WWDC is an interesting event for Apple Watch fans. Apple doesn’t want to reveal its hardware plans this early in the year with the next Watch still some months away. But it does want to get developers excited about making apps for it.

The result? An unveiling of the next generation of watchOS, which can often bring some clues about where the hardware is going to go.

Here, then, are the highlights of watchOS 7 – and what these features and updates might mean for the Apple Watch 6.

• WWDC 2020 live blog: everything Apple announced
• iOS 14 release date, beta, features and supported iPhones
• iPadOS 14 release date, features and compatibility details

1. More independence

There are now more than 20,000 watchOS apps, and Apple’s own apps are becoming more independent from the iPhone: in watchOS 7 your dictation will now happen directly on the device, and you’ll be able to use real-time language translation too.

That’s quite demanding, so it’s really going to benefit from the increased processing power of Apple’s next-generation Watch processor.

You’ll also be able to share Watch faces directly from your device, and take advantage of Apple Maps’ new cycling directions in some US and Chinese cities; more cities will be added later in the year.

2. Built-in sleep tracking, but perhaps not better stamina

It’s unclear which Apple Watch models the new built-in sleep tracking will support, but you can be certain the Apple Watch 6 will be one of them. The new Sleep Mode turns the display off and only shows a dimly lit time when you tap it, and it’s clever enough to detect not just motion, but the rise and fall of your breathing, to gain an accurate picture of your sleep.

The keynote specifically mentioned the wake-up screen showing battery life “so you can remember to charge”, which suggests the next Apple Watch isn’t going to have massively increased battery life.

3. Improved audio

With on-device dictation and language translation being key selling points of the new watchOS, it’s likely that we’ll see improvements to the Apple Watch’s microphones: the clearer the audio input, the less work the processor has to do to understand it.

The new watchOS 7 will also offer improved sound level monitoring, and it will analyze your headphones to see if you’ve been listening to them too loud for too long. It’s unclear whether that will apply to all headphones, or just Apple’s own ones.

4. Better health tracking

We asked last year whether Apple “could be positioning this as an overall health device as well as one for physical fitness?” The answer is a firm yes: during the keynote, the Apple Watch was described as an “intelligent guardian for your health.” From cycle tracking to sound monitoring, watchOS 7 wants to make you better informed and more aware of what your body is doing.

Apple hasn’t confirmed the leaks indicating it will be adding blood oxygen level detection to the next Apple Watch, but as the code was in a leaked version of iOS 14 it’s a pretty safe bet. That will be a useful supplement to the existing health and movement tracking sensors, which Apple has used to introduce a new form of fitness tracking: Dance.

It uses what Apple calls “advanced sensor fusion” to get input from the accelerometer and gyroscope to work out what your arms are doing (unlike walking or running, they don’t always do the same as your legs) and combines that with heart rate sensing to calculate the calories you’re burning.

There are four new workout types in watchOS 7: in addition to Dance, there’s Core Training, Functional Strength Training, and Cooldown. And the app you’ll be tracking them in has a new design and a new name, with Activity being renamed to Fitness.

5. More customization

Each Watch release bring some new watch faces, and the Apple Watch 6 will be no exception. Those faces will be more customizable too, because Apple now enables you to run multiple versions of the same complication at the same time. For example, you might use a fitness app to show more than one of your metrics on your watch face.

6. More notifications to disable

If like us the first thing you did with Breathe, heart rate and sound volume notifications was to turn them all off so they’d stop annoying you, there’s going to be a new one to disable on your next Apple Watch: handwashing.

It will automatically detect vigorous hand movement consistent with handwashing - even listening for the tell-tale sound of squirting soap – and we will try very hard not to make any puerile jokes about it.

If you don’t disable it, it will give you a soapy countdown until 20 seconds are up and urge you not to stop if you try to finish prematurely. Data will be shared with the Health app so you can see just how hygienic you are.

We know it’s important. We do. But we’ll be honest, it wasn’t exactly on our wish list for the next Apple Watch.

7. A release date near the end of the year

As expected, watchOS 7 is due for release “this fall” (meaning September or later this year), so it’s a safe bet that that’s when we’ll see the Apple Watch 6 too. More specifically, we'll probably see it in early to mid-September based on past form.

Apple may have played its wearable cards close to its chest this week, but the days when Apple leaks were harder to get than a deep discount on the iPhone 11 Pro are long gone: these days we usually know most of the hardware stuff weeks before Apple announces it, so stay tuned for Apple Watch 6 leaks, rumors and predictions in the coming months.

• iOS 14 has also been announced in full

If you're lucky, a computer virus is one of the most annoying things that can happen to your PC or Mac. And if you're unlucky, it's one of the most devastating. While some viruses are little more than a pain in the backside, others can seriously damage your most treasured data – data such as your photos or important personal documents.

The good news is that if your PC or Mac has one, you don't need to be really techy to get rid of it. And it's really easy to prevent your computer from getting infected again in the future.

Let's discover how you can tell your computer has a virus, and what to do about it.

How do viruses get into PCs?

Computer viruses typically spread in two different ways. The most common way is by getting people to open infected files. Those files could be sent via email, downloaded from websites or on removable storage such as a USB stick: if you open the file, the virus sneaks onto your PC or Mac.

Viruses can also be transmitted via insecure software, which is when a program isn't 100% safe from infection: some viruses are written specifically to target vulnerabilities in specific programs.

How to spot the symptoms of a PC virus

PC viruses are like real-world viruses: they attack your PC and prevent it from working properly. So the first sign of a PC virus may well be your computer doing unusual things. Are you suddenly seeing stacks of pop-up adverts? When you try to search the internet, do you get weird results? Are you locked out of your computer altogether with a message demanding money?

These are all what computer experts call 'malware', which is short for malicious software. Each one is a slightly different kind, so the one that blasts you with adverts is called adware, the weird search results are the result of what's called browser hijacking and the locked computer is called ransomware.

In the case of ransomware, never, ever pay the ransom or even worse, give the criminals your card details or bank details: they probably won't unlock your PC but they'll definitely make off with your money.

Although many viruses are obvious, some of them aren't. Some of them are only obvious to other people. For example, if you get messages from friends, family or colleagues asking why you're sending them weird stuff, that's often a sign that a virus on your computer is sending out infected emails to try and spread to everybody in your contacts book.

The good news is that all of these problems are easy to fix.

How to remove a PC virus from your computer

To get rid of a virus, you need to do two things. First of all, you need get hold of some digital disinfectant. We use the term 'antivirus software' to cover all kinds of virus killers; the very best antivirus software can find and destroy all kinds of malicious software, from adware to ransomware.

Different suites will suit different people, but our top recommendations are Bitdefender AntiVirus, Norton AntiVirus and Kaspersky AntiVirus: we think these are the smartest, safest and most straightforward solutions for most people.

Once you've got it, update it immediately. The antivirus software will usually do this automatically, but it's a good idea to use its "Check for Updates" option to be on the safe side. 

New forms of malicious software are found every day, and the best antivirus apps are constantly updated so that they can destroy even the most recent viruses.

The second thing to do is to isolate the virus so it can't do any more damage. To do that, you can put your PC into something called 'Safe Mode'. 

This is a feature of Windows that runs with the absolute minimum of features. That means there are fewer opportunities for the virus to do anything or to spread to other computers.

• How to start Windows 10 in Safe Mode

Once you're in safe mode, run your antivirus software and put the kettle on: no matter how fast your PC, scanning everything on it can take a little while. Your antivirus software will identify any infected files and clean them if it can; if they're beyond repair, it will quarantine them so they can be safely deleted without re-infecting your PC.

In some cases you can also use Windows' System Restore to roll files back to their pre-infection state.

How to stop viruses getting onto your PC

The last thing you want is another infection, so it's important to practice the internet equivalent of social distancing: never open files you haven't specifically requested and never download files from places you don't 100% trust.

We'd strongly recommend good antivirus software no matter how careful you are. Many of the best antivirus software suites will automatically scan incoming emails, files you download and USB devices you connect – but they'll also protect you in other ways too.

For example Norton AntiVirus has anti-ransomware protection and virtual private networking (VPN) to prevent people from intercepting your data when you're using public Wi-Fi, and it has parental controls so you can ensure the kids browse safely too.

Not every virus is obvious and not every virus spreads in ways you can anticipate, and new viruses are discovered every day. Good antivirus knows about them too.

It's also very important to keep your copy of Windows and your other apps up to date. In most cases that should happen automatically via Windows Update and your apps' own automatic checking for updates, but not all apps do it for you so make sure you click those "check for updates" buttons.

We'd also recommend two other very important things. One, make sure you backup anything important. Viruses aren't the only threat to your important files: hardware can fail, laptops can be stolen and accidents can happen. If it matters to you, make sure you have backups of it.

And two, never use the same username and password twice. It's tempting, we know, but if you do and malicious software manages to intercept your password for site A, it can then try those details on site B, and site C, and site D, and site E, and… If the thought of trying to remember different, complicated passwords for lots of different sites sounds terrifying, look for an antivirus suite that also includes a password manager. 

That'll create really strong passwords for you, and it'll remember them when you need to use them.

Over the last decade we’ve seen things people wouldn’t believe. Samsungs on fire over our shoulder. We watched Windows Phones glitter in the dark near Bill Gates. 

Many of those moments are already lost in time, like tears in the rain. But some other awful things endure, and it’s time they got in the sea.

When it comes to naming the tech trends we’d like to see the back of, we’re spoilt for choice: hardware you can’t upgrade, surveillance tech you can’t evade, streaming service exclusives and Windows Flipping Updates. But despite their obvious irritations, they aren’t the worst. Far from it. These are the ones we love to hate, the tech trends we’d like to see the back of in the 2020s. 

Style over substance

You know who we’re going to pick on here. The 2010s were the decade when Apple’s designers ruled the school at the expense of practicality, when 'it just works' became 'it doesn’t work, but it looks brilliant'.

Remember the MacBook Pro keyboard that couldn’t handle people typing on it? The Mac Pro that didn’t so much put form over function as throw function in the bin, set the bin on fire and push the bin off a cliff? The MacBook with a single USB port that meant you couldn’t charge it and use an external device at the same time?

And don’t get us started on the iPhone headphone jack, the location of the charging point on the second-generation Magic Mouse or the clown car of remotes that ships with the Apple TV.

The good news is that Apple appears to have belatedly realised this, so for example the new 16-inch MacBook Pro has a proper keyboard again.

Here’s to more slightly duller but more user-friendly design decisions this decade.

