There was a time when every airplane seat had a headphone jack and every passenger had a tangled pair of cheap earbuds. Today, most of us carry excellent Bluetooth headphones, but the seat-back entertainment system still expects us to plug something in. It’s an annoying little problem that has spawned an entire category of travel gadgets.

British audio company iFi thinks it can do better with the UP Travel Max, a $129 Bluetooth transmitter and receiver that promises CD-quality wireless audio in a package smaller than a USB stick.

The interesting part isn’t just that it works on airplanes. It’s that it can bring Bluetooth to practically anything with a 3.5mm audio jack, including that old iPod sitting in your drawer.

A Little Adapter That Does Both Jobs

The UP Travel Max is essentially two devices in one. In transmit mode, it takes audio from a wired source and sends it to Bluetooth headphones. Plug it into an airplane entertainment system, for example, and you can watch a movie using your own wireless headphones instead of the airline’s terrible complimentary pair.

Flip a switch and it becomes a Bluetooth receiver. Plug it into your car’s auxiliary input and you can stream music from your phone to an older stereo that doesn’t support Bluetooth.

This isn’t a new concept, but iFi has made a few interesting design decisions. The 3.5mm connector flips out of the body like an old-fashioned car key, eliminating the need for a dangling adapter cable. The whole thing weighs just 25.7 grams and promises up to 10 hours of battery life.

It’s also an interesting accessory for the growing number of people rediscovering dedicated music players. If you’ve got an old iPod Classic or another MP3 player with a headphone jack, the UP Travel Max can turn it into a Bluetooth music player without modifying the hardware.

That’s arguably more interesting than its airplane functionality. There’s something appealing about carrying an old iPod loaded with thousands of songs while still enjoying modern wireless headphones.

The Audiophile Approach to Bluetooth

Most inexpensive Bluetooth adapters are built around a single chip that handles practically everything. iFi has taken a different approach, pairing a dedicated Qualcomm Bluetooth processor with a Cirrus Logic MasterHIFI digital-to-analog converter.

The company says this arrangement provides better sound quality than conventional all-in-one adapters.

The UP Travel Max supports several Bluetooth codecs, including aptX Lossless, LDAC and aptX Adaptive. The headline feature is aptX Lossless, which can deliver CD-quality audio under suitable conditions when paired with compatible headphones or speakers.

There is a catch, of course. Both ends of the connection need to support the appropriate codec, and the source audio and wireless conditions also matter. Plugging this into an airplane entertainment system won’t magically improve the quality of the movie soundtrack. Likewise, if your headphones don’t support aptX Lossless, you won’t get lossless transmission.

Still, the flexibility is welcome. LDAC provides another high-quality option, while aptX Adaptive offers a low-latency mode intended to keep audio synchronized with video.

A button on the adapter allows users to switch codecs, and holding it down identifies the active codec.

iFi has also included JVCKENWOOD’s K2 Technology, which uses digital processing to reconstruct some of the high-frequency detail and harmonics lost during audio compression. Whether that sounds better will depend on your ears and your source material, but it’s an unusual feature for a travel adapter.

Two Headphones, One Movie

One of the more practical features is support for two pairs of Bluetooth headphones simultaneously.

That means two passengers can watch the same airplane movie without sharing earbuds or carrying a headphone splitter. Anyone who has tried to watch a film with another person on a long flight will appreciate the idea.

The adapter also supports Auracast, the Bluetooth broadcasting technology that allows compatible headphones and speakers to join a shared audio stream. iFi says this can support an unlimited number of listeners, although everyone needs compatible equipment.

Auracast and several other features are managed through iFi’s Nexis smartphone app. The app also handles firmware updates, codec settings, K2 processing and battery optimization.

In receiver mode, the device includes a built-in microphone with Qualcomm noise and echo suppression for hands-free calling. That makes it potentially useful for older cars with auxiliary inputs but no integrated Bluetooth calling system.

Is It Worth $129?

The obvious question is whether a $129 Bluetooth adapter is necessary when inexpensive alternatives already exist.

