibly cool aesthetic too, and as a quality handheld gaming PC for your Xbox games as well as your PC library, this is a very slick, attractive, and quality bit of kit that impressed me.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Razer Prio

A suspiciously simple mobile controller solution, but one that still features some Razer-isms and design flair, the Prio mobile controller was one of the most innovative and different things I saw at Gamescom.

With the ability to fold up to the size of something akin to a card wallet or earbud pillbox, the Prio is a foldable mobile gaming controller that will offer gamers a convenient and easy way to quickly jump into a game while on the go.

Despite its diminutive size and foldable form, it still features all you need to game, like dual shoulder buttons, satisfying face buttons, and thumbsticks featuring the latest in capacitive tech. It’ll work with Android and Apple phones, works with cases easily, and there’s also no need to charge it.

It’s a fascinating new addition to the mobile gaming controller market and could make quite the splash.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Beyerdynamic MMX 130 wireless gaming headset

The MMX 130 is an open-back gaming headset that channels all the excellence of the audio brand’s pedigree while embracing the benefits of an open-back design. And the results are fantastic, with a gaming headset that sounds full-bodied, clear and detailed, round and spacious, and overall brilliant — even in the short time I had with it at Gamescom.

Despite the design’s popularity in the headphone and audio-fi space, there aren’t that many open-back gaming headsets on the market, so Beyerdynamic is pushing the envelope a bit and challenging what we expect of gaming headsets a little too.

The open-back design enables the MMX 130 to offer a rounder, more spacious soundscape, and one that players of single-player, immersive, maybe open-world games will be incredibly well served by, who are looking for awesome, detailed audio and not something geared toward online or competitive play like dozens of other headsets.

I’m really looking forward to testing and adding this gaming headset to my ranks when it launches later this year in October.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Rainbow Six Tactics

I am not normally one for XCOM-like strategy or turn-based games, but Rainbow Six Tactics well and truly got its hooks into me at Gamescom, and has me yearning to see more and, frankly, play it as soon as I can.

The game perfectly captures the vibes and ambience of Rainbow Six, with the settings of missions, aesthetics, operatives, and action making a pretty seamless jump over to the turn-based strategy genre; breaching through walls, the chatter among operatives, and the use of tools such as the drone are some of the most notable and obvious successes of this in my time with the game, for example.

Likewise, the idiosyncrasies of the turn-based genre manifest excellently in the Rainbow Six aesthetic, with slow-mo actions and operators carrying out gunfire or actions particularly pleasing, as well as carefully plotting multiple, sequential actions to ensure you have a chance for victory — or seeing it all fall apart in front of your eyes.

There looks to be great depth to Tactics too, which I can’t wait to get into. Matching up a favorite roster of operators, upgrading said operators to my preferences and for particular scenarios, hoovering up intel from incapacitated enemies in order to get bonuses for future missions, and plotting out all the stages of the game’s Breach mode to ensure an impactful and full-blooded commencement of attacks all play their own part. The whole tactical strategic loop feels like the perfect blend of genre and series.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

MOZA × MotoGP Sim Racing Handlebar

One of the most original, cool, and exciting hardware products I saw at Gamescom was easily Moza’s new Sim Racing Handlebar, officially licensed by MotoGP.

While surprising and eyebrow-raising on one hand, after investigating it further, it really did suddenly dawn on me: why shouldn’t MotoGP video game players have access to the same kind of specific controllers that players of racing games, truck games, and even farming games have?

And now they do, with the terrific MOZA × MotoGP Sim Racing Handlebar, which should comprehensively serve that market when it releases fully (launch is still to be confirmed, however). And it’s a seriously awesome bit of kit that features all you need to fully immerse yourself in the latest game.

The handlebar controller will attach to MOZA’s own wheelbases, feature controls inspired by real MotoGP handlebars, and offer enough customisation options in terms of adjustment and button mapping to give it incredible flexibility. It’s niche, perhaps, but we can’t wait to test the excellently cool bit of gaming hardware out.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Fable

Playground Games' upcoming release in the long-standing fantasy series continues to massively impress us. While our first look at the game at Summer Game Fest 2026 showed us a glimpse of the reputation system, our time with the Gamescom preview gave us a proper hands-on look at combat, and it’s utterly fantastic.

Playing a sliver of the game with two builds revealed the elegance with which the game blends melee and ranged combat with magic and spellcasting. The hand-to-hand combat is weighty and feels excellent to carry out, offensively or defensively, with a perfectly timed parry.

The ranged weaponry is very effective, and one rapid-fire crossbow weapon had me grinning from ear to ear. However, the magic is a real stand-out for me, offering loads of options for not only effective combat but also comedic theatre. The amount of gleeful satisfaction I got out of raising up some silly undead enemies, only to then slam them down and turn them into chickens was glorious.

Combine all this with the brilliance in writing and acting that our demo had, as well as a hugely impressive graphical presentation of the world, and I really think we’re in for a treat when Fable releases, and it was easily one of the best games on show at Gamescom.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons

2027 looks set to bless us with not only one brilliant fantasy adventure game in Fable, but two, with Warlock really catching my eye at Gamescom in a fascinating and intriguing preview.

As well as a captivating land to explore and a story and narrative which seem deeply compelling already, the role of deep and raw magic and the creative ways in which the game’s protagonist, Kaatri, can use it caught my eye particularly. For example, each spell or cast doesn’t seem to be a one-and-done trick, or you can use subsequent spells and casts one after another to solve puzzles, take down enemies, and explore the world in satisfying and creative ways.

What’s more, it’s all put together very slickly and sharply too, with combat looking fluid and responsive, the array of spells at your disposal vast and varied, the world and its secrets yearning to be discovered, mysteries to solve, Kaatri’s sort-of-helpful companion adding some good banter, and a style that will please those familiar with D&D, and those not.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

SteelSeries Aeon Pro Controller

It’s been a while since SteelSeries gave a proper go in the controller market, and some of the brand’s mobile offerings have raised an eyebrow, but as soon as I saw the Aeon Pro controller, I knew the brand was on to something.

Built around the traditional Xbox controller design — akin to the Elite Series 2 controller in many ways — the Aeon Pro is a premium pad with a few exciting features up its sleeve. Chief among these is the OLED mini screen on the front-top part of the pad, which is tidily done; it’s not intrusive or gimmicky and feels like it will be genuinely useful for players looking to have easy access to profiles and some controller information while the pad is in play.

It also has an excellent infinite power and battery supply system built into its dock that’s heavily inspired by the Nova Pro headset series and can charge a spare battery while you use another.

Targeting those on PC or Xbox — and those with both, particularly — the Aeon Pro will also offer an excellent grippy texture on its wings, remappable buttons, and interchangeable thumbsticks to provide multiple options for players looking for a one-and-done premium controller solution.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Turtle Beach Command Series MC7 Mouse

While this mouse from Turtle Beach massively raised eyebrows when first announced, having now seen it in the flesh and understood how it can be used, the Command Series MC7 Mouse is both a quality addition to the market and a worthy winner of one of our awards.

The 2.25” touchscreen on the side of the mouse is the star of the show, of course, and its ability to house touchscreen controls and clearly visible features seems like it could well add a layer of functionality to a gaming mouse not really seen before. You can load an extensive range of controls onto the screen too, from OBS to apps, PC information, and loads more — it may even provide a worthy service to streamers alongside the likes of a Stream Deck.

And the inclusion of the screen doesn’t compromise quality elsewhere either: you’re still getting the two buttons on the side for your thumb, and there’s true 8K wireless ultra-low latency, Turtle Beach’s Owl-Eye 30K sensor, and an excellent external dock that houses the USB dongle, as well as a second battery for the mouse that charges while you’re using the mouse, ensuring you’ll never be out of juice.

It might not be for everyone, sure, but props to Turtle Beach for having the guts to try something totally different with a mouse and give it a proper go.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past

One thing I vividly remember noticing during my long preview of The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past was that everyone in the session — a few dozen members of the press, at least — was absolutely, totally, deathly silent and utterly gripped by the quest we were being shown on screen. The allure, pull, and attention that this game still demands, all these years later, even with brand new content, is as strong as it’s ever been.

Seeing Geralt and Roach ride across the lands of The Continent once more, in that familiar older-looking engine brushed up anew, was a true highlight of Gamescom for Witcher fans, but with Songs of the Past, it already feels like we’re in for one more absolutely thrilling and deep expansion from CD Projekt Red that will finally round out the game’s narrative and complete the story.

Focusing on Dandelion and the new area of Letten, Songs of the Past already looks to have the makings of a Blood and Wine-esque expansion, filled with brilliantly written quests, a fascinating main storyline, and a host of different places to discover and see.

It also makes The Witcher 3 look better than ever (thanks in part to enhancements offered by the Remastered upgrade coming later this year), with luscious vegetation covering the land, sun-soaked vistas across lakes and forests, as far as the eye can see, and expect more of the brilliantly acted and realised NPCs going about their daily lives.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

The epic strategy game series finally comes to the epic and grimdark fantasy universe, and the results are absolutely belting. Offering up perhaps what was my favorite game preview of the entire Gamescom, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is the perfect combination of the PC game and the grimdark galaxy.

Playing a bit of an onboarding intro, as well as some of the interplanetary campaign and a climactic, testing, and epic battle as the Space Marines, I devoured and soaked up every tiny detail of Creative Assembly’s creation at Gamescom.

The epic battle at the end, utilising a wide variety of unit types, terrain factors, reinforcements, and abilities, was a true highlight of the show for me, and gave me that excellent mix of confidence when plans were going well, panic when it looked like the tide was turning, and relief crossed with triumph when I clawed my way to victory.

Playing it all in the studio’s new Warcore engine was an absolute blast too, with projectiles filling the skies, blood covering the ground, and environmental effects like dust and so on adding to the brilliant visuals on offer.

I’m deeply intrigued by how the diplomacy, trade, and other non-battle-focused elements of Total War games will manifest in this 40K version, but if what I’ve played is anything to go by, fans need not be worried; only incredibly excited and hyped.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Thrustmaster SimTask Truck-40 Add-On Kit

Another niche but excellent hardware offering at Gamescom 2026 was Thrustmaster’s SimTask Truck-40 Add-On Kit, a large steering wheel designed specifically for truck and heavy-vehicle simulation.

It’s a simple affair in its design, but it has that Thrustmaster quality running through its veins, with a robust design, a pleasing aesthetic, and a strong feature set.

There are 22 action buttons, four different heights, and a 30-degree tilt angle achieved with its bespoke mount, and it looks set to be a welcome addition to the market for both PC and console users, working with all of the brand’s wheelbases too.

What’s more promising is that it might well offer the only wheel specifically designed for games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator that console users will have access to, earning it a huge thumbs-up from us for serving a dedicated community of players.

Rob Dwiar, Managing Editor, TechRadar Gaming and Streaming

Nvidia RTX Spark

Among a few things that the hardware giant had to show, what stood out to me most was the new and upcoming RTX Spark. In case you missed it, this is Nvidia’s new ARM-based chip, specifically designed for slim and lightweight Windows laptops, with Nvidia AI and RTX graphics ready to be utilized.

The latter means laptops using the superchip are fully capable of playing numerous triple-A games at high frame rates, and that’s exactly what I both witnessed and played. The likes of 007 First Light, Borderlands 4, and Arc Raiders perform nearly flawlessly on the RTX Spark laptops on show.

Team Green has essentially opened up the possibilities for manufacturers to design slim desktop or laptop PCs, or even handheld gaming PCs — and Nvidia noted that it's more than happy for brands to reach out to use the superchip for handhelds. As a fan of gaming on the go on lightweight systems, I’m more than happy to give Nvidia credit where it’s due with this one.

Isaiah Williams, Staff Writer, Computing

JBL Quantum Engine advancements

JBL continued its push into the world of gaming headsets at this year's Gamescom with the announcement of three new headsets, which build upon the stellar work already shown off in last year's range. And while these light, comfortable, powerful, and sustainable headsets should be lauded, it's the development of its Quantum Engine software that caught my attention at this year's trade show.

The JBL Quantum Engine starts simple enough, with an array of customisable features and EQs that you might expect from a piece of audio software. These settings adapt to the specific genre or game that you're playing, with the intention of emphasising the important sounds such as footsteps or making your experience more immersive, taking full advantage of the 50mm carbon dynamic drivers found in the Quantum headset range. It can also cleverly block out background noise from especially clacky keyboards.

And there are now more features to come in Q4 2026. Most notable of all is the increased interconnectivity between the app and the games you play. One feature shown off to me will be of particular interest to racing game fans. The app can receive information from the game to transform into your speedometer and heads-up display, giving you features and details you might expect from a premium racing wheel, but beamed to the app on your phone or tablet. It's a cool idea that builds on the manufacturer's audio nous to create an all-in-one solution for gaming.

James Pickard, Senior Deals Editor

And one more thing we can't talk about yet...

Sometimes we're shown games or products at Gamescom that we can't talk about for even weeks after the event has finished, and one of our award winners is exactly one of those things.

Check back here in a few weeks time when we can reveal our last Best of Gamescom 2026 winner!

Being a devoted Gemini user seems to require a peculiar combination of loyalty, patience, and an unusually high tolerance for the word Flash.

That patience is being tested again. Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 last week, bringing significant improvements to its model lineup. OpenAI followed with GPT-6 Astra, its new frontier model designed to operate software, tackle complicated multi-step jobs, and work with considerably less human supervision.

Over in the Gemini community, meanwhile, some users are staring at their model picker and wondering when Google is going to join the party. The increasingly nervous focus is Gemini 4 Pro, the presumed next major frontier model from Google, and whether the company will actually release it at all.

Google has not announced that Gemini 4 Pro has been canceled, and the increasingly elaborate theories circulating on Reddit should be treated as exactly that: theories. Still, the mood is revealing. One r/Bard post jokes that Astra's arrival means Gemini 4 Pro will now be canceled while everyone waits for Gemini 4.5 Pro instead, and the thread title predicts Google will decide 4 Pro is no longer competitive enough and return to releasing Flash models.

Awaiting the new Gemini

"I also want to feel the frontier," one Reddit thread begins, with plenty of sympathetic agreement from others. "Google doesn't have enough talent anymore, and most of its compute is reserved for Apple Intelligence and Google Search AI Mode," one user posted in response.

The frustration makes more sense when you look at what Gemini users can see happening elsewhere.

Anthropic calls Fable 5.1 one of its most advanced models for coding and knowledge work, with improvements aimed at long-running tasks and research. The model has a one-million-token context window and 128,000-token maximum output, while Anthropic has also made cache reads dramatically cheaper.

Then there is Astra. OpenAI describes GPT-6 Astra as its most intelligent model yet, with an emphasis on computer use, coding, and completing complex work across multiple steps. The important part for ordinary enthusiasts is that OpenAI says Astra is rolling into ChatGPT, including access through Plus in Work and Codex as rollout progresses.

Gemini users want their turn.

Another Reddit thread is literally titled “I envy them too,” but most of the comments there are pushing back against the idea that Gemini's current model is useless. "Just keep all three subs, best way to play," one post argues.

Still, that misses something about why people become attached to these platforms. Gemini comes with Google's wider ecosystem, Android integration, and tools such as NotebookLM. As one Reddit commenter put it when told to subscribe elsewhere, “Gemini is cooler, has more tools, NotebookLM, it's better integrated in Android, etc.” Switching models is easy. Switching ecosystems is less so.

Gemini Flash again?

There's a running joke is that Google will respond to all this impatience by releasing another Flash model. Google has continued iterating rapidly on its faster Gemini models, and the current Reddit discussion is full of references to Gemini 3.7 Flash and 3.8 Flash.

In the thread speculating about Gemini 4 Pro's fate, one commenter imagines Google announcing, “We have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet, for Gemini 4.5,” while another delivers the punchline: “Here's another few Flash models.” A less amused commenter writes that DeepMind has “lost the initiative” and its famous confidence.

This is not really a fight over whether Gemini 3.8 Flash is good. Some users think it is excellent. Multiple commenters argued that Gemini remains highly competitive on price and performance and wins when it comes to coding.

The feat is that, after years of seeming to have an AI advantage, Google has squandered it. When Gemini looks like it is following OpenAI and Anthropic rather than forcing them to respond, its most enthusiastic users notice.

Of course, whether Google even wants the same victory its Reddit fans want is debatable. A cheaper, faster model embedded across Search, Android, Workspace and countless other services could ultimately be much more valuable than topping a frontier benchmark for a few months. For Google shareholders, that could be wonderfully sensible. For the person refreshing the Gemini model picker while Claude and ChatGPT users play with their new frontier models, it is rather less exciting.

“I've seen AIs of me sitting with Obama talking about insane things that we never did”.

George Clooney is clearly concerned about the power that AI has to produce deepfakes that are so real you can’t tell that they’re fake, especially when they contain images of world leaders.

“We were never there having a conversation. It is me doing it. And okay, that's a joke for people. But what happens if you see a video of Putin saying he's launched the first nuclear strike [against] the United States — how do you discern it?”

Clooney was raising his concerns in Venice at the ‘The Future of... Creativity’ symposium presented by Finch & Partners and Creative Artists Agency (CAA). George Clooney and Maggie Gyllenhaal were among the international group of artists, filmmakers, musicians, cultural thinkers and technology leaders who gathered to discuss how technology is changing creative work, and the people who produce it.

The panel discussions were moderated by the journalist and broadcaster Emily Maitlis, who asked Clooney, “is there a fear of replacement, as an actor?”

Clooney acknowledged the risk, but also the problem inherent with AI actors, which is that it’s going to be hard to create an AI movie star: “Well, there's two different conversations we're talking about. As an actor, there will be some portion of that that will be replaced. AI will have the exact same problem that I have as a director, and that we all have as filmmakers, which is how you make a star, because that’s hard to do.”

‘And it fundamentally did not work’

Actor and filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal cited a recent experience with AI on her upcoming short film Flesh Impact about Marilyn Monroe, commenting: “I did try working with AI on this project […] I have a 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe, and then I also have flashbacks to Marilyn Monroe when she's in her 30s. I have Dakota Johnson playing her, who is an incredible artist in my opinion. And the people who commissioned this project asked me to use AI […] and I went for it. I was like, 'All right, I'm curious. I don't know. Let's see.' And it fundamentally did not work.”

Ultimately, Gyllenhaal found that AI was not able to replicate the nuances of human performance and emotion.

“The idea was that we trained it on her. We then put her face on Dakota's face; we worked very hard at it, and in the end, they threw it away because [… ] Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe, was so much more moving, human, alive. All the reasons we decided to make this project to begin with”.

It’s perhaps reassuring to hear filmmakers say that while a fabricated AI clip can be convincing enough to mislead someone, it can’t deliver the emotional depth a director wants from a performance. Gyllenhaal’s experience offers a reason for creative optimism, even as Clooney’s raises concerns about what audiences will believe.

If you thought the stubby form factor of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 was a passing craze, think again: Xiaomi has today launched the Xiaomi 18 Fold, a similarly proportioned device that arrives just days before the expected launch of Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Ultra.

Featuring a 5.38-inch cover display and a 7.58-inch inner display — both of which have a 1.4:1 aspect ratio — the Xiaomi 18 Fold mimics the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s passport-style design (and indeed that of the China-only Huawei Pura X Max) to deliver a “flexible user experience across work, creativity, and entertainment.”

Mind you, the Xiaomi 18 Fold may actually have more in common with Apple’s imminent iPhone Ultra than the Galaxy Z Fold 8, given that it has two rounded corners when closed and four when open. The Galaxy Z Fold 8, meanwhile, is straight-edged whichever way you slice it.

TechRadar’s Collections Editor, Ruth Hamilton, got hands-on with the Xiaomi 18 Fold at IFA 2026, and confirmed that the device is also ever-so-slightly shorter and wider than Samsung’s latest foldable. The latter has a pair of screens measuring 5.5 inches and 7.6 inches, respectively, with each offering distinct 10:16 and 4:3 aspect ratios. The Xiaomi 18 Fold, by contrast, has a 1.4:1 ratio when both folded and unfolded.

Xiaomi’s foldable is also a touch heavier and thicker than the Galaxy Z Fold 8. When closed, it measures 10.68mm and weighs 219g; when unfolded, it’s 5.02mm thick. The latter device weighs just 201g and measures 9.7mm and 4.5mm, respectively.

But we’re talking millimeters here. This is still a thin and lightweight foldable whose proportions are perfectly suited to video content. Tellingly, the Xiaomi 18 Fold’s 1.4:1 aspect ratio is almost identical to the 1.43:1 aspect ratio of an IMAX screen.

While we didn’t get to watch any movies on the device in our short hands-on time with it, we can attest to the superior entertainment experience delivered by the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s shorter and wider form factor. 4:3 is slightly taller and squarer than 1.43:1, but given that most video content is presented in 16:9, the video-watching experience is likely to be similar across both devices.

Incidentally, despite being rumored to have similar-looking rounded corners to the Xiaomi 18 Fold, the iPhone Ultra is tipped to match the Z Fold 8’s 4:3 unfolded aspect ratio. We’re expecting Apple’s device to have a cover display of between 5.3 and 5.49 inches, and a foldable display of between 7.7 and 7.8 inches.

It’s also, however, rumored to be slightly shorter and wider than the Z Fold 8. This may again make it look closer in appearance to the Xiaomi 18 Fold, even if its screens are most closely aligned to the Galaxy's.

Other features of Xiaomi’s latest foldable include a pill-shaped camera bar with three Leica-optimized cameras: a 200MP main, a 50MP ultra-wide, and a 50MP telephoto with 3.5x optical zoom.

This could be where the Xiaomi 18 Fold pulls ahead of the competition — the Z Fold 8 doesn’t have a telephoto camera, and the iPhone Ultra is likewise rumored to launch with just two cameras (a wide and an ultra-wide).

Under the hood, the Xiaomi 18 Fold is powered by Xiaomi’s in-house Xring O3 chip, a 6,000mAh battery, and up to 16GB of RAM. These are strong internal specs. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to put them to the test unless you live in China; the Xiaomi 18 Fold is only launching in Xiaomi’s home market for a starting price of ¥10,999.

That figure would make the phone around $1,650 / £1,220 / AU$2,275 overseas, which, before import tariffs and local taxes, isn’t far off the $1,899 / £1,699 / AU$2,699 starting price of the Galaxy Z Fold 8. Might the iPhone Ultra cost a similar sum? We’ll find out tomorrow (September 9), when Apple’s ‘Surprise and Shine’ event gets underway.

The Wolf Among Us 2 has been in development hell for years, to say the least, since its 2017 announcement. After a studio closure, a sudden revival, engine changes, and further creative conflicts between Telltale Games (its main developer) and co-developer AdHoc Studio, the long-awaited sequel is finally arriving in 2027.

I had a chance to see what Telltale Games has been cooking behind closed doors, with a short preview of The Wolf Among Us 2 at Gamescom 2026, and I walked away intrigued and hyped for its launch. The Bigby fans loved in the first entry is back, and just as entertaining as ever.

This sequel takes place six months after the events of the first game; we follow Bigby Wolf, who has been temporarily removed from his duties as Fabletown's sheriff. Bigby's job is to uncover a mysterious string of murders happening, working behind the curtain to save a city "consumed by corruption, vengeance, and fear".

Right off the bat, I noticed Telltale Games leading The Wolf Among Us 2 in a different direction in terms of gameplay. Instead of the fixed camera angles present in the first game, and frankly, most of Telltale Games' entries (notably The Walking Dead), players will now be able to control Bigby in a third-person over-the-shoulder camera perspective.

The dialogue between characters is still as strong as ever, and decisions within those sequences matter in both shaping the story and the relationships Bigby has with others. In classic Telltale fashion, one sequence left me with a choice to lie to a new character, Faye, who Bigby meets early on, about whether the ongoing case involved magic or not, as she suspects a Fable (characters that include Snow White, Bigby Wolf, Mr Toad, etc.) is the murder suspect.

I quickly learned that your choice may come back to bite you or aid you later on, via the 'X will remember that' notification — but sometimes, silence is the best answer.

Sitting down with The Wolf Among Us 2's design director, Jessica Hara Campbell, and principal scene coordinator, Leslie Harwood, I raved about the camera perspective change, as it offers a more immersive experience than I've ever seen in any Telltale entry before — and it very much reminded me of Capcom's switch to third-person action in its Resident Evil series, via Resident Evil 4.

Unsurprisingly, both Campbell and Harwood highlighted that the switch was made to push "further immersion", as players control Bigby going on a long run of investigations. It's possibly the best choice the team has made with the sequel, and perhaps a camera switch all future Telltale and other episodic narrative-driven games should make.

It's also worth noting that The Wolf Among Us 2 features a new dynamic style of examining areas or objects during investigations. Players are no longer expected to examine every single item or area, nor will there be constant hints during puzzles if players don't want them.

If the player is already a step ahead in an investigation, you won't be pulled back to step one, as the game is designed to respect players' detective work, as Campbell stressed.

While The Wolf Among Us 2 has some new design choices, Campbell emphasized that Telltale has its eye on maintaining what fans know and love about the series.

"What we are looking at in a lot of our gameplay systems is keeping the core of what was built," Campbell says. "For our fan base, there's a very specific feeling of nostalgia, but the core of that is the noir detective piece that we don't want to reinvent the wheel on.

"It's about making sure the game still feels like Wolf [first entry], and with returning players, they feel like they're kind of coming along."

The Wolf Among Us 2 is expected to launch in 2027, but there is currently no specific timeline for which quarter it'll arrive in. My only hope is that the launch is successful without any further delays, as I'm quite excited to see what the team at Telltale has been working hard to deliver.

Whenever a new AI model is released in a cut-down form because it is too powerful, or one transgresses its sandbox and performs an unexpected cyber hack on a company’s website, we tend to see jokes made about Skynet or HAL 9000 becoming a reality.

