Well, here we are… it's 5,821 days since the start of my time at TechRadar as a staff writer, and this is one of the last things I’ll ever write for the site – and, I won’t lie, it’s making me pretty sad.
Over that period I’ve been privileged to witness, and write about, some of the biggest developments in the world of technology, many of which I could never have imagined when I first stepped tentatively over the threshold of our old London office.
When I started, Apple was that iPod maker, YouTube was only just in the hands of Google, and Facebook was an odd curio in contrast to the might of MySpace. Phones weren’t smart (and I remember telling my then publisher that I thought nobody would ever use the phrase ‘smartphone’ as it was too business-y. Nailed that one).
I watched the birth of 3D TV, and quickly saw it fade away again – and it’s easy to forget that in the rush to add a third dimension to every gadget, 3D phones also became a thing, and they were pretty awesome.
I got to review (nearly) every iPhone – sadly I wasn’t present for the launch of the first ever model; I've spent time in all corners of the globe; I've been stuck inside my hotel room because I couldn’t charge smart socks, and I've interviewed some of the biggest names in tech as the gadget world pitched and rolled through all manner of trends.
And in my last few years I’ve had the privilege of leading the most amazing, talented and hard-working team I could ever have imagined working with. A team that wouldn’t go to bed until it had covered every last angle of the latest product announcement. A team that I count as friends more than colleagues.
It’s also a team that ignored a directive to not write one particular article, with said piece becoming our highest-trafficking article of all time (for complicated reasons I can't say what it was). And I couldn’t be prouder of them for that.
I’ll be leaving the Week in Review in the capable hands of Lance Ulanoff and Matt Hanson, who you’ll already be familiar with if you’re a regular reader, so you know it’s going to continue to be a rollicking good read.
For those of you who miss the Noise Cancelling podcast, that’s back this week too for one final outing – check it out here or wherever you get your pods! Thank you to all of you for reading and subscribing – it’s been a real blast.
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The Samsung F110 miCoach Adidas was a pioneering piece of fitness tech (Future)
Well, this is already a lie. I thought I’d written our review of the Samsung miCoach F110, a hybrid phone/fitness gadget, as it was the first gadget I was handed when I joined TechRadar, but looking at the byline – ‘TechRadar Staff’ – I think someone else wrote it.
But it was the first device I ever tested for TechRadar, and eight years later I did write something about it, in my first Running Man of Tech column, so that kind of counts.
I still have this phone, as you can see in the photo above. It was a pre-smartphone collaboration between Samsung and Adidas, and to test it, I strapped a single sensor to my shoe and a heart rate monitor around my (then quite rotund) chest and puffed about a bit.
It was magic. This was my first taste of technology unlocking my metrics… I could see how far I’d gone! How hard I worked! It didn’t have GPS, which would have been useful, but this was 2008 – the PlayStation 3 was still a ‘new thing’, and most people still reckoned there was a future for the Microsoft Zune.
(Fun fact: much later I re-ran the first course I tracked with the F110. When I first did it I celebrated hitting 5km for the first time in my life… but it turns out that when tracked with GPS, it was more like 4km).
This was truly a phone before its time – and it kicked off my lifelong love of strapping things to my body and seeing what happened. (Side note: I once had to get totally naked and spray my body with water to try out another fitness gadget).
Me, immersed in virtual reality with the HTC Vive (Future)
Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I love all things virtual reality, and while I’m still waiting for it to truly become ‘a thing’ nearly a decade after first experiencing it, it’s definitely getting there, with the likes of Meta Quest and PSVR leading the way.
VR gave me one of my favorite memories at TechRadar too. Back in 2015, in the middle of a packed hall at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I got to try the HTC Vive for the first time.
I knew it was going to be good because HTC, the once-great phone brand, was so excited about it. In the mid 2010’s I used to be part of a group of journalists who would get to see the new HTC phones well ahead of time, and interview the people that actually made them, but on this occasion they were all smiling about some sort of in-joke, because they knew something mega was coming.
That something was the Vive, a VR headset that needed to be connected to an incredibly expensive and powerful computer, with multiple wireless infrared trackers placed around the room. It was way too much hassle, surely? Nobody would like this, right?
Wrong. I slipped on the headset and found myself in a virtual world, standing on the deck of a ship underwater. I’d experienced something similar with a VR headset before, so it was nothing exciting at this point.