Subscriptions for everything

You’re in a cafe. You ask for a coffee, but the barista won’t take your money. They want your bank details, because you can’t just buy coffee any more. You need to sign up to the Vibrate My Eyeballs Mega Super Deal Member Plan. You get seven days free and you can cancel at any time but if you forget it’s $79.99 a month.

That’s pretty much where tech is now.

The slow march of subscriptions didn’t stop with TV and movies. Today you don’t just need six different streaming subs to cover the programmes you want to watch and the songs you want to stream. You need your photo storage sub and your online gaming sub and your Creative Cloud sub and the Patreons you support and the sub that unlocks the filters in your photo app and your wireless security camera sub and the eighty-six different subs you’ve had to take out because nobody lets you just buy an app any more and you look at the graph in your online banking app and you ask yourself, hey! How did I get here?

And the short answer is: cheapskates, mainly. Cheapskates who wouldn’t pay for stuff even when it was reasonably priced, so the people who make stuff started to see too many ribs poking through their T-shirts and decided the only way they’d actually get to eat was to make the entrance fee zero and then hit everybody with a sub to actually make things work.

And that’s fine, and it’s fair, and it’s OK until the day when that check doesn’t clear or the client doesn’t pay and your bank account is full of cobwebs and your email app has 17 messages telling you there appears to be a problem with your payment method and nothing works anymore.

Launches for tech that doesn’t work

Ever since everyone discovered that the original iPhone demo featured a phone held together with duct tape and sheer force of will we’ve had to sit through tech launches where execs will quite happily burble on about products that don’t work.

Take Samsung, for example: in their rush to market a folding phone, they forgot to make sure that the folding bit of the Samsung Galaxy Fold could handle being folded and unfolded. This is rather like a parachute company forgetting to put the parachutes into its backpacks, or a shark repellent manufacturer not checking that its product actually repels sharks. And before the Apple fans get too smug here, one word: AirPower. A charger so advanced, so beyond what anybody else is capable of doing that, er, Apple wasn’t capable of doing it either.

So here’s our request to the tech industry. If you’re going to make shit up, if you’re going to announce products you know you can’t make and that you might never be able to make properly, go crazy! Show us holographic heli-trousers! AR glasses that reveal our enemies’ most shameful thoughts! An affordable, rock-solid triple-A streaming games platform with minimal hardware, 4K resolution and zero lag!

OK, maybe not that last one. Too far-fetched.

Dockless electric scooters

It’s not much of a stretch for dockless electric scooters to get in the sea when so many of them get in the rivers, in the canals, in the storm drains and anywhere else where drunk and/or lazy people can throw them. They’re still illegal in the UK but in many parts of the US they’ve become a curse: blocking sidewalks, being dumped all over the place and causing all kinds of problems for pedestrians and local authorities.

The problem with dockless scooters isn’t the tech, or even the fact that some – critics would say many – riders are awful. It’s that the companies behind them are 'disruptive', which is tech-speak for 'irresponsible and of dubious legality'. The same story repeats: operator appears from nowhere, doesn’t apply for a licence, floods the streets and expects the council to pay for clearing up their mess. It’s Facebook’s 'move fast and break things' strategy taken far too literally.

It’d be a shame if bad business practices spoiled the scooter party, though: if they’re not being thrown into bits of the environment, they can be better for the environment than cars.

Facebook Portal

What could go wrong with a Facebook-connected camera in your home, apart from absolutely everything?

All personal digital assistants are potentially sinister, of course. But Facebook’s rivals haven’t spent most of the last decade demonstrating their complete disregard for people’s privacy. How many times have we heard senior FB execs apologise, say they haven’t lived up to their usual high standards and promise to do better after yet another privacy scandal?

You know how Portal will pan out: Facebook will promise not to listen to or look at anyone without permission, and then an accident or a leak will make it clear that Facebook has been listening to and looking at a whole bunch of people without permission – just like it’s continuing to record and monetise your location data even when you’ve said no to location sharing with the Facebook app. Facebook will then apologise, say that it hasn’t lived up to its usual high standards and promise to do better.

Expecting Facebook not to try and analyse and monetise Portal video and audio is like expecting your dog to ignore a plate of sausages you’ve left on the worktop. Oh sure, they’ll give you those big sad eyes when you come home, but they’ve still eaten your dinner.

• CES 2020: what you can expect to see at the world’s biggest tech event

The bigger and better Apple's batteries get, the bigger the screens and the more powerful the processors we attach them to. That means we all still need to charge our iPhones regularly.

There are two kinds of charging: wired charging and wireless. Wired can be faster, but not always: what matters is the power of the charger. Until very recently every iPhone came with a 5W charger, but iPhones have supported fast charging since the iPhone 8: for that you’ll need an 18W charger or better, and it should have a USB-C connector, not the more familiar USB-A.

iPhones use slightly different wireless charging to Android devices, so it’s crucial that you look for PD (Power Delivery) if fast charging matters to you: that’s the one Apple’s iPhones use. Without it, a fast charger won’t charge, er, fastly.

Below you'll find advice on what to look for in a charger, followed by our picks of the best. And if you're on the lookout for a deal, make sure to keep an eye on our Black Friday and Cyber Monday pages.

Wireless vs wired charging

Wireless isn’t as fast, but it’s more convenient. Wireless iPhone chargers deliver 5W or 7.5W and work through most iPhone cases.

Most standalone charging pads expect you to provide the actual charger, and can’t deliver more power than you put into them – so even if an iPhone wireless charging pad can deliver 7.5W, it can’t do that if you’re plugging it into a charger that only gives it 5W.

How to pick a charger

Don’t just look at price. Look at what you want to do now, and what you might want to do next year. For example, an 18W charger will fast charge your iPhone, but it’s not powerful enough to run a MacBook Pro; a more powerful one that can may be a better option for your future travels.

It’s also wise to go for USB-C even if you don’t need it right now: that’s where everything is heading, so USB-C is future-proof and backwards compatible.

These are our favorite iPhone charging blocks, iPhone charging cables and wireless iPhone charging pads. We’ve chosen them on three key criteria: quality, usefulness and value for money. Whether you’re a road warrior or a box set binger, these chargers, cables and pads are the best ways to keep your iPhone powered up.

What to look for in a charging block

Power and ports matter here. For fast charging (iPhone 8 onwards) you’ll need 18W or more and USB-C, not the older, more common USB-A.

What to look for in a charging cable

Durability is key. Nylon braiding reduces tangling; look for reinforcements where the cable meets the connector, as that’s where cables tend to fray.

What to look for in a wireless charger

Many wireless chargers deliver 5W, which is fine for overnight charging, but 7.5W charges faster.

The best iPhone charging cables

The Powerline Plus II is exceptionally tough and exceptionally quick, and may be the last Lightning cable you ever buy. That’s because it’s designed for USB-C connections, which deliver much faster charging than USB-A ones – assuming your charger delivers the right amount of juice, of course.

It works with high-powered chargers including Apple’s ones and is lab-tested to withstand 30,000 bends, which means it should last thirty times longer than lesser cables. Anker is so confident that it offers a lifetime warranty: this cable should last much longer than any of your iPhones or iPads.

If you’re not fussed about getting a braided cable and want a 1.8 meter one, the original Powerline cables are very good value: you’ll be hard pushed to find a similarly good quality USB-C cable of the same length for the same price.

The question here is whether you want the increased strength of the braided Powerline Plus II, which is only a little bit more expensive. Where that one has been lab-tested to survive 30,000 bends, the original Powerline has only been tested to 12,000 bends – although like its sibling it does come with a lifetime warranty.

This 3 meter cable may be the most useful iPhone charging cable ever made. It’s available in much smaller sizes, but there’s a reason we love the long one. It’s long enough to stretch from a wall socket to the sofa or from your in-car charger to the kids’ iPad in the back seat.

Length isn’t the only good thing here. Nylon braiding means it doesn’t tangle easily, and the sleeves at the joint between the cable and the connector prevent the bending that can lead to dangerous fraying.

The colors range from utilitarian grey to hard-to-lose red and rose gold. Our only niggle is that the lightning end feels a little looser than Apple’s own cable, especially in our iPad.

Here’s a handy one for people with gadgets of various vintages: a triple pack of 6-inch charging cables that covers pre-Lightning iPhones, iPads and iPods, plus modern Lightning devices and non-Apple micro USB devices such as Kindles, console controllers and cameras.

We’d argue that the main benefit of buying a triple-pack of good-quality cables from the likes of Belkin instead of a single cable with swappable connectors is that swapping connectors causes wear and tear for the three days you get before losing all of them.

Sometimes little things make a big difference: at 1.2 meters (4ft) compared to the more common 0.9 meter (3ft), Belkin’s Boost is a little bit longer than the average iPhone charging cable.

That extra foot means it’s a lot more useful: it’s long enough to reach from the floor socket to the sofa without you having to sit in an awkward position; it’s long enough to reach the bedside table without having to rearrange the furniture; it’s long enough for the passenger in your car, and so on.

It’s a typically high quality Belkin product, although personally we prefer braided cables to smooth ones.

Apple recommends this charger for the iPad Pro and iPhone 8 or later, all of which support fast charging; despite this, Apple didn’t provide a fast charger with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, X, XS, XR or the non-Pro iPhone 11, so this is a purchase you’re going to make while pulling a pretty sour face.

But if you’re a heavy iPhone user, it’s a worthwhile investment. The difference between the 18W charger and the ancient 5W one is dramatic: with the former you can get about 50% charge from flat in half an hour, but the latter takes about six years.

Does the Apple charger come with a cable? Ha ha ha no.

If you can’t bear giving more money to Apple for the charger that should have come with your phone, be careful what you buy instead: some chargers advertised as fast chargers are only fast for Android devices, not Apple ones. This one, though, is a 42W fast charger that works with all iPhones and fast charges iPhone 8s onwards.

It’s half the price of the Apple one and has one high-speed USB-C for fast charging and a second USB-A for other devices. Cables aren’t included.

We’ve used many Anker chargers for many years now and we’ve found them to be utterly reliable.

If you want to charge your laptop as well as your iPhone, this is the iPhone charger for you. It comes in two flavors, a single-port one and one with a second USB-A port; while they both have the same usual selling price, at the time of writing the single-port one is being heavily discounted on Amazon.

The PowerPort Atom III has 60W of power and can charge pretty much anything that you can connect to its USB-C port.

