Features

It might be time to reconsider the “five-second rule” when thinking about eating food that has fallen on the floor.

Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey say in a new study that bacteria can contaminate food that falls on the floor instantaneously.

The findings were published this month in the American Society for Microbiology’s journal.

Researcher Donald Schaffner said the five-second rule is a “significant oversimplification of what actually happens when bacteria transfer from a surface to food”.

“The popular notion of the ‘five-second rule’ is that food dropped on the floor, if picked up quickly, is safe to eat because bacteria need time to transfer,” Schaffner said.

“We decided to look into this because the practice is so widespread. The topic might appear ‘light,’ but we wanted our results backed by solid science,” he added.

Schaffner’s research isn’t the first to conclude that the favourite excuse for why that yummy snack that fell on the ground is still OK to eat is wrong.

The research did find that longer contact time means more bacterial transfer, but that the type of food and surface is just as, or more, important.

The Rutgers researchers tested watermelon, bread, bread and butter, and gummy candy on stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood and carpet.

Researchers found that watermelon garnered the most contamination, while gummy candy had the least, and also noticed that carpet had very low contamination transfer rates compared to tile and stainless steel.

“Transfer of bacteria from surfaces to food appears to be affected most by moisture,” Schaffner said. “Bacteria don’t have legs, they move with the moisture, and the wetter the food, the higher the risk of transfer. Also, longer food contact times usually result in the transfer of more bacteria from each surface to food.”

Two years ago, Apple Inc. executives made the case that anyone with an iPhone would be better off also owning the company’s new smartwatch.

But as many gadget buyers remain unsure about the usefulness of high-tech timepieces, Apple this week pitched its second-edition watch to a much narrower audience.

Workout and activity tracking capabilities surged to the front and center, taking over the spotlight from messaging features and customisable timefaces. The promotional video for the Watch Series 2 featured almost only athletes: swimmers, tennis and basketball players, cyclists, skateboarders and runners.

The shift in approach reflects some major technical changes. The Apple Watch Series 2 has built-in GPS — essential to athletes who don’t want to lug their phones on runs or bike rides — and is water resistant for use while swimming and surfing.

But establishing the Watch as a fitness tracker rather than a catch-all smartwatch serves a bigger purpose too, analysts said. Thanks to smartphones and popular devices such as the Fitbit, consumers now understand how devices can track steps and monitor sleep. Emphasising those features make the Watch a more familiar device than the revolutionary communications tool Apple touted in 2014.

The “ultimate device for a healthy life” is how Apple Senior Vice President Jeff Williams summed up the Watch at a media event Wednesday. Two years ago, Apple called the Watch its “most personal device ever”.

Apple showcased games, animated messages and other features on stage this week as well, but health and fitness underlined even some of those presentations.

“You get people into the Watch through the guise of fitness, but then you get people messaging and playing games,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research analyst at the data firm IDC.

Though Apple hasn’t released sales figures, analysts estimates upward of 12 million Watches have been sold since the original incarnation went on sale in April 2015. Some experts say the device suffered from an identity crisis. The device’s benefits weren’t clear and immediate for most.

“Personality disorder is what I would like to call it,” venture capitalist and Fitbit investor Om Malik told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “Until they figure that out, Fitbit has a clear lead and will maintain a clear lead.”

Sharpening the pitch for the Watch suggests Apple may be on its way to reining in aggressive ambitions and figuring out a clearer, albeit smaller, role for the device. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s absolutely a refocus towards fitness,” Ubrani said. “It’s the low-hanging fruit.”

A faster version of the Apple Watch Series 1 will go on sale next Friday for $269, or about $80 less than the retail price at launch last year.

The Watch Series 2 starts at $369, including a set of wristpieces with unique colours and features designed in collaboration with Nike.

Sports-centric marketing campaigns around the Watch could spur more interest in offerings from Fitbit, Jawbone and other fitness tracker makers. Their wearables generally cost less and have longer-lasting batteries than Apple Watch. Their limited apps haven’t turned off consumers, who are satisfied with just having smartphone notifications pushed to their wrist, said Ray Maker, who runs the popular fitness-device blog DCMaker.

The competitors also work in tandem with Android smartphones; the Apple Watch only syncs data with iPhones. And data suggest Apple’s rivals have plenty of room to grow as a result. Only about 25 per cent of people who purchased a Fitbit online since the start of 2014 also bought an iPhone over the Internet, according to data from receipt tracker Slice Intelligence.

