Latest articles from Andrew

The Dell XPS 13 for 2017, which follows a minor refresh in late 2017, is a much bigger deal in the update stakes. It's slimmer and lighter than ever before, getting closer to the skinny factor of its slimmest rivals. Best laptops 2018: All the best ultrabooks... Read more

The Yoga 920 is Lenovo's latest take on a hybrid laptop for people with plenty of money who want something worth showing off. At £1,399 with no extra gaming hardware, this is a laptop that asks you to you pay for its design.There's a difference between... Read more

Shop for a laptop with a good budget to play with and you have to make one key choice pretty early on: do you want a very light laptop you can take anywhere, or one that'll moonwalk through pro-grade apps?The Acer Swift 5 tries to get you the best of... Read more

These days, home assistant speakers are hot stuff. We've signed all the T&Cs and asked Alexa and Google Assistant all the weird questions a five-year-old might ask a beleaguered parent. Traditional Bluetooth speakers like the Denon Envaya aren't as in... Read more

Asus was the original pioneer of modern hybrid computers. Give us half a chance and we'll start reminiscing about the old Transformer tablets, a bit like your grandad talking about "the good old days". Times they were a-different back in 2011.More recently... Read more

Laptops used to come in about three flavours: sleek and portable, big and powerful, or cheap and nasty. What a choice, eh?The HP Envy 13 is a laptop that tries to merge the two good-sounding ones, without a price that'll make you run screaming for the... Read more

For a while tech seemed to be getting cheaper. Bargain phones, affordable all-metal laptops and the like gave the careful buyer something to be happy about. But in the last year a lot of gadgets prices have risen, particularly in the UK.The Acer Swift... Read more

Not every portable laptop secretly wants to be a MacBook. No other series quite nails the "not a MacBook" angle like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, while still providing you with almost all the benefits of a slim and light Apple computer. This is one... Read more

In the early days Chromebooks were fairly limited things without an internet connection and would only let you install a handful of Chrome extension apps. That's no longer the case: Chromebooks just got a lot more fun. The Acer Chromebook 11 is one of... Read more

The main aim of most Chromebooks is to offer a decent computing experience for little cash. That price proposition is changing, though, with higher-end models such as the Asus Chromebook Flip C302CA entering the market.The Chromebook Flip is a Chrome... Read more

Chromebooks have been around for years, but we still meet plenty of people who don't know what they are. If you're going to buy a laptop, it might as well be a Windows 10 one, right?Wrong. If you only have £200-odd to spend, something like the Acer Chromebook... Read more

The Asus Transformer Mini T102HA is a hybrid for people who want a Surface Pro 4 but can't face the price.It's smaller, far cheaper and, simply put, not as good. But it is really quite a lot cheaper - around £360 at the time of writing - and still has... Read more

There are a few kinds of hybrid laptop: ones with screens that pull off; those with 360-degree hinges; and (now rarer) ones whose screens flip around, almost independent of the base. Dell has had a go at the lot, but it seems to have settled on a style... Read more

Windows laptops have a bit of an identity problem. Everyone knows about MacBooks, but a lot of people who ask us for advice don't even know where to start when looking to Windows after seeing the latest MacBook prices.The Dell XPS 15 is that place to... Read more

Where Apple goes, others follow. The Asus ZenBook 3 is this effect in action, taking the much-loved ZenBook design, removing most of the ports and squashing down the keyboard.Not all of the design changes work that well, but this little laptop is at least... Read more

Tech is getting more expensive. Apple, Tesla, Nescafe and just about every other company out there has either already put up prices in the UK, or is planning to do so.That makes laptops like the Acer Spin 5 all the more important. Normal folk who were... Read more

Ask the average person about the themes of 2016 and you'll hear about celebrity deaths and far-right politics spreading across the western world quicker than a cute puppy video.Tech trends were, thankfully, less depressing: we saw a lot of super-super... Read more

The Acer S13 is a response to the complaint that nice laptops are just too bloomin' expensive. Not everyone can afford to splash out £1,000 on a computer, and Apple's cheapest Air laptops haven't been meaningfully updated in years.The Acer S13 starts... Read more

Convertible laptops are multiplying. It's like they've grown reproductive organs and formed their own tribe. But that means there's something to suit every scale, level of productivity and price point.The HP Envy x360 isn't a brand new model. HP been... Read more

Tech giants have responded to the decline of laptops in a couple of ways. Some companies have backed out altogether, others have simply gritted their teeth and carried on, doing their best to reinvent the laptop. Again.The Lenovo Yoga 11 710 is a Windows... Read more

Look at the high-end, stylish Windows laptops released over the last five years and you'll see quite a lot that look a bit like a MacBook of one kind or another. The HP Spectre 13 is a concerted attempt to make something that looks about as far from a... Read more

Just being a laptop doesn't cut it anymore. The Asus ZenBook Flip UX360CA plays at the level you need in order to walk with the Windows 10 cool crowd, complete with a hinge that lets the screen flip around to form this month's least likely tablet.It's... Read more

Can a wireless speaker already be retro? Weirdly enough, that's what the Harman Kardon Go + Play feels like. There's something refreshing about how out-of-step it is.As a large wireless speaker it totally ignores the trend for every speaker larger than... Read more

