In The Outer Worlds 2, everything goes back to antitrust. Like the first game in the series, this first-person shooter is set in the far future in an alternate timeline in which William McKinley was not assassinated. As a result, Theodore Roosevelt was never president and the trustbusting of America’s early 20th century never happened. The result, in the game’s alternate timeline, is a future defined by sprawling mega corporations of almost comical scope and power.
The game plays its corporate-controlled scenario for winks and laughs, extrapolating and exaggerating the power of unregulated corporations as they reach into space via interstellar colonies. The first game featured a war between a home goods company called Auntie Cleo’s and a colonial supply company called Spacer’s Choice. In the post-war sequel, they’ve merged into an even more powerful entity, Auntie’s Choice.
The game’s satire of corporate rule is often funny. But it’s so over the top that it undermines its point: In the game world’s dystopia, corporate control is so complete and inescapable that it functions like authoritarian government power. Turns out that’s what everyone dislikes.
An upcoming update to Steam includes a helpful improvement to game reviews. As part of the Steam Client Beta update Valve released on February 12, users will now be able to attach information about their hardware specifications when they post a new game review or update an old one.
It’s not uncommon to find negative reviews that complain about a game’s performance, information that’s hard to draw a conclusion from without knowing what kind of hardware the reviewer is using. With specs attached, the usefulness of complaints becomes a little bit easier to gauge. A game’s sales performance and discoverability on Steam is heavily influenced by its review average, a data point Steam users sometimes manipulate for reasons unconnected to the quality of a game. Provided reviewers actually attach their specs — at least in the beta, the feature is entirely optional — Valve’s mercurial reviews ecosystem could end up becoming more nuanced overall.
Alongside the new option in reviews, Valve is also experimenting with a way for users to share “anonymized framerate data” with the company. When framerate sharing is enabled, “Steam will collect gameplay framerate data, stored without connection to your Steam account but identified with the kind of hardware you are playing on,” Valve says. The feature is specifically focused on devices running SteamOS, Valve’s Linux-based operating system for the Steam Deck and some third-party handhelds. The extra information could help the company’s attempts to improve game compatibility using software like Proton.
The beta update also includes bug fixes, and a tweak to how Valve collects feedback about whether a game should be Deck Verified. Now when Steam prompts you to confirm whether you agree with a game’s rating, if you disagree, you can provide a reason as to why.
Nintendo’s Switch 2 Pro controller committed the one cardinal sin no gamepad should ever perpetrate: it made me lose.
Nintendo’s $90 first-party controller exclusive to the Switch 2 has large, snappy sticks—too snappy, in fact. Flicking the joystick from one side and releasing it will cause it to flick back so fast that the gamepad will register an input in the opposite direction. While playing the first Hollow Knight on Switch 2, difficult bosses like Nightmare King Grimm became nearly impossible when having one pixel out of place could be the difference between saving my skin or a trip back to the bench.
Such failures of hardware design can be rage-inducing, but I kept returning to the Switch 2 Pro controller for one reason: convenience. Ignoring the default Joy-Cons, Nintendo’s first-party controller used to be the only one that could wake the handheld console from sleep. That’s no longer the case. Gulikit’s TT Pro and TT Max controllers are both capable of keeping your butt glued to the couch when you need to game. I’ve used half a dozen controllers for Switch 2 from the likes of Snakebyte, Hori, 8BitDo, and Gulikit themselves. The TT Pro and TT Max are perfect for me. That doesn’t mean it will be your perfect gamepad. Controllers are so ubiquitous; you’ll need to decide what is worth sacrificing for your preferred gaming experience.
Gulikit TT Pro / TT Max
Some people won’t like the stick layout or lack of HD rumble, but Gulkit’s controllers will be enough for many Switch 2 gamers.
Switch 2 wake function
Drift-resistant sticks
Solid feel
Customizable joysticks and D-pad
Form-fitted case
No headphone jack
Back buttons don’t fit in case
Rumble isn’t as nuanced as Switch 2 Pro
These controllers start at $70 for the TT Pro and $80 for the TT Max. That’s more expensive than Gulikit’s former offerings and potentially costlier than past favorites like the 8BitDo Pro 3. Gulikit’s design is compatible with PC, Android, iOS, and Switch. It will work fine as your mainstay controller thanks to the included 2.4GHz dongle, but don’t expect something truly incredible or original other than on the Switch 2. Maybe we’ll see more controllers find ways to wake Nintendo’s latest system. Even if they do, I don’t imagine I’ll need another Switch 2 controller anytime soon.
Why do first-party peripherals lack these features?
The China-based company Gulikit got its start by selling Hall effect joystick replacements for the original Switch. The first-gen Joy-Con controllers had notorious stick drift problems, where the physical potentiometer sticks would degrade over time and create unintended inputs. Hall effect, which uses magnetic fields rather than physical connections, is far more durable. No console maker has yet to create a first-party peripheral with Hall effect. What makes that fact maddening is how companies like Sony and Nintendo will limit third-party capabilities on these consoles. For example, a PS5 DualSense is the only peripheral with access to the force-feedback Adaptive Triggers.
In a similar fashion, Nintendo limited wake capabilities to its own controllers. Not even licensed controllers from companies like Hori could wake the system from sleep. To be clear, this is a privileged position to take. There’s nothing stopping me from getting off my ass to wake the Switch 2 in its dock. But if I have the option, you’re damn right I’m not leaving behind the comfort of my butt-shaped hole in my cushions.
Pairing the controller with the Switch 2 is a little more involved than with a Pro controller. You need to set the TT Pro or TT Max into pairing mode, then go into the Controllers and Change Grip/Order menu to then have the device pair. From then on, the controller will be able to wake the console. I’ve found that waking the Switch 2 isn’t as immediate as it is with a Pro controller or Joy-Con 2. It normally takes half a second longer.
The system still requires me to press both triggers to select my controller before getting into a game. I can’t confirm by myself, but my suspicion is Gulikit is working around the proprietary controller protocol to enable wakeup without fully connecting the controller. This one extra step is so minimal, it’s hardly any sacrifice for the sake of convenience.
This capability is a singular and—admittedly—petty reason that the Gulikit TT Pro takes the top spot. Or maybe it would be, if the controller itself didn’t feel so good as it does.
I’ve used many of Gulikit’s controllers since then, such as its older KK3 Pro gamepad and its Genesis-like Elves 2 Pro controllers. The company’s first controller with the ability to wake the console, the ES Pro, sported an Xbox layout with the “A” button on the bottom rather than on the right. While Gulikit’s other controllers all support the Switch 2 (after you install several firmware updates to make them work), this is one of its best. Instead of Hall effect, the TT Pro and TT Max controllers use TMR joysticks. That stands for tunneling magnetoresistance, which is another magnetic-based sensing technology that should be even more resistant to stick drift.
So it has everything you need, right? Not quite. The controller lacks the “C” button for accessing the Switch 2 GameChat function. If that doesn’t matter to you, then shrug it off. There’s also no headphone jack. They’re both small features, but they will inevitably matter to some players.
The TT Pro and Max sport the PlayStation stick layout, where both are on the same level. I know that some players cannot stand this. I, on the other hand, prefer this layout (strange to say since I grew up an Xbox diehard). It’s all about preference, and unfortunately, this is what you’re stuck with, for now. Both controllers come with a plastic case containing a special set of A,B,X,Y keys if you wish to replace the buttons with an Xbox layout.
These controllers aren’t exactly budget options. For the $70 or $80 you spend, you’ll at least gain extra customizability and a form-fitted controller case. The case is where you’ll also find the optional metallic back paddles, four in all. These slot into the controller with a little bit of force. I rarely, if ever, use back paddle buttons, so I appreciate having the choice of whether to keep them or not. If you use the back paddles, the controller won’t actually fit inside the case, which means removing them if you want your gamepad to stay safe when travelling.
There’s also an optional D-pad with a traditional cardinal direction thumbpad hidden inside the carrying case. You may look at the flat panel D-pad and squirm, but in practice, it feels superb. I didn’t have a problem feeling out my directions when playing side-scrollers or in a fighting game, like Soul Calibur II in the GameCube classics collection.
I normally prefer stiffer joysticks than most players. The default Gulikit TT Max’s 720-degree sticks felt just on the edge of right for how I play. What’s better is that it comes with two alternative sticks if you prefer a different height. The pack includes an extra screwdriver to adjust the tension of the joysticks as well. Plus, the Hall effect triggers have a nice depth and springiness to them. There are two switches on the back of the controller to change to instant triggers if you want the same feel as the Joy-Con or Switch 2 Pro controller.
And there’s solid gyro and rumble packed in as well. The Switch 2 Pro controller can feel a little muted in the rumble department, though that HD rumble feature is far more nuanced than what I felt on the TT Max. I would trade off the slightly worse rumble for the sake of sticks without snapback or stick drift potential.
These controllers aren’t built for tournament players by default. The best you can get is a 1,000Hz polling rate when using them wired. Polling rate is how often the gamepad sends information to the console, so a higher number is preferable. It also sports a 730Hz polling rate over Bluetooth, which isn’t too shabby. Gamepads like Razer’s Wolverine V3 Pro feature an 8,000Hz polling rate, but only the wannabe pro gamers will ever notice a difference.
These controllers are also middle of the road when it comes to battery life. Gulikit promises you can get a full 26 hours with these controllers’ 950mAh battery running without any lights or Turbo on. With the lights, the actual battery life will be closer to 14 hours, and less if you’re playing a game that enjoys rumble (practically all first-party Nintendo games do). The Switch 2 Pro controller, which lacks any lighting whatsoever, gets far better battery life, equivalent to close to 40 hours. In real life scenarios, that means charging the controller once every few weeks rather than a few days with Gulikit’s design.
And here’s what you need to know: most people will be perfectly happy with the TT Pro rather than the TT Max. The only difference is that the TT Max allows for 10 minutes of macro recordings compared to 10 seconds on the TT Pro. These macro recordings will help you recreate specific inputs, which may be helpful for fighting games. The extra recording time is equivalent to the older, slightly cheaper KK3 Max. Most players won’t ever use that feature.
And $70 for this controller is more tempting than $80, which is approaching Switch 2 Pro controller pricing. This is meant to be my go-to Switch 2 controller, even replacing my previous favorite, the 8BitDo Pro 3. That controller will remain with my PC, but the Gulikit TT Pro is going to sit on my couch, ready for me when I get home after a long day of work, when I can’t even be bothered to stand up to turn on my console.
Melania, Brett Ratner’s Melania Trump movie, is a purportedly serious film that plays like a mockumentary. If you were making a movie that parodied the current first lady of the United States, I’m not sure what you’d do differently.
This interminable, nearly two-hour long film features a running voiceover by Melania, leading us through crucial moments in the twenty days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration: choosing fabric for her coat, making sure her dress is the right length, approving a design plan for the dinner, and perusing furniture for Barron’s future bedroom. (Sadly, we never get to see which chest of drawers she picks.) “My creative vision is always clear,” she intones, returning to that notion throughout.
This is a work of propaganda, but director Brett Ratner is no Leni Riefenstahl. Missing are the German filmmaker’s awe-inspiring visuals and hypnotic edits; instead, Ratner substitutes endless shots of the gaudy, excessive Trump aesthetic as Melania floats through Trump Tower, private jets, motorcades, and gala dinners until she lands at the White House. The doc’s opening shot is a panorama of Mar-a-Lago in all its gilded glory, accompanied by the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away,” Jagger’s voice promises.