Running and cycling watch companies such as Garmin sell well among endurance sports enthusiasts, but they may lose sales to Apple if consumers find the Watch Series 2 more multi-functional, fashionable and fairly priced.

Some may continue to opt against the Apple Watch because other options are better tailored for harsh weather and rugged environments, Maker said. Another big problem for many athletes is the battery. The five-hour GPS battery life on the Watch won’t hold up for some marathon runners or any Ironman competitors.

“If you’re training for a marathon or a triathlon, it’s likely you’re going to want something that you know will get you to the finish line,” Maker said. The Apple Watch battery life is “well below virtually all fitness companies’ GPS watches today on the market”.

About 25 per cent of wearable devices sold last quarter were Fitbits, with models from Xiaomi, Apple and Garmin following in the low teens and single digits. Fitbit’s dominance is expected to continue through the holiday season in large part because demand has been for affordable, lower-tech fitness trackers, analysts said. In other words, for all the robust capabilities of Apple Watch, it might be the simple things that get consumers to consider it.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
Helen Simonson
New York: Random House, 2011
Pp. 368

Just when Major Ernest Pettigrew begins to experience disconcerting symptoms of ageing, several chance encounters with the local shopkeeper, Mrs Ali, rekindle the joy of living that he fears is waning. Having both lost beloved spouses in recent years, the two are drawn together by a mutual love of classical literature, appreciation of nature and sensible approach to life. But, as their friendship develops, it raises eyebrows in their Sussex village, Edgecombe St. Mary, revealing residual prejudice despite the village elite’s claim that it is “a utopia of multicultural understanding”. (p. 6)

Roger, the Major’s twenty-something son, is also shocked by the ethnicity of his father’s new companion, as are many others who seem very modern in consumerist terms, but have obviously not come to terms with the legacy of British colonialism. 

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” is first and foremost the story of the gentle, old-fashioned romance between two middle-aged people, but it is also the story of Britain in transition and an exploration of cultural differences. Interestingly, these differences are not only between the “real” English and Mrs Ali’s Indian Muslim/Pakistani-origin family, but more so within the two respective communities. Sometimes, they are synonymous with the generation gap. At other times, they are the friction between a simple, locally based way of life and the frenzied, globalised world of branding, electronic communication, cosmopolitan tastes, fast travel and fast money.

Ironically, the quintessentially English Major was born in Lahore, his father having been an officer in the colonial army, while Mrs Ali was born in Cambridge, her father having immigrated to Britain after India’s partition. Mrs Ali, whose first name is Jasmina, remembers being “raised in a library of a thousand books” by a father who dreamed that the United Nations would grow into a world government and that Britain would finally accept the immigrants from its former colonies — an issue that predominates in the novel. (p. 62)

Her husband was also open-minded, but after his death, her in-laws try to restrict her independence: She should join them in North England to care for their children and elderly, while her nephew, their son, whom they have retrained in conservatism, should take over the shop. The Major is outraged at these plans, but hesitates to speak out against family obligations since he is suffering from the neglect of his only son, who is so absorbed with his career in London’s financial sector that he often seems to be “the strange adult who existed mostly at the end of the telephone”. (p. 30)

With the aid of the Major’s dry wit, the book satirises most of the English characters for their hypocrisy, hurtful prejudices, petty preoccupations and, in some cases, crass materialism and wilful ignorance. Nor are Roger’s American girlfriend and business contacts spared.

Cultural differences are revealed to be a clash of values as reflected in the novel’s various subthemes, such as the attempt of a bankrupt lord to retain his property and privilege by partnering with a US corporation to parcel out the village land for a luxury housing estate. The Major is not one to join public protests, but the prospect of pseudo-manor houses abutting his back garden makes him sick at heart — and what would happen to Jasmina’s shop in a revamped Edgecombe St. Mary? 

The brilliance of Helen Simonson’s writing is that she doesn’t describe these cultural differences directly. Her characters act them out, revealing their sentiments in zesty, realistic dialogue. What she does describe is rural beauty from the gracious, 17th century, stone houses of the village, their luxuriant gardens crisscrossed by rabbits, to misty mornings, wide-open fields and rocky seashores.