Most of us live in households where there’s more than one kind of device to charge. This from TeckNet is a good solution: it has an 18W USB-C port with Power Delivery for fast charging your iPhone, and it also has two USB-A ports that you can use to charge other devices at the same time.

It’s a fairly bulky thing – don’t expect to be able to hide it behind something in the kitchen – but it’s solid, safe and delivers enough power to recharge even the biggest iPhone at high speed. Three ports mean it’s a good travel option too.

It’s not pretty, it’s not incredibly light and it’s not very small, but the PowerCenter 4 is pretty useful. It can throw up to 60W through its USB-C connector, which is enough to charge a laptop, and its triple USB-A connectors enable you to connect and charge three other devices at the same time.

Like many such chargers it’s dual voltage so you can take it with you on holiday to charge your iPhone, your Kindle, your camera, your Apple Watch and anything else that needs topping up. It’s not as elegant as a multi-device wireless charger, but it’s an awful lot cheaper.

With Apple’s AirPower wireless charging pad DOA, where do you go when you want to charge not just your iPhone but your AirPods and your Apple Watch too? Mophie has the answer, and while it’s hardly cheap it’s compact, stylish, easy to clean and particularly handy for commuters and travelers.

It will chuck 7.5W of power at your iPhone and works through cases up to 3mm thick, while the Apple Watch connector is housed at an angle that’s ideal for Bedside Mode and the AirPods charging point doesn’t obscure your view of your Apple Watch’s face.

Unlike standard wireless charging pads you won’t need to buy or provide a separate wall charger, either.

As with wired fast chargers, wireless chargers don’t work in the same way for iPhones as they do for Android devices.

For example, a typical 10W wireless charger will deliver that power to Android but drop to 7.5W or even 5W for an iPhone. That’s because Apple doesn’t currently support 10W wireless charging: it initially supported 5W and upped that to 7.5W, but iOS 13 still currently limits some Qi chargers to 5W.

This Anker wireless charger delivers the current iPhone maximum of 7.5W to recent iPhones, but it’s important to note that it can only do that if it’s connected to a wall charger that’s compatible with Quick Charge 3.0. If not, it isn’t drawing enough power.

Belkin’s PowerHouse is a simple, effective and reasonably-priced dual charger for iPhone and Apple Watch, and it works with any iPhone that has a Lightning connector.

Unlike the Mophie wireless pad there’s no AirPods charger and the iPhone connection is wired, not wireless – but the connector is movable so you shouldn’t have to take your phone out of its case.

The integrated, magnetic Apple Watch charger doesn’t need your charging cable – so you can use your Watch cable somewhere else, for example when you’re traveling or at work.

It’s a good quality charger but beware if you have an official Apple leather case: some reviewers say the heat from the charger transfers color from the case to the charger.

Many car chargers deliver tiny amounts of power, and that’s a problem if you want to charge something hungry such as an iPad, or if you need to recharge a flat iPhone in a hurry.

Anker’s Power Drive PD solves that problem: it’s a 30W charger with a fast USB-C port as well as a USB-A port for older devices and devices that don’t support fast charging.

That means you can charge your iPad while topping up your iPhone, or just recharge something big like your laptop. It’s small, too, so it won’t dominate the dashboard like some other multi-socket chargers do.

If your iPhone doesn’t support fast charging, if you don’t need it, or if you don’t want to pay for it, then this is one of the best bargain chargers. There’s no USB-C socket here so don’t expect to charge an iPhone 11 in half an hour, but twin USB-A sockets mean you can connect two devices simultaneously.

It’s a good option for running older devices or for maintaining the charge you already have, so for example you could use it to power your phone when you use it as a sat-nav: no matter how far your destination, you’ll still have a fully-charged iPhone when you get there.

• Now load up on the best free iPhone apps

In the run-up to today’s Pixel 4 event Google was leakier than a fishnet stocking full of soup. One of the things that fell out was Google Recorder, which made its way into some people’s hands before it was officially unveiled on stage.

It might not be a big surprise anymore, but it looks like it’s going to be a big deal.

Google Recorder is going to be a brilliant tool for students, journalists and anybody else who needs to record and transcribe speeches, lectures or interviews – and the good news is that while it was unveiled purely for the Pixel 4, it’s been tested on other Android devices too.

What does Google Recorder do?

Google Recorder records audio and converts it into searchable, editable text. It does it automatically, and it works offline. That’s a crucial difference between it and other voice recording apps, which either require an internet connection to do transcribing or just don’t offer transcriptions. You don’t even need to ask it to transcribe your audio; it does it automatically.

It’s important to take tech demos with a pinch of salt, of course, but what Google showed us was very impressive: the app appeared to work incredibly quickly with error-free results. 

We’re sure it’ll be a bit more patchy in areas where there’s a lot of ambient noise, but given a good quality microphone and a reasonably quiet environment its performance should be excellent.

The app looks like a more Zen version of Samsung’s Voice Recorder and very much like the Voice Memos app that Apple ships with iOS. The first leaked version didn’t have transcription features, but it got those earlier this month in a significant pre-launch update. That update brought three killer features: transcription, exact match searching and audio classifiers.

What features does Google Recorder have?

The big selling point here is of course the transcription, something we’ve already seen from a number of online services. But real-time and offline takes it to a whole new level.

One key benefit of automatic transcription is that you can search your audio for specific things you or the speaker has said, which is what the exact match searching feature delivers. It enables you to search for a specific word or phrase either in the current recording or across all your recordings. 

When Google Recorder finds a match, it can take you straight to the appropriate bit of the audio while highlighting the appropriate bits in the transcription. It’ll also show you on the audio timeline if the word or words appear elsewhere in the clip so you can scrub directly to the appropriate section.

That’s going to be a boon for journalists whose interviewees tend to waffle, or for students whose lecturers take an eternity to get to the point, and it’s something other recording apps don’t generally offer.

The big benefit of these various features is attention. If you’re not trying to concentrate on making notes that’ll make sense or just be legible in the future, you can give all your attention to the person who’s speaking, not the notes you’re making.

Google Recorder can recognize cats and whistling

The app enables you to search for specific sounds. According to Mishaal Rahman, who got their hands on an early version of the app, the audio categories the app can automatically recognize include Applause, Bird, Cat, Didgeridoo, Knock, Laughter, Music, Rooster, Phone and Whistling. 

Language support so far is limited to US English, but more languages will be added soon.

Google Recorder: saving and sharing

When you’ve finished recording, the app enables you to tag it with your location and give it a title. In a nice touch it uses Gmail-style suggestions based on the audio it’s recorded, although you can ignore that and go for your own suitably memorable title instead. 

Once you’ve done that you can share the end result as an audio file in .m4a format, the transcription in .txt format, or both together. Naturally you can save to Google Drive too.

When is the Google Recorder release date?

The app will be pre-installed on the Pixel 4, which goes on sale on the October 24. Plus it'll be free, so you don't have to pay to subscribe to the service.

What phones will Google Recorder be available for?

The official answer is just one, the Pixel 4: at the moment Google Recorder is going to be a Pixel 4 exclusive.

However, the APK file for the app has been leaked and seems to run on Android devices such as the OnePlus 5T, albeit with some issues. That suggests that the exclusivity is more to do with marketing than any technical tomfoolery, and that in turn suggest that Google Recorder will make its way to other Android phones eventually. The system requirements state Android Pie as a minimum.

If Google Recorder can come to other Android phones, we’d also expect an iOS version to follow along sooner or later. After all, Google wants to organize all the world’s information, not just the information on Android devices, and Pixels are just another way to get people using Google’s online services.

What other options are there?

Don’t forget the excellent Voice Typing feature in Google Docs, which does a great job of speech-to-text – although it does require an internet connection to work. And don’t forget to check out our round-up of the best online transcription services covers every platform, not just Android.

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What did you think of the iPhone 11 keynote? The word on social media appears to be “meh”, largely because the iPhone 11 appears to be going through its Gillette razor blade period: 

“What will we do this year, guys?” 

“Put another camera in there!” 

But while the iPhone’s clearly going through a protracted period of incremental improvement there were still plenty of interesting things to take away from Tim Cook and company's talk. 

We saw the future of the iPad, worked out what the Apple Watch is actually for and discovered that nobody in the organisation or the theater appears to have a dirty mind: when we were told that the new iPad “is a great one-handed typing experience” nobody laughed. 

Nobody! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, nobody booed when Apple tried to persuade us that the portmanteau “slofie” – short for slo-mo selfie – was a thing that should exist. Let’s pretend that it never happened and never speak of it again.

Here are the six key things you might not have heard from the Apple keynote.

1. The iPad is a PC. Oh yes it is

“We have never been more excited about the future of iPad,” Tim Cook said, unveiling the latest version of what we think is Apple’s best-value product: the entry-level iPad. It’s less than half the price of an iPhone but it certainly isn’t half the device. 

How you compare your products to says a lot about where you think your product is headed – so when Apple explicitly compared its latest, slightly bigger iPad to the current best-selling Windows PC in the US, the message was clear. Thanks in no small part to iPadOS – which, among many other things, brings mouse control to the iPad – the iPad is intended to be a fully-featured PC rival, not just a really big iPhone. And this little iPad has got a smart connector too, so you can add one of Apple’s smart keyboards for an even more PC-like experience.

2. Apple knows what the Apple Watch is for now

The original Apple Watch was a bit like the original iPad: Apple had made a thing and didn’t really have any idea what that thing was for, so it released it to see what people would end up doing with it. And like the iPad, after a few iterations Apple now has a much clearer idea of what the Watch is and what it isn’t. 

As the testimonials and keynote demonstrated, the Apple Watch is no longer intended to be a fully featured do-everything device like an iPhone or an iPad, a wrist-based communicator, garage door opener and dog translator; other than pinging you when you need to be pinged about things it’s for tracking your vital signs whether that’s to stop you dying, helping you win races or helping with medical research. 

In other words it’s a kind of hyper-powered, hyper-fashionable Fitbit, and that’s no bad thing. It’s not bad for business, either, given the incredible amounts of money ageing baby boomers have to spend on health tech.

Oh, and it’s finally able to show the time all the time. It just took five generations.

3. Apple wants all of your money, all of the time

Quite a lot of the event was dedicated to services and subscriptions because that’s where a lot of Apple’s income is coming from now. It all adds up. Five bucks for your Apple television subscription. Another five bucks for Apple Arcade. And of course there’s your iCloud storage, because the free tier is still hilariously stingy. Oh, and then there’s your Newsstand subscriptions and your app subscriptions, of which Apple takes a cut too, and the Apple Card you’ll be paying for them with. 

