Tech that will take your breath away (and that’s pretty useful too)
Sonos Sub Mini
Finding the right sound is about design as much as anything else. Sonos knows it’s usual to conjure up deep bass tones with a huge cornercluttering cube but figured that a pair of faced-off woofers could, given a suf ficiently well-engineered cabinet, offer just as much rumble in a whole lot more style. The original Sonos Sub does this, packing two distortion cancelling speakers into a square-sided rectangular cabinet. The Sub Mini carves its design down to a bare cylindrical minimum, retaining the central output slot but reducing the size – if not the sound – significantly. Once you’ve figured in Sonos’ standard single wire connectivity, the result is a sub that can be hidden but doesn’t have to be. Indeed, there’s every chance you’ll want to keep the Sub Mini on display. Little bigger than a bookshelf speaker, packed with power, and smart enough to balance its output to match the acoustics of your room, the Sub Mini hits a sweet spot basically nothing has before – and gives the rest of a Sonos system, whether that be a lonely soundbar or a set of the excellent Era 300 smart speakers, a chance to focus on the highs without muddying themselves with the lows.
£339, sonos.com
Teenage Engineering EP-133 KO II
Just look at it. Look at the blend of nostalgic rear-coloured backlit LCD, fantastic colour-matched industrial design cool, tactile buttons that beg to be touched. Then listen to it, and the amount you can do with its oh-so-playable sample engine, or as a controller for other MIDI devices. Teenage Engineering has knocked it out of the park with its sequel to the roustabout Pocket Operator series, giving musical experimenters and pros alike the kind of tool that inspires creativity and sheer audio fun, all while remaining affordable. Not everything needs top-line components to succeed: more of this sort of thing, please.
£299, teenage.engineering
Circular Ring Slim
Maybe the tech industry went wrong when it decided that health tracking should live on the wrist? The thin, subtle form of the Circular Ring Slim certainly suggests as much. It’ll keep tabs on your heart rate, blood oxygen, breathing rate and temperature all from a finger; later, it pulls off detailed sleep tracking. A ring, then, that monitors the metrics that really matter. And if the two gram, two millimetre thick hardware (and its five-day battery life) weren’t impressive enough, the extremely high quality of Circular’s app-based ecosystem marks this out as a real winner.
£225, circular.xyz
Nothing Phone (2)
Carl Pei’s willingness to take risks is the stuff of legend, so his choice to leap from the increasingly pedestrian shores of OnePlus and create an island of