Her pen is so painterly that one easily imagines the book as a film, while eagerly turning the pages to see if the Major’s and Jasmina’s love, and the village’s tranquillity, can survive the new developments. Another way to pose this question is to ask whether their shared, old-fashioned values — a strong sense of duty, honesty, patriotism, family pride and the importance of manners and education — are still viable in the post-modern world. 

Simonson was born in Britain but has lived in the US for 20 years, qualifying her to write a truly English novel, but with the objectivity gained at a distance. In this, her first novel, she creates a set of memorable characters in a story that is by turn heart-warming, funny and slightly provocative. Though grounded in often harsh realities, her whimsical scenes and writing style make this book a great pleasure to read.

BERKELEY, California — Scientists are developing dust-sized wireless sensors implanted inside the body to track neural activity in real-time, offering a potential new way to monitor or treat a range of conditions, including epilepsy and control next-generation prosthetics.

The tiny devices have been demonstrated successfully in rats, and could be tested in people within two years, the researchers said.

“You can almost think of it as sort of an internal, deep-tissue Fitbit, where you would be collecting a lot of data that today we think of as hard to access,” said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fitbit Inc. sells wearable fitness devices that measure data including heart rate, quality of sleep, number of steps walked and stairs climbed, and more.

Current medical technologies employ a range of wired electrodes attached to different parts of the body to monitor and treat conditions ranging from heart arrhythmia to epilepsy. The idea here, according to Maharbiz, is to make those technologies wireless.

The new sensors have no need for wires or batteries. They use ultrasound waves both for power and to retrieve data from the nervous system.

The sensors, which the scientists called “motes”, are about the size of a grain of sand. The scientists used them to monitor in real time the rat peripheral nervous system — the part of the body’s nervous system that lies outside the brain and spinal cord, according to findings published last month in the journal Neuron.

The sensors consist of components called piezoelectric crystals that convert ultrasound waves into electricity that powers tiny transistors in contact with nerve cells in the body. The transistors record neural activity and, using the same ultrasound wave signal, send the data outside the body to a receiver.

The researchers said such wireless sensors potentially could give human amputees or quadriplegics a more efficient means of controlling future prosthetic devices.

“It’s a meaningful advancement in recording data from inside the body,” said Dr Eric Leuthardt, a professor of neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis. “Demonstrations of capability are one thing, but making something for clinical use, to be used as a medical device, is still going to have to be worked out.”

Before implanting wireless sensors into the brain, the science of understanding how the brain processes and shares information needs to advance further, Leuthardt said.

To deliver motes, currently one millimetre in size, into the brain, the researchers would need to miniaturise the sensors further to about 50 microns, about the width of a human hair.

“It’s not impossible,” Maharbiz said. “The math is there.”

HARROGATE, England — Ji Mengyu sinks into a soft chair with her cup of tea to the sound of tinkling teaspoons and light chatter. The opulently decorated Victorian tea salon is quintessentially British, something straight out of Downton Abbey. Except it’s in Beijing.

The 25-year-old HR professional is one of a growing number of Chinese who are looking past their country’s ancient tea traditions in favour of imported British blends. For Ji, the tea has an aura of luxury and quality, and gives her a sense of partaking in the posh British culture popularised globally by TV shows and fashion brands.

“I think British people’s traditional customs and culture have a kind of classical style,” says Ji, who says she’s inspired by TV shows like Downton Abbey, but also Sherlock Holmes and Game of Thrones.

For three centuries, countries in Asia and Africa have been quenching Britons’ thirst for tea, supplying dried leaves worth millions of pounds every year. Now, that trend is showing some signs of reversing. China and Hong Kong in particular are seeing a surge in appetite for British tea blends — some of which are made with leaves from China itself, an example of the twists in trade that the globalisation of tastes can create.

Upscale tea blends from storied British companies like Twinings, Taylors of Harrogate and Hudson & Middleton occupy increasingly more space on shelves in Chinese supermarkets, restaurant menus and online shops.

Teahouses serving British afternoon tea have sprouted up in the bigger cities in China. Five years ago, Annvita English Tea Company managed 10 teahouses around China, serving imported blends and pastries in British style tearooms. The number has since grown tenfold, with more planned.

“It fits the taste of people who want to pursue a higher quality of life,” says Li Qunlou, the general manager at AnnVita English Tea House in Sanlitun in Beijing.