Before he was exiled from Hollywood by sexual assault accusations (he has denied the claims), Ratner was best known for directing the Rush Hour movies—so I at least expected propulsive pacing and drama. No such luck: We might as well be watching gold paint dry.
It’s hard to tell whether Melania herself finds it all as dull as I did: she remains inscrutable through most of the film, her face frozen into an elegant mask. The only times she genuinely lights up are when Ratner coaxes her to sing along with her favorite song, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” and later while dancing to the Village People’s “YMCA” at an inaugural event. At several points Melania refers to the death of her mother with sadness, and even has the cameras trail her to St Patrick’s Cathedral, where she lights candles. But throughout, there is no perceptible change in her demeanor.
That departure could’ve been a great segue into a segment about Melania’s past—her childhood in Slovenia, her modeling career, background information that might give context to her transformation into Trump’s consort. But instead, the doc sticks with the minutiae of the march toward Trump’s second term. Unmentioned is the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol; instead, the camera just pans over images of the Capitol preparing for the inauguration—now a symbol of Trump’s triumphal power.
The world loves an underdog. And right now, when the gap between the privileged and the few continues to grow, we relate more than ever to the person who has been working hard, only to find themselves at the mercy of corporations who don’t care about the value you provide.
Sam Raimi’s Send Help, a gloriously bloody romp on a deserted island in the Gulf of Thailand, isn’t shy about making its statement. The rich get richer, whether they’re qualified or not, leaving us to fade into a penniless obscurity where we watch reality TV shows alone with our pets (which sounds greta, really).
Raimi has returned to form, reminding us why we love his films like Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell. Throughout its runtime, Send Help is both campy and grounded. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien are a delightful duo, even though O’Brien is playing the kind of C-suite jackass many of us are too familiar with.
Linda Liddle (McAdams) is a corporate pawn on a chessboard full of many who has just been passed over for her rightful promotion. Liddle is that mainstay worker in every office, the one who is just a little too eccentric, a little too involved in her work.
Bradley Preston (O’Brien) is Liddle’s new boss (and the son of her former boss, who has just passed away). Preston is cocky and demanding. He chooses a less-qualified friend over Liddle, which leads to Liddle joining him and his team on a private plane to Bangkok to finalize a business deal. Of course, that deal never happens, and the morning after the plane crash on the island finds Liddle and Preston the sole survivors.
Annie Wilkes if she was on Survivor
(20th Century Studios)
McAdams plays Liddle’s journey exceptionally. Back on the mainland, she’s a nobody who works in Strategy & Planning (this is important), but here, she’s the only one who can save them both. An avid Survivor fan, she is the one who is able to gather food and water, and assist Preston with his injury. The callbacks to the popular reality show are genuinely delightful, and do provide some good laughs.
O’Brien, on the other hand, slips into his role as the image of douchey corporate greed easier than anticipated. Preston is a man who has never had to work, and who has never actually suffered. He refuses food, water, and shelter, until he has no choice but to crawl to Liddle. This is the first of many instances where his own pride has to take backseat to the need to survive.
As the days pass, the once-frumpy Liddle blossoms into a confident, self-assured woman. She has found her place here. She is needed and useful, and for once, those above her cannot look away from or appropriate her work for themselves. Though, as Liddle reminds Preston, there are no bosses here.
Send Help can seem obvious where it’s going at times, but that does not make it any less joyful. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift dig deep into the sort of loathing those of us in corporate America experience every day and gives us a fantasy we never knew we needed.
Imagine Lost, but unhinged
(20th Century Studios)
This is also a story that explores power dynamics. Out here, their roles in the office don’t matter. Liddle revels in her newfound power. As the weeks drag on, Preston starts to become wary of her. Though they both dislike the other, Liddle isn’t the kind of boss he was, she likes to remind Preston. And it isn’t like either of them are innocent: Straits become more dire, and the duplicitousness becomes stronger.
Though not particularly gory, Send Help doesn’t shy away from the blood; unfortunately, however, much of it is CGI. That is ultimately just a minor issue, as the CGI does work. Raimi is known for his practical effects, so it would have been nice to see it come into play here as well.
The story itself is rounded out with genuine moments between the characters, like a scene on the beach at night where they talk about their pasts. It reminds us that human connection is a priority among us for a reason. When times are bad, we need to know we’re not alone. And being stuck on a remote island with your monster of a boss is definitely bad.
Rachel (she/her) is a freelancer at The Mary Sue. She has been freelancing since 2013 in various forms, but has been an entertainment freelancer since 2016. When not writing her thoughts on film and television, she can also be found writing screenplays, fiction, and poetry. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her cats Carla and Thorin Oakenshield but is a Midwesterner at heart. She is also a tried and true emo kid and the epitome of “it was never a phase, Mom,” but with a dual affinity for dad rock. She also co-hosts the Hazbin Hotel Pod, which can be found on TikTok and YouTube.
SwitchBot, the company behind a button-pressing robot that turns dumb buttons smart, has been rapidly expanding its catalog of smart home devices in recent years. Those range from the super niche—things like a smart candle warmer—to the useful and compelling gimmickry of a smart hub with an IR transmitter that lets it act as a Matter-enabled universal remote. For one of the company’s newest products, the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell, the gimmick is a connected indoor display that acts as a chime, digital peephole, and video storage device, among other things.
A dedicated video monitor and local storage aren’t enough to save the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell from itself for most people.
Included video monitor
Local storage
Wired and Battery power options
Matter compatibility (sort of)
Terrible video quality
Limited detection features
Limited aspect ratio
Grating, tinny audio
Finicky software
It’s a shame, then, that the Smart Video Doorbell itself is one of the worst smart home cameras I’ve ever used. Its big problem is that the company whiffed it on the actual video doorbell part. The camera produces muddy, awful video at the wrong aspect ratio, the onboard speakers of both the doorbell and display are terrible, and the whole affair is driven by smartphone software that’s unreliable, at best. Despite it all, I still think this camera might have a place. But that place is decidedly not next to my front door.
Good on paper, and nowhere else
I had a number of reasons to look at SwitchBot’s Smart Video Doorbell. Its supposedly 2K resolution video recordings are local by default; it’s battery-powered but can also be wired up; it’s Matter-compatible (with a big asterisk that I’ll get to); it’s got a 165-degree field of view (again, asterisk). If you have a paired SwitchBot smart lock, the Smart Video Doorbell can read the NFC chip on your smartphone or a SwitchBot tracking device in order to unlock it.
The indoor monitor component is what really caught my eye, though. It’s a smallish, square device with a 4.3-inch display that can either be wall-mounted or placed on a table using a built-in kickstand—near a power outlet, though, as it uses a power cable that’s only about four-feet long. Below the display are four buttons, including one to view the camera’s live feed, one to lock or unlock your door (assuming you have a SwitchBot smart lock), and one to pop up a list of generic, robotic replies asking visitors to leave a message or telling them someone will be at the door soon. A feature in the SwitchBot app supports user-recorded replies, so, obviously, I fired up YouTube to grab soundbites from “Angels With Filthy Souls,” the fake movie inside of Home Alone. Then I had my child ring the doorbell so I could answer with them. We laughed and laughed.
The display comes with a microSD card slot already filled with a 4GB microSD card for local recordings, which I think is enough, but the device officially supports up to 512GB memory cards for those who need more. Having the memorycard live inside an indoor device is nice, and not something every local-first video doorbell does, so kudos to SwitchBot. It’s part of why this doorbell works without an internet connection, another nice feature. In fact, you never actually need to connect the Smart Video Doorbell to an app or the internet at all, as the monitor comes paired with it. Although, in my testing, the camera didn’t actually record video when I used it without connecting it to the SwitchBot app.
Beyond the video monitor, SwitchBot’s camera just slides right off the rails. I’m not a fan of the camera’s design, and I can’t stand the scratchy, tinny speakers in either it or the video monitor. Its video quality is atrocious, and the camera didn’t seem to produce recordings anywhere near the 2K resolution SwitchBot claims it’s capable of. Those I checked on the microSD card were 640 x 360 at most, in fact. If there are circumstances in which the camera will actually grab a 2K video, I didn’t encounter them. I asked SwitchBot for clarification on this, and I’ll update this review if I get an answer.
Right after setting the Smart Video Doorbell up, I saw another issue—its 165-degree FOV is great on paper, but SwitchBot’s choice to use a 16:9 aspect ratio meant only the edge of my porch floor was in view, despite the camera being mounted at the low end of SwitchBot’s recommended mounting height of 1.2 to 1.5 meters. Compare that to the Google Nest Doorbell, which uses a square aspect ratio and captures about as much lateral area as the SwitchBot camera while getting way more of what’s above and below it.
Not being able to see much of my porch means I couldn’t check the camera to see if, say, a package is there—one of the main reasons I even want a video doorbell on my porch in the first place. That wouldn’t be as big a deal if I could count on the Smart Video Doorbell to always catch it when someone is delivering a package, but it routinely missed people approaching my porch, especially when they were quickly in and out the way so many delivery drivers are.
Stingy, sluggish software
It’s not much better on the software side of things. The SwitchBot app is immediately annoying about promoting its cloud storage service. Thankfully, you can turn off its pestering reminders if you explore the app’s settings deeply enough. But then there are other weird choices, like that motion detection and recording are both turned off by default, or that video recordings are set to end after just five seconds.
At home and on the same Wi-Fi network, it takes many seconds to load the live feed, occasionally failing. When I left for a few days while reviewing it, I could hardly get it to load at all. And while I could get the live feed to load in the Alexa app, I never could in Google Home after adding the camera there. That’s a harsh contrast to the video monitor, which shows the live feed almost immediately when the doorbell button is pressed. It was also consistently a struggle to load recordings in the SwitchBot app, either by navigating to the camera’s timeline via the app, or by tapping a motion notification on my phone. Most smart home security cameras have these issues here and there, but for the Smart Video Doorbell, it was constant.
Third-party support is a little confusing all around. The Smart Video Doorbell has a settings menu labeled “Third-party Services,” but this seems to just be a way of linking your general SwitchBot ecosystem to others. That is to say, the doorbell shows up when I link SwitchBot to Google Home or Amazon Alexa, but not for Samsung SmartThings or Siri Shortcuts. Apple Home isn’t supported. Also, although this package has Matter support, that’s only referring to the video monitor’s ability to bridge a SwitchBot smart lock to other ecosystems via the universal standard. Matter only just gained smart home camera support in version 1.5 of the standard, and as of this writing, only Samsung SmartThings has updated to that version.
Lastly, the SwitchBot app is a little light on typical smart camera features. You can set a single detection zone by resizing a rectangle on the video feed, but there’s no privacy blackout feature. The app has scheduling and a sensitivity slider, but you can’t turn off, or adjust the brightness of, the blinding LED lights that turn on when someone approaches the camera at night. And human detection is the only specific motion detection category that’s included with a free plan; you have to pay for one of SwitchBot’s cloud subscriptions for vehicle and pet detection (both are things that my Netatmo camera has been able to do for free since I bought it in 2019). That costs at least $3.99 a month for a single camera—which isn’t bad!—and doesn’t include package detection.
All of my complaints aside, there are the makings of a good video doorbell here. Local storage, the fact that it works without Wi-Fi, easy setup, and its SwitchBot smart lock integration are all great things. But the problems I listed make it a bad choice if you want all the smart home bells and whistles that come with many smart home security cameras.
But there’s one kind of person the Smart Video Doorbell might be ideal for. Its indoor video monitor makes it ideal for non-tech-savvy folks, especially those with limited mobility, since it means they can see who’s at their door without getting up, and they don’t have to futz with an app to do it. And if you don’t care about ever having recordings and just want a fancy digital peephole and intercom, it’s great for that, too. Bad video quality, inconsistent event sensing, and fancy algorithmic detection features really don’t matter, then.