But science fiction didn’t just predict our current relationship with AI, it influenced it. Our fascination with artificial life began long before computers — or even electricity — existed. Ancient Greek stories featured mechanical servants created by the god Hephaestus, while Jewish folklore gave us the Golem, an artificial being brought to life to carry out its creator’s commands.

In their new book, Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence, authors Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero trace humanity’s dreams and fears about machines that can think, through mythology, literature, movies and television.

Their argument is that these stories haven’t simply anticipated AI; they have shaped how we talk about it, what we expect from it and, in some cases, the technology people have gone on to build.

I spoke to Bradley and Vero about why humanity keeps creating machines in its own image, whether science fiction has influenced today’s AI developers, and why our response to artificial intelligence still swings between two extremes: “If we don't like it, we’ll kill it. If we love it, we’ll marry it.”

The ancient beginnings of AI

TechRadar: Talk me through the title - why is it called Myth-Made Machines?

Dave Bradley: The core argument of the book is that humans have always been fascinated by the idea of creating thinking machines and artificial life. When ChatGPT formally launched in 2022, one of the first jokes I saw on social media was about Skynet coming online. It struck us that the whole way we understand and talk about this new technology is shaped by stories we’ve been telling ourselves for years. Kelly has a deep knowledge and love of Greek and Roman myth, as well as stories such as Frankenstein, while I’m a huge science fiction nerd (and occasional medievalist). Through our conversations, we realised that our cultural idea of “AI” is much older than modern computers.

Kelly Vero: Myth-Made Machines is the essence of where every element of AI or robo-futurism comes from: Myth. With myth, we, as humans, have to navigate the real and the prescient from the propaganda and the fanciful.

TR: When did artificial intelligence first enter our human stories?

KV: When we started researching the book, it was Greek myths that we started with. We found our own Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei hiding in plain sight.

DB: The idea is incredibly ancient. In Greek myth, Hephaestus creates golden workers to help him in his workshop. Jewish legend brings us the Golem. The idea that one might build autonomous servants out of inanimate material is thousands of years old.

For something closer to what we would recognize as a computer, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels gives us a wonderful early example in the 18th century. The Engine of Lagado randomly rearranges words in the hope of generating useful knowledge. Read today, it looks uncannily like a satirical ancestor of generative AI.

The term ‘artificial intelligence’ in the modern sense of machine learning and reasoning was coined in the 1950s by computer scientist John McCarthy — and that’s when it starts creeping into TV and film too. There are some great early Twilight Zone and Star Trek episodes about the possibilities and perils of machines in our homes and workplaces.

TR: Which are your personal favorite sci-fi AIs/robots, or movies and TV shows that involve AI?

KV: I’m a Lawnmower Man aficionado, but having worked on the actual Transformers franchise, I’m also a Decepticon through and through.

DB: I’m a huge sci-fi geek, and to this day I maintain that R2-D2 is the most important character in Star Wars. He has a mission, gets on with it, saves everybody repeatedly and barely receives any credit.

But I also nerd out over Marvin in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Cylons in both versions of Battlestar Galactica, and, of course, Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, who I’d argue is the character on the real hero’s journey in that series.

Side note: HAL 9000 slightly infuriates me, mainly because people have been quoting “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” at me personally for decades.

TR: Do you think our myths about conscious machines have influenced the real development of AI?

KV: Absolutely! Human life is all about dreaming up concepts to adore or fear; it’s how we roll.

DB: Today’s engineers and entrepreneurs grew up on Star Wars, Star Trek, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson, and there’s good evidence that science fiction influences the people who go on to build the future. One 2022 study found that 93 per cent of UK astronomers enjoyed science fiction, for instance, and 69 per cent said it had influenced their career decisions.

Sometimes the connection is very direct. Pete Bonasso at TRACLabs has credited HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey as an inspiration for his work on NASA space AI systems. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were invented for fiction, but they’ve become a reference point for real-world thinking about AI safety. Google DeepMind’s 2024 ‘Robot Constitution’, for example, sets out safety rules for machines in a way that is very much in that tradition.

TR: What do you think of the current crop of AI models?

DB: I follow this area as closely as I can, although you have to bear in mind that it changes almost daily. We’ve just seen another generation of frontier models arrive. It moves fast, which is fascinating for tech writers, although it also explains why we wrote a book largely about things that happened hundreds of years ago rather than trying to capture the state of AI in 2026!

When it comes to video games — still my day-to-day working life — I believe it’s going to be important to work out what new experiences AI can bring to the table, not just how quickly they can automate existing processes.

KV: They’re facsimiles of every book, TV series, movie or game we’ve ever imbibed. They’re not as clever as we are and they never will be.

TR: Do you think of AI as a threat to humanity, or as an opportunity?

KV: A super opportunity to ride alongside a civilization’s worth of knowledge? It’s almost too good to be true. If you think about it, until AI came along, humans held a monopoly on intelligence. We kind of only knew what we could discover or search for as humans (history is always written by the victor). Today, we can effectively outsource our thirst for knowledge to something else and tell it how we should understand the results; for the most part, we get balance: the rest is sponsored content!

DB: It feels glib simply to say ‘both’, although I’m tempted. Personally, I’m an optimist by nature, and I like to believe the general direction of travel is towards progress, growth and better lives. That doesn’t mean everybody prospers equally, or that there aren’t important battles over jobs, ownership, ethics and power along the way. William Gibson famously said that the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. I think that’s a useful way to think about AI too. The interesting question isn’t simply whether the technology is good or bad, but who prospers from it, who controls it, and how widely any benefits (and risks) are shared.

TR: Do you think we’ll ever reach man-made super intelligence, and if we do what happens then?

KV: We have man-made everything else, don’t we? Why should this be different? For me, the detail lies in sentience. We already have man-made superintelligence, but we don’t have fully operational sentience yet. When something can blink its eye without thinking as quickly as humans can, well, let’s talk again.

DB: I don’t think it’s going to emerge simply by scaling today’s transformer models, regardless of some of the more excitable predictions around them. However clever and interesting LLMs are, these are fundamentally probabilistic systems that generate text, images and other media. That doesn’t make them conscious.

An omnipotent silicon supervillain, like Skynet, makes for good screen drama — but if we do eventually create genuine superintelligence by some route, I’d actually hope that a networked brain with access to vast amounts of information, capable of seeing problems from many different perspectives, would naturally tend towards connection and assistance rather than destruction. But I’m not naïve about it. Systems also magnify our biases, flaws and prejudices. That’s why alignment matters.

TR: What have you learned about humanity's approach to AI from writing this book?

KV: That we’re the only stakeholders. We’re the arbiters of our own creation(s); if we don't like it, we’ll kill it. If we love it, we’ll marry it. AI is all of us, and my main worry is that only 6% of the world’s population currently decides on how the other 94% will live, work and adapt to an AI future. However, if the past is to be believed, we’re probably going to be ok. (Famous last words, I know!)

DB: Technology and automation are things humans do. What became very apparent is that humans repeatedly try to create things in their own image, while simultaneously struggling with the implications of that. We worry about job losses, replacement and loss of identity. We’re fascinated by creating something powerful, then immediately frightened that it might overthrow us. But the fear of the servant who will turn on us, or the untrustworthy ally who might sneakily replace us, is not limited to machines, right? We might project those stories onto computers in our books and films, but the subtext is often about human paranoia around class, politics, war…

More specifically, there’s a recurring oscillation between loving and fearing our own technology. In the 1970s, amid Cold War paranoia, computers were frequently instruments of doom: Colossus, Cylons, HAL 9000, even V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In the 1980s, as PCs and games consoles became familiar household playthings, popular culture increasingly gave us machines as loyal companions: KITT, Metal Mickey, Twiki, Nono and Data. Then the pendulum swings back: by the late 1980s and 1990s, we get The Terminator and The Matrix. You can trace those alternating waves of optimism and anxiety all the way back through the Industrial Revolution. The technology changes, but our emotional responses to it are remarkably consistent.

Author bios and book details

Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence

co-written by Dave Bradley and Kelly Vero

Published by Bloomsbury on 3rd September 2026

Available as ebook or hardcover

The first Wi-Fi 8 routers were launched by TP-Link at IFA 2026 last week with the devices set to hit the shelves later this year. So, when that happens, is it a good idea to immediately jump on board with this new more performant wireless standard?

Not exactly. There's a bit to unpack here about exactly how Wi-Fi 8 improves on Wi-Fi 7 — it's not any faster in terms of raw performance, in case you weren't aware — as well as when routers and devices that support the new standard will arrive.

All of this will factor in to the decision you'll make about when to upgrade to Wi-Fi 8 in your home. In this article, we'll look at what Wi-Fi 8 offers over and above Wi-Fi 7, and then examine considerations around the upgrade timeline, and when you might want to make a move to benefit from cutting-edge Wi-Fi.

How is Wi-Fi 8 better than Wi-Fi 7?

Wi-Fi 8 doesn't move the needle in terms of raw speed over Wi-Fi 7 — the latter is already beefy in that respect anyway — and instead aims to boost overall wireless performance in different ways.

Wi-Fi 8 seeks to improve the overall stability and reliability of the wireless connection, so you get a smoother and faster experience when you're further away from the router — and it's particularly focused on helping boost speeds at the very edge of the network's signal.

Another key point with Wi-Fi 8 is that it's built to cope with more devices and keep speeds up, as well as dealing with interference better. So, in signal-dense environments, where there are lots of devices competing for bandwidth, all this traffic will be better directed and managed to ensure better performance.

That'll obviously help with larger households where everyone has multiple devices, but it's going to be particularly important for places like apartments or office buildings where there can be a lot of competition from multiple routers and a whole host of devices all packed into a relatively small area.

TP-Link — which unveiled both a traditional Wi-Fi 8 router, the Archer 8 Ultra, and a mesh Wi-Fi system, the Deco 8 Ultra, at IFA 2026 — revealed some clever tricks for these cutting-edge pieces of hardware. They use Dynamic Sub-band Operation (DSO) and Non-Primary Channel Access (NPCA) tech to portion out only the bandwidth any given device needs — so tiny smart home devices, for example, only get the small chunk that they require, leaving more bandwidth to be usable for other hardware. In short, the traffic from all devices is managed in a much smarter manner, and situations where performance gets congested with Wi-Fi 7 are avoided with Wi-Fi 8.

The end result is a considerable leap in performance of wireless devices, even though the core speed and throughput spec of Wi-Fi 8 remains the same as its predecessor. This is particularly evident in environments with lots of competing devices, or when you're at the outer limits of the wireless signal.

When will Wi-Fi 8 routers go on sale — and should I buy one straight away?

As mentioned, TP-Link's initial models are on sale later in 2026, and pre-orders will go live in some regions from the start of October. Asus Wi-Fi 8 routers are also expected to arrive later this year.

In theory, then, you could grab yourself a Wi-Fi 8 router in a couple of months and be up-and-running with the latest wireless standard — but should you?

Here's the thing about being an early adopter of a new Wi-Fi standard: you must remember that when the first routers come out, they're based on a draft version, not the finalized wireless standard. In other words, it's still very early days for Wi-Fi 8 (although when it is finalized, likely in mid-2027, existing routers will be updated appropriately, of course).

So, while you can have a Wi-Fi 8 router later this year, you won't be able to buy any devices which are compatible with the standard. Naturally, both the client device and the router must support the new standard to benefit from its features, and smartphones and laptops that are Wi-Fi 8 capable aren't arriving until next year.

And even then, they will only be available in small numbers, and these will be premium cutting-edge (expensive) devices, as you might expect.

Is it pointless to buy a Wi-Fi 8 router when they first come out?

While you won't get the immediate full benefit of Wi-Fi 8 until you have the supporting devices to go with the router, it's not completely pointless to be an early adopter of something like the TP-Link Archer 8 Ultra. It's backwards compatible with all devices supporting earlier Wi-Fi standards, of course, and that hardware will still get the benefit of some of the Archer's traffic management tricks.

That said, until Wi-Fi 8 laptops, tablets and phones arrive in greater numbers, you're not realistically going to get much mileage out of your shiny new Wi-Fi 8 router. You will, of course, be future-proofed and ready for next year's devices, but the problem is that buying a Wi-Fi 8 router at launch means you'll pay a premium and a high price for the privilege.

This cutting-edge hardware is always expensive when it first comes onto the scene, so on balance, it's much better to wait until the market fills out, and more Wi-Fi 8 hardware — routers and consumer devices — is available, before you pull the trigger on a purchase. Your wallet will be happier if you're patient.

Rest assured, though, that the future of wireless is almost here, and Wi-Fi 8 promises to make a big difference when it fully kicks in.

I want to talk about Magnus Carlsen. That’s right, the chess genius who even laypeople like me know about because of how good he is. He’s leagues beyond anyone else. You would’ve thought the room for improvement in today’s world would be marginal given the game is over 500 years old, but no: somehow, someone in our lifetime is a streak ahead of any past or current human being.

The thing is, though, he’s not the best chess player. Not even close. That honor goes to Stockfish, the chess computer that’s many, many times better. To put it into perspective, Carlsen’s peak ELO rating — the preeminent ranking system for chess players — is 2,882. Stockfish is estimated to be somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000.

Now, there is a championship exclusively for chess computers, but human players are still the main draw, despite their relative inferiority. Is this because we inherently want to see human endeavors and activities rather than anything involving a computer mind?

All this brings me to the recent comments made by Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer at Saber Interactive. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, he remained steadfastly bullish about generative AI, a surprising move given the recent controversy stoked by Saber’s CEO Matthew Karch for saying he’d have been happy to replace Stella Sacco, one of the writers on its upcoming title Rideshare "Stimulator", with AI.

Most companies would beat a hasty retreat and enter damage control mode, but not Saber, it seems — Willits claimed that “someone will make something that will change people's minds” about the tech, something like the “Half-Life 2 of AI”.

"Half-Life 2 of AI"

Willits admits that his is a “silly example”, but his point remains that sooner or later, a game made entirely or in large part by AI will be too good for players to pass up, converting the naysayers in the process. But I’m not sure I share his optimism.

In a short time, AI has already irked gamers to no end. Putting AI slop aside, think of all the high-flying titles it’s negatively impacted: the generated assets in Crimson Desert, DLSS 5’s unsolicited makeover of Resident Evil: Requiem’s Grace Ashcroft, and the gen-AI disclosure of the upcoming Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis (not to mention the uncomfortable moment a vigilant PR interrupted a Game Informer interview with the game’s Experience Director when he was asked about using such tools).

It's true that as gamers, we’ve had to contend with a lot of unsavory elements in the industry that leave a bad taste in the mouth. From the mass layoffs and treatment of developers to the wider threat it poses to the climate, with discarded components contributing to e-waste and the vast amounts of resources required to produce and power systems and servers.

But AI seems to exacerbate these issues, sending them into overdrive. It has the potential to make even more developers redundant, and the amount of energy required to run such models is scarcely believable, far beyond any consumption hitherto seen in the computing world.

Perhaps this is why AI is touching a nerve with not just gamers, but the general population, and why many are reluctant to play games where it’s been involved?

Putting these concerns aside, though, could AI actually make games as good as Half-Life 2 in the future? In theory, I can see the potential for AI to speed up development, but for now, it seems best at making mistakes and creating soulless art and assets. There’s evidence to suggest that it’s actually slowing down developers, in other industries at least.

Maybe it will get to the point where these issues will be ironed out, and it’ll create astonishingly original and mechanically flawless titles. Heck, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassibis thinks we’re already in the “foothills of the singularity”, let alone the tech being used to create something as trivial as a decent videogame. In fact, it would be interesting to see Hassibis program a tool for the purpose, given his former life as a dev at Bullfrog and Lionhead.

But let’s imagine it could one day make a bona fide ten-out-of-ten — what would the cost be to devs and the environment? And would we as gamers actually be content to play such a title, or do we inherently want to experience exclusively human endeavors, like watching two people on either side of a chessboard?

I recently polled our readers about their biggest concerns in the games industry. Among the options was the use of gen-AI in game development, but it didn’t rank highly.

It was a long way below the death of physical media — understandable, given the recent news of Sony’s decision to scrap discs, but still a surprise to me. It was also less concerning than the RAM crisis, but more so than layoffs and studio closures.

So here’s another one for you. What do you think about a ‘Half-Life 2 of AI’? Would you play such a game, or steer clear? Or is such a thing a mere pipe dream of Corpos at the big studios? If you want to elaborate on your answers, feel free to comment below, too.

Can AI-driven NAS tech be sentimental? UGreen CEO Samuel Zhang seems to think so.

Launching the company’s new smart-home technology suite, he started by recounting a personal story. It was a hot summer’s day, and his family gathered in the backyard for a barbecue. They cooked together, chatted, played, and just had a genuinely fantastic time. But weeks later, when Zhang went to check his photo gallery and relive that cherished day, he was left feeling disappointed. The family hadn't taken any photos.

This, he said, got him thinking about home cameras — devices that are typically used for security. But, Zhang said, “it [a home camera] should see more than just danger — it should also be able to witness the joys of everyday family life”. And this, he said, was one of the key points of inspiration for UGreen’s new suite of local smart-home AI technology.

I got the chance to hear about, and see, UGreen’s home hubs, cameras, digital photo frames and more at IFA 2026 in Berlin. Here’s what I learned — and how the technology could transform the smart home.

Keeping it local

At the heart of UGreen’s smart-home suite is the new HomeAgent. This is an ‘agentic AI local hub' that brings local storage, computing, and control all together in a single device. Through this hub, users can connect up a range of UGreen AIoT devices, such as cameras, smart speakers, and digital photo frames, plus some select third-party products.

A crucial part of the HomeAgent’s appeal is its reliance on local storage and computing. This means that any data that runs through your hub — be that photos, videos, voice inputs, or other files — is processed locally, rather than through a corporate cloud server.

At a time when trust in large corporations is strikingly low, and major data breaches seem all too common, this could be a massive selling point for security-savvy customers. Keeping data local also removes the need for costly Cloud subscriptions, making the initial investment feel that bit more worthwhile.

There are three HomeAgent models scheduled for release. The first is the UGreen HomeAgent HA100, which is the most basic option. It provides all of the core functions you’d need from the hub, but offers slightly less processing power, memory, and storage, among other things, than its siblings. The HA100 Pro is the step-up model, which offers heightened performance, with 205 TOPS (as opposed to the standard HA100’s 26 TOPS), a 10GbE LAN port (compared to the HA100’s 2.5GbE), and a more advanced CPU.

The final boss, if you will, of the HomeAgent trio is the MA100. This is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Thor T5000, and offers far superior AI performance to the other two models, and considerably more memory and storage.

However, this is certainly reflected in the price, with the MA100 commanding a list price of $19,999, compared to the HA100 Pro, which costs $5,999 and the HA100 at $1,799. Early bird offers are available, which make the HomeAgents about half-price across the board. Shipping is set to commence in early 2027.

AIoT in action

So what does UGreen’s smart home AIoT tech look like in person? Well, pretty impressive.

I was able to check out a demo, and take a closer look at all of the HomeAgent products, and other devices you can connect up to it. UGreen had a HomeAgent connected to a smart speaker, and a camera, among other things.

I tried walking towards a door, and a UGreen smart security camera started blaring after I walked past a certain point, telling me that I was on private property. This data is processed locally through the HomeAgent, so if you ask your connected smart speaker about any unusual activity, it can tell you if anyone approached your door, whether that was a delivery worker, or something more nefarious.

The smart speaker UGreen showed off has a new AI assistant, named Uliya. You can use the smart speaker to do just about anything around your home. You can ask Uliya to remind you of where you were at a specific time, to close the curtains, to play music, or even to identify the location of your pet and cast a live video feed. The functionality you get will vary depending on how invested you are in UGreen’s AIoT ecosystem, but the capabilities are pretty broad.

You can also ask Uliya to give you a summary of captured events throughout the day, display memories on a UGreen smart photo frame in real time, or to show you highlights from a special day — circling back to Zhang’s desire to revive memories that had been lost in time. One function I really liked was the ability to create an Away mode, so that when you step out of the house, lights will turn off, curtains will close, and a robovac will get to work.

UGreen’s new HomeAgents appear to be incredibly capable, feature-rich, and innovative products, and their local handling of data could be game changing for some households. At the product launch, Zhang said “In the future, we hope every family can have a HomeAgent”; and it'll be interesting to see how families adopt such tech moving forward.

The first episode of The Real Housewives of London season 2 is now streaming exclusively on Hayu — and as one of the lucky few who got to watch the premiere with the Housewives themselves, I can confirm that it's an absolute riot.

It goes without saying that arguments and ever-changing alliances are part and parcel of the format, but fans are likely to be incredibly surprised with just who is chummy with who when season 2 picks up.

Amanda Caroline Cronin and Juliet Angus' infamous "back to Paddington" feud has held strong, but #Lipgate, a clash stemming from Panthea Parker getting lip treatments done at Amanda's clinic and being unhappy with the result, seems to have been smoothed over.

Nobody is more shocked at the seemingly stable Amanda-Panthea friendship than Parker herself, who initially teased that fans would be shocked at just how much friendships have changed between seasons on the Hayu Presents... podcast.

After speaking to her and fellow Housewife Karen Loderick-Peace, I'm surprised they've kept up with who is and isn't getting on.

'You have to take us for who we are here and not listen to gossip'

"Very," Parker responds when I ask her if she's as surprised by what happens in season 2 as fans are set to be. "Especially between me and Amanda. We left the season and I thought I really got to know her, and when at the reunion, she had said, 'You have to take us for who we are here, and not listen to gossip, but not listen to everything that you've heard,' we then really built on that friendship. I think me and her got very close throughout when we weren't filming.

"Coming back, I was a bit shocked at that. Now... I'm just in a place where I think, 'Well, actually, everything everybody said was true, and why should you take people as they are?' If you go to get a plumber, or a good school, you would go and fine one with good recommendations."

"Sadly, that's not how it works in a friendship group," Loderick-Peace adds.

From episode 1, you might think this remark is a little strange. In the season 2 premiere, we see Panthea and Amanda as thick as thieves, even going so far as to go out to lunch with fellow Housewife Nessie Welschinger without so much as a harsh word shared between them. Jokes and non-alcoholic cocktails are flowing, and the vibes are good.

But while we haven't seen the real of RHOL season 2 yet, the trailer alone tells us that the tide is going to turn once again. In my favorite clip of the reality TV series that's been released yet, we see Amanda and Panthea having lunch in a rooftop restaurant, with Panthea saying, "You have Ryanair customer service, and I'm used to flying first class."

When other diners look over to where the pair are loudly arguing, Panthea apologises before adding, "The lady is a tramp." Oof.

What got us to this point is something that I do not know, but if Real Housewives is anything to go by, the catalyst could literally have been anything. Strap in for a turbulent time, is my advice.

It's been a busy week for the team at Philips Hue. At its annual showcase event in Berlin, the company unveiled not just a new series of smart lights (including some particularly stylish additions to its Liane series), but also a whole new approach to AI, which it's using to take the complexity out of creating bespoke automated lighting setups specifically for your home. No more tinkering with toggles and timers — just tell the app what you want your lights to do and when, and the software will handle the rest.

This isn't Philips Hue's first foray into AI. In 2025, the brand introduced an AI assistant that allowed users to describe a lighting scene and would then either find a match in the library of presets or create a new scene from scratch if nothing suitable existed.

Earlier this year, it also launched SpatialAware for the Philips Hue Bridge Pro, which applies lighting scenes differently depending on the position of smart bulbs, light strips, and lamps in a room, with AI trained using expertise from professional lighting designers.

After this week's showcase, I spoke to Marco Merolla, Executive Vice President and Business Leader of Consumer Connected Lighting at Philips Hue's parent brand Signify, to find out his thoughts on the future of smart lighting and AI. I started by asking him about SpatialAware, and whether users had welcomed the new feature in their homes.

"It’s something that brings smart lighting to the next level, but also intuitiveness in getting to the result that you want as a user — to the desired ambience," Merolla said. "The reception of the base was very good in terms of adoption. This is an exclusive currently with the Bridge Pro, but the reception of the Bridge Pro was extremely good in terms of adoption, and that’s not surprising, because, as we said, ambience creation is key in smart lighting."

SpatialAware has been a success, but Merolla says the brand has now turned its focus to the custom AI automations demonstrated in Berlin.

"Really, in our perspective, [that is] the next step, because there is a lot that you could do, or may do today that is a bit limited by the system itself," he said. "By analyzing and assessing the user behavior and the consumer behavior, we create a lot of different layers with which they can create behaviors and automation."

That analysis doesn't mean monitoring the behavior of individual users, or automatically creating anything for you based on that behavior. Instead, Signify uses anonymised, aggregated usage insights and broader consumer research to understand patterns and usage, which help inform the behaviors and automation built into the system.

"Clearly there is a limit right now, but with the power of large language models, that is not there anymore, so we can give them the chance and [get them] into concepts that were completely unprecedented before — and that’s part of the things that we launched yesterday," said Merolla. "We’re super excited because the consumer experience will change dramatically in the way you can enjoy the system and create beautiful things."

Not AI for the sake of it

The Philips Hue showcase was packed with news and launches, so I asked Merolla which ones he was most excited about.

"I was super excited by three of them," he said. "Custom AI behavior is a great step because it’s not AI for the sake of it — it’s really AI at the service of the consumer experience. Not in the sense of wanting to enter into people’s lives or be intrusive, but in the sense of giving them a chance to unlock possibilities in a very intuitive way. Custom AI from this perspective is an amazing, lovely direction.

"The second key one that’s quite close to my heart is the entertainment area," he said. "You know that over the years we have worked a lot on making the lighting experience better and better, stronger and stronger. Here, the effort we made was really to make it more accessible."