Apple’s business model used to be that it would sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and that was the end of it; now, it seems the model is to sell you frighteningly expensive hardware at huge profit margins and then sell you lots and lots of subscriptions and services on top of it. 

4. Apple TV+ probably won’t be very good

And we don’t just mean it’ll be rubbish in the UK, as Apple’s TV offerings traditionally are, and where history is likely to repeat in the short term at least. We mean that the signs from the keynote weren’t entirely encouraging. 

Yes, offering a free year’s subscription could mean Apple’s simply using its deep pockets to bring its TV service to everyone at a very low price, but Apple TV+ was already priced below its key rivals Disney and Netflix. If you were a really rich company and you were really confident in the quality of your content, wouldn’t you just spend your money on ads showing how great it was? You don’t see Apple giving you a free iPad for a year, after all.

5. Apple’s doing diversity right

The tech industry can be terribly pale, male and stale, and tech presentations can be particularly terrible examples of that: all too often the only women and people of colour you’ll see are the models in their big-budget ads. 

So it’s good to see Apple walking the walk as well as talking the talk, with a relatively diverse line-up of presenters from within the organisation. Was it perfect? Nope. But it wasn’t an endless parade of middle-aged white guys either, and the same diversity was apparent in the camera demos. This stuff matters.

6. Brexit’s borked tech for the Brits (and it’s probably going to get worse)

For years we’ve been able to translate Apple’s US prices into UK ones, because they’ve been identical: five nine nine USD worked out at five nine nine GBP. 

Not any more. 

The new iPad is $329 in American money but it’s £349 in British pounds. Confusingly the price difference isn’t across the range, so for example the new Apple Watch is a straight dollar-pound conversion, but it’s clearly the shape of things to come and things may well get worse if the Pound continues its decline against the Dollar.

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Smartphone manufacturers have a problem, and that problem is us – the smartphone consumer. 

When they ask us what we want, we say: everything! We want our screens to be bigger but the bezels to be smaller, our batteries to last longer but our phones to be slimmer. 

And most of all, we want to take selfies in such high resolution that you can see the individual atoms that make up our face.

Juggling all these different requirements is hard enough for any hardware, but when you’re dealing with the constraints of mobile phones it’s harder still.

And that’s why smartphones are getting weird.

All about that space

Smartphones are all about cramming a lot of tech into a relatively small space. Once you’ve got the battery in there, there isn’t room for much else – but modern multi-lens, integrated flash camera assemblies need a lot of room, and cameras are very high on buyers’ list of priorities.

How do you square that circle? You could do what Apple does and stick a lumpy bit on the back and a notch on the front. Or you can think outside the box, literally. Why have a built-in camera when you can have one that pops up instead?

Pop-up elements are hardly a new idea in camera design: compact cameras have had pop-up flash units for many years. But actual pop-up cameras in smartphones are a relatively new invention, and they’re a hot trend in smartphone design.

So where did they come from, and are they going to hang around?

Slide away

Making room for all the bits that manufacturers want to get into a phone is a problem that goes back long before the original iPhone, and it resulted in some iconic designs such as the folding Motorola Razr V3 of 2004 and the folding and sliding phones of the pre-iPhone era such as the Windows Mobile-powered O2 XDA II.

In those days the problem wasn’t the camera – it was the keyboard. Whether they folded up or slid away, the keyboard mechanisms were hidden from sight until they were needed in order to make the devices look as small as possible. 

Then the iPhone came along and got rid of the keyboard altogether, and everything was brilliant...until it wasn’t.

Space invaders

The problem of keyboards may have gone away, but after a few years the smartphone designers faced a new kind of space invader: the camera. 

As fashion demanded ever-thinner bezels and edge-to-edge screens with ever-bigger batteries to power everything, the room for camera hardware became increasingly squeezed – but at the same time, the number of cameras and sensors in a typical device was increasing. 

Take the iPhone X, which Apple released in 2017. On the back there’s not one but two lenses, and a flash; on the front, the camera array has sensors plus an infrared camera, a front illuminator, a dot projector for Face ID and the actual camera itself.

Unless you want to go back to having big bezels there are two ways to accommodate all this. You can build the camera elements into the phone, either by having a 'notch' taking a chunk out of the screen – the approach taken by Apple and others – or by putting a 'punch-hole' cutout in the screen, a solution implemented on devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S10. 

Or you can build out, which is what Huawei did in 2015 and many more firms are doing today.

Are you in or out?

Huawei’s Shot X took a sensible approach to the issue of fitting camera hardware into a sleek design: if it isn’t going to be used all the time, Huawei thought, there’s no need to see it all the time. 

So Huawei stuck the camera in a pop-up tab that not only popped up, but did so in such a way that you could use the main camera to shoot selfies. The phone wasn’t a huge success, however, so the idea wasn’t widely copied.

The first of the current crop of pop-up camera phones was the 2018 Vivo Nex, whose 8-megapixel camera pops up when the camera app is activated – although while it’s there for selfies it doesn't do face unlock – for that you’ll need a device such as the Vivo V15 Pro, whose pop-up camera also does fast Face Unlock. 

OnePlus has taken the pop-up approach with its OnePlus 7 Pro, as has Realme with the spring-loaded Sony selfie shooter in the Realme X. 

Meanwhile Xiaomi has gone back to the Matrix-style phones of the mid-1990s for its Mi Mix 3, which has both its front and rear cameras in a sliding rear section, and Lenovo’s Z5 Pro and the Oppo Find X take the slider approach too.

Samsung takes a slightly different tack. The camera on the Samsung Galaxy A80 doesn’t just pop up – its camera assembly rotates, enabling you to point its three lenses and 48 megapixels wherever you fancy, and this rotating section also includes the depth camera for portrait effects. 

Asus has a similar system in its ZenFone 6, once again offering 48 megapixels in its motorized housing. It was actually first debuted in the Oppo N3, a phone randomly sent to TechRadar and sat proudly in our hall of curios... until the tech suddenly became popular again.

Which is better: pop-up, punch-hole or notch?

No matter what technology you use, cameras all have the same basic requirement: they need a lens to let in light and to see what you’re snapping, and bigger is often better here.

Let’s look at a notch-design camera first, where space is very limited. The front-facing camera in the iPhone XS Max's notch is a fixed-focus lens with a 32mm equivalent focal length and an aperture of f/2.2. 

Aperture tells you how much light gets in; the lower the number, the better. Focal length tells you how zoomed-in the image will be, so how big or small subjects will appear in the frame, and lower numbers are better for getting more into the frame. 

Let’s compare the iPhone’s notch camera with the one in Samsung’s S10 Plus, which has a larger space thanks to its punch-hole design (and two cameras instead of one).

 The primary front camera has an f/1.9 aperture to Apple’s f/2.2 and a shorter focal length, equivalent to 25mm. That’s comparable to the iPhone’s main camera, which is f/1.8 and 26mm.

What about the pop-ups? The OnePlus 7 Pro’s front camera has a 25mm equivalent focal length and an f/2.0 aperture. Again, that’s comparable to the main rear camera on many phones.

Why is this important? Well, in a bid to bring the very best technology to smartphones (and allowing brands to charge just that little bit more for the privilege) these front-facing cameras need to start rivalling the technology of the rear - and physics kind of gets in the way of shrinking them. 

Will the pop-up bubble pop?

Are pop-ups the future? We suspect not. That’s because mechanically moving parts get stressed: they wear, and they break, and stuff gets into them. That’s particularly true when they’re in a device that spends so much of its time in pockets and bags, where fluff and various debris can be found.

If your moving parts are motorized the motor is another potential point of failure, and it’s a power drain too – each individual pop-up might not take a lot of energy, but if you use the camera multiple times over the course of a day they'll mount up.

One solution might be to look back at the other way of hiding hardware as demonstrated by the iconic Motorola Razr: instead of sliding the camera out of sight, fold it. 

While the early attempts at folding phones haven’t been entirely successful, there’s a ton of money being spent on making folding phones happen – and if rumors are to be believed, some of that money is being spent by Apple. 

We can’t help thinking that a lot of the problem is that manufacturers are currently prioritizing form over function – after all, we already have a solution to the selfie problem that doesn’t require spring-loading, motors or cutting bits out of the screen.

It’s called a bezel, and it's a perfectly good place to stick a camera - if they can be miniaturized to fit into the sliver of space around the edge of the phone.

If that doesn't work, then it's about going invisible: Samsung has already confirmed that it's working on a sensor that's impossible to see (and the camera quality isn't, apparently, affected) and Oppo has gone one step further by actually showing off a prototype of such technology.

According to the Verge, Oppo admits that this will have a slight impact on the camera quality, but it's worked out ways to optimize the hardware to make the quality comparable. 

Invisible cameras feel like the obvious next step from the pop-up - one that doesn't pop up at all. It merely turns on when needed and creates and unbroken display, one free of mechanical misadventures - now we just need to wait to see when (or if) the technology becomes mainstream.

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Amazon Cloud Cam gives Alexa a new sense: sight. It’s a security camera and a pet camera, a motion detector and even a two-way intercom that you can use to chat to the kids or bark at the dog.

Amazon Cloud Cam was introduced in late 2017, although at the time it lacked the ability to watch via a web browser (that’s now been added). It was designed to work with Amazon Key, Amazon’s security service that enables customers to control access to their home for appointments and deliveries.

Amazon also suggests that you might want to use it to check in on the kids when you’re cooking in the kitchen, or monitor the front door while traveling. It’s a direct competitor to the Google-owned Nest cameras, as well as the recent wave of Wi-Fi-enabled, cloud-connected security products.

What is Amazon Cloud Cam and how does it work?

Amazon Cloud Cam is a connected security camera that records and streams video in 1080p whenever it detects motion; the camera is only enabled when motion is detected, so it’s not recording 24/7.

Amazon Cloud Cam has night vision LEDs that can see in the dark, a microphone so it can hear, and a speaker so that you can talk through it, and it works with Alexa.

To see what the camera can see, just ask Alexa to show your video feed. You can then watch live or watch the recorded clips on your phone or tablet, Amazon Fire TV, Fire tablet, Echo Show or Echo Spot.

Of course, the main feature of a security camera is to let you know if something happens when you aren’t watching. Amazon Cloud Cam will notify your phone or Echo device whenever it thinks there’s something you should know about, such as the sound of breaking glass or an unauthorized visitor. 

You can adjust the frequency of the notifications by turning off 'Motion Detected' in the app’s Settings. Once notified you can watch the live feed on your phone, your Amazon device, or via your web browser.

