Phones, laptops and creepy glasses: what to buy, and what to avoid

What recently-launched tech products are flops? Which ones are genuinely worth getting? With the dust now settling on the main tech launches of the year, here’s what you need to know.

 

The flops

Facebook Glasses (€329)

As I said when I reviewed it, Facebook’s recently launched smart glasses are quite good as Bluetooth headphones and as a hands-free kit for calls. And because they’re designed by Ray-Ban, they actually look decent, too.

But the ‘creep’ factor has proven too strong. It’s not that they record 30-second video clips or take photos. It’s that there’s virtually no signal to anyone you’re filming that this is happening. In the week I tested them, I shot countless videos and photos in a variety of places, public and private. No-one had any idea I was doing it.

The capture button is in a place on the frames that makes it look like you’re simply adjusting the glasses’ position. And the tiny LED light that comes on when you film is white and steady, not red or flashing, as anyone might expect.

As the glasses also have a red-light mode (for depleted battery), this is a design choice. One can see potential for ‘creators’ to film interesting things with them. But being labelled a creep may not be worth it to use them.

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 (€1,899)

It feels a little mean to file this under the ‘flop’ category, as Samsung’s big foldable phone-tablet thing is innovative in its own way. And to give the company credit, Samsung was the first to really push this form factor and it has outdone its main competitors. So it deserves respect for that.

Even still, the Fold feels like a drawing-board gadget waiting for a real-world purpose. Unlike its cute, smaller ‘Flip’ folding phone (which gets a good review on Independent.ie), the Fold’s main selling point – that it folds out to be an 7.6-inch tablet – is critically limited by its shape.

Because its folded-out form is square and most video content is rectangular, the part of the Fold3’s screen for things like Netflix or YouTube is no bigger than a normal smartphone. Except now you have a much bigger, clunkier gadget to hold.

Its screen quality, battery life or engine power isn’t better than any flagship phone, either. And it’s heftier in the pocket than almost anything else you can buy, while also attacking your wallet in an intimidating way.

So who really benefits from the Fold? Maybe it’s someone whose main use for a phone is to constantly review and sign documents, and who can expense two grand? For everyone else, this is a little Frankensteinish.

5G

The latest and greatest mobile communications technology has proven to be the biggest damp squib since Wap. Not even Apple can make 5G attractive – no-one has found any real-world use for it yet.

4G now gets you over 100Mbs on the most basic budget smartphone, tablet or laptop. Two years after its launch mobile operators here still can’t say, in a single sentence, what you can do better with 5G.

Yes, those use-cases will come sometime in the future. But right now you don’t need 5G. There’s no way you should pay more for a 5G plan if it’s an option to get a 4G one for less.

 

What’s worth getting

Enough with the slagging. What have been the recently-launched tech products that are actually worth getting? There are two standouts.

iPhone 13 Pro (from €1,179)

I want to be clear here. I specifically mean the 6.1-inch iPhone 13 Pro. Not the standard iPhone 13 or the iPhone 13 mini. There’s nothing wrong with any of those other iPhone 13 models, but they’re not compelling enough to make it into a star category.

The 13 Pro, on the other hand, is. For two main reasons.

First, its new screen is a genuine jump over all previous iPhones (and the standard 13 model doesn’t get it).

Second, its camera jump is far better than the improvement on the regular 13 model.

It also has well over an hour’s extra battery life or even more if you adjust the settings on the screen back to a normal resolution. And it’s tougher against scratches, too. The 13 Pro Max? Yes, it also has these improvements – but the jump in camera quality isn’t quite as much as in the smaller, cheaper iPhone 13 Pro. So that’s definitely the upgrade model that trumps all others.

2Microsoft Surface Pro 8 (from €1,498 with keyboard and pen)

The iconic Surface Pro gets its biggest upgrade in a long time – making it one of the most useful and important laptops this year.

Its main improvement is the new 13-inch screen. It’s not just that it’s bigger than previous models (without increasing the size of the overall machine on your lap or in your bag). It’s that Microsoft has given it a new super-smooth, high 120hz resolution.

This means it’s far better to use in tablet mode, or with a stylus to sign documents or to sketch. That is essentially the flexibility that Surface Pro machines have always been about.

The new device also bows to no-one on power, being configurable up to a whopping 32GB of Ram. And its keyboard is now a little better, with less ‘bounce’ when you’re typing on it.