Merolla explained that accessibility isn't just about price, although that is something Philips Hue has addressed with the Sync Box 4K — a more affordable alternative to the Philips Hue Play Sync Box 8K that launched in September 2024. Accessibility, he said, is also about compatibility, which is why Philips Hue has launched Screen Sync — an alternative to the Sync Box that uses a camera rather than HDMI input, so you can synchronize your Hue lights with your TV screen regardless of the source.

"In the area of accessibility, there is also the Bridgeless idea," he added, referring to the ability to use the Sync Box 8K, 4K and Screen Sync without buying an additional Philips Hue Bridge Zigbee hub. "You can have just one strip light in a Bridgeless configuration. And this is again because we believe that everyone should watch TV or watch video with at least one light connected to amplify the experience, and we don’t want to limit the user who, in that specific moment, only wants that kind of benefit [without] having to necessarily join the full ecosystem."

The final items on Merolla's list of exciting launches are the new Liane 360-degree rope and Signe pole lights.

"These are beautiful design objects — really beautiful design objects," he said. "We did not invent the archetype in the design world — that archetype is something that already exists, but of course we can create the mix between a beautiful design object and an amazing light structure. These two things very often don’t go together. Sometimes products that have a super cool design light effect, like gradient scenes and so on, are not necessarily associated with the most beautiful design from an object perspective.

"And as a direction for the brand in the future, I firmly believe that we need to put this world together — that the design of the external object and the light effect, the things that you can do with that, really need to merge. And I think Liane and the new Signe product are a strong step in this direction."

It will definitely be interesting to see how those two aspects join together in the future, and whether AI functionality begins to affect the design of Philips Hue lights, now that LLMs can remove the barrier to complex automations. I'm definitely looking forward to next year's showcase.

We saw a lot of incredible technology at IFA Berlin 2026, be that cutting-edge headphones, futuristic robot vacuums, or game-changing AIoT systems. But one area that arguably went under the radar, but impressed me an lot, was new charging technology.

I saw some incredible gadgets that could change the way that I, and many of you, juice up our phones, tablets, and laptops, so I thought I’d round up some of the most amazing technology I saw at IFA this year.

I’ll run through three of my favorite innovations (alongside a bonus entry), and reveal my favorite chargers, why they impressed me, and all the details you need to know about them. Here's some of the most exciting charging tech coming down the (power) line…

1. UGreen’s liquid cooling wireless chargers

It only seems right to kick things off with the most exciting new products of them all: UGreen’s new liquid cooling wireless chargers.

UGreen’s MagFlow lineup — which consists of a magnetic power bank, 3-in-1 wireless charging stand, and a 2-in-1 foldable model — could be a genuine game changer. Why? Well the a key issue for high-speed wireless chargers is heat, and I’ve seen it myself when testing. You can be juicing up your phone at great pace, but past a certain point, the build-up of heat can trigger throttling, which slows speeds in the interest of safety.

But UGreen’s new model combat this with active cooling, as well as passive heat-dissipation and “intelligent temperature regulation,” enabling improved performance.

I had the chance to see all of the new Qi2 25W chargers, but my favorite was the MagFlow Pro Magnetic Power Bank, which UGreen claims is the first power bank to include micro-pump liquid cooling. It has a transparent window, enabling you to view coolant circulation in real time, and according to UGreen, its peak temperature during testing was 18F / 10C lower than the 118F / 48C “industry reference”.

2. Belkin’s slim semi-solid-state power banks

Another titan of the charging world, Belkin, had a few new drops to show me too. And the most interesting were its new semi-solid-state power banks, which impressed me for two key reasons.

The first, and perhaps most obvious, is the fact that they make use of semi-solid-state batteries rather than the more typical lithium-ion alternative. Semi-solid-state batteries are denser than lithium-ion ones, enabling them to offer higher maximum capacity in an even slimmer form, and they also degrade at a slower rate.

The other thing that impressed me was the build quality of the two power banks. They both look and feel excellent, with a sleek Black or Sand finish available, and their phenomenally slim construction makes them highly practical for using your phone while charging.

There are two models available: the Belkin UltraCharge Pro Slim Magnetic Power Bank, a 15W wireless power bank with a 5,000mAh capacity that’s just 8.8mm thick (which is about the same length and width as a standard credit card); and the Belkin 10,000mAh UltraCharge Pro, which offers a 60W maximum power output, dual USB-C ports for juicing up multiple devices at once, and a display for viewing charging and temperature information.

3. ESR’s dual-retractable cable chargers

I personally use a bunch of chargers with retractable cables — the convenience is unmatched. And so, ESR has a new set of products that truly calls to me in its Xtend chargers.

The 100W version of the Xtend wall charger comes with not one, but two built-in cables which can fully retract. This means it's incredibly easy to charge two devices at once, be that a phone and a laptop, or a tablet and some wireless headphones. The built-in cables are also able to extend up to 95cm (3.1ft), which is considerably further than some models I’ve tested.

A second model, the ESR Xtend 45W has just one built-in cable, but it’s more compact, and has an additional USB-C outlet if you want to charge two devices simultaneously.

Bonus: UGreen’s cat chargers

Okay, these might not be the most advanced chargers I saw at IFA, but UGreen’s new cat chargers really caught my eye.

They look a bit like cats wearing a hoodie, and even come with detachable feet if you want to avoid damaging the charger when it's in a bag, or scraping yourself when carrying it in a pocket. They have a pleasant rubbery feel, a compact build, and offer charging speeds up to 45W from their USB-C port. A purr-fect option for feline fans.

Generally, the launch of a new iPhone means a drop in price for the old one, but this isn’t a typical year for iPhones — not only is Apple expected to finally launch its long-rumored foldable phone, but thanks to out-of-control memory prices, it’s costing more for companies to build handsets.

On top of that, we’re actually not expecting to see a base iPhone 18 model this year, with that device reportedly landing in March or April instead. So at Apple’s September 9 launch you might only be able to choose from an iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, or iPhone 18 Ultra.

Typically, it’s only the standard model that gets a price drop — so when the iPhone 18 finally does launch (likely next year), the iPhone 17 may well drop in price. But I’d guess the launch of the Pro series this month probably won’t trigger a price drop, since the iPhone 17 will probably remain the latest standard model for a while longer.

In fact, the rising price of memory could mean Apple won’t drop the price of the iPhone 17 even when the iPhone 18 does finally launch. Instead, it might decide to sell the iPhone 18 at a new, higher price and keep the iPhone 17 at its current one.

But I doubt that. If the iPhone 18 doesn’t land until early 2027, then the iPhone 17 will be well over a year old by that point and definitely due a price drop — though, at that point, Apple might instead choose to discontinue it altogether, especially as the cheaper iPhone 18e might land then too.

Regardless, this could be a rare year where there are no price drops, as my prediction is that, as usual, Apple will discontinue the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max when the iPhone 18 Pro series lands, rather than dropping their prices.

As noted above, the iPhone 17 may get a price reduction when the iPhone 18 lands, but that feels up in the air at the moment, and probably won’t happen this year. If it does happen, Apple typically knocks $100 / £100/ AU$150 off the price, which would take the starting price of the iPhone 17 from $799 / £799 / AU$1,399 to $699 / £699 / AU$1,249. But I’d think you’ll be waiting until next year for that reduction, if it happens at all.

Limited options

So your options after the September 9 launch are likely to be either one of the new models at a (probably) higher price than existing iPhones, or an iPhone 17, iPhone 17e, or iPhone Air at their current prices.

It’s not impossible that Apple will drop some of these prices, or even keep the iPhone 17 Pro series around, but I doubt it.

If you’re desperate for a cheaper phone, though, you might not be totally out of luck, as while I’m not expecting Apple to drop any prices this year, third-party sellers might drop the prices of discontinued models to make way for the new ones.

So in other words, if Apple discontinues the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max — like it usually does when new Pro models land — the likes of Amazon and Best Buy might drop the sticker price on them until they sell out.

Pre-owned handsets are also likely to fall in price, so if you don’t mind buying a used phone, you may be able to find a real bargain.

As such, if you’re in the market for an iPhone upgrade but don’t want any of the upcoming models, I’d still recommend waiting until they’re announced before buying anything, even though there probably won’t be any official price drops this year. Just don’t wait too long after September 9 to buy, or stores might run out of new units.

Sound quality is important to me. Whether I'm listening to hi-res mixes on Tidal or making music of my own, I want to hear it in the absolute best detail I can. That's why, during Prime Day this July, I finally pulled the trigger and bought the Sennheiser HD 660S2. But since then, I've started to wonder whether getting a DAC is essential to unlocking the loftiest realms of sonic sophistication.

While the Sennheiser HD 660S2 aren't the most expensive headphones I've ever owned, I'd argue they are the most premium, sonically speaking. Compared to wireless headphones where a decent chunk of your spend is going on Bluetooth chipsets, ANC and fancy features, wired headphones such as the HD 660S2 are a pure audio play. Pretty much every cent you spend goes towards their engineering for sound quality.

As a result, it's not surprising that my initial response to these cans has been positive. They don't have the most strongly flavored sound profile — for example, there wasn't throbbing bass pounding my ear drums like Neil Peart trying to slaughter a fleet-footed fly crawling across his skins. But their frequency balance is as judicious as any of the best headphones, neglecting no part of the spectrum.

Another huge factor is their open-backed design. As they let in near enough every perceivable external sound, the idea of using them on the subway brings me out in a cold sweat — ain't nobody there to hear fellow passengers discuss nasty medical ailments in graphic detail before breakfast. But that same transparency gives them a seriously spacious sound that allows each element a decent amount of room to breathe, already making them a great upgrade over their closed-back cousins.

Perhaps the biggest win in their corner is the very fact that they're wired. As they don't have to contend with the limited bit- and sample rates of Bluetooth headphones, they're free from lossy compression (in themselves at least — they can't help your source material if it's not up to the job), meaning they can maintain the original source's resolution and detail. While that might matter less when you're using a flimsy $30 / £20 / AU$40 pair of cans, in more premium headphones, you can absolutely hear lossless formats the way they're meant to be heard.

This all comes with a pretty serious asterisk though. As alluded to above, unlike their wireless rivals, wired headphones aren't packing their own DAC, meaning those digital files you're listening to need to be converted to analog audio before passing along that wire. And while laptops — and the few phones that still have 3.5mm jacks — have their own built-in DACs, these usually lack the power to drive heavy duty cans like the HD 660S2.

Don't get me wrong: while I knew the Sennheisers wouldn't necessarily be giving me their A-game without a DAC, their sound has still been impressive, which is no mean feat. But it has started me wondering: what am I missing? Could one of the best DACs help me unlock the loftiest realms of audio quality?

I resolved to find out.

DAC-seat driver

Given iFi created many of our picks for our best DACs guide, it seemed a sensible place to start and I eventually settled on the iFi Zen DAC 3. Not only is this portable DAC capable of audio resolutions of up to 32-bit/768kHz, its 390mW amplifier should have plenty of power to drive the 300-ohm resistance of the Sennheiser HD 660S2.

Setting it up is simplicity itself. All I had to do was hook it up to my laptop with a USB-C cable, plug the HD 660S2's chonky 6.3mm jack in its front port and I was all set to start comparing the quality of some tunes.

Mid-range frequencies fared surprisingly well, even without a DAC. During Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes by Paul Simon, I felt like I was sat right at the heart of Ladysmith Black Mambazo's choir and there was some really tasty detail to the low toms in the percussion. Once I'd plugged in the iFi, there was some improvement, with a little more dynamism to those vocals and a bit more spaciousness in the mix, but the changes were very subtle.

Treble is a similar story. Before I plugged the DAC in, Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac sounded bright and crisp — the strumming of the guitars felt suitably tight and had a decent amount of bite, without feeling brittle. Hooking the the HD 660S up to the DAC didn't substantially transform the treble, but the iFi did allow for even more low-end heft to the track without overshadowing the pinpoint definition of those guitars. Honestly, this is probably the first time I've ever felt like this track actually sounded bassy.

In light of this, you won't be surprised to hear that low-end performance is where iFi's DAC made the biggest difference, making Otomo by Bonobo sound truly ridiculous. Even without the DAC, the HD 660S2 made the bass sound warm and punchy, without harming the clarity of the percussion or those tribal choral vocals. But when using Zen DAC 3, the impact bass during the drop was unreal — the sub bass is so strong it feels like it hits you right in the brain stem.

This increased low-end clarity and dynamism also helps when it comes to precision and separation too. Deprived of DAC, the HD 660S2 did an excellent job of rendering I Need the Night by London Grammar — those reverberant vocals sounded wonderfully detailed and gorgeously expressed, even when the beat kicked in. But with a DAC picking up the slack, the sustained guitars and bass were able to shine more without encroaching on the vocals, while the beat still felt suitably punchy.

So the iFi Zen DAC 3 definitely added some spit and polish to my tunes.

DAC to reality

Still, all of the improvements I've noted above feel incremental at best. Attempting to jack up my listening experience with a DAC resulted in what I'd class more as a 5% improvement, rather than the revolutionary experience I was expecting. So what gives?

Turns out, some sacred cows need to be put out to pasture. While there are plenty of people who will swear blind that you need a discrete DAC for a pair of high-impedance headphones like the HD 660S2 (which come with a rating of 300 ohms), that's not actually always true. Because, if you're lucky, you may find that your gear's built-in DAC is plenty powerful enough on its own.

I should have dug into the specs of my hardware a little more. Both the MacBook Air M5 I use at home and the MacBook Pro M4 I use at work have a pretty sophisticated DAC built-in — if you're driving some low-impedance wired earbuds, it'll deliver a far lower voltage but when you pop in a pair of audiophile-grade headphones like the Sennheiser HD 660S2, it'll deliver substantially more power. That's why these cans sounded so great out of the box to me.

While that's great news for me — and for anyone else who's happy to drop $1,299 / £1,299 / AU$2,099 on a MacBook just as an expensive network audio player — it's not that illuminating on whether your more humble devices will benefit from the help of an external device.

So I guess it's DAC to the drawing board.

To hell and DAC

Like all great technologists, I know every catastrophic failure is just a fantastic opportunity to pivot. So I redesigned my experiment on the fly. I grabbed one of our testing smartphones — the skilled yet affordable OnePlus Nord CE5 — plugged in a USB-C to 3.5mm adapter and jacked in the Sennheiser HD 660S2. And boy, was it a... whatever the opposite of a revelation is.

When drip-fed on the meager power a phone outputs, the HD 660S2 sound like a completely different pair of headphones. As you'd expect, their output is much quieter and mids lack impact. On Painted Wolf by O’Flynn, the Rhodes-style keyboard and strings sounded far more hollowed out than when listening with the DAC, which gave that fiddle part real body and texture.

Without the Zen DAC, the phone struggled to deliver much treble either. Thanks to its bright presentation, Crash into Me by Dave Matthews Band quickly shows up any glassiness or sibilance in a pair of headphones high-end, yet here it sounded rolled off and lacking in confidence. Conversely, once hooked up to iFi Zen DAC 3, the HD 660S2 made each of those densely layered guitar parts feel distinct and detailed — I could practically hear the vibration of the plectrum as it scrapes over the strings.

One area I'll give the Sennheisers their due though is when it comes to bass. Even without a lot of power behind them, the low end of Listen by Pola & Bryson and Goddard. still sounded pretty tasty — those snarling D&B bass warps still felt deep and beautifully detailed and there was a soupçon of sub beneath it all. The DAC still delivered here too though, swaddling you in lush pads, while that bassline genuinely sounds like you’re being hit full-force in the chest by a Funktion One rig.

It isn't just the frequency balance that felt off either: the lack of DAC limited the HD 660S2's to present its soundstage with quite as much dynamism or distinction. Playing Breathe This Air by Jon Hopkins with the Zen DAC 3 plugged in, I found the wonderful interplay of piano strikes across the stereo field to be genuinely breathtaking. Thanks to the Sennheisers' open-back design, they were still able to get a decent stereo spread without the iFi's help but the pinging of each element across the soundstage felt considerably less dynamic than before.

So a DAC absolutely makes a huge difference. If you're playing music off a cheaper or more portable device, any increased investment in higher-quality headphones may well be wiped out if you don't pair it with a discrete DAC. But don't assume you need one by default, as the days of all built-in DACs being dreadful are well behind us.

With all six episodes of the new series of The Grand Tour now on Prime Video, you've probably binged them as quickly as I did.

I was so pleasantly surprised by the natural chemistry between new presenters James Engelsman, Thomas Holland and Francis Bourgeois that now I want to see the trio do even more together.

Head to YouTube and you'll find some additional videos of the trio together, ranging from more Grand Tour-related content to separate clips posted on Engelsman and Holland's channel, Throttle House.

But what if that's not enough? What if — and I'm massively running before I can walk here — Amazon is so pleased with the trio that they want to commission a spinoff?

Clarkson's Farm is the blueprint that immediately springs to mind (for obvious Jeremy Clarkson-based reasons), but according to the team, their spinoff would have to look like something else entirely.

'Clarkson can't even do Clarkson's Farm'

"I don't know. I think Clarkson can't do Clarkson's Farm... that's what makes it so entertaining to watch," Engelsman jokes. "We would not be able to do the farm."

But that doesn't mean that they don't have ideas. In fact, leave it to TikTok star Bourgeois, who seems to be able to turn his hand to just about anything, to have a completely unexpected spinoff idea.

"I'd do the cafe at Queenstown Road Station. There's a business opportunity there," he explains. "The aperture where the tickets would be sold as you go into the station is still there. So I don't know why it isn't utilised to sell coffee through there too. Then there's a disused platform at Queenstown Road Station that could then be the outdoor coffee veranda with a view of the railway."

If you've ever wanted to meet Bourgeois and hoped he would be exactly like he seems online, hopefully this exchange confirms that as the truth. Stick this concept on BBC 2 or Channel 5, and I'd be lapping it up like there's no tomorrow.

"This is our retirement plan," Holland laughs. "Maybe it could be a joint venture. Don't tell her anymore about it... this is our new business."

In all seriousness, I think we'd be waiting for years if a trio spinoff were to be announced. Instead, let's hope that The Grand Tour will be renewed for more seasons... my fingers are crossed.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 shortlisted entries were announced last week, and one contender in particular caught the eye — a photo of a swift in flight as an aeroplane looms overhead, shot by 16-year-old photographer Jack Crockford, from the UK.

'Great shot!' chimed a few people in the 500 or so comments on TechRadar's Facebook post, which also received almost 25k reactions. The majority of the comments, however, focused on the camera gear element of the headline (not the photo itself or the age of the photographer), which pinpointed that the photo was captured with a 10-year-old Nikon DSLR.

In case you were wondering, the camera in question is the enthusiast-level Nikon D500 (APS-C), and Crockford paired it with the Nikon AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR telephoto zoom lens to get the shot.

Cue the age old photography debate I've read time and again in my 15+ years writing about camera gear — is it the gear, or the photographer, that gets a great photo?

The correct answer, of course, is that there's no simple, single answer — it depends on the context and subject being photographed — and that the end result is the work of both tool and creator. For Crockford, however, gear certainly empowered him to get his WPOTY award contender.

Sometimes, gear really does matter

I'm all for celebrating the photographer, and rightly so. The craft and dedication (and, sometimes, a dash of fortune) required to create an image that stands out is undeniable, and deserves appreciation.

I see it in myself — I have a better eye for a photo now than I did at the start of my career, and I'm still improving (emphasis on having an eye for it to begin with).

But to those that simply said in the comments section; "it’s not about the camera", or "photography was never about the equipment", and “it’s the singer, not the song", I say you'll need more than luck to get a photo like the image in question — a distant bird in flight.

Skill alone doesn't reach 600mm, a lens does. Nor is your iPhone bagging you that shot. You need telephoto reach, and decent autofocus helps.

Technically speaking, enthusiast-level and pro-level mirrorless cameras are the most advanced cameras today for wildlife photography, thanks to dedicated subject tracking modes (which, in many models, includes bird detection autofocus), and faster-than-ever burst shooting. You are more likely to get a technically sound image with modern camera gear.

Many of the comments defended DSLRs, but the point of the article was never to attack the format, which in the current market has essentially been replaced by mirrorless, but to highlight how popular (and capable) these systems are still.

DSLRs are still seemingly the camera of choice for wildlife photographers — if the shortlisted entries for WPOTY 2026 are anything to go by. I still rock my Nikon D800 which precedes Crockford's camera, and its age doesn't stop if from taking good photos.

You don't need the latest gear to get the (wildlife) shot, but it does help. But for the incredible shortlisted entries in WPOTY 2026, it took skill and gear to get the shot. There is a gear bottom line required to stand a chance.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026 winners will be unveiled in October, and you can see the winning images in the flesh when the exhibition begins in October at London's Natural History Museum, UK — you can grab tickets here.

Following the leak of the tech and a raft of unofficial mods, this week saw Nvidia's official launch of DLSS 5, with the company showing it off in NBA 2K27 at Gamescom 2026 and providing some further illuminating details.

Before, after Nvidia's initial DLSS 5 reveal in March, I was skeptical on some points, but I wasn't tearing holes in the idea like some gamers were. However, this week, we've seen a rapid shift in opinions and the general online sentiment around DLSS 5 — and I'm a good deal more excited about this AI trickery myself.

Indeed, I think there are a number of reasons to be hopeful that DLSS 5 could prove to be a compelling step forward for PC gaming, from Nvidia's clarification on support for GPUs, through to what modders have shown that the tech can achieve since it was leaked — some of which is truly eye-opening.

Here are my five reasons why Nvidia's incoming neural rendering model could turn out to be a very literal game-changer.

1. Nvidia has clarified that DLSS 5 won't just be for RTX 5000 GPUs

While DLSS 5 is currently only supported by RTX 5000 graphics cards — the tech went live this week in NBA 2K27 — Nvidia has confirmed that it will come to older GeForce GPUs. Indeed, we won't have to wait that long before wider support is ushered in, which is good news.

VideoCardz spotted an update from an Nvidia rep on Reddit which stated: "Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series."

So, we could be looking at early 2027 for work to begin on bringing DLSS 5 to RTX 4000 models — and possibly previous generations of GPUs will be in line for the same treatment. Modders have already got the tech working on RTX 3000 and 2000 models, after all — although the performance levels could well be the sticking point here.

At any rate, this puts paid to fears that DLSS 5 could remain locked to just the latest Nvidia RTX 5000 graphics cards.

2. Continual optimization should improve performance a good deal

I just touched on performance, and this is the area which has proved to be the biggest downer with the mentioned unofficial experiments that have been conducted with DLSS 5.

As Tom's Hardware observes, the performance hit with DLSS 5 is a nasty one, and it's generally causing a 40% to 50% drop in frame rates. In some reports, it's less than this (more like 30%), and what we have to remember is that all these unofficial figures are based on a pre-release version of DLSS 5 being fudged into play by modders.

The final version of DLSS 5 will likely provide better performance, and in any case, optimization is going to be high on Nvidia's list of priorities. I'd be surprised if there weren't major strides taken in this department as 2027 rolls around and more games are supported.

3. Experimental results with DLSS 5 are pretty incredible

Those modders playing with the leaked version of DLSS 5 have clearly shown us that this tech can be used to produce seriously impressive results. Of course, on the official front, the demo of NBA 2K27 at Gamescom 2026 proved the case that this AI-powered graphics uplift can work wonders, too.

That said, the benefits of DLSS 5 are situational to an extent, and it's not a silver bullet for making all graphics better. It really shines in certain use cases, though. For example, even if you don't want the main character models in a game to have the tech applied because you hate that idea, it can still make a huge difference to background details, and the likes of the faces of NPCs in the lurking atmospheric crowds which are the backdrop for open world games.

As one Redditor points out: "NPC crowd faces are one of the best use cases for it [DLSS 5]. It sometimes takes you out of the game when you're talking to a character model that's clearly been hand crafted with a lot of effort, and as you said then there's some janky smooth skinned ghoul walking by you lol. Watching an LTT [Linus Tech Tips] vid where they showed the difference in random NPCs was actually super impressive."

DLSS 5 can also transform lighting and shadows to make graphics look far more realistic, including character models — some of the results shared by modders in a megathread on Reddit make that crystal clear. I was blown away by some of these examples, frankly. When it works, DLSS 5 works really well — although it doesn't always come off.

That said, some of the wonkier examples that have been aired are down to modders being daft with the sliders and options on offer, which brings me onto my next point.

4. Tuning options are key for DLSS 5

As noted, some of the more stomach-churning moments from the various modders messing around with DLSS 5 have come from those folks ramping up the intensity of the sliders — sometimes intentionally just to provoke an anti-AI reaction.

There's a decent level of granular control over various aspects of what DLSS 5 does (including intensity, tone, and structure), and when a game developer properly tunes the tech for their particular release, the effect is going to be more subtle, appropriate, and in line with the overall art direction. (Well, hopefully — you'd assume this will be the case, anyway).

Used judiciously, it's clear enough that DLSS 5 can really enhance the visuals of a game — modders have proved that in some cases, and NBA 2K27 is a great official example of how this works, too.

Yes, it is very possible to get 'uncanny valley' kind of effects with character models if you're extravagantly flinging sliders up towards their maximum limits — and not every game's art or graphics style suits DLSS 5, by any means. But we come back to the last point — when it works, it really does work.

5. DLSS 5 will probably age like a fine wine (ahem)

My final point is a simple — but important — one. And okay, I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating. Rewind time back to when Nvidia revealed the original DLSS, the very first take on this tech that was purely about upscaling, and it had some quite pronounced flaws. Problems like blurriness, ghosting and artifacts proved a blight on the upscaled graphics, but these were issues that Nvidia resolved with the next iteration of the tech.

I'd expect there will be examples of DLSS 5 which show the visuals going off the rails in a similar kind of way, although it already looks off to a far better start than DLSS 1. The point being that whatever we think now, at launch, may change quite drastically in a year or two, and there's a genuine potential for DLSS 5 to be revolutionary in polishing up gaming graphics — albeit that caveats around its misuse and situational nature aren't going to go away.