Amazon Cloud Cam also stores footage in the cloud so you can review it later, although if you don’t have a subscription that storage only lasts for 24 hours.

What does Amazon Cloud Cam cost?

At the time of writing, Amazon Cloud Cam is only available to Amazon customers in the US, and we're waiting to see if Amazon makes it more widely available.

A single Cloud Cam costs $119.99 (roughly £95 / AU$170), or $139.99 (around £110 / AU$200) if you want one that works with Amazon Key, and multi-buy offers can reduce the price. You’ll also need a monthly or annual subscription to get the best from it.

Keep an eye on Amazon sales events such as Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday, when Amazon tends to offer good deals on its own devices.

What are the specifications of the Amazon Cloud Cam?

The Amazon Cloud Cam comes in a smart white finish, and has a 1080p camera that can record at up to 30fps, with eight infrared LEDs for night vision and a 120-degree field of view. There’s an ambient light sensor, an omni-directional microphone, a small speaker and a micro USB port with a 10-foot power cord.

There’s no battery backup and no display; everything is controlled via the companion app. The app is available for iOS, Android and Fire OS. The Cloud Cam works with 802.11g and 802.11n Wi-Fi, and an upload speed of 2Mbps is recommended.

Why do you need an Amazon Cloud Cam subscription?

Amazon’s Cloud Cam may be a new product, but it’s based on the same old business model as traditional security systems: for the best protection you need to take out a subscription, and here that subscription comes in three different flavors: Basic, Extended and Pro – see below for details of these.

Some of the Cloud Cam’s best features are only available to subscribers. Person detection uses intelligent image analysis to tell the difference between people and things, so you’ll be notified when the kids come home or if someone is trying to steal your TV, but you won’t be interrupted if a leaf blows past or a curtain moves.

Zones are really useful. These enable you to tell Alexa to ignore particular bits of the room, so for example if you have glass doors or really big windows you can exclude them to prevent the slightest outside movement from triggering the alarm. Zones can also be used for indoor things such as fish tanks, or for walls that tend to get a lot of light reflections.

How much do Amazon Cloud Cam subscriptions cost, and what do you get?

The Basic plan gives you seven days of cloud storage and supports up to three cameras. Extended doubles the storage time to 14 days and supports up to five cameras, while Pro takes the storage up to 30 days and the number of cameras to 10.

You’ll save a lot if you pay upfront for a year. The Basic plan is $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, a saving of just under $14; Extended is $9.99 / $99.99, saving you just under $20; and Pro is $19.99 a month or $199.99 per year, a saving of just under $40.

Should you be worried about privacy with Amazon Cloud Cam?

That’s an interesting question. The official line is that your video is stored on Amazon’s servers and isn’t shared with any third parties, and Amazon has a pretty good record on security.

However, we also know that a lot of Alexa’s intelligence comes from humans listening in, and in early 2018 Alexa accidentally sent an entire private conversation to someone in its owners’ address book – an accident that, according to Amazon’s explanation, required an almost impossible combination of extremely unlikely circumstances.

So while you shouldn't have to worry too much, if you are concerned about privacy then you might want to be careful about what you do in view of your Cloud Cam

What are the main rivals to Amazon Cloud Cam?

Google’s the big one here: its Nest products include two indoor cameras, an outdoor camera and a doorbell. They’re all more expensive than the Amazon Cloud Cam, though: the cheapest indoor camera is $199 / £159 / AU$249, although it’s sometimes discounted by retailers.

Like Amazon Cloud Cam, Nest cameras need a subscription to unlock their best features: they’re $5 / £4 / AU$7 per month for five days of video history, $10 / £8 / AU$14 for 10, or $30 / £24 / AU$30 for 30 days of recording.

That’s for one camera. Each additional camera requires a subscription too, and they’re billed at 50% of the normal cost – so it’s $2.50 / £2 / AU$3.50 to $15 / £12 / AU$15 per additional camera per month.

Where can you find out more about Amazon Cloud Cam?

Amazon has all the blurb right here.

• Check out all the best security cameras

Welcome to a clash of the titans. In the red corner there’s Ring, now owned by Amazon. In the blue corner, say hello to Google subsidiary Nest. Both firms can add HD eyes to your smart home in the form of video doorbells and security cameras, but there are some important differences between the two platforms.

Both sets of products are designed to make your home more secure and more convenient. Video doorbells can tell you who’s at the door, while connected cameras enable you to see what’s happening in or around your house.

Both platforms can detect intruders and notify you wherever you are, and both can be expanded to cover your entire property. But there are some important differences in what they do, what other products they work with, and what they cost to buy and run.

Below we'll tell you all you need to know in order to decide which system, and which products, are right for you – and with Amazon Prime Day just around the corner you can expect to see cut-price deals on most of the products featured here.

Ring vs Nest: what are the key features?

Both platforms work with IFTTT, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and the Nest Hello also has Google Home notifications for your smart speakers: if someone comes to the door your Google Home or Google Home Mini will tell you somebody’s there.

Ring and Nest both enable you to set up multiple zones, for example your windows, where motion detection should be ignored. They both offer person recognition, so you don’t get alerted if the cat moves or a leaf blows past the window, and Nest also offers facial recognition.

As you’d expect from a Google-powered product it’s very good, and while it takes a little bit of training it does a good job of working out who’s at the door so you can decide whether you want to get up or not.

Both platforms can deliver live video from their hardware to compatible devices: via Google Home Hub for the Nest device and via the Echo Show for the Ring one. Ring also works with Samsung’s SmartThings and Amazon’s Echo and Fire devices, while Nest has its own Works With Nest family of compatible products and services.

Ring: options and accessories

Ring makes three video doorbells and three kinds of cameras: the Stick Up Cam, the Spotlight Cam and the Floodlight Cam. All of the cameras bar the Floodlight Cam are available in wired, wireless and solar variants.

You can also buy a charger for the Ring Video Doorbell, and there’s a plug-in chime so you don’t need to rely on your phone for notifications. The chime also comes in a Pro version that doubles as a Wi-Fi extender. Ring also sells a huge range of fixings for its cameras and doorbells.

Nest: options and accessories

Nest makes one video doorbell, three indoor cameras and an outdoor camera, all of which are wired. The outdoor camera doesn’t double as a security light, although it does have infrared night vision.

The Nest products are part of a wider ecosystem that includes the Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke detector, the Nest x Yale smart lock, a Wi-Fi range extender and a range of Nest Secure alarm sensors. Not all Nest products are available in every country.

Both firms offer bundles that combine multiple products in a discounted package. You’ll find some retailers do the same.

Ring vs Nest: which is easiest to set up?

In the doorbell department it’s an easy win for Ring’s entry-level models here: its Doorbell and Doorbell 2 can run on battery power, but the Doorbell Pro and Nest Hello can’t.

That means you don’t have to mess around with wiring if you don’t want to – and even if you do have a wired doorbell already, you might still need to install a transformer to give the Nest Hello enough juice.

The non-Pro Ring doorbells are therefore going to be much simpler and cheaper to install, but the battery does make the Ring doorbell wider than a normal doorbell so it can be an awkward fit on some door frames.

Ring also offers wireless cameras in the form of the Stick Up Cam Battery and the Stick Up Cam Solar, although the latter one still needs to be connected to its solar panel.

Ring vs Nest: how much do they cost?

Ring doorbells start at £89 / $99.99 / AU$149 for the basic Video Doorbell, rising to £449 / $499 / AU$499 for the Video Doorbell Elite. The Stick Up Cam starts at £139 / $149 / AU$319.

The Nest Hello Video Doorbell is £229 / $249, but that doesn’t include the recommended £100 / $100 installation. The Nest Cam range starts at £159 / $199 / AU$279 for the Nest Cam Indoor, rising to £329 / $349 for the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor. The Nest Hello and the Nest IQ Outdoor are not currently sold in Australia.

Remember that the price you pay for these systems isn’t just what you pay for the hardware. There are subscription fees to consider too; without them you won’t get all the features or more than 24 hours of cloud storage.

Ring vs Nest: how much do the subscription plans cost?

Ring calls its subscription service Ring Protect. There are two tiers: Protect Basic, which is for one doorbell or camera, and Protect Plus, which covers all the devices at a single address.

Both plans include 60 days of storage (30 in Europe), and Protect Plus also throws in professional monitoring (US only) and 10% off additional Ring purchases.

Protect Basic is £2.50 / $3 / AU$3 per month or £24.99 / $30 / AU$30 annually. Protect Plus is £8 / $10 / AU$10 per month or £80 / $100 / AU$100 annually.

Nest’s subscription service is called Nest Aware, and it’s £4 / $5 / AU$7 per month for five days of video storage, £8 / $10 / AU$14 for ten days, or £24 / $30 / AU$30 for thirty. Additional cameras are 50% of that cost, so that’s an extra £2 / $2.50 / AU$3.50 to £12 / $15 / AU$15 per month per additional camera.

Ring vs Nest: which one is right for you?

That depends on whether you’ve already embraced the exciting world of smart home technology. If you have, then it makes sense to look first at the platform that plays most nicely with what you’ve got.

So if you’re a paid-up Alexa fan or use Samsung’s SmartThings then the Ring range is likely to suit you better; if you’re all-in on Google then Nest will probably be a better fit.

Neither platform is a good fit with Apple’s HomeKit: while both offer iOS apps, they don’t integrate with Apple’s smart home platform in the way Hue lights or Ecobee thermostats do. Choosing either option effectively means running two separate smart home systems in the one place.

If you haven’t already thrown your money into the smart home ring then Ring looks like the better beginners’ bet: the Nest range is prettier and generally more polished but Ring’s hardware is generally cheaper, most of its doorbells don’t require expensive installation, and its all-in subscription works out considerably less expensive than a Nest one if you have multiple cameras.

Its camera range is more versatile too, with wireless and solar options as well as the standard wired models, and if you hang on for Prime Day, Black Friday or any of Amazon’s sale events, you’ll almost certainly be able to buy it at a big discount.

It’s worth mentioning here that Amazon also has non-Ring smart security products, at least in the US, where its Amazon Cloud Cam is priced to sell and integrates tightly with Amazon’s various hardware products. However, since its introduction in late 2017 it hasn’t been joined by any further devices.

• Add more security with our guide to the best security cameras

5G networks and smarter mobile tech are creating a perfect storm that’s going to transform livestreaming.