But then I stepped forward, with those infrared stations tracking me in real time. I peered over the edge of the ship and saw a wrecked World War 2 plane. I looked up and a whale come close, its eye peering at me, and I instinctively backed away.
Suddenly I could move in VR… and it was incredible. I couldn’t stop smiling. I just knew that this was the future.
I got to try the Vive for a longer period about a year later. I just hope that in the near future, VR headsets like this will become cheap and easily accessible, with lots of great games to play.
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'Scary press shot of the week' was a regular feature of my '7 days in mobile' column
Look, I can’t really remember why I started doing this, or how I was even allowed to do so, but back in the early days of TechRadar we were encouraged to do a weekly column.
Mine was ‘7 days in mobile’, where I’d round up all the fun stuff I’d seen that week; the problem was that in the late 2000s there often wasn’t much ‘fun’ phone-related content about.
So I decided to start telling the story of Winston, the mobile phone unicorn, who was obsessed with the BlackBerry Storm and was hell-bent on destroying the tyranny of Nokia (turns out, he did a pretty good job of the latter).
While the early stories were lost in the Great Purge when we switched servers, I resurrected it for our weekly Keitai series in the mid 2010s – again, I’m not entirely sure why, but I can now see this was surely a huge abuse of my power.
Suddenly his world went from single monochrome letters to a gloriously rich technicolor. His senses were momentarily overwhelmed as a cacophony of sound, smells and sights flooded into his newly-overhauled cortex.”
You get a sense of the nonsense that was indulged in. But they’re an inexplicable part of the story of my time at TechRadar – and I will forever love Winston.
One of the things that’s made compiling this newsletter so much fun has been the readers who’ve emailed in over the years to tell me what they think about the topics I cover.
Gary R. has been a regular contributor over the years, so when he said he’d like to see me write about reviewing the Apple Watch over the years, I was only too happy to oblige, especially as I’ve just reviewed the Apple Watch Ultra.
The first Apple Watch appeared in 2015. It was this new second screen that sat on your wrist, and seemingly just pinged you with notifications constantly. It wasn’t waterproof, it didn’t have GPS for run tracking, it was slow, and, well, it was a bit useless.
Yet, somehow, Apple managed to iterate on it time and again, drip-feeding the features people were asking for. It did this without changing the design at all (apart from a slightly bigger screen with the Watch 7), and it’s sold in huge numbers for years.
I won’t lie: I still wouldn’t buy an Apple Watch, even the new Ultra, which solves a lot of the issues I’ve had with the range. It’s more rugged, it’s a powerful fitness device, and it has lots of health-monitoring smarts that could actually save your life. But it only lasts two days on a single charge – and while that’s better than previous Apple watches, that’s still too short.
And once again, I find myself saying the same thing: if only Apple addressed this one shortcoming, the Watch would be a five-star device. But I’ve been saying that for years, and people are still buying Apple Watches in droves.
When Apple launches a wearable with a week-long battery life, as I’m sure it eventually will, I’ll raise a glass in celebration, because finally we'll have a great Apple Watch.
Me again, slogging through the streets of London in Ford's 'aging suit' (Future)
In 2016, I tried out Ford’s ‘aging suit’, which was fitted with a series of weights, straps and tethers to simulate the average issues an older body would experience.
Me, being in my chirpy and naive early thirties, thought it would be fun to try it out on a run – and it was the most eye-opening, and saddening, experience I’ve had in this job.
This paragraph explains why: “I used to wonder what effect getting older would have on my running style – if it's anything like this, you're basically feeling like every limb is tethered to the middle of your body, and no matter how much effort you put in, it's not going to get any better.”
Just re-reading this piece brought it all back to me: the sheer panic that I couldn’t use my body as I wanted; speaking to my grandma afterwards and understanding the true pain of her arthritis; realizing that we all have a duty to enjoy every pain-free moment we get from our bodies.
It wasn’t a fun piece to write, but it was one of the ones I’m most proud of – if you get a moment, watch the embedded video too, as it explains everything far better than my words could.
An iPhone Flip concept image from ConceptsiPhone (ConceptsiPhone)
Another reader got in contact this week to ask: “Is there any information regarding an Apple folding phone? It does seem like the final frontier for the iPhone.”
So I thought a quick look into the future would be a nice way to finish the tech section of this newsletter. Will there be a foldable iPhone? Almost certainly, I would say.