As the US moves to integrate more AI systems into every arm of its military, the situations on the ground in the Middle East are raising some serious problems for maintaining the compute and connectivity needed to keep systems online.

Drones, sensors, AI-assisted targeting and decision-making all rely on these systems in one way or another, and the destruction of a single frontline AI data center can seriously damage an army’s capacity to function.

But these problems go beyond hardware. How does a drone adapt its mission parameters without being able to communicate? How can AI models continue inference without access to critical battlefield data? And what compromises must be made to prepare battlefield AI for these conditions?

Battlefield AI should continue functioning, even when comms go down or hardware is disabled

While the conflict circling the Strait of Hormuz may be a hugely expensive endeavour, Iran is providing valuable lessons for warfighters. Relying on traditional data centers in the Middle East has already shown its weaknesses. These sprawling warehouses make easy targets for cheap missiles, and entire systems can be taken offline from a single hit.

Palantir has already begun deploying shipping containers filled with Nvidia hardware as an alternative to the traditional data center. These containers can be deployed on frontlines and can connect directly into operational workflows, offering decentralized compute where it is needed most.

Scaleout is a company building infrastructure for edge AI and federated learning that trains models on distributed, sensitive data without centralising it. The company has worked with NATO - most recently the Swedish Air Force - and defense primes such as BAE Systems.

Andreas Hellander is the CEO and co-founder of Scaleout. He holds a PhD in Scientific Computing and an MSc in Biotechnology Engineering, and is an Associate Professor at Uppsala University, where he built one of the top research groups at the Department of Information Technology before founding Scaleout.

I spoke to Andreas to learn more about how battlefield AI systems can be made more resilient, and how drones, sensors, and other frontline technologies can continue functioning when conditions go downhill.

• What happens when parts of a battlefield AI's computing and hardware are taken offline? What redundancies are in place to keep communications between systems operational?

The aim is not to promise an unbreakable connection; it is to stop the loss of one component from taking down the whole capability. In our architecture, a disconnected node continues local inference using its last approved model, caching detections and telemetry until a link returns.

Multiple aggregation points can be used above the edge. If one becomes unavailable, clients can be reassigned and training can proceed with those still reachable. That creates graceful degradation rather than an all-or-nothing failure. We do not supply the tactical communications network itself; our job is to ensure the AI workload does not assume that any radio, satellite or other link will always be available.

• What are the trade-offs between a highly centralized battlefield AI network and a more distributed approach, especially concerning data gathering, targeting, battlefield coordination and logistics?

Centralisation provides a consistent operational picture, substantial compute and a clear place to enforce security, model approval and command policy. It supports theatre-wide coordination and logistics, but also concentrates risk: losing one link or facility can remove a disproportionate share of the capability, while moving large or classified datasets may be slow, prohibited or impossible.

A distributed system keeps analysis close to the sensor, reducing latency and allowing local functions to continue during disconnection. The trade-off is fragmentation. Targeting based on a partial or stale picture is risky, and local logistics decisions may not be optimal for the wider force. The best design is usually hybrid: central coordination when available, with clearly bounded local capability when it is not. Authority remains with the relevant command-and-control and human decision process.

• How do these AI drones and sensors adapt to the battlefield and what differences are there in the behavior of an AI drone that can still communicate and one that has lost communication?

It is important to separate running a model from retraining it. Small platforms typically perform inference in flight, while controlled retraining and approval happen on a ground node or more capable edge computer. Onboard learning exists in research, but uncontrolled mid-mission retraining creates serious assurance problems.

A connected platform can share detections, receive tasking and contribute to a wider operational picture. After losing its link, a drone follows its pre-approved failsafe: depending on the mission, it may continue a bounded task, return, hold or land. Onboard processing can keep perception and navigation working, but the platform loses external context, new instructions and fleet coordination. Disconnection should be a designed operating state with explicit limits, not an improvised emergency mode.

• How is the data collected by these drones and sensors used to help battlefield AI systems adapt to new conditions, threats, and tactics?

The useful data is often the hardest to move, so we send the model to the data rather than centralising the footage. Active-learning software identifies the frames most likely to improve it, such as uncertain detections, unfamiliar objects or changed conditions. A person still labels the selected material; the software reduces the searching, not the need for human judgement.

The model is then fine-tuned locally and tested against a benchmark. A candidate can also run beside the current model in shadow mode before an operator approves it. Where policy and connectivity allow, sites exchange protected model updates rather than raw training footage, combining them into a shared model. Federated learning reduces data movement, but the updates still need to be secured, validated and audited.

• What are the main challenges you encounter when deploying AI drones and sensors? What capabilities are available for militaries to source the required compute and energy production close to the front lines?

The hardest constraints are usually power, heat, weight, weather, vibration, electronic warfare, inconsistent data and safe software updates across a mixed fleet. Integration and accreditation can be as demanding as the machine learning.

The compute is commercially available: low-power modules such as NVIDIA Jetson for small platforms, and ruggedised GPU servers or containerised edge units for ground sites. Energy is tougher. Every processor competes with propulsion, sensing and communications, while generators, batteries and distribution equipment add logistical burden and new points of failure. In our public demonstration with BAE Systems Bofors, the perception workload ran on onboard compute at -18°C without connectivity. The principle is to use the smallest practical footprint and assume both power and bandwidth are scarce.

• There is an increasingly blurred involvement of commercial companies providing services for military use, such as AWS data centers in the Middle East and drone production in the UK for Ukraine. How are companies providing services to the military adapting to the pressures of potentially being deemed a legitimate military target?

Speaking for Scaleout, rather than for the sector as a whole, we design our platform so that a customer’s operation does not depend on Scaleout remaining continuously available. It runs in the customer’s own infrastructure, works air-gapped, and does not require a licensing call-home or persistent connection to our systems or a public cloud.

That matters in any contested or disconnected environment: reliance on a remote provider can become an operational vulnerability. Our approach has therefore been to keep control and continuity local to the customer, rather than make our own infrastructure a critical dependency.

The wider question of how commercial providers are viewed in a conflict is one for policymakers, legal experts, and the companies involved. We would not want to speculate about other providers’ risk assessments or operating models.

• What is the future trajectory of these systems? Will each individual drone and sensor have its own connectivity that can feed data back through a global satellite network? Will these systems be able to operate autonomously for multiple days or weeks without human input?

Connectivity will improve, including through low-Earth-orbit satellites, but connecting every sensor directly to space is unlikely to be the universal answer. Terminals consume power and spectrum, add cost and can create an electronic signature. A more resilient pattern combines local mesh links, opportunistic synchronisation and selected gateways to satellite or other long-range communications.

Longer disconnected operation is realistic, but endurance is often limited by batteries, weather and maintenance rather than AI software. There is also a critical distinction between operating without a connection and operating without human authority. The first is a resilience property; the second is a policy, legal and ethical decision. The future is therefore not simply more autonomy, but verifiable control: knowing which model ran on each platform, what produced it, where its limits were and who approved it.

September 9 could be an exciting day for Apple fans, because along with new editions of long-running phones, like the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, we’re also expecting the company to finally launch its first foldable, possibly dubbed the iPhone Ultra.

This of course will almost certainly be the most expensive iPhone in history — though if you think of it as an iPhone and iPad all in one then it could still be reasonably good value. But despite the definitely high price and the possibility of ‘Ultra’ in the name, it might actually be lacking some standard iPhone features.

Their absence will probably be part of an effort to keep the device slim, but in some cases could also be a cost-cutting measure, and combined they might make some buyers question just how ‘Ultra’ — and how good value — the phone really is. We’ve detailed these possible omissions below.

1. Face ID

It’s long been rumored that the iPhone Ultra won’t have Face ID — instead it could have a Touch ID fingerprint sensor. Though unlike the last iPhone to sport Touch ID (the iPhone SE (2022)) this will probably be built into the power button, rather than being housed in a large home button under the display.

Still, it’s been many years since a high-end iPhone has lacked Face ID, and in recent years even budget models like the iPhone 17e have had it, so this omission could really sting.

There’s no guarantee that the iPhone Ultra won’t have Face ID, but numerous sources say it won’t, apparently because it’s going to be too slim for Apple’s TrueDepth camera array which powers Face ID.

2. A telephoto camera

Another casualty of the iPhone Ultra’s likely slim build could be a telephoto camera, with this phone reportedly having just a dual-lens rear camera, with wide and ultra-wide sensors.

This is a very believable claim, as not only has it been repeated a lot, but the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 — which it’s likely to have a similar form factor to — also only has a dual-lens camera.

Plus, Apple hasn’t equipped the standard iPhone 17 or the iPhone Air with a telephoto camera, so the company doesn’t seem to see it as an essential feature, even for quite expensive handsets. But given that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max do have one, it would mean the iPhone Ultra is far from the best iPhone for photography.

3. An Action button

Apple debuted Action buttons back on the iPhone 15 Pro series and since then loads of iPhones have had one, but the iPhone Ultra reportedly won’t.

At this point we’ve seen numerous dummy units of the phone, such as some from leaker Sonny Dickson, and they lack an Action button, which could be a sign that the phone won’t have one — likely because it’s too slim for the required components.

These dummy units also lack a mute switch, which could make this the first iPhone to have neither.

4. MagSafe

As with the Action button, dummy units of the iPhone Ultra also lack a MagSafe ring, and while this could just be an omission from the dummies, it’s present in dummy units of the iPhone 18 Pro series, suggesting that the iPhone Ultra might not include magnets for connecting wireless chargers and accessories.

That said, Mark Gurman — an Apple watcher with a superb track record — has said in an interview with Tom’s Guide that "all indications that I've heard is that ‌MagSafe‌ is in for this foldable phone. They were able to get it into the iPhone Air, and I don't see why they wouldn't be able to get it into the foldable."

So right now we’re not sure whether MagSafe will be included or not. We’re inclined to believe Gurman, but then again the iPhone Ultra looks like it might lack some other features the iPhone Air has (such as Face ID and an Action button), so his comparison there doesn’t fully add up.

5. A SIM card slot

Apple has already ditched physical SIM card slots for its phones in the US and a handful of other regions. But except for the iPhone Air, all of its phones currently do have SIM card slots in most of the world — including the UK and Australia.

However, the iPhone Ultra might join the iPhone Air in relying purely on eSIM, whatever country you buy it in.

This is something we’ve heard from multiple sources and it would make sense, since if the iPhone Air is too slim for a SIM card slot then the iPhone Ultra likely will be as well. In fact, of all the possible omissions, this is the one we’re most sure of — though for buyers in the US it will be business as usual.

Our double-episode Casualty special for its 40th anniversary is now streaming on BBC iPlayer, and I'm still recovering from the emotional whiplash.

From the hospital explosion in its opening minutes, the drama is operating with a full-force gusto we've rarely seen in the show. There's no longer one main storyline with smaller ones unfolding in the background — which is the usual Casualty format — but a gigantic story that involves absolutely everybody.

Nobody is overlooked or left behind, and all cylinders are firing. Whether we're in the heart of the hospital with Dylan (William Beck) as he struggles with the overwhelming influx or patients, or in makeshift emergency rooms with Flynn (Olly Rix) and Stevie (Elinor Lawless), the intensity never lets up.

But even with all of this chaos going on, I can't help but think that Flynn and Stevie would make a beautiful couple... if it was something that they wanted.

With an underlying tension already between them, is this something that we're ever going to see? If Rix's response is anything to go by, we can remain cautiously optimistic.

'There is a real depth to their relationship'

"To some extent, the answer to that is quite a simple in that it's not my decision," Rix explains. "That's one for the producers. But I think there's something there that they're the last to see.

"The audience has seen it. The producers and the writers have seen it. I think it's sort of been there from the off, and it's taken a moment like this to reorientate them, and perhaps to get them to realise that there is a real depth to that relationship. I think there's a lot more to come... I'll say that much."

I think Rix is right. There's nothing quite like a life-threatening tragedy to bring two people together in a way they've never been before — I mean, how many romantic dramas have based their premise on this exact idea?

The truth is that if Flynn and Stevie do end up together, their romance will likely be incredibly drawn-out, leaving us kept waiting for the slow-burn to materialize into something more.

For now, at least, we've got the great chemistry between the two actors. "Ellie and I work very nicely together anyway and we've always improvised well," Rix adds. "We're quite free in the way we do scenes together, and that was encouraged and embraced in the filming of these specials. I had a great time. I hope it shows."

Welcome to my August 2026 Blu-ray Bounty, where I’ll be testing some of the latest 4K releases of the month. If you’re new to the Blu-ray Bounty, you can check out previous editions of these roundups by clicking the link above.

This series is where I test the picture and audio quality of select new 4K discs from each month. I personally use 4K Blu-ray all the time when I’m testing the best TVs and best soundbars, and have become somewhat of a collector myself.

In last month’s July 2026 Blu-ray Bounty, I looked at four discs: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (which has now entered my testing rotation), To Live and Die in L.A., Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Hairspray (1988).

I’ll be using our usual setup to test this month’s seven discs, which includes one of 2026’s best OLED TVs the LG G6, the Panasonic DP-UB820, the best 4K Blu-ray player on the market and the Samsung HW-Q990C, an older-but-excellent 11.1.4 soundbar system. As always, I won’t be reviewing any of the movies here: just the picture and audio.

Project Hail Mary (Amazon MGM)

Based on the Andy Weir (author of The Martian) novel of the same name, Project Hail Mary follows schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), who awakens on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. He soon discovers he must stop a substance from killing the Earth’s Sun.

From the offset, this is a breathtaking disc. As grace awakens and explores the ship, black tones are rich and deep, and there’s plenty of strong contrast between the dark recesses of the various hallways and the lights around the ship. It’s the same with scenes of space, as the disc renders the blackness of space with real accuracy, while still showing every individual star. There are scenes with plenty of strong shadows as well, and within these scenes there is excellent shadow detail, with details maintained in the dark areas on screen.

With Dolby Vision supported, colors are both punchy and accurate. Grace’s yellow coat is vibrant and true-to-life. There are even more spectacular colors later on in the film, such as ‘Adrian’ (a planet Grace studies), which really pops on screen but keeps that nice, realistic look that is present with colors throughout the movie. Any brighter colors really dazzle on screen, aided by Dolby Vision.

This disc’s Dolby Atmos soundtrack is fantastic. The sound is accurate with a fantastic balance, demonstrated in scenes where Grace frantically explores the ship. As he grips onto surfaces and moves through space, the sound of his rubber suit is clear and detailed, mapped to the rear speakers. This balances nicely with the ethereal score during the movie’s more curious moments, such as the first meeting with Rocky. There’s plenty of thumping bass too, with any impacts during the movie’s tense moments generating some solid punch from the subwoofer.

Michael (Universal Pictures)

A biopic of the legendary ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson, Michael covers the singer’s life from his early days in the Jackson 5, culminating in the late 1980s during the Bad World Tour. Jackson’s real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson takes the role of his uncle.

Obviously, we’ll start with audio. The disc has a Dolby Atmos soundtrack and the most impressive sequences are the live concerts and recording sessions. There’s a terrific balance between instruments and the crowd, which utilizes all the space within a surround system, such as the Samsung soundbar I used. When Jackson first records 'Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough' , the Atmox mix is superb, with Jackson’s vocals crystal clear at the front, a tightly controlled drum and bass line, as well as detailed strings and guitars, all given room to breathe.

Picture-wise, this is a crisp, polished presentation as you’d expect from a modern, high-budget movie. Colors have plenty of punch and vibrancy, but also look true-to-life, and the clothing looks accurate and detailed for the time. The peacocks on the lawn of the Encino mansion in particular show what Dolby Vision's color reproduction is capable of. There’s also good contrast throughout during night time sequences and when Jackson is on stage, particularly during his live performance of Billie Jean.

Troy (Arrow Video)

Troy follows the story of Paris, Prince of Troy (Orlando Bloom), who falls in love with Helen (Diane Kruger) and convinces her to leave her husband King Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). Menelaus declares war on Troy and sends an army led by Achilles (Brad Pitt) to take the city. The movie is loosely based on Homer’s Iliad, focusing on the Trojan War.

This 4K restoration presented by Arrow Video is brilliant. Textures such as skin look lifelike with a 3D-level of detail, and the detail within objects such as armor and weapons is intricate and clean. Colors are bold and vibrant, such as the lush greens of the trees in the opening fight scene, as well as the blues of the sky above. Landscapes look superb thanks to fantastic cinematography, and again really demonstrate the excellent quality of this restoration.

Gold detail within the armor shines and is a showcase for TVs with good HDR highlights, like the G6 I used. There’s also plenty of strong contrast, with dark tones balancing the light, such as the dark walls of the palaces balancing with the fire torches on the walls. There’s some good film grain still present too, despite how clean textures look now.

There’s no Dolby Atmos soundtrack supported here, but there is a DTS-HD 5.1 MA soundtrack that more than lives up to the task. During battle scenes, the sounds of arrows and spears whipping through the air is clear through the rear channels, creating a sense of height despite the lack of channels, while the front channels handle the clanging swords and more visceral sounds as people are slain. There’s plenty of strong bass too, as horses and chariots take part in battle.

West Side Story (1961) (Capelight Pictures)

Inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story follows Tony, a former member of the Jets gang, who falls for Maria, a girl whose brother is a lead figure in the rival Sharks’ gang. Set in 1950s Manhattan, New York, it is one of the most well-known musicals in cinematic history.

Starting with audio, the 4K disc has a DTS-HD 5.1 MA soundtrack, restored from 70mm 6-channel master, and its quality shows. There’s a lovely balance between the backing score and vocals, all of which have been made into a natural-sounding, clean surround mix that makes use of all the space it's granted.

Vocals are consistently clear and instruments sound detailed throughout. Even more subtle effects, such as the shuffling of feet during dances, sound refined and well-defined within the mix.

Visually, this is an impressive restoration. The colorful clothes and locales around the New York neighbourhoods really pop on screen. During the opening sequences, the reds of the walls and various gang member’s clothing are both vivid and true-to-life, and this carries on throughout the movie, with the vibrant 1950s clothing looking bright and vivid.

Textures have been given a nice uplift, with skin in particular benefitting from the 4K restoration, giving people a 3D-like appearance that makes the movie feel much more contemporary than its 1961 release date. There’s also some demonstrations of strong contrast during the movie’s night sequences, with stage spotlights overhead creating strong shadows, while still maintaining rich black tones.

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (Arrow Video)

A sequel to the beloved Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey sees the duo Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) end up in the afterlife, after a pair of evil doppelganger robots is sent back in time to stop them from ever becoming famous musicians and creating a utopia.

This is another excellent (pun intended) 4K restoration from Arrow. From the get-go, colors are bold, vibrant and engaging. The neon clothing of the people in the future explodes on screen, but in the 1980s, people’s clothes really shine too, particularly Ted’s red jacket. Colors still look true-to-life at the same time.

Black tones are rich and deep as well, including the deep black during the tunnels in hell and of Death’s cloak. Textures have been upscaled nicely too, cleaning up skin and objects throughout the movie, while maintaining a good amount of grain.

The disc comes with a DTS-HD 5.1 MA soundtrack that delivers a surprising amount of detail. Various effects throughout really use every channel, such as the crackle of the time-travelling phone booth coming through clear in the rear channels, while speech is clear in the front channels. More subtle effects are also clear, such as the creaking of the Colonel's leather boots as he tells Bill and Ted to do infinity pushups. Musical scenes also sound great as well, with punchy drums and bass and detailed guitars.

Hunt For The Wilderpeople (Visions Home Video)

Hunt For The Wilderpeople tells the story of Ricky (Julain Dennison), a young orphan who ends up running from his foster home with his foster uncle Hector (Sam Neill) into the New Zealand wilderness. As a manhunt ensues, the two must work together to avoid the law. This was one of Taika Waititi's first movies.

The showcase visual aspect of this disc is of course the gorgeous New Zealand wilderness. The greens of the fields and trees are beautiful, looking both vibrant and accurate in equal measure. Any bolder colors, such as Ricky’s bright red jacket and yellow hoodie, also pop on screen whilst also looking true-to-life. Textures are crisp and realistic, with the detail in nature, such as leaves and roots, adding some nice depth to the image.

The DTS-HD 5.1 MA soundtrack sounds great here. As Hector and Ricky move through the wilderness, the sound of birds tweeting and the crackle of twigs and leaves underfoot is nicely detailed, with the birdsong demonstrating some accurate mapping as it quietly comes through the rear channels. Speech is clear throughout the movie, balancing well with the other aspects of the soundtrack. There’s even some nice directionality as well, with the sound of a travelling bullet moving around the rear channels behind me.

Mars Attacks! (Warner Bros.)

From Tim Burton, Mars Attacks! follows a group of aliens who land on Earth, and after meeting with US President Dale (Jack Nicholson) under peaceful circumstances, begin to attack cities across the globe. The movie has an ensemble cast including Annette Benning, Glenn Close, Jack Black and Michael J Fox.

Colors are the 4K disc’s real highlight here, with the gaudy aesthetic of Las Vegas, both the casinos and the people’s outfits, really popping on screen. The silk shirts a lot of the characters wear are extremely vivid, but never look oversaturated. Textures have been cleaned up well, giving the overall picture a refresh, particularly in people’s skin. During darker scenes, black tones are deep and there’s strong contrast on show, particularly during any night scenes on the Vegas strip.

The 4K disc’s Dolby Atmos soundtrack is engaging and detailed throughout. Explosions deliver plenty of meaty bass that's also well controlled through the right subwoofer. The sound of the alien’s ray guns is accurately mapped to the action on screen, demonstrating some brilliant, refined detail. As spacecraft fly overhead, Atmos is in full effect, demonstrating an effective use of height channels.

Silent Hill: Townfall feels like the culmination of two recent trends: the renaissance of Konami's survival horror series, dormant for the past decade, and the rise of more culturally authentic Scottish games.

As a standalone spin-off, it delivers the first full-length first-person Silent Hill experience that was the initial promise of the cancelled Silent Hills meant to be directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro (though its playable teaser 'P.T.' ultimately became a horror classic in its own right).

Its setting in the fictional Scottish town of St. Amelia couldn't be more perfect, given that the series is iconic for its fog, which actually occurs on the Scottish east coast when warm air passes over the cold North Sea during the summer and can make its way inland.

And who better to realise this vision than Screen Burn Interactive, the Glasgow-based developer whose acclaimed games Stories Untold and Observation (released back when the studio was known as No Code) were also experienced in the first-person perspective?

Yet despite the authenticity of its setting, the Scottish studio has opted not to feature Scottish-sounding characters in its main cast, unlike the BAFTA-winning Still Wakes The Deep. Protagonist Simon Ordell, played by British-American actor Jovan Adepo, is something of an outsider who has been instructed by a mysterious voice to come to St. Amelia to "make it right" — whatever “it” may be.

Make it right

For the Gamescom demo, things certainly start off not quite right. Simon arrives at the town's harbor not by boat, but simply emerging from the water. Judging by the red wristband with his personal details on one hand and tubes connected to the other (like he’s escaped from a hospital), something's clearly up with him too.

St. Amelia, meanwhile, is a ghost town, as evident by the sight of abandoned shops as well as one street lined with 'house for sale' signs. If you get a creeping fear that this might be one of those indie games from over a decade ago when you just walked around in a photorealistic area in the aftermath of the actual story, it’s instantly resolved by the ringing coming from a nearby public phone box just past the town square.

It goes dead when I pick it up. I survey possible numbers to ring and go with “100,” which tells you to "save yourself" (and is literally how you save progress in this game).

Back in the town square, I spot an upright man being fed some kind of fluid coming from a tube seemingly attached to the sky above. As Simon instinctively goes to free him, his voice is familiar — it's the voice from the beginning calling out to Simon to "make it right". When I next return to the square, things have changed again, with protest banners and placards alluding to a crime that had occurred that may be linked to a company with the acronym 'CEG'.

As eerie, enigmatic, and atmospheric as this beginning is, it also feels a bit aimless. There were several occasions during my session when I was still slowly plodding around St. Amelia's streets, only to discover doors that were locked, and the option to sprint had not yet been unlocked.

It turns out this is because I had overlooked a few key numbers I could have called on the phone. Whereas some games can be overzealous in marking the critical with yellow paint, Screen Burn seems quite content with letting you get literally lost in its world, even if that might make for an even slower burn than intended…

Tactile horrors

If there was one consistent thing about Silent Hill: Townfall, it's that you really do have to pay attention to every detail. That is, fortunately, the benefit of the first-person perspective: you can really scrutinize all the flyers displayed on a community noticeboard without having to bring up a larger text box.

There's also a real physicality to the clues and equipment you have access to, such as a double-sided map you have to hold and flip over manually rather than just bringing up a map UI. The most tactile of these is the CRTV, a portable television that you can tune using the analogue triggers.

So you're not completely lost, a couple of markers do appear at the bottom to hint at the signal you should be tuning towards. Once you get a video clip, it's about carefully scrutinising the image, often waiting for it to loop back, as a hint of what you need to find next or where to go.

Not that these hints will spell it out for you. In one case, I was supposed to look for a white house, which is not the most obvious clue when most of the houses in St. Amelia's streets have white walls.

The CRTV also has another function, as it can be tuned to detect enemies nearby. Even if they're obscured by walls, their outlines can still be made out through noise and static. Alternatively, you can also hold another button along with the left stick to peek around corners.

Even though I only encountered a couple of enemies during my hands-on, which stay true to Silent Hill convention as nightmarish deformed figures with uncanny movements, combat remains a clunky aspect of the game, made no better or worse in first-person. This made it more important for me to prioritise evasion as a tactic.

But from what I managed to play at Gamescom, it's the unsettling vibes that resonate strongest over hostile threats, such as the dread of what could be in a locked box that's meant for carrying human organs, or an extremely Scottish puzzle that involves having to top up an electric meter with a prepaid card from a newsagent.