Livestreaming is a great example of how sometimes it takes time for tech to be useful. Back in 2016, livestreaming people falling into puddles was about as good as it got: in the UK, the #drummondpuddlewatch kept the entire nation enthralled, and was the perhaps best thing ever to appear on Periscope. 

Now, though, livestreaming is used by celebrities and social media influencers, bands and brands alike. 

It’s used for both good and evil; we’ve seen livestreaming used to inform populations about terrible tragedies and to cover important events, but we’ve also seen it used as a propaganda tool by the perpetrators of unspeakable horrors.

And yet it’s still in its infancy. 

One of the things that’s kept livestreaming back is the limitations of our phone network; if you don’t have a stable, fast connection then watching livestreams on your smartphone can feel like taking a time machine to the 1990s.

The arrival of 5G promises to bring landline speeds and massive capacity to our mobiles. What does that mean for streaming?

How 5G changes livestreaming

One of the key differences between 5G and 4G is speed. The faster your upload and download speeds, the better quality video you can send and receive – and 5G promises to be a lot faster than even the very best 4G.

In trials, Deutsche Telekom – T-Mobile’s parent company – achieved speeds between 3Gbps and 10Gbps, the equivalent of downloading an entire, uncompressed DVD in four seconds. DT says the average latency in its data network is 50ms; in its very first 5G trials it achieved just 3ms, with further trials taking latency to 1ms.

Of course, it’s important to take speed and latency claims with a big pinch of salt: our 4G phone is technically capable of incredible things but it often struggles to stream Spotify, let alone high-res video, and there are lots of potential bottlenecks between your device and the faraway server you’re connecting to. 

In areas of good coverage we can expect very fast connections delivering smooth, high quality video, and in areas of high demand we’ll see less of the signal-degradation that makes it pretty much impossible to stream anything decent from a big gig or sporting event.

That’s good news for streamers and initially at least, terrible news for gig-goers and sports fans. People who previously didn’t bother livestreaming because the quality wasn’t good enough or they couldn’t get a decent connection at all, will become insufferable, holding their iPads aloft when 5G is widespread. 

Saying that, 5G could bring interesting things to the events themselves, too.

Even better than the real thing

One of the most exciting applications for 5G is in the live arena, where it has interesting potential benefits for sports, concerts and other big events. 

Fancy having your favorite football team stream from its own cameras directly to your phone? Barcelona and Manchester United are already making moves in that direction: the former’s Nou Camp is Europe’s first 5G-enabled stadium, featuring multiple wireless cameras streaming to the 5G network, while Manchester United has been talking to Vodafone about 5G at their stadium, Old Trafford. 

Some pundits reckon that such technology will enable us to experience live events in a different way, the cameras streaming over 5G to mission control before the appropriate feed is rebroadcast to our phones. Reports even suggest that Barcelona will have holographic presenters conducting live interviews with players on the pitch. 

Just last month, London's Wembley Stadium was the venue for an EE 5G experiment that enabled fans with 5G phones to experience the FA Cup Final in augmented reality.

4G simply can’t cope with that kind of app in big numbers: if you’ve ever tried to do anything online at a big sporting event or gig you’ll be painfully aware of how congested the network can get. 

5G should address that, providing enough capacity for fans to experience extra livestreaming content while they’re actually at the event. That could mean switching to a goalie’s-eye view when you’re watching from the stands, or seeing through Matt Bellamy’s eyes when you’re at a Muse gig, (or maybe just streaming something more interesting when a band plays their new album).

Livestreaming to fight the fakes

Livestreaming isn’t just about amusing ourselves. It can inform too – and this is particularly important as we’re moving into an age of deepfakes where the camera definitely does lie. 

Livestreaming is at least a temporary solution to that; until the faking tech catches up, we can be reasonably confident that real-time streamed content is the real deal. 

5G can also play a key role in providing access to media. By enabling much higher quality connections to people on mobile connections we’ll be able to get contributions from more places and hopefully, from more people. 

That’s not just good news for people trying to expose injustice. It’s good for more mundane things too. For example, a primary school will be able to stream the school play so parents who cant leave work don’t need to be there in person.

Everything old is new again

If you’re feeling cynical you might point out that we’ve heard this stuff before: super-powered citizen journalism, rock concerts in VR, even holographic phone calls. 

However, the technology is comparable to electric cars, which have been around since 1832 but only really became mainstream in the last couple of years. Sometimes it takes a very long time for the technology to actually deliver on people’s more excitable promises.

We think that’s the case with 5G. In our 3G/4G world, mobile tech doesn’t have the speed, the capacity or the sufficiently low latency to deliver the more excitable and exciting things we’ve been promised. 

5G removes those obstacles – and it isn’t happening in isolation, either. As mobile tech gets smarter, what’s possible gets more exciting. Oculus has finally delivered decent cable-free VR. Apple’s working on more AR games and experiences than ever. Even basic smartphones have desktop-class processing and graphics. Combine that with 5G and you’ve got a perfect storm.

It won’t happen overnight. It’ll take time to build out capacity, and to replace our 4G devices with 5G ones. And it’ll take time before we work out exactly what livestreaming on 5G is capable of. We’ll probably start off livestreaming puddles in much higher definition. 

However, in the longer term 5G will deliver experiences we haven’t even imagined yet.

5G Uncovered, in association with Samsung, brings you everything you need to know about the next wave of connectivity - not just how fast it's going to be, but in just how many ways it's going to change your life. Our 5G Uncovered hub is carefully curated to show everything there is to know about the next generation of connection.   

• Read our Oculus Rift review

The lock on your iPhone stops you accidentally activating or changing anything, and if your Apple Watch isn’t passcode-protected then unlocking it is just a matter of tapping the screen or raising your wrist. 

But if it is passcode-protected then things are a little more complicated. That’s because passcode protection is a security feature, and you don’t want anyone else to override it. 

But you don’t have to enter your passcode every time you want to tell the time. Let’s discover what options are available to you.

Why should you lock your Apple Watch with a passcode? 

The short answer is Apple Pay: you don’t want anybody with access to your Watch to be able to spend money without your permission. That’s why Apple asks you to choose a passcode when you first set up your new Watch; no passcode, no Apple Pay.

If you skipped the passcode bit during setup you can add a passcode later by going into the Apple Watch app, tapping on settings and selecting Passcode. This enables you to set a code for your Watch. Choose one you haven’t used for anything else.

How to unlock your Apple Watch with your iPhone 

You can automatically unlock your Apple Watch whenever you unlock your phone, which is handy for iPhones with Touch ID or Face ID. To set this up it’s back to the Watch app. Tap on Settings > Passcode > Unlock with iPhone.

Unlocking uses Bluetooth, so you’ll need to be within range. Apple says that’s about 10 metres or 30ish feet.

How to turn off automatic locking

Your Watch can automatically lock itself whenever you aren’t wearing it, which prevents other people from doing anything with it.

If you want to disable that feature, which Apple calls Wrist Detection, you need to know what you’re switching off: on the first-gen Apple Watch you’ll also turn off Apple Pay, and on the Apple Watch Series 4 you’re turning off the feature that automatically makes an emergency call if you have a hard fall.

Still want to do it? Go into the Watch app, tap Passcode and disable Wrist Detection.

How to manually lock your Apple Watch

If Wrist Detection is turned off, you can manually lock your Apple Watch by swiping up on the Watch face to bring up Control Center. Tap on the lock to lock your Watch.

How to unlock your Apple Watch when you can’t remember your PIN / Passcode 

If you enter the wrong passcode too many times and you’ve suddenly remembered what it is, you can use the Watch app to enter the correct one and unlock your phone – although if Erase Data is enabled, your phone’s data was wiped after the 10th unsuccessful attempt.

If you can’t remember your passcode at all then you’ll need to go nuclear: a full reset. Don’t worry, you’ll get your data, preferences and settings back… eventually. The reset process takes ages, as does restoring your stuff from the backup.

• Spotify on Apple Watch: how to set it up and listen to music on your wrist

The controversial UK porn block comes into effect on July 15 2019. According to the government it’s going to save the children from online awfulness, and there won’t be any negative effects whatsoever.

But I just know it’s all going to end up like my sex life – a combination of severe disappointment, intense embarrassment and a terrible mess. So it’s worrying that nobody seems to be paying attention to what's coming down the tracks.

Porn in the USA (but not the UK) 

The UK porn block is based on the belief that if we make porn slightly harder to access, kids – and in this case "kids" includes 16 and 17-year-olds, which of course means they’ve reached the age of consent – won’t see any of it by accident, and can't see it even if they try.

As you may be aware, there’s a lot of porn on the internet. And as you may also be aware, very little of that is made in the UK. So while we can demand overseas sites implement all kinds of things, they can tell us to go whistle.

Aha! The UK government says. We’ve thought of that!

And they have. Sites that don’t implement age verification will be blocked. 

Remember how blocking the Pirate Bay stopped all piracy forever?

Exactly.

And that’s not the worst of it. 

A pandora's box of privacy issues 

Whenever somebody suggests a new law, we should ask two questions: one, will it solve the problem? And two, is it going to hurt? I think in those case the answers are “no” and “not in a good way” respectively.

We call it the UK porn block, but it isn’t really a block – that comes later. The law creates a mandatory age verification regime. When you visit a website and it identifies you as a UK visitor, you’ll be asked to prove your age. No proof, no porn.

As a bad comedian might put it: you’ve heard of cookie consent; this is nookie consent. 

The problem with age verification is simple: unless you buy a kind of porn pass in the local newsagent, which will apparently only work for a single device, it ties your real world photo ID to the porn sites you visit. In some cases just the URL of a site may make it very clear what your sexual orientation is and what your sexual preferences are. Do you really want that to end up on a government-mandated database? The data may be anonymised, but that doesn’t mean it’s anonymous.

We may think of ourselves as pretty enlightened about this stuff. After all, everybody’s turned their social media banners into rainbows to mark Pride Month. But the reality is that for many people, their sexuality, gender identity or sexual preferences can be used to hurt them. For example, LGBT+ people are abused and hounded online and off, while newspapers take great delight in kink-shaming and pillorying anyone with the slightest public profile who doesn’t stick to the missionary position.

That means the existence of any database of people’s porn preferences is worrying, because if the information gets out it can damage people’s lives. The schoolteacher who’s into some harmless kink. The LGBT+ teen who hasn’t come out yet. The crusading journalist the government wants to discredit. The businessman someone wants to blackmail. You get the idea.

Massive data breaches are so common we barely notice them any more, and if a system can be abused it usually is. If we can’t even trust the police not to abuse the Police National Computer, why should we trust companies located far beyond Europe and beyond the reach of our data protection regulation? 

