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I spent 3 weeks testing the Sonos Play, and I love it — and the sound isn’t even the most important thing

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Sonos Play: two-minute review The Sonos Play is one of the few products I've tested recently that really converted me to its cause over time. It's a product that Sonos pitches as a home speaker that's also portable — the one speaker you can use everywhere. I started off thinking that the Sonos Play was struggling for value, because it's more expensive than Sonos' small purely home speaker, the Sonos Era 100 , but doesn't sound quite as good. And it costs a lot more than most of the best Bluetooth speaker options, such as the excellent JBL Charge 6 . But over time, I realized that the Sonos Play excels in subtlety. Despite Sonos' claim, I don't think of it as a home speaker first and a portable speaker second. I see it as a portable speaker that's good enough to justify a place out on your furniture all the time, rather than being relegated to a drawer when you're not using it. And as a result, I started using it as both a home speaker for th...

I had an absolute blast flying the DJI Avata 360 — it’s ‘the 360 drone to beat’

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DJI Avata 360: one-minute review Antigravity launched the world's first 360 camera drone in 2025, but now drone market-leader DJI has arrived with its own spin on the concept – and it's a quite different beast from the somewhat pedestrian Antigravity A1 . The clue's in the name: the DJI Avata 360 is not only a 360 drone but also an Avata drone — the latest model in DJI's line of sporty FPV flyers. If the A1 is a Fiat 500 (tiny, eye-catching, innovative, but not especially nippy), the Avata 360 is a VW Golf GTI – unassuming at first glance and much heavier, but faster, more responsive and more practical, yet (and here's where my automobile analogy breaks down) somehow cheaper too. The Avata 360 looks a lot like the DJI Avata 2 , or perhaps a larger DJI Neo 2 , albeit with one obvious difference: its front-mounted camera has two lenses rather than one. Arranged on opposite faces of the gimbal, these record everything surrounding the drone (while using software to ...

Acer Swift Edge 14 AI laptop review: Another lightweight wonder from the Acer stable

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Acer Swift Edge 14 AI: 30-second review Having recently covered the TravelMate P6 14 AI, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI seems like a remarkably similar design, until you investigate the details. All brands have a version of the thin-and-light laptop market where every machine looks broadly the same: aluminium lid, backlit chiclet keyboard, 14 inches of 1080p, and the manufacturer's brand at the top of the bezel. However, the Acer Swift Edge 14 AI dares to be different. Built around Intel's Lunar Lake platform, the Swift Edge 14 AI packs a Core Ultra 7 258V processor into a magnesium-aluminium chassis that comes in under 990g. That alone is enough to make most carry-on bags significantly lighter, but Acer has also fitted a 14-inch 3K OLED panel treated with Corning Gorilla Matte Pro. That’s not typical, and positions this hardware with creatives in mind. The Lunar Lake architecture also brings several surprises with it. The eight-core hybrid design drops Hyper-Threading entirely...