But everyone else should just look elsewhere. There’s just too much competition from the likes of Eufy, Reolink, and others whose cameras also prioritize local video storage but that produce better video quality, offer more features, and can detect, record, and show events with much greater reliability. I’ve never used a smart home security camera that I thought was perfect, doorbell or otherwise, but the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell misses the mark in too many areas, making it a doorbell camera for almost nobody.
I’ve never cared more about my sleep in my life than during the month-plus that I’ve worn the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic. Previously, if I woke up drowsy, I’d blame the past night’s bad choices and think, “Well, better luck tomorrow night!” Now, the first thing I do when I wake up is check my sleep score.
I’ve always been a person obsessed with tracking my body metrics, having become addicted to both my heart rate and my step count when fitness trackers first came out. But when sleep was added to the devices, I largely ignored it. All that data was starting to add up and feel like too much information to me. How could I possibly walk 10,000 steps in a day, get a perfect sleep score, and keep my heart rate down, my heart rate variability up, and my cardiovascular age lower than my actual age? I am literally just one person.
Oura Ring 4 Ceramic
If you want to track every biometric you can using available sensors, the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic does it best. But it still requires you to put in the work.
Long battery life
Extremely comfortable
Lots of size options
Very accurate tracking
Probably tracks too much data
Needs to be worn 24/7 to get detailed insights
Most fitness trackers these days try to do it all and, honestly, most of them fall short on that task. But surprisingly, when I tested the Ring 4 Ceramic, I stopped feeling bothered by all the data points. Yes, the Ring 4 Ceramic does cram every body metric possible into its tiny device and accompanying app. And yet, somehow, it does so in a way that I am at least a little bit less bothered about than I had been in the past.
I’ve also decided that of all the options currently out there to track my health—smartwatches, straps, etc.—a smart ring is by far superior.
The Oura Ring, which originally debuted exactly a decade ago after a successful Kickstarter campaign, is currently in its fourth iteration, which came out over the summer. In October, the company also debuted its ceramic version of the Oura 4, which is made up of high-performance zirconia ceramic, which is a material known for its durability and light weight. The new Oura Ring 4 Ceramic comes in four colors: Tide, Petal, Cloud, and Midnight.
A benefit of the Ring 4 Ceramic, according to Oura, is that the colors are part of the ceramic, and not an added extra layer like they had been with past metals. With older models, users had issues with the colors (a mix of silvers and golds) fading or chipping over time; ceramic has no such issues. And while I’m only going on my second month, my Tide-colored Oura is still just as vibrant as day one.
The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic is currently priced at $500, which is on the pricier end for a health tracker. The regular Ring 4 is $350. Competing devices like the screenless Whoop 5.0 is an annual subscription that includes the band and starts at $200, the Samsung Galaxy Ring is $400, and the most decked-out Fitbit Sense 2 is $250.
You also need a subscription for the Oura Ring, which is $6 a month (you can also pay $70 upfront for the whole year). If you don’t want to pay that monthly fee, the smart ring still works and you will still get certain data, including sleep analysis, a readiness score, and an activity tracker. But if you want access to everything else, you’ll need to pay that monthly fee.
I’m not generally a big ring person, but I honestly found the Ring 4 Ceramic to be pleasantly snug and cozy on my finger. I often alternated between wearing it on my middle or index finger. For the best and most accurate results, Oura recommends the index finger mostly because it provides a snug fit, and generally, the company suggests avoiding fingers where the knuckle is wider than the base. In my experience, I found that if I wore it on my middle finger, I could more easily forget it was there, whereas if I wore it on my index finger, I tended to fidget with it.
Comfort is a huge component of health and fitness trackers, and it’s one that doesn’t get talked about enough when reviewing these products. If the goal is to wear them 24/7, then they have to be comfortable, and it’s worth trying on a bunch of different types—smartwatches, straps, smart rings—to figure out which one works for you and your lifestyle.
A single charge lasts for up to 8 days, according to the company. In testing, mine has lasted a full 7 days multiple times. It’s available in a wide variety of sizes—4 to 15—which is even more than the smart ring’s previous iteration.
The Ring 4 Ceramic comes with what the company calls “smart sensing,” which is essentially an algorithm where the smart ring optimizes its multiple sensors to use the one with the best signal at any given time.
The better question, honestly, is what can’t the smart ring track? The Oura Ring 4 Ceramic uses infrared LEDs to measure blood oxygen during sleep. It also uses photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensors, which detect changes in blood flow, to measure heart rate and heart rate variability as well as respiration rate (which is important for sleep tracking). Temperature sensors measure average body temperature and accelerometer sensors track movement and activity.
All of those sensors mean that the Ring 4 Ceramic has the ability to track a huge swath of data, but the key is how it spits all that out into a usable form.
The Ring 4 Ceramic provides a daily sleep score. It also breaks sleep down into smaller details like total sleep versus time in bed and gives you a sleep efficiency percentage, which is how much of your time in bed you actually spent sleeping. It knows when you are doomscrolling or tossing and turning with the Sunday scaries. The Ring 4 Ceramic takes all of this, along with your nighttime resting heart rate, and calculates a sleep score. Anything 85 and above is optimal, and I’m proud to announce to the entire internet that my highest score was 88. This is where health optimization can get somewhat addictive, and I’m absolutely prone to it.
The tracker also provides a daily “Readiness” score, which it calculates using an algorithm that takes into account your resting heart rate, heart rate variability, any significant body temperature fluctuations, as well as your respiratory rate and sleep. Again, anything 85 or higher is optimal, and I’ve been getting a lot of scores in the 90s, which makes me proud of my mind, body, and spirit, honestly.
It also provides a daily activity goal, which you can set yourself, and it’s nice to hit that goal each day. Though a daily activity goal is pretty standard across all trackers, Oura’s is really well presented.
Similar to its competitor Whoop, the Ring 4 also provides a daily stress analysis. It tells you how long your body was in high stress (which it detects based on shifts in your heart rate, heart rate variability, and your body temperature). It also shares a daily stress score by telling you if you were “stressed,” “engaged,” or “relaxed” that day.
It didn’t predict that I was getting sick, but it could tell I was sick
Luckily for you all, I tested the Oura Ring 4 Ceramic during the month of October and November, which is peak fall cold season. The smart ring has an algorithm built into it called the Symptom Radar, which essentially uses changes in skin temperature, respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability to detect if something is off in your system. Theoretically, the idea is that it could detect these changes early and predict that you are getting sick. You could then take it easy those days or maybe even sleep an extra hour or two that night.
I got a cold in mid-October, which honestly came on pretty suddenly. I babysat a friend’s kid on a Monday. She sneezed into my face multiple times (so cute) and then on Thursday morning, I woke up with that dreaded scratchy lump in my throat, which continued to get worse and then better over the course of that next week and a half. The Ring 4 Ceramic didn’t detect any shifts from my baseline on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even Thursday, when I woke up feeling off. But once my cold was full-blown, the app did note that both my body temperature and resting heart rate were elevated, and wanted to know what was up.
That cold was fairly mild, and came on quickly, so I do wonder if I had had something worse, like the flu or covid, if it would have detected it a bit earlier. I also wonder if I keep wearing the Ring 4 Ceramic for longer, would it get better at knowing what’s normal and what’s not for me?
I still think that the best period tracker is a pen and paper (or a dedicated note in your notes app). Oura’s new cycle insights and fertility feature, which was unveiled at the end of October by the company (I had been using it since the start of my testing in early October) requires 60 nights of data in order to make accurate predictions. In order to really assess whether it’s working well or not, I’d want to give the Ring 4 Ceramic another couple of months after that, too. So, it’s too soon to tell how well it works.
To predict your period, the tracker collects body temperature readings over a long period of time (two months or more) and uses that in addition to an algorithm to predict when your next cycle might arrive and when you might be ovulating.
The Oura 4 Ceramic really can do it all, from tracking your sleep and your stress score to monitoring your period, your activity level, and your heart rate. There are also a slew of integrations that you can use with the Ring 4, including Headspace, Strava, Natural Cycles, and even Stelo, which is a continuous glucose monitor. Connecting it to the smart ring allows users to see their glucose levels in the Oura app, which shows how factors like meal choices, sleep, and activity impact their glucose levels. Oura’s newest partnership, as of late October, is with Quest Diagnostics, the blood testing company. For an additional yearly membership fee of $100, users can get a comprehensive blood panel, though it’s not available in every state.
However, like I’ve written about in the past when reviewing similar products such as the Whoop and Polar Loop, how much of this data is that useful?
After a month of use, I did become obsessed with my sleep score, but I am not sure if I actually became a better sleeper because of it. This is similarly true for tracking my activity and my strain score. I’ve been a health tracking user for years now, and I’ve found that the key question you have to ask yourself when deciding whether you want to spend a couple of hundred dollars or more on these devices is: what are you trying to get from these devices? Is it better sleep, less stress, increased energy and activity? These devices can do it all, to a degree, and perhaps Oura can do it the best, but it still comes down to how much work you are personally willing to put into making your health better.
Well folks, it’s the holiday season and there’s no shortage of smart light companies hawking bright, deeply saturated RGB string lights. And if you’ve gone hunting for that sort of thing in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly encountered Govee, increasingly one of the most visible names in smart lighting.
Govee makes smart lights for almost any situation you could imagine, from A19 RGB bulbs to light-up LED sticks meant to stand up in corners to netted string lights that let you paint your hedges with pixel art. You can make your home a total Lisa Frank fever dream using this company’s products.
One new entry in its vast catalog is the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism. Yeah, that’s Lights Prism, not Prism Lights. It’s a modular set of soffit lights with tri-color lamps that you can use to accent your home’s roofline and illuminate walkways around it, or to spray your walls with obnoxiously vibrant gradients of color, Homeowners Association busybodies be damned.
Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism
Govee’s Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism is a fun, colorful way to light the outside of your house, but it’s hard to justify the cost.
Easy physical install
Bright, colorful lighting
Responsive app control
Lots of fun premade scenes
Solid music synchronization
Matter-compatible
Cheap-feeling
Can be hard to place
Very expensive
It seems like there are a million smart soffit lights available from countless alphabet soup brands on Amazon, ranging from the very cheap to the fairly expensive. The reason you may have heard of Govee and not, say, Letianpai or Poofzy is that Govee is a real company with an app that’s actually nice to use. Also, thanks to the Matter protocol, most of its newer lights are compatible with every major smart home platform, which doesn’t hurt.
After a week of testing the Lights Prism on my garage, I’ve found them to be responsive, reliable, and even fun to use. Getting them set up is easy enough. The lights are modular and come in manageable 6-lamp segments. Each of these lamps comes with a sticky 3M backing that bonded quickly with my garage’s wooden soffit and makes it easy to secure them with screws or, if needed, anchors that Govee includes. (For the purposes of this review, I only used the adhesive.) You’ll connect the lights to the generously long cable of the controller that contains all the lights’ connectivity and smarts, and that in turn to the power adapter.
One issue I had is that the controller’s cable, which is around 12 feet long by my hasty measurement, was still too short to reach the point where I wanted to start the lights. That’s a problem because without an extension cable, I couldn’t make them wrap around my garage without doubling the lights back on themselves. It would’ve helped if Govee had added a splitter, as I could have sent one segment in one direction, and the rest of them in the other.