Apple has filed multiple patents for hinges and other tech related to such a device, so we know it’s on the brand’s radar (and it would be weird if any major phone manufacturer wasn’t working on foldable devices right now).
If it does land, it’ll likely be between 2025 and 2026, as that’s when the costs of the flexible materials needed will have dropped sufficiently to meet Apple’s needs – although don’t expect a foldable iPhone to be anything less than extremely expensive.
The early renders suggest Apple will go for a clamshell design, similar to the Galaxy Flip 4, so you can have the same longer iPhone but in a smaller form factor when folded. I wouldn’t be surprised if an iPad Fold emerged too, with Apple calling its Galaxy Z Fold rival a tablet rather than a phone to differentiate between the product lines.
But the one thing that tells me that we’ll see a folding iPhone is… Samsung. This brand went really big on the marketing for its folding phones last year, before the technology was truly ready for the mainstream, and I believe that’s because it wanted to establish a lead in the foldable space before Apple could get into the game.
If and when Apple does make a folding iPhone, you’ll know we’ve entered the era when every brand will have a flexible smartphone in its lineup – and that’s exciting.
It’s been tough trying to decide which science story to put at the end of my final newsletter: do I go for my favorite of all time, or something that’s currently interesting? Well, in a decision that will likely irritate our wonderful production editor who has to put this together each week, I’ve gone for both.
There's a great story currently on our sister website LiveScience about researchers who’ve fired an incredibly powerful laser at a sheet of plastic – the same kind as is used in plastic bottles – and put it under pressure that’s millions of times greater than the Earth’s atmosphere.
This made it into something called nanodiamonds, which could tell us how atmospheres behave on other planets (the researchers also potentially discovered a whole new type of water, called superionic water ice, which is cool in itself), but could also help with developing technology to remove plastic from our oceans.
It’s the perfect science story: a regular household object, a super-powerful laser, something about outer space, and discoveries that could help to save the planet.
But… that’s still not as cool as my favorite science story of all time: the one about how a heron ate an eel, and how said eel decided that it wasn’t going to go quietly, and burst its way out of the heron’s stomach while it was in mid-flight.
What was especially wild was that the heron didn’t seem that bothered, and there are more pictures further down the story that show the heron, having landed, casually wandering around with the eel still dangling from its stomach
Come to think of it, it was more horror movie than science story, but still.
This is from the editor
Well, that’s it. Before I say goodbye, there’s one more thing I want to highlight, because it made me so happy.
Last week, I asked you readers what happened to the meteor that struck the Earth all those thousands of years ago, leaving a vast crater in Arizona, USA. I quickly received a confident-sounding answer, and that solved it for me – or so I thought.
Then I got another, different answer. And then another, and then some more – and now I don’t know what to believe. Here’s a selection…
“If you take this up to something the size of a bus that doesn't burn up and then impacts, the energy release is of the order of a megatons nuclear weapon. That ought to be enough to reduce most things around to dust which then disperses over a huge area. Maybe at the point of impact the meteorite will have penetrated the surface, need to ask the specialists if there is a residue left there or it's all blown out.”
“The meteorite was mostly vaporized upon impact, leaving few remains in the crater. Since the crater's formation, the rim is thought to have lost 50–65ft (15–20m) of height at the rim crest as a result of natural erosion.”
“Pretty sure that it went all the way through the earth and popped up on the other side forming China!.”
“It was a 100% iron asteroid which hit the earth and bounced towards the Pacific Ocean where under a few thousand feet it still lies. Someday it will be found.”
I also had someone angrily telling me that I’d got meteors and asteroids confused, and the time of the impact wrong (I hadn’t).
But ultimately, I’m none the wiser, but I’ve had a lovely time learning about impacts on the Earth in the last week. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in!
A final shout out to my dad, who reads this newsletter every week, and often rings me to give me his thoughts (thanks, dad), and to Mike McNally, who’s diligently cleaned up my nonsensical copy and got this newsletter into your inboxes every week, despite me missing deadlines and ruining his Friday evening plans time and again.
And that’s it, and a great topic to end on. I just want to say thank you again to all of you who read this newsletter each week, and who get in touch. I can’t tell you to email me any more, but please do keep the emails coming for Lance and Matt – and you can catch up with me @superbeav on Twitter, so don’t be a stranger!
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