Honest Mobile vs Smarty compared for 2026: prices, the Three network, roaming, perks and referral offers, so UK buyers pick the right SIM-only deal.
May 23, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Father’s Day Tech Gifts UK 2026: The Beyond-Obvious Edit
Father's Day Tech Gifts2026 Edit
The tech gifts he doesn't know he wants yet.
Last updated: 23 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Father's Day tech gifts tend to arrive in two flavours: the painfully obvious and the quietly disappointing. After all, your dad already owns an iPhone, a pair of AirPods, and a smart speaker he shouts at across the kitchen. So this year, skip every one of those. Instead, this edit of Father's Day tech gifts is for the dad who has the obvious stuff already, and who secretly wants the interesting stuff he has not discovered yet.
Father's Day 2026 falls on Sunday 21 June, which gives you roughly a month to order. Moreover, every pick below sits in that sweet spot between "I did not know this existed" and "I cannot believe I lived without it." Some we own. Some we have tested. Some we have researched obsessively and quietly added to our own wish lists. All of them passed the same test: is it well designed, does it solve a real problem, and would we be genuinely excited to unwrap it?
Some links in this guide are affiliate or referral links. This costs you nothing extra and helps support the site.
Best under £100AncestryDNA Kit£79
Best under £150Fairphone Fairbuds£129
Best splurgereMarkable Paper Pro£699
Most unexpectedBird Buddy Pro£199
For the audiophile dadTeenage Engineering OB-4around £599
For the tinkering dadBambu Lab A1 Minifrom £149
May 17, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Running Watches UK 2026: Tested, Strava-Verified Picks
Last updated: Sunday 17 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Affiliate disclosure: CoolCuration is reader-supported. When you buy through links on this page we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products we'd genuinely use ourselves.
Best running watches UK 2026: tested, Strava-verified picks
The best running watches UK buyers can buy in 2026 are not the most expensive ones. After a year of parkruns, half marathons and one deeply regrettable ultramarathon between us, our verdict is unambiguous. The Garmin Forerunner 265 remains the right watch for most runners, the COROS PACE 3 still humiliates everything near its price, and the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is finally credible for iPhone owners who actually train. Everything else is either better than that trio (and considerably pricier) or, more often, worse.
Why this matters: the running watch market has a dirty secret. The best watch for 90% of runners costs about £250. Spend more and you mostly pay for maps, sapphire glass and longer battery for ultras. Spend less and GPS accuracy collapses, which is the one thing a running watch cannot afford to get wrong. A watch that tells you your 5K was 4.8K is worse than useless. Below is our curated shortlist for UK runners in 2026, organised by need rather than brand. Every pick syncs with Strava natively and automatically. If a watch can't talk to Strava, it doesn't exist to us.
Between us we've run in Garmin, Apple Watch and COROS. We've done parkruns, half marathons and one deeply regrettable ultramarathon. The Garmin won, every time.
Best overall
Garmin Forerunner 265
From £329. The right watch for most runners.Best value
COROS PACE 3
From £219. A silly amount of watch for the money.Best budget
Amazfit Active 2
From £99. Mapping at this price is unheard of.Best for trails
Garmin Fenix 8
From £849. Routable maps. Weeks of battery.Best smartwatch for runners
Apple Watch Ultra 3
From £719. iPhone only, but finally honest.Best battery for ultras
Garmin Enduro 3
From £699. 90 hours of multi-band GPS.Best for recovery data
Polar Vantage V3
From £400. Recovery science nobody else matches.
May 15, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Home Printer UK 2026: Laser Beats Ink, Every Time
Last updated: 15 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Affiliate disclosure: this post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend kit we would put on our own desks.
Printers are the one piece of tech that has somehow got worse over the past 20 years. They jam, they run out of ink the moment you need them, and they cost more per millilitre than vintage champagne. So when we set out to find the best home printer UK buyers can actually live with in 2026, we started from a position of mild rage and worked outwards.
Here is the short version. For most homes the best home printer UK answer is a small Brother mono laser. It is boring, reliable, cheap to run, and the toner never dries out. If you genuinely need colour at home, skip ink cartridges entirely and buy a refillable ink tank such as an Epson EcoTank or a Canon PIXMA MegaTank. That is the whole guide in two sentences. The rest is the working.
