Now that the end of the year is upon us, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at 2018 and pick my five favorite tech and smart home gadgets. <\/p>
If you haven\u2019t seen my full review of the Sonos Beam, you can watch it here. <\/p>
Sonos has created a home theater speaker at a price point that\u2019s a little more mainstream than their other offerings. If you\u2019re using the Beam in an appropriately sized room, it will give you a rich, room filling sound. You definitely feel like dialog is coming from the center, while music and ambient sounds are spread throughout the listening area. The soundstage is much wider than I was expecting. It\u2019s not to say it\u2019s perfect though. I wouldn\u2019t hold this up as audiophile speaker or as a replacement for a true full-fledged home theater system, but for improving up a smaller setup like in my bedroom, it sounds really good.<\/p>
And with Amazon and Apple Airplay support out of the box, you can tie this speaker into home automation and get some extra control for your television set. When it comes to how Sonos Beam works with Amazon, I\u2019m very pleased. The Beam is able to pick up my voice from the other side of the room while the TV is playing. You can have Amazon turn on your TV or adjust the volume. If you have an Amazon Fire TV, you can even have it start playing a specific show, or play\/pause a video. <\/p>
There\u2019s a lot of value packed into this little bar. Add to that the ability to add additional speakers to your setup over time, and you\u2019ve got a great little home theater package.<\/p>
This one surprised me. If you watch my channel, you know that I\u2019m a big fan of voice assistants and have Amazon Echoes and Sonos One speakers throughout my house. I wasn\u2019t too keen on the Amazon Echo Show because I didn\u2019t want a camera on a smart home device like this sitting in my kitchen … and there\u2019s no way I\u2019d want that in my bedroom. The Google Home Hub caught my eye because it doesn’t have a camera and has a very small footprint.<\/p>
Right now we have Google Home Hub in our kitchen, which seems like one of the prime locations for it. It obviously can do anything your smart home speaker can do, but the added display adds a lot of interesting use cases. We use Amazon for timers in our kitchen while cooking all the time (very handy when your hands are messy or full). Having a screen solves the downside of not knowing how much time is left on a timer without having to ask. The Google Home Hub displays all active timers on the screen. Ask for the weather, or what\u2019s next on your calendar, and you\u2019ll not only get the audible response, but you\u2019ll get a visual of the forecast as well. <\/p>
One of my favorite features of Amazon and Google is asking for the news report. On the Hub you can select video sources in addition to audio, which is great to see while we\u2019re cooking or cleaning up in the kitchen. It can also act as your central smart home control center. Swipe down on the screen and you get smart home controls for the room the Hub is in, one more tap and you get controls for every item in your home. <\/p>
And the final, \u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting to like this as much as I do\u201d feature is the photo frame. The screen on this thing is absolutely beautiful and adjusts the color temperature and brightness based on the room. You can link a Google Photos album to the hub, so any photos you drop into the shared album will automatically show up on the hub when not in use. It\u2019s beautiful.<\/p>
I\u2019m not a watch guy and never have been. And I\u2019m guessing that like a lot of you, I stopped using a watch when smartphones became the norm. Why strap a single use device to your wrist to tell time when you\u2019re carrying a miniature computer in your pocket that can do the same thing and much, much more. <\/p>
The Apple Watch changed the equation for me because it meant that I wouldn\u2019t have to use my phone as frequently. I could see if a notification was important without pulling a phone out of my pocket. Set timers, check the weather report, see what\u2019s next on my calendar. In my car I can ask Siri to play a song and control it from the watch if I need to.<\/p>
Where the Series 4 Apple Watch takes one of my \u201cfavorites of 2018\u201d crowns is based on four things: computing power, battery life, size, and health. This is the first Apple Watch that doesn\u2019t feel underpowered. The Series 3 Apple Watch wasn\u2019t a slouch, but you\u2019d get hiccups in scrolling from time to time, and a lag pulling up your calendar or weather report. The Series 4 doesn’t suffer from any of those problems for me. There may sometimes be a little lag pulling the latest weather report, but that\u2019s the phone waiting for the data from the network … not the watch struggling to display the data. <\/p>
The battery life is amazing, even on the smaller model which I use. I can get between 36-48 hours of use before it needs to be charged, which is better than previous versions. Every night I drop it onto a charger on my nightstand, which doubles as a clock, so I never run out of charge … no matter how much I use my watch over the course of a day.<\/p>
I\u2019m not a fan of big bulky watches. The first Apple Watch felt like giant slab strapped to my wrist, this one feels more like a normal watch. The larger screen with smaller bezels, and the case\u2019s rounded corners really helps it feel more watch like and smaller on the wrist. <\/p>
And finally, the health tracking. Yes, it tracks steps like any other fitness tracker, but it\u2019s also gotten smarter about automatically tracking your workouts. Every day when I take my dog for a walk I don\u2019t have to remember to start an outdoor walk activity. The phone usually taps me on the wrist asking if I\u2019d like to record my outdoor walk, as I\u2019m doing it, because it figured it out on its own. At the beginning of the year I was part of a heart health study of Apple Watch owners. The watch automatically checks your heart rate every so often, but as part of this study they were seeing if they could proactively detect certain heart issues and notify the wearer. Apple is supposed to be releasing a new feature very soon that activates the Series 4 EKG feature. And if you\u2019re older and prone to falls, or are more active and do actives where you may fall and hurt yourself, you can activate auto-fall detection on the watch, which can help notify emergency services if it detects you fell and are unresponsive. Wearable technology like this, which we have on us all the time, is going to be a game changer when it comes to healthcare. <\/p>
The Apple Watch Series 4 finally feels like the definitive version of the product.<\/p>
I\u2019ve been an iPad fan since I bought the original in 2010. It immediately felt like the future of computing to me because it boiled down a computer experience to the bare essentials and reimagined it. Obviously, that first version was severely limited by software, slower processor and hardware, and was very much a 1.0 product that needed refinement, but I could see a bright future ahead.<\/p>
Fast forward to 2018 and this 12.9\u201d iPad Pro is an absolute beast of a computer … with some limitations. Yes, iOS 12 is still holding this thing back because it doesn\u2019t good external storage file access (yet), and many pro apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic, Premiere, and Photoshop aren\u2019t here (yet), but the hardware isn\u2019t holding this thing back at all anymore. <\/p>
The processor in this thing screams and apps feel fluid and I never experience any kind of lag at all, which I can\u2019t say the same thing about for my desktop PC or Macs. With this version of the iPad I\u2019m doing more \u201creal work\u201d on this thing than I\u2019ve done with any iPad before it. I can do 90% of my tasks on this without any issue because the software options are finally here. With Microsoft Office and Google Docs you can do all of your email, spreadsheets, and documents without any problems. I use the writing app Ulysses<\/a> to write all of my scripts on my iPad, and art programs like Affinity Photo<\/a>, Procreate<\/a>, and Graphic<\/a> to edit photos, sketch, and design vector graphics and logos. <\/p>