The Lights Prism’s lamps are its big differentiating feature. Unlike all of those generic soffit lights I mentioned, Govee’s RGB lamps can blast three colors at once, each at different brightness levels, making for much more nuanced—or potentially garish!—lighting. The lights themselves are bright, at least when using the single segment I set up for testing.
These triple LEDs aren’t quite as gimmicky as it might sound. For one thing, they let you direct the light. Combined, they all make the full light cone that you see when all are illuminated, but each of their beams points in a different direction and, with only one or two of the LEDs lit, can be used as a spotlight of sorts. I could see turning off most of the lights at night but keeping specific beams shining on doorways and windows. I’d even be tempted to try to use it indoors to highlight some of the large pieces of artwork I have in my basement, although that would be tricky to pull off well.
Ignoring the triple LED thing, Govee’s Lights Prism makes for good ground illumination, at least from eight feet up on my garage’s soffits. Whether the same would be true if I’d mounted them beneath my second-story roofline, I cannot say.
The big thing that I imagine will keep most people away from these lights is the price: starting at $540 for a 100-foot kit, they are expensive. Sure, it would cost potentially thousands of dollars for a fully integrated soffit lighting setup if you factor in professional installation, but you can get similar lights to these for less. Even Govee’s own Permanent Outdoor Lights Pro, which use single LED lamps, are $100 cheaper for the same length of lighting.
The trouble is that Govee’s lights feel cheaply made and that leaves me with questions about their longevity. If I wanted something that feels cheap, there are a lot of options that actually are. And if I wanted to spend more money, I don’t think I’d be tempted enough by the triple LEDs of Govee’s lights not to just get the cheaper Festavia Permanent Outdoor String Lights from Philips Hue, a company generally known for its high-quality and long-lasting products. After all, even the Hue bulbs I bought nearly a decade ago work as well now as the day I bought them.
Govee’s known for its fancy lighting effects, and the Lights Prism is no slouch here. The Govee app is fat with options for different looping effects—you can go with premade ones, roll your own looping effects and light gradient combinations, choose from effects made by other Govee users, and more.
Unsurprisingly, you can also ask AI to make mediocre effects. For instance, when I asked the lights to mimic forest lighting, the app created an effect that made light slowly creep across the string, to mimic daylight cracking through the leaves in an overhead canopy. It was okay, but lacked the sort of simulated random swaying of trees I might have tried to build in.
I found other effects a lot more compelling. The plethora of premade ones fit into categories like “Festival,” “Soothing,” or “Universe.” They might be as simple as a gentle pulsing light or be more complex, with the individual LEDs of the lamps winking and flashing. There are also some licensed effects, like for Zootopia 2, but you’d need Govee’s net-style lighting to actually get any benefit from them.
I especially liked the music synchronization effects, probably because at my core, I’m just a simple ape who wants to be entertained. Govee’s effects really shine with the three-light lamps as they allow for more detailed gradients, or for the individual lights of each lamp to flash on and off in a more lively display than you might get with single light sources. It’s cheesy, all of it.
Of course, neither of the ways Govee makes this work—using the microphone on the lights themselves to pick up cues from external music or using your smartphone—is good enough to be more than cheap entertainment. The onboard mic is more precise but susceptible to other noises screwing it up, while syncing using your smartphone’s microphone introduces so much latency the effect might as well be totally random.
I could see using the music effects for a backyard karaoke party or something. But I would never subject my neighbors to what amounts to a Temu version of those Christmas light shows that go viral every year when some stage lighting professional goes hog wild with Disney soundtracks or whatever.
Matter matters, but you still need the Govee app
The best thing Govee has going for it these days is that, since 2023, this company has gone hard on supporting Matter. That’s great for a couple of reasons. One is that any Matter-compliant smart light you buy from Govee will work with any smart home platform you use, assuming you haven’t found some obscure, non-Matter-supporting one.
Also, Matter-certified devices are required to function even when your internet goes down. So, if you’re savvy enough to have the Lights Prism on your local network but closed off to the broader internet, they’re still controllable.
All that said, you won’t be able to ditch the Govee app if you want to do anything more complicated than turning the lights on and off or setting the whole string’s brightness or color at once. Matter just doesn’t support that granularity, and none of the major smart home platforms has any sort of easy, built-in support for lighting effects.
The Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism is a very slick alternative to more invasive, integrated installations that would require professionals to cut holes in your soffit and install lights that they then wire up directly to your home. And with three LEDs per lamp, it makes for much more detailed lighting effects than just about any of the other permanent string lights on the market right now.
The trouble with it all is price. Sure, the Lights Prism is cheaper than those professional installations I just mentioned, but the physical product just doesn’t feel like it’s worth its at-least-$540 price. That’s hard to get over, especially when Philips Hue has a cheaper version of this concept, minus the triple-LED gimmick. It’s wild to see Philips Hue lights outprice anything even remotely similar, but there it is.
Still, the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism are very neat, they work with all major smart home platforms, and I wouldn’t be sad if I owned them. So it’s a good thing that Govee never keeps its products at their street price for long, especially around the holiday season, when prices plummet as everyone competes for your gift-giving dollars. If you’re in the market for fancy outdoor smart lights and you see a really good deal on the Lights Prism—I mean cheaper-than-Hue good—go for it.
There comes a point in every consumer tech writer’s career where they have to lie down on the railroad tracks and take the heat for a tech category nobody else believes in. For me, it’s stereoscopic, glasses-less 3D screens. So when I agreed to test the Abxylute 3D One, a tablet-sized handheld PC, it only made my lust for stereoscopic screens grow ever more heated.
The 3D One is a kitchen sink handheld that throws so much stuff at the wall that something is bound to stick. Sure, it’s big and heavy—especially at 2.45 pounds with the controllers attached—but it also houses a huge screen, removable gamepads akin to the Switch 2, a keyboard that attaches to the bottom like a Microsoft Surface Pro 12, and the horsepower of an Intel mobile chip used in the solid MSI Claw 8 handheld. It misses out on anything resembling good battery life for its size, despite its good performance. Beyond all else, the 3D One fails to deliver on its main promise. Based on my tests with a pre-production unit Abxylute sent me for review, you can get a 3D effect in all your games, but they weren’t playable by any stretch of the imagination.
Abxylute 3D One
The Abxylute a handheld built for people with big hands who want the largest screen possible. At the same time, the promised 3D effect can’t live up to the hype.
Comfortable feel despite size
Nice 11-inch display even without 3D
Detachable keyboard and controllers
Shaq finally has his perfect handheld
3D effect tanks performance
Extremely poor battery life
Limited menu options
One of the least portable handhelds around
Could the 3D One ever be my one handheld I take everywhere? Of course not. Look at the size of that thing. In its plus-sized case, it would take up most of the room in my backpack, whereas a laptop and a controller would eat half that space. The “handheld” is up on Kickstarter now for an early-bird price of $1,500, but it will sell for more later. This is very cool tech, even if it’s expensive. For mostly selfish reasons, I’m hoping some updates will see the 3D One pick up steam. I don’t want the dream of 3D screens to die.
Handheld PCs keep getting bigger, not necessarily better
I first spied the 3D One at CES 2025 on a forlorn shelf within Intel’s demo room. Back then, Intel only described it as an effort with Chinese games publisher Tencent on a 3D handheld. The 3D One sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V “Lunar Lake” CPU, which has proved a strong contender even with the most recent AMD handheld APUs (accelerated processing units). The Lunar Lake chip inside the 3D One offers just enough juice to game at the device’s max resolution in some titles.
I’m not a huge person. I rarely hold tech that makes me feel small. While other people think near-9-inch gaming handhelds like the Lenovo Legion Go 2 are too mammoth for their miniature digits, you don’t know what a big handheld feels like until you get to grips with the Abxylute 3D One. It includes an 11-inch IPS LCD display that runs at 2,560 x 1,600 resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate, which is equivalent to many 14- or even 16-inch laptop screens. For comparison, the Legion Go 2 can go to 1200p, while most 7-inch devices like the $1,000 Asus ROG Xbox Ally X max out at 1080p and 120Hz refresh rate.
The display is decent for a handheld of this size, though it may not be as bright as other LCD screens at its peak of 480 nits. The display is also a little too reflective for playing underneath any bright lights, but games end up seeming extra beautiful when pushed to the system’s max resolution, even ignoring the 3D effect. Audio-wise, there’s not much here to set it apart from any other handheld, big or small. Even when pushing the volume to its limit, it won’t fill a room with sound.
The case also comes with a controller attachment point for the two Legion Go-like removable controllers. I could play from a comfortable sitting position even when I didn’t want to prop the device up with my arms on my lap. You just have to hunker close to the 3D One to use it, or else hook it up to a monitor. Despite the size of the two removable controllers, I found the face buttons to be clicky and responsive. I didn’t have to reposition my hand that much to inch a finger around for the bumpers and triggers. The back ridges aren’t ergonomic enough to feel form-fitted for my hand. Otherwise, I could still use them as separate controllers or alongside the screen. There are also two touchpads, one on each controller, though only the right one seems to offer any mouse controls.
The keyboard does a lot of the heavy lifting to make Windows 11 usable on a device that would normally have to rely on the touchscreen or trackpads to get anything done. The keys on the device feel particularly nice and hit with a small though satisfying clacking sound. The keyboard’s touchpad is not my cup of tea and feels too rough and sticky despite its minuscule size. Hell, you could treat this as an overlarge, somewhat janky laptop. I did get some work done on the 3D One while on vacation. Was it worth the hassle of dragging it around? Probably not.
While I could feel safe in my efforts to use the 3D One like any other gaming handheld—albeit one that adds more muscle on my shoulders holding it aloft—my desperate attempts to turn it into a modern Nintendo 3DS went awry.
Abxylute told me it went with such a large display because, in their tests, this is the screen size needed to show off the 3D effect properly. The 3D One isn’t offering customers what many think of when they hear the word “3D screen.” You won’t see images pop out at you like an annoying jack-in-the-box at a horror-themed carnival. Instead, the screens are essentially showing an offset image to your left and right eyes individually. Your brain combines them into a singular image with the effect that makes some elements on the screen pop. Cool, right? Well, it gets even more interesting. The 3D One uses the built-in front-facing camera to track your eyes. Even if you’re off-center, you should still be able to see the 3D image. It’s the same type of technology employed by the Samsung Odyssey 3D I tested earlier this year. That display was capable of 4K resolution with 165Hz, though it required a beefy computer to run games with the 3D effect.
This screen works for the most part, but if you swim too fast in and out of view, the handheld’s eye tracking will struggle to keep up. You need to maintain position when playing with the 3D effect, though you’re punished less for shifting around. A single switch near the top of the device (you can also enable it through the system’s quick menu) lets you swap between 2D and 3D modes. There are certain games that Abxylute says support the stereoscopic screen natively. Otherwise, the handheld will employ an “AI 3D Mode” that takes an image in 2D and transforms it into 3D. The company said it hopes to eventually support more than 50 games with native 3D rendering through Steam.
In my tests, the 3D effect immediately made games run sluggishly, to the point they were practically unplayable. After days of going back and forth with Abxylute, the company told me I need to play games at specific settings, without V-Sync and AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling, and at the max resolution to get the full 3D effect. These restrictions already hamper performance, but the 3D effect doesn’t seem to be impacting frame rates specifically. In supported games like Baldur’s Gate III, the frame rate would remain above 30 despite it feeling like it was running at 15. This could be due to latency or some other factor from the system essentially duplicating the screen for the sake of your eyeballs.
