Tag Archives: Notebook

2025

The Unique Gift Guide 2025

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Discover gifts that break the mould, a curated collection of inspired finds that mix innovation, nostalgia and pure fun. From character-led collectables to next-gen tech and design-driven home essentials, each product brings something special to the table, making it easy to find a thoughtful, memorable gift for every personality on your list.

Arlo Penguin Bestie Water Bottle – £29.99 Available from Suck UK

A penguin shaped bottle with a yellow beak AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Add character to your routine! This adorable, insulated 450ml water bottle features a removable, collectable silicone character head, making hydration fun and playful. With double-wall vacuum insulation to keep drinks cold for 24 hours, it’s the perfect companion for any adventure.

Cable Guys Five Nights At Freddy’s, Freddy Controller Holder & Phone Stand £29.99

Five Nights at Freddy's Freddy Fazbear Cable Guy

Welcome Freddy Fazbear into your world with this chillingly cool Cable Guy. Straight from the dark and thrilling world of Five Nights at Freddy’s, Freddy is here to guard your devices in true villainous style. With incredible detail and a mischievous vibe, this Cable Guy adds a touch of frightful fun to any space. Freddy holds remote controls, smartphones and gaming controllers,

Mindful Bath – £24.99 from Suck UK

A tray with a pen and a notebook on it AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Mello waterproof A5 notebook & incense. Put pencil to paper and let your thoughts and ideas flow in the steamy comfort of your own bathtub. Includes a 100% waterproof A5 notebook (no crinkled pages or slippery fingered accidents here!) and scented incense sticks and holder to get you in the perfect headspace

Plant With Willow Starter Pack – £34.99 Available from PlantWithWillow.co.uk

Willow Starter Pack

The Plant With Willow Starter Pack gives your houseplants a voice, quite literally. A discreet soil sensor tracks moisture, light, temperature and nutrients, sending real-time updates to your phone via a beautifully intuitive app. You’ll know when to water, when to feed, and when your monstera simply needs a moment in the sun.

Photo Creator Video Projector Camera – £69.99 from Smyths

A close-up of a video projector AI-generated content may be incorrect.

With the 3-in-1 Video Projector Camera from Photo Creator, you can snap photos, shoot crisp HD video, project your creations in colour, and connect to cast your favourite content onto any surface! This exciting all-in-one device projects photos and videos from up to 4 metres, creating a big screen projection display up to 200 x 112cm, with adjustable focus to capture the perfect picture. Take 48MP photos and films crisp HD video on the 2.4 screen, with 27 fun effects, including digital frames and filters to personalise your work! With simple projection in bright, bold colour, this video projector camera offers endless creative fun, with a 16GB MicroSD card that lets you capture, save and share with friends and family. Connect devices wirelessly to cast your favourite content onto any surface for an even bigger viewing experience and home-projector fun

 

Care Bears Digital Pet – £20 from ThumbsUp.com

Care Bears Digital Pet Collection - Cyber Pet with Care Features, 1.4” Inch Screen, Handheld Interactive Virtual Pets for Kids, Collectible Electronic ...

The Care Bears Digital Pet brings a nostalgic twist for kidults who grew up loving the bears. Relive the magic of the ‘80s with a pocket-sized digital companion. it’s a retro revival with a modern digital edge.

Krafted Couch Wireless Charger – £39.99 available from Kraftedtech.com

Couch - Matcha – Krafted

Meet the home essential you never knew you needed. Draping elegantly over the arm of your sofa, the Krafted Couch Charger brings effortless power to your favourite spot. Its sleek silicone finish grips gently in place while your phone recharges. A rare piece of tech that feels as good as it looks, and every bit as considered as a well-placed throw.

Warmies Gromit £29.99 from Warmies

A stuffed animal dog with brown ears AI-generated content may be incorrect.

From Wallace & Gromit, Warmies Gromit is a fully heatable soft toy that can be heated in a microwave to provide hours of soothing warmth and comfort. This luxuriously soft plush design is gently scented with relaxing lavender and can be reheated time and time again. Warmies® are weighted, warming, scented and super cuddly, making it an ideal gift for all ages!

