The Victrix Pro AF ANC gaming headset is the pair of headphones I've been looking for since I first fell in love with Saint's Row. They'd fit in perfectly with their aesthetic - what with the purple and the both extreme yet subdued (somewhat) industrial design. The look is good, the sound is tight, the total package is worth your consideration.
I have to admit, I have a strange history with the Mario Party series. I’ve been playing since the very first game launched on the N64 back in 1998, and while I’ve always been entertained by them, there’s always been this voice at the back of my head saying “you know this probably isn’t very good, right?” Still, I would play them, and I never really listened to that voice until Mario Party 9 rolled around. In that game, Nintendo decided that having everyone move around the game board individually wasn’t a good idea and plopped them all in a car that meant they’d be stuck side-by-side for the entire match. Why? I don’t know. Reasons, I guess.
You can probably already guess from the title: Honor has done it again. While it’s easy to knock the company as “just a Huawei sub-brand”, it has been rocking the smartphone global market, including the US, with affordable smartphones that sometimes rival even Huawei’s high-end models. While it definitely isn’t the Mate 20, the Honor 8X won’t leave you wanting despite its price tag. In fact, it could very well leave you satisfied because of it. This review shows exactly why.
Xiaomi's associated company Pocophone made this Pocophone F1 (also known as Poco F1) to tackle emerging markets and companies like OnePlus. What they made was a smartphone with features that defy logic - at least when it comes to a device that costs this little. The Poco F1 is a smartphone that's very, very nice - especially when it comes to its price, in every region in which it's been released. This is a pretty gosh-darned nice phone.
It's a testament to just how high expectations are for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL that, even after months of the Google phones leaking, interest in them remains high. Now, the pair of Android 9 Pie handsets are finally headed to shelves, promising the cutting-edge in Google's computational photography, the latest and greatest in software, and a more cohesive and premium-feeling design. Ambitious, certainly, but also more expensive than the phones they replace. Question is, has Google done enough to warrant both that excitement and that price premium?
Last year, Insta360, one of the first few companies that made 360-degree video recording accessible to the masses, launched the Insta360 ONE. It offered more ways, many of them novel and fun, to create 360-degree content without having to carry bulky equipment. But while it mostly did deliver on those creative features, the actual quality of the output still left some things to be desired. This year, the company is coming out with the Insta360 ONE X and it’s like a completely different product. We take it for a long ride, actually multiple ones, to demonstrate how much it has improved in just a year’s time.
The new Echo Show 2nd Gen finds a far more powerful Amazon Alexa waiting for it, with none of the touchscreen uncertainty of the original. Back when Amazon first launched the Echo Show, its first smart speaker with a display, few were convinced that Alexa skills would translate from voice-only. A little over a year later, the new Echo Show is still $229.99 but faces a whole new set of skills - and a whole new set of challenges.
Sony's aibo is back, and after more than a decade the robotic dog is smarter, more talented, and generally more adorable than ever. Now promising to be more lifelike and to tap into the potential of the cloud, aibo's 2018 return is a long way from the original, faintly-Terminator-esque robots that first introduced the name back in 1999. What hasn't changed, though, is the premium price tag, or indeed the suspension of disbelief required to truly understand the aibo experience.
Over the last few weeks I've been using Moodo, a smart fragrance mixer that allows users to "create their own personalized ambiance." It's gone well, or as well as one might expect such a thing to go. Once I got the hang of creating scent atmospheres in my home, I realized that the device made such activities so simple, I skipped right over the whole "how do I use this device" part of the equation.
If 2017 was the year Apple hit reset on the iPhone then, in 2018, the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max are its masterplan writ large. In the case of the iPhone XS Max, that's quite literally very large indeed. Doubling down on its screen-first design, these new smartphones promise formidable power and cleverer photography in a beautifully designed package. You pay a significant premium for all that, though, raising the very real question of whether Apple is delivering enough in the premium category it created.
What do you really need in a modern TV these days? Picture quality is, of course, a given, with terms like “4K”, “HDR”, “FALD”, and “Quantum Dots” being thrown around in marketing spiels and materials. With increasingly connected homes, Internet connection for streaming is almost expected as well. Maybe even some smart home control, too. And beyond being just functional, these “smart” TVs are expected to look just as nice as any decoration in your living room. In all but one of those, Vizio’s 2018 P Series promises to check all those dots. And so we take it for a spin to see, no pun intended, if it can deliver.
In an industry obsessed with acronyms, you can credit the BMW X5 as being the first-ever SAV, or Sport Activity Vehicle. Back in 1999, people were left scratching their heads to discern the differences between an SAV and SUV. Fast forward to today, and the new 2019 BMW X5 is still an SAV to the core, but it's certainly all grown up now. Larger, and more practical, the promise is up to seven seats of family convenience but without sacrificing the driving feel that the X5 has always been known for.