Performance was a consistent issue when trying it out with games like Hogwarts Legacy with native 3D support. Abxylute suggested I try a much less intensive game, Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy. That game runs much better on a handheld, and yet I experienced similar lag issues that forced me to turn off the 3D every time. Even when I dropped the graphics settings as low as they would go, lighter games struggled to perform. I also tried numerous games supported with a special 2D to 3D mod. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Injustice 2 both became completely unplayable with the 2D to 3D effect.
If I wasn’t just interested in playing modern titles with 3D effects, what else is there? I put on Netflix to watch a few shows with the 3D effect on, and through streaming, I found there was very little lag. Animated shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender may add a small, though noticeable, effect to pop out images in the foreground, though it can make other shots look more blurry than they should be. You won’t get much of an effect in other media, however.
There are a few other 3D systems out there not made by Abxylute. Unfortunately, Samsung’s Reality Hub software created for the Odyssey 3D monitor isn’t compatible with anything but a Samsung device. Russ Crandall from the Retro Game Corps YouTube channel described using the ReShade plugin to enable a native stereoscopic effect in unsupported games. You need to force it to install on specific games and adjust other game settings to create the double image needed for the 3D effect. I tried forcing this on games like Metaphor: Refantazio and Hades II. Unfortunately, the result still generated too much input lag to be playable.
Emulators for the Nintendo 3DS, like Azahar, also support a 3D effect for use in games. Crandall reported in his video that 3DS emulation is especially good on the 3D One, so score one point for Abxylute. Although, spending upwards of $1,500 on a handheld seems extreme when you can simply buy an old 3DS and original game cards for much less.
Like the MSI Claw 8, the Intel chip housed inside can match up to and even beat the latest AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip found in handhelds like the Xbox Ally X—at least in some 3DMark benchmarks. That, combined with the extra-large screen buoyed with bountiful resolution options, means you can get a surprising number of recent titles to run well.
The Intel chip makes use of the company’s Arc 140V GPU, which is a strong contender more than a year after the chip was first announced. When testing the 3D One at its highest 30W TDP, or thermal design power, the handheld beat the Xbox Ally X in 3D Mark’s Steel Nomad test by around 100 points and in the Time Spy test by 200 points. The 3D One performed slightly under par in the Steel Nomad Light tests. In Cyberpunk 2077, it would hit around 45 fps with Steam Deck graphics settings at 1080p, whereas the Xbox Ally X could do 52 fps at 35W TDP. That’s not a big gulf considering AMD’s latest handheld chips squeaked into position at the tail end of this year.
When testing out our usual stack of benchmarking games, I found I could achieve playable frame rates at the max 2,560 x 1,600 without much fuss, so long as I limited graphics settings and relied on AMD’s FSR upscaling to push the needle a few more points in the right direction. That was the case with Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam Deck settings and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Medium.
In the careful balancing act between resolution and performance, you may eventually need to adjust down. For example, if I wanted to get a playable frame rate in Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered at Very High settings, I needed to drop the resolution down to 1080p.
The tradeoff with any larger screen is that you will notice when the graphics don’t look quite as good as soon as you drop your graphics settings. A smaller display does a lot to reduce any obvious graphical blemishes or muddy textures. That’s why Abxylute’s mandate for max resolution for native 3D games hurts all the more. You want those beautiful foreground colors to pop, and while the screen is good enough for it, the chip may not have enough power to showcase the best textures in Trine 5, even when they’re leaping off the screen.
The other issue is battery life. This 3D One has a measly 50Wh battery, which is far less than the Xbox Ally X’s 80Wh. In most AAA games set at max resolution, I could barely squeak out more than an hour of game time. Less demanding titles would do a little better, closer to two hours.
The 3D One is usable, so long as you transform your gamer lifestyle to fit Abxylute’s design. If you had the heart for it, you could turn this into a laptop, though with a terrible trackpad and a battery life that won’t meet your expectations. The concept behind this device is brilliant. Based on my tests, it just doesn’t have the power necessary to meet those expectations.
Is it worth $1,500 at minimum? Well, it’s a Kickstarter, so that opening price won’t stick around for long. Gaming handhelds are already way too expensive, but there may be somebody out there who imagines they need something this large in their life, and that they want a screen that is similarly larger than life.
At least, we finally found the perfect handheld for people with Shaq-sized hands.
I’ve been onboard the wireless charging train for nearly a decade, and still remember being excited to finally have a device I could try it with when I bought my iPhone 8 in 2017. Wireless charging felt like magic,despite the fact that it was slow and unreliable, that it wasn’t all that unusual to pick up your phone to find it was both way too hot and hadn’t charged at all. We’ve come a long, long way since then.
The most recent innovation is Qi2.2, the latest version of the Wireless Charging Consortium’s MagSafe-based standard that requires chargers to feature a magnetic ring and be capable of outputting up to 25 watts of power to Qi2.2-compatible phones. That’s really good for wireless charging, although without some additional cooling, you can’t expect it to hit that rate for very long, if at all.
Enter the new Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station, one of the first Qi2.2 chargers on the market—and priced like it’s the only one, at $230. At first glance, it’s no different than any other 3-in-1 stand that you can hang iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods on for simultaneous charging. Yet there’s more to it than that: it’s got a cooling fan to keep your phone from throttling the charging rate. It also has a touchscreen, so you can check the charging power going to each device. You can also see that same info in an app that lets you tweak settings, set the time (its timeout screen shows a clock), and even update its firmware.
Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station (3-in-1, MagGo, AirCool, Dock Stand)
Anker’s 3-in-1 Prime Wireless Charging Station great multipurpose wireless charger held back by an obscene price.
Very fast wireless charging
Cooling fan keeps your phone chilly
Useful integrated display
Tilting Magnetic charger
Solidly built
Onscreen clock loses time easily
Too expensive
That’s all a lot, but the good news is that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station works well, especially when it comes to its big banner feature of fast wireless charging for your smartphone. I confirmed with my partner’s iPhone 16 that this charger can get up to 22.5W, as Apple says it and others in the 16 line can. And my own iPhone 15 Pro, which isn’t explicitly capable of that, still reached about 17W and held it for long-ish stretches. That’s all according to the stand’s own display; there’s not a good way to check it, otherwise. But the end result was a phone that could fully charge nearly as fast as when I charged with USB-C, yet was still cool—and sometimes cold—to the touch when I pulled it off the charging pad.
These sorts of charging stands—the kind with two stalks, one for a phone and one for an Apple Watch and a wireless charging pad for AirPods—aren’t usually pretty, but Anker sure tried! It’s sturdy and weighty, and the company used soft touch materials for the base and magnetic pad for iPhone charging. Its stalks are encased in shiny, reflective metal, the base has nicely grippy feet, and its display seems to sit beneath glass.
The phone pad is thick to accommodate the cooling fan and sports vents at the top and bottom to eject hot air through, and you can tilt it up and down for better viewing. The Apple Watch charger, like the AirPods pad, charges at up to 5 watts. Powering this apparatus are a braided USB-C cable and a 65W Anker USB-C wall adapter.
I am a sucker for screens on devices that don’t usually have them, even when they’re extraneous; thankfully, the one on the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station is anything but. Besides offering key info about the charging wattage of each device sitting on it, you can also cycle through a few options to set things like the charging mode, the time and date, and screen brightness. The clock function is a little under-baked; it doesn’t account for daylight savings time in the U.S. (which happened to start while I was testing it), and if you unplug the device and plug it back in, it loses the time completely. You know, like a stove clock. Thankfully, all you have to do is connect to the charger via the Anker app and the time corrects itself. As for the display, it was barely visible under the bright fluorescents of IFA 2025, where I first saw it, but, thankfully, it’s perfectly visible in normal indoor lighting conditions.
As for those charging modes, they are Ice Mode, which sets the phone charging pad’s cooling fan to full blast; Boost Mode, which is a balanced charging mode in which the fan doesn’t run as high; and Sleep Mode, which turns the fan off and is probably best if you use the charger at your bedside. It’s nice to have the choice, but also, the fan is already so quiet even in Ice Mode that I didn’t bother changing it after testing the various options.
It’s my firmly held belief that the screen is good enough that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station never needed an app at all, but the Anker app connects to it, so we might as well talk about it. When using the app, you’ll connect to the charger via Bluetooth, giving you a screen that shows you a picture of the Prime Charging Station, current output wattage, voltage, and amperage, and a “Real-Time Data” line graph. Tap on that, and you can see a few hours’ worth of charging history for each of the charging points.
It’s great that Anker has decided to come out of the gate swinging with its first Qi2.2 charging station. The Prime Wireless Charging Station is inarguably nice and certainly worth more than your average no-name Amazon charger. And the company seems like it’s really trying to justify the price with the features that this thing comes with. I really like this charging stand and don’t mind calling it one of the best 3-in-1 charging stands you can buy today.
The thing that Anker has to contend with here is that the vast bulk of its value is derived from the raw convenience of its tree-style form factor, not from its fast charging, its cooling fan, its touchscreen display, or any of the other niceties. It’s just too convenient to have one easy place to plop an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods case at the end of the day, and the bar to improve on that is a lot higher than I think any of Anker’s extra features reach. I just can’t see myself paying $230 for this.
Anker seems to know that’s perhaps too much, and has already discounted the charger to $150 (as of this writing) within less than two months of it being announced. But that’s still more than what competing 3-in-1 Qi2.2 chargers cost; see Belkin and its own cooling fan-equipped Qi2.2 charging stand for $130, or Kuxiu, with its tri-fold Qi2.2 travel charger that’s fanless and much more vulnerable to thermal throttling in my testing, but also only costs $100. I think you’d have to be a real Anker super fan to buy the Prime Wireless Charging Station for full price or anywhere close to it. Still, it’s a great device, and it’s totally worth checking its price during Black Friday.
It also came with two sticks of Kingston Fury 16-GB RAM and a Wi-Fi 7 card. All that for $1,550 is a really solid deal. There are cheaper ways to get RTX 5070-level performance, such as this iBuyPower system, but the Alienware Aurora is also far from the most expensive either. The Asus ROG G700, for example, is hundreds of dollars more, even when similarly configured. I haven’t tested these yet myself, so I don’t know how equivalent the performance or fan noise is. But the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop is a great deal, especially if you catch it on sale.
The Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop performs fine enough. It’s about 5 percent behind the typical RTX 5070 scores in 3DMark Steel Nomad, a standard benchmark for measuring gaming PCs. The RTX 5070 is considered primarily a 1080p video card that can occasionally jump up to 1440p, depending on the game. You can see the frame rates in the chart below, all of which were tested at max settings without ray tracing, frame generation, or upscaling. Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong are both more GPU-intensive, while Marvel Rivals and Monster Hunter Wilds are more bottlenecked by the CPU.
The performance in Cyberpunk 2077, in particular, felt impressive. I was even able to average 71 fps (frames per second) in the Ray Tracing Ultra preset in 1080p without relying on DLSS. It’s really too bad that it couldn’t get Black Myth: Wukong over 60 fps at 1080p, though. It’s a heavy game, but when you spend over $1,500, you hope that you can play modern games at 1080p at smooth frame rates. You can always drop the graphics preset in the game settings or sprinkle in some light DLSS upscaling for better performance. It was also around 5 percent behind our testing of the RTX 5070 Founders Edition on our test bench.
While performance didn’t blow me away, I was overall impressed by what’s on offer with the Alienware Aurora Gaming Desktop. This isn’t the PC to buy if you want ultimate control over upgrades in the future or even the most powerful gaming desktop. But if you want a pretty computer that you can upgrade the graphics for in the future, it does the job—just make sure to get it with the 1,000-watt power supply.
