Best Father's Day gifts 2023: Milo Action Communicator, Journey TRIO charger, Bellroy Tokyo bag, Panasonic ES-LS9A - The Australian Financial Review

The battery on the Milo lasts about 10 hours, six on-board microphones handle wind and background noise with ease, and as many as eight (16 with a forthcoming firmware update) units can be grouped together at once.

Also, the Milo creates a mesh network, extending the 600-metre range between any two Milos by allowing transmissions to hop from one Milo to the next.

Considering you need at least TWO Milos to do anything at all, it’s a bit of an indulgence, but surely he’s worth it.

$399 per Milo. Armband clip $64.95. Pocket clip, collar clip $49.95, bike clip, action clip $34.95

Journey Rapid TRIO iPhone/Watch/earbud charger

The Rapid TRIO, from the Melbourne-based Apple accessory maker Journey, lets dad wirelessly charge up to three things at once: an iPhone 12, 13 or 14 on the magnetic-docking MagSafe charger at the top; a pair of wirelessly chargeable earbuds, or indeed a second, wirelessly chargeable phone, on the “Qi” charger under it; and an Apple Watch on the back.

Rather niftily, that Watch charger is actually detachable, and plugs right into the USB-C port on a laptop, so dad can charge his Apple Watch when he’s on the road, too.

The Rapid TRIO also lets iPhone owners take advantage of one of the best new features in the upcoming iOS 17 firmware update: StandBy mode.

When you attach a locked iPhone to the TRIO’s MagSafe charger and spin the phone around so it’s in landscape mode, the phone’s screen turns into a sort of bedside clock, with big widgets showing your choice of the time, the day and date, the weather, calendars and upcoming events.

If only the Apple Watch charger were one of the newer, rapid chargers, and not a regular Watch charger, this thing would be perfect. As it is, it’s merely fabulous.

$159.95, not including a power supply. You’ll need a USB-C wall charger capable of 20 Watts of power, probably a lot more if you want to charge two phones at once.

Bellroy Tokyo Totepack / Tokyo Work Bag

If the dad in your life already has everything, then he definitely needs a bag to put everything in.

We’re tossing up between two bags from the Bells Beach/Fitzroy company Bellroy.

The Tokyo Totepack (pictured, and our favourite) is a computer backpack for grown men who want something more professional than a backpack, but who draw the line well before an actual briefcase.

It’s a very tidy tote bag that converts to a backpack via straps that hide away in a panel at the back. It’s got a padded pocket big enough for a 15-inch laptop (we’d recommend pre-filling it with the new 15-inch MacBook Air if you really want to earn/buy his love), plus another structured pocket for a tablet or Kindle Scribe (see below), plus internal and front pockets galore.

The Tokyo Work Bag, meanwhile, is quite like the Tokyo Totepack for features, except it’s in landscape mode rather than portrait mode, so to speak.

The Work Bag slides onto a suitcase handle. Bonus!

It can take a 16-inch laptop, and it’s got an over-the-shoulder strap that hides away in the back pocket, rather than a pair of backpack straps.

Crucially, the Tokyo Work Bag also has a short strap on the back that holds it onto a suitcase handle, which the Tokyo Totepack lacks, probably due to it being too tall.

Tokyo Totepack $249. Tokyo Work Bag $259

Panasonic ES-LS9A 6-Blade Electric Shaver

When will they call a truce in the blade wars, do you think? When razors and shavers have ten blades each? Twenty?

Panasonic’s ES-LS9A electric shaver has six blades, which we thought was getting a little extreme until we used it.

In the five weeks we’ve been reviewing this shaver, the ES-LS9A hasn’t given any of us here in the Digital Life Labs shaver burn, not once. That’s a first for an electric shaver for us, so there might be something to be said for having that many blades on your face at the one time!

Other than that, the Panasonic has all of the advantages and all of the disadvantages we normally associate with electric shavers, compared with blade razors.

It’s much slower to shave with than a razor, particularly if the father in your life has a complex shave area with swirls and/or whiskers that lie flat; and it’s much less irritating than a razer, for men whose job/grooming habits demand they shave every day, or who need to exercise immediately after shaving.

Of course, shaving is such an individual thing, it’s hard to be sure whether the dad in your life will keep using the Panasonic ES-LS9A, or quickly revert to whatever he’s shaving with now. But it’s the money spent on the gift, not the utility of the gift itself, that buys you love, isn’t it?

$899 including clean & charge station (but we’ve seen it for $699)

Kindle Scribe

When we reviewed the Kindle Scribe late last year, we complained that this otherwise-marvellous e-book reader and digital notebook was lacking a couple of obvious features, like the ability to convert handwriting into text, and the ability to use its pen to write directly onto the page of a book you’re reading.

Since then, Amazon has fixed many of the flaws, but not all of them. A firmware update to the Scribe in May let users email themselves a copy of their handwritten notebook, in which all the handwriting has been converted to text. In our tests, the conversion wasn’t 100 per cent accurate, but it was damned good, given the near-illegible state of the handwriting it had to deal with.

There’s also now a lasso tool for copying, moving, and resizing drawings and writing, better PDF editing, and better ways to navigate notebooks. But there is still no way to use the pen to write marginalia directly onto a page, the way you can with a real book and a real pen. All you can do is write notes that are linked to a page, which doesn’t look or feel as natural.

Still, it’s a great gift for any dad who reads a lot, and likes to annotate documents.

From $549 to $679, depending on pen style and amount of file storage.