For someone who just wants to connect wireless headphones to an airplane seat once or twice a year, probably not. Basic transmitters can handle that job for considerably less money.

The UP Travel Max makes more sense for someone who regularly switches between different audio setups. It can connect wireless headphones to an airplane screen, bring Bluetooth streaming to an older car stereo and give an old iPod a new lease on life. It also offers more sophisticated codec support than many basic adapters.

The dedicated DAC, dual-headphone pairing and Auracast support make the package more interesting, although the real-world sound benefits will depend heavily on the devices connected to it.

I particularly like the idea of using it with an old iPod. There is a growing appetite for music players that don’t require notifications, subscriptions or a cellular connection. Adding wireless audio without changing the experience seems like a sensible upgrade.

The iFi UP Travel Max is available beginning October 29, 2026, for $129 in the US, £129 in the UK and €139 in Europe, through iFi Audio.

It’s a fairly expensive solution to a small problem. Then again, if you’ve ever found yourself on a 10-hour flight staring at a headphone jack while holding a perfectly good pair of Bluetooth headphones, you already understand why it exists.

I’m an inveterate Apple fanboy. I buy nearly every odd-numbered iPhone release because I can’t justify spending $1,000 or more on a new phone every year anymore, and I upgrade my MacBook Pros every few years. I’ll be the first to admit that the speeds-and-feeds benefits of upgrading are fairly limited in Apple’s case. You’re basically buying a slightly faster version of the same machine every time. But there is definitely a reason to upgrade as batteries age, performance begins to lag and the general usability of older models degrades.

This upgrade path, familiar to anyone with an Apple fetish, is fine. It’s natural. It works. And one day, when it no longer makes sense to buy one of the best-designed laptops with some of the best specifications and the best operating system in the world, I’ll be the first to dump my MacBook for a Dell or an intracranial link or whatever comes next.

Given Apple’s recent product launches, however, I’m beginning to wonder whether that day is coming sooner than I expected.

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I love electric bikes. I’ve ridden a Retrospec Jax around the city since about 2021 and ended up welding the seat post back onto the frame simply because I couldn’t stand to lose access to that beast of an e-bike. That said, I might be ready to part with the Jax if I can get my hands on an Also TM-B.

The TM-B isn’t a conventional electric bicycle. Developed by ALSO, a company spun out of electric vehicle maker Rivian, the TM-B brings automotive engineering, integrated software and a new approach to electric propulsion to two-wheeled transportation. Starting in the $3,000 range, with Performance and Launch Edition models priced at $4,500, it’s designed for riders who want something more capable than a typical commuter e-bike.

First off let me note that the price tag is quite high for something like this but there are a few benefits to the TM-B over something like the Retrospec Jax. First, this thing runs on 60 miles on a single charge. That’s a huge deal. If you use manual mode — meaning you pedal and it offers pedal assist — you’re going to be enjoying that full 60 miles or more. If you’re a throttle jockey like me you’ll see about 10 miles less but you’re still hitting far more than a standard e-bike. Next, as mentioned above, this is the Apple iPhone of e-bikes. It’s well-built, high-tech, and eschews the “make a regular bike and add a battery” nature of cheaper brands. You’re buying an electric vehicle here, not a bike. Would I pay $4,500 for this thing? The answer is a resounding maybe, but it’s well worth the price if you intend to use this as an alternative to a second car for trips around a smaller city.

Back to the bike.

The biggest difference between regular e-bikes and the TM-B is the so-called Dream Ride propulsion system. Unlike traditional bicycles, there’s no mechanical connection between the pedals and the rear wheel. Instead, pedaling generates electricity that powers a custom-built motor, delivering up to 180 Nm of torque at the wheel. The system electronically controls pedaling resistance, allowing riders to maintain a consistent feel whether climbing hills or cruising on flat roads. Regenerative braking captures energy during deceleration and returns it to the battery, helping extend the bike’s claimed range of up to 100 miles, depending on configuration and riding conditions. This “pedal by wire” feature is honestly amazing. Further, it reduces the need for traditional bike parts. The only things moving here are the regenerative disk brakes and the rubber chain. Everything else is self-contained.

