With so many excellent midrange smartphones available now, how do you choose? Every year, Xiaomi’s Poco range pushes hardware expectations, and the Poco F6 and F6 Pro are no exception. The Poco F6 Pro (£499) struggles to justify the Pro tag, but the cheaper Poco F6 (£399) is an absolute bargain (even more so if you bagged the early-bird price of £339). You will struggle to find this processing power or display quality elsewhere without paying more.
Xiaomi routinely rebadges affordable phones released in China under its Redmi brand as Poco phones for Europe and the rest of the world, though they are not sold in the United States. Poco quickly built a reputation for value, and the F6 is a strong example of why. It ticks all the boxes with a gorgeous display, zippy performance, capable camera, and fast charging, though the software and battery life let it down some.
The Poco F6 could be the perfect phone for gamers on a budget this year and is almost compromise-free. The Pro is not worth the extra cash, so I’ll focus on the Poco F6 in this review, but I will drill deeper into the differences below.
Identity Crisis
The design is perhaps the least interesting thing about these phones, but it is also the most obvious difference. The Poco F6 is all-plastic, with a flat frame, a gently curved shimmery back that doesn’t show finger smudges, and two huge camera lenses at the top left flanked by a smaller flash. My review unit is a handsome green, but it also comes in black or a beige gold that Xiaomi calls titanium.
The F6 Pro has an aluminum frame and a glass back with a marble effect finish. My review unit is black, but you can also opt for white. The camera module is far bigger, spanning almost the whole top of the F6 Pro, with three medium-sized lenses and a flash in a symmetrical grid of four. The F6 Pro is a touch thicker and heavier than its sibling, and you can tell it is the more expensive of the two, though I preferred the F6. The Poco branding is mercifully subtle. That said, neither design is very exciting.
Photograph: Simon Hill
Both phones have a fingerprint sensor under the screen, and it worked fine for me, usually unlocking the first time. But it is weirdly low compared with other phones, so I kept having to adjust the position of my thumb. Strangely, the F6 has a superior IP64 rating for water resistance and Gorilla Glass Victus to protect the screen, while the F6 Pro is IP54 and has the older Gorilla Glass 5.
These phones are almost identically sized, both boasting a 6.67-inch AMOLED with a 120-Hz refresh rate, though you must activate it in the display settings. The distinction is the resolution, with the F6 Pro at 3,200 x 1,440 pixels and the F6 at 2,712 x 1,220 pixels, and the F6 Pro is supposed to get a bit brighter. Even side-by-side, I couldn’t see much of a difference. Both screens are sharp and bright enough to see outdoors. These are solid phones for movie watching (if you must watch movies on your phone) with stereo speakers and support for Dolby Vision and HDR10+.
While the Netgear Orbi 970 Series has impressed me over the past month, it is not flawless. I first tried to test this system before it was released and had to give up after encountering frequent network drops. To be fair, I had issues testing many pre-certified Wi-Fi 7 systems, particularly with Google’s Pixel 8 (and I’m not the only one). Netgear has updated the Orbi 970 firmware, so it runs far more smoothly. I had issues with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra this time, but deleting its network settings and reconnecting fixed my problems.
Premium Price
There’s a lot to like about the Netgear Orbi 970 Series, but it makes the Eero Max 7 (7/10, WIRED Review) and the TP-Link Deco BE85 (7/10, WIRED review) look relatively affordable, and both of those systems slightly bested it in many of my tests. The scenario where the Orbi comes out on top is for very large homes with multi-gig internet connections. If you have a big house, you can likely afford it, but why pay more? One possible answer is the extras.
Netgear Armor is a comprehensive security package with many features. It scans devices when they connect to your network, proactively blocks threats, including malware and dodgy websites, and includes Bitdefender Security and VPN service to safeguard your devices outside the home. This package certainly adds value, and some families will find it very useful, though you only get the first year for free. It costs $100 a year after that.
Basic parental controls are free but limit you to creating profiles for your kids’ devices and pausing their internet. If you want to set limits, track website and app usage, apply age-appropriate filters, set bedtimes, and more, you need Smart Parental Controls at $8 a month or $70 a year after the 30-day trial. These are comprehensive parental controls, but that’s a hefty extra fee.
While the subscription model is now dominant, Asus still offers much of the same functionality for free with its router range. It’s not quite as user-friendly, but you can tweak more settings. If you prefer the set-and-forget approach, you can save hundreds with the Eero Max 7 at $1,700 for a three-pack or $1,150 for a two-pack (less if you wait for a sale). It is every bit as easy to use, and an Eero Plus subscription at $100 a year includes everything you get with Netgear Armor and Smart Parental Controls, plus genuinely handy extra smart home features and one of our favorite password managers.
You might pay a premium for some consumer electronic brands because you love the design or for unique features, but that’s harder to justify for something as utilitarian as a router. The Netgear Orbi 970 Series is undoubtedly an excellent mesh, but it doesn’t do much, if anything, that another mesh system cannot do for less. Ultimately, it is overpriced and overkill for most folks.
As soon as you want to hear the same music in multiple rooms, you understand why so many people love Sonos. When it comes to set-it and-forget-it multiroom audio, the company makes the hardware and software experience easier than anyone. From speakers to soundbars (and even turntables and networked amps), Sonos has taken over the homes of everyone who doesn’t want to drop oodles of cash on a “real” custom-installed system with wires running through walls. In a roundabout way, this makes a somewhat-costly Sonos system feel affordable.
The same can be said about its first pair of headphones, the $450 Sonos Ace. They might ride the high-water mark of the price set by Apple’s AirPods Max, but they also work seamlessly within Sonos’ ecosystem, albeit over Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi.
Sonos has dabbled in portable speakers like the Roam and Sonos Move 2 to extend its in-home sound to patios and beach blankets, but the Ace headphones mark a real mobile turning point for the company, and they’re largely great. They might not perfectly match the expectations of audio nerds who have been begging for Wi-Fi-based Sonos headphones for a decade, but the Ace are a fantastic pair of Bluetooth over-ears that go toe to toe with the best from Bose, Sony, and Apple. If you’re shopping for premium wireless headphones, these should be on your short list.
Going Mobile
The Ace feel incredibly well-made. Pop open the included hard case—something the Airpods Max notably, and very oddly, lack—and you’ll see a sleek pair of over-ears with shiny metal bands and supple leather around the headband. They’re round, traditionally shaped headphones that do nothing to grab anyone’s attention—they look a lot like Sony’s WH-1000XM5.
The simple design is timeless, sleek, and professional, so as never to seem out of place. It’s a design language borrowed from the “I didn’t see you there” styling of its speakers, and a welcome one in the world of flashy modern cans. Like the speakers, they come in matte white or black.
Photograph: Parker Hall
You have two tones of gray inside the ear cups to tell you which is right and left (darker is left, lighter is right, which makes these great for people who are colorblind or have low vision), and they have three basic buttons on the outside, set between a large assortment of mesh-covered microphones. The replaceable ear cups use magnets to attach and come with a built-in mesh cover that helps keep gunk out of the headphones’ drivers, and there is also a slot for a USB-C cable on the bottom left.
The main thing you’ll use to control the headphones, apart from the app and your smartphone, is the volume slider on the right ear cup, which allows you to play and pause music with a press; you can slide it up or down for volume control. On the bottom of the left cup is the power button, and there is a similarly sized button on the bottom of the right that adjusts active noise canceling between on and transparency mode (which pipes in sound from the outside world). Inside the Sonos app, you can also set this button to turn off ANC and transparency entirely, but that isn’t the default option.