Will they share their data with, say, the Home Office if they’re asked to? How long before some enterprising lawyer sees the potential? We’ve already seen fitness trackers’ location data used in divorce cases. Fancy discussing clown porn in court?

It’ll take more than Viagra to make this stand up 

Maybe I’m spending too much time in a tinfoil hat. But even if there were no privacy concerns, the UK is trying to make and enforce a system that won’t work.

We already block porn to try and keep it from kids, and the UK government says that that blocking isn’t effective. The solution? Block sites that don’t introduce age verification. “Filtering doesn’t work! Let’s do more of it!”

The UK porn block is very limited. It only applies to sites designed to make money from sales, subscriptions or ads where more than a third of their content is commercial pornography. It won’t affect social media at all, although it could encourage them to kick off people making perfectly legal adult content. 

It places an incredible burden on the BBFC, which has to decide which overseas sites count as pornography. And there are the usual risks of overblocking and mistaken blocking.

And then, of course, there are VPNs.

It’s safe to say the makers of VPN software are feeling pretty aroused right now. Sites will detect UK users by their IP address; use a VPN service and you’re immediately "in another country". So we expect to see a big spike in searches for 'best VPN for porn' in the UK from July 15.

It’s just as well there aren’t tons of affordable, reliable VPN services for every conceivable kind of device. That would make a mockery of the whole thing.

• The best VPN service 2019

Won’t somebody think of the grown-ups? 

I’m a parent, so this legislation is designed to reassure people like me: of course I don’t want my five-year-old seeing sexually explicit content. But this parent has been reporting on porn filtering since the days of USENET, so forgive me if I’m more cynical than the average madam.

Once this infrastructure is in place for porn, what’s next? What else will we have to petition the authorities to let us see, to have recorded in a database somewhere? Do we really think it’s a good idea to tie people’s photo ID in with their porn habits? Can we trust anyone not to abuse the data?

I think you should be wary of anything that comes from people yelling “think of the children!” All too often, that means they don’t want you to think at all.

• Read more: UK porn block: Everything you need to know

With a great video editor for iPhone, you can give ordinary video clips a professional edge that will make them impossible to skip.

iPhones are brilliant for shooting video: recent ones can capture 4K video at a speedy 60fps and automatically stabilize the recording to reduce the worst of the shakes.

That’s great, but for best results you really need a video editing app too. In most cases that enables you to join multiple clips together, add titles and effects, get rid of unwanted sections and turn your footage into something you’ll want to show off.

There are lots of video editors for iPhone in the App Store, ranging from simple apps designed for social media sharing to high-end apps that you could easily make entire movies with and specialist apps for specific tasks. Some are cheap, others cheerful, and some are both. Whether you want to amuse your friends or make a masterpiece, these are the apps we think you should consider.

We think Apple’s iMovie is the best iPhone video editor for casual users. It’s powerful enough to produce very impressive results, simple enough for absolute beginners and doesn’t cost any money.

Like all iOS video editors it’s a little fiddly on iPhone, but it’s superb on the iPad’s bigger screen – and you can connect a keyboard to use keyboard shortcuts for even easier editing.

As you’d expect it integrates very well with Apple’s other apps and features, such as Photos, iCloud Drive, Mail and Messages, and you can stream via AirPlay to an Apple TV. 4K video is supported on iPhones 6 upwards (and iPad Air 2 onwards).

• iMovie

If you find that iMovie isn’t quite powerful enough for you, LumaFusion delivers many of the features of higher-end video editors without losing the simplicity you want on iPhone.

It’s a multi-track video editor for iPhone with three audio/video tracks and an additional three audio tracks for narration and effects, and in addition to the built-in effects and transitions it also supports chroma keying for green and blue screen effects.

In addition to local and cloud storage it also supports WD Wireless Pro drives, and if you want to subscribe to the optional Storyblocks service you also gain access to thousands of royalty-free images, videos and sounds.

• LumaFusion

As a video editor for iPhone, Premiere Rush CC is very good, with four video and three audio tracks and a typically user-friendly interface: if you’ve used Adobe’s iOS image apps you’ll pick it up immediately.

The sound tools are particularly good at balancing, reducing sound and ducking audio so narration is always clear, and the app makes it easy to export for the major social media services such as Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Projects can be opened on desktop in Premiere Pro CC, Adobe’s heavy-duty video app.

As with other Adobe iOS apps, the free offering is limited: you can only export three times. To unlock unlimited exporting and sharing you’ll need the $9.99 monthly sub. That gives you a licence for iPhone, iPad and desktop along with 100GB of cloud storage.

• Premiere Rush CC

Filmmaker Pro is a slightly more advanced alternative to iMovie, with particularly good colour options, filters and green screen support. This video editor for iPhone includes video grading, something iMovie doesn’t, and it enables you to choose between nearly 200 different fonts for your text overlays.

Filmmaker Pro can shoot video too - but not in the free version: like many such apps the full feature set requires in-app purchases. Unlocking removes the watermarks that the free version puts on video, and you can choose between monthly and annual subscriptions. Like iMovie, it supports 4K video on most iPhones and iPads (iPhone 4K support begins with the iPhone SE).

• Filmmaker Pro

You wouldn’t use Clips to make a serious video project on your iPhone unless you were some kind of masochist, but for quick video messaging and social media sharing it’s hard to beat.

It’s exceptionally easy to use, comes with stacks of stickers from the likes of Star Wars movies and Pixar movies, and you can easily add a soundtrack from the supplied library or from your own music collection. The voice-controlled titling is a nice feature and the all-important filters are present and correct too.

If your device has the TrueDepth camera for FaceID, you can also use the clever Selfie Scenes feature to put your animated avatar in front of an animated background.

• Clips

Magisto is another video editor designed for social media sharing, and it’s been created for people who have zero video editing experience.

It can turn static photos into an animated slideshow, automatically apply features such as video stabilisation and cropping, and easily share the results via the likes of Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

The core features are free; $6.99/£6.99 a month gets you the Premium version with support for longer movies, but if you want to be able to edit and reorder scenes you’ll need the Professional package for a whopping $29.99/£29.99 per month. If you pay yearly that drops to $89.99/£89.99.

• Magisto

Quik - GoPro Video Editor isn’t just for GoPro users, although it integrates with GoPro Plus and can recognize faces, smiles and certain actions from GoPro footage. It also works with your photo library and includes support for Live Photos.

As the name suggests it’s designed to make video editing quick: all you need to do is select the photos and video clips you want to use and it’ll do the rest.

It’s easy to reorder clips, change the formatting and speed up or slow down footage, and you can add the usual stickers and text. It doesn’t do 4K, though: videos are 1080p or 720p.

• Quik - GoPro Video Editor

If you want to turn a bunch of clips into a seamless whole or stick emoji on your snowboarding footage, VideoGrade isn’t the iPhone video editor for you. It’s designed to do one thing and one thing only: color grading.

Color grading is the process of changing or enhancing the colour of something, and it’s what makes movies really pop. 

You can use it on photos and Live Photos as well as on video, and you can make adjustments ranging from incredibly subtle to ridiculously dramatic depending on what you want to achieve. There are over 40 different adjustments, you can save presets for easy recall in future and it renders 4K video quickly and effortlessly.

• VideoGrade

• Check out our guide to the best free games for iPhone

Not content with being one of the best smartwatches money can buy, the Apple Watch has the best selection of official and third-party bands on the market. Paired with the choice in size and color of the watch itself, new Apple Watch bands can totally personalize the Apple Watch so it’s right for you.

It also means you can have several different straps that you can rotate depending on if you’re at work, the gym or at a fancy dinner. When the bands are so easy to switch over, you can change your look in seconds.

There is a huge selection of Apple Watch bands, from Apple’s many official offerings to a whole host of silicone, fabric and metal straps made to fit by other companies. There are even NATO-style straps here, though you can’t have an actual NATO strap as the material would cover the Watch’s heart rate sensor. 

The great thing about the Apple Watch is that despite the new design of the Apple Watch 4 and Apple Watch 5, older straps will still fit. The 38mm straps designed for the Apple Watch 1, 2 and 3 will fit the 40mm newer models, while the 42mm straps will fit the newer 44mm models.

New 40mm and 44mm straps are therefore backwards compatible with older 38mm and 42mm Apple Watches respectively. 

The versatility afforded by such a wide selection of straps is great, but it means there are far too many to choose from. That’s why we’ve picked our twelve favorites - there’s something for every taste here. 

These are products that we haven't had in our test labs, but based on our experts' opinion and knowledge of the most reputable brands around, we think these are worth looking at.

Our selections, ranked from cheapest to most expensive, takes into account online reviews, brand reputation, product capability or unique features, to help you pick through the maze of choices available to you.

• Not sure how to switch straps? Here's how to change Apple Watch bands

Best Apple Watch bands and straps at a glance:

1. Chok Idea Innovative Buckle 
2. Clockwork Synergy Classic NATO Band
3. Casetify Printed Apple Watch Band
4. Southern Straps Nylon Apple Watch Band
5. Hoco Original Stainless Steel Strap Bracelet for Apple Watch
6. UAG Active Watch Band
7. Apple Nike Sport Band
8. Apple Sport Band
9. Apple Sport Loop
10. Ullu Skinny Strap for Apple Watch
11. Apple Leather Loop
12. Apple Leather Modern Buckle
13. Apple Milanese Loop
14. Apple Link Bracelet band
15. Hermès Fauve Barenia Leather Single Tour band

Best Apple Watch bands and straps

If you like the leather strap look but don’t want to fork out for the official Apple leather bands then look no further from this curiously named option. Chok Idea’s simple leather strap apes the fastening of the Apple Sport Loop for a true melding of ideas at a fine price.

The leather may be a tad stiff and take a few wears to break in but after that it should age splendidly. It’s available in either Watch size and a whole host of colours. 

Pedants would argue that these aren’t NATO bands, because that describes a very particular kind of strap that runs under the watch itself, whereas these are two-part Apple Watch straps. But screw those guys! 

These NATO-a-likes look very much like the real thing and come in a range of designs clearly designed to cover all bases – so there’s a good old-fashioned US flag right next to a brightly colored Pride rainbow (although unlike Apple’s Pride band there’s no charity benefiting here), and plenty of other options too.

Casetify’s printed bands are tons of fun, and probably cheaper than you might expect. Made from cruelty-free faux leather, the bands come in a dizzying variety of designs and colors from animal prints and bold florals to geometric patterns, emoji and flags.