As a result, British tea companies selling premium blends have seen their exports to China and Hong Kong skyrocket.

In the first five months of 2016, British tea exports to Hong Kong nearly tripled in value compared with two years earlier. They doubled to the rest of mainland China, data from the UK HM Revenue & Customs show.

Shipments to China and Hong Kong only make-up 7 per cent of total British tea exports, but the share is growing quickly.

Some of these deliveries come from Harrogate, a small town in northern England that is the home to Taylors of Harrogate. The fourth generation family owned company has been selling tea to China for more than 10 years. In the past three years, sales have more than doubled every year, albeit from a low starting point.

“China produces nearly one half of the world’s tea, so on the surface you would think that there is a limited opportunity for Taylors of Harrogate,” says Matthew Davies, the head of International Sales at Taylors of Harrogate.

Tea originates from China and has been a central part of the culture for thousands of years. In Britain, tea was not introduced until the 17th century, though it has since become a staple and adapted to local tastes.

Every day thousands of tea samples arrive in Harrogate for the tasters to evaluate. The business essentially relies on their taste buds to find the right mix of leaves to maintain the signature flavours that the company bases its reputation on. Chinese customers mainly buy Taylor of Harrogate’s Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea.

“Our approach was to invest time and resources to understand consumer behaviour and we found that there are a number of Chinese consumers with a high level of discretionary income and demand for Taylors of Harrogate brands,” says Davies.

Another reason for the thriving popularity of British imported tea is the seemingly endless string of food scandals that plagues China and Hong Kong.

Greenpeace and government investigations found high levels of pesticides or poisonous earths in tea, also in some of the best known brands. Imported premium British tea brands are perceived as being safer and of higher quality.

Paradoxically, some of the British tea sold in China and Hong Kong is originally grown in China. 

It’s already 20 years that the GPS was first launched in the USA for wide public use, and about seven to eight years that Jordanians also are enjoying it, with simple devices. And yet, usage is not as widespread as one can imagine.

Eleven years ago, the Greater Amman Municipality brought a major improvement to the city. Streets were not only all clearly and systematically named, with the highly visible green signs on elevated posts at each intersection, but also and more importantly buildings were at last numbered, like virtually all major cities in the world have been for a long time.

It then became very easy to give directions to someone looking for a given address. Instead of the old — though perhaps charming — way that consisted of saying, for example: “turn right, go past the supermarket that sells delicious ice creams and fresh produce, make a left, drive for 150 metres, open the car window and ask the janitor of the four-storey building with a palm tree in the garden for more directions”, you would now just give a number and a street name. Less poetic but more efficient.

However, old habits diehard. There’s still a majority of citizens who don’t go by the “building number and street name” system. There’s also a non-negligible number who don’t know the name of street they live on and even more who don’t know their building’s number. 

Regardless of how much people depend on and use the traditional number and street address system, the GPS coordinates constitute an amazing, accurate and simple way to get to any place. Whereas it is important in a city like Amman that is growing at an unprecedented rate, it is even more important outside the city, everywhere in the country. Satellites, computers and networks have made GPS a common tool. With a smartphone you don’t even need a dedicated GPS device, but only to install a GPS app.

The number of available GPS applications for smartphones exceeds 50, and at least five of them can be rated as excellent. Most are free, if you are willing to live with ads, as usual. Maps are very frequently updated so as to reflect any changes as soon as they happen. In addition to the well-known and excellent Google Maps, MapFactor Navigator is a superb GPS navigation application, with countless features, and is relatively easy to learn. I frequently use it whenever I have to go to a place in Jordan for the first time. It works flawlessly and the voices available are pleasant and clear, giving directions in a choice of languages.

When someone gives me directions to a place for the first time, I tend to ask for the GPS coordinates instead of the street address. In most cases, my contact wouldn’t know what the coordinates of the place are, and so I look up the address on Google Earth and writes down the GPS coordinates that Google Earth shows me. I then use MapFactor Navigator on my smartphone to get there, and the app’s precision is a stunning 5 metres on the map.

One must admit that there’s one aspect of the GPS coordinates that puts the non-technically minded off and perhaps makes them reluctant to use GPS navigation. It’s the coordinates’ unit system. Coordinates can be expressed in decimal values, like for example 31.99317, 35.88771, or in their equivalent values in degrees, minutes and seconds, being in this case 31 59 35.4, 35 53 15.7, which incidentally happens to be The Jordan Times’ offices in Amman. There are also two other units that are variations of these two.