The TM-B also takes an unusual approach to construction. Its central magnesium structure houses the motor, removable battery and key electronic configurations for recreation, cargo carrying and more comfortable everyday riding. A built-in touchscreen-style control experience, delivered through Also’s high-contrast Portal LCD display, provides navigation, ride settings, media controls and battery information. You can also change the riding style from automatic to manual. Manual also places the bike into trail bike mode, allowing you for pedal assist while hitting the gravel. There is also walking assist which gives you a boost when pushing the bike up hills and holds the 80 pound beast back when going down them.

Security is another major focus. The TM-B can recognise its owner through a connected smartphone, automatically unlocking when approached and locking when the rider walks away. Electronic motor immobilisation, tamper alerts, GPS tracking and remote disabling add protection against theft. Over-the-air software updates also allow Also to improve features and performance after purchase. While I liked this feature, you’re going to want to lock this thing down with a chain if you’re in a big city.

The TM-8 can hit speeds of up to 28 mph in some riding modes and has great air or spring suspension, depending on the model. The Performance model, for example, has a 100 mile battery and better shocks while the standard model gives you a 500 Wh battery. There is also a system for removing the seat and top frame, allowing you to add a cargo kit or a better seat for trail riding.

The Bottom Line

I rode the TM-B for an afternoon through Brooklyn and found it very zippy with great pickup and excellent brakes. The bikes definitely needed grippier road tires for the leaf and shmutz-strewn Brooklyn bike paths, and because the bike is so well-engineered, I found myself sliding to a stop more than once. Basically, the brakes caught a little too well.

The bike looks like something out of the heyday of hardware startups when companies like Juicero and Canary redesigned the same-old, same-old products with a Silicon Valley edge. They rarely survived.

Also, sadly, might follow in their footsteps.

I want it to survive simply because there is plenty of unique engineering ingenuity on display here, and I love the design, utility, and thoughtful touches like lockdown mode. Is it over-engineered? Absolutely. People are riding around on far worse bikes, and cladding something in white plastic and giving it a cool LCD display doesn’t make much sense for someone who might use this to deliver DoorDash.

But again, this isn’t for the delivery guy. It’s for the folks who want an electric bike and trail bike and also want to look cool. This is definitely the Jony Ive-style e-bike that will make SF denizens salivate, but it might not translate well in the burbs.

Ultimately, this thing is very cool, very usable, and very expensive. What that means to you as the consumer is that you need to decide if you want to ride the iPhone Duo of e-bikes or if you’re fine with the flip phone that you won’t mind crashing into a wall at some point. I know my choice — I’d want something slightly less precious — but your desires might vary.

There was a brief period around the year 2000 when technology companies seemed convinced that everything in the physical world needed a connection to the internet. Magazines, newspapers, advertisements and product packaging were all opportunities to send consumers to websites, provided somebody could invent a sufficiently complicated way to get them there.

You’ll notice what I just wrote: they wanted to put magazines and newspapers on the Internet. But not in the way we think about them now. Print publishers saw the Internet as a gaping maw about to swallow them up, a Neverending Story-esque Nothing that would destroy their bottom lines. And they are absolutely right.

The solution? Why not connect paper to the Internet in a way that would give readers just enough of an online connection but keep them headed to Borders to pick up the latest issue of Cat Fancy.

Enter the CueCat, one of the strangest computer accessories of the dot-com era.

The CueCat was a small barcode scanner shaped like a cat. It connected to a computer, sat on your desk and waited for you to scan special barcodes printed in magazines and advertisements. The accompanying software would then open a related website, saving you the supposedly arduous task of typing a URL into your browser.

It was a solution to a problem that most people didn’t know they had. But for a short time, the CueCat had some of the biggest names in American publishing behind it.

A cat-shaped bridge between print and the web

The CueCat was developed by Digital Convergence, a Dallas-based company led by entrepreneur J. Jovan Philyaw, who later became known as J. Hutton Pulitzer. The device launched in 2000, at the height of the dot-com boom, when investors were willing to fund almost anything that promised to connect traditional media with the rapidly growing internet.

