Dependent on Gadgets

Keeping your smartphone battery topped up means trailing cables, lost chargers and portable batteries. Wireless charging is convenient, but too slow. Well, it was until Samsung injected some quick-charge magic into their latest convertible charging stand. Click on for a full review.

Tablets become instantly more useful if they can stand up for themselves. Watch a movie, follow a recipe, or video-chat with friends. All these things are better hands-free. Since very few tablet makers bothered to include a stand, Filofax have stepped in with a clever solution. Full review of the eniTAB360 inside.

WhatsApp is one of the best, most popular messaging apps out there. Whilst desktop users can use WhatsApp Web to chat away using a big screen and a keyboard, iPad owners are left out in the cold. There are a slew of attempts to bring WhatsApp to the iPad, but all are painful to use. All but one.

Parenthood is amazing, but also a time of worry. This new Dad thought he was pretty cool until the time came to put the boy to bed on his own for the first time. Fortunately, tech was there to ease the nerves.

There are many apps offering great note-taking opportunities for iPad Pro owners with an Apple Pencil. However, there are very few indeed that will do a good job of converting your writing to text. Here's one that will not only do a good job, it will do it on the fly! Read on to find out more about Nebo.

No need for a digital camera if you have a posh Samsung smartphone. It can already do everything, right? Wrong! The Gear 360 is the best reason to dust off the Gear VR headset and enjoy photos and videos you've made in full 360 degrees!

Smartwatches have put the smart ahead of the watch for too long. Samsung have created a cracking timepiece that is packed full of the latest clever stuff. Full review inside.

If you thought you'd seen every bluetooth speaker design. Think again. If you thought you'd heard the biggest sounding small bluetooth speaker. Hear again! The Damson Cisor is a small speaker with a BIG sound, because it has a few tricks up its sleeve.

A £50 tablet? That's Christmas present money. But will you get any thanks if you hand over an Amazon Fire?

Monitor your home from anywhere in the world with the Arlo smart camera range. Here we review the Arlo Q and watch cats and ghosts from afar...

The iPad Pro is the best tablet Apple make and arguably the best tablet out there. Apple are confident that it's basically now a 'computer' and it is therefore ready to do battle in the office as well as on the sofa. I spent a few weeks with one to see how it held up in an IT Department.

With fitness bands and health monitoring apps on smartwatches all the rage - surely we must need another gadget to tell us that all this activity is paying off? Smart scales can feed your app with weight, muscle, fat and hydration data - if you want to know the truth read on.

Since the rise of the tablet and smartphone, your home laptop may have been relegated to third place in the gadget prestige hierarchy. CloudReady will convert your tired old Windows machine into a speedy Chromebook for free! Click on to find out more. 

Wearable tech has advanced a lot in the past few years, especially when it comes to monitoring your health and fitness. Smartwatches and wristbands are doing a fine job of generally monitoring your activity, but accuracy is not their strong point. If you're a bit more serious about your exercise, but still want the convenience and motivation of capturing your fitness data into an app, then check this out.

Your smartphone is powerful enough for some serious gaming action, but for anything more complex than Angry Birds, that touchscreen is a bit of a pain. Fortunately there are gamepads like the Moga Pro that can give you console like control over your mission. But is it any good?

I put my own money down on this one. Am I still wincing in financial pain, or loving my new gadget indulgence?

Over the years, the screen has marched from across the living room, today stopping just short of the eyeballs. Yes, virtual reality is finally available in the home, via the method of strapping your smartphone to your face. You look a bit silly, but is what you see any good? This is the Samsung Gear VR.

In a digital world, keys are just as important for security as they are in a physical world. The GateKeeper 2.0 is a wireless key that can keep your computer automatically locked when you're away from it and keep you from losing those physical keys too! Full review inside.

One upgrade you should always take when it comes to audio, is those included headphones. I don't care if they came with a top of the range iPhone, they're poor. Everyone should do that for a big leap in sound quality. What? You want to take another step and upgrade again? Well, then you'll want to consider a headphone amp. This time the portable Q1 from Fiio.

It's pretty easy to only buy one pair of headphones ever, or slip into filling ever more niche use cases as you balance the best sound and portability for your needs. Bluetooth has long promised to cut the cables, but until now, the compromise has been too great. Sennheiser shows how it's done with the MM 400-X mobile headphone.

This is both a folding keyboard review and a confession. I have a bit of a weakness for a nice keyboard and now own more than a few. Click on to see what I made of an impulse purchase on Amazon.

As part of the blogger community, it's great fun to share an interest over Twitter with your readers and the wider audience. Trouble is, you can't be there to hit the Tweet button at the right moment every single day. That's where an app like Buffer can help. Schedule your Tweets with a minimum of fuss!

There's a world of choice out there, whether you're making a Christmas wish list or a Christmas gift list. That doesn't actually make it any easier though, so to help with either list, I've picked out five highlights from my gadget blogging year that I think would make great gifts. Happy Christmas all!

Upgrading the free router supplier by your internet provider might not be an obviously good buy, but if your family are all drinking heavily from the internet well or your looking for simple ways to backup, protect and share between all the family gadgets, then this Netgear Nighthawk D7000 makes a very reasonable case for itself.

The next generation of premium tablets, the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 are putting the stylus back in the driving seat after years of neglect. They're pretty cool, but you don't necessarily have to spend all that money upgrading an older iPad just to have a stylus, Whink Whink!

It's easy to slate Apple for their swagger, it's also easy to wax lyrical about their kit - here, I'm afraid I've done both

The original Chromecast made your TV smart and brought apps and sharing from your smartphone and tablet. With the new generation, ChromeCast Audio attempts to do the same for your audio. Is this cheap wireless adaptor any good? 

There are some pretty interesting tablets gunning for enterprise and professionals - so what are they up against from the main incumbent. Can Dell bring it to the Surface Pro 4 or Apple's iPad Pro? 

Treating yourself to a gadget generally costs money and has environmental consequences. Happily, there is one that could not only save you money over time, but also help reduce your energy usage. Dependent on Gadgets checks out Loop home energy monitor.

Ask a blogger what they need more of and the answer will likely be time. We get what time we're given though, so the best thing to do is be really efficient with the time we have. Less time organising, more time doing. The best tool to help me do this is Trello. Click on to see why.