Because some applications would use one unit, when people would give you the coordinates in another, you have to keep converting the values, which is rather a tedious thing to do. Of course, there are applications that do the conversion for you, and you can always set the unit to use and display in the “Options” of your GPS app, but this doesn’t make everything always easy. GPS will receive a major boost when everybody agrees to use one single, standardised unit for the coordinates.

I checked 24 websites of companies established in Amman, at random. Only two of them show the GPS coordinates of the company’s location in the usual “Contact” page. One does it in decimal values and the other in degrees, minutes and seconds. There’s a long way to go before everyone adopts GPS coordinates as a modern, accurate and fool proof address, and before the world adopts one standard unit system.

In the meantime, good GPS systems can take you to known places, hospitals, restaurants, gas stations, landmarks and the like (called Points of Interest), simply because they are already located on your GPS map, without you having to have, to input or to convert any GPS coordinates.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc. unveiled its new water and dust-resistant iPhone 7 with high-resolution cameras at its fall product event on Wednesday, and said a Super Mario game was coming to the new phone and Pokemon Go would feature on its upgraded Apple Watch.

The excitement at the Bill Graham auditorium in San Francisco was not matched on Wall Street as Apple's stock spent most of the session in negative territory before briefly showing small gains.

However, Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s US-listed shares jumped more than 20 per cent to trade around $35 after it announced a new smartphone game in the venerable Super Mario Bros series, Super Mario Run, which will debut in December on the iPhone and iPad.

The world's best-known technology company said the iPhone 7, starting at $649, would have one, zooming 12-megapixel camera. The “Plus” edition, starting at $769, would feature two cameras.

It also removed the analogue headphone jack, as was widely expected. The new headphones supplied by Apple with the phone will plug into the same port as the recharging cord, but it will also work with Apple's new wireless headphones, called Air Pods, available in late October at a price of $159.

The new phone will start shipping in major markets, including the United States and China, on September 16.

"While the camera improvements for the iPhone 7 Plus are nice, they are incremental for most and the lack of headphone jacks could offset that for others," said Bob O'Donnell of research firm TECHnalysis.

He said Apple's new glossy black finish could be more popular than any tech feature, reflecting the slowdown in major tech innovations for smartphones.

Mike Binger, senior portfolio manager at Gradient Investments LLC. in Minneapolis, said the disappearance of the headphone jack "will probably annoy a certain amount of people" but they would likely get over it.

"Every other release tends to be a better release. Most people's two-year contracts are nearing the end, so I think the iPhone 7, just from a replacement basis, will be a successful launch," he said. "We're in good shape for a nice sales cycle here, so I'm encouraged."

Apple typically gives its main product, which accounts for more than half of its revenue, a big makeover every other year and the last major redesign was the iPhone 6 in 2014.

Apple said its Apple Watch Series 2, with a swim-proof casing, will be available in more than 25 countries starting on September 16.

"I predict Watch sales will improve dramatically," said Tech analyst Patrick Moorhead. "Most of the current Watch owners are early adopters and the next wave could be 10 times the size of that market."

Apple also launched a new version of the device called the Apple Watch Nike+, in partnership with the athletic goods manufacturer Nike Inc., featuring GPS so athletes can track their runs.

Shares of Fitbit Inc., which makes activity-tracking bands, fell 2 per cent on the emergence of such a high-profile competitor.

When I lived in Bahrain a few years ago, there was not much of sightseeing to do. Other than a very long causeway that connected it to Saudi Arabia, it had one museum and one Souq. So when our visitors arrived, there was a lot of time on their hands, especially if they did not like to go shopping in the colossal malls. 

In such a scenario, I used to introduce the idea of visiting the “Tree of Life” very tentatively. In all honesty I should have made it their top priority because if you did not want to drive half distance on the causeway, before you were stopped (as you did not have a visa to visit the neighbouring country), and had already been to the museum, this unique location, was the place to go.

Also called Shajarat Al Hayat, this remarkable tree was almost 10 metres tall and had survived in impossible living conditions for approximately 400 years. There was no apparent source of water and other vegetation for miles around, and the mystery of the survival of the tree had made it into a legend of sorts. It stood alone, majestically, on top of a seven-and-a-half-metre high sandy hill, at the highest point in Bahrain, with no other natural tree nearby.