There should be something here to suit all tastes and all kinds of looks: for example, there’s a beautiful black strap with dark red and grey florals that would go well with a nice frock, or you could relive the 1990s with fluorescent smiley faces.

Straps come in both watch sizes and you can choose between gold, black or silver fixings and buckles.

You don’t get many Apple Watch straps offering a five-year warranty, but then you don’t get many Apple Watch straps made as beautifully as this.

Handmade in San Francisco from a single piece of nylon and with hardware that’s noticeably higher quality than the majority of similar products, these straps come in a variety of colors including NATO-style stripes in sober and fun colors.

There are 84 possible combinations – and they’re bigger than some: if you’ve got larger hands you’ll appreciate the fit of up to 25cm.

Fascinating fact: Southern Straps was the first company to put NATO-style straps on the Apple Watch without obscuring the heart rate sensor.

If you like the look of Apple’s Stainless steel bands but also like being able to afford to eat, Hoco’s bands are an attractive and affordable alternative: this is around 1/10th of the price of Apple’s link bracelet.

As you’d expect it’s not quite up to Apple standards – the dark ones still have edges where the original metal is peeking through and their finish is prone to scratching – and while there’s a link removal tool to get the right fit the process is really quite fiddly.

But it’s nice on and it both looks and feels better than similar-looking but cheaper competitors.

If you’re the outdoorsy type then this is the strap for you. Available in orange, black and camo and made of a high strength nylon weave, it’s the perfect Watch band for the active lifestyle.

Compatible with all Apple Watch series of both sizes, the look is finished off with a big stainless steel buckle. It isn’t the most subtle of straps but if you dig the look then this will make a great wrist addition. 

The official Apple/Nike Sport Band has the toughness and design simplicity of the normal Sport Band, but it also has those compression-molded perforations – or what we like to call "holes”.

Those holes make a big difference to the long-term comfort of the Apple Watch because they enable your skin to breathe under the strap.

The range of colors isn’t quite as exhaustive as for the normal Sport Band and some, like the Black/Volt one, are a little loud for wearing outside the gym, but there are still some subtle shades such as Teal Tint, Smokey Mauve and Spruce Fog.

If you’d rather not have a band full of holes the original Sport band remains an excellent all-rounder.

It’s pricey because Apple, but it’s also made of nicer materials than the knock-offs you’ll find on certain auction sites – and that means you’re not going to end up with odd things happening to your skin after a few hours of wear.

It’s available in fifteen colors to suit most outfits and there’s a charity-helping Product Red version too. You don’t need to worry about getting the right size, either: you get S/M and M/L straps in the same box.

Yes, it’s another official Apple strap and that means official Apple money – but we’ve found Apple’s nylon bands to be really hard-wearing and comfortable. The Sport Loop is made from double-layer nylon and has a clever design on the skin side that uses larger loops for cushioning and breathability.

Because it’s a sports design the colors can be on the bright side, but the Cerulean, Product Red and Pink Sand versions are a bit more subtle and there are some suitably sober blacks and greys too. It’s a useful option for fans of NATO straps who don’t want to cover their Apple Watch’s sensors.

Here’s a slightly cheaper alternative to Apple’s leather bands. Ullu’s Skinny Strap is made from good quality Italian leather and comes in eleven colors, all of which have been hand-colored – although unfortunately the lugs and buckles only come in stainless steel.

Because it’s real leather it will get more interesting over time as the leather ages, and that means no two straps will ever be the same. If the Skinny Straps seem a little too thin, Ullu also makes a padded version that uses the same kind of leather, comes in a similar range of colors and costs the same.

A pricey official strap but an excellent one, the Apple Leather Loop comes in yellow, brown or black. Its party trick is its clever segmented magnetic closure that means you can get a precise and comfortable fit every time. 

This is the Watch band to buy if you like wearing your Apple Watch to formal events or for work and feel a standard rubber one isn’t quite the right look. That’s what you get with leather that;s hand made in Arzignano, Italy.

Note though that this strap is only a 44mm option - so it’ll only fit the larger 44mm Apple Watch 4 and 5 and only the 42mm Apple Watch 1, 2 and 3. 

At $149/£149 they’re hardly cheap, but Apple’s leather Modern Buckle options are genuinely beautiful and are so much cheaper than the Apple/Hermes options. 

The Modern Buckle is a smooth leather with a large rectangular buckle that echoes the shape of the Watch itself, and Apple keeps different colors in stock depending on the season.

It's a great option if you want an official leather band from Apple with a non-magnetic design. 

Possibly the most sought-after Apple Watch band, the attention that the Milanese Loop band receives is warranted.

At a similar price to the Leather Band, owners can get their feet wet with a cool-to-the-touch stainless steel band that ekes elegance and simplicity in its design.

You'll know at first glance if this band is for you, and if it is, you can choose between traditional silver and black options.

OK, now we're getting up there in price. Apple offers up its brushed stainless steel Link Bracelet, but it isn't going to be cheap.

Build materials aside, this couldn't be any more different than the Milanese Loop. Rocking a look akin to high-end analog watches, the Link Bracelet possesses a sophisticated sheen that the others don't.

Equipped with a watch tool, you can customize the size to perfectly fit your wrist and if silver doesn't suit you, it's also available in black. Paired with the Apple Watch, this is probably one of the slickest bands you can make your own.

One look at the name and you know this is going to be pricey. For your money, you're getting industry-leading Hermès design in a band, complete with master-class fabric stitching and leather quality that's unparalleled in the vast batch of Apple Watch bands available. 

It might cost a lot, but if you're a watch aficionado, there's not substitute for quality.

• Now check out the best Apple Watch apps

Let’s start with a question. Does your Apple Watch really need a screen protector? If yours is stainless steel, the answer is probably no: its sapphire crystal glass is incredibly tough and very scratch-resistant.

For aluminum Apple Watch models, things aren’t so clear-cut: the Ion-X glass is pretty tough, but we found our watch soon accumulated a lot of little scratches. They weren’t enough to annoy us in everyday usage, but they did affect the resale value.

Scratches aren’t covered by your warranty, because they’re everyday wear and tear. Smashes are, though. If you really damage your screen and you’ve got AppleCare, Apple will replace the screen two times for a fee of $69/£49/AU$99 each time.

The out-of-warranty fees are much higher, starting at just under $200/£200/AU$300 and reaching the heady heights of $800/£749/$1,199 if you have the ceramic Apple Watch 3.

Even if you do have AppleCare, it’s better not to have to pay the fee: protecting your watch from damage is cheaper than fixing it after damage has occurred. Even the most expensive option here is a fraction of the price of an Apple Watch screen repair.

If you want to keep your watch pristine and protected, there are three main options. There are plastic screen protectors, very similar to smartphone ones, where you peel off the backing, stick them to the screen and push out the bubbles.

These are by far the cheapest screen protectors you can buy, and while they can be a little bit fiddly to fit – getting them onto your watch without leaving any bubbles requires patience and a bit of skill – they do a decent job of standing up to everyday scrapes and bumps.

If you’d rather add something a bit tougher, a tempered glass protector may be a better option. These are much harder to fit – as they’re glass, they’re not as flexible or as forgiving as plastic.

Finally, there are cases that surround the whole watch. Inevitably, they add bulk - and some models are hideous. But if you’re likely to be in an environment where your watch faces various hazards, a case may be a worthwhile investment unless that environment is hot and humid, or wet.

Most protective cases aren’t waterproof or airtight, so they’ll often get steamy in the gym or will let in water when you swim. That doesn’t affect your watch but does make it hard to see.

These are products that we haven't had in our test labs, but based on our experts' opinion and knowledge of the most reputable brands around, we think these are worth looking at.

Our selections, ranked from cheapest to most expensive, take into account online reviews, brand reputation, product capability or unique features to help you pick through the maze of choices available to you.

• After a dock? Check out the best Apple Watch charging stands

Most screen protectors just cover the screen. Not this one: it’s a full body protector with sections to cover the entire Apple Watch body, although we’re not entirely sure why you might want to do that. At the time of writing the full coverage model is available for the Apple Watch 3 but not the Apple Watch 4.

It’s a 'liquid skin' film that you apply while wet, although some reviewers have found that the little sections for the sides of the Apple Watch are very, very fiddly to apply. The main screen bit is a doddle, though.

Here’s a great deal for US Apple Watch owners: the same liquid skin film you get in other firms' protectors at a rock-bottom price. RinoGear’s top-rated screen protectors are available for just $7.85 for a pack of six at the time of writing, which is a dollar thirty per protector.

There’s a lifetime guarantee, but who cares when these are so cheap? If one gets damaged, just throw it out and stick another one on. As with other liquid skin protectors the RinoSkin protectors are applied when wet, can self-heal from minor scratches and are pretty easy to put in place.

If you want to protect your Apple Watch with a case, this is one of the thinnest, least obtrusive ones around. It’s made of the same TPU as rugged watch cases, so it’s tough and scratch-resistant, and it’s easy to fit.

The main downside to this kind of case is that it can trap moisture between the case and the screen, so for example it’s not one to wear to the gym or when you go for a swim. Make sure you get what you order, though: some customers say they paid for a two-pack but only got one.

Spigen makes a whole bunch of Apple Watch cases with differing levels of protection: this, the Rugged Armor version, is one of the cheaper options. It’s a solid TPU case that protects your watch from impacts, though it’s bulky in a Casio G-Shock kind of way.

This case doesn’t include any direct screen protection – the raised lip around the screen should be enough – and that means it won’t suffer from the misting or water ingress that can affect some full-coverage cases.

This is Amazon’s choice for the Apple Watch 4, and it’s also available for all generations of the Apple Watch.

The protectors are made of laser-cut liquid skin film that can be washed and reapplied; unlike some film protectors the LK ones are designed to be applied while wet, which makes it easier to get rid of the dreaded bubbles.

There’s also a lifetime warranty, although we’re not sure why you’d bother invoking it when a six-pack of these protectors is so cheap: it’s much quicker to just chuck on another protector than to write an angry email to the manufacturer.

There are lots of brands offering very similar tempered glass screen protectors with very similar photography, which makes us think they’re coming from the same factories.

That means the buying decision here is largely down to price and reviews: look for ones featuring customer images rather than just endless “Best protector EVER!” hyperbole.

Tempered glass is tougher than film and less prone to air bubbles but there are three minor downsides: it’s slightly fiddlier to apply, it costs more, and film doesn’t smash if something hard hits it. That means even fairly minor knocks can mean it’s new-protector time.

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