Icon A&K ACRO CA1000

AS WELL AS HAVING INPUTS FOR EXTERNAL SOURCES, IT CAN BE USED AS A STANDALONE MUSIC PLAYER

ASTELL&KERN ACRO CA1000

£1999 / astellkern.co.uk

So that’s where all the headphone ports have gone… Well spotted. While it’s pretty much impossible to find a phone with a socket for your cans on it these days, Astell&Kern’s ACRO CA1000 has four of them – but you’d have to be a headphone mega-nerd to make use of every one. Across the front you’ll find unbalanced 3.5mm and 6.35mm (quarter-inch) plus balanced 2.5mm and 4.4mm outputs, so it’ll cater for pretty much any type of wired headphones you could possibly want to plug in. And if you’re the type of person who’d consider spending £2000 on a headphone amp, chances are you’ve got a few.

Ah, so that’s what it is! That’s only half the story. As well as optical, coaxial, USB-C and RCA inputs on the back for plugging in turntables and other sources, the ACRO CA1000 can be used as a standalone Android-powered music player, with 256GB storage that can be bumped up to 1TB with a microSD card – plenty for that collection of hi-res audio files you’ve been building up. While the 4.1in tilting touchscreen looks just like one of A&K’s portable players you can’t actually remove it, but the whole thing is portable, weighing just over 900g with an 8400mAh, 10.5hr battery built in. Hmm, perfect for the commute… That shiny aluminium chassis and big volume wheel would definitely turn heads on the train. But in that instance you might be better off using the onboard Bluetooth to connect a pair of wireless cans and stream through it from your phone – perhaps making use of the Crossfeed mode that’s intended to help relieve ear fatigue by making it sound more like listening to a pair of speakers.

Hold on titanium BROMPTON T LINE ONE

Folding bikes might be easier to squeeze on the 6:57 to Paddington, but a collapsible cycle isn’t much use if it’s too hefty to haul over the footbridge. Crafted from titanium, the single-speed T Line One tips the scales at just 7.45kg – some 37% less than the all-steel original. Brompton’s latest featherweight foldaway has been redesigned from bars to bottom bracket, with a carbon fork, handlebars and crankset for improved power transfer, self-aligning hinges to make reassembly a cinch, and a new whittled-down derailleur that adds just 60g to the weight. Only the brakes remain untouched. Fancy a few more gears? An extra £200 gets you the four-speed T Line Urban. £3750 / brompton.com Er, it’s a breed of dog. But isn’t this supposed to be a gadget magazine? That’s very observant, but Labrador’s Retriever gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘man’s best friend’. This domesticated robot looks like a cross between a cupboard and a Dalek, and is designed to give people with reduced mobility a bit of help around the house. Use it to ferry shopping bags from the front door to the kitchen, safely transport a pot of scalding hot tea to the living room, or just ensure that important things like medication or the phone are only ever an Alexa voice command away.

How do you stop it running over the actual dog? The Retriever uses 3D vision to find its way around, with a dual layer of down-facing sensors on all four sides keeping an eye out for real dogs – although Labrador does say you shouldn’t leave it unsupervised around kids and pets. Hopefully that doesn’t mean it’s prone to ED-209-style meltdowns. It’s designed to work on preset paths, with various ‘bus stops’ added to its memory during setup, so you can summon it to the washing machine or your favourite chair, with extra forward-looking sensors keeping an eye out for any obstacles on the way.

Shame it doesn’t have hands. It is, although it does come with a set of special trays that it’s able to pick up on its own as long as they’re left within reach. The Retriever can adjust its own height from 25 to 38 inches, so it can stretch or stoop to grab one if required. In total it can hold up to 11kg, which is about the same as 30 tins of soup, four bricks or one sausage dog. And there’s even better news to come: Labrador says it plans to release a Retriever-friendly fridge with an automatic door, so the dream of a robot that can bring you a cold beer is alive and well.

Ma-ma-ma Dell DELL XPS 13 PLUS

Ten years is a long time in laptops – but some things never change. It’s been a whole decade since Dell unveiled its first XPS 13 and we’ve been besotted by the company’s ultraportables ever since. Well, that doesn’t look like changing with the arrival of the XPS 13 Plus – a beefed-up version that comes with Intel’s new 12th-gen Core chips, a 13.4in screen (3.5K OLED and 4K LCDs are available), a battery that can be charged to 80% in under an hour, and touch-sensitive function keys above its edge-to-edge QWERTY and seamless glass trackpad. The Plus does come with a couple of minuses, though: the headphone port and microSD slot have been ditched. Here’s to another 10 years. £tba / dell.com