It had come to be known as the “Tree of Life” due to the fact that it existed in a hot and dry desert, which truly represented the magic of life and the power of nature. The local inhabitants believed that Enki, the mythical god of water in Babylonian and Sumerian mythology, granted the tree its longevity. Others say that it marked the location of the biblical Garden of Eden.

With this remarkable saga of mysterious and unusual vegetation in the desert, why was it not the first port of call for all my visitors to Manama? The answer was that going to visit Bahrain’s loneliest tree was like entering a puzzling maze, and to reach the spot took us a good part of the day. Every time I went there I got lost, every single time! The GPS did not have it in its list of tourist attractions, and after some distance showed brown sand in its pictorial view. The signage was missing for most of the journey and wherever it was visible, was completely misleading. Following it, you landed up onto a dirt road, which actually went nowhere.

So one had to drive by sheer instinct. The first landmark was a scrap metal yard, which suddenly appeared on the right hand side of the road. After continuing straight, and getting confused by some smaller shrubs, one finally reached the luscious tree, by turning left at Gas Well No. 371. You had to be careful about staying on the vehicle-worn path, or else the car was likely to get stuck in the soft sand.

The way back was the same story, and one reached home after several trials and errors. A distance of roughly 40 kilometres could take you from two to six hours, depending on whether lady luck smiled or not, on that particular day.

I was back in the island nation recently. On day two, I ventured out to find the “Tree of Life” once more.

“Oh mom! You got lost again?” our daughter was on the phone.

“Missed the Gas Well number something turn,” I admitted.

“Why did you go?” she asked. 

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” I confessed.

NEW YORK — Apple isn’t saying much about its next iPhones, but there’s been plenty of speculation that the giant Plus model will have two camera lenses side by side on the back.

Why? A second lens could make photos sharper or give amateur shutterbugs blurring techniques more common in full-bodied SLR cameras. Apple isn’t revealing anything until its product event in San Francisco next week. For now, though, people can look at how a few other smartphone makers are using two lenses.

Motorola Moto Z

The three Moto Z phones get amazing zoom with a second lens that comes in the form of an optional attachment. Motorola unveiled its third Moto Z model and the attachment, called Hasselblad True Zoom Mod, at the IFA tech show in Berlin on Wednesday.

An accessory normally wouldn’t count, but in this case, it’s an integral part of the phone once you attach it with powerful magnets. The Moto Z has a mix-and-match design that makes it possible to remove its back and replace it with a speaker, a projector or a zoom lens that offers 10-fold magnification — better than what many point-and-shoot cameras offer.

You’d be wrong to think smartphones already offer zoom capabilities by pinching out on the screen. That’s just a software trick that leaves images fuzzy. The camera lens itself is fixed; you need an attachment for true zoom.

With it, a statue of Alexander Hamilton in New York’s Central Park looks as sharp from afar as it would closer up. By contrast, the same statue taken with the regular lens from afar looks dull. It’s possible to make out a New York University logo on a bean-bag toss game board shot with the second lens from across the lawn; with the regular lens, it’s just a blob of purple.

This functionality will cost you, though. The module alone will start at $250 when it comes out in mid-September, or at the high end of what point-and-shoots cost. That’s on top of $400 for the cheapest Moto Z. Motorola says the attachment will appeal mostly to photography aficionados, but the company believes that’s a sizeable market.

The results are indeed remarkable, but not flawless. It takes a second or so to focus and shoot, enough to miss a moving subject. Faces can look distorted near the edges of the image, and the second lens doesn’t do extreme close-ups, known as macros. That’s one thing stand-alone cameras still do better.

And the attachment is about as heavy and bulky as a point and shoot.

But the module gives you amazing zoom shots that you can easily share via the phone. That’s not a simple task with most cameras.

LG G5

The G5’s second lens offers an impressive 135-degree wide angle, compared with 78 degrees on the normal one. That’s the difference between getting the entire Colosseum in Rome into a single shot, as opposed to just some of it. At St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, the wide angle gets you not just Michelangelo’s dome but also the ornate columns holding it up.

With most cameras, you’re shooting as though you lack peripheral vision. With a wide angle, the photo frame expands to almost match your real-life field of view.