The UltraFine 6K is also a Nano IPS Black display, which is something the Asus model is not. Nano IPS Black is actually a combination of two technologies that improve the image quality of IPS in different ways. Nano IPS enhances color coverage, while IPS Black cranks up the contrast. The combination of the two is pretty spectacular, especially on a monitor this sharp. It covers sRGB and AdobeRGB at a full 100 percent, something I’ve never seen on an IPS monitor before. The color accuracy is also incredibly strong. Right out of the box, I measured the average color error at a Delta-E of 0.62. Anything under 1.0 is considered excellent, even for professional color graders. No further calibration needed here.
In terms of brightness, my review unit topped out at 480 nits in standard dynamic range (SDR), which is quite bright. The screen has an anti-reflective, matte coating that deters glare and reflections without dimming the screen too much. This is probably going to bother some people coming from a glossy, older LG 5K display. Although I’d also prefer a glossy display, LG’s solution is subtle enough. And while this is certainly not a proper HDR monitor in that it uses a conventional LED IPS panel, I was able to measure 640 nits of peak brightness in HDR. That’s far from what OLED or mini-LED can do. Remember: The HDR effect is created by higher brightness and contrast. That’s what makes OLED displays attractive. The UltraFine Evo 6K has a 2,000:1 contrast ratio, but I only got 1,720:1 in my testing. That’s still better than the average, though, as monitors like the Dell UltraSharp 32 4K use an enhanced IPS Black in order to push the contrast closer to 3,000:1.
The refresh rate is the one big problem with the UltraFine Evo 6K’s picture. It’s only 60 Hz. It doesn’t matter how sharp, vibrant, and color-accurate your image is if the motion feels stiff. Even fairly affordable monitors like my favorite, the Dell 27 Plus 4K ($300), have a 120-Hz refresh rate. That’s likely not the fault of LG, as Asus’ 6K monitor is also stuck at 60 Hz—but it’s a current limitation of the resolution on offer. I have no doubt that future 6K monitors will come out with a 120-Hz refresh rate, but as of now, that’s a trade-off you’ll be making for the extra pixels.
Pricey Proposition
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The LG UltraFine Evo 6K costs $2,000. While that’s not as much as Apple’s ridiculous Pro Display XDR, it also lacks the HDR capabilities that make that monitor special. The price feels especially egregious when you consider how cheap OLED monitors are getting. Dell’s first nongaming OLED, the Dell 32 Plus QD-OLED, is only $850 and is often on sale for under $700. It’s only 4K, but it’s better for both watching and producing HDR content.
Lastly, if you’re set on 6K, there’s also the Asus ProArt PA32QCV to consider. I haven’t tested it yet, but it’s $600 cheaper than LG’s model, despite using the same 6K panel. What does that extra $700 buy you? A flashier design, for one, but also more up-to-date ports. Although I like where Asus has placed its ports better than LG, it uses old specs such as Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 1.4. The biggest difference is the lack of Nano IPS Black, which means it likely doesn’t have the color performance and contrast of the LG model. These differences aren’t insignificant, but are they worth $700? That’s tough to say, especially since they are otherwise the identical panel. I can’t say for sure until I’ve tested Asus’ model, but on the surface, the LG UltraFine 6K does feel a little overpriced by comparison.
On the other hand, if you’re already dropping this much cash on a 6K monitor, image quality is paramount, and the inclusion of Nano IPS Black makes the LG UltraFine 6K a better alternative to OLED or the Pro Display XDR.
Space is the right environment for a TV with this level of staggering contrast, and it’s not just the dramatic moments, but also the more subtly lit scenes that stand out. Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is full of searing highlights and colorful bursts of space glow, but moments like the crisp sunrise on the Guardians’ plumb-brown shirts or the dark corridors of their small ship were just as impressive thanks to the Z95B’s masterful color gradients and shadow detail.
That meticulous touch comes through in everything you watch, including plain old HD sitcoms like The Office, where I found myself oddly enamored with moments like the auburn highlights of Jim’s hair or the gleam of Andy’s tie. This may not be the reason you buy a premium TV, but it’s lovely to find joy in the little things. Skin tones look almost touchably natural and clean, enhanced by the TV’s knockout image processing, and even lower-quality video looks good with its improved upscaling.
That’s not to say you won’t find plenty of bombast here; the Z95B gets as bright as anyone should need when properly tasked. Playing Mad Max: Fury Road on 4K HDR Blu-ray with the Panasonic DP-UB9000 elicited the perfect dichotomy between the dull desert backdrop and the catastrophic lightning storm. The storm’s jagged bolts split the sky with precision, erupting with blistering shocks of orange and white, right down to that sputtering white-hot flare.
Part of the Z95B’s potency comes from its excellent glare reduction. Like the LG G5, it’s able to reduce everything but direct reflections while preserving its obsidian backdrop for a more dramatic contrast in brighter rooms than Sony’s rival Bravia 8 II QD-OLED. I think the Bravia beats both TVs for image clarity, but it’s close. Only Samsung’s similar S95F offers a more potent way to kill the glare while still preserving contrast.
The Z95B and G5 are unsurprisingly similar, given that they share the same panel. The Z95B feels slightly more natural in its color and lighting, and a bit better for off-axis viewing, but that may be recency bias. I’d need to see them back-to-back to point to any real differences. Some extra color banding in Dolby Vision streaming content and a bit of image stuttering are the only noticeable flaws I saw in the Z95B over two weeks. (Note: I reviewed the G5 after LG addressed initial complaints of HDR color banding.)
All four premium OLEDs provide knockout performance, each with its own specialty. I’m partial to the G5 and Z95B over the Samsung and Sony for their balance of fiery brightness with jet-black backdrops—and the G5 has an edge with its four HDMI 2.1 ports and better smarts. The Z95B is hard to deny, though. If you’re after an all-in-one screen that elevates everything to showcase levels, this is the TV to take home.
Google is betting that AI can justify the high price of its smart home security camera subscriptions. The idea is that with AI, your notifications would read more like a human looked outside and told you what they saw. And instead of you scrolling through endless video footage to see what happened, AI can summarize the day for you. Sounds good, right? Sounds great to me.
If you already read my Nest Cam Outdoor (wired, 2nd gen) review, you’ll know the reality, as I experienced it, is underwhelming. Notifications, generated by Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, constantly misidentified my pets and gave weird and wrong descriptions of events taking place in triggered recordings. Daily summaries of my family’s comings and goings made it sound like my house was being mobbed with people and animals. None of it helped justify the pricey cloud storage service that the Google Home Premium (formerly Nest Aware) subscriptions otherwise are. And without those subscriptions, the Nest Cam Outdoor just doesn’t do enough to make it worth buying over some of the more capable, less cloud-reliant alternatives out there.
Does the Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) fare any better? Well, the AI features are still broken the same way, but it may still be a better purchase, depending on how deep your roots are within the walled garden of the Google Home ecosystem. If you’re not a big Google Home user, though, it’s best to look elsewhere.
Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen)
Janky AI summaries and spendy subscription aside, the Nest Doorbell is good enough if you’re deep in the Google Home ecosystem.
Clear, wide field of view
Nice integration with Google Home speakers and displays
Attractive design
Quick notifications
Inconsistent AI notifications
AI summaries are useless
Expensive hardware and subscriptions
No local storage
The Nest Doorbell might be the nicest-looking video doorbell on the market. Its slender, bar-shaped housing is rounded on both ends, curving tightly around the camera and the LED ring-lit doorbell button. The whole thing has the same gentle, pleasingly symmetrical vibe that characterizes the other Google Nest cameras. It’s a lot nicer to look at than chunky, blocky video doorbells from the likes of Ring or Eufy.
Beyond the pretty design, Google’s third-gen wired doorbell has solid specs like a 2K resolution camera sensor with a generous 166-degree diagonal field of view that spreads out over a square aspect ratio. It captures HDR video at 30 frames per second; clips come in vibrant color during the day and, using infrared LEDs, black and white at night. The Nest Doorbell also has a microphone and speaker that enables two-way audio. Connectivity-wise, the camera uses both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy. Thanks to that fast Wi-Fi and its always-on nature, its live feed loads almost instantly in the Google Home app.
Installation is straightforward, assuming you’ve got the requisite doorbell wiring by your door. The Nest Doorbell comes with a mounting plate and a second angled adapter that you can use if you want to have the camera pointing more toward people at your door. Google includes wire extenders if you need them, and the Google Home app, which you use for setup, guides you through installation.
It’s easy to connect the Nest Doorbell to the Google Home app—the only place you’ll ever use it, since this is exclusively a Google Home-compatible product—but a word of advice: Setup requires a QR code included in the box. Lose it and you’ll have to undo all of your physical installation work to get at the same QR code on the back of the doorbell itself.
Once set up, it works like most other video doorbells. You’ll get notifications when someone presses its button, or when the Nest Doorbell detects the sorts of objects—people, pets, and vehicles—you’ve set it to notify you about. Unfortunately, you’ll need a subscription if you want those notifications to feature a zoomed-in preview of whatever triggered the recording, as well as for package detection. Seems stingy, but I guess thumbnail images and machine-learning cardboard box recognition don’t grow on trees?
Despite those omissions, Google is more generous with free features for the Nest Doorbell than the Nest Cam Outdoor. It works with existing mechanical and digital chimes, for instance, and if you don’t have a functioning chime (like me) then you’ve also got the option to use Google’s smart speakers or displays. They can be configured to announce when someone has rang your doorbell and—in the case of the Google Nest Hub or Hub Max—start streaming the camera’s live feed. Through the display you can also chat with the person who rang your doorbell or, if you’re not into chatting, pick an automated response such as one telling a delivery person to leave the payload there.
In testing, my second-generation Nest Hub was fairly quick to announce that someone had pressed the button, and chatting back and forth with them was easy enough. The only problem was that I had to deal with the Nest Hub itself, which has an interface that’s absolutely sluggish in 2025. Still, it’s a cool integration. Now, if only I could get it to do this on the Google TV-equipped OLED TV in my basement.
And that’s it for the Nest Doorbell, sans subscription. There’s no local recording, although Google did bump the amount of time it’ll keep a recorded event on its servers from a scant three hours in the previous Nest Doorbell to a still-meager six hours. Either way, it’s paltry compared to the free local storage offered for video doorbells from the likes of Eufy, Reolink, Blink, and Aqara.
If you want more out of the Nest Doorbell, you’ll have to pay for a $10 or $20 per month Google Home Premium subscription. That’ll give you more cloud video storage history—to the tune of 30 days or 60 days, respectively, with the latter also adding 10 days of 24/7 recording that you can search using Gemini.
The lower Standard tier also gets you facial recognition, package detection, and alerts if one of your Google Home devices hears glass breaking or smoke alarms. Those features, as well as local storage, are all things the Reolink Elite I recently reviewed offers for free. In fact, the only thing this subscription nets you that you can’t get with a lot of other cameras is a feature called “Help me create,” which lets you create automations by describing them in a text box in the Google Home app. It worked well for creating simple automations, although one thing that bothers me is that if you ask it to do something that Google Home’s automations aren’t capable of, Gemini won’t tell you that. It’ll just deliver a non-functioning automation.
Eventually, the Standard plan will also include a wide rollout of Gemini to smart speakers. That includes features like Gemini Live, Google’s LLM-powered assistant’s back-and-forth voice chatting feature. As of this review, it’s best to hold off on the subscription if you want access to Gemini on your speakers, as that’s only available to some in early access.