Other settings you can change in the app include basic bass and treble EQ, and whether you want the headphones to pause when you remove them, or to answer calls when you put them on.
All-Day Listening
The fit is astonishingly comfortable, thanks to the Ace’s 11-ounce weight. and there’s an excellent design choice where the headband attaches to the ear cups. It links up at the center of the cup, which gives the headphones a nice, center-directed clamping force. This means less headband fatigue and better comfort when wearing glasses, something I experience with the AirPods Max, which are heavier and have a higher clamping force on my head.
It’s headphone-reviewer hyperbole, but I genuinely did forget I was wearing the Ace on a few occasions. They’re that comfortable, and the included transparency and associated mics are so good that they have a weird ability to trick your brain into feeling like you have nothing on your head at all. I found none of the weird boxy sensations I get from other headphones with transparency turned on. I had full conversations with the headphones on, which I’ve usually felt too awkward to do with other over-ears. (I still think it’s rude to not remove your headphones when chatting.)
As far as noise reduction, I was genuinely astounded how the Ace immediately offers some of the best noise canceling on the market with a press of a button. Turning on ANC mode feels like turning the volume of the world from a 9 to a 1 on some global volume dial. HVAC noises all but disappear, cars on roads are reduced to nothing, and even my clacky mechanical keyboard sounds like a light tap of a pen on a pad. The noise reduction is easily on par with the top brass, with Bose still narrowly edging out the competition on high frequencies.
For me, a dryer lives and dies by its diffuser, and I’ve never seen one like this, which is actually two diffusers. In “diffuse mode,” it looks like any diffuser you’ve ever seen, with prongs to get right into the root to dry and help with volume. Dyson says this one is best for more textured curls and coils.
Pop that prong part off to use “dome mode.” Instead of pushing air out, it creates a vortex of air within the dome so air spins around the curls to dry them. It’s meant to elongate and enhance waves and curls. For my hair, they were best used together, and I think many curl types would benefit from both. I dried the roots and coarser bottom layer with the regular diffuser, and then switched to the dome for the length, particularly focusing on the damaged curls on top that require a bit more care to bring out the shape.
You’ll notice a few slight visual changes from the first Supersonic. Lights change colors based on the heat setting, turning blue for cool, yellow for low heat, orange for medium, and red for high. It makes it a little more fun-looking, but it’s also a nice visual cue to quickly check which setting you’re on. My favorite new addition though, is the clear back where the settings are, which gives you an inside look at some of the internals. As a huge fan of ’90s clear tech, I want more of this all the time. Dyson, if you’re reading this, the people want fully transparent hair tools with candy-colored wires.
Putting most of the controls on the back of the barrel is a smart move (as it was with the original). Most dryers put the buttons right where your hands grip the handle, so you can accidentally change settings when you’re just trying to hold it to your head. Here, the power switch and cold shot button are on the handle, but out of the way.
Smart Features
Photograph: Medea Giordano
The Supersonic Nural has a few unique smart functions that make the hair-drying process a little easier. Scalp protect mode uses a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor and infrared beam to detect when the dryer gets close to your head, automatically turning the temperature down to 131 degrees Fahrenheit. Though it works with only some of the attachments, like the gentle air attachment, styling concentrator, and smoothing nozzle, it means you don’t have to fiddle with settings as you move from roots out.
Instead of zoom levels, Nubia lists focal length (the distance where lens and sensor converge) measured in millimeters, and smaller numbers mean a wider field of view and depth of field. The Flip 5G camera gives you an option of 50 mm or 26 mm. There is no telephoto lens, so zooming tends to wash out details. The processing is often heavy-handed, sometimes taking a second or two and resulting in an oil painting effect.
Most optional modes, including portrait, are poor, and the resulting photos never look natural, but you can achieve a reasonable bokeh effect with the regular camera. Rely on the automatic settings and you will be disappointed regularly. It works better if you turn off the AI and best if you are prepared to tinker with Pro mode, but there’s a lot of gimmicky fluff in the camera app. There isn’t much call to use the 16-megapixel front-facing camera outside of video calls, but it’s passable.
Software Worries
The Nubia Flip 5G gets off to a bad start on the software front, with the already outdated MyOS 13 on top of Android 13. It is fairly close to stock Android, but there’s some bloatware and pointless shortcuts to download apps and games you almost certainly do not want.
It’s important to note that the cover screen does not support third-party apps. It can display notifications, music controls, weather, your calendar, a pedometer, a stopwatch, or a voice recorder, and it enables you to take selfies with the main camera, but that’s about it. The “interactive” pets are super cute (my daughter loved the cat), but they aren’t really interactive; they are just animated wallpapers.
Nubia has a poor track record for updates. When I asked the company for clarity, it could not provide a definite timeline for Android 14 or subsequent updates. Based on past phones, you will be lucky to get three years, and that’s woeful when you consider Google is offering seven years for the similarly priced Pixel 8A.
Photograph: Simon Hill
The closest competitor is the Motorola Razr (2023) and, sadly, Motorola is also bad at software updates. There isn’t much to separate the two beyond the different designs. I prefer the look of the Nubia Flip 5G. It charges faster and comes with more storage. But the Razr supports wireless charging and scores an IP52 rating. One final consideration that might swing it for Motorola is network compatibility. The Flip 5G should be mostly OK on T-Mobile or AT&T in the States, but cross-check supported bands with your carrier before you buy.
If you can live without the fold, pick something better from the best cheap phones. If you are set on a folding flip phone, try to find an extra $200 or so for something like the Motorola Razr+ (7/10, WIRED Recommends) or Samsung Z Flip5, which both offer a more useful cover screen. Ultimately, I enjoyed using the Nubia Flip 5G, and it is cute enough that my 11-year-old daughter asked to trade it for her Pixel 6.
This review of Godzilla Minus One was originally posted in conjunction with the movie’s theatrical release. It has been updated and reposted now that the film is available on digital platforms.
Godzilla Minus One is the throwback movie that longtime Godzilla fans have been waiting for. This is an age of abundance for Godzilla media: Over the past seven years, as part of a partnership between Toho and Hollywood studios, the giant lizard received three animated films on Netflix, two U.S. movies, and an Apple TV series that premieres Nov. 17. Godzilla fans like me haven’t been left wanting. And yet something crucial has been missing from most of this media, something fundamental to the earliest films in the Godzilla franchise: terror.
We nearly had a decade of terrifying Godzilla. In 2016, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi releasedthe horrifying Shin Godzilla, widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise. It promised a return to the petrifying, humanity-destroying Godzilla of the past. But Shin Godzilla marked a lengthy hiatus in the production of Japanese live-action Godzilla films, and signaled the beginning of a colossally successful American era for the big lizard. The American Godzilla media of the past seven years, including Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong, and those Netflix anime movies, ranges from serviceable to pretty damn good, though its creators borrowed far more from the Marvel Cinematic Universe than from classic kaiju matinees.
Instead, Godzilla Minus One sticks to the original recipe. The movie that kicked it all off, 1954’s Godzilla, mixes horror, classic melodrama, and a feverish anti-war message to mine the anxieties of ’50s Japan. Minus One goes even further into the past, with a story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki (who took another beloved franchise back to basics with Lupin III: The First)imagines how a Japan with no military, no economy, and no international support would respond to Godzilla’s first attack.