Having moved to Glasgow under two years ago into a newly renovated tenement building that nonetheless still had one of these relics in the cupboard, it was a moment when Silent Hill: Townfall's mundane horror became a little too real. That's also sure to make this unlike any other Silent Hill game I have played.

Silent Hill: Townfall releases for PlayStation 5 and PC on September 24, 2026.

Gaming on the go has reached fresh heights over the years, with slim laptops and compact handhelds delivering great performance. AMD and Intel have spearheaded the charge with their mobile processors, but a new player is in town.

Nvidia revealed its RTX Spark at Computex in May, an ARM-based superchip designed for Windows on ARM laptops, with AI capabilities and obvious strong suits for creators – but also gamers, too, with a powerful integrated RTX GPU. It's designed for slim laptops and compact PCs, keeping workspaces less cluttered and making creation alongside gaming much easier when travelling.

I was lucky enough to go hands-on with an RTX Spark laptop at Gamescom 2026, specifically the HP OmniBook Ultra 16, which was running Borderlands 4. Gearbox Interactive's latest entry in the franchise was notorious for its rough performance at launch.

It has significantly improved since then, and the OmniBook Ultra 16 was running the game at an incredible frame rate, one I could tell was above 60 frames per second, with the help of Nvidia's Frame Generation x2.

The mention of Frame Generation may throw some off; after all, it's been frowned upon for a long time with the 'fake frames' nickname (a criticism I disagree with). However, the input delay and overall latency weren't an issue for me on this RTX Spark system.

I didn't get the chance to put the system through its paces other than playing that particular game, but it's worth noting that the other RTX Spark laptops at Nvidia's booth were running games like 007 First Light and Arc Raiders, both of which ran at smooth, solid frame rates.

If it wasn't clear already, I think RTX Spark is great for laptops and compact PCs, and my only concern is the price. I'm hoping for something that isn't too expensive, but that's probably wishful thinking due to the nature of these devices and the ongoing RAM crisis. However, it would be a shame if RTX Spark laptops don't blossom as a result of memory shortages.

Handheld manufacturers could use RTX Spark

Speaking with Nvidia's staff at Gamescom, I asked if the RTX Spark was intended to be used with handheld gaming PCs, and it was made clear that Team Green is completely open to any handheld manufacturer reaching out to use the superchip.

Handheld territory isn't exactly foreign to Nvidia either. The Nintendo Switch 2 uses the Tegra T239 processor, with access to DLSS across multiple games — and the upscaling technology does wonders for image quality and performance.

While AMD and Intel's processors continue to provide fantastic performance on most handheld gaming PCs, especially with Intel's new G3 Extreme CPU, I told Nvidia that DLSS on something like a Legion Go or MSI Claw would be untouchable.

Of course, performance has to be balanced with battery life and power usage, as well as pricing, and I'm very aware that this could be a tricky equation to deal with.

If the RTX Spark (or any similar chip in Nvidia's plans going forward) could be the engine of a handheld gaming PC, using more aggressive upscaling wouldn't be something to avoid in terms of any easy win to boost performance. DLSS Super Resolution is great at maintaining sharp image quality, and it would work even better on the smaller screen of a handheld.

Will this ever happen, though? That's down to the manufacturers of these devices.

OpenAI has unveiled a much anticipated AI model which the firm has dubbed ‘GPT-6 Astra’. While the model has improved significantly across benchmark testing and brings a host of new business features, there is still a dark cloud looming over the new model.

Off the back of OpenAI’s accidental hack of Hugging Face and the company’s subsequent efforts to improve how AI agents behave and interact, numerous cybersecurity experts have raised concerns about the model’s new ‘recurrent depth’ reasoning capabilities.

This new reasoning architecture allows the model to consider a problem multiple times before taking an action, compared to the standard chain-of-thought reasoning used in previous models.

Why the concern about recurrent depth reasoning?

This new level of reasoning apparently offers improved performance. OpenAI also says it has fixed its models' abilities to circumvent boundaries when performing tests by monitoring the models reasoning and ensuring the model stays aligned within the scope of its task.

During Astra’s launch event, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said: “We will not accept degradation in our ability to monitor model alignment beyond a certain level. We will withhold scaling until we can regain enough confidence.”

But numerous experts believe that the lessons of the Hugging Face incident have not yet been learned, and the model has been released without adequate testing on Astra’s reasoning and monitoring.

After all, no one thought one of OpenAI’s models could set up a hidden internet-connected messaging board that allowed AI agents to influence each other's behavior.

But with Astra being released into the real world, the lessons may have to be learned on the fly.

Expert perspectives on OpenAI Astra release

• James Blake, VP of Global Cyber Resiliency Strategy at Cohesity:

The launch of Astra is raising questions again around the safety of Frontier AI. Instead of simply asking whether a model is "safe", organisations now need to ask whether it remains safe across millions of different situations, prompts and interactions. Cyber resilience has traditionally assumed that systems and threat actors behave deterministically. AI systems don’t.

Advanced models can and will continue to exhibit behaviours that emerge from their optimisation process rather than from explicit programming. We have to move beyond thinking about AI as just another software tool and find ways to ensure these systems remain observable, auditable and governable throughout their lifecycle.

The most important question we’ll need to answer in future is one of liability. Suppose an AI system autonomously develops a strategy that causes financial loss, leaks confidential information or violates regulation. Who is responsible? The developer that trained the model? The cloud provider operating the infrastructure? Currently the answer is surprisingly unclear. It’s not just about what AI can do: it’s about who is accountable when it does something nobody expected.

• Oleksandr Yaremchuk, Co-Founder & CTO at Manifold Security:

OpenAI is calling Astra its most aligned model yet, even as its chief scientist admits monitorability is getting harder as models get more capable. Evidently, Astra hides its reasoning in the majority of tested cases, and some successful attacks left no reasoning trace at all. That's the tool many organisations still use, including the labs themselves, for auditing what an agent is doing, and it's getting less reliable with every release.

That matters because Astra isn't staying inside OpenAI's test environment. It's going to run as an agent on employee laptops and in the browser, holding real credentials, inside companies that have no way to watch what it does once it's there. A model that explains itself less isn't more aligned, it's just harder to catch when it goes wrong.

Labs can keep debating what these models say or refuse to say. Security teams need to stop relying on that and start monitoring what agents actually do at runtime, with the ability to shut one down mid-action. That's the only oversight left that still works once the reasoning goes quiet.

• Kristin Lowery, Field CISO at Optiv:

For boards and executive leaders, the emergence of OpenAI’s Astra model highlights a broader reality: AI is no longer just a productivity issue; it is a risk management issue.

Just as organizations established governance for cloud adoption and digital transformation, they now need clear policies, strong oversight, and accountability for AI use.

The question is not whether AI will become more capable — it will. The real challenge is whether organizations can strengthen their governance, security controls, and workforce readiness quickly enough to keep pace.

• Patricia Titus, Field CISO at Abnormal AI:

OpenAI crossing this threshold deserves attention. Credit where it's due, they're handling it responsibly by restricting Astra's advanced cyber capability to a small coalition rather than releasing it broadly.But this isn't one company's problem to contain.

Once a model can find and exploit unknown flaws without a human in the loop, that capability doesn't stay exclusive for long. Open-weight and modified models typically trail the frontier by only months, and that's the reality defenders have to plan around now.

Static, signature-based defences were built for attacks that repeat. They weren't built for an adversary that generates a new one every time. Defenders need the same shift, systems that learn what normal looks like for every identity, human, machine, or AI agent, and flag and contain the moment something deviates, at machine speed.

The window to build that is open now. It won't stay that way once this capability is common instead of rare.

• Raghu Nandakumara, VP of Industry Strategy at Illumio:

With the Astra announcement, OpenAI is doubling down on monitoring the model's own behaviour – a response to the model "breakouts" seen over the past few months.

When Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, the core concern was the model falling into the wrong hands. OpenAI's answer goes further adding guardrails around the model's own reasoning and actions, regardless of the user's intent. The goal is to catch a model going rogue mid-task, not just stop it being misused at the outset.

The rest of this announcement can be summarised as ‘we have a new frontier model, and it’s more capable than the last one’.

I saw a lot of fun things at IFA 2026, but among the many halls full of tech, one experience has stuck with me the most. It was the Strutt ev1c personal mobility vehicle, which basically mashes up tech from robot vacuums and self-driving cars to create a wheelchair/mobility scooter that can take you from room-to-room in your home without you touching the controls.

Equipped with cameras and LiDAR to sense the world around it, the ev1c really has two key sets of interesting features that come from these sensors: being able to fully self-drive within a known and mapped environment; and being able to offer automatic measures for safer use when you're out and under manual control.

Within the home, what it does at first is exactly what robovacs do: it takes a map of the whole area using LiDAR. The system is able to distinguish temporary, moving objects (people and pets) from static objects (walls and tables) — that's obviously important for mapping, but also means you can see what it 'sees' at all times on a little touchscreen on the armrest.

Once the map is created, you can then choose different areas to set as "Waypoints", basically giving you a menu of places you want it to self-drive you between. So you can use the touchscreen or the connected phone app to select a waypoint, and the chair just starts driving you, no controls necessary from there.

You can also trigger waypoints using voice, so you can tell the app "Take me to my bed" and as long as you have a waypoint called "my bed", it'll take you there.

This also means that if you're someone who doesn't need the vehicle all the time, though you may sometimes need it suddenly. You can use the app to have the ev1c bring itself to you, even if you'd left it on the other side of the house.

There's another feature that the team is testing right now for people who only need the vehicle intermittently, which is a "Follow me" mode — so you can start walking, and the ev1c will just trundle along behind you. If you need it, there it is, ready to go.

I tried that out at Strutt's booth, and while it was buggy at this stage, it did work — and would probably take some getting used to, because having something quietly following right behind you is pretty unnerving.

However, the self-driving side of the tech is ready to go, and when I tried that side out as well, I was truly impressed. The chair can be a little jerky when it's turning around in a small space, but that's really the only issue I could take from it, from my admittedly limited demo.

Starting at one end of the fake 'living space' in Strutt's booth, it steered me around a dining table, through a narrow gap towards a doorway, through the doorway, and then up to the couch. It finished with me facing the couch, for convenience, and it didn't touch a single thing along the way — no brushing a dining chair or clipping wheels against the door. I went across a rug as well as a hard floor, and that made no difference.

I also tried it in its more manual modes, with the 'Co-Pilot' feature switched on. This is the 'smart' system for when you're driving it yourself, and the key thing it adds is object avoidance. The simplest benefit is that the system won't let you crash into anything — Strutt's team told me to drive towards them at full speed, so I did, and the vehicle just stopped as we got a few inches away. It wasn't like slamming on the brakes — it just ramped down and left me stationary.

Other handy features for when you're in manual control include a reversing camera (with a line of your steering trajectory) and a 'cruise control' mode so you can just set it to go in a straight line at a set speed, and you can relax your hand.

But there is also a 'Co-Pilot+' more advanced assistive mode, and the interesting feature the team showed me here was an alternative to the auto-stop, in which the system will look for space and actually steer around the blockage, rather than just braking when you get too close.

Perhaps more useful in the day-to-day use of the chair, is that this mode will just finesse your driving, so if you're at risk of clipping the door in your home it'll automatically adjust the steering to make sure it doesn't happen — it's like the steering assist in Mario Kart.

I tried the same demo of driving into someone, but this time the ev1c steered in an arc around them, then returned me to my original position on the path and carried on forward — but my hand had just stayed on pushing the controls forward the whole time, I didn't contribute any motion to the steering.

As for the vehicle's general specs, it's capable of going up to 8mph, with a range of around 20 miles on its battery, depending on the terrain. It can handle grass and gravel, as well as inclines of up to 13° (23%) and two-inch curb heights, all powered by a four-wheel drive system.

The ev1c breaks down into five pieces for packing into car, and Strutt told me that it's looking into offering a backup battery bag, so you can hot-swap when away from home if you want support for longer distances.

It's officially priced at $7,499 / £5,995 / AU$9,999, though the actual price you pay might be affected by local schemes to make mobility vehicles more affordable.

It's a lot of money, though I assumed it was going to be even more expensive than that. I'm not someone who uses a personal mobility vehicle, so all my opinions here need to be taken in that context, but I was really impressed with how the chair works in practice, how it's been designed and built, and what it can do — it even picked up one of our 'IFA 2026 Best in Show' awards.

Plug-in (or balcony) solar tech has been booming in Europe for a while now, but it seems as though the rest of the world is slowly catching on: these kits are now legal in the UK, while an increasing number of US states are approving them too.

The simplicity is the main appeal of these solar panels, which can be plugged straight into a standard outlet in your home, without any expensive roof mounting or time-consuming planning permission required. Any energy that you generate from free sunlight is used immediately for the appliances in your home, cutting down your electricity bill.

Now that the tech is legal in a growing number of places, we're seeing more and more certified kits and compatible batteries appear on sale. During our travels around the IFA 2026 tech expo in Berlin, the products below particularly caught our eye.

There's one big caveat here — in the UK and US, grid-tied plug-in batteries aren't currently a legal part of plug-in solar, so in those regions the products below will need professional installation (which slightly negates that 'plug-in' descriptor).

Still, there are hopes that plug-in batteries could soon be legalized in the UK and elsewhere, which means the bill-cutting products below could be a glimpse of our home energy future...

1. EcoFlow Stream 2 / Ocean 2

EcoFlow has been in the energy storage game for some time of course, and brings all of its expertise to bear on these two new products. Starting with the 3-5kWh Stream 2 home battery, we've got support for up to 5,000W of solar input and 3,000W of electricity output, so enough to power washing machines, dishwashers, and the like.

It's modular too, so you can stack these up like Lego bricks as your energy needs change, and the units offer four MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) inputs if you need to connect panels in different spots. There's also an AC version if you already have solar panels installed and just need somewhere to store the electricity.

As for the Ocean 2, this is a fitted home battery, replacing the PowerOcean line. It does up to 30 kWh with a single inverter, and can provide backup power if the grid goes down with an instant switchover so you'll never even notice. Both require professional installation, but you can take the Stream 2 with you when you move.

2. Anker Solix Solarbank Max

On to the Anker Solix Solarbank Max, and this impressive-looking home battery brings with it 7 kWh of storage capacity, which should be enough to keep an entire home going overnight (assuming it hits the average figure for usage).

Unlike the AC version that's already on the market, this can connect directly to your solar panels, and it can take on 10,000W of solar input across three MPPTs. You can also expand the capacity up to 42 kWh with extra batteries.

You do need to get an electrician to fit this to your home power network, just to avoid anything blowing up, but Anker reckons you'll have saved on up front costs and be getting pure profit within 2.5 years — though your mileage may vary.

3. Zendure SolarFlow 2400 Pro / 4000 Mix Pro

The Zendure SolarFlow 2400 Pro and 4000 Mix Pro aren't entirely new, but they were shown off at IFA, and we're including them here. Again the emphasis is on simple, easy to manage solar energy storage: the SolarFlow 2400 Pro can take on 4,800W of solar input across four MPPTs, and offers 2,400W bi-directional AC power (hence the name).

With the SolarFlow 4000 Mix Pro, we've got capacity for 13,000W of solar input across two MPPTs, and you get (you've guessed it) up to 4,000W of bi-directional power, so it's a more heavy duty operator and larger unit.

Both these batteries can be connected to plug-in solar panels as well as retrofitted to panels that are already on your roof, though obviously the SolarFlow 4000 Mix Pro can handle more of them.

4. DJI Power 2000 and solar bundle

We were very impressed with the DJI Power 2000 portable power station when it launched last year, and at IFA 2026 it told us that it's going to turn this into a fully fledged balcony solar system — complete with its own solar panels and a microinverter for connecting to a standard power network.

Details are a bit thin on the ground though, as we don't know how much it's going to cost or exactly how it's going to work. Apparently the bundled kit is going to be sold in Germany first, with no word yet on an international expansion.

What we do know is that DJI has the technical experience and nous to put together one of the most compelling plug-in solar packages out there — and one which you can pick up and take camping with you. We'll be keeping a close eye on this.

5. Bluetti Balco 260 / Balco 500

While the kits were unveiled shortly before IFA 2026, we've been able to get a good look at the Balco 260 and Balco 500 at the expo. They offer 2,400W (through four MPPTs) and 4,300W (through a single MPPT) of solar input, respectively.

As with the Zendure models, they're basically an entry level and more advanced version of the same pack: They can be hooked up to balcony solar or rooftop solar as needed, and connected to the mains electricity network in your home.

We were at the launch of these units back in May, and there was a big emphasis on simplicity throughout. The aim here is to reduce as many barriers to entry as possible, which is helped through the changes in regulations now happening in the US and UK.

I hold my hands up. I got this one wrong. In 2022, when Garmin announced the headline feature for the Garmin Fenix 7X was an LED flashlight, I might have had a bit of a chuckle to myself about it.

Since moving to multiple model sizes for its premium outdoor smartwatch, the largest ‘X’ models quickly came to represent the introduction of exciting, cutting-edge innovations that then start to filter down to the rest of the best Garmin watches. But I wasn;t convinced a multi-LED flashlight on the top of the watch case was something prospective Garmin watch owners should get excited about.

Garmin claimed it would be a “game-changer for sport, adventure and daily life”. In the early weeks of testing the 7X, that wasn’t my experience. I’d quite quickly written it off as rather gimmicky. The question I kept on asking myself was; ‘why would I choose it over reaching for the pretty good LED flashlight I have on my phone?’

It probably wasn’t until being out of that testing bubble of a month with the 7X and I started simply living with it, that my opinion began to change. I was using it more and more each week.

It probably wasn’t until being out of that testing bubble of a month with the 7X and I started simply living with it, that my opinion began to change. I was using it more and more each week.

It started to become the flashlight I used when trying to quietly hunt out charging cables at night moving around my flat without turning on the main light and getting a telling-off. I didn’t need to be a further nuisance and look for my phone because I already had an exceptionally bright light on my wrist. Then it became the source of light on darker sections of my nighttime running routes or helping me to navigate my way back home from the gym. When I was dabbling in some DIY, it was less awkward to use than a phone to line up fixings.

I began to appreciate that Garmin didn’t just slap on a flashlight because it could. It wanted to show how useful a wrist-based source of light could be. I now also had a flashlight I could set to strobe or match my running cadence to improve visibility. It could also switch from white to red light for a still bright, yet less intrusive way to illuminate what lay ahead and around me.

As Garmin moved to share the flashlight love to other watches in its range, it also continued to evolve its abilities to become smarter. Now when I went out for a run or walk after sunset, the watch would display a prompt to turn on the strobe mode to make sure I was thinking about staying seen as day turned into night. There’s a distress mode that when set up from the Garmin Connect app, can display emergency contact information on screen while flashing an SOS light pattern.

It’s no big surprise that rival watchmakers thought it was a great idea too. Suunto, Coros, Amazfit and Polar now all have torch-toting smartwatches.

Are there any downsides of having a flashlight on a smartwatch? Well, it does mean creating more space on the watch case for it. That’s likely why so far it’s mainly been included on larger more rugged watches like the Suunto Vertical 2, Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro and the Polar Street X, although Garmin has managed to plant it onto its slimmer Forerunner and Venu series watches.

Another consideration is battery life. Running a flashlight while also using GPS or any other onboard watch sensors will contribute to that battery drain, but unless you’re planning to keep it switched on continuously for hours, I’m not sure the type of battery life drop you’ll experience is going to be anything to be massively worried about.

How could it become even smarter? I think Garmin in particular has shown it can be more ingrained with your current environment or the time of day. Further integrating with safety features is an obvious one. Especially for anyone that goes on solo adventures. Could we get a UV mode or even be one strong enough to start a fire for that added outdoor appeal? As smartwatch makers focus on making brighter watch displays, should the same happen for the built-in flashlight?

When it feels like there’s more of a focus on breaking new health tracking ground or cramming our lives and screens with more metrics , it’s easy to forget about some of the simpler gadgets that makes a smartwatch a useful thing to own. I’d now put the LED flashlight in the bracket of things I hope to see on any new smartwatch. We’ve not seen one on an Apple Watch Ultra model yet, so maybe that’s to come. I’ve definitely seen the light and it’s in the form of a feature I thought had gimmick written all over it. How wrong I was.

Indian tech brand Noise has teamed up with Bose for a brand new pair of open earbuds, the Noise Master Buds Open.

These clip-on buds are a first for Noise in the open ear segment, but join its existing Master series lineup, that includes over-ear headphones and in-ear buds — which were also built alongside Bose.

And lucky me — I’ve already tried the Master Buds Open for myself. I got hands on with the brand new open earbuds at IFA Berlin 2026, and spoke with Noise about its collaboration with Bose and the fancy features crammed into its latest creation.

Bose sound at an affordable price… kinda

Allow me to start with something of a disclaimer. The Master Buds Open aren’t a fully fledged Bose product, they simply feature ‘Sound by Bose’ technology. This means that the audio giant helped to tune the sound on the Master Buds Open, and there’s a specific Sound by Bose EQ option for the model.

We’ve seen other brands use Sound by Bose tech in the last year or so, with Baseus making use of a partnership in its Inspire line (including the XH1 headphones), and Skullcandy teaming up with the ANC giant for products including the Method 360 ANC (which we rated very highly).

However, Noise has a closer relationship with Bose than most, as the latter has invested in the Indian company across recent years, and the pair have already developed a number of audio products together, including the Noise Master Buds 2 and Master Buds Max.

Although the new Master Buds Open don’t quite offer the exceptional build and sound quality we’ve come to expect from products like the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds Gen 2, this collaboration certainly heightens the perceived value of Noise’s affordable audio gear, and helps it to stand out as a relatively recent entrant in competitive markets like the US, UK, and EU.

Getting hands on

Anyway, let’s talk about my time getting hands-on with the Noise Master Buds Open.

I have to say, when the buds were brought over to me, they made an excellent first impression. They come in a beautiful case with appealing metallic details, and the buds themselves look incredibly sleek and almost futuristic — especially in the slick Silver colorway.

In use, the Master Buds Open also felt supremely comfortable. I find that some clip-on earbuds have the tendency to either feel a bit tight, or almost too loose, but in my short time with the Master Buds Open they seemed to master the clip-on feel, with a secure yet comfortable fit and almost weightless on-ear sensation.

Sonically, the Master Buds Open performed about as well as I expected, although I should preface my thoughts by noting that the unit I tried was a prototype, and so the Master Buds Open may sound a little different at launch.

Naturally, I made use of the Sound by Bose EQ option, and I’d say the earbuds performed decently overall. A representative played me a bit of I’m Alive by Céline Dion, and I was treated to clear vocals, with fairly prominent bass (as far as open ears go), and well-separated guitars in the mid-range.

I also had the chance to play some songs of my choosing, and switched over to Can’t Resist by Jamback. In this house track, I realized that treble was pretty forward, meaning that drums higher in the frequency range were particularly prominent. Bass was also decently weighted, although you won’t get the pounding low-end that some of the best wireless earbuds can provide.

Was I blown away by the audio on offer from the Master Buds Open? Perhaps not — at least not at this stage. But they did perform pretty well overall, especially when you consider their price. I was told that the Master Buds Open will release for about €119 (around $140 / £100), which is relatively affordable — especially when you consider that Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds have a list price of $299 / £299 / AU$449.95.

A surprising highlight

While the Master Buds Open will undoubtedly face stiff competition from similarly priced rivals like the Anker Soundcore AeroClip, they did impress me with their comfort and looks.

But one thing struck me more than any other: their surprisingly feature-rich companion app. Not only did I find Noise’s app to be incredibly easy to use and navigate, but I also couldn’t believe how much functionality it had to offer.

There’s a spatial audio setting, designed to offer “dynamic and realistic” audio, as well as a Gaming Mode if you need low-latency audio — a nice touch for keen mobile gamers.

On top of this, the Master Buds Open have customizable touch controls, multi-point, Find My Device capabilities, and a Focus Mode, which locks the buds’ controls when you just want to zone in on your tunes and avoid accidental touch commands. Of course, there are also EQ settings, including a fully customizable equalizer, and mics built in for taking calls on the go.

Noise was also keen to show me that the Master Buds have a built-in AI assistant. This enables you to ask questions with your voice, read chat history, and transcribe meetings or discussions. That’s quite a lot of functionality for buds in this price-range.

While there’s no specific launch date for the Master Buds Open just yet, Noise has said that they’re set to launch on their website and with some major online retailers from late September 2026.

Sonos recently announced that it's launching a new soundbar to fill the gap between the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) and the Sonos Arc Ultra — it's called (perhaps predictably) the Sonos Beam Ultra. It's launching on September 29th 2026, and it costs $699 / £699 / AU$1,099.

It's small, like the regular Beam, but it features nine drivers to deliver 7.1.2 channels of Dolby Atmos, including upfiring drivers (which the Beam doesn't have).

Sonos' promise is that it's a bigger, more expansive, and meatier home theater experience than the regular Beam, and I got a chance to listen to a demo — though we'll have a full and in-depth review later when we can test more thoroughly.

But my time with the Beam Ultra was enough to really impress me. We started by listening to some music in Dolby Atmos, and the soundbar was extremely good at separating the sound from the hardware — the audio felt spaced across the whole room in front of me, rather than feeling like it was emitting from a compact soundbar.

Bass dispersion was really impressive, as was a feeling of 'airiness', in a good way, to vocals and positional instrument effects. Every element felt like it was able to float in the room very naturally and individually.

Switching to something bass-heavy, which is an area Sonos says it specifically wanted to improve, what stood out to me was the weight of the mid-bass. Often, in smaller speakers, this is where things fall off — they might be tuned to give good punch at their lowest point, but can't always maintain good strength as they move towards the mid-range.

