Best back to work gadgets

Hermes tie

Bring some geek chic to the office with this heavy twill silk Hermes tie, sporting a marvellous – and mercifully subtle – keyboard pattern design. Available in a variety of eye-catching colours, you’ll be showing the entire workplace you take technology and fashion very seriously. Who says geeks can’t be cool? Alternatively, save a few quid and go with one of these equally geeky tie designs.

Spy Pen Video Camera

£40, Red5.com

Capture all the office drama with this sneaky gadget – and probably lose your job in the process, but hey – it’ll get thousands of hits on YouTube. Charge it up via USB and then fill up the 8GB microSD card with video to your heart’s content. Well, until the two hour battery life expires.

Moleskine Evernote Smart Notebook

£17 amazon.co.uk

Apps are all very well, but sometimes you need a pen and paper to collect your thoughts. This Moleskine gives you the best of both worlds – simply fire up the associated Evernote app, snap a pic of your scribbles on the page and it’ll automatically align the image and, using handwriting recognition, lets you search your notes. It also comes with smart stickers that can automatically be associated with different tags when they’re snapped using the app.

Samurai Umbrella

£20, Red5

The last thing you want is for a January downpour to ruin your day – and this brolly lets you shun the showers in style. It sits on your back like a samurai sword, ready to be unsheathed at any given moment in true martial arts fashion. Just beware of police armed response units.

Ice-Phone Retro Handset

£29 Amazon.co.uk

Liven up your desktop with this retro phone dock – it turns your smartphone into an old-school telephone, with enhanced call quality and comfort just a couple of the benefits. To complete the effect, an accompanying app adds a rotary dial to your phone screen, while the handset can be connected to your computer to jazz up videoconferencing calls.

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About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home