作者彙整: Daniel Bader

Right now, the best smartwatch for Android users is the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2. It’s optimized for Samsung phones but runs well on all Android devices and has all the smartwatch and fitness features you’d expect. It’s compact and lightweight but still offers good battery life. But if you’re not into that one, the good news is that there are so many other amazing options from Fossil to Garmin to Fitbit and more.

Best Overall — Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2

You don’t have to use a Samsung phone to enjoy the benefits of owning a Samsung smartwatch, and the Galaxy Watch Active 2 provides the most well-rounded wearables experience for Android users right now. It’s compact and lightweight but features an extremely sharp and vivid touch display that’s easy to navigate and fun to use thanks to the new capacitive bezel. The Tizen OS is smooth and battery-friendly, unlike Google’s own Wear OS, and while the app selection isn’t massive, the core tenets are there, like Spotify, Stra… 閱讀全文 →

It’s 2020, and flagship smartphones are all nearly a thousand dollars or more. But as high-end phones get more expensive, cheaper phones are getting better. Phones under $300 are beautifully designed, with great screens, super-long battery life, excellent cameras, and awesome speakers. We’ve researched and ranked all of the best cheap Android phones you can buy, and with our buyer’s guide, you’ll find the perfect phone for you.

Best Overall: Moto G7

The Moto G7 and its other budget counterparts on this list have impressive, high-resolution touchscreens, reliable software, and great cameras. Some features, like NFC, drive up manufacturing costs, so you have to weigh whether you need NFC-enabled features like mobile payments. And the Moto G7 also lacks the same graphical power as its more expensive competitors, but most games play without issue, even at medium or high settings, because Android games are designed to play on hardware of all sizes and prices.

At the same time, Motoro… 閱讀全文 →

CES is the place of tech dreams, where spectacle is paramount and the price of products is often out of the public’s reach. From massive 8K TVs to waterproof drones to AI-powered washing machines to… Alexa-powered Lamborghinis, there was an out-of-reach product for everyone at the show.

With over 4,500 exhibitors showing off hundreds of thousands of products, we’re rounding up some of the more garish and aspirational products we saw at CES 2020.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo with Amazon Alexa

Availability: Now, at select Lamborghini dealers
Price: $267,000+
Cheaper alternatives: Literally anything else?
More info here

Coming in at over $300,000 for most models, the new 2020 Lamborghini Huracan Evo is likely the most expensive Alexa speaker ever made (unless you count the diamond-encrusted Echo Dot I’m sure someone received for Christmas this year).

Alexa integration in a car is nothing new — it’s possible through the company’s dismally-inefficient Echo Auto or many third-pa… 閱讀全文 →

It’s hard to keep getting excited about true wireless earbud announcements, especially at a show like CES when they come fast and often, but when the company is Audio-Technica you stand up and perk your ears.

The ATH-ANC300TW is not the first pair of true wireless earbuds from Audio-Technica, but they’re the first with active noise cancelation, and based on my quick impressions with them from CES 2020, these $230 earbuds could be the stars of the show.

A bumpy road to Bluetooth

Audio-Technica has been making headphones for the better part of its near 60-year history, but the last few years have been relatively turbulent for the company, steeped in the tradition of wired products aimed at audiophiles.

Like many of the big names in the space — Sennheiser, Beyerdynamic, Master & Dynamic, and others — the transition to Bluetooth was largely forced on them, and many didn’t anticipate how much the addition of technology in their analog products would change and chal… 閱讀全文 →

These phones don’t have a price or release date, but they’re pretty nice all the same.

Samsung’s no stranger to strange moves, but announcing the S10 Lite and Note 10 Lite only weeks before it plans to introduce the next flagship Galaxy phones at an Unpacked event on February 11 is one of the weirder things the company’s done lately.

The phones themselves, however, aren’t particularly remarkable. They’re big, rounded hunks of metal and glass, with cobbled-together specs from a bunch of different Samsung phones released over the past year. And we still don’t know availability and pricing on either of them, which is even stranger given how quickly they’re about to be overshadowed.

Still, it’s impressive just how capable these devices are, especially considering they’re likely to be priced considerably under what the regular Galaxy phones cost today.

A shared lineage

If you were to look at both of these phones from the front, you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference… 閱讀全文 →

Jabra’s also launching MySound to allow for more personalized listening experiences.