So is this a reboot? A remake? A reimagining? A bit of all of the above.
Our reluctant hero is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who, in the waning hours of the war, faked a plane malfunction to escape death. In a Godzilla film, the giant monsters typically carry the central political metaphor, but in Minus One, Koichi shoulders that burden on his tiny human frame. As a kamikaze pilot who survived the war, he returns to his neighborhood to find that little remains beyond rubble and a few surviving neighbors.
This is ground-level Godzilla storytelling: We see the events through the eyes of Koichi, his neighbors, and his co-workers, rather than through knowledgeable government leaders, superhuman soldiers, or Godzilla himself. As with any great kaiju film, we spend much of the film’s first half learning to care about these lovable folks just before their world gets obliterated by hundreds of tons of giant lizard.
Koichi is an unusually grim lead, even by the standards of the more somber early Godzilla films. He despises himself for his decision to bail on his kamikaze mission, and his neighbors, who’ve lost their homes and families, aren’t especially thrilled to see him either. Nonetheless, together they rebuild from bombed-out blocks to bivouacked shacks, and eventually to modest homes that cluster among the suburban Tokyo sprawl. Considering this a Godzilla movie, it’s like watching people rebuilding their lives with a giant box of dominoes.
Image: Toho
Minus One isn’t a period piece in aesthetic alone: The story itself feels like something preserved from the 1950s. Yamazaki steeps it in the melodrama of a classic historical epic. His characters are capital-R Romantic, constantly making bold proclamations and grand sacrifices, discussing heavy topics where modern characters would quip about shawarma.
Koichi and his companions debate the power of nonviolence, the value of self-preservation, and the unjust expectations governments put upon their populations in times of war. The latter point makes Godzilla Minus One a surprisingly potent pairing with Hayao Miyazaki’s animated semi-biopicThe Wind Rises, and a timely response to Japan’s current military buildup.
Of course, it’s precisely when Koichi and company begin to open their hearts and get their feet on the ground that Godzilla arrives. (Technically, he appears earlier in the film, but I’ll spare you the spoilers.) When Godzilla makes his first legitimate impression, he strikes like a 2023 version of the original Godzilla: the living manifestation of nuclear terror. His initial physical destruction is dwarfed by his heat ray, which, as shown in the trailer, leaves behind little more than a crater and a mushroom cloud.
Image: Toho
This is the moment in modern Godzilla movies where the heroes send in mechs, a rival kaiju, or some cutting-edge military aircraft. But Minus One, to its credit, sticks to the original formula, using historical reality to wave away any easy solutions. Most of Japan’s military has been decommissioned following its surrender to the U.S., its remaining warships sent away for disassembly. The U.S. government won’t help, either; its government is afraid to move weaponry into the region, which might provoke an anxious Soviet Union. So there’s only one group left to stop Godzilla: the civilian population. It’s a legitimately terrifying prospect — a group of average people versus a kaiju.
For those of us under the age of 70, conceptualizing Godzilla as a genuinely frightening horror monster can be a challenge. Hell, he appears in an upcoming children’s book that espouses the power of love. But in 1954, Godzilla terrified audiences across the globe, as a metaphor for nuclear weapons’ imprecise, passionless ability to level whole cities.
In its back half, Minus One recreates that style of terror with human stakes and an intensely political message. Yamazaki brings together the threads he carefully put in place: Koichi’s mental health, the barely rebuilt Japan, the absent government, the abandoned military, and, in true classic melodrama fashion, a love story. Then he pits them against an indifferent, catastrophic force.
Image: Toho
Is Godzilla the threat of nuclear weaponry? The temptation to respond to violence with greater violence? An indifferent American military in a period of national rebuild? The fact that Godzilla Minus One prompts these questions underscores what modern Godzilla media has been missing.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve enjoyed the near-decade of Godzilla entertainment in America. But as someone who has Shin Godzilla at the top ofhis Godzilla tier list, who introduced his child to Mothra at far too young an age, and has a Hedorah anatomy poster sitting behind him at this very moment, this is the Godzilla I’ve been waiting for.
Godzilla films provide filmmakers a precious opportunity to tell political stories not just about individuals, but about communities, or even entire nations. And because Godzilla movies will always feature a kaiju destroying famous cities and landmarks like a toddler let loose in a Lego museum, people will show up. It’s a fantastic entertainment vessel for big ideas. For years now, Godzilla has been giving us plenty of sugar. But considering the state of the world, I’m glad he’s once again showing up with a bit of medicine, too.
Godzilla Minus One is streaming on Netflix, and is available for digital rental on Amazon, Vudu, and similar digital platforms.
HMD, the Finnish company that has been licensing the Nokia brand name to make cheapo and midrange Android phones for more than 7 years, is finally striking it out on its own. Now you’ll start seeing cheapo and midrange phones with the branding “HMD,” which stands for Human Mobile Devices. (The company says it plans on continuing its relationship with Nokia.)
A few of these devices have already hit European markets—the HMD Pulse series—but the US is getting the HMD Vibe. It’s a $150 smartphone, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking. It omits a few too many features, and HMD now takes the crown for the worst software policy out of all well-known Android makers. But if you want to spend very little on a mobile phone, the Vibe will do.
Vibe Check
To me, the most important feature of a cheap smartphone is performance. If it’s too slow and frustrating to use, then it doesn’t matter how cheap it is. Good news then—the HMD Vibe is a fairly smooth-performing smartphone considering its $150 price. My initial impression was not great, as the phone was ridiculously slow as I was setting it up and installing all my apps, but once that was sorted, it’s been fairly smooth sailing.
It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 680 chipset with 6 GB of RAM. I’m not saying this is a speedy device—there’s even a small delay when you swipe up on an app to go to the home screen. Apps don’t launch at lightning speed. But I’ve been using the Vibe for more than a week (on 4G LTE no less) and it’s been better than tolerable. I’ve played games like Pako Forever and Alto’s Odyssey with no problems, and my benchmark scores place it on par with the similarly priced Moto G Play 2024.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
However, remember to turn on the Adaptive refresh rate in the phone’s display settings menu. This bumps the refresh rate from 60 Hz to 90 Hz. Things were a bit choppy without it, but after I turned it on, there was a noticeable improvement in smoothness. Speaking of the display, this is a 6.56-inch LCD screen that’s decently sharp but doesn’t get too bright. On sunny days out, I had a hard time seeing content on the screen while out and about.
This phone looks pretty bland. It’s just a black rectangle, with a bit of a graphite-esque design on the black rear. You do get a headphone jack and a microSD card slot to expand the included 128 GB of storage, but this phone does not have a fingerprint sensor. That’s a convenience available on its peer, the Moto G Play 2024, and it lets you access secure apps quickly without having to log in all the time. HMD offers a basic face unlock, but it won’t work with apps, and it doesn’t work in the dark (or when you wear sunglasses).
I’ve long been skeptical of alternative toothbrushes, those mouthguard-like trays filled with nylon bristles that claim to brush your teeth in just 10 to 30 seconds. I’ve found them to be OK for days when I’m just too tired for a full brushing, but it doesn’t quite get my teeth clean enough. I’ve never felt like I could get close to someone’s face and chat after. But Y-Brush’s DuoBrush also comes with a regular sonic brush head. Both click onto the same brush handle.
