These Were July’s Coolest and Weirdest Gadgets

July brought with it Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, but it also gave us a fair few cool af gadgets. Well, not all cool. Some are just… weird.

But here at Gizmodo Australia, we love weird. And we know you do too. So without further ado, here are all the gadgets (and things) that caught our attention last month.

Nothing, a relatively new phone company, , the Phone (2). The reveal was contained to , well, that and Twitter, skipping the hype that other phone brands tend to do on every channel possible, at every opportunity they can. But that’s sort of the appeal of Nothing.

The company is almost nonchalant about the actual appeal of its phone to Android lovers. The is probably . It doesn’t take itself seriously, yet it offers a pretty decent experience when we take away the fun and look purely at it as a .

It’s… it’s just a sweet phone that wants you to be happy. But it’s also an engineering marvel, so there’s that. Also announced last week at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, but not yet reviewed, is the .

The Fold 5 is lighter, thinner, and brighter than its predecessor, the . It’s also $3,149 for the 1TB model – $2,599 if you can settle for 256GB and $2,799 for 512GB. Its biggest selling point, at least as far as the company is concerned, is that it’s basically a PC that fits into your pocket.

The penultimate of the Samsung Unpacked devices in this list is the . The three tablets offer three different propositions – but they’ve all had a refresh over , which, if you cast your mind back to February last year, dropped with a focus on video. This year, however, the focus seems to be on “immersive viewing and creative freedom”.

Which this year also means underwater. Yep – you can write with this thing underwater. Last but not least is the .

The Samsung Galaxy Watch has been un-dethroneable (not a word) as , and it looks like the throne isn’t going to vacate any time soon. With the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 and 6 Classic (yes, the Classic is back after two years in purgatory), Samsung’s upped its fitness and health focus – so much so that it spent more time talking about these features at Galaxy Unpacked than it did the specs. Technically a gadget, but still worthy of a mention, a observable with a microscope sold for $US100,000 in July.

It was made by an artist collective called MSCHF, which you may remember as the guys behind the , or the . The whole idea of the collective is to draw attention to overconsumption and behaviours of consumerism. Speaking of overconsumption, luxury aftermarket gadget company Caviar presented an in July, covering the upcoming Apple headset in gold with a more luxury-looking strap.

It’s expected to cost $US39,990, although a final price hasn’t been locked in (because, obviously, the headset hasn’t even been released yet). It does include one feature over the standard Apple Vision Pro that’s pretty cool though – a hard covering over the eyes that may be attractive to some users. Despite attempts to turn them into keyboard-less laptops, tablets remain primarily media consumption devices for most users.

promises to expand on that use by transforming your tablet into a portable home theatre with a pair of detachable satellite speakers. July also saw the release of the – , a phone app that’s built as a sleep tracker, with the fun-little gamification gimmick of assigning you your own Pokémon type based on your sleeping patterns, and letting the virtual monsters visit your ‘camp’ while you snooze, allowing you to collect them as you go. Your phone needs to be turned on for the entire night for it to work, but if you love Pokémon and want to focus more on your sleep, it’s certainly something you can try out (for free too!).

The Samsung Bespoke Jet AI Stick Vacuum Cleaner is the most souped-up non-tech, tech product I’ve ever used. I am unsure what to class it as – is it a home appliance or a gadget? All I know is that this thing is very good, albeit over the top. .

My biggest criticism of Dyson stick vacuums has always been that there is no mop head attachment – they’re otherwise fabulous (save for the price). A mop head would go some way to justify the price, though. Well, , as Dyson has , one it’s calling a wet-and-dry cordless vacuum cleaner, one with a name that I’m genuinely surprised made it to market.

It’s called the Hisense at , focusing on its , OLED, and of course . But Hisense does a little bit more than TVs, and even though I have a Hisense washing machine and fridge, have for yeeeeears, I somehow forgot that home appliances are a massive part of the company’s focus. The .

Tired of interrupting your run to constantly take off and put on your jacket to help regulate your body temperature? Nike’s new so that when you start to sweat, a series of vents automatically open to allow air to flow right through the jacket to cool you down. Once it dries, the vents close again to help keep you warm by trapping heat. Last year’s was a surprise hit with one fatal flaw: the company couldn’t keep them in stock for more than a couple of minutes.

The console would sell out almost immediately and was nearly impossible to buy if you didn’t spend all day tracking stock. The is the company’s solution to that problem, but an expanded design has introduced another fatal flaw: a bigger screen. Twenty-five years after the Game Boy Camera first debuted back in 1998, fans are not only still enjoying lo-fi, black and white, pixelated photography, they’re also re-engineering the camera to make it better, even going so far as to of a regular Game Boy cartridge.

Apple still hasn’t quite given the world a great reason to spend $US3,500 on its , nor even released it, but BMW Motorrad, the automakers’ motorcycle division, believes it’s come up with a convincing reason for . The company’s position dashboard metrics in riders’ field of view so they . Framework, one of our favourite laptop manufacturers, showed – a modular device with a removable graphics card and an ‘Overkill’ option.