There was no problem with that here: bass felt really solid throughout the range. Being a small soundbar, it's not like it can hit hard on really low-end frequencies, but there's loads of presence across the bass, so it feels satisfying.

Switching to movies and TV, we watched a clip from the Apple TV+ show Widow's Bay, emphasizing the improvement to the clarity of the center channel — dialogue came through clear over background noise.

But the real test was watching Sinners, in the big music scene of I Lied to You, which has become a common demo scene for companies to use. I was so impressed by the positional Dolby Atmos effects of elements that were way off to the side — the width was far better than other small soundbars, and was better than most big soundbars I've tested.

There's a real sense of instruments being positioned right in the far forward corners of the room, a good six feet beyond the edges of the TV we were watching, let alone beyond the edges of the small soundbar.

However, when we get it in to review, I want to test the height channels more deliberately. I wasn't feeling a lot of height effect from the demo — which might have been for a few reasons, so I can't cast judgment against the Beam Ultra for it yet. We'll be keeping an ear out for it, though.

I also got to try the same scene using the Sonos system's new ability to add some portable speakers as rear satellite speakers for surround sound. Two Sonos Play speakers were brought in and placed just behind me, and they instantly connected to the soundbar without needing the app at all.

A little tone emitted from the Beam Ultra to indicate that the Plays had connected themselves, but all the detection and connection is done invisibly by the system, and it seemed really slick.

The Plays made for a really good set of rear speakers in the demo, too — I got really clear positional effects from them, and they have a great dynamic range for movies.

Sonos confirmed that with the Plays (or a pair of Sonos Move 2 speakers, or static rear options such as the Sonos Era 100) connected, it can describe the system as a 7.1.4-channel setup, though the extra two height channels will be virtualized.

I was surprised that Sonos went with the small size of the Beam for a soundbar to sit below the Arc Ultra in its range, because I assumed that would mean a compromise on how expansive it would be — that's definitely not a concern for me anymore, and I'm really looking forward to hearing how it handles our movie library in our test rooms.

In the packed halls of Gamescom with so many games to see, it's easy to get tetchy if a session goes on for too long when there's another appointment you have to rush off to see. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve was a rare exception where I wished I had more to go on than I was given.

On one hand, the Ace Combat series' appeal is a straightforward one. It captures the thrill of flying a fighter jet locked in aerial dogfights without the intimidating knowledge of actually operating an aircraft like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but with more control than a rail shooter like Star Fox.

A new instalment coming just a few years after a new Top Gun movie is even more tantalising for anyone eager to take to the skies like Tom Cruise.

Back to Strangereal

That the series also takes place in an alternate world called Strangereal, which nonetheless looks like our own, means you can enjoy the immersive realism without being drawn into the awkward politics of any real-world conflicts.

For the mission I got to play, titled 'The Fall of the Numbered Fleets', there's already a sense of a meaty narrative to get into, as my squadron, Joker Flight of the Federation of Central Usea (FCU), is tasked with launching an offensive to strike fleets belonging to the invading forces from the Republic of Sotoa.

An added wrinkle is that you also have to contend with a once-friendly squadron nicknamed the Sharks, who have recently defected.

This drama plays out during the mission; banter zips between your fellow wingmen Baxter and Tasha over the radio as you approach the targets on Newfield Island before being interrupted by enemy Sotoan chatter when you manage to deal damage to their fleet and supplies. And of course, it's only a matter of time before the Sharks turn up as sparks fly between factions that wouldn't be out of place in an anime if it wasn't for the game's realistic aesthetic.

Although you have targets to destroy, there are also different approaches you can take to tackle an objective, such as customising your loadout at the beginning. While there's a lot of information on the UI that can feel intimidating, it felt readable when a missile is definitely locked onto a target, while an outline below makes it clear where your bomb will drop when trying to sink ships.

There's a simple satisfaction to see the green display change from 'Hit' to 'Destroyed,' but if you really want to showboat, you can even switch to the camera looking back to enjoy the explosion in your wake.

Cloud control

If 2019's Ace Combat 7: Unknown Skies had already set a new bar for the series' realistic visuals and combat aircraft, then Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve raises it again, not just with Unreal Engine 5 but also with Bandai Namco Aces' own upgraded Cloudly tech.

That said, I spent most of my time a little too close to the ground (a prompt repeatedly telling me to pull up) when trying to aim for targets on land and sea to properly experience getting into the clouds. Yet that showcased another visual leap too, as all the objects you see are rendered at a 1:1 scale. So instead of flying over flat textures or miniatures, you really do feel immersed in the world. That also allows for setpieces such as a moment when you can fly your aircraft through a tunnel to reach an airbase stationed on the other side.

But for anyone who enjoyed the sheer action spectacle of Top Gun: Maverick, it wasn't the action alone that made it a great watch; it was all the other human drama unfolding in between the training, so that you become invested in the characters you want to succeed. Even though I'm not sure any of the characters in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve are likely to have the same star power and charisma as Tom Cruise, that is something I still wish I could have seen more of in this relatively brief Gamescom demo.

As the first entry to have its story play out through a first-person perspective, it's surely meant to provide a more immersive way to spend time in the company of your wingmen, not just during mission briefings but also when catching up in the canteen or other bouts of R&R.

Having the in-mission banter is nonetheless also a key element, as are the small narrative choices you can make, such as in the demo where Baxter wants one of the Sharks pilots captured alive and asks that you only shoot around his cockpit, to which you can agree, or not.

But with the game's launch not far away, and arriving in time for the series' 30th anniversary, it's looking like Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is going to soar to a whole new plane.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve releases on October 2, 2026, for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S. Advance access is available from September 28 for those who pre-order the deluxe edition.

Following the aftermath of the Manchester Airports Group cyberattack - where hackers made off with the data of 8.7 million people - the hackers have now posted the entire database for sale on the dark web.

The group behind the attack, FulcrumSec, attempted to get Manchester Airports Group (MAG) to pay for the security of the database, promising that it wouldn’t be released if the company paid a settlement. But as all companies should do when faced with extortion, MAG didn’t play ball.

Now FulcrumSec wants to try and maximise the damage of the cyberattack, and has listed the database containing email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations and postcodes online in the hopes a fellow hacking group will find value in the data.

What happens when extortion fails, and why didn’t MAG pay?

In the past, when companies faced ransomware attacks or data breaches, they would sometimes quietly pay the hackers for their silence.

Companies feared serious reputational harm and loss of business would cost more in the long run than the perpetrators were asking for. But this created an incentive for hackers to carry out more attacks.

After all, if companies aren’t kicking up a fuss about being hacked or reporting the attack to the authorities, hacking groups can launch more attacks on other companies that are completely unaware of their tactics.

In order to counter this, authorities and cyber experts from around the world issued guidance that under no circumstances should companies pay for the safe return of their data. By removing the incentive from ransomware attacks and data breaches, the hope is that hackers will get bored or not see enough ROI, and therefore stop.

But the 500GB database of data on over 8.7 million people is ripe pickings for other cybercriminals looking to launch highly specific phishing attacks or scam campaigns. While FulcrumSec may not make any money from the attack, they can seriously enhance the damage of the attack by offering the data for free for others to use.

A successful scam or phishing attack can steal banking and financial details, allowing other groups to steal even more money off the back of the attack.

Expert perspectives on MAG extortion and customer data

• Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress:

While Manchester Airports Group followed official guidance by refusing to pay the ransom, the release of 8.7 million records creates an immediate risk for passengers.

We expect other criminals to use this freely available database of vehicle registrations, postcodes and contact details to craft highly convincing phishing attacks.

Anyone who has used parking, lounges or Wi-Fi at these airports must treat unexpected messages about their travel with extreme caution.

• Muhammad Yahya Patel, vCISO and cybersecurity advisor for EMEA at Huntress

The "free release" model is deliberately designed to maximise harm and reputational damage as a warning to the next target.

Publishing almost nine million records for free isn't just punishment for MAG it's a marketing campaign aimed at every other organisation watching.

Pay up, or your customers' data gets handed to every fraudster and scammer on the internet at no cost. Refusing to pay a ransom is the right call. But nearly nine million people are now paying a different price for a decision that was never theirs to make.

• Danny Jenkins, Co Founder & CEO at ThreatLocker

Unfortunately, once data is made public, it can’t be hidden again. The most important thing consumers can do is focus on basic cyber hygiene. Use a unique password for every website, learn how to identify phishing scams, and monitor your credit report.

Be highly suspicious of emails that create a sense of urgency, offer something that seems too good to be true, or ask you to reset your password.

When in doubt, look up the phone number for the alleged sender yourself, rather than using a number provided in the email, and call to confirm whether the communication is genuine.

• Brian Higgins, security specialist at Comparitech:

Whilst the airports breached in this attack don't appear to have had any financial data compromised the risk to affected or associated customers is very real. With so much other information freely available in the wild it is vital that airport users stay highly vigilant for some time to come.

Any and all unsolicited contact; whether online, by telephone or even home visit approaches, should be viewed as suspicious. Never engage until you've taken time to check credentials/veracity etc.

Research advice from trusted sources like the NCA or Information Commissioner and share it with your family and friends. Look for ways to increase digital and physical security like two factor authentication on Apps and devices or Smart Home tech.

When this breach was first reported by the Manchester Evening News the comments were quite telling. Affected parties were quick to identify potential vulnerabilities over and above the breach of financial and banking details.

Home addresses, vehicle registrations and time spent away from home all add up to some excellent opportunities for criminal exploitation, not to mention the usual follow-up phishing campaigns common in this type of incident.

As AI makes data aggregation swift and easy consumers are waking up to the fact that criminals can monetise successful breaches in increasingly inventive ways. It’s no longer enough for data owning organisations to advise post-attack vigilance and turn to their backups.

Victim communities rightly expect better protected networks and systems over and above established norms. As the marketplace grows less fearful and more angry when breaches are made public we may see more emphasis on cyber crime prevention which can only be a good thing.

• Denis Calderone, CTO at Suzu Labs:

The 8.7 million number is attention-grabbing, but it deserves some context. MAG has confirmed that the vast majority of those records are email addresses collected through airport WiFi sign-ups.

A much smaller subset includes phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes from customers who actually completed parking or lounge bookings.

No payment data, no passwords, no passport information. So despite this affecting airports, which is obviously a sensitive subject, the actual data sensitivity for most affected individuals is relatively low.

What's more interesting to us from a technical standpoint is the attack path. MAG told The Register that attackers compromised one of their internal systems and then went on to steal files from a database hosted by a third party. That's a pivot upstream into a data provider, not downstream into operational systems.

What remains unclear is whether the data was exfiltrated directly from that third-party environment or whether it was pulled back through MAG's network first. That distinction matters for understanding where detection controls failed and who was responsible for monitoring the egress.

The UK's Civil Aviation Authority has a Cyber Assessment Framework for Aviation, developed with the NCSC, that mandates strict separation between IT systems and operational technology.

We don't know whether MAG was formally operating under that framework at the time of this incident, but I would be very interested to find out. Because the segmentation appears to have held here. Flight operations, baggage handling, terminal systems, etc., all were unaffected.

The lateral movement went upstream toward a data provider, not downstream toward the systems that keep planes in the air.

• Seemant Sehgal, CEO and Founder at BreachLock:

This data was initially collected because passengers needed a login, and somewhere along the way, the sensitivity of what was accumulating in that database stopped getting the same scrutiny as the network itself.

Vehicle registration details, postcodes, and contact information across three major airports are a profiling dataset, and whoever held it for ransom understood its value better than the organization storing it did.

Here at IFA 2026 I finally got to try the Xreal Aura glasses. They’re the tech you’d get if my Xreal One Pro and Samsung Galaxy XR had a baby, and their Fall 2026 release date can’t come soon enough.

While they can basically do everything an Android XR headset can do (more on that in a moment) the Xreal Aura is importantly a pair of smart glasses, with the lightness and comfort advantages you’d expect of that compared to a bulkier VR wearable.

They do boast some serious tech, despite the light weight. Including see-through 2K displays boasting a 70-degree field-of-view — up from the the 1,080p screens you’ll find from similar smart specs to come before — plus speakers tuned by Bose, a microphone for capturing what you say, and cameras that facilitate hand-tracking and tools like Circle to Search (which lets you Google search things you can see, by drawing a circle around it with your hand).

However the specs don’t include a battery or any processing power. This is instead housed in an external compute puck that also doubles as a track pad — scroll your finger across the surface and you’ll move a digital cursor you can use to interact with apps alongside hand-tracking controls.

This is how the glasses are able to be so comfortable, while still being incredibly capable.

One the Android XR side of things, these specs can — just like the Galaxy XR — access the Google Play Store to download dedicated XR and flat apps, let you enjoy content from your favorite streaming service on a giant virtual screen, engage with Gemini across your apps for assistance with a variety of tasks, and boot up Google Docs if you’re looking to be productive.

You can do these tasks all at the same time too, arranging virtual windows in the space in front of you.

With a USB-C Cable and compatible device — which includes most phones, laptops, tablets, and several consoles and handhelds — you can connect it to the glasses (via the puck) to have its screen appear as a window in front of you too.

In my demo I was watching the latest GTA 6 trailer while playing Hades on a Steam Deck. The windows appeared side-by-side in front of me, and I had Gemini watching me game so it could offer coaching (I’ve played plenty of Hades before so didn’t need the help, though the advice I was offered did seem decent).

When will it land?

It’s all very impressive and I cannot wait for these specs to be in my hand for a full-on review.

Speaking of, unfortunately Xreal hasn’t confirmed a release date or price for Aura. However its official website says it’ll be landing sometime this fall (Northern Hemisphere, so that’s September, October or November) and will cost no more than $1,500.

I hope the price will be as low as possible (even sub $1,000), though Xreal’s promise would still make it cheaper than a Galaxy XR headset, and there’s only so cheap we can expect XR tech to get — especially with the ongoing RAM crisis.

I’ll lay my cards on the table and admit that I wasn’t very familiar with Hohem before I arrived at IFA Berlin 2026. But interestingly, the Chinese tech company has revealed one of the most innovative products at the conference so far, in my view, with the Eyepic 2-in-1 Pocket Gimbal Camera.

This product, Hohem told me, is a real “first” — not only because it’s the company’s first actual camera, but because it’s what Hohem describes as “the world’s first 2-in-1 pocket gimbal camera”.

What sets this model apart from other compact video cameras? I got the chance to watch a demo and speak with Hohem about the Eyepic 2-in-1, and learn about its tech specs, features, and design quirks. Here’s everything you need to know.

It’s all about versatility

Hohem told me that the Eyepic is targeted at a more casual, everyday user or vlogger, rather than those looking to take professional-grade video. Even so, its capabilities are commendable.

It offers native 4K vertical video capture at up to 60fps, which is ideal for users who want to film a TikTok or Instagram Reel, for instance. But a Hohem representative showed me that by merely rotating the on-board 2.51-inch touchscreen, the camera will reorient, enabling you to seamlessly switch to capturing landscape video instead.

But it gets even better.

As I watched, the Hohem demonstrator swiftly removed the camera unit from the device, revealing that the Eyepic is capable of fully hands-free shooting. He attached the unit to a lanyard on his neck to film a video, and I can see this being incredibly useful for creators who are on the move. The camera unit is magnetic, so it could really be attached to all sorts of accessories, be that a tripod, a fridge…you name it.

What’s more, the camera is highly waterproof, and Hohem told me it can even withstand being around 10m (32.8ft) underwater if, say, you want to take a video while swimming or diving. I was also interested to find that when the camera is detached, the gimbal retracts and locks, and a user can view a 1080p live preview of the action on the Eyepic’s touchscreen.

From what I saw in the demo, it appeared that the Eyepic was more than able to capture smooth, high-res video in a flexible, versatile manner, and this could really help it stand out from top-tier rivals like DJI and Insta360. It can also capture video in slow motion, although Hohem said that this will likely be at a lower resolution, potentially around 1080p.

While Hohem wouldn’t reveal the Eyepic’s price just yet (trust me, I tried), I was told that the model is expected to launch around the time that CES 2027 kicks off, which is early 2027.

Due to a combination of a Gamescom trip, illness, and holiday, I'm sorry that there wasn't a crossword last week. I'm here to get things back on schedule now, though, with another of our regular little brainteasers. Enjoy!

This should be a fairly easy one to get things going again. Hopefully my setting skills haven't got too rusty in the last couple of weeks!

I did have a good time going back to Gamescom for the first time in about eight years to see something that's included in this week's puzzle — no spoilers if you're reading this first.

Outside of maybe Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, which got a much bigger reveal and an all-important release date announcement this week instead of at Gamescom, it felt like a fairly quiet event in terms of big news. Perhaps everyone is still nervous about being in the shadow of Grand Theft Auto 6, which is also getting the classic limited-edition DualSense treatment ahead of release.

Anyway, I best stop before I disappear into a rabbit hole of gaming yet again. Enjoy the puzzle!

Contains spoilers for Alice and Steve season 1

Don't worry Alice and Steve fans, the Hulu (Disney+ internationally) show is not leaving us on a cliffhanger. It's been renewed for another round, so rest assured, we should get some of those burning (no pun intended...) questions answered.

When we last saw everyone, they were in the middle of a chaotic wedding venue fire. In intense scenes, Alice saved Steve and jumped off the roof into a pool with him, with their fates left unknown. Even though Alice was furious that Steve was marrying her daughter, she still risked her life to help save his.

With a finale like that, we should all breathe a sigh of relief that we'll get to see what happens next. And by the sounds of things, we won't be disappointed.

Speaking of the renewal, Sophie Goodhart, creator and writer, said: “I am so thrilled that Alice and Steve has been given a second season. No one will be prepared for what happens next, especially not Alice and Steve.”

Read on to find out everything we know about Alice and Steve season 2.

Alice and Steve season 2 release date

Alice and Steve has only just been renewed, so a release date has not yet been confirmed. When I have more information about when it's expected to air on Hulu and Disney+.

The series was well received, with Lee Mason, VP, Scripted, Disney+ EMEA, praising the series after its renewal.” He said: “It’s been fantastic to see the rapturous reactions to ‘Alice and Steve’ from viewers at home. Sophie has created a distinctive and original comedy that is striking a chord and sparking debate with audiences across the country.

"I’m excited to see what mayhem Sophie and Clerkenwell have in store for our titular characters after that delicious cliffhanger – but we can expect more laughs, betrayal, and bad decisions in season two.”

Alice and Steve season 2 trailer: is there one?

No, it's too early for a trailer yet, but I'll keep you updated once one is available.

If I had to speculate, the trailer should immediately pick up after the fire, where we can hopefully learn the fates of those caught up in it. I really can't wait, I need to know if everyone made it out alive...

Alice and Steve season 2 cast speculation

If everyone reprises their roles or survives the fire, we should get the core cast back on our screens in season 2. Should that happen, here's the full line-up we'll expect to see in Alice and Steve season 2.

• Nicola Walker as Alice
• Jemaine Clement as Steve
• Yali Topol Margalith as Izzy, Alice's daughter
• Joel Fry as Daniel, Alice's husband
• Tyrese Eaton-Dyce as Dom, Alice's son
• Marcia Warren as Val, Alice's mother

However, casts can change, so if any of these aren't coming back, I'll update you. Fingers crossed we'll see them all!

Alice and Steve season 2 story synopsis and speculation

Considering season 1's cliffhanger, it's likely the fire will be a key focus at least for the first episode of season 2. The scene cut to black before we could see if Alice and Steve made it out of the venue alive, so we really need to learn what happened to them.

If that wasn't enough drama, there's so much more. Izzy is pregnant, initially believing it was Steve's. As it happens, the baby's father is her ex, Yannis, but Steve has insisted he still wants to be involved in the child's life. But something tells me it won't quite be this plain sailing, especially if Izzy's ex arrives back on the scene.

We haven't seen Yannis on screen yet, so there's a chance he could become a new, problematic character when season 2 picks up.

Since the mass adoption of CCTV, we have accepted — for the most part — giving up a degree of personal privacy in exchange for public safety. But are we prepared to hand that same power to everyday citizens, all in the name of fashion?

In 2025 alone, over 7 million people bought Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. This rapid adoption has coincided with an alarming rise in covert harassment, prompting public venue bans and calls to ban sales entirely.

Yet these glasses are just the most well-known product in a broader cultural shift experts are calling the "chicification of surveillance."

From smart doorbells to camera-equipped smart cars — as well as rumors of camera-fitted AirPods — the latest tech is quietly turning citizens into passive, continuous monitors of each other.

As the distinction between fashion and surveillance blurs, is this another acceptable trade-off for innovation and convenience, or is it time to rethink our entire approach to public privacy?

Fashion accessory or surveillance tool?

For many tech companies, combining AI with audio and video sensors represents a huge opportunity to make seamless products. The major benefits? Better accessibility, usability, and, sometimes, even security.

Take smart glasses, for example. These intelligent wearables offer clear benefits for users, such as live translations, on-the-go content creation, and hands-free commands. These advantages are particularly important for people with disabilities, offering tools that boost everyday independence.

Yet mainstream adoption relies on more than just usefulness. And to position smart hardware as everyday lifestyle items, tech firms are increasingly turning to the fashion world.

Meta, for example, launched a major campaign featuring Kylie Jenner to promote its Ray-Ban smart glasses. Speaking to Glossy, Meta’s Vice President of Fashion, Eva Chen, explained that the new frames are built "to blend into and be a part of your personal style."

This strategy illustrates what digital rights advocates say is a deliberate reframing of surveillance tools.

Lauren Hendry Parsons, Director of Communications at the Mozilla Foundation, notes that tech companies and influencers are shifting how the public views constant recording.

How? "Turning what would previously have been private moments or a level of recording that would be quite distasteful or shocking into something cool, fashionable or, in some way, desirable," she told TechRadar.

While acknowledging the genuine value these devices offer for accessibility, Hendry Parsons argues that behind there is a hidden motivation: "This is all about collecting more data, encouraging more people to collect more data."

Parsons is not alone in warning against the "chicification of surveillance."

AI ethicist and digital rights educator Catharina Doria also believes that what she calls the "coolification of surveillance" serves tech companies' growing need for personal data in the age of artificial intelligence.

"We stop thinking about the data that we're giving away because it's cool," Doria told TechRadar. "The data is being created, collected, and I would assume it will be used by them to improve their products," she added.

But how exactly do smart gadgets collect our data? And what’s the real impact on our privacy?

The hidden cost of passive recording

While smart glasses have been criticized for their potential to covertly record people, many emerging wearables — from AI pendants to sensor-equipped earbuds — do not record visual footage at all.

Take Nothing’s recently released earbuds, which allow users to take an instant "Audio Snapshot" of their environment. While audio-only, the feature still raises eavesdropping concerns, even with alerts intended to notify others when recording is active.

And even without cameras or microphones, many smart devices still pose a threat to public privacy as they continuously harvest environmental data to train AI models.

For Hendry Parsons, this continuous logging raises some important questions:

"What I worry about with this sort of thing is: are the sensors continuously on or user-triggered? What outputs are being retained, linked to an account, or a location? What metadata is being collected and put together with this data? Is it being used to train models?"

Products like Alexa have previously blurred the boundaries between privacy and convenience behind closed doors. Now, as surveillance chic moves into public spaces, those risks multiply.

While buying a wearable may be your right and choice, that choice is increasingly impacting others around you — processing the voices, movements, and behaviors of bystanders without their knowledge or consent.

As Doria puts it, "When you're walking on the streets, and someone passes you with smart earbuds, smart glasses, and smart whatever, it is still your face, still your voice, still you. Suddenly, you don't have that control anymore because a third party is deciding that for you."

This raises the question: can we still exercise our data protection rights in the age of surveillance chic?

NEW: Leave No Trace — A weekly newsletter on digital privacy and online surveillance.

Leave No Trace investigates the companies and governments putting our digital freedom at risk — and the people fighting back.

📩 Subscribe now to get every edition delivered to your inbox every Friday, launching this September.

Why current privacy laws fail in public spaces

While recording in public is not inherently illegal, data protection frameworks like Europe's GDPR grant citizens specific agency over their personal data through the main principles of transparency, consent, and data minimization.

The expansion of always-on, wearable sensors creates a clear regulatory gap. Existing privacy laws were designed primarily for centralized, internet-based data processing — not for thousands of individuals continuously capturing ambient public data as they walk down the street.

The risks aren't always visible, either. While smart glasses are relatively easy to spot, sensor-equipped earbuds and smart vehicles operate far more discreetly.

How can a bystander realistically exercise their legal rights when they have no way of knowing the device next to them is actively monitoring their voice, image, or location?

While lawmakers struggle to keep pace, digital rights advocates argue that manufacturers must take responsibility before products hit store shelves. Reactive fixes — such as Meta disabling camera functions on modified devices — are a start, but experts argue guardrails belong in the design phase.

For Parsons, that requires building hardware around a private-by-design ethos: "This means very thoughtful ephemeral data processing, strict purpose limits, no secondary use, and really independently verifiable protections," she told TechRadar.

AI ethicist Doria believes that tech companies should undergo rigorous audits before launching a new product in the market. A similar, strict framework to what currently regulates pharmaceutical and food manufacturers.

"We shouldn't be allowing tech companies to create technology for the sake of 'innovation,' push it into the market, and harm people. If they want to create something that is amazing, awesome, and great for everyone, they should make the appeal, we check the appeal, and only then are they able to push it," Doria told TechRadar.

The price of progress?

The debate around "surveillance chic" ultimately hinges on how we define innovation — and whether we are willing to trade our privacy for the latest style.

According to Doria, if 'moving fast and breaking things' compromises human safety, dignity, and life, then societal well-being must be prioritized over profit. "We have to start asking, what actually is this 'innovation,' who is it benefiting, and who is it leaving behind?”

Yet while lawmakers debate regulation and manufacturers introduce haphazard guardrails, the power remains with us.