U-shaped brushes aren’t a replacement for regular brushing. Your tongue still needs to be cleaned everyday, which these can’t do, and they’re likely missing some build-up and plaque. But for people with mobility problems, or in nursing homes or for small children, they can be useful tools. Despite watching Timmy the Tooth on repeat in my youth, some days even I struggle. That’s when I liked reaching for this.
Tooth by Tooth
The brand recommends using its Y-Brush for 10 to 20 seconds per jaw. I opted for 20 and occasionally went even longer. In addition to the vibrations caused by the brush handle, you should gently chew and slowly move it from side to side (that’s recommended with all these types of brushes). This gets your back teeth and offers a little more movement for the bristles to really work—according to the company, there are 35,000 bristles arranged in the tray. Taking it out and flipping it to get the rest of your teeth can be a little messy and slobbery, but do it over the sink and you should be fine.
While the brand does claim that the Y-Brush gets your teeth as clean in one minute as a regular brush does in two, I think having both the Y-brush and the sonic brush is important. It reminds you that you need to have a well-rounded dental routine, even if once a day you take the easier route. I brushed my teeth and tongue with the regular brush head in the morning or before I went somewhere, and used the U-shaped head at night. My teeth felt cleaner, but not as clean as they typically do.
Photograph: Medea Giordano
If I only used the U-shaped brush, my teeth wouldn’t fall out of my head, but I also don’t think they’d be sparkling or that my mouth would feel minty fresh. Still, I could go to bed at night not feeling completely gross.
It comes only in one size, though the tray head is made to fit most adult mouths. Every one of these alternative brushes I’ve tried has fit my top teeth comfortably, but hurts the back of my bottom jaw, where the edges push against my back gums. Thankfully, you don’t have to use it very long. The sonic brush head is standard and feels like any affordable brush I’ve tried. I like the options available from Sonicare more, as they’re just a little more dense without being hard, but the DuoBrush is on par with many others in the category.
The company recommends a toothpaste that foams well, but it works with any that you like. I used it with Crest and Sensodyne and found that both did the job, but you do end up using a bit more than you do on a regular brush head. Make sure you thoroughly clean the tray after each use, so spit and toothpaste doesn’t sit in between all those bristles. That would make for a nasty surprise next time you try to clean your teeth.
Brush Away
If you’ve been curious about these types of alternative toothbrushes, it might be worth giving the DuoBrush a try. At $80, it’s not a bad price for two types of brushes. WIRED writer and reviewer Brenda Stolyar likes the Symplbrush. It has more bristles—each clump of bristles is basically a regular toothbrush, plus they’re arranged on all three sides of the tray. That one is $129, however, and you still need another toothbrush. You also have to replace the heads, like with any electric toothbrush.
Y-Brush recommends changing the heads every four months, which is another $40. That’s kind of steep even with two brush heads included.
Mobility difficulties, depression, and exhaustion are just a few reasons why your dental care might suffer. If you’re a parent, you may have had more than a few moments where a frustrated or screaming child just refused to brush. You might take care of elderly family members who struggle to brush. If you think a U-shaped brush might work for you, the Y-brush is an affordable one to try.
Streaming video can be a big business, if a bit painful. Whether you’re playing games, making crafts, or just hanging out in a hot tub, one of the biggest streaming challenges can be finding a camera system that works for your needs. That’s what Logitech had in mind when creating the Mevo Core multi-cam system, and it’s an impressively simple solution to a modern problem.
The Mevo Core is an unassuming cube-style camera that uses a Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lens system. The four sides flanking the lens each have a ¼-inch 20-thread mount, allowing you to mount it by the top, bottom, or sides. On the rear, there are two USB-C ports for charging or connecting as a wired webcam, a 3.5-mm audio output, an HDMI port, and a microSD card slot tucked behind a protective cover.
The whole system is designed to be adaptable to a wide range of shooting situations. The camera can capture 4K video locally, and stream up to 1080p video over Wi-Fi 6E, and it even has an internal rechargeable battery that can record or stream for up to six hours on a single charge. It’s a fascinating camera system that walks the line between streaming webcam and more professional mirrorless cameras used for shooting video. But it’s the software that steals the show.
A Studio, Made Simple
The Mevo Core cameras are designed to be used in multi-cam setups—where you have multiple cameras around you for various angles—and to approximate one if you only have one camera. The Mevo Multicam app is the key that makes the whole system work. This app allows you to connect multiple cameras and feed them all to a single output for livestreaming.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
The Mevo Core cameras are shockingly easy to pair with the app. Open the app and it will automatically detect the camera and walk you through adding the camera to your Wi-Fi network. Once they’re on the network, you can connect them to the app with the touch of a button.
Once your cameras are connected, you can tap the source to swap the live output to that camera angle. In addition to the Mevo Core cameras, you can also add Mevo Start cameras, or, with a Mevo Pro subscription, you can connect any smartphone camera as another video source.
On top of this, the Mevo Multicam app lets you add picture-in-picture presets as well as graphic assets like full-screen overlays, lower-thirds, and over-the-shoulder images. The result is a makeshift live studio that can run on equipment you can easily fit into a messenger bag.
Streamers typically have to rely on apps like OBS and StreamLabs to manage video streams, and while those apps are certainly more robust, there’s a simplicity to the Mevo Multicam system that makes it incredibly easy to manage multiple camera angles while live. The app can show you all the camera feeds at once and let you quickly tap one to swap angles, adjust each one’s audio input levels, and add graphics with a tap. If that was all this system did, I’d be impressed, but then Logitech added something I would’ve wanted years ago if I’d thought to ask.
Turning One Camera Into Many
The 4K sensor inside the Mevo Core is solid and captures decent picture quality, but its better utilized as a 1080p streaming webcam. So why the extra resolution? Well, because when you shoot with more resolution than you need, it gives you the flexibility to crop in on the image without sacrificing picture quality. It’s partly why some of our favorite cinema cameras use 6K sensors for shooting 4K content.
Usually, that’s a postproduction process, but the Mevo Multicam app makes it easy to use that flexibility for live productions. In the app, you can tap on parts of the frame to crop in on the subject and send just a portion of the videofeed to the output. This is a technique I’ve used myself when editing video essays, but this camera system brings it to live performances. You can use a wide shot, then crop into a medium shot to emphasize a line.
In practice, this is the first 360 camera I’ve used where the video footage is still very sharp and clear, even when reframed to 16:9. You still have to deal with the stitch line, which is where the edges of the two lenses meet and software (imperfectly) fills in the gaps, but otherwise postproduction use of this footage feels like, well, just editing video. I mixed it with footage from a Sony A7R II, GoPro Hero 12, and Insta360 Ace Pro, and aside from the wider angle of view, it’s hard to tell the footage apart.
That alone is enough for me to say that this is the 360 camera filmmakers will want. The 8K footage still doesn’t reframe to 4K (you’ll have to wait for 12K footage before that’s possible), but it looks good enough for anything you’re going to put online.
It’s not just the high-end specs that have changed in the X4 either. Frame speeds have been improved in lower-resolution footage, with new options to shoot 5.7K video at 60 fps, 4K at 100 fps, and 4K at 60 fps when shooting in wide-angle mode. None of that is earth-shattering, but it does give you some better slo-mo options, thanks to the higher frame rates.