The idea was relatively straightforward. Instead of printing a website address in a magazine, an advertiser could print a special barcode. Readers would scan the code with their CueCat, and Digital Convergence’s software would direct their browser to the appropriate online destination.

The company called this process cueing.

The hardware itself was wonderfully peculiar. Its elongated body resembled a crouching cat, with a scanning window at the front and a tail-like cable at the back. Early units connected through a PS/2 keyboard interface, allowing the scanner to send data to the computer much like a keyboard would.

The CueCat wasn’t designed to be an independent device. It needed a computer, the company’s software and an internet connection to do anything particularly useful.

That was a lot of infrastructure to replace typing something like example.com. But, as you might recall, URLs were still deeply confusing. Further, there was no way to attribute a click to a certain magazine. If an advertiser wanted to see if someone visited their site because of a magazine ad, they needed some way to attribute interest. All of this was very primitive, to be clear, but the CueCat promised at least some level of attribution.

RadioShack and the magazine industry get involved

Digital Convergence wasn’t simply a tiny startup handing out novelty gadgets. The company secured major commercial relationships, including backing and distribution through RadioShack and partnerships with publishers.

RadioShack distributed CueCats through its stores, while magazines such as Wired and publications associated with Forbes participated in the program. Millions of scanners were produced and distributed, often at no cost to consumers.

The strategy was to build an audience first. If enough people had a CueCat on their desks, advertisers and publishers could pay to connect printed material to online content.

Digital Convergence also experimented with codes embedded in television and radio audio, extending the idea beyond printed barcodes.

In theory, it was an early version of the physical-to-digital advertising systems we now take for granted. In practice, it required consumers to install special software, register the device and keep a dedicated scanner next to their computers.

The inconvenience was considerable, particularly when the alternative was simply reading a web address.

When the cat got hacked

The CueCat had another problem, and this one was considerably more serious than the inconvenience of scanning magazine pages.

To use the official software, consumers had to register with Digital Convergence. Each scanner carried a unique identification number that could be transmitted along with scanned codes, raising concerns about the company’s ability to track individual users and their reading habits.

In September 2000, a security vulnerability exposed registration information associated with approximately 140,000 users. The incident attracted criticism at a time when consumers were becoming increasingly aware of online privacy, and Digital Convergence offered affected users a $10 RadioShack gift certificate.

Meanwhile, programmers discovered that the hardware was more useful than the company’s intended application. By modifying the scanner or using alternative software, they could turn it into a general-purpose barcode reader.

Suddenly, a device designed to send consumers to advertisers’ websites could be used to catalogue books, organise CD collections or scan grocery products. Wired documented several of these projects in December 2000, including applications that retrieved book information and product details from online databases.

Digital Convergence initially resisted this experimentation, asserting restrictions on modifying its hardware and software. That only generated more criticism. The company had given away enormous numbers of scanners, and hobbyists were finding uses for them that were arguably more practical than the original business model.

In a strange way, the CueCat became successful as a piece of hardware precisely when people stopped using it as intended.

The collapse

By 2001, the CueCat’s problems were becoming impossible to ignore. Digital Convergence had spent heavily on distribution, software and partnerships, but there was little evidence that consumers wanted to make barcode scanning part of their daily internet use.

The company had attracted roughly $185 million in investment, according to a retrospective published by Hackaday. But giving away millions of scanners was expensive, and the advertising business needed to justify that investment never developed as hoped.

In May 2001, Digital Convergence laid off most of its workforce. Major investors began writing off their investments, and the company ultimately collapsed.

The scale of the failure was remarkable. Millions of CueCats had been manufactured, with large quantities eventually ending up as surplus electronics. In 2005, a liquidator offered two million unsold units at just 30 cents apiece in bulk.

For a device that had once been promoted as a new way to navigate the internet, that was a fairly undignified ending.

The CueCat was a QR code with extra steps

The most interesting thing about the CueCat is that its underlying idea wasn’t particularly bad.