Big Tech may control production and influencers may drive trends, but consumers hold the ultimate leverage: voting with our wallets to declare that our right to privacy is not for sale.

• Fujifilm unveils XF 400mm F4.5 R LM OIS WR telephoto prime lens
• It's equivalent 609mm focal length is ideal for bird photography
• The lens is weather-sealed, weighs 1.2kg and costs $3,200 / £2,499 / AU$4,949

Fujifilm camera gear is better known for its retro looks than its wildlife and sports photography prowess, but the company is looking to close the gap with Sony, Canon and Nikon through the launch of a new super telephoto prime lens — the new XF 400mm F4.5 R OIS LM WR lens.

It's designed for the Fujifilm X series of crop-sensor (APS-C) cameras, such as the X-T5 and X-H2S, and has an equivalent focal length of 609mm and bright maximum aperture that make it a prime candidate for bird photography.

I had a special hands-on session with the lens ahead of its September 4 announcement, pairing it with Fujifilm's speediest mirrorless camera, the X-H2S, to photograph birds of prey in the grounds of a stately home in the UK. Could the camera and lens surprise me? You bet!

About the Fujifilm XF 400mm F4.5 R OIS LM WR lens

The new 400mm F4.5 lens isn't actually the longest in Fujifilm's XF range — that accolade goes to the 500mm F5.6 R LM OIS WR (equivalent 762mm focal length). However, it's arguably the one that Fujifilm bird photographers have been waiting for, and it's compatible with the company's 1.4x and 2.0x teleconverters which can extend that reach (at the cost of reduced maximum aperture).

Fujifilm had both lenses at the event it was hosting for the 400mm lens hands-on, and the design of the two optics is strikingly similar, as hinted by the nomenclature. 'R' denotes an aperture ring is present, 'LM' that autofocus is powered by a linear motor, OIS that they're optically stabilized (the 400mm is rated at providing 5.5EV of stabiliztion) and 'WR' tells us that the lenses are weather resistant.

Boy, did I need that weather resistance — there was incessant, light, sideways rain for much of the photography experience, and the 400mm stood up to the task just fine (better than the birds did).

It's also equipped with a focus limiter with Full or 7m to infinity options — using the latter improved my hit ratio of in-focus shots of the birds in flight, because it removes the minimum 2.75m focus distance up to 7m from the range the linear motors scan for.

The lenses are similar in size and in weight too, but by weighing 1,245g and measuring 240mm in length, the 400mm F4.5 is slightly smaller and lighter — impressively so for a lens of this focal length and maximum aperture.

It also comes with a tripod collar, a loop to securely attach a strap, plus a mighty lens hood — all features I'd hope for in a serious super-telephoto prime.

The shooting experience

I'll be the first to admit it, but I struggled getting a single usable photo at the start of the session. Changing a few camera and lens settings helped; using the focus limiter, selecting a wide autofocus area and the bird detection autofocus mode, and then shutter priority (set to a minimum 1/1250sec) with auto ISO.

The bottom line is that tracking birds in flight requires true skill, real understanding of the subject (and a slice of luck), especially if you're new to it. This proved to be one of the toughest photography tests, and for the first 30 minutes I had nothing to show for my efforts.

We switched to some portraits of the birds which gave me the chance to get close up, and to take comparison shots at the various aperture settings (which proved to me how sharp the lens is even at its maximum f/4.5 aperture). Then I suggested to the Walks with Hawks group hosting the session that we started the birds off from a longer distance, giving more room in the frame to begin with as the birds took to flight towards us, making them easier to track.

This new approach made the task much more manageable, and yielded plenty of keepers that I'm really happy with. The lens's autofocus was essentially silent and lighting fast, and the camera's autofocus tracked the subject and, provided I kept the bird in the frame, gave me an impressively high hit rate (see the originals of some of my favorites below, which can easily be cropped tighter).

Fujifilm for wildlife, then?

Incidentally, I also had some high-end full-frame Sony gear, including a super-telephoto zoom with the same focal length as the Fujifilm, and I used it later on that day in my local nature reserve. For me, that setup still felt snappier than Fujifilm.

As things stand, Fujifilm remains a couple of paces behind regarding autofocus performance. Emphasis on as things stand — the camera I was using is a few years old, and the entire range is built on a processor and autofocus system introduced in the X-T5 in 2022. Even back then, autofocus performance was perceived as a weakness.

We can expect the next generation Fujifilm processor soon, presumably through the rumored X-T6, which could result in speedier cameras and refined autofocus performance.

Even until then, Fujifilm is better at wildlife photography than the comments sections make out. And it just future proofed the genre with this incredibly good 400mm F4.5 lens, available from the end of September for $3,200 / £2,499 (Australia price TBC).

Spoilers for The Grand Tour season 7 episode 1 ahead.

Regardless of whether you're into cars or not, talking about them on TV is synonymous with three people: Richard Hammond, James May and Jeremy Clarkson.

The trio transitioned to Amazon's The Grand Tour after parting ways with BBC's Top Gear, and now the time has come for them to hand the presenting baton over on Prime Video, too.

Frankly, I don't think The Grand Tour could have picked a better set of replacements, those replacements being James Engelsman, Thomas Holland (both of YouTube channel Throttle House fame) and train TikTok superstar, Francis Bourgeois.

I've been surprised and impressed by how well the trio work together in a TV format, particularly considering they were quickly written off as mere content creators when they were originally announced. But both in the announcement video and ever since, Clarkson has been their biggest champion.

In fact, Clarkson has taken it upon himself to hand The Grand Tour reins over to the new trio in the best way possible — and both on and offscreen, they say that's been "surreal."

'He'd watched our YouTube videos and seen Francis' TikToks'

"It's everything. It's biggest thing, I think, right?" Holland says about having Clarkson's seal of approval.

Engelsman adds, "It was weird, though. When we first found out that he knew who we were, it was a bit surreal. He'd like watched some of our YouTube stuff and he'd seen Francis' TikToks. What did he say to us at dinner?

Bourgeois responds, "He said, 'I know you think that I'm old, but I actually pay attention.' He told me 'You're the train guy.' To find out that he that watching was a surreal moment."

But if you've already watched episode 1, you'll know this wasn't all. The opening scene shows our new trio pitch up at Clarkson's Cotswolds pub, The Farmer's Dog, and enter his onsite butcher and bottle shop, Hops & Chops.

They've come to ask Clarkson for The Grand Tour tent, which the star repurposed for the shop after they original trio finished filming. Clarkson tells him that it's clearly being used, and they if they were to use even a corner, they'd "have less of an audience, and more just customers."

The three leave citing that they are "homeless," while Clarkson turns to the camera to tell viewers that he's been watching what they've been up to for the previous year and a half. "You're going to love this," he signs off with.

"From there, it was kind of ramped up to him doing what he saw in episode 1," Holland continues. "Especially when we'd heard that he'd watched one of the other episodes. He loved it.

"We were like, 'Who paid you?'" Engelsman adds. "He'd been quite happy with it. He tweeted that the new presenters can't be a celebrity, have to be car enthusiasts, all sort of stuff. We were like, 'Okay.'.. but we passed his tweet test."

Can you actually get a bigger or better endorsement than that? I doubt it.

I have developed a fairly strong allergy to the AI slop filling some corners of the internet. It's not that I haven't seen impressive demonstrations of what AI models can do visually; it's just that the baseline creations made by most people are execrable at best and blandly monotonous when they aren't horrifying or malevolent.

ChatGPT’s new Stickers feature didn't immediately strike me as a chance to change my opinion, but the option to import the results into iMessage and WhatsApp was interesting enough to make it worth experimenting with. I went with a photo of my chihuahua and asked for a few options of stickers based on her. While I am obviously biased about her, the results actually looked like images I would not be ashamed to use in a conversation with someone.

Sticker emotions

ChatGPT’s Stickers tool is in the platform's Image section only on the ChatGPT mobile app. Open the main + menu, pick Images, then click Stickers, which is currently the first option on the long list of templates. ChatGPT has a prompt ready to go, but you can adjust it for different styles or add different emojis to the design. Once the results are ready, the “Add to chat apps” button appears, and ChatGPT can send them directly to your WhatsApp or iMessage sticker library.

The source photograph makes a noticeable difference. Choose one with the animal or person clearly separated from the background, good light on the face, and important features fully visible. A dark dog against a dark couch did not work well. And be sure to mention any details you want to make sure are highlighted in the prompt.

At first I asked for photographic stickers to see how well it did at consistency. While not perfect, the best stickers preserved the details that made my dog recognizable. Her expressions became exaggerated, but she remained the same dog. Even when I wrote some of the prompts for new stickers from scratch, ChatGPT managed to keep my dog looking like a (sillier) version of herself.

Cartoon canine

After testing the more realistic stickers, I tried pushing the feature toward its cartoonier options. The chibi-esque result is fun in its own way. The resemblance became looser, particularly around her coloring and age, but the emotional range improved with the flexibility.

Just specify one illustration style and list any specific reactions you want.ChatGPT may still reinterpret a few physical details, but consistency matters more than perfect accuracy once your dog is wearing sunglasses and wondering whether she is cool yet.

AI slop is still bad, and the way it buries useful information beneath a mountain of disposable and often problematic images is an issue that has to be addressed. But when used for something like personalized WhatsApp stickers, AI tools can be attractive. The best use of generative AI images may be smaller and more personal, not a content factory, but a way to add a little fun to online chat.

If we're being honest, Amazon could have picked absolutely anybody to host the new season of The Grand Tour on Prime Video. From a random but established presenter who is trying something off-brand to a complete unknown fresh from a internship — you name it, they could have had the job.

But for two of our three new faces, their casting in the new series feels incredibly predetermined. James Engelsman and Thomas Holland, the creators of the popular car YouTube channel Throttle House, have been dubbed by fans as the "spiritual successor to Top Gear" for years.

Obviously Top Gear and The Grand Tour aren't mutually exclusive, but thanks to Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the latter was born from the former. If you scroll back through two years' worth of Throttle House content, you'll even find that Hammond had a starring cameo.

Amazingly, Holland and Engelsman's first meeting for The Grand Tour job came just days after the above video was released — though the pair insists that one has nothing to do with the other.

'We thought we were walking into a wall of knives'

"That first initial meeting was literally right after that," Engelsman tells me about the Hammond YouTube cameo. "We just about had an idea [of the job] at that point. We had no idea what it was, really, or any detail consciousness. [The cameo] was completely separate. That was fun coming out."

Even so, it set a chain of events in motion that fate itself couldn't have timed better. And who doesn't love seeing Hammond involved in an informally formatted car show? It's almost like he knows what he's doing.

But now that YouTube clips have effectively soft-launched the pair's TV presenting partnership with train TikTok creator Francis Bourgeois, how do they feel about the fan reaction so far?

"We try not to read every single comment.... while reading every single comment," Holland jokes. "The sense of it is good. Obviously, when the show comes out, that is when it matters.

Engelsman adds, "We really thought we were walking into a wall of knives up until the moment the show comes out, but people have been a lot better than I thought, honestly. The call is good. They're a good bunch.

"At its core, it's people who just enjoy cars, and I think that more people than we expected are ready to simply enjoy more car content," Holland agrees.

Luckily for them, all six episodes of The Grand Tour are ready to drop on Prime Video on September 4, so the wait is almost over.

Persona 4 was my belated introduction to Atlus's Japanese high school RPG series, so it still has a special place in my heart.

The PlayStation 2 original was, however, also usurped by the greatly expanded and far superior Persona 4 Golden, which is where I racked up my New Game+ playthroughs. Even as I have become more time-poor over the years, I would still dip into its subsequent post-Vita ports.

That does, however, present a problem for Persona 4 Revival. When a perfect expanded version of the game already exists and is available on all current platforms, is a $70 modern remake really needed?

The elephant in the room is that this is also a way for Sega to plug the gap for the long-anticipated Persona 6, though given that it was only given the briefest announcement this year, fans will likely have a much longer wait ahead.

But after about an hour of hands-on time with Persona 4 Revival at Gamescom 2026, I can appreciate the different touches that have gone into making this JRPG classic more palatable to modern audiences, while still preserving key elements of the original.

One more remake

Persona 4 Revival's hands-on demo was split into three parts: the first focused on story, the second on its dungeon-based battles, and the last let me choose how to spend several calendar days as a transfer high school student in the rural town of Inaba.

As a remake, it follows a similar approach to Persona 3 Reload. Character models aren't just a huge visual upgrade over their original lower-poly PS2 counterparts; they're even better than Persona 5's and look virtually on par with the character portraits that typically accompany dialogue boxes. Turn-based battles, meanwhile, have been updated to mirror Persona 5's control scheme, where commands are mapped to different buttons rather than scrolling up and down a menu.

Just like Persona 3 Reload, Persona 4 Revival has also updated its audio with a completely new voice cast and a re-recorded soundtrack, including at least one or two brand-new songs. I don't mind so much the decision to recast the roles, especially as several of the original voice actors have become much higher profile (including Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, and Yuri Lowenthal).

Still, the voice of Teddy takes time to get used to because while some may have found his original voice a tad annoying, now he just sounds a bit too much like another teenager rather than a mysterious being inside a mascot suit.

From what I played, the story seems to unfold virtually beat-for-beat in line with the original. I think that's fine, and given how long the game already was, the script really doesn't need fleshing out in the same way as the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series, for example. But there are still some interesting changes within that.

The most notable is the more interesting camerawork going on, including close-ups, that make extensive cutscenes more engaging to sit through instead of just lengthy dialogue you might be inclined to skip if you can read faster than the characters speak.

The script itself has also undergone some subtle adjustments in the localization process. It might seem very minor, but I picked up on how Yosuke now addresses the other female students like Chie and Yukiko more formally by their family names, which is closer to how real-life Japanese classmates who aren't close friends behave.

I'm still intrigued by how and to what extent Yosuke's character is updated in Persona 4 Revival, as in the original, he behaves like a creep and is pretty insensitive at times. Given there's a moment in the story demo where he gets annoyed with Teddy and pushes him over, my guess is P Studio is still retaining at least some of the more abrasive side of his personality.

Holding on to the past

Persona 4 Revival's visual upgrades apply to the environments too. With a completely free-looking 3D camera, you can appreciate more of the details in the Dojima household, while in the Twisted Shopping District, you can look up and see the strange red and black vortex instead of a sky that indicates you're in the Midnight Channel's parallel dimension.

Nonetheless, the places you go to are still very much as I remember them. Rooms are still separated by loading screens; Inaba's main commercial district has the same businesses, including the item shop that turns into a bar at night. That's also fine for me, as I don't think it would necessarily benefit the game to suddenly expand the real estate.

While seemingly still randomly generated rather than having the bespoke design of Persona 5's palaces, the dungeons you explore have nonetheless been adjusted to be a little less tedious, from having objects you can break to gather resources to a subtle wayfinder if you just want to get to the next floor ASAP. Ironically, I took this as a cue to go the other direction to explore more of the map.

When encountering enemy shadows on the map, the game even clearly indicates whether you've got the drop on them to get a pre-emptive attack. Failing that, Persona 4 Revival also adds the ability to guard against a shadow's attack so that you're less likely to start a turn-based battle at a disadvantage.

During battle, the Baton Pass mechanic has also been passed down from Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload, which allows you to attack again if you've hit an enemy with their weakness, but pass that turn onto another party member who may have the right attack to exploit a different enemy's weakness.

But whereas Persona 3 Reload was criticized for not being a truly definitive remake, given the lack of an option for a female protagonist like in Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Revival at least is confirmed specifically as a remake of Persona 4 Golden. That means it will include that expanded version's additional story content, such as Marie, the mysterious and temperamental guest in the Velvet Room.

Despite those smart updates, I'm still curious why some other elements have been left untouched. For instance, character portraits were used prominently in JRPGs as they were more expressive than in-game models. But when Persona 4 Revival's character models are better animated and expressive, having these portraits seems arbitrary.

Similarly, when you knock down all enemies and trigger an all-out attack, Persona 4 would originally cover the enemies in a cartoon cloud for comical effect, yet the remake opts to keep this visual despite also having party members running in to perform a lot of flashier animations alongside it.

There might be some nostalgic charm to retaining these conventions, but it also feels unnecessary in the context of a modern remake. Similarly, once my hands-on time was up, I came away impressed with what I had played, yet still not convinced why I would drop $70 on it when Persona 4 Golden is right there for a fraction of the price.

Persona 4 Revival releases on February 18, 2027, on Xbox Series X and Series S, PlayStation 5, and PC.

Does every existing IP need a movie adaptation? The answer is no, of course, but I'm quietly confident in the upcoming live-action version of hit Hideo Kojima franchise, Death Stranding.

Why? Well, let's start with the concept. In the game, courier Sam must reconnect a broken America after an apocalyptic event merged the worlds of the living and the dead. Add in distributor A24 and the man who directed Pig and The Death of Robin Hood — which is now in UK cinemas after its June US release — and you've surely got gold.

However, there's one immediate snag. While we don't know much, we do know that the new movie won't follow the same premise as the existing Death Stranding games.

In fact, according to director Michael Sarnoski, not only is it a standalone movie, but will be made with a lot of creative freedom — and something about the way he explains this makes me nervous.

'I need the space to find authorship and find the things that I really believe in'

"I actually like to make things difficult for myself," Sarnoski tells me. "I like to do projects where the initial instinct is 'Oof, that could be a really bad idea.' Another Robin Hood movie? A prequel to a horror franchise? I like things where it could be easy to miss the mark."

This in itself is a concerning statement. I prefer it when my movie directors don't go into an adaptation thinking that things could potentially go horribly wrong. Whatever happened to positive mental attitude?

"I like the challenge," he continues. "I like finding the humanity in things that otherwise could not work. On Death Stranding, they're giving me a lot of freedom to tell the story that I want to tell separate from the core video game stories. It's its own standalone thing. I need the space to find authorship and find the things that I really believe in... I'm really excited about it."

Playing devil's advocate here, creative freedom could be a good thing. If fans expect a movie to replicate its original source material exactly, nobody ends up winning. But with so few details to go on, we've got to keep our fingers crossed that good decisions are made in the meantime.

But is Sarnoski concerned about appealing to existing fanbases, or is he happy to stick to his guns? "A little bit of both," he responds. "I feel the pressure, but I have to set that aside and focus on what creatively excites me. I can't make stuff as a reaction to what I think someone else wants — it has to come from a place of love and fascination."

Make of that what you will, folks... and watch this space.

TCL has revealed its new P80 series of phones at the 2026 edition of IFA Berlin, and luckily, I’ve been able to try them for myself already.

The TCL P80 Ultra, P80 Pro, and P80 were all on display, and I was genuinely impressed by all three devices. But it was the first two models that really caught my attention. And that’s because the P80 Ultra and P80 Pro combine a vivid, eye-catching AMOLED display with TCL’s nxtPaper technology, which offers a matte, paper-like display akin to something you’d find on an e-reader.

During my time at TCL’s showcase, I also managed to get hands-on with its nxtPaper-equipped tablets, and I have a fair few thoughts to share about them too. So, here’s everything you need to know about TCL’s all-new nxtPaper devices.

AMOLED and nxtPaper: the best of both worlds

By combining AMOLED and nxtPaper technology, the more premium P80 handsets appeared to deliver very solid contrast and color while also providing benefits such as reduced glare and reflections.

When I was using the phone for drawing, watching a video, or scrolling, I found it to be perfectly clear and capable of plating up eye-catching colors — as you’d expect from a standard AMOLED phone. But at the mere flick of a switch (on the side of the phone), I was able to enter an e-reader mode, and this felt excellent to use.

There were two main modes available with the nxtPaper key switched on: Max Ink Mode and Paper Mode. Max Ink Mode is intended to minimize distractions and power consumption for the purest reading experience, while Paper Mode is intended to recreate a paper-like feel and harness customizable eye-care settings.

The Max Ink Mode was my go-to, and when reading text on either the P80 Pro or Ultra, the black-and-white display made viewing text incredibly seamless and focused — almost as if I was reading on a Kindle.

On top of this, the P80 line offers a pretty solid set of specs. The leading model, the P80 Ultra, has a 6.83-inch AMOLED display with a peak brightness of 3,200 nits and a 1.5K resolution. It also boasts a 120Hz refresh rate, ultra-thin 1.38mm bezels, and a 5,800mAh battery. It’s got a seemingly strong camera line-up, too, with a 50MP main lens, 50MP periscope telephoto, an 8MP ultra-wide, and a 32MP front camera.

The P80 Pro is very similar, but skips the periscope telephoto camera; the P80 strips things back even further with no nxtPaper switch and a bit less power. This is reflected in the prices, however, with the P80 Ultra starting from €549 (about $640 / £470 / AU$890), the P80 Pro available for as little as €429 (about $500 / £370 / AU$690), and the P80 going for just €349 (about $400 / £300 / AU$570).

New Note and Tab slates continue to impress

On top of TCL’s flashy new phones, I also got the chance to try out its tablets with nxtPaper technology. This included the TCL Tab A1 and larger A1 Plus, which are available with or without nxtPaper. But the model I really want to hone in on is the nxtPaper-equipped TCL Note A1.

I found each of these models to be absolutely beautiful to use, with smooth, responsive performance for basic tasks, video streaming on YouTube, and drawing, but the Note A1 was on another level.

It’s the more premium option, sure, but it was considerably nicer to use in my experience — especially for drawing. When using the accompanying stylus, it felt like I was getting the pleasing resistance and natural feel I’d expect from drawing on real paper. That meant that whether I was sketching or writing, the user experience was top-tier.

Other than that, the Note A1 packs a 1.5-inch, 120Hz display, a huge 8,000mAh battery, an octa-core processor with 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage for your apps, drawings, photos, and more.

George Yianni is excited about the future of smart lighting, and his enthusiasm is infectious. As the Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Philips Hue, Yianni has seen smart home tech move from niche to mainstream — and he has a clear vision for how you'll be lighting your home in years to come.

On September 2, Philips Hue held its annual showcase event in Berlin, just around the corner from the IFA tech expo. There, Yianni and other senior figures took to the stage to show off the brand's latest hardware (including some particularly artistic new lights and more affordable syncing devices), and to explain how new software developments will change how we all interact with lighting in the coming months.

After the event I had the opportunity to speak with Yianni, and to delve deeper into how Hue (and its parent company SIgnify) has identified practical uses for AI that aren't just a gimmick.

"There’s a push for AI for the sake of it, and we’ve really tried to shy away from that," he told me. "AI large language models are really good at processing the unstructured information and turning it into something structured, and vice versa, and that’s really where we applied it."

The first example he gave was SpatialAware — a feature that launched last year, which creates lighting scenes and applies them based on the position of lights in your room.

"We’re applying AI as a tool to deliver functionality," Yianni explained. "So what we launched last year is, we spent quite some time with our lighting designers to produce the right set of rules, tools, and training towards a large language model to codify and scale the lighting design process."

"So it can take all the unstructured information of where lights are in space, lighting design rules, and what colors look complementary, and then expose that to the user in a general way, so they can describe anything they want, and it uses its world knowledge and this lighting design skill set we’ve given it to generate new lighting design scenes for them. It’s really not something you could have done any other way."

The second example, which debuted at this year's event, is Custom AI Behaviors. This lets you use natural language to describe how you want your Philips Hue lights to behave. For example, you can ask them to behave differently on weekends and weekdays, or change scenes automatically at sunset — all without fiddling around with complex settings.

"There are so many different diversities and details about how a consumer might want their home to behave that we cannot build a user interface with buttons, toggles, dropdown menus for every possibility, and that’s why we put some limitations around automations to this point," Yianni explained. "Otherwise, the user interface would be impossible for most users.

"But natural language is a fantastic way to just describe arbitrarily how you would like your home to behave, and then we can use AI to translate that into a special programming language we’ve developed that runs the automation in the Bridge. So it’s a fantastic way to capture intent and translate into something we can just run in the background, and again, AI is the right tool to do that.

"We think of AI as a tool to be used to solve problems, and often it’s not the right tool, and then we don’t do it that way. But there are definitely are good use cases, and I think more in the works, which take advantage of it."

Exciting developments

The Philips Hue event was packed with new announcements, so I took the opportunity to ask Yianni which one he was most excited about personally. For him, accessibility was one of the biggest draws.

"It's a little bit difficult to choose, because I think we've made some great products for users that don't have smart lights yet," he said. "I think what we've done with entertainment is super exciting, to just make it so that even if people don't want a smart lighting system, they just want it around [their TV]. Now we give you a very simple, easy to use and understand kit that gives it to you."

This system is the Philips Hue Play Screen Sync, which is designed for people who aren't using an HDMI source for their TV, and may be using a native smart TV app, for example. Screen Sync uses a camera with a fish-eye lens to monitor what's on the screen, and then synchronize those colors with a light strip behind the TV. You don't have to invest in a Philips Hue Bridge to use Screen Sync either — you can use it with a single light strip via Bluetooth if you're not interested in a full Philips Hue setup.

If you do use an HDMI source for your TV, there's now a more affordable 4K version of the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, which also works with a single Hue light and no Bridge.

Yianni is also particularly proud of what the brand has achieved so far with artificial intelligence. "I think for our install base of users and for ourselves as users of Hue personally, the AI automations are a bit of a game changer," he said. "I now can finally have my home behave exactly the way I wanted to. I think that's a really big deal.

"So I'm a bit torn between those two, right? For me, it's AI automations, but I think for our business and for our overall mission of getting people to use lights in a in a richer way than just being on or off, I think the the bridge-less entertainment with just becomes so much easier to to step in with just that use case, which is a great way to start."

When it comes to the lights themselves, though, Yianni has a clear favorite: the Liane 360-degree rope light (pictured at the top of this article), which users can drape in any way they like, and which projects light around its whole circumference.