You have to subscribe to the $20/month Google Home Premium Advanced plan to get the headlining AI camera features like daily summaries and AI-created notifications for events. You can read a lot more about my issues with these features over in my review of the Nest Cam Outdoor, but to summarize: Google’s AI system has a tendency to misinterpret what’s happening in front of it, confidently misidentifies animals, and its summaries often describe a person coming and going in a way that makes it seem like I’m having a house party every day.
That said, the system seems more accurate in the context of a video doorbell, perhaps because the camera is closer to the ground and can see what’s in front of it more clearly. Or maybe it’s just because what happens in front of my house is a lot more routine than in the backyard—it’s not trying to make sense of dogs going in and out or people doing yardwork or taking out the trash. Gemini still called my cat a dog sometimes, but it accurately called out when most packages were delivered and even noted that one was from Amazon.
These features are slick when they work, and—again—like I said in my Nest Cam Outdoor review, they’re a clear technological leap forward for home security cameras. But Google’s AI descriptions are still wrong often enough that it’s like paying $20 a month to beta test, and that just doesn’t feel good to me. Heck, even when they aren’t flat wrong, they’re not much more useful than the generic, non-AI descriptors of “Person,” “Person with Package,” or “Activity or animal” of the subscription-free experience. Also, AI video search might be very cool, but as the Reolink Elite shows, you can get similar AI search from an on-device AI model. Like with local video storage, it feels like Google could make a camera with on-device AI search for free, and just didn’t do it because, well, more money via subscriptions is better than less money without them.
The Google Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen) serves a pretty specific niche—people heavily invested in the Google Home ecosystem—very well. If you have a home full of Google Nest speakers and smart displays and you love using Google Gemini for things, you’ll probably like the Nest Doorbell. And if you’re already paying for a spendy Google Home Premium plan and don’t have a Nest Doorbell or you’ve only got the first-generation model, it’s a no-brainer.
But for anyone else, the Nest Doorbell isn’t meaningfully useful on its own, and the Google Home Premium subscription is a raw deal at a time when your weary dollar won’t go as far as it used to. It’s hard to feel good about paying $20 a month for useless AI summaries, or for AI-written notifications that can be slightly more helpful than generic “person spotted” alerts when I’m canceling streaming services to save money. I’d much rather buy one of the many cheaper alternative video doorbells that offer local video storage and reactivate my Netflix account for a couple more months with the money I saved.
Phone, card holder, keys: The items you’ll never catch me leaving the house without…those and a healthy amount of Charlotte Tilbury’s Magic Cream all over my face, of course.
I have acne-prone skin, but I’m also simultaneously combination-to-dry – an odd mix, I’m aware. That means however, when I do find a moisturiser that works for me, it becomes my holy grail, and that’s exactly how I feel about Magic Cream.
I’ve been wearing it daily for the past seven years now, ever since I stepped into the fashion industry really, and I think it might be my desert island item.
SKIP TO & FAQs:
Magic Cream review, at a glance…
How I tested:
My skin type: Combination-dry and hormonal acne-prone.
I’ve been ‘testing’ Charlotte Tilbury’s Magic Cream for almost a decade now – which is more than enough time to give a fair verdict I reckon. I’ve worn it on makeup-free days while working from home and running errands as well as beneath full-glam looks while attending events/weddings/date nights. I’ve also tried it alongside the rest of my skincare routine (read: after a cleanser and toner, and before or sometimes after facial serums), to see if it pilled or reacted in a different way each time.
Before and after pics:
Charlotte’s Magic Cream 50ml
Why you can trust me:
While my area of expertise mainly lies in fashion, being a senior shopping writer means I also know a thing or two about beauty (see here for my Light Salon Boost review – one of the best LED face masks on the market – for proof). I have to say I’m fairly fussy when it comes to skincare, unless I see immediate results I lose interest and am unlikely to re-purchase, so when I do ramp and rave about something you can rest assured it’s because it’s a mainstay in my beauty bag.
About Charlotte Tilbury
Hopefully by now Charlotte Tilbury needs little to no introduction – even if you’ve been living under a rock. One of the leading brands in the global beauty and makeup sphere, it’s a name you’ll hear (and see) on the lips of celebrities like Kate Moss, J-Lo, Amal Clooney and – the most recent face of the brand – Celine Dion.
Founded in 2013, it’s most celebrated for its Pillow Talk collection and Magic Cream. The invention of the latter all came about when Charlotte herself was a backstage makeup artist. She was renowned for using her own secret concoction on model and A-lister’s faces to instantly revive their dull, dry and tired skin.
“I created my iconic Magic Cream to prime skin too, so that makeup glides on flawlessly, looks more beautiful and lasts longer – I never do makeup without it!” She says. Neither do I, Charlotte.
The formula:
Charlotte’s Magic Cream 50ml
As a fairly thick emollient, Charlotte Tilbury’s Magic Cream is ideal for those with dry skin like myself. That said, if you’re on the oilier side (or have sensitive skin to fragrances) you might be better off trying the Magic Water Cream or steering clear entirely. It’s not for everyone, but those that love it will struggle to find anything better. Trust me, I’ve tried.
What’s in Magic Cream? The ingredients…
Hyaluronic acid: A humectant produced naturally by our body that can hold up to a thousand times its weight in water (AKA, great for hydration).
Rosehip oil: Rich in vitamin F for a cushioning effect.
Oat extract: Contains loads of alpha-glucans.
Frangipani flower extract: Gives that delicate scent Magic Cream is renowned for.
Vitamin C: Brightens complexion.
Vitamin E: Evens skintone.
Peptide complex: Plumps.
Aloe vera: Calms.
Camellia oil: Provides that dewy finish.
Shea butter: Nourishes and softens.
My experience & final verdict:
The blend of antioxidant-rich Rosehip oil and oat extract softens and smooths the feel of my skin and lifts the look of my facial contours which, in turn, is what creates that perfect base for foundation, bronzer, blush etc to sit atop. I will say I’ve found I’m better to apply it at least 10 minutes before, though, as it can pill if I don’t let it soak in properly – especially if I use anything water-based on top.
The device has no moving parts, with just a 3.5-inch touchscreen that covers its face and a few buttons on each side. These include power and volume buttons, and the now standard pair of “talk” buttons—one to recognize your partner’s voice and one for your own. In many modes, you won’t need to use these, however. Like most handheld translators, the unit includes a preloaded SIM 4G card that gives it near-global usability. (Vasco says it works “in nearly 200 countries,” which is a lot, since there are only 195 widely recognized nations today.) 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz Wi-Fi are also available when you’re in range of a hot spot or at a hotel.
The 2,500-mAh battery charges via USB-C. Vasco claims that the Q1 offers “many hours of intensive use” and up to 160 hours on standby—though note the battery will drain faster than you might expect even when it’s idling. “Many hours” in my testing was less than eight, but the 160-hour standby metric was roughly accurate.
Language support is robust, but details vary based on how you use the device. For voice-to-voice translation, it supports 86 languages. For text-based translation, that goes up to 108. Oddly, photo-based translations work with 113 languages. Lastly, real-time call translation has support for just 53 languages. I’ll get to each of these in a bit.
After a quick setup, the Q1 drops you into a straightforward interface that lines up its six functions, one over the other. In addition to the four modes mentioned above, the system offers a group chat feature that can support up to 100 participants in their own languages, and a basic learning mode that simply quizzes you on vocabulary, Duolingo style.
Chatty Cathy
Photograph: Chris Null
Most users will likely spend the bulk of their time in conversation mode, which lets you carry on a one-on-one voice discussion with a real-life partner, each in the language of your choice. As is common for handheld translators, holding down one of two buttons—either the pair on the side mentioned earlier or another pair that appears on the touchscreen—lets you tell the Q1 who is talking.
Under the surface are 11 individually powered speakers, including two five-inch woofers, two midrange drivers, two tweeters, and five “full-range” drivers. The collection includes both side-firing and upfiring drivers to bounce sound off your walls and ceiling for surround sound and 3D audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
Around back, you’ll find solid connectivity, including HDMI eARC/ARC for seamless connection to modern TVs, an HDMI passthrough port for connecting a streamer or gaming console, Ethernet, RCA analog connection for a legacy device like a turntable, and a traditional subwoofer that lets you side-step Marshall’s available wireless sub. There’s no optical port, but since optical doesn’t support Dolby Atmos or DTS:X spatial audio, that’s kind of a moot point.
Setup is pretty simple, but the bar’s hefty size adds some complications. At three inches tall, it’s a tough fit beneath many TVs. Conversely, the rubber feet that diffuse its 43-inch long frame from your console offer almost zero clearance at the sides and, unlike bars like Sony’s Bravia Theater 9 or System 6, there’s no way to extend it. That makes it tough to set the bar down properly with all but the thinnest pedestal TV stands, which are becoming common even in cheap TVs. All that to say, there’s a good chance you’ll need to mount your TV to use the Heston.
Like the Sonos Arc Ultra, there’s no remote, meaning adjusting settings mainly relies on the Marshall app. The app is relatively stable, but it froze up during a firmware update for me, and it usually takes a while to connect when first opened. Those are minor quibbles, and your TV remote should serve as your main control for power and volume.
Wi-Fi connection unlocks music streaming via Google Cast, AirPlay, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and internet radio stations, with Bluetooth 5.3 as a backup. Automated calibration tunes the sound to your room (complete with fun guitar tones), and in-app controls like a multi-band EQ provide more in-depth options than the physical knobs.
Premium Touch
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
The Heston 120’s sound profile impressed from the first video I switched on, which happened to be an episode of Bob’s Burgers. The bar immediately showcased a sense of clarity, openness, and overall definition that’s uncommon even from major players in the space.
One of my favorite new additions isn’t on the desktop app, though. NordVPN recently introduced scam call protection on Android, with an iOS version planned for the future. I’ve been using it for months, and it has easily flagged more than a hundred spam calls to my phone. It works a treat, even if it’s not one of NordVPN’s big advertised features.
Almost the Fastest VPN
NordVPN is fast. It’s not the fastest VPN I’ve tested—that’s Proton VPN—but that’s more of a rounding error than a notable difference in speed. Across five US locations, NordVPN dropped 15.32 percent of my unprotected speed on average. For context, Proton dropped 15.23 percent. Surfshark, which is also owned by Nord Security, dropped 18.84 percent, while Mullvad closed in on 24 percent.
So, NordVPN is fast, but more importantly, it’s consistent. Across the locations I tested, it never posted a slowdown of more than 20 percent, and in one location (Chicago), it only dropped a meager 6.6 percent of my unprotected speed. Overall, though, that 15 percent drop is a good representation of the speeds you can expect, at least in the US.
Speed testing with any VPN is tricky. There are a ton of factors that influence speeds beyond the server you’re connecting to. My speed testing—and any VPN speed testing, for that matter—is a snapshot in time. It provides insight into the kind of speeds you can expect on average, not a concrete number you should expect from every server at every time of day. To get the most accurate snapshot possible, I tested across five US locations at three different times of day over the course of a week. Before each test, I ran three passes of my unprotected speed to get an accurate comparison, and I threw out any results with a greater than 10 percent deviation between passes.
The best way to get around speed hurdles is to change servers, and NordVPN is solid on that front. It has around 7,400 servers, but the exact number is constantly changing. It maintains a database of its servers and locations, complete with details on the features those servers support and whether they’re virtual or physical servers.
NordVPN lives up to its monumental name. It still has a massive network, fast speeds, and a ton of features, and despite its infamous data breach, it has continued to double down on security measures. The main issue with Nord is the price. You can score a good deal on a two-year discount, but that price jumps up significantly when it comes time to renew. This is why I rank it slightly below Proton VPN, despite the two services going toe-to-toe on features and speeds. Proton Unlimited clocks in at the same monthly price as NordVPN Basic, and it comes with Proton Pass, Proton Mail, and a handful of other apps.
