Gadget Guy Australia

Since the delightfully weird and silly Pro Jank Footy took out best in show at SAGE last year, I’ve kept a close eye on the absurdist AFL equivalent of NBA Jam. Now, the South Australian-made indie game has a release date. Confirmed overnight with an appropriately ridiculous trailer animated by Michael Cusack, Pro Jank Footy will launch on 13 August.

Skullcandy is a brand that has always had interesting ideas, but the company’s dedication to bass above all else has held its products back from being actually good. They were fun, looked interesting, and certainly fulfilled the DJ’s request to ‘turn the bass up’, but they were toys, not serious headphones. Now that the brand has joined the ‘Bose Sound Program’, all the best parts of what makes Skullcandy special can shine alongside refined, mature audio and good quality noise cancelling.

In the world of TVs, 2026 has been the year of RGB technology. Most of the major TV brands are using some form of RGB-based backlighting, including Samsung, LG, and Hisense. Sony also recently debuted its spin on the technology in the form of the Bravia RGB range. I recently reviewed the Sony Bravia 7 II, and it really does show how deep the colours can look with RGB technology.

When I was a little kid playing princess dress-ups, long before I was old enough to pierce my ears, my mum got me some shiny clip-on earrings. They clipped onto my earlobes and were encrusted with dozens of sparkling fake diamonds, and they really helped with my role-play of ruling over the land of the teddy bears. The Motorola Buds Loop is a set of true wireless open-ear headphones, and thanks to the collaboration with Swarovski, it’s covered in crystals.

Skullcandy once positioned itself as the punk rock of headphone brands, made for people keen to deviate from the mainstream. While the street culture aesthetic remains, it has a much broader appeal, with plenty of subtle headphone designs for a mass market. With the Skullcandy Crusher 1080 ANC headphones, it’s perhaps the brand’s biggest swing at the top-end market.

Shokz is in an unusual position as a company. First, it was a small challenger brand chasing the bigger open-ear headphone companies, like Jawbone. After a few years of rivalry, those other companies went down, and Shokz was left as the biggest and best open-ear brand in town. But now, with the air-conduction true-wireless open-ear headphones (as opposed to bone conduction) having a moment of popularity, suddenly Shokz once more finds itself competing against bigger brands.

There are a lot of reasons why I previously haven’t enjoyed the earring-style earphones that have been surging in popularity recently. They often have all the downsides of other open-ear headphones, without the comfort or microphone quality benefits. However, with the Shokz OpenDots 2, I think I finally understand the appeal of this type of earphone.

When you think of gadgets with eye-catching, sparkly aesthetics, robot vacuums probably don’t immediately come to mind. Perhaps it’s time to change that perception, because the Mova Z70 Ultra Roller looks quite different to other robots. Launching in Australia today, Mova’s new flagship robot vacuum comes with a docking station in a ‘brushed metallic’ finish. There’s a more subtle ‘stone black’ variant, but it’s hard to look past the glam rock stylings of the metallic design.

As we mentioned only yesterday, the latest foldable phones are far more advanced than those from just a few years ago. Stronger hinges and better folding glass technology mean they’re more durable and have a much less visible crease than early iterations. Now, Samsung has debuted its latest innovation, a technology it calls ‘Flex Titanium’.

Shrinking the screen while beefing up the grunt, the Honor 600 Pro takes the fight to the mid-sized Android heavyweights. Spun off from Huawei a few years ago, Chinese gadget maker Honor’s Android smartphones don’t get as much attention in Australia as household names like Samsung, Google and Motorola. Despite its lower profile, Honor is producing flagship handsets which can go toe-to-toe with its rivals, like the new Honor 600 Pro and the foldable Honor Magic V6.