5 trailblazing tech reviews of the week: Nothing's stylish, affordable flagship and why you should buy AMD's new graphics card over Nvidia's

In a world of smartphone clones, the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro is a true breath of fresh air. The series' sheer brutalist looks have been honed, offering something truly distinct yet refined, while those glyph lights are as useful as ever, allowing you to customize lighting patterns for calls and alerts. On top of this, you get an excellent camera with a 3x optical zoom that's basically unheard of at this price.

And it's still a bit of a bargain, even compared to some of the best cheap phones. It comes in at a full $140 / £150 / AU$150 less than the cheapest iPhone, the iPhone 16e. In return for less money, you get a bigger screen with a silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate, a more capacious 5,000mAh battery, speedier charging and a boosted 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM.

If you found Nvidia's latest RTX 50 series GPUs difficult to justify in terms of value, the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT may offer far better bang for your buck. Put simply, it's the best graphics card for consumers AMD has ever released, not only smashing the standard set by the Radeon RX 7900 XTX but almost giving the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 a run for its money in terms of 4K and 1440p gaming performance.

Yes, it has some shortcomings – it's not the kind of card you'll be co-opting to run your AI from or carry out complex creative work. But for sheer gaming performance, it does an admirable job without being as vulnerable to price inflation and scalping as Nvidia's latest cards. That makes it a much wiser investment if you just care about getting the most gaming power for your spend.

As you can probably tell from that enormous, Leica-supported camera array, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra is betting big on its photography credentials. Not only does it have a huge 1-inch 50MP sensor but it now has a massive 1/1.4-inch 200MP telephoto sensor to boot. This means it's capable of taking skillful snaps without the over-processed look of some of its rivals, while offering better videography than its rival, the iPhone 16 Pro, when it comes to resolution or capturing footage in the LOG video format. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's one of the best camera phones ever made.

It's also got it going on elsewhere too, with the powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset driving it forward and its IceCool vapor chamber keeping its innards frosty. On top of that, its super-fast storage and RAM helps it translate this into blisteringly quick performance. So while it's not available in every market, if you can get your hands on it, it's definitely worth a look.

In some respects, what Bose has achieved with the Solo Soundbar 2 is genuinely impressive. It's space-savingly compact at just 21.6 inches (549mm), meaning it should be easy to fit in front of even pretty modest-sized TVs. And yet it's capable of pretty powerful audio for such a little guy, providing ample room-filling sound and crisp, clear dialogue.

There are some odd quirks though. Chief among these is the fact it doesn't offer HDMI, such a rarity these days that it's hard to find many bars that aren't capable of it. On top of this, for what you're getting, this isn't the best value bar – quite a few of the best cheap soundbars offer similar features and performance for an even better price.

The Panasonic Lumix S1R II is capable of taking seriously detailed snaps and vids. It rocks a new full-frame 44.3MP CMOS sensor and is capable of filming 4K video at 120fps or 8K at up to 4K, which is a significant boost over its predecessor. There have been significant improvements when it comes to areas like autofocus, image stabilization and shooting speed as well.

But one of the most impressive improvements is how light and compact it is, even for one of the best full-frame mirrorless cameras, especially in comparison to the Lumix S1R. That means it's squeezing an awful lot of photographic talent into a handier, more flexible form – which is pretty impressive stuff.