Wide angles aren’t always desirable. If you’re shooting an elephant in front of you, you want more of the elephant and less of its surroundings. But wide angles are great when you’re shooting a large landmark or a large group of people from close up.

As with other wide-angle lenses, though, LG’s produces distortion around the edges of the image. Think of how warped fisheye shots look. Columns inside St. Peter’s Basilica look curved rather than straight. Distant objects look even farther away.

The regular lens is what you’ll want most of the time. Of course, you can get something close to a wide-angle shot by installing apps or using built-in panorama features, but it takes time to pan across the landscape, rather than snap once. That software approach also doesn’t work for video.

Huawei P9

One lens captures images in colour, the other in black and white, or monochrome. The dedicated lens produces sharper monochrome shots than you can get by letting software bleach out the colour from an ordinary image. Huawei says it also lets in more light.

In practice, though, the differences are subtle. Images of colourful street art in New York often look cleaner, with better contrast, using the monochrome lens than by running comparable colour shots through a black-and-white software filter. While this will matter to artists, it probably won’t to most users, especially since people rarely take black-and-white shots anyway.

But that monochrome lens promises to help colour shots as well. By using sensors for the two lenses in conjunction, the phone can restore some of the detail and light lost to filters in the colour sensor. The result is a camera that’s among the top in the class — though recent iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones do just as well or better with just the colour lens.

And despite promises of better lighting, the Galaxy S7 often produced better night shots than the P9.

The dual lenses offer one neat trick: They sense depth, so you can blur out the background to highlight something in the foreground, mimicking an SLR technique done by adjusting the lens aperture.

The P9 isn’t available in the US yet, but Huawei is taking a similar dual-lens approach with the just-announced Honour 8.

Launched late last year, the second generation Jaguar XF is a high-tech and focused executive saloon successor to the model that, in 2007, pivoted Jaguar’s design ethos from traditionally inclined to its contemporary sleek, sophisticated and modern aesthetic. Evolutionary in design, the new XF gains the British brand’s lightweight aluminium architecture and features extensive and advanced driver and dynamic assistance and infotainment technology systems.

Driven in currently top XF-S 3.0 Supercharged iteration in rear- rather than optional four-wheel drive, Britain’s great hope for the traditionally German-dominated executive saloon segment is sportily agile, smooth, balanced and refined. Using 75 per cent aluminium content including suspension components for reduced unsprung mass, the 28 per cent stiffer and 11 per cent lighter new XF makes ride refinement, handling precision, performance and efficiency improvements.

Ridged and rigid

With sharper lines, more sculpted surfacing and snoutier jutting honeycomb grille, the new XF is distinctly more defined, chiselled and broader, emphasising a classic cabin-rear look and more assertive road presence. A more chiselled and ridged yet sleek and swept back design, the new XF features moody squinting headlights with “J” style LED elements, larger and deeper air intakes, sharper lower lip and a dramatic bulging bonnet power dome.

Trailing off from a more muscular bonnet, the new more aerodynamic XF’s waistline is more prominently ridged yet classier, levelled and lower for improved visibility. Meanwhile, its taut and arced roofline rakishly descends towards and seamlessly integrates with its powerful haunches, creating a sporty and urgent sense of momentum, enhanced by a short front overhang and more elegantly long rear overhang.

Riding on double wishbone front and integral-link rear suspension with softer bushes and stiffer camber and castor settings, the XF reconciles and enhances ride quality, roadholding, body control and cornering responses. Supple, smooth, fluent and refined on imperfect road surfaces, standard passive dampers feature improved low-speed ride while optional adaptive dampers automatically become more compliant for comfort or stiffer for better cornering body control.

Consistent and confident

Beneath its sculpted bonnet, the XF-S is powered by Jaguar’s now familiar 3-litre direct injection V6 engine, which with mechanical-driven supercharged forced induction delivers instant off-the line responses and a broader, cleaner and more consistent sweep through it rev range than a gas-driven turbocharger. Rear wheels are driven through a slick and quick shifting 8-speed automatic gearbox with stylish rising metal rotary selector and paddle shifters for concise manual mode gear changes.

Driven in the more potent of two states of tune available to Jaguar’s supercharged V6, the 1710kg XF-S produces 375BHP at 6500rpm and 332lb/ft peak torque by 4,500rpm, set to subtle visceral induction noises under heavy throttle load. Swiftly sprinting through 0-100km/h in 5.3 seconds and able to attain an electronically governed 250km/h top speed, the XF-S return low for its class 8.3l/100km combined fuel consumption and 198g/km CO2 emissions. 