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May 14, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Travel Accessories UK 2026: The Editor’s Edit
Last updated: 14 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
This post contains affiliate and referral links. We may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Everything here is independently chosen.
The best travel accessories UK 2026 has to offer are not the loudest ones. They are the quiet objects that earn their square inch of a carry-on: a Danish raincoat that folds to the size of a paperback, an Aarhus-engineered adapter that survives a flickering hotel socket, a 37Wh power bank that walks through a Heathrow gate audit without a raised eyebrow. This is the CoolCuration edit, written for people who travel often, pack light, and would rather buy once than buy twice. Eighteen pieces, all UK-priced, all in stock as of this morning.
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May 11, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Portable Speakers UK 2026: 12 We’d Actually Buy
Last updated: 11 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Long before the AirPods era, before Sonos was on every shelf, before "Bluetooth speaker" stopped sounding faintly novel, there was the Jawbone Jambox. We had one of the original models knocking around for years. Tiny, weirdly heavy, sounded like a pocket-sized rock concert, and felt like the future. Then Jawbone went bust, the Jambox died, and the entire portable speaker world quietly got a lot better. So in this guide to the best portable speakers UK shoppers can buy in 2026, we're rounding up the speakers we'd happily replace that old Jambox with today.
A good portable speaker turns a garden into a festival, a kitchen into a club, and a park meet-up into something worth staying for. A bad one sounds like music playing inside a tin can from three rooms away. Here's how to pick the right one without overpaying.
This guide contains affiliate links. If you buy through our links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
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May 8, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Ethical Phone Cases UK 2026: Compostable, Recycled & Built To Last
Last updated: 8 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Your phone case is the thing you touch more than almost any other object you own. It's also one of the most frequently replaced accessories on the planet, and most end up in landfill within 18 months. The best ethical phone cases don't have to follow that script. We've tried cheap Amazon eco cases that fell apart in weeks, and we've tried premium ones that lasted years. The price difference is usually about a tenner. That tenner buys you a case that actually protects your phone and doesn't end up as microplastic in the ocean.
So we set ourselves a simple test. Does it look good? Does it protect the phone? And can we actually verify the sustainability claims? If a case ticks all three, it earns a spot on the list.
Some links in this guide are affiliate links. This costs you nothing extra, and it helps support the site.
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May 4, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Why Retro Gaming Is Booming in the UK in 2026
Last updated: 4 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Retro gaming in the UK is having a moment. Actually, it is having much more than a moment. The global retro gaming console market hit $3.8 billion in 2025 and is on track to reach over $4 billion this year. Old cartridges are selling for serious money on eBay. Companies like Analogue are building premium FPGA consoles that sell out in minutes. And a growing number of us are dusting off our childhood game collections rather than queuing up for the latest blockbuster release. So what is actually going on? And if you want in, what is the best way to play retro games in the UK right now?
This article contains affiliate or referral links. If you click through and sign up I may earn a commission or referral bonus at no extra cost to you. It does not affect my editorial view.
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May 2, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Refurbished MacBooks UK 2026: Models, Prices, Tips
Last updated: 2 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
A new MacBook Air starts at over £1,000. A refurbished M2 Air with the same performance costs under £700. Same laptop, same build quality, same Apple silicon. The only difference is that someone opened the box before you. Here is our hands-on guide to the best refurbished MacBooks UK buyers can actually trust in 2026, which models are worth your money, and where to get the best deal.
Some links in this guide are affiliate or referral links. This costs you nothing extra and helps support the site.
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May 1, 2026Comments are off for this post.
Best Noise-Cancelling Headphones UK 2026: Honest Picks
Last updated: 1 May 2026
By Stiv · Design, technology and personal finance
Noise-cancelling headphones are one of those purchases where the difference between "good" and "life-changing" is roughly £100. Fortunately, even budget options in 2026 are genuinely impressive. More importantly, between us we've worn every pair below for long enough to know which ones are worth your money, and which ones will start hurting your ears after an hour. This is our honest guide to the best noise-cancelling headphones UK shoppers can buy right now.
This guide contains affiliate links to Amazon. If you buy through our links, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. All picks are based on genuine use and independent assessment.
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