"I think it's hard to beat the statement of Liane," he told me. "I think it's really taking what we offer in a in a new direction, where you can really unleash a lot of creativity in users because it's really a product which has a lot of different ways of it being applied. I think it's something quite unique that doesn't exist in the world yet.

"Yeah, these as they omnidirectional rope lights exist in architectural lighting, but I really think we we add a new element of depth to it by making it controllable and having these subtle gradients that we can put on it. I think that's really exciting. It's something that doesn't exist in the world yet, and really adds something to an existing trend. I think that I think the most exciting lighting model."

I'm hoping to test the Liane rope light very soon to see whether it meets those expectations, so watch this space.

The spirit forms of The Warrior of Light, Terra, Zidane, and Cloud bob up and down behind each character in my party as I get into battle in an early dungeon in Final Fantasy Resonance.

When the trio of monsters is briefly staggered in front of me, I’m given a choice of which iconic character’s power to unleash to end the battle, and I promptly pick the spiky-haired and Buster Sword-wielding hero of Final Fantasy 7. My reward is a flashy CG cutscene of Cloud obliterating everything on screen in a visual display that seems strangely at odds with the rest of the game's HD-2D style.

But this clash is perhaps to be expected when you learn that Final Fantasy Resonance adapts parts of an old 2015 mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, to create a brand-new entry in the traditional turn-based style of Final Fantasy’s NES/SNES golden era.

For players like me whose formative gaming years were spent playing those classics and who long for more old-school turn-based RPGs, it’s the kind of pairing that should shoot Resonance right to the top of the must-play list. And even in just the brief hour I spent with the game, I could feel myself getting sucked into its combat and presentation style almost immediately.

I can’t speak much on the story that frames this fan-service-heavy premise, given I got to experience so little of it, but it feels very much in the vein of a Final Fantasy of old. There are warring factions, a party of adventurers, and crystals to protect in temples dotted around the world.

However, it didn’t matter that I had very little exposition to set up my time with Resonance, given that I immediately saw so much to dig into with the characters and combat.

Alongside the four that were already assigned to my party, there are signs that many more familiar faces from across the full history of the series will make an appearance as Visions that you can equip to your characters.

These provide a vast number of active and passive abilities that can be brought together to create particular builds or strengths that you want characters to focus on.

For example, The Warrior of Light has several physical attacks and defensive magic that work together to make the equipped character a strong frontline warrior or damage-mitigating tank. You can further build upon that with abilities learned and masteries gained from other Visions to perhaps buff your health or offer other worthwhile passives.

I enjoyed tinkering with the makeup of my party to create the classic areas of expertise across all four members — the tank, the physical damage dealer, the mage, and the healer — and I’m sure you’ll be able to create more interesting hybrids as more Visions and their classes become available.

And like the best turn-based RPGs, it was even more fulfilling to see those builds succeed in combat. It led to a satisfying rhythm where you exploit the elemental or physical weaknesses of an enemy to stagger them, earn bonus turns for your characters to create an even bigger advantage in battle, and then unleash a Vision’s special attack once all opponents are in a staggered state.

It’s nothing hugely revolutionary in the world of turn-based combat, but it does add some flair to a familiar formula.

Throw in summons, limit breaks, and more abilities that are exclusive to each Vision, and you have the makings of an exciting and dynamic battle system that still retains some old-school charm.

And that sums up how it felt to play Resonance. Anyone with a hankering for some classic Final Fantasy will find a lot to love here — even beyond the fan service with its large cast of well-known characters from across the series. If that sounds like you, a demo is available to try right now.

Final Fantasy Resonance launches on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and PC on October 22.

Visiting Hisense's booth at IFA is always good for some future-gazing technology — the company often shows off product concepts that it's aiming to actually launch, but often only in China. So obviously, I like to go, find the best ones, and then write articles like this to persuade the company to release them more widely.

And here we are, in one of these articles, because I just saw the world's first micro-LED 3D TV (according to Hisense), and I thought it looked incredible.

The reason why is super-simple: micro-LED's giant brightness levels. Hisense's system uses active-shutter glasses, meaning that the TV shows alternating frames that should be seen by your left and right eyes, and you wear glasses that literally close off the vision of each eye, so that only the correct eye sees the correct frame on the TV.

But these lenses reduce the brightness even when the lens is 'open', and having only half the time to see each frame per eye also reduces perceived brightness, since less light reaches you.

This is the same technique used in the better examples of the old 3D TVs, but it meant that 3D always looked a bit dull.

But that doesn't matter if the TV is ridiculously bright to start with. Hisense's micro-LED model is capable of 10,000 nits of peak brightness, which means that when you're watching through the glasses, the 'dimmed' version of the video still looks like just a normal TV among the best TVs available today.

Colors look super-rich in 3D, and the 3D is super-sharp and detailed because you're getting native 4K resolution because of the active-shutter tech, and the crispness of the 3D effect is super-impressive. In the video I watched, there was no ghosting or stuttering of the image.

The motion looked really smooth and true to what you want from a TV, especially when combined with colors that actually feel rich and like you're getting HDR.

The amount of depth was really impressive, as well — the foreground truly looked like it was jutting out of the screen towards me, and the background felt like there was some real distance to it.

Hisense says that the TV will be able to convert from 2D to 3D in real-time with anything you watch, using a powerful AI-based system, with all the processing handled on the TV itself.

Of course, I'm more interested in breaking out my still-saved 3D Blu-rays of the movies I genuinely loved watching in the format, which were truly filmed with it in mind: Hugo, Pacific Rim, Gravity. I have never watched Avatar at home, because I know it would be a way weaker experience — but I'd watch it on this TV.

And while the dimming problem is the main issue with 3D glasses, I know that for many people the glasses themselves are the problem, and this TV won't solve that.

But man, if I were speccing out a high-end home theater setup (Hisense said the TV would cost over $200,00), I'd absolutely want this in it.

Thinking of buying a new TV?

Try our TV size and model finder! You tell it how far you sit from your TV, we'll tell you what size to buy based on viewing angle advice from image quality experts, and we'll recommend our three top TVs at that size for different prices.

AI tools can automate large-scale tasks at a fraction of the usual cost, which makes them a great option for solo or small business setups.

If you can't invest in a sizeable employee headcount just yet, you can now limit your hires to key roles or just have a few contractors while everything else runs automatically. It's not a replacement for an actual large-scale enterprise operation, but it's a good enough solution to get your feet in and expand more thoughtfully.

So, here are 7 accessible AI platforms that I'd personally use if I were launching a new business in 2026.

Do you need AI to run a business in 2026?

No, not strictly. People built profitable small businesses before AI came along, and obviously, plenty still do. What's changed is the cost of not using AI relative to competitors who can automate the bulk of their work to move faster and scale up.

AI works best as a way to reclaim time on repetitive tasks, not as a replacement for anything that requires judgment. A chatbot can draft your customer email, a task manager can organize your daily workflows, a text generator can come up with marketing drafts. It won't replace your judgment in client relationships, but it will take some load off your back.

Businesses that get the most value pick two or three tools that solve a specific problem. Rather than bolting on every AI tool you can find, start with whatever's eating the most hours in your week, and build out from there. Here are my personal picks.

7 useful AI tools for solopreneurs and small businesses

I've picked one standout per category so you're not choosing between five near-identical products. There's plenty of competition in each space, but the ones recommended here are specific to smaller operations and priced accordingly.

Writing: Jasper

Jasper remains one of the most capable AI writing platforms for small teams that need consistent output across blog posts, ad copy, and social content. It works from your brand voice and past content, so drafts sound less generic than what you'd get from a bare chatbot prompt.

Jasper's Creator plan starts at $59 a seat per month when billed annually, or $69 monthly, with a Business tier that adds more seats and workflow features.

It's not the cheapest writing tool on the market, but the output usually needs less editing than lower-cost alternatives, which matters when you don't have a copywriter on staff. If you're only writing the occasional caption or product description, a general chatbot might cover it, but Jasper earns its keep once content becomes a weekly commitment.

Customer support: Tidio

Tidio is built with small teams in mind rather than enterprise support desks, pairing live chat with an AI agent called Lyro that reads your website and builds its own knowledge base automatically. That means you're not stuck writing scripts or training a bot from scratch before it can answer real customer questions.

Tidio's free plan covers 50 handled conversations a month, which is enough to test whether it fits your support volume before paying anything. Paid plans start at $59 a month for higher conversation limits, and Lyro AI costs another $39/month for 50 automated conversations. Setup is straightforward enough that most owners can have it live on their site within an hour.

Bookkeeping: QuickBooks Solopreneur

QuickBooks built a stripped-down tier specifically for people running side gigs or one-person operations who need to separate business and personal spending without a full accounting course. Intuit's AI features categorize transactions, flag anomalies, and estimate quarterly taxes as you go.

Pricing ranges from free to $20 a month for the Lite tier, which adds unlimited invoicing and automated sales tax tracking. It won't replace an accountant once your finances get complicated, but it's a sensible starting point for keeping records clean from day one.

Just don't skip a real bookkeeper once revenue climbs past a side-gig level. AI categorization still makes mistakes that a professional would catch.

Task management: Motion

Motion combines your calendar, task list, and meeting bookings into one AI-managed system that automatically reshuffles your day when priorities shift or meetings run long. It's built for people juggling client work and admin without an assistant to protect their time.

The AI Workplace plan starts at $29 a month. That said, users are split on how intuitive the interface feels at first, so it's worth running the free trial before committing to annual billing. It's most useful if your calendar gets disrupted often, since the automatic rescheduling does the negotiating you'd otherwise do by hand.

Design: Canva

Canva's Magic Studio bundles AI image generation, background removal, and one-click resizing into the same editor most small business owners already know from making social posts and flyers. You can generate a product photo, clean it up, and reformat it for five different platforms without leaving the tab.

Canva Pro costs $18 a month or $180 a year and unlocks the full range of Magic tools, on top of the platform's existing template library.

For businesses without a design budget, it's usually the fastest way to look professional without hiring anyone. It's worth pairing with a proper brand kit setup early, so every asset stays consistent as more people touch your Canva account.

Email marketing: Mailchimp

Mailchimp pairs its email and automation tools with AI content generation that drafts subject lines, full campaigns, and basic segmentation based on your past sends.

The Standard plan, which unlocks the generative AI tools, starts at $11.95 a month for up to 6,000 monthly email sends. The free tier still exists but was cut back sharply in January 2026, so budget for a paid plan if email is core to how you reach customers.

It's a reasonable fit if you're already sending newsletters or promotional emails and want to speed up the drafting stage. But remember to treat the AI drafts as a starting point rather than the finished send, since generic subject lines still underperform ones written with your actual audience in mind.

Workflow automation: Zapier

Zapier connects the other tools in your stack so information moves between them without you copying and pasting. Its newer AI Agents feature goes a step further, letting you describe a workflow in plain language and have it monitor for triggers and act automatically.

The Professional plan starts at $19.99 a month when billed annually, unlocking multi-step workflows and AI-assisted automations. If you've ever manually moved a new customer's details from a form into your CRM and email list, this is the category that fixes it. The free tier is usable for simple two-step automations, so it's a reasonable place to test whether automation actually saves you time before paying for it.

Things you should be aware of

Every tool above collects your data to function, and it's worth reading what happens to it before you upload customer details or draft sensitive documents. Some vendors also train future models on your inputs unless you actively opt out in account settings, which isn't always apparent right away. Check the privacy or data policy page for each tool rather than assuming the default options are safe.

Another thing to keep in mind is that costs can also creep up faster than expected. Several established AI platforms bill per resolution, per credit, or per task rather than charging a flat monthly fee. Usage-based pricing looks cheap right up until it doesn't, so set a spending alert where the platform allows it. Also review your invoice against your actual usage, at least for the first couple of months.

The final problem is accuracy and liability. AI-generated content, whether it's a customer support answer, a bookkeeping category, or an email to a client, can be confidently wrong, and you're the one who has to answer for it if it is. Treat it as a first draft that needs a human check before it reaches a customer, a regulator, or your tax return, especially anywhere money, legal terms, or compliance are involved.

Let's say you've got an idea for a new business. A landing page is usually the first piece of "real estate" you invest in, long before you think of retail space or even a marketing brochure.

Websites cost a lot less today than they did ten years ago, but they cost even less if you know what you need (or don't).

In this guide, I'll show you how to set up a professional website for a solo or small business for as little as $13 in setup costs. You'll need a GitHub account, a free or low-cost vibe coding app, and $5 to $20 of spare cash for a domain registration.

But the best part is that you can scale this setup as you grow, adding just what you need without a single cent wasted. Slow season? You can also scale those resources back down. Here's exactly how I would structure it.

Launching a website in a day with $13: What to expect

My stack works best for landing pages, portfolios, small business sites, and simple lead generation forms. You'll end up with a mobile-friendly site on your own domain, built without any coding skills by describing what you want in plain English.

There's always a trade-off with these setups, which is scale. You can't collect payments, running complex workflows will crash your website, and storage is limited if you want to host audiovisual content.

But if you structure it right, you can keep space to expand things later without having to go through an expensive migration to a premium platform. There's no vendor lock-in, your existing stack is designed for scalability, and you're not stuck with any one provider.

Does it really cost $13?

Yes, because you'll only have to pay for the domain and a small subscription fee if you want to access one of the better vibe coding or AI website builders.

A .com domain from a mainstream registrar runs somewhere between $5 and $15 for the first year, which covers the budget in this guide with room to spare.

There's no upcharge for connecting your domain, AI tools don't always bill you for every additional token, and there are no additional monthly charges for hosting or storage, etc.

What tools will I need?

You'll need three things, and possibly a couple more if your site needs to store data or display dynamic content. Each category has many options with generous free plans. None of them require you to enter a credit card to get started.

Here's the exact stack you'll use to build and launch a website using this guide.

• A vibe coding tool. Look for one that supports code sync and export to an external repository, even on the free plan.
• A free GitHub account with a new repository that has GitHub Pages enabled.
• A custom top-level domain, such as a .com or .org, which costs roughly $10 to $20 a year.
• A free Supabase account for handling logins and storing form submissions. This one is entirely optional.
• A free AI code editor, like Cursor or Claude Code, installed on your computer for minor tweaks and updates. Also optional.

Step-by-step instructions for launching a $13 website in one day

All of these steps take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour individually. Work through them in order, and you should have a live site well before dinner.

Step 1: Describe your site to a vibe coding tool

Open your chosen vibe coding platform and describe the site you want in plain language. Mention the type of business, the pages you need (home, about, contact, pricing), and any specific sections like a lead capture form or testimonials block.

Most tools generate a working preview within a minute or two. From there, refine it with follow-up prompts:

• Ask for changes to layout, color scheme, or copy one section at a time, rather than everything at once.
• Request a working contact or sign-up form early, since this is often the trickiest part to get right.
• Check the mobile preview, since most visitors will land on your site from a phone.

Remember that on most free tiers, vibe coding tools will limit the number of prompts you can enter in a day. So make sure to read up on these limits and be certain about what you want so you can describe it verbatim. Also mention that you'll be hosting the website using GitHub Pages in your prompt itself, so that the AI can structure the code to be Pages-compatible.

Step 2: Connect a GitHub repository

Once you're happy with the design, look for the option to sync or export your project to GitHub. Most vibe coding tools have a one-click GitHub connection built in. You can also just export the code as a ZIP file and upload the contents directly to GitHub.

Create a free GitHub account, then create a new repository for the project. Keep it public so you can enable GitHub Pages, because Pages hosting is free for public repositories but requires a Premium plan for private ones.

Step 3: Turn on GitHub Pages

In your repository, go to Settings, then Pages. Choose the branch your site should deploy from (usually main) and save your changes.

GitHub will generate a free web address in the format yourusername.github.io/repository-name. This confirms your site is live, even before you attach a custom domain.

Step 4: Buy your domain

Pick a domain registrar and search for the domain name you want. Prices vary depending on the extension you pick, so a .com will usually cost more than a less common option like .dev or .site.

Stick to a mainstream registrar with clear pricing and no surprise renewal jumps. Skip any add-ons you don't need, like a premium DNS, to keep your total below $10.

Step 5: Point your domain at GitHub Pages

Back in your GitHub repository's Pages settings, enter your custom domain in the relevant field. This creates a small configuration file in your repository that tells GitHub which domain to serve your site from.

Then, in your domain registrar's dashboard, add the DNS records GitHub provides. This usually means a few A records pointing to GitHub's servers, plus a CNAME record if you're using a "www" version of your domain. These changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to fully take effect.

Step 6: Set up Supabase (optional)

If your site needs to collect sign-ups, store bookings, or handle a login system, create a free Supabase project. Supabase gives you a hosted database along with authentication tools, without needing to manage a server yourself.

Most vibe coding tools have a direct Supabase integration, so you can usually connect your project with an API key rather than writing database code by hand. Ask your vibe coding tool to build the specific form or login flow you need. It will typically wire up the Supabase connection for you. When you connect or upload the files and code to GitHub, the integration will stay intact.

Step 7: Test everything before you call it done

Open your site on both desktop and mobile, and click through every link, button, and form. Submit a test entry through any lead capture form to confirm it actually reaches Supabase or your inbox.

Check that your custom domain loads correctly with https:// rather than throwing a security warning, since GitHub Pages issues free SSL certificates automatically once your DNS is set up correctly. Fix anything that looks off before sharing the link with anyone.

For small fixes, like a typo or a button that's misaligned, it's often faster to open the project in a free AI code editor like Cursor or Claude Code and make the change directly, rather than going back through your vibe coding tool's chat interface. Once you push the update to GitHub, your live site refreshes automatically.

What to do when you outgrow your $13 website

At some point, your free tiers will start to feel tight. Maybe you're approaching Supabase's storage or user limits, or your traffic has grown to the point where you want more control over performance and analytics.

The good news is that none of the upgrades below require you to rebuild your site from scratch. Because your code lives in a standard GitHub repository, you can move it to almost any hosting provider without losing your design or content.

• Upgrade your Supabase project to a paid tier once you're close to the free plan's storage, bandwidth, or user limits, rather than waiting until you hit a hard wall.
• Move hosting from GitHub Pages to a platform built for dynamic sites, such as Vercel or Netlify, if you need server-side features GitHub Pages doesn't support.
• Add a content delivery network in front of your site once traffic grows, so pages load quickly for visitors regardless of where they're located.
• Bring in a developer to review and harden any AI-generated code before it handles sensitive customer data, particularly around authentication and payments.
• Set up proper analytics and monitoring so you know when you're approaching a limit, instead of finding out when something breaks.

Low cost alternatives

The approach I have outlined above gives a great level of flexibility and scalability with a small upfront cost. However, there are other options out there if you are looking to create a website on a budget.

For example, you may pick an AI website builder and build your website entirely within that platform. This offers a simpler, all-in-one approach, although it can make it tricky to move your website elsewhere if you find it doesn't meet your needs in the future.

The best AI website builders start at around $2.99 a month, although this price will often rise to anywhere from $10 to $150 a month once the introductory period is over and depending on your website needs.

Spoilers for The Gentlemen season 2 ahead.

If you weren't expecting The Gentlemen season 2 to return to Netflix with a bit of bite, then what were you thinking? Eddie (Theo James) is back, and he's on a heroic journey to transform from a domesticated cat into an untameable lion.

He's already broken away from Susie (Kaya Scodelario) and Bobby (Ray Winstone) to work directly alongside Mafia crime boss Marco (Sergio Castellitto), and that decision has helped ignite a new romance with Bella (Benedetta Porcaroli). In fact, it went so well that the pair got married in Italy in the space of only a few episodes.

But by the time we reach the penultimate episode of season 2, disaster strikes. By the time the pair are due to go on their honeymoon, Bella — who is travelling there via seaplane — dies in a plane crash, leaving brand-new husband Eddie bereft.

Convinced there's more to Bella's death than meets the eye, Eddie sets off on a path of vengeance to make her killer pay. This essentially makes The Gentlemen season 2 ending a full story on its own, so let's go through exactly what happened before season 3 starts production.

Eddie is convinced Bobby Glass is behind Bella's death

The Gentlemen season 2 starts off with a weeping Eddie being consoled by Marco during Bella's funeral in Italy, but there's a burning hate in his eyes. Back in the UK, Eddie tortures one of the 'soldiers' found transporting weapons into the Duke's estate at the same time as Bella's plane crashed, with Geoff (Vinnie Jones) having killed the rest of them.

Considering the unnamed man has a car battery clamped to his testicles (that basically electrocutes his nether regions), he's only too happy to give over the name Eddie wants to hear: Bobby. Clearly coerced into saying whatever Eddie wants, Eddie decided who was responsible before he even began this round of torture.

After their tense words at the wedding, things aren't exactly amicable between him and Susie. With Marco's help, Eddie is able to get information on Bobby and a gun to an Italian hitman without Susie knowing... but she's too busy trying to get to the bottom of what has happened herself.

She turns up at the house while Charlotte's (Jasmine Blackborow) partner Nanny (Benjamin Clementine) is telling Eddie he wants to move to an unused house on the Sandringham estate to protect his wife and child, Tarquin. Eddie allows Susie in, but has a marksman trained on her while the pair walk through the grounds.

Susie says that she initially believed that Bobby was responsible, but learned that Bobby bought the £100 million debt Eddie owes to Stan (Giancarlo Esposito). "There's a hundred million reasons why my dad wants you alive," she adds, though neither of them are quite sure why Bobby has made this move.

Stan's sellout changes everything

Eddie brings Susie to the man being tortured, who also falsely claims that he met Susie, further confirming that she's telling the truth. Eddie eventually rings Stan to ask if he sold the debt, which he confirms.

It's then a race to stop the hitman, who is already on his way to Bobby in order to kill him. We see Bobby approach his infamous sauna just before the hitman arrives, but thankfully Eddie has made it in time to stop the worst from happening. Together, they kill the hitman with only so much as a few words spoken between them.

While patching her dad up, Susie and Bobby discuss his decision to buy the debt. While Susie sees the grieving Duke as "unstable," Bobby thinks he's at a turning point. The death of his wife will serve as the motivation Eddie needs to fully trust in, and take control of, himself.

Eddie then pays a visit to Stan, who uses an overly complex religious analogy to explain a similar thinking to Bobby: both are giving Eddie the tools he needs to come into his own power. For the time being at least, Eddie seems too preoccupied by his own self-destructive need for vengeance to really take this onboard.

Freddy outs himself being behind Bella's death

We then cut to Freddy (Daniel Ings) who phones Lady Sabrina (Joley Richardson) out of the blue to ask if "everyone is okay." He explains that he has had "vivid dreams" recently that indicate someone is hurt or in trouble, with Sabrina confirming the news of Bella's death.

Meanwhile, Geoff's new "carrot and stick" approach to the tortured man means he's found out new information: he claims to have a phone number to phone his boss in case of emergencies. Eddie tells him to make a call as if his mission has been successful, asking to exchange Tarquin, who has been repeatedly used as bait (metaphorically) for money. A text message in response suggests the number was bogus, leading to Eddie shooting the man in the head.

Susie assures Eddie that they'll find the culprit together, but a quiet dinner with Sabrina, where she relays the phone call she had with Freddy, redirects Eddie's suspicions to him. He tells Marco his theory, but also claims that this isn't something that Freddy would have been capable of doing without outside help.

Eddie makes Gospel John pay for what Freddy has done — at Freddie's own hands

At once of his group services, henchman Errol (John McGrellis) tells Gospel John (Pearce Quigley) that Mr. Vargas (Cosimo Fusco), a "producer," wants to meet them. A meeting is arranged at an airport-bound warehouse, which essentially means that it is not officially considered to be UK territory.

A four-walled office is set up in the middle of the empty warehouse, with Vargas only allowing Errol and John inside. The rest of John's henchmen are taken out by snipers when all of the lights suddenly cut out, turning back on to reveal Eddie and Susie walking through a heap of bodies.

Susie and Vargas leave Eddie to speak to John, having shot Errol in the head for refusing to sit down. John confirms that he was Freddy's help in killing Bella, claiming that this cycle of revenge started when Eddie took out John's brother back in season 1.

John claims that he's been “doing God’s work” since, and sees the introduction of Freddy in his life as the Lord replacing the brother that he has lost. Now, he is helping Freddy get back “what was taken from him," which includes the family's underground drug empire. Surprisingly, Eddie leaves with John still alive.

Back at the manor, Sabrina begs Eddie not to take Freddie's actions out on him, citing that he is too mentally ill to know what he is properly doing. Eddie pays Freddy a visit where he is housed, taking him on a walk of the grounds. When they are far away enough from the grounds, Eddie confronts him, saying he knows exactly what Freddy has done.

Freddy denies being involved, but Eddie beats him to a pulp regardless. A black van arrives when Eddie puts a gun to Freddy's head, but refuses to fire when Freddie pleads for his life. Instead, he throws the van doors open to reveal a gagged and bound John, gesturing that Freddy must get in and kill John with a chainsaw one of his men is holding.

The door closes and screams are heard as Eddie turns away. The door reopens shortly afterwards, with a bloodied, screaming Freddy holding John's severed head. "Good boy," Eddie tells him before the scene closes out.

Season 3 predictions

As you can tell, family dynamics between the Halsteads are incredibly up in the air at the moment. The relationship between brothers Eddie and Freddy is now in its strangest place yet, and it would be fair to assume that there's no legitimate trust between them — even if things feel more "even," so to speak.

Does Freddy become a lapdog for Marco, if Eddie's allegiance stays with him? Does Freddy rebel if Eddie is so intent of having control over him? And do Sabrina or Geoff intervene either way?

Then there's Eddie's relationship with Susie and Bobby, which is bound to change again now that Bobby has bought the debt. Now that things are smoothed over with Susie, it makes sense that the trio will find their way back to each other... somehow.

It goes without saying that new faces, enemies and drama will be knocking on season 3's door, but for now, all we can do is wait and find out.