The color profile options remain the same as the X3: Standard, Vivid, and Log (for those who prefer to color in post). I shot primarily in Standard and found the colors to be nicely rendered, perhaps a little on the warm side. I find Vivid too garish, and of course if you plan to mix footage with other cameras, you’ll want to shoot everything in Log and do your coloring in software.
Film Crew in a Box
Testing action cameras is always one of the best parts of this job, but it was especially fun with the Insta360 X4. I don’t even like shooting 360 video, but shooting 360 video knowing that I can crop, reframe, and still get sharp, clean footage with lots of detail and smooth pans? Yes please.
In many ways the Insta360 is like adding a small film crew to your bag, especially if you get Insta360’s hilariously oversize 9.8-foot selfie stick, which makes it possible to fake surprisingly realistic boom shots.
At $99, the new Extended Edition Selfie Stick isn’t cheap, but is well worth it for the versatility it creates when paired with the X4. Fully extended and held behind you while you walk, it mimics a low-flying drone tracking shot, but without the whole crash-in-the-trees thing.
Speaking of trees, shade, and shadow, the X4 excels in bright sunlight. High-contrast scenes like a forest floor at midday are more challenging (this is true for any camera). HDR mode can help sometimes, but then you lose the ability to shoot Log.
One kind of artistic bravery involves, say, an actor bearing it all, self-consciousness be damned. And then there is the sort of courage on display—in front of and behind the camera—in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a slow-burn drama set in turbulent, repressive modern-day Iran that premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24. The film’s director, Mohammad Rasoulof, has fled Iran after receiving an eight-year prison sentence for his movies, and the film’s actors have been investigated by the state. These artists knew such an outcome was likely—an inevitable consequence of publicly criticizing the Iranian government—yet they made the film anyway, so committed are they to the urgency of their message.
Sacred Fig is about a family in Tehran, comfortably middle-class but poised to ascend to a new economic stratum. The father, Iman (Missagh Zagreb), works for the country’s judicial system and has been promoted to investigating judge. The position comes with a certain amount of perks and social cachet but also involves the signing of death warrants following hasty, perfunctory investigations. His doting wife, Najmeh (the remarkable Soheila Golestani), is excited that the family will get to move into a three-bedroom apartment so that her adolescent daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), won’t have to share a bedroom. Iman is stressed about work, haunted by the mortal weight of his decisions, but otherwise the household seems content enough, a picture of stability.
Yet the noises coming from outside suggest a coming storm. Protestors have taken to the streets following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died in 2022 under suspicious circumstances while in police custody, after she was arrested for allegedly improperly wearing a hijab. The subsequent demonstrations were massive, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and the arrests of thousands more. As Iman’s workload grows heavier with each wave of protestor roundups, requiring him to issue countless dire rulings per day, his daughters begin to rebel against the strictures of their home and their country.
Rasoulof unspools this narrative at a deliberate pace, introducing plot elements that initially appear small but gradually spread like cracks on a windshield. When a handgun is first glimpsed—given to Iman for his protection—we’re fairly certain it will have some grim function later on. Same for the classmate whom Rezvan brings home one day, a small-town girl who has moved to Tehran to study and has found herself, either willingly or not, amidst the swell of the uprising. There is some suspense here, but Rasoulof mostly keeps the first half of the film focused on social manners, all the careful negotiation required when living under the glaring eye of a totalitarianism.
He is setting the stage for the second half of Sacred Fig, in which the tenuously maintained order of the family crumbles and the allegorical engine of the film churns into motion. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about everyday Iranians, particularly women, coming to realize that a monster—or, at least, a functionary of a monstrous entity—is in the house with them. With calm insistence, Rasoulof depicts the shaking awake of perhaps whole swaths of Iranians who have found themselves no longer able to abide or ignore the injustices occurring on their doorsteps—nor those in their communities, or families, who help perpetuate that injustice.
This is a sad and frightening story about a family’s undoing, but Rasoulof ekes out some hope too. He threads in real footage of recent protests throughout the film, most shot in the narrow vertical aspect ratio of cellphone video—perhaps modernity’s most effective tool for documenting state brutality. Many of these clips are horrors: beatings, shootings, young people lying dead in the streets. They are visceral reminders of the fiction of Sacred Fig—a narrative film can only reveal so much, can only make us imagine what Rasoulof then shows us in plain fact.
But the footage is not all crushing. At a crucial moment in the film, Rasoulof cuts to rousing images of women in protest, both solitary and en masse. It’s a poignant act of humility, I think—a solemn acknowledgment that Rasoulof’s allegory has its own purpose, but perhaps best functions as a signal boost for those so bravely clamoring on the front lines of reality. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a mighty tribute to the filmmaker’s many countrywomen who continue to risk it all in the fight for their lives.
If you went to school before the 2010s, you might’ve been taught with the help of an overhead projector. These gigantic light cannons blasted photons upward through typically transparent worksheets, through a lens and a mirror, projecting the image onto a screen so everyone could see. I can only imagine my teachers back then wishing they had something like Logitech’s Reach to make that process so much easier. Well, mostly.
The Reach is a unique product in Logitech’s lineup. First announced in September 2023 as an Indiegogo project and successfully funded within five minutes, it’s shipping to backers in July for a retail price of $350. The Reach is an articulated camera arm designed to make it easier to get overhead views of objects sitting on a table while keeping your hands free. It’s handy for showing off books and worksheets in a classroom, demonstrating how to do crafts for a YouTube channel, or giving a bird’s-eye view of a board game.
The arm itself is excellent. It’s easy to tilt the camera arm up or down, extend it farther from the base, and even slide it higher or lower off the table. It’s an ideal way to get overhead footage of almost anything, except for one pretty substantial problem: It’s designed to work only with Logitech’s Streamcam, a webcam that’s not great.
A Thoughtful Camera Arm
First things first. The arm is the star of the Logitech Reach and it’s an absolute delight to use and dead simple to install. There are two mounting options: a sturdy clamp that attaches to the side of a desk or a heavy base plate you can set on top of a table.
The Logitech Reach with the base.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
And when I say heavy, I mean heavy, which is a good thing. The base plate is so hefty that it counterbalances the weight of the entire arm and camera, even when fully extended. This keeps it from falling over or even tilting. It’s so effective that the only reason I can think of to use the clamp is if you don’t have space on your table for the base.
The arm slides into the base with a metal peg that rotates freely and can spin 360 degrees. The USB-C cable that runs to the camera fits into a ridge along the length of the camera arm so neatly that it’s almost invisible. Since the camera and its cable are already set up, it takes only a couple of seconds to place the base plate on a table, slide the arm into the base, and plug the cable into a laptop, and you’re ready to go.
The arm itself is so smooth it almost feels unreal. You can rotate the top section of the arm forward to a 90-degree angle from the lower section without fiddling with any controls or locks. It just moves easily into place. Likewise, the top section of the arm can slide forward and back, extending up to around 18 inches away from the base, and it stays in place. Again, no extra buttons, knobs, or clamps involved.
Maybe that’s why Samsung’s obstinate Tizen interface feels so vexing? The system is easy enough to set up on the TV itself (it crashes every time I’ve tried to use the mobile setup option). It’s aesthetically pleasing and makes connecting and labeling devices a breeze. Yet its scattered layout can make some features feel inordinately difficult.
Adding the Peacock app, for instance, was twice as hard as it should be. It’s not featured in the app store and didn’t register in search until I typed it out completely. Once I found it, as with all new apps, I had to manually add it to the home screen or it lay hidden in the “Installed” window like a second-class citizen.
