September 2018 - 530 Room

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Jeff Redman

The 5 best tech gifts of 2018

Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY’s newsroom and any business incentives.

Whether you’re buying for a family member, a coworker, or your nerdy spouse, knowing which tech gizmos and gadgets are big-ticket items this holiday season ain’t easy.

Does anything evolve faster than technology? By the time you come up with an answer, there’s going to be a new wave of fitness trackers to drool over. The rapid-fire rate at which manufacturers iterate upon their tech products—whether they’re TVs, laptops, or new ways to ask Alexa to drop the bass—can make it tricky to shop for tech gifts.

To help you be a little more knowledgey about technology, we’ve put together a list of 20 awesome tech gifts for all the different people in your life. Whether you’ve got a buddy who spends more time counting steps than he does counting sheep, or a spouse whose perfect Sunday is GrubHub and binge-watching, we’ve got you covered. These are the best tech gifts of 2018, according to Reviewed:

1. For the binge-watching addict: The best streaming device

The 2018 Roku Ultra really is the perfect choice for that person in your life who has a few too many streaming subscriptions. Not only does this handy device give you access to thousands of Roku’s so-called “channels”—things like Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO Now, Pandora, Spotify, Sling TV, and so on—but it’s also Roku’s most powerful streaming box ever (and our favorite streaming device, period). Come for the snappy experience, intuitive menus, and voice remote—stay for the ability to stream 4K and HDR content when you finally upgrade your TV.

If the Ultra’s $100 price tag is too rich for your blood, there are other alternatives. The Roku Streaming Stick+ is a more affordable, hyper-portable option that still gives you a voice-enabled remote and the same oodles and oodles of content options.

2. For families that game together: The newest cool gaming device

The Nintendo Switch is the latest family-friendly video game console from Nintendo (you know, the company responsible for Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, Kirby, and all the other games most people have actually heard of). The Switch combines the power of a full home gaming console with the ability to “undock” the smaller screen and take it on the go like a tablet, which kind of makes it like two gifts in one!

Most Switch games allow three or four players to game together at the same time, and as usual, Nintendo’s games are colorful, intuitive, and family-friendly, making the Switch the ideal choice for parents looking to never, ever watch “Baby Shark” again. Oh, and don’t forget to pick up a great case for your new Nintendo Switch.

If you don’t wanna spend three-hundred smackers, though, I don’t blame you. You can get the Super NES Classic Edition—a miniature version of one of the best Nintendo consoles ever, loaded with all the best nostalgic games—for just $80.

3. For the daily commuter: Amazing wireless earbuds

If you or someone you know someone commutes every day, you probably also know that there are two essential ingredients to a stress-free commute: packing light, and mitigating the sounds of honking horns, squeaking breaks, and “Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.”

Apple’s Airpods perfectly complement both situations: They’re true wireless earbuds (meaning the two pods simply sit in your ear holes, literally no strings attached), and they sync so flawlessly with an iPhone you’d think the same company designed both—oh, right. Even one of our most discerning writers couldn’t deny his burgeoning, burning love for these earbuds—why should you?

4. For the serious gamer: HyperX Cloud II headset

If you’re looking for a great gift for the person who spends a fortnight playing Fortnite, the HyperX Cloud II gaming headset is a great choice. During our hands-on testing of the best gaming headphones, we found the original Cloud headset to be unsurpassably comfortable and easy to use—without all the garish design details that usually haunt gaming-focused headsets. Between plush velour ear pads and compatibility with PC, Xbox One, and PS4, there’s really no gamer that wouldn’t be on cloud nine when they unwrap these choice cans.

5. For the student: A great laptop for Netflix, I mean studying

I recently helped my girlfriend buy a new laptop for grad school, and two things immediately became clear: Generally, you don’t need a mega powerhouse, workhorse of a laptop for the years-old software required by most classes, and if you have to lug it around all day, you really want something lightweight and sturdy. Acer’s Chromebook 11 fits both those student-friendly niches quite perfectly, but it’s still [robust enough to tackle web browsing, email, and archaic statistics software. For around $270, it’s a super valuable gift for any student in your life.

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Jeff Redman

Video speaker showdown: Which is best – Amazon, Google or Facebook?

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. – If last year’s holiday shopping was all about the connected speaker and saying “Hey, Google,” and “Alexa,” multiple times after bringing home discounted fare, this year it’s all about video.

Amazon has enlarged and enhanced its Echo Show device, which brings video to its line of smart speaker, Google counters with the Home Hub, adding video to the Home line of speakers, and Facebook is in there as well, with its controversial Portal video speaker.

