The dog delusion
PETOI BITTLE
If your main concern with Boston Dynamics robots isn’t their terrifying
nature but their lack of portability, you’re going to love the Petoi Bittle.
This dinky robot rocks up as a plastic kit that takes an hour or so to
make; it’ll then skitter across your desk and up slopes on spring-loaded
legs that give it plenty of expression, like a puppy, and right itself with a
weirdly alien flipping motion, not like a puppy. The custom Arduino board
at the heart of the unit gives the Bittle its balance, plus there’s infra-red
for triggering movements, and you can programme the thing in a range
of coding languages in an attempt to have it do your bidding.
£176 / petoi.comNeat little 16
HONOR MAGICBOOK PRO
You’re probably not sharing tables with strangers that often right now,
but when the time comes, Honor wants to help you hog them like a pro.
Its new MagicBook Pro is fitted with a whopping 16.1in FHD display. By
shaving off as much bezel as possible, Honor has actually managed
to get the screen into a 15in-laptop-sized chassis, and you get a 90%
screen-to-body ratio as a result. Thanks to the lightweight aluminium
build, which definitely doesn’t look almost exactly like a MacBook Pro,
the MagicBook Pro weighs in at 1.7kg and is just 16.9mm thick. Under
the hood, meanwhile, there’s a 512GB SSD, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a
Ryzen 5 4600H processor to keep everything ticking along.
£850 / hihonor.comFinally! A workout app for techno DJs!
Jeff Mills will be delighted. Now all he needs
is a name that doesn’t sound like an area
manager for Homebase. No, unfortunately
for Jeff, this is not a workout app for DJs
of techno, fidget house, progressive
psytrance or any other genre of dance
music for that matter. With hot, sweaty
gyms pretty much just potential germ
factories and the weather only getting
worse, Technogym’s new app works with
its connected fitness kit, adding a whole
new dimension to your solo workouts.
Ah, so it’s like Peloton?
A bit, although without the insufferable
marketing by the looks of it – and you can
do far more than just cycle and run. With
treadmills, bikes, cross-trainers and rowing
machines in its range, Technogym Live
brings live video classes, one-to-one cardio
sessions and virtual routes to its whole
range of heart-pumping machines, with
expert trainers from London, New York,
Los Angeles and Milan. Cosmopolitan.
You can now also enlist the help of the
new Technogym Coach, an AI-based
regime that will suggest different training
options to you each day, depending on
what your goals are and the kind of stuff
it knows you like.
Right, well I like watching Netflix. Will it
suggest that?
It’s not going to tell you what series to binge
next but it does come with a whole load
of built-in apps – including Netflix, YouTube,
Eurosport and social media feeds – that’ll
help take your mind off the pain.
And how much does it cost?
If you thought Peloton was pricey, you
might want to cover your bank account’s
ears. Technogym’s cheapest bike is £2250
but they go up to £9850, and you can
spend almost £20,000 on a treadmill and
nearly £15,000 on a cross-trainer. Perhaps
it is only for minted techno DJs after all.
WTF IS
TECHNO-
GYM LIVE?