Star Wars Cable Guys Darth Vader Controller Holder & Phone Stand £29.99 from EXGPro.com

Star Wars: Darth Vader A New Hope Cable Guys R.E.S.T Collectable Figur

Welcome the Dark Side into your home with our Darth Vader A New Hope Cable Guy Based on one of the evilest and most beloved characters from the Star Wars franchise, our Darth Vader: A New Hope Cable Guy is armed with his lightsabre and ready to attack anyone from the Rebel Alliance who may want to get their hands on your most treasured items – from your phone to your controller, and even your lightsabre. Just remember not to “underestimate the power of the Force”.

Krafted Connex – £29.99 available from Kraftedtech.com

Connex - Jade – Krafted

If tangled cables and missing adaptors are your personal nemesis, meet your new best friend. The Krafted Connex hub tidily houses multiple connectors for phones, tablets, watches and beyond – offering fast charging, data transfer, and peace of mind in one compact design. Sleek, simple, and ideal for anyone who travels, works remotely, or just hates rummaging in drawers.

Pad Creator Instant Print Tablet – £129.99 Available from SmythsToys.com

A tablet with a stick and a pen AI-generated content may be incorrect.

For the next generation of digital dreamers, the Pad Creator is part tablet, part instant printer, and entirely brilliant. With six creative modes, kids can shoot photos, film mini movies, sketch, add filters and print their masterpieces instantly from the 8-inch touchscreen. There’s even a child-friendly browser for inspiration hunting – making it as safe as it is inspiring. The kind of gift that turns rainy afternoons into studio time.

Majority Pulse 1 Bluetooth Party Speaker – £99.99 Available from Currys

MAJORITY Pulse 1 Bluetooth Party Speaker - Black image number 0

The Majority Pulse 1 is made for parties and spontaneous kitchen discos. The 80W speaker packs a punch with crisp highs and bass that means business, complete with a synchronised light show that pulses to the beat. It even comes with a wireless mic for karaoke mode, because someone’s always going to want to sing. Portable, powerful and fun.

Dell, Gadget Man, Matt Porter, Mobile, Tablet, Technology, Transformer

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 with InfinityEdge Screen

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In the never-ending battle of the tech giants, 2018 has most certainly been the year of the bevel or indeed lack of bevel. TV’s have become almost bevel-less, transforming from boring black rectangles that have been slowly consuming our living rooms to ambient wall furniture which can now disguise itself as the wall-covering it once blighted like some kind of digital chameleon.

In our hands, the swift removal of bevels from around our curved smart phone screens has introduced us to the ‘notch’ as manufacturers desperately seek new ways to hide fingerprint readers and front facing cameras. Along with these gadgets, we now see the same happening with computer screens, laptops and of course the 2-in-1 or convertible touchscreen notebook / tablet devices.

Three Dell XPS 13 (Model 9365) Touch 13-inch notebook computers, codename Aventador.

The Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 is just one of those devices, a beautifully sleek device with the almost bevel-less screen in the form of Dell’s own ‘InfinityEdge’ display and a power packed Intel Core i7 processer and SSD drive.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 is a convertible laptop which with the help of Windows 10 converts into a 13” tablet by simply folding away the keyboard and transforming into a lovely device to please artists or note-takers alike.

The 2-in-1 comes in a nicely branded black soft-touch box. Inside you find the laptop with its lid and base polished aluminium with embossed Dell logo in the centre. Opening the lid to expose the keyboard and screen isn’t quite as graceful as other laptops due to the lack of weight, but this is a small issue as once revealed, it provides a very pleasant view for owners.

The keyboard is nicely recessed, typing is very tactile and feels high quality with a good sized touch pad below. Surrounding the keyboard and touchpad is what looks a feels like carbon fibre, this this looks really nice and gives good grip when ‘manipulating’ the device, but is also a bit of a fingerprint magnet. There is also a fingerprint reader for use with Microsoft Hello.

