Steve Litchfield

YouTube has popped up several hands-on videos with Huawei’s latest (and rather mis-labelled, if you examine the form factor) 'tri-fold' Mate XT, officially only available in China so far, but several people have paid stupid money, up to $5000, to get a sample.  The Mate XT has two hinges, one inward and one outward, meaning that one 'edge' of the phone has a fragile plastic display crease exposed to the world permanently. I know, I know, the geek dream of a phone which magically expands into a tablet is oh so cool. But physics is heavily against it. At least in the real world, away from cosy first week YouTube reviews. Heck, physics itself is against existing folding screen phones. I’ve just about accepted that the Flip idea (as here) now works because the crease is small, because the device is always closed when not in use to protect the fragile interior, and because the purchase price is now sub-£1000 (though that's still a lot).  But the folding screen failure ra...

Unusually, for me, this case wasn't sent in for review - I sought it out and bought it and for good reason. The last few years have mostly seen me with a clear TPU case on my phones, in this case an iPhone 14 Pro Max, and usually a Ringke case with MagSafe built in. I've had about four of these, one for each year because the clear material starts to 'yellow' and look a bit tacky. It's a common issue with clear TPU, it seems - something to do with ultra-violet radiation when outside. So yes, I replace the case each year, and sized for the iPhone I'm currently rocking. Except that this time I wanted to look further 'up market'. Given that I wasn't upgrading to the 16 series (I still prefer stainless steel to titanium and I'm not convinced by the new 'Camera Control'), I had funds to invest in a top notch case. In the end it only cost me about £24, I read up about this TORRAS case and it fit the bill across the board: Being smoked black, it...

Clicks is a fascinating story, from start to, well... it hasn't finished yet and even as I write this, (what is effectively) a version 2 with notable improvements is being made for the new iPhone 16 series. The whole 'you don't need keyboards' motif came in with the Apple iPhone in 2007, so 17 years ago, but while that's true on the whole, there are a number of use cases where a keyboard is surprisingly handy: When writing anything more than a couple of sentences, in a social or messaging or business app, it's really handy to have the full display of content and the keyboard separate. In particular, when working with numbers, perhaps a spreadsheet, having 40% of the screen full of number or QWERTY input makes things very tricky. Clicks solves that elegantly. Using hot-keys that you've learned on, for example, a Mac. So Command-F to find something in a web page in Safari, or Command-N for a new message or email, or space bar to play/pause in YouTube or any o...

(I answered this in video form, but I thought an article would help people find it too!) As part of my research into buying an EV or hybrid, one complaint I heard was that, perhaps especially on the Toyota Yaris models, the 12V battery tended to die if the car wasn’t used for a few weeks, then requiring a jump start from a battery pack or another car. And there’s a lot in this. Not least because the problem is endemic to all cars, though more so with more recent models, as there’s more going on - literally - under the hood. Let’s start with the 12V battery itself, a lot smaller in hybrids and EVs than in traditional pure petrol cars because it doesn’t need to be beefy enough to crank a starter motor. Which is mainly why you don’t hear of 12V depletion in those cars - the larger batteries can withstand much longer periods of inactivity. A 12V battery is used to run the car’s lights, computers, air conditioning (usually), cabin fan, engine pumps and fans and power steering, that sort o...