The main settings bar is similarly unintuitive, with various picture settings randomly interspersed between other settings. You can rearrange things, but it’s usually simpler to just click All Settings to access the legacy setup window. I also experienced a few odd Tizen quirks over a week or so of testing, like apps freezing and even some audio dropouts. Unplugging and replugging the TV seemed to fix things apart from a few minor video-loading issues.
Credit where it’s due, Tizen is packed with extras, from its swath of health and fitness apps to split screen features. There’s even a handy Game Hub with built-in cloud gaming from apps like Xbox Cloud Gaming, NVidia GeForce now, and Amazon Luna. Like most competitors, there’s also a dedicated gaming bar for on-the-fly adjustments.
A (Mostly) Loaded Package
Samsung’s Gaming Hub complements the S95D’s stout collection of gaming features, including VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and Freesync Pro for buttery high-frame-rate gaming, and ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) for speedy input response. All four HDMI 2.1 inputs support high refresh rates at up to 144 Hz to match high-frame-rate gaming from PCs, and there are a slew of game-oriented picture modes, making it easy to lock in a gorgeous picture.
The TV’s 4.2.2-channel audio system provides surprisingly solid sound. There’s some moderate punch in the lower midrange and fantastic overhead expansion (especially for a TV this thin), shooting Dolby Atmos effects overhead and side to side. Adding a newer Samsung soundbar with Q-Symphony lets you utilize both devices in concert.
Other features include options like Amazon Alexa or Samsung Bixby voice control, Apple AirPlay streaming, and support for HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma) HDR formats.
What you don’t get here is Dolby Vision HDR or, bizarrely for a company that makes Android phones, Chromecast streaming support. These omissions are pretty common across Samsung devices, but each year I hold out hope they’ll eventually cave and add them.
The main advantage of omitting Dolby Vision is one less picture setting to mess with, not that you’ll need to do much to the picture settings anyway. The TV looks almost flawless out of the box in the Filmmaker mode, requiring only minor tweaks. For those who like a slightly brighter picture, the Movie mode is also solid, though you may want to turn off settings like motion smoothing. Whatever your settings, you’ll want to ensure the oddly inaccurate Intelligent Mode is off.
Inner Reflection
Samsung’s new anti-glare screen technology is the S95D’s most exclusive feature and works phenomenally well compared to other such options. As previewed at Samsung’s TV event in March, the matte surface is incredibly effective at reducing reflections, even with lights aimed directly at the screen from mere feet away.
There is a trade-off for killing the glare. Part of the beauty of a perfectly black screen on which pixels only pop on demand is just that: perfect black. With the matte screen, lights or reflections aren’t the conspicuous eyesores they are with traditional screens, but they don’t all disappear completely. The screen diffuses but also expands some reflections across a broader area, raising its backdrop from glossy obsidian to lighter charcoal.
Thirty-four years ago, Kevin Costner debuted his corny, stirring, culturally iffy Western drama Dances with Wolves. It would go on to win a heap of Oscars, including the director prize for Costner. That success seemed to augur the arrival of a new actor-turned-auteur, a whole two years before Clint Eastwood won his Oscar for Unforgiven. But Costner’s directorial follow-up, The Postman, rang not even once; it was an expensive debacle that kept Costner away from the director’s chair for nearly a decade. He then returned to form, on a smaller scale, for Open Range, before going dormant once more.
In recent years, though, Costner has had a revival as an actor on the smash-hit neo-Western series Yellowstone. This, in turn, has given him the cachet to once again revisit the open skies and blazing guns of his cherished genre. He quit the series (for various scheduling reasons, it has been reported) and got to work on Horizon: An American Saga, a four-part epic that, one hoped, would be the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned movie event (of the non-superhero or sci-fi kind) that hardly exists anymore.
Chapter 1 of Horizon premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which seemed like a good omen. Surely this swank, pomp-and-circumstance festival would only premiere a film of quality—it could be a little hokey, but there’s nothing wrong with that if done well. But unfortunately, Horizon is far from stately, or even coherent. A jumble of clichéd plots rendered in washed-out color (and washed-out performances), Horizon may rival Megalopolis as the biggest American boondoggle at this year’s Cannes. Sure, what appears disorderly may turn out to be genius by the time we’ve seen the end of the project—but ten hours is an awfully long time to wait to find out.
The strangest, most dismaying thing about the film is that it doesn’t feel like a film at all. Costner, who co-wrote the script with Jon Baird, introduces us to a television season’s worth of characters and plot threads. He jumps from one location to another, much as Game of Thrones did. Yet Costner never lets us feel the grand interconnectedness of these stories. They play as distractions from each other, intruding when something else was maybe, possibly about to find some traction. The film ends with a scenes-from-the-next-installment clip reel, as if to entice us with more to come. But despite the first chapter’s three-hour runtime, we haven’t been given space to get interested in what’s being teased. The writing and direction is so erratic and confused that it’s near impossible to figure out who several characters are, let alone what they are seeking to accomplish.
The three central narratives, as I see it, concern the ragged townspeople of a settlement in the San Pedro River valley (called Horizon) ; a gruff gunslinger making his way across the mountains further north with a woman and a child in tow; and a Santa Fe Trail wagon train snaking its way toward Horizon. (I think?) There is, halfheartedly, a fourth thread, about schisms within the Apache tribes who are native to the territory on which Horizon was hastily built. But the film only pays them lip service. Mostly they function as the brutal antagonizers of the Horizon townsfolk, who are nearly wiped out in a nighttime raid that is one of the film’s very few action sequences—the rest is the dullest and hoariest of talk.
We might be deep in the digital age, but film photography has never gone away. Like records, which lived on through tapes, CDs, and now digital music, film continues on. However, while you can DIY develop film quite easily, making prints with an enlarger remains a cumbersome process that requires a dedicated space. The more economical alternative is to scan your film and print it digitally.
Professional scanning is expensive, and pro-level scanners are also expensive (not as expensive as enlarging your house to make way for a darkroom, but still not cheap). One popular solution is to photograph your negatives with a high-resolution digital camera. The resulting RAW file can then be touched up, sharpened, and printed like any other digital file.
And finally, photographing your images still isn’t as easy as it sounds. That’s where Valoi’s Easy35 film-scanning kit comes in. It’s everything you need to “scan” your 35-mm film in one simple-to-use kit. It’s a breeze to set up, fast to scan, and produces great results.
A Series of Tubes
Scanning film by photographing it is tricky business. You need a good light source, you need to keep the film absolutely flat, and you have to have the camera and lens aligned with the film so there’s no distortion.
Film photographers have been building scanning rigs for years, and there is a ton of great advice on Reddit and elsewhere, but if you want an off-the-shelf solution that eliminates the learning curve, the Valoi Easy35 film-scanning kit is the best option I’ve found.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
The Easy35 consists of a light box, with brightness and temperature controls for the backlight and slots on each side to feed your film through. Inside, there’s a film holder that helps your film slide through and line up. A series of tubes forms a light-tight tunnel between the film you’re photographing and the sensor in your digital camera.
The result is consistently excellent digital images of your film with very little effort.
There are some caveats, though. The big one is that this only works for 35-mm film. If you’re shooting medium format or larger, this won’t work. That a shame, because 120 and larger film is where you still have a resolution advantage over digital. I’d love to see Valoi build a 120 scanner, but for now it’s 35-mm and smaller (there’s a 110 adapter if you shoot 110 cartridges).