Today, scanning a printed code to open a website is completely ordinary. Restaurants use QR codes for menus, advertisers put them on posters and manufacturers print them on packaging. Most smartphones can recognise these codes using their built-in cameras, without dedicated hardware or proprietary desktop software.

The CueCat anticipated that relationship between physical media and digital content, but its implementation was unnecessarily complicated.

You needed to own the scanner, connect it to a computer, install the software, register an account and scan a compatible barcode. The computer also needed an internet connection, which in 2000 frequently meant dial-up.

QR codes eventually succeeded partly because smartphones removed nearly all those barriers. A camera was already in your pocket, and opening a website required little more than pointing it at a printed square.

There was also a fundamental difference in how the systems operated. CueCat’s original model relied on Digital Convergence’s infrastructure to interpret codes and route users to websites. Standard QR codes can directly encode web addresses, making them far less dependent on one company’s servers.

The CueCat wasn’t the only precursor to modern QR-code marketing, but it remains one of the most memorable.

A strange little piece of internet history

Today, the CueCat survives as a collectible and a curiosity among retrocomputing enthusiasts. Some owners have modified the devices to work as ordinary barcode scanners, while others keep them as reminders of an era when internet companies were willing to spend extraordinary amounts of money on speculative consumer technology.

And the CueCat deserves to be remembered for more than its failure.

It demonstrated how difficult it was to persuade consumers to adopt dedicated hardware for a task that offered only a small improvement over something they could already do. It also illustrated the risks of tying a physical product to a proprietary online service, particularly when that service depends on a business model that hasn’t been proven.

Perhaps most importantly, it showed that users sometimes understand the value of a device differently from the company that created it.

Digital Convergence wanted the CueCat to revolutionise advertising. Hackers wanted a cheap barcode scanner. Consumers mostly wanted to visit websites without having to plug a plastic cat into their computers.

Twenty-six years later, it’s hard not to appreciate the absurdity of the whole thing. The CueCat was an attempt to build a bridge between print and the internet, backed by major publishers and millions of dollars.

The bridge eventually got built. It just didn’t need the cat.

Carbon fiber is usually associated with racing cars, expensive bicycles and aerospace equipment. Now Fosi Audio is putting it inside a pair of $150 earphones. The company’s new Carbon12 in-ear monitors (IEMs) use an ultra-thin carbon diaphragm, a titanium housing and a forged carbon fiber faceplate, combining some fairly exotic materials in a surprisingly affordable package.

The main attraction is the Carbon12’s 12mm dynamic driver, which uses Fosi Audio’s proprietary Ultra Thin Ply Technology (UTPT). The company claims this is the first IEM to use the technology, which produces a thin, rigid carbon diaphragm designed to move quickly and accurately. In theory, the combination of low weight and high stiffness should improve transient response, allowing the driver to reproduce quick changes in music with less unwanted vibration.

The earphones also feature a dual-chamber acoustic design. An open front chamber helps relieve pressure inside the ear while creating a more spacious soundstage, while damping foam in the rear chamber is designed to reduce standing waves and unwanted reflections. Fosi describes the resulting sound signature as warm and full-bodied, with slightly forward midrange frequencies that should suit vocals and pop music.

The construction is equally interesting. Each earbud uses a TC4 titanium alloy shell with a forged carbon fiber faceplate, giving every pair a slightly different pattern. Despite the materials, each earpiece weighs just 7.5 grams. The rounded housing is designed to sit comfortably in the ear during extended listening sessions, although actual comfort will depend on the fit.

Fosi includes a detachable four-core silver-plated oxygen-free copper cable with standard 0.78mm two-pin connectors and a 3.5mm plug. That means owners can replace the cable or upgrade to a 4.4mm balanced connection without replacing the earphones themselves. The package also includes ear tips in three sizes and interchangeable nozzle tuning foams with three density options, allowing listeners to adjust the treble response.

The Carbon12 has a claimed frequency response of 20Hz to 40kHz, an impedance of 37 ohms and a sensitivity of 108dB/Vrms. Fosi also specifies total harmonic distortion of no more than 0.5% at 1kHz. Those figures suggest the earphones should work with a portable digital audio player or a reasonably capable USB-C dongle DAC without requiring a large desktop amplifier.