What you need to know

The Jabra Elite Active 75t is a new take on the already-excellent true wireless earbuds.
Jabra is promoting better durability with the Active model, along with it being 22% smaller than the Elite Active 65t.
In Q2 2020, Jabra MySound is launching as a new software experience for optimizing Jabra audio products for people’s individual ears.

I’ve written many times about how it wasn’t the AirPods that turned me into a true wireless earbud fanatic, but the Jabra Elite 65t. That relegation didn’t happen until January 2019, months after the product was released too much acclaim. At the time, I still vacillated between form factors for specific tasks: AirPods for listening to podcasts and phone calls while walking the dog (read: casual listening), neckbuds like the OnePlus Bullets Wireless for music listening on the go, and noise-canceling wireless headphones for commuting and fl… 閱讀全文 →

Looking back on the decade, from micro to macro.

Some of us may hate end-of-year roundups, but I’m not one of them. I start looking forward to them in mid-November, as the beginnings of the year’s end start to permeate our culture’s subconscious. January was a long time ago, and I can’t be blamed for not recalling in pristine detail the albums I adored, the movies I savored, the TV shows I binged, the podcasts I devoured, and the books I didn’t finish (new parents will understand).

But this year being the end of a decade also offers a new layer of narrative gold to plunder. We just published our massive 20,000-word Decade in Review series, looking back at the 2010s through the lens of Google and Android, along with some products and services our editors thought signified high points in our technological journeys. We’ve all been there: the first phone that brought us into the Android fold; the smart home doohickey that woke us up to the possibilities of automation; the streaming box… 閱讀全文 →

These are the stories that mattered this decade.

Google

Top Google stories of the decade
Google Home & Google Assistant
Moto X
Roku
Chromecast & Google Cast
HDR+
Samsung Galaxy S7
Alexa & Amazon Echo
HTC One M7
Robot Vacuums
Google Cardboard
Google Wifi

Apple

Apple across the decade
Rene Ritchie’s product of the decade
The iPad
iPhone 4s
Qi charging
iPhone 5c
iOS 8
Apple Watch
Pokémon Go
Nintendo Switch
iPad Pro
iPhone 11 Pro

Microsoft

Top Microsoft news stories
Surface Pro
Windows as a service
The Xbox revolution
AMD vs. Intel
OneDrive

Ten years. It’s an impossibly long time in the tech space, and it’s similarly impossible to highlight all of the major events and stories that shaped the world during the period. So we’re not going to do that.

Instead, we’re going to highlight a few of what we think are the biggest Google and Android-related stories from each year in this decade, starting with 2010.

We’re not pretending this is every story pertaining… 閱讀全文 →

It’s 2019, and flagship smartphones are all nearly a thousand dollars or more. But as high-end phones get more expensive, cheaper phones are getting better. Phones under $300 are beautifully designed, with great screens, super-long battery life, excellent cameras, and awesome speakers. We’ve researched and ranked all of the best cheap Android phones you can buy, and with our buyer’s guide, you’ll find the perfect phone for you.

Best Overall: Moto G7

The Moto G7 and its other budget counterparts on this list have impressive, high-resolution touchscreens, reliable software, and great cameras. Some features, like NFC, drive up manufacturing costs, so you have to weigh whether you need NFC-enabled features like mobile payments. And the Moto G7 also lacks the same graphical power as its more expensive competitors, but most games play without issue, even at medium or high settings, because Android games are designed to play on hardware of all sizes and prices.

At the same time, Motoro… 閱讀全文 →

Not everybody needs to spend upwards of a thousand dollars on their phone just to get by, especially those on prepaid carriers looking to cut down on spending wherever possible. Luckily, phones at all price ranges have gotten great lately, and that holds especially true in the budget category. It was previously a wasteland of near-unusable devices, but now you can get a shockingly good and reliable phone these days for under a Benjamin.

Best unlocked phone

Moto E6

Staff pick

The Moto E6 is a lot of phone, with a 5.5-inch 18:9 display, a 3,000mAh battery, and modern Android 9 Pie software powered by an octa-core processor. It works on virtually any carrier (even CDMA networks), and it’s one of the few remaining phones with a user-replaceable battery. It’s also somewhat water-resistant, protected by a p2i coating. The one thing it’s missing — and this is a big one — is a fingerprint sensor, meaning you’ll have to revert back to using a PIN for security.

$100 at Amazo… 閱讀全文 →