I previously wrote an article comparing Zigbee vs Z-Wave and the pros and cons of each smart home technology. Thread is a new smart home communication protocol that builds upon the Zigbee specification and is available at no cost; however, this requires agreement and continued adherence to an End-User License Agreement (EULA). Albeit, you have…
I have recently covered several smart home products, and many of these use the Zigbee communication protocol. There is also the Z-Wave which I have covered extensively in the past, and then you have Thread which is an up-and-coming protocol. It can get confusing what the difference is between these technologies and which is best,…
The Nest WiFi Pro was announced back in October 2022. Google chose to skip WiFi 6 and jump straight to WiFi 6E, giving this router the new 6GHz band, which provides superior throughput for short range connectivity. Like the older Nest routers, this works as a mesh system and can be paired with other Nest WiFi…
Aqara are one of the first companies to begin the rollout of the new Matter royalty-free home automation standard. Matter is a new connectivity standard for IoT devices to enable a wide variety of smart home accessories to work together across brands and ecosystems. Via an M2 hub with this new firmware, the Aqara Zigbee…
Creative announced the Sound Blaster PLAY! 4 back in February, offering some useful improvements from the previous Sound Blaster PLAY! 3. With most of us working from home in the past year, Creative has added several features to the Sound Blaster Play! 4 that will significantly improve the quality of calls, including a clever auto-muting…
OnePlus have arguably shifted their strategy from being the flagship killer to going right up against premium-priced flagship phones. As they introduced more features to keep critics happy, the prices went up, causing critics from a different direction. Similar to previous years, the OnePlus 9 Pro ups the spec with a new Hasselblad collaboration with…
THX, the renowned audio company originally founded by George Lucas, has traditionally never developed hardware. THX itself is a quality assurance system guaranteeing that the sound produced by something meets its standards. Originally this was for movie theatres ensuring everything was perfectly set up to replicate the sound of movies perfectly. This certification then trickled…
This is a quick short post to highlight the specs of the new Ring Video Doorbell 4 and how it is different to the existing Video Doorbell 3. Key differences This post can be condensed down to 4 lines of differences: Plus model dropped Standard model now includes pre-roll Pre-roll is now colour Video Doorbell…
Ring has been on one with product launches recently; with pressure increasing from competing brands, they will likely want to establish their dominance (in the doorbell market at least). Ring Video Doorbell 4 with colour pre-roll for £179 – No Plus model? I was provided with an embargoed announcement to write this up, which is…
As usual Samsung are at the forefront of introducing the latest Wi-Fi to their consumer devices. They were one of the only companies to offer WiFi 6 back in 2019 when the Samsung Galaxy S10 launched. This trend has continued, this year the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra features WiFi 6E while other phones such as…
When the Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 was first announced, I expressed some criticism towards Qualcomm; rebranding an existing chipset seems lazy and a marketing gimmick. However, I am not opposed to the reusing of old chipsets, I thought it was a superb idea with the Realme X3 SuperZoom. It is likely Qualcomm saw the value in…
The new Acer Swift 3x is one of the first laptops on the market to launch with the new discrete Iris Xe Max GPU. It is far from a gaming GPU but instead aimed at aimed at improving performance for GPU orientated productivity such as photo and video editing. The Xe Max GPU will therefore…
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