My parents always used to say, “You get what you pay for,” and at the ripe old age of 33, I’ve often found that to be true. If you buy a knockoff, that’s usually what you’re going to get: an imitation of something that’s cheaper, but probably not quite as good as the real deal. Usually, that’s what you’re going to get. But not always.
Sometimes, if Soundpeats’ new Clip1 wireless earbuds are any indication, what you actually get (for a lot less money) is your favorite new pair of open-style wireless earbuds for the price.
Soundpeats Clip1
The Clip1 are a great-sounding pair of open-style wireless earbuds with an enticing price.
Sound is excellent
Very comfortable
Volume keeps up with ambient noise
Accessible price point
Not a huge fan of the look
Movie mode sounds… bad
Sorry, Bose
I’ve used a few pairs of open wireless earbuds in my day, and there was always one pair that stood as my favorite: Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds. I personally love Bose’s clip-on design, which is comfortable and (at least in my opinion) looks pretty good—more like a piece of jewelry than a pair of wireless earbuds. Also, Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds shouldn’t work, but they do. The wireless earbuds actually tuck the speaker behind your ear, while a solid plastic lip rests inside and holds the whole thing in place. Despite that strange, very indirect method of delivering audio, they sound great. There’s just one problem, and that’s that they’re kind of wildly expensive.
Coming up on nearly two years since their release date, the Ultra Open Earbuds are still $300. That’s a steep price to pay for wireless earbuds that you’re probably not going to want to use all the time, every single day. But $70? Now we’re talking.
Unlike Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds, Soundpeats’ Clip1 start at less than half the price. While you might be raising your eyebrows, wondering what kind of sacrifices you’re making in the sound department, I’m here to tell you that the Clip1 might be a lot less of a compromise than you’d expect. Immediately upon sliding the Clip1 onto my ears and loading up Spotify, I noticed that Soundpeats paid special attention to fidelity.
I started off with some jazz, Wes Montgomery’s “While We’re Young,” and noticed ample low end and very little distortion even with the volume turned up past 75% on my phone. Guitar tones sounded natural and nuanced, like I was in the room. I could hear subtle string buzzes and even the soft fuzz of the recording process from 1961, an artifact of how the tune was recorded back then. More than a solid start.
Other genres translated equally as well. I listened to some rock songs with a lot more going on instrument-wise and in the production department, and the Clip1 crushed it. In “Castleman” by Floatie, I was able to hear all of the guitar tracks clearly and separately, with very little distortion. Vocals stood apart from the mix but weren’t too pronounced, and the low end was present but not overwhelming. Similarly, with electronic music, the Clip1 continued to impress. I listened to Todd Terje’s “Delorean Dynamite,” and the driving arpeggiated synths sounded perfectly gritty, with shakers and other reverberated percussion came across as atmospheric but well-accounted for.
If this all sounds like I’m gushing, well, I kind of am. The Clip1 exceeded my expectations in the sound department, and it’s clear that Soundpeats made the effort on a hardware level to deliver. Inside the Clip1, there are 12mm drivers, which are backed up by dual magnets. The use of two magnets, according to Soundpeats, is meant to decrease distortion and deliver a more precise, uniform sound, since the two magnets equate to less variability in the way the wireless earbuds’ diaphragm moves. The results are clear—literally. These are some of the best-sounding open wireless earbuds I’ve used to date, and I’ve used quite a few now from Sony, Nothing, and Bose.
On top of sounding great, I also find them to be equally as listenable in louder volume scenarios as Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds, if not a little more so. Because of the design of open wireless earbuds, no pair will ever be ideal in high-volume situations where you’d want a more traditional pair of wireless earbuds with tips and active noise cancelation (ANC). There’s a middle ground to be struck where you can still hear your audio well while also being able to hear your surroundings, though. In my humble opinion, Soundpeats strikes that balance well.
On the crucial subway test, I was able to hear my post-work Buffalo Bills sports talk podcast while still keeping one foot in the environmental sound. That’s more than I could say for other entrants in the open-ear audio game, which have a bad habit of being drowned out in loud environments.
Which clip gets the comfort crown
Outside of being able to hear your surroundings more, another reason why people buy open-style wireless earbuds is that they’re just a lot more comfortable than using something that gets put inside your ear, even if it’s only a little bit.
While both the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds and Soundpeats’ Clip1 have a similar design (a clip that you wrap around your ear), there are subtle differences between the two you should know. As I mentioned, Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds have a plastic knob that goes inside your ear, while the speaker, a round little drum, actually gets tucked behind your ear. The indirect approach to delivering audio somehow produces solid, well-balanced sound.
Similarly, the Clip1 also tucks around your ear like a clip, but instead of tucking the speaker behind your ear like Bose, the speaker rests in your outer ear in the Clip1, while the battery and magnets actually located behind. I’ve already covered how that design seems to deliver sound, and as satisfied as I am with that end, I’m equally as satisfied with the comfort. The Clip1, like Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds are great to wear over long periods and feel sturdy and comfortable while wrapped around my ears. If you’re the type of person who hates the feeling of shoving silicone tips into your ears like you would with wireless earbuds that have ANC, the Clip1 will feel like a massive relief. The Clip1 might even have a slight edge over Bose, since Soundpeats manages to get the weight of each of its earbuds down to 5g as opposed to Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds, which weigh 6.3g per earbud.
Like Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds, the Clip1 also allows for a good amount of ambient noise bleed, which, in this case, is exactly what’s supposed to happen. While wearing the Clip1, I was still able to hear colleagues and respond to people in my office, while they were unable to hear what I was listening to; in this case, that happened to be a podcast at about 75% volume. While I didn’t test the Clip1 on a bike, I would be more than comfortable wearing these open wireless earbuds in a situation where I needed to hear my surroundings. I
f you’re in need of hands-free controls, the Clip1 also have touch inputs which allow you to double and triple-tap the piece that rests behind your ear on either earbuds to play and pause, and skip tracks respectively. It’s a little awkward at first, tapping behind your ear like that, but once you get the hang of it, they work just fine.
As long as we’re talking about design, it’s worth mentioning one area that I actually don’t think the Clip1 takes the crown over Bose in, and that’s looks. There’s nothing particularly offensive about the Clip1 design, but it’s not my cup of tea if Bose is the comparison. The Clip1 is a little bit lower profile compared to the Ultra Open Earbuds, which is nice, but I actually appreciate the almost cyberpunk look, even if they’re more noticeable when they’re clipped onto your ears. Similarly, the charging case of the Clip1 is fine but very cheap-feeling, thanks to the shiny, smooth plastic as opposed to Bose’s almost matte plastic.
That’s a minor gripe, all things considered, and even more forgivable when you keep in mind that the Clip1 is $70 compared to Bose’s current $300 price tag on the Ultra Open Earbuds.
Battery life and features
Open wireless earbuds may not have the benefit of canceling noise like other wireless earbuds, but that lack of ANC is actually a blessing in some ways, mostly when it comes to battery life. According to Soundpeats, the Clip1 should get 8 hours on a single charge when being played at 60% volume. That battery life tracks in my testing; after more than two hours of listening, I was at about 80%, though I wasn’t listening to audio the entire time (I took some short breaks intermittently).
I wouldn’t call 8 hours impressive by wireless earbuds standards, but it does notably beat the Bose Ultra Open, which get about 7.5 hours on a single charge. For context, some wireless earbuds that I’ve tested this year, like the Technics EAH-AZ100, get 10 hours on a single charge with ANC activated. Again, though, those wireless earbuds are also $300 compared to the Clip1’s $70 price tag, so maybe that comparison is a little unfair. For me, I have no major complaints in the battery life department when it comes to the Clip1; I think they’ll last long enough to satisfy most people.
As for features, there are quite a few things to take advantage of in the Soundpeats app, including the ability to toggle on Dolby audio for “movie mode” and “music mode,” which are meant to provide “immersive 3D sound.” I tested both, and while I could do without movie mode (sorry, I know it’s supposed to give in-movie audio a sense of space, but I think it just makes everything sound worse), music mode actually sounds pretty good. I don’t need music mode toggled on to enjoy how the Clip1 sound, but I do think using it provides a heightened sense of space and atmosphere in most songs.
There are also additional EQ options in the Soundpeats app, including preset EQ for genres like rock and electronic, and even one for enhancing treble, and also a granular 10-band EQ if you’re that kind of person. There is an option to custom-tune the EQ with a hearing test so that the wireless earbuds conform to your specific hearing, but when I tried to take the test, I noticed that lots of the tones being played for me were hard to hear. Picking them up is a lot harder when you’re wearing a pair of open earbuds, where ambient noise is a factor. For that reason, I’m going to go ahead and assume that while you can take the hearing test for personalized EQ on the Clip1, you should make sure you’re in a very silent location when you do so.
As an added bonus, the SoundPeats app also has free, playable white noise for when you just want to zone out (think rain sounds and airplane noises) as well as something called “EQ space” where people can share their custom EQs for things that they like to listen to. Let’s be honest, most people are never going to take advantage of that sort of thing, but having the option is always nice.
As I mentioned previously, there are a lot of open-style wireless earbuds on the market nowadays, so making a decision can be tough. Ultimately, though, the equation is simple. Most people, when it comes to open audio, just want something that sounds good, is audible in a range of settings, and is comfortable and practical in terms of battery life and features.
For the Clip1, all of those boxes are checked, and while the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds still have the edge in terms of design, that only matters if you really care about that sort of thing. For most, the $70 price tag and great fit and sound should be enough to give Soundpeats a shot at being their go-to open-ear wireless buds.
Breaking open the mouse requires only four screws: two covered by one of the mouse’s adhesive feet, and two underneath the removable puck. Covering two of the screws with an adhesive panel limits repairability, since it will slowly lose stickiness over time. After removing the screws, there are two plastic clips up front and two in the back that need to be released. Like any plastic clip, you risk breaking them during disassembly.
Inside the mouse is a single-sided printed circuit board that houses the sensor, micro switches, and the mouse wheel. The overall design is simple; with replacement parts and some soldering skills, repair should be straightforward. The battery is attached to a removable section on the top shell of the mouse using a rubbery adhesive. This adhesive panel stretches and sticks to itself when removed, making it nearly impossible to reuse with a new battery, but it leaves no residue on the actual plastic of the mouse. A new battery should be easy to install using double-sided tape.
The Cobra HyperSpeed’s simple internal design has nothing unnecessary, and no added confusion or failure points. While some other models, like the Logitech MX Master 4 or the Razer Basilisk 35K, boast a lot of premium features (with added complexity), it’s always refreshing to see something only as complex as it needs to be.
Alongside the $100 Cobra HyperSpeed, Razer also offers the $35 Cobra and the $130 Cobra Pro. Compared to the Pro model, the HyperSpeed’s slightly less responsive sensor and scaled-back RGB aren’t huge hits to performance or usability, and the HyperSpeed’s lower weight is a distinct advantage. Compared to the standard wired model, the addition of wireless is a major benefit to both performance and usability. The HyperSpeed’s optical scroll wheel is a definitive improvement over its siblings.
Overall, this mouse is a solid workhorse for gaming and general browsing. It’s fast, comfortable, and compact. The simple yet robust build will stand up to normal day-to-day use. While it doesn’t push the limits of performance or functionality like some of the more expensive esports-focused mice available today, the Cobra HyperSpeed is a great option for someone who doesn’t need cutting-edge specs but wants a mouse that gets things done.
