Lifestyle

Beach season has a way of exposing every gap in your kit at the worst possible moment: the cooler that goes lukewarm by lunch, the towel that’s still damp three hours later, the tent poles that turn a five-minute pitch into a fifteen-minute argument. So we spent the last few weeks actually testing our way through the stuff people swear by, from the cooler bag that survives a proper submersion to the sunscreen that doesn’t leave you looking like you’ve been dipped in flour.

Smart feeder, dumb workflow. The FeatherSnap Scout has real appeal for wildlife-obsessed tech fans, but the manual processes and subscription wall take the shine off a genuinely likeable bit of kit

It works with your cat’s actual litter. It connects to your phone. And it costs half as much as a Litter-Robot. The catch? There’s always a catch.

From hybrid electric-charcoal grills to ceramic French cookware and a wireless thermometer that follows you to the end of the garden, this is everything you need to grill well this summer.

The U3000 Pro is Thinkware’s best dash cam yet, and its headline trick, a radar sensor fitted to both cameras, is genuinely useful rather than a gimmick. It detects motion around your parked car and starts recording before anything happens, which puts it a step ahead of every dash cam that only wakes up after a bump or impact.

Dyson has made hair dryers that sound like jet engines, vacuums that cost more than a weekend in Paris, and air purifiers that look like they belong in a Bond villain’s lair. And yet, until last week, you could not buy a Dyson handheld fan. You could buy a £400 cordless hoover. You could not buy the thing you wave at your face on the Tube in August.