Pulling consistently and muscularly hard through a broad and versatile range from tick-over to redline, the XF-S delivery may be abundant and confident, but is tuned for an urgent build-up to peak torque and power rather than being a flat and featureless curve. Linear, progressive and indefatigably urgent in delivery, the XF-S entices one to reach higher towards it rev limit and provides precise throttle response.

Connected and committed

Following an initial session feeling out the limits of its grip and electronic stability control system’s intervention thresholds and on slower, narrower and tightly winding inclines, the XF-S proved to be satisfyingly connected yet sublimely reconciling ride fluency with handling balance and finesse. Devoured the following long stretch of sprawling northern Spanish B-road switchbacks the XF-S settled into an intuitive rhythm and eager fluency.

An instinctive and fluidly rewarding drive through winding roads, the XF-S turns in tidily, with linear, direct and responsive steering while lateral weight transfer is progressive but well controlled. Balanced through a corner with near ideal 50:50 weight distribution, the XF-S finds a happy medium between outright grip from its large optional 255/35R20 tyres and engaging and alertly intuitive on-throttle adjustability, allowing one to pivot weight out to tighten a cornering line.

Committed and poised through corners, the XF-S responsive throttle control 

Allows one to dial it exact increments for it to hunker down and power out of a corner, but without unintentionally overpowering rear grip and traction. At speed the XF-S is reassuringly stable and quiet, and settled and buttoned down on vertical rebound, while road texture imperfections are soaked with supple grace, despite optional low profile tyres.

Tastefully high tech

Plush and refined with low wind noise, the XF’s cabin features uncluttered, user-friendly layouts and design clarity combined with quality leathers, metals, woods and soft textures. Supportive, comfortable and well-adjustable seating provides an alert driving position, while boot volume is generous at 540 litres. A 51mm longer wheelbase provides better ride stability and rear legroom, in addition to a 27mm rear headroom improvement, both despite slightly shorter overall length and lower roofline.

Extensively semiautonomous features include emergency braking, lane keeping, sign recognition, semiautonomous parking assistance, 360° camera, reverse traffic detection and adaptive cruise control. All-Surface Progress Control — derived from similar Land Rover sister systems — is like sure-footed low-speed cruise control over low friction surfaces at 3.6-30km/h. Meanwhile, heads up display proves useful, but in certain lighting conditions, causes a slight reflection from the projection unit onto the windscreen.

User-friendly and advanced, the XF’s infotainment suite includes standard InControl Touch 10.2-inch touchscreen system with gesture and voice control and text-to-voice tech. The optional smartphone-like InControl Touch Pro features quad-core processer, 60GB solid-state drive, Ethernet connectivity and interactive sat-nav able to position the vehicle even without a GPS signal. Convenience features are numerously and include automatic boot operation and four-zone climate control.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 3-litre, supercharged, in-line V6 cylinders

Bore x stroke: 84.5 x 89mm

Compression ratio: 10.5:1

Valve-train: 24-valve, DOHC, continuously variable valve timing, direct injection

Gearbox: 8-speed automatic, rear-wheel drive

Ratios: 1st 4.714; 2nd 3.143; 3rd 2.106; 4th 1.667; 5th 1.285; 6th 1.0; 7th 0.839; 8th 0.667

Reverse/final drive: 3.317/3.23

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 375 (380) [280] @ 6,500rpm

Specific power: 112BHP/litre

Power -to-weight ratio: 219.29BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 332 (450) @4,500rpm

Specific torque: 150.25Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight ratio: 263.15Nm/tonne

0-100km/h: 5.3 seconds

Top speed: 250km/h

Fuel economy, urban/extra-urban/combined: 11.7-/6.3-/8.3-litres/100km

CO2 emissions, combined: 198g/km

Fuel capacity: 74 litres

Wheelbase: 2,960mm

Track, F/R: 1,605/1,594mm

Boot capacity: 540 litres

Kerb weight: 1710kg

Suspension, F/R: Double wishbones/integral link

Steering: Variable electric-assisted rack & pinion

Turning circle: 11.61 metres

Brakes: Ventilated discs

Tyres: 255/35R20 (optional)