Now down to the display itself, which I have to admit is absolutely stunning! Dell have gone for a gloss glass screen which makes colours rich and vibrant, blacks are… well black as they should be with no obvious backlight ruining your viewing experience. My unit was a 1920 x 1080 FHD screen, but there is also a 3200 x 1800 model giving even greater clarity. The screen is also multi-touch (10 touch points) capable and for artists the Dell Active Pen can also be used which is sold separately.

Powering the device is the 7th generation Intel Core i7 running at 1.60Ghz along with 8Gb of memory and a 240Gb Solid State Drive (SSD), as expected the machine runs very quickly indeed with almost instantaneous boot up and excellent performance. Running Adobe Photoshop was a breeze and I can imagine with the Dell Active Pen would provide an excellent environment for artists.

As the machine runs on Windows 10 Home Edition, the majority of owners will be familiar with finding their way around the system and with a device designed to work directly with this software, the journey is relatively painless.

If you are looking to plug in your peripherals, you will find that the XPS 13 2-in-1 has now joined the USB Type C charging club and thus has no traditional USB ports other than using an adapter. Thus, you have 2 USB-C ports for connectivity or charging the device, a Micro SD port for transferring data, a display port connector, a Thunderbolt™ 3.0 connector and headset jack port. The frustration of losing the standard ports we have all grown used to can be easily remedied by after-market adapters.

Dell have yet again produced a high quality machine which sits right up there with other manufacturers hardware. It would be very useful for business people who need to work from remote locations or whilst commuting and I’m pretty sure that a few lucky students would also benefit from using it.

Starting at around £1150, the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 is by no way an entry level device, but if you are look for a very nicely designed notebook or tablet, then buying a 2-in-1 may well be your solution.

Matt Porter
The Gadget Man
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Asus, Bluetooth, Gadget Man, Matt Porter, Tablet, Technology, The Gadget Man, Transformer

The ASUS Transformer Mini T102H Review – Is it a Laptop or a Tablet?

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For the last few weeks, I have been testing the ASUS Transformer Mini, a device which can be a laptop and tablet depending on your mood.

ASUS Transformer Mini T102H
ASUS Transformer Mini T102H

The idea of a tablets with keyboards is not a new one, these were generally add-on keyboards for iPads or Android tablets which worked well, but seemed out of place on a device that was designed to be operated without one. There have also been laptops with detachable keyboards which in turn felt out of place running software which was designed for one.

The key change is the introduction of Windows 10 which can seamlessly transform itself from a keyboard and mouse centric operating system into a touch and swipe based tablet and back again, simply by detaching and reattaching a keyboard,

ASUS Transformer Mini T102
ASUS Transformer Mini T102H

ASUS have been in the ‘transforming’ tablet market for some time and the Transformer Mini T102H brings a very useful addition to the table with a 10.1″ LED backlit HD screen which uses ASUS’s ‘Splendid’ and ‘Wideview’ Technology to give great viewing angles.

ASUS Transformer T102H
ASUS Transformer Mini T102H

Powered by the Intel® Atom™ x5 Processor and 4 GB of RAM. The hard disk is in fact Solid State memory and gives your 64GB of silent running. Everything on board is low power and there didn’t appear to be any internal fans to cool the device.

The graphics are fast and snappy helped by the integrated Intel HD Graphics processor and there’s also an inbuilt 2 megapixel webcam for Skype or other video chat applications.

The great thing about Windows tablets is the number of connectors, the Transformer has a 3.5 mm combo audio jack, USB 3.0 and Micro USB ports, a micro HDMI socket, Fingerprint reader for login, volume controls and micro SD card slot.

ASUS Transformer Mini T102
ASUS Transformer Mini T102

The detachable keyboard was really easy to use and attaches using a powerful magnet and always seemed to line up properly and was responsive to use with the inbuilt trackpad. My Transformer also came with a stylus which is battery powered and looks and feels like a real pen, it was great for drawing and painting using the bundled apps and can also be used to write on-screen sticky note.

 

ASUS Transformer T102H
ASUS Transformer Mini T102H

I really enjoyed using the Transformer and it makes a great device for people who are comfortable with tablets, but also need a real keyboard for their work, possibly an idea for students? At £449 it is reasonably price too.