We’ve taken all for intensive test drives. Which one is for you? Read on:

Home Hub

The Google speaker, ($149, on sale for $99 during Black Friday sales) is our all-around favorite of the trio because it does more than the others. It’s a digital photo frame, accessing your pictures from the Google Photos app; it’s a YouTube viewer, showing videos on command, playing endless songs from the YouTube library and a recipe helper. Ask how to make chicken cacciatore, and it will show you, in step-by-step detail, in words and video, just how to do that. It connects to the cable TV alternative service YouTubeTV if you’d like to watch cable or broadcast TV on the device, along with your Google Calendar, Google Podcasts and other Google functions. Unlike the other two devices, there is no built-in camera for video calls. So while you will still have to live with knowing that every time you say “Hey, Google,” your wake word and the command are being recorded, at least you know an always-on video camera isn’t pointed at you.

At 7 inches, the screen is too small and pales in comparison to the other two. But since it does so much more, without the privacy concerns of Facebook’s Portal, it gets our top nod.

Facebook Portal and Portal+

With a 10-inch screen for the entry level edition, ($199, on sale for $149 for Black Friday), the Portal has a big, bright screen that’s beautiful to look at. Unlike the Home Hub and Echo Show, Portal exists for two key functions: video chat and a digital photo frame.

The other features – recipes, watching YouTube clips, listening to podcasts and the like – can be done, but not on command.

That said, the video chat looks so good and so superior to any video chat I’ve ever done before, you may think twice about the perils of letting a Facebook product into your home. (More on that in a minute.)

The Portal has a built-in camera designed to not just offer a static image of you during a video chat, but the whole family, and it zooms in and out and moves across the screen as others talk, looking like a professionally made video. FaceTime, Skype, Hangouts and the others pale in comparison.

But Portal is from Facebook, the company that has struggled with outside forces getting into our personal credentials, the firm that’s known for taking our personal information and creating targeted advertising out of our likes. This is the social network that served as a portal through which foreign entities wreaked havoc in the 2016 election.

Just last week, a bombshell New York Times report said that Facebook knew about the Russian attack for months before making it public and spent much time and energy on covering it up. It was followed with many calls for the ouster of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who says he won’t step down.

That said, Facebook says it’s not recording the calls you make on Portal but does say it will use the information of whom you called, how long you spoke and where both parties live to potentially target ads to you elsewhere on the Facebook platform.

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Jeff Redman

Bill Nye: We are not going to live on Mars, let alone turn it into Earth

Sorry, Elon Musk. Bill Nye says the idea of Mars colonization and terraforming – making a planet more Earth-like by modifying its atmosphere – is “science fiction.”

“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?” Nye said in an interview with USA TODAY. “We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet.”

As for living on Mars permanently: Sorry, Nye says that’s not happening either. “People disagree with me on this, and the reason they disagree is because they’re wrong,” he quipped.

The famous science educator and CEO of The Planetary Society appears on National Geographic Channel’s series “MARS.” While the series explores human beings living on the Red Planet and even mining it, that doesn’t mean Nye buys into the idea.

For starters, he points to Antarctica, where scientists are stationed even during the harsh winter months but no one lives permanently. “Nobody goes to Antarctica to raise a family. You don’t go there and build a park, there’s just no such thing.”

“Nobody’s gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians,” Nye said. “It’s not reasonable because it’s so cold. And there is hardly any water. There’s absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there’s nothing to breathe.”

Plus living in a dome, then putting on a spacesuit to go outside will get tiring – fast.

“When you leave your dome, you’re gonna put on another dome, and I think that will get old pretty quick,” he said. “Especially the smell in the spacesuit – all the Febreze you can pack, I think it will really help you up there.”

But Nye is still in favor of astronauts traveling to the Red Planet.

“I want to find evidence of life on another world in my lifetime, so Mars in the next logical place to look,” he said. “People say what are you gonna find there? We don’t know, and that’s why we go and explore the unknown horizon.”

The reason the Red Planet captivates us so much is because it’s like Earth in a variety of ways, Nye said. While it’s quite a bit smaller and has lower gravity, it also has ice caps, seasons and days just like here on Earth.

“You can see it in the night sky, it’s romantic. You want to say, ‘Lets just drive over there, take a trip, have a look around,’ ” he said.

But sending astronauts has a very practical purpose: What our best rovers on the planet can do in a week, a human can do in about 5 minutes, Nye said.

“We would send people there to make discoveries. To explore, that’s the big idea,” he said. “So when we go to Mars, you don’t know what you’re gonna find, it’ll be new. I guarantee it will be amazing.”

Particularly amazing would be to find life on the Red Planet.