At $149.99, the Carbon12 sits in a competitive part of the wired IEM market, where buyers have plenty of choices from established audio brands. The carbon diaphragm is an intriguing feature, but exotic materials don’t automatically guarantee better sound. Driver tuning, acoustic design and fit will ultimately matter more than the carbon fiber itself.

Still, the Carbon12 is an interesting addition to Fosi Audio’s growing lineup of personal audio equipment. The combination of a carbon diaphragm, titanium housing, detachable cable and adjustable sound tuning makes it worth a look for anyone interested in wired listening without spending several hundred dollars.

The Fosi Audio Carbon12 is priced at $149.99, with preorders listed as shipping from October 30, 2026.

Holy wow. I’ve been following Fosi for a while (we’ve done loads of coverage), and thus far the quality/price/value ratios for their gear — which have thus far ranged from headphone amps, earbuds, to powerful desktop and living room audio systems — have been excellent. Fast forward to, well, right now, and I’m blown away.

Their latest product, the $99 Audio DISC Nano CD Player, is what amounts to one of the funnest products I’ve used in a long time. It’s basically a portable CD player that outputs to standard audio cable, optical out, or even a balanced headphone output. The whole thing is able to be as big as a few CDs stacked on top of each other.

The most unusual part is its half-exposed disc design. Instead of hiding the CD inside a plastic case, the DISC Nano leaves part of the disc visible as it spins, secured by a snap-lock mechanism. It’s an interesting design choice that makes playing a physical album feel a little more deliberate, although you’ll probably want to be careful about where you put it. That said, seeing the CD spin like a dervish inside this little player is a real treat, a reminder that CDs are, despite the lasers, still physical media.

Inside is a Cirrus Logic CS43198 digital-to-analog converter, a chip normally associated with more serious portable audio equipment. The player includes both a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a 4.4mm balanced headphone output, along with an optical output for connecting it to an external DAC. It also supports Bluetooth, so you can listen through wireless headphones or speakers without abandoning your CD collection.

Fosi has even added a MagSafe-compatible magnetic mounting system, allowing you to attach the player to a desk stand, refrigerator, or other suitable mount. It doesn’t support wireless charging, but the built-in 800mAh battery recharges over USB-C. Electronic anti-shock protection is included to help prevent skipping when the player is moved.

The DISC Nano supports standard audio CDs, some CD-R and CD-RW discs, and the CD-compatible layer of hybrid SACDs. It measures 102 × 102 × 29mm, making it small enough to slip into a bag, although the exposed-disc design means it probably isn’t something you’ll want rattling around loose with your keys.

What’s appealing here is the combination of old and new. You get the experience of choosing an album and watching it spin, but with Bluetooth, balanced audio, and modern digital conversion.

For a cool $100, this thing is great. It plays CDs, it looks amazing, and the audio quality is solid. Sure, it’s small, sure, it’s silly, but if you have any selection of CDs in your junk drawer, this is exactly what you want: a cute, cool, and affordable alternative to an eBay Discman or buying a higher-end, audiophile solution just so you can hear Tricky like you heard him back in 1998.

Some caveats: the headphone jack is, as mentioned before, 4.4mm balanced, so you’re going to want to get some nice headphones or earbuds. Luckily, the AUX out in the back works fine, and because it has an optical out, it’s great for connecting to headphone amps or receivers. Basically, you get a high-end CD player in a tiny package that looks cool and will work with your standard home audio setup.

The Fosi Audio DISC Nano CD Player is a great product from a great company. If you want to play CDs in your future, buy this $99 gem. It’s honestly a no-brainer, and you’d definitely love how your old discs sound in this modern, if overly exposed, CD player.

When a vape starts to look like something out of Frankenstein’s lab I’m a little wary. That said, with the DaVinci EQ, DaVinci company has made something that is simultaneously cool, cool-looking, and immensely useful, especially if you’re focusing on vaping