The next caveat is that you should probably have a camera with interchangeable lenses. It doesn’t have to be the best camera, but the quality of your results will depend on both the quality of the camera and lens you’re using. A 100-megapixel Fujifilm GFX is generally going to give you better results than a micro4/3s camera.
Four blank lines and a cursor. After getting through the setup pleasantries, that’s all you’re left with when you start a new draft on the Freewrite Alpha.
No spell check, no AI-powered notes on your grammar, and most certainly no other browser tabs to distract you from the ultimate goal of getting words down on the page.
Instead, Freewrite has taken its already distraction-free writing experience and shrunk the price tag some by cutting the Alpha’s screen down to almost nothing.
I might not be a novelist, but between news posts and reviews, I write somewhere in the region of 20,000 words a week. So, I thought, what better way to test a writing machine than to use it exclusively for a full week, to see how it holds up to the rigors of the online journalist’s grind?
Freewrite, in fairness to it, wouldn’t claim that this is the ideal plan for the Alpha—it’s a writer’s tool, sure, but it seems fairly clearly aimed at longer-term projects, on a grander scale. We’re talking novels, memoirs, manifestos.
Still, with cloud-storage syncing, I could have the Alpha immediately upload anything I write to Google Drive (or Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, or just its proprietary system called Postbox), so if I placed it on a desk in front of a computer monitor that I’d use to send drafts through to editors, there was nothing technically standing in my way.
So, one work week later, here I am, impressed by how the Alpha held up, but also wishing I were a novelist, since this device would so clearly suit that calling.
Writing Reformed
The Alpha is a simple plastic slab, with a small kickstand on the back that can’t be adjusted, and a mechanical keyboard on the front. It has a red power button, a few function keys on that keyboard, and a four-line LCD display.
It’s a word processor in the old-school 1980s sense of the word, capable of storing a large stash of drafts and syncing them over Wi-Fi when you’re connected.
Photograph: Freewrite
Moving between those drafts, changing your settings, and signing in and out can be a fiddly annoyance due to the lack of a touch interface or trackpad, but most people would find themselves doing that far more rarely than me, because, again, most people wouldn’t write eight news stories on it in a day.
Razer has made a name for itself in the gaming space, with robust gear that tackles the high demands and highly particular needs gamers have. The company makes everything from customizable gaming mice to powerful laptops. But can Razer meet the needs of gamers’ butts? With the Razer Fujin Pro gaming chair, it’s looking like the answer is yes.
Unlike most so-called gaming chairs, the Fujin Pro wouldn’t look out of place in a typical office. It avoids the all-too-common racing style seat, opting instead for a lightweight, breathable mesh over an aluminum alloy frame that looks stylish without being garish.
The Fujin Pro model has a few advantages over its less expensive cousin: The aforementioned aluminum frame replaces the nylon frame on the Fujin; the adjustable headrest is now an included option, rather than an add-on; the lumbar support can be adjusted both vertically and forward and backward; and the armrests can now be adjusted along four different directions.
It all adds up to a premium chair that would spoil any gamer.
S-Tier Support
The first thing that impressed me about the Fujin Pro was how incredibly easy it was to set up and customize. The aluminum frame is so sturdy that when inserting the seat back into the base, the frame was able to hold itself in place with minimal support while I screwed in the bolts. All told, the setup process took about 15 minutes.
Once the chair was upright, I expected to spend some time fiddling with levers and dials to get it positioned to my comfort, but even this was simpler than I anticipated. A switch on the right released the pneumatic cylinder to raise the seat to the correct height, and another on the left allowed me to slide the base of the seat forward and back. Both snapped back into place once I was satisfied and released them.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
This is all fairly standard, but the lumbar support and backrest surprised me the most. The lumbar module on the rear of the chair features a large dial, and two easy-to-grasp handles, both of which I could reach while sitting in the chair. The handles let me move the lumbar support higher or lower along my back, while the dial pushed the support forward or backward.
Meanwhile, the backrest has two modes. You can either pull a switch along the left side of the seat up to lock the back in place, or press it down to freely tilt the entire seat back. And when I say the entire seat, I mean the base and all. While the seat back can tilt further, independent of the base, the bottom of the seat tilts largely in tandem with the back, making the act of reclining extremely comfortable.
A dial under the right side of the chair base controls how much reclining resistance the chair provides, and it’s surprisingly strong. I usually prefer to keep my chair locked, as I have a tendency to slouch, but with the resistance dialed high, I was able to get enough give from the chair to lean back, without losing any support.
Up In Arms
Most of the time, I don’t care much for armrests on office chairs. They’re handy (ha) for sitting back at rest, but they either get in the way or aren’t in a position to be useful for the way I sit in my chair. But the Fujin Pro’s armrests are so versatile that I actually got some use out of them.
The armrests can be adjusted in four different ways. A switch on the outside allows you to adjust their height, and a button on the inside lets you slide them left or right. If this was all the customization the armrests provided, it would probably be sufficient.
I’m picky about my desk setup. I love working from home with my laptop stand, monitor, mechanical keyboard, and mouse, and I hate using just a laptop most of the time. But sometimes I want to work from the library or my sister’s kitchen counter without losing all the convenience of my peripherals. Enter Logitech’s Casa Pop-Up Desk.
The Pop-Up Desk weighs about 2.7 pounds and, when closed, looks like a small textbook. That means it fits in most backpacks and tote bags so you can take it anywhere. You open it to find a wireless keyboard and trackpad in their designated spots. Just pop ’em out and then configure the case into a stand to keep your laptop at eye level, using magnets to connect the platform to the edge of the case.
There’s also a compartment to hold the USB-C charging cord (it doesn’t come with a power block) that charges both accessories. It’s not big enough for much else, but it could also hold your phone charger too, a pen, and maybe a thin stack of Post-it Notes.
Photograph: Medea Giordano
Desk Mate
Logitech makes reliable keyboards, and we recommend many of them. I wish the Casa Pop-Up Desk included a cute mechanical keyboard, like Logitech’s Pop Keyboard, instead of a quieter membrane keyboard. I like clicky-clacky keys, but that would likely make the whole thing bigger, bulkier, and more expensive.
Still, the Casa Keys keyboard included here works well, with a slight incline for comfortable typing. It’s a compact keyboard, so it doesn’t have the numpad or function row. I prefer a full-size keyboard, but for use when I’m away from my desk it’s perfect. If you typically use your laptop keyboard anyway, you won’t be disappointed with it.
This review of AGGRO DR1FT was originally published after its screening at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It has been updated and republished for the film’s limited theatrical run.
It’s rare to see a movie that challenges basic ideas about how films are made or what they should look like. It’s even rarer to see a movie in that mode that’s actually enjoyable. AGGRO DR1FT, from Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum director Harmony Korine, made in collaboration with rapper and music producer Travis Scott, certainly doesn’t look like any kind of conventional movie, but it also isn’t an exception to the rule. It’s strange and mostly eventless — some viewers will probably jump ship on after five minutes or less. But it’s also utterly fascinating in the rare moments when it’s actually coherent.
