Entertainment Reviews

Amazon's Fire TV Recast isn't just a DVR for cord-cutters, it actually cuts any physical connection between the set-top box and your TV itself. Instead, the newest addition to the Fire TV line offers up a wealth of free, over-the-air channels and the storage to record them, then beams that wirelessly to your TVs, smartphones, and Echo smart displays, complete with a splash of Alexa convenience. Sounds good, but has the Fire TV Recast missed the boat in this age of on-demand entertainment?

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

The LEGO remote controlled Batmobile is an exercise in beastly looks, battery-powered rumbling motor action, and a new Batman. For some, the new Batman minifig for August of 2018 is enough incentive to own. Even without that Batman - even if this set came with a super old Batman - this set remains a pretty tight box of LEGO bricks and elements.

Continue Reading

Take a quick peek at this newest last-ditch effort to get you to spend money on Deadpool 2. It's a plastic box with four different fancy disks inside it. One each for each of the most important characters other than Domino inside it. Because Domino was lucky enough to avoid getting her face plastered on a disk some poor goofball went out and bought from 20th Century Fox - lucky her!

Continue Reading

Over the past week we've played with the Air Hogs Supernova, a tiny drone made to be minimal. This drone is controlled with an on-switch and sensors. The user tells the drone what to do and how to act with a series of gestures - hand signals in the air - and all power is provided by a charging cable that's not unlike what smartphone users have for their smartphone. This drone is just about as simple as a drone gets.

Continue Reading

Look upon this mighty work of LEGO artwork and despair! For this is a licensed movie LEGO set, and it probably won't be released more than once! This is the LEGO Jurassic World set 75930, Indoraptor Rampage at Lockwood Estate. It's made for the release of Jurassic World, and depicts a scene heavily featured in the last preview trailers before the release of the film. In this set you'll find no less than 3 (three) dinosaurs with which you can terrorize your minifigures, and have oh-so-very-much fun.

Continue Reading

Sonos' vision of entertainment has always been more open house than invite-only, and with Amazon Alexa, Apple AirPlay 2, and the Google Assistant on the horizon, the new Sonos Beam epitomizes that ethos more than ever. The $399 speakerbar isn't just a more affordable version of the company's Playbar and Playbase models, but the smart guts of the Sonos One packed into a louder, TV-friendly enclosure. Question is, does the Beam's house party go without a hitch, or are all these assistants bad neighbors?

Continue Reading

Alexa is coming for your living room and, just like the Borg cube that the Amazon Fire TV Cube might remind you of, resistance is futile. Amazon's virtual assistant may not be an entirely new addition to the TV experience, thanks to integrations into early Fire TV adapters and dongles, but the Fire TV Cube ousts buttons completely in favor of end to end voice control.

Continue Reading

This week we're taking a peek at the first release of YouTube Music Premium. That's not the same service as any one of Google's various Music-entwined services. Instead, it's an amalgamation of the parts that've worked for Google in the past. In our first look at this app and the full features it serves, I've come away cautiously optimistic.

Continue Reading

The newest Millennium Falcon LEGO set is here, and we're going down its hallways in detail. This is the Falcon as it existed in one of its earliest forms - the earliest we've yet seen it. This was back when Lando Calrissian owned the ship and the ship - man - it was clean. So clean it almost breaks the "used future" Science Fiction George Lucas originally pierced our collective consciousness with in A New Hope.

Continue Reading

The Lenovo Mirage Solo is making a splash landing in the virtual reality headset market, and it's causing waves both in mobile and traditional VR. One of the small handful of truly standalone headsets, it doesn't demand you slot in your smartphone or plug into a gaming PC. Instead, Lenovo and Google are leveraging smartphone tech and some mighty clever inside-out tracking to give the Mirage Solo its edge - and justify its $400 price tag.

Continue Reading

There's a new sort of LEGO set in town, and it's all about the brand's new label: BrickHeadz. This is the "Go Brick Me" box set, and it's as entertaining as it is challenging to wrap one's mind around. What on earth is such a strange collection of odd pieces doing presenting itself as a LEGO make-it-your-own set? And why didn't LEGO think of this a long, long time ago?

Continue Reading