The Roberts Radio S2 - which is part of a whole new series of R-Line multi-room speakers - is one of the first products from everyone's favourite DAB radio maker. Alongside Pure Digital, anyway.At £279 the S2 is a good deal more affordable than the Sonos... Read more

For years we've heard tablets are killing laptops. But would we trade in our MacBooks for an iPad and an on-screen keyboard? Only if the alternative was having to ram an Apple Pencil down each fingernail.The Dell Latitude 7000 2-in-1 is a 12.5-inch device... Read more

What are budget tablets about these days? Should they be the sort of devices you can slip into a small bag and carry around with you 24/7; light enough so you can hold them in one hand; cheap enough so you won't fall into a month-long depression when... Read more

First things first: forget the "Pro" bit. The Asus ZenBook Pro UX501 isn't some stuffy laptop meant to display dreary Excel spreadsheets in glass-walled meeting rooms for people in suits.The name undersells how fun this laptop can be. As well as looking... Read more

Laptops can usually be split into one of a few different camps. There are chunky gaming laptops that'll give you back-ache, but can handle running The Witcher 3 like no other. There are super-ultra slim laptops with amazing battery life. Or those fancy... Read more

Looking for a budget phone? It's always easy to recommend the latest Moto G — a phone that's simple and just works. However, there are other options out there, one of the very best being the Vodafone Smart Ultra 6.The Ultra 6 costs just £125 and easily... Read more

Laptops are going through a change. But is it a kind of growing-up or that last pre-retirement crisis? Machines like the Lenovo Yoga 900 and Microsoft Surface Book want us to believe it's more the former than the latter.The Lenovo Yoga 900 takes what... Read more

Asus doesn't half like to stick it to Apple when it can. First the ZenBook UX305 from last year showed Apple up by being what the rapidly-ageing MacBook Airs should be. Now the Asus Transformer Book Flip TP200SA laughs right in the face of the 12-inch... Read more

Most tablets are black rectangles. Looking at them for too long is a sure recipe for a good night's sleep. Front-on the Lenovo Yoga Tab 3 seems like just another among that crowd. But it's totally different.The Yoga is a tablet with a built-in stand and... Read more

The Cambridge Audio G5 is a mid-size wireless speaker. It'll fit in a rucksack but certainly not a coat pocket, and the £229 price sits in the same middle ground. It's not cheap, but is also not so expensive you'll feel like you need to use the G5 as... Read more

There's a good chance you don't think of Asus when you think of tablets. Apple, Samsung? Sure. Asus makes boring stuff, right? However, Asus is secretly a bit of a tablet demon, having come up with the Nexus 7 (2013), still one of the best tech-per-pound... Read more

Buying a gaming laptop can get expensive. The sort of expensive that'll make you wince and have you scoping out your cupboards for things you can flog on eBay. The Lenovo Y50 is designed to be an antidote to that kind of financial anxiety.For as little... Read more

It's a pretty good time to be shopping for a cheap laptop, with hybrids, Chromebooks and plain ole laptops each available from a couple of hundred quid these days. So there's no need to spend a small fortune on your next portable computer.The Acer Aspire... Read more

Do you believe the hybrid hype? Windows tablets have failed to really take off in the way Android and Apple tablets have, but Windows is where it's at if you're after a hybrid for productivity. The Microsoft Surface 3 proved that.The Asus Transformer... Read more

Cut out the middle man – it's one of the best ways to save money. That's the idea behind the EE Harrier budget 4G smatphone: by getting rid of that Sony, Samsung, or whatever label, carrier-tied phones such as this can get you the most features for... Read more

We've long heard Apple lauded for its laptop ranges, but the Cupertino company has arguably taken its eye off the ball of late: the MacBook Air looks a bit stale these days and the MacBook Pro hasn't changed much in a few years.That gives Windows laptops... Read more

Think gaming laptop and a clear image probably forms in your mind. Huge chunky body? Check. Adolescent blue LEDs everywhere? Check. Looks a bit like a blinged-up Vauxhall Corsa? Yep.Well, take that image and resign it in your brain's dustbin because it's... Read more

About two years ago cheap phones reeked of compromise; the gap between entry-level Android phones and top-end ones was massive. But that's all changed recently, with phones like the Asus Zenfone 5 and Motorola Moto G (2014) plugging the gap. Spend in... Read more

Laptops are not in a great state. Samsung and Sony have already announced their departure from the market altogether. The money's just not there anymore, and companies need to adapt to survive. Lenovo's Yoga series is this kind of evolution in action.The... Read more

Gaming laptops are usually chunky beasts - the sort of thing that will give you shoulder ache and win you odd looks should you dare to take them out of the house. The Gigabyte P34G v2, however, is something quite different.It has serious gaming power,... Read more

Slim, light, good-looking laptops are great. If you spend half your life rushing between places with more work to do than is strictly healthy then a decent one is exactly what you'll need. But to fit the MacBook Air-style blueprint in a Windows 8.1 form... Read more

Serious laptops don't have to be dull anymore. Just a few years ago, we'd have avoided those designed for business folk like we would a swaying drunk on the train - but the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon proves that Ultrabooks fit for business are now good... Read more