ALL THE BIGGEST STORIES FROM PLANET TECH
HOT FIVE #1
Xiaomi 14 Ultra
If you believe in the maxim that the best camera is the one you have with you, it’s worth making sure your smartphone is packed with as many megapixels as possible –and Xiaomi’s 14 Ultra has more than enough to get any phonetographer’s shutter finger twitching.
Its four Leica-branded lenses all guide light onto 50MP sensors, including a 1in one with astepless variable aperture to give you dreamy depth blur when you want it and all-over crispness when you don’t. There’s also a 12mm ultrawide snapper with a 5cm focusing distance for macro snaps, plus two telephoto lenses – 75mm and 120mm –both boosted by optical image stabilisation.
You can immediately admire your handiwork on the 6.73in AMOLED, with the 3200x1440 resolution and 3000 nits of peak brightness ensuring every shot really jumps out at your eyeballs. Processing power comes from a Snapdragon 8Gen 3and 16GB of RAM, with a 5000mAh battery to keep you clicking away all day and 512GB of storage giving you plenty of space to fill up with those snaps.
As hot as… an extra-spicy chicken Madras photographed from 5cm away £1299 /mi.com
HOT FIVE #2: BRAINY DAYS AND FUN DAYS
It’s always agood idea to read the small print. When asmartwatch boasts of a battery that’ll last longer than apot of UHT milk frozen in carbonite, it’s normally dependent on turning off all the functions that make the watch smart in the first place –and what’s the point of owning alonglife smartwatch if all it’s really doing is telling you the time?
The OnePlus Watch 2demands no such sacrifices: even if you go for a 30min run each day with the dual-frequency GPS turned on, track your sleep every night, and check the 1.43in 326ppi AMOLED display 220 times between waking up and going to bed, the battery will still last up to 100hrs. Even with more intensive use, including activating the always-on screen mode, it’ll keep going for 48hrs before you need to plug it in.
It’s capable of tracking over 100 different sports, with sensors that can measure your heart rate, VO2 Max and SpO2, and all your stats are stored in OnePlus’s OHealth app. It runs Google’s Wear OS 4, so there are plenty of third-party apps to download and almost as many ways to customise how it looks.
As hot as… UHT milk that’s been sitting on aradiator for 100hrs £299 /oneplus.com
HOT FIVE #3: NOTHING EXCEEDS LIKE 6S
Big-screen Android tablets are almost as rare as Bigfoot’s bogeys, largely because of the incredible popularity of Apple’s iPad Pro lineup –but that hasn’t stopped Xiaomi from stomping in with asizeable slate of its own. With a 12.4in screen, it’s the same size as another of this rare species, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S9+, but costs afull £250 less.
And it’s not just th