AGGRO DR1FT follows BO (Jordi Mollà), a middle-aged man who loves his wife and children deeply. He’s also the world’s greatest assassin. He tells the audience both of these things directly, via omnipresent voice-over narration. The majority of the movie has BO wandering aimlessly around Florida from one meeting to the next. The encounters are only linked by his narration, which seems related to the plot only about half of the time. The plot, such as it exists, is about BO’s attempt to assassinate The Beast, a demonic villain with giant wings who has two katanas and hangs out with scantily clad women who he sometimes keeps in cages.
It isn’t really clear what The Beast did to earn the contract put on his head, but at one point, he stands between two women in bikinis and chants, “Dance, bitch. Dance, bitch” over and over again until the scene finally cuts and BO’s narration says, “There’s magic in this brutality.” I can’t say what that means for sure, but I can say that Korine seems to believe it’s true, and also that it’s exactly in keeping with the tone of the rest of the movie. More than once we see several uninterrupted seconds of The Beast pelvic thrusting while holding his sword and yelling, only for BO to cut in with narration telling us how terrifying The Beats is.
Image: EDGLRD
BO rolls around southern Florida buying sniper rifles, telling the audience to be careful of strippers because if you stare into their eyes for too long, you’ll lose your soul, and meeting with other assassins, including Travis Scott’s character, Zion, who BO seems to take under his wing. But after every brief trip, BO always returns to his home base, where his wife has been waiting in bed for him, while her voice over talks about how much she misses him and wants to have sex with him.
What makes all this fascinating, though, is AGGRO DR1FT is accidentally a more insightful look at an incel’s fantasies than most of the movies that actually attempt to portray incel life.
BO is a bit of a schlub, but he has a cool, sexy job, a cool, sexy wife, and a family he loves very much, and would do anything to protect. He also sees evil everywhere in a cruel and horrible world. It just happens to look like a demon in a mask, holding samurai swords. His wife is perfect and must be protected, but strippers are evil sirens who exist to steal men’s souls.
All this performative hyper-masculinity feels like it’s been filtered through the lens of a 14-year-old boy screaming on Xbox Live over a game of Modern Warfare 2. Evil is something you vanquish with a special sniper rifle, and women are made to be protected, not spoken to. The movie doesn’t create a coherent ideology, but it’s clear BO’s worldview is inherently self-righteous, and the world of the movie contorts itself around justifying him.
What’s unique about AGGRO DR1FT is seeing all of this presented so brazenly, and without the defense of irony or sarcasm to dress it up. Like most of the movie, though, it’s fascinating to think about, but an absolute slog to actually watch.
The most uncomplicatedly interesting thing about AGGRO DR1FT, though, is the way it looks: Shot entirely with an infrared camera, with morphing neon colors that are often inverted, moving characters from bright featureless red to bright featureless blue, the movie looks unique. These aren’t entirely successful choices — the movie often just looks like an ugly mess of colors. But it’s a style that a different, more carefully conceived and directed movie could use well. The blocky neon vagueness of the bright colors often used in infrared photography also grants space to the movie’s best and most interesting feature: shifting illustrations that show up inside of the colors.
Image: EDGLRD
When a character or space (like the sky, for instance) slips all the way into a deep red hue, ink-like illustrations start to appear inside of the color, creating demonic heads, intricate machine parts, or presumably any other design Scott or Korine thought looked neat. These moments sometimes mean things, like when a massive demon-monster appears as BO commits a particularly nasty bit of violence, which seems to reflect his own self-image. Though these illustrations pop up constantly throughout the movie, especially in the second half, they feel criminally underthought, and like a disappointing waste of a great stylistic choice.
Reading all this, it might be tempting assume that, in spite of its flaws, AGGRO DR1FT is at least entertaining or exciting. I cannot stress enough that it is not. For all the movie’s talk about demons and assassinations, most of the movie’s nearly 90-minute runtime is taken up by characters driving from place to place, awkwardly standing around, or walking around southern Florida.
Writing a review of AGGRO DR1FT is already letting Korine win. It’s defiantly non-traditional and deliberately provocative. I can’t say that the movie really made me mad, but I can say I’m happy to let Harmony Korine win. He’s earned it; AGGRO DR1FT is an obtuse, ridiculous, headache-inducing movie to watch. It’s nearly impossible to tell whether any moment of the movie is entirely a joke or entirely sincere — it’s called AGGRO DR1FT, for God’s sake. It’s a meaningless phrase, rendered in all capital letters with a 1 standing in for an I; for all we know, it might as well be Travis Scott’s Gamertag. But the movie is more than that too. It’s as clear a depiction of a certain kind of distinctly male-coded interior life as I’ve ever seen, and there is value to making that in such a weirdly unfiltered way. AGGRO DR1FT isn’t an enjoyable or particularly well-made movie, but it is the movie I’ve thought about most this year. For better or worse, that’s worth something.
There’s an elegance to efficiency. Doing as much as possible with as few resources as you can requires coming up with clever solutions that you might not have otherwise needed. That’s part of what makes Logitech’s G Pro X 60 keyboard so impressive. It’s a 60 percent variant of our top keyboard pick but manages to keep nearly everything we like about its larger sibling.
A 60 percent keyboard is one of the smallest, most compact keyboard layouts you can find. In addition to lopping off the Numpad like most TKL boards (including the G Pro X) do, the Pro X 60 further compacts itself by removing the navigation keys like Page Up, Page Down, etc., the arrow keys, and the row of function keys along the top.
If you need any of these buttons, you can access most of them by holding Fn and pressing one of the keys on the regular keyboard. Small indicators on the front of the keys show you which buttons map to what function, which is pretty typical for most 60 percent keyboards. However, much of what we liked about the original G Pro X TKL were the extra features that Logitech added on top of the basics. Surely, those would have to be cut to fit into such a low profile. Right? Not necessarily.
Smart Space Saving
One of my favorite keyboard features also happens to be one that most keyboards cut first when they need to save space: the volume wheel. The Pro X TKL had one in the top right corner, easily accessible with my right hand. At first, I was disappointed (if not surprised) to see that this feature was gone on the Pro X 60.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
That was until I noticed a small dial on the left side of the Pro X 60. Only one other keyboard I’ve tested has put the volume roller on the left side, and I loved it for that. Logitech’s keyboard takes a more subtle approach than the previous NZXT model I used, embedding the volume roller into the side of the keyboard, where it’s easily accessible but out of the way.
Similarly, the Game Mode toggle is now a switch embedded in the right side of the keyboard, while on the Pro X TKL it’s a button on the top left. The Game Mode switch lets you easily disable keys like the Windows button or the context menu key that don’t have any real use in a game aside from interrupting your game right before you’re about to land a headshot. No, I’m not bitter.
Connection Convenience
I’m glad for the physical buttons, because one of my favorite aspects of Logitech hardware is how easily they swap between devices. The Pro X 60 supports the company’s Lightspeed connection—via a 2.4-Ghz USB dongle—which dramatically reduces latency when compared with protocols like Bluetooth.
Along the rear of the keyboard there are two buttons to switch between Bluetooth and Lightspeed connections. They’re easy to reach without being in the way. Personally, I like this location better than it being directly on the surface of the keyboard. I occasionally accidentally swap devices on my main keyboard, leading to interruptions, but this placement keeps the buttons convenient with less risk of mistakes.
The faster connection really matters only when you’re playing fast-paced games, but I play way too much Overwatch 2, so that low latency matters to me. However, I don’t care as much when I want to switch over to my laptop. So, for that, I can use the Bluetooth connection. With the dedicated buttons on the Pro X 60, it’s one tap to quickly switch to typing on a different device.
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