We the original Framework device, and one of the things we wish it had was a dedicated GPU. This new model will be released with one, along with AMD’s latest Ryzen CPUs. Sony has just announced , its latest in-ear headphones that come with the promise of “the best noise-cancelling”.

Sony’s tried true wireless many times over the years, and in many forms, too. As a lover of the over-head counterparts of these bad boys, the , and someone yet to use any of the in-ear offerings from Sony, I was very keen to try the WF-1000XM5s. But while I’m impressed, I won’t be ditching the for them just yet.

I (Zac, typing this par) got a bit PrinterPilled. I , where it announced the release of its new SmartTank bulk printing devices, and I spent a while pondering if I could make a printer work in my small apartment. As it turns out, HP had a cool portable printer on display that I absolutely loved – it’s small enough to fit in a laptop bag and I reckon it’d be best paired with HP’s Smart Ink subscription service.

We’re big fans of the , the laptop I’m using right now to write this, which is the company’s most powerful portable machine, but now rumours of the are being circulated. , and reported that device is codenamed ‘Ersa’ over in Redmond. It’s expected to include Nvidia’s 4000 series GPUs, Intel’s 13th-gen CPUs, and up to 64GB RAM, with an expected reveal in Q4 2023.

I cannot wait. Up in Darwin on the last weekend of July, an resto-mod broke the world record for the longest and deepest underwater drive. It’s an awesome-looking car with some heavy modding to make it work underwater, and it’s called the Mudcrab.

Although mostly relegated to e-readers, e-notes, and price tags at your local grocery store, there are some other novel users for E Ink displays. Want to display art on your walls without committing to just a single artist? That’s how , but instead of putting Renaissance masterpieces on a wall, it turns front page news into artwork. By leveraging the same technology and techniques used to manufacture OLED panels, including lasers, a can be used to fix broken OLED panels exhibiting malfunctioning vertical lines without a device’s screen having to be turned off.

. We put ASUS’ budget gaming laptop to the test, and we were very impressed. is a brilliant and powerful gaming laptop with a fairly standard screen and less of the RGB-heavy flare that ASUS saves for its ‘Republic of Gamers’ subdivision.

The only problem we really found with it was the placement of the activity lights – they’re located directly underneath the screen, and while they weren’t particularly annoying during gameplay, they were excruciating during pretty much every other activity. Science fiction promises us all sorts of sentient automatons once artificial intelligence becomes a part of our daily lives — not hockey puck-sized speakers. Determined to breathe more life into Amazon’s smart assistant, Thomas Burns and a pair of moving eyes to — or look more like an eighth-grade science project, .

An Apple patent was really interesting – a modular laptop with a particularly interesting turntable attachment. The patent was originally filed back in July 2021, and covered the company’s conceptualised “modularised computing and input devices”. Other interesting mods were shown, including swappable screens, keyboards, and a drawing tablet attachment.

While the rest of the world is trying to live more sustainably and find ways to reduce its trash output, LG Labs has put its resources into designing yet another : it actually to make a single cup of coffee, doubling the amount of trash generated with every cup brewed. The , the first new addition to the Beats Studio line in six years, bring excellent ANC performance plus a built-in DAC supporting high-res audio through a USB-C connection. But the headphones also feel like some important features are MIA, making their $529.

95 price tag a harder sell for some users. The mountain of merchandise revealed at San Diego Comic-Con this year included a couple of toys we wish we could un-see. Lego’s two foot-tall are already a staple of our nightmares, and is soon to be joined by a growing Groot Hasbro that .

To tie in with the upcoming Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, a has been released, with a core gimmick being a Pizza-smelling odour. The controllers can have a Pizza diffuser fitted to them, capable of spritzing the user with the quick smell of greasy, old pizza. It’s a freakin’ weird tech tie-in for a movie, but hey, it makes the list.

In 2021, Robosen and Hasbro left ‘80s toys fans with their jaws on the floor after revealing a $US700 that could autonomously transform from the Autobot leader to a Freightliner truck. Two years later, Optimus is finally getting some backup with a that transforms nearly exactly the same way the original ‘80s toy did. From the makers of Stable Diffusion, .

It takes your poor attempts at mouse-drawn images and converts them into a more cohesive AI illustration. The service is free, and users on the Clipdrop platform can use their mouse (or a drawing tablet) to create a simple black and white line drawing that can transform into a more interesting image in a variety of styles. Sony’s gaming arm has long been fascinated by shapes.

The fact that everybody else labelled their buttons with “A” or “B” meant nothing to the legacy tech brand, as the first PlayStation controller included “X” or “O” buttons instead. Now, the gaming company finally has a release date and price for one of the —a large, flat circle with swappable keys engineered to be one of the on the console market. Petition to bring both Chipotle AND its to Australia? SHARE THIS STORY GET OUR NEWSLETTER.