Gadgets and Tech

It’s technically too late to make a new year’s resolution, but if you carry one thing with you through 2018, make it this: never call directory enquiries.

The year is barely three weeks old but it’s not too early to predict that the technology trends of 2018 will be driven by the month-long event that will take place in Russia come the summer.

SELLING your spare junk on eBay is so easy now that many of us give barely a second thought to the alternatives. Yet there is a raft of other online resources that could give you as much, if not more, bang for your buck.

BY NOW, you may already have experienced the annual disappointment of flicking through the double issue of Radio Times to discover that there’s virtually nothing worth watching on any of the dozens of channels you can now receive. So it’s exactly the right time to explore the world beyond your aerial or Sky dish.

IT’S NOT too late to fill someone’s stocking next weekend with a piece of covetable Christmas kit, even if you want to buy it online.

THEY COULD hardly be more unsuited to an English winter, but drones are, apparently, the gift at the top of most men’s wishlists this Christmas.

CAR MAKERS have their hands full with important questions of what colour upholstery to have with the SRi trim, or, in the case of Volkswagen, whether to try reporting their emission levels accurately. Audio systems are a long way down their priority list.

A TIME before remote controls seems positively prehistoric today - yet until the mid-Seventies, they were unheard of in Britain. Even then, the first ones were capable of doing nothing more than muting the volume and clicking between the three available channels.

IF YOU’VE bought a new TV recently, or plan to in the near future, there’s a good chance that it will come with an ultra high definition screen, whether you want it to or not.

WITH SO many of us using our phones for day-to-day computing, the market for larger devices - tablets, let alone laptops - has begun to decline. The absence of a new tablet in Google’s recently-announced Pixel range of devices speaks volumes.

MOBILE phones are an indispensable part of modern life, even if we seldom use them for making actual phone calls. But as we all know, Britain - and the northern half of Yorkshire in particular - is a patchwork quilt of coverage, with more holes than the A64 after a wet winter.

Despite the addition of new features such as waterproofing, twin high-resolution cameras and a pressure-sensitive button, most of the fuss about the iPhone 7 has been about something that’s missing.

WE ALL know that a little light haggling with a mobile phone supplier is likely to procure us a better deal and a new handset - especially when the contract is nearly up. But it’s less well known that you can pull the same trick with your internet company.

APPLE is warning its customers to be vigilant after a new scam targeting users by text was revealed.