Best Valentine’s gifts for tech lovers

Don’t order your partner about – bark orders at the Amazon Echo instead.

The Amazon Echo is a hands-free voice-activated speaker that uses Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to play music, check the weather, turn on the lights, and much, much more. Alexa can answer your questions, as well as giving you a news and weather briefing. You can also ask Alexa to dim your Philips Hue lights or turn up the temperature on your Nest thermostat, so clothes start coming off a little faster.

Music is one of Alexa’s specialties. As well as playing tracks you’ve uploaded to your Amazon account, she can also play from Amazon Music or Spotify (assuming you have a subscription to such services). If you request a track and it isn’t in your personal library, she will try Prime Music.

While you can control smart home gadgets with your voice, or get a weather forecast or train times don’t forget to actually talk to your partner as well on Valentine’s Day. Otherwise you and Alexa will not be as popular as you’d hoped.

There are several versions of Amazon’s speakers available in the UK. The Echo 4, which received a major upgrade last year, costs £89.99 from Amazon while the smaller Echo Dot 4, which underwent a similar upgrade, costs £49.99. Read our Amazon Echo review to find out more.

The ideal Valentine’s gift should really be something that brings the two of you closer together, which is why we reckon these DIY electronics kits from Technology Will Save Us could be a winner.

Each kit contains everything you need (including instructions) to build a different bit of tech, giving you both a useful gadget and a little more tech know-how at the end of it all. For a music lover, the synthesizer kits are obvious choices – and you can save a bit of money by buying them together in a gift pack.

What better romantic gift is there than fitness? Everyone’s got fitness on their minds since we’ve started spending more time at home. There are plenty of fitness trackers out there – you can read our selection of the best to see what suits you – but the most popular by far are made by Fitbit.

There are still lots of different types of Fitbit, though we have a guide to help you figure out which Fitbit is best for you or your partner.

The entry-level Fitbit Inspire only costs £69.99, while the mid-range Charge 4 costs £129.99. If you want to get super fancy, there’s also the top-of-the-line £299.99 Fitbit Sense.

You can also find our selection of the top Fitbit deals online in case you want to shop around first.

One of the best things about the digital age is how easy it is to take photos wherever you are, and it’s never been easier to remember special occasions or time spent with your partner. Conversely, one of the worst things about the digital age is how easy it is to forget those same photos, to lose them in the mass of other files you accumulate, without any physical copies to hold onto.

With that in mind, we think one of the new wave of instant printers would make an ideal techy Valentine’s gift. There’s no need to give up the ease of taking quick photos on your smartphone, but now you can immediately print out your favourites, Polaroid-style, giving you a few romantic keepsakes to hold onto.

The Polaroid Hi-Print (pictured) costs £89.99 and is currently the #1 printer in our round-up of the best instant printers. See our full review.

Alternatively, you can grab a camera with the printer built in – ideal if your partner’s phone doesn’t have a great camera, or if they just fancy themselves a bit of a budding photographer.

Does your partner have a tendency to forget where they put their keys, their phone, or, well, everything? Enter the Tile.

You simply attach one to whatever you’re worried about losing, and as long as it’s within Bluetooth range of your phone, you can ring it to find out where it is. It also works the other way too – double-tap the button on a Tile to make your phone ring, even if it’s on silent.

If you’re not in Bluetooth range, the phone app will remember where it was the last time it connected to each Tile, to give you an idea of where to start looking.

Each Tile lasts a full year without charging, at which point you can buy a replacement at a discount – just in time for Valentine’s Day next year too. Though don’t blame us if your partner doesn’t appreciate getting the same present two years in a row.

You can either buy Tiles individually (£19.99) or in packs of two (£37.99) or four (£59.99), and they’re now available in a slimmer variant too (£24.99), which is thin enough to slip inside a wallet.

Look, we’ll admit that we’re not entirely sure of how romantic a portable battery pack can ever really get, but judging by how often they go on sale for Valentine’s Day there’s clearly a market for people looking to give that special someone a little extra juice.

We’ll leave it up to you as to how you spin this from ‘dull and practical’ to ‘thoughtful and romantic’, but there are a few obvious options at least.

Maybe you want to share battery life just as you share your love. Maybe it’s about making sure that they never miss one of your messages thanks to a battery running low. Or maybe you just go full Frankie Goes to Hollywood and say something or other about the power of love.

The Aukey 10,000mAh Ultra-Compact power bank (pictured) costs £19.99 snagged the top spot in our round-up of the best power banks.

An Apple Watch is exactly the sort of gratuitous gadget that it’s incredibly hard to justify buying for yourself, but brilliant to be given by someone else.

Even better, because it comes in a variety of versions with different watch colours and straps, it’s a good chance to show off that you know your loved one’s personal style.

Yes, an Apple Watch is expensive, but since the introduction of the affordable Apple Watch SE (pictured), you can now pick one up for just £269.

If you want to spend a bit less, and your partner already owns a Watch, you can give them a bit more customisability by buying a new strap from it. Apple has its own extensive range, and our colleagues at Macworld UK have also rounded up a few of their favourites from other manufacturers.

You should also check out their round-up of the best Apple Watch bargains to find the best price before you buy. 

If your partner is the type who can’t get off their phone, you might as well help make sure that they can do as much as possible with it.

Google’s Chromecast devices connect to either your TV or your speakers, letting you broadcast to them directly from your phone over your Wi-Fi network.

The base Chromecast (check out our review here) plugs into the HDMI port on a TV, and lets you stream audio and video from any Chromecast-enabled app on a phone, tablet, or laptop direct to the TV.

If you want to step the quality up, the Chromecast with Google TV (pictured, see our review) does basically the same thing but with 4K HDR support. It also comes with a remote control.

If your partner already has a Smart TV, or just doesn’t care much about controlling it with their phone, then you might also want to take a look at Amazon’s equivalent, the Fire TV Stick

If your partner is still carrying around a battered old pair of cheap in-ear headphones, it might be time to get them an upgrade.

There are too many headphone options out there to sum up right here, and it depends a lot on what your partner is looking for. We’ve rounded up what we think are the best headphones on the market, with the Sony WH-1000XM4 (pictured) coming in at the top.

If you’re looking to spend a bit less then you might prefer our budget headphone round-up.

Then again, if they’re an Apple lover then there’s really only one choice this year: the wireless AirPods Pro, which our Macworld colleagues gave a 4.5-star rating for their slick design and active noise cancellation. Buy from Amazon where there’s £50 off.

And if you want to keep things romantic (and wired), why not throw in a headphone splitter so you can listen to music together next time you travel.