T3 Awards 2018 are at Ministry of Sound this Thursday and the winners are lining up

published 24 September 2018

The T3 Awards 2018 is its 12th year on earth, and it's moving to big school. We're hosting the winners' party at the Ministry of Sound, possibly the world's most famous club, and the guest list is already about four miles long.

Big shout going out to our sponsors AO, Honor, ExpressVPN, MSI and Shell

Over the next 3 days, leading up to the event itself, we'll be revealing the winners in 42 of the 51 shortlists, with the final victors to be announced on the night. That's in the following categories:

Gadget of the Year
Best Brand
Best Phone
Best Laptop in association with AO.com
Innovation of the Year
Tech Personality of the Year
Tech Legend
The Eco Award in association with Shell
£10,0000 Tech Innovation for the Future prize in association with Honor

Most of these are well established and self-explanatory but Tech Personality is given to the man or woman who's propelled tech to the forefront of the public's minds in 2018, while Tech Legend is given to a figure who's made a lasting impact on the tech landscape over a prolonged period. This year's winners, without giving too much away, actually also form an amazing tech double-act that's now lasted for an incredible 30 years. Figure that one out if you can.

Previous winners of the Personality and Legend awards have included everyone from Stephen Fry to Lord Sugar to Will.I.Am to Mark Zuckerberg to Gary Numan, so it's fair to say the field of potential winners is wider than an extremely widescreen TV.

This year, the Eco Award (in association with Shell) makes its first appearance in the T3 Awards line-up for nearly a decade. It celebrates some quite remarkable innovations in the world of renewable energy and sustainable tech, from solar-powered gadget-charging stations in Rwanda, to a state-of-the-art, solar-powered soccerball stadium in Amsterdam.

Tech Innovation for the Future in association with Honor

Not so much a mere award as the culmination of 6 months of planning, events and sifting through competition entries that veered from near-genius to near, uh, not-quite-so genius, shall we say, this £10,000 award will be handed over on T3 Awards night to one brilliant entrant.

T3 and Techradar asked Britain's students and recent graduates to come up with a truly innovative tech idea, and received hundreds of entries, covering everything from life-enhancing social networks to ambitious energy projects to extremely novel new ways of boiling and serving eggs.

As part of this process, we also toured Britain with sponsor Honor's support, speaking to audiences about tech, innovation, security and privacy issues, and Alexa's quite uncanny ability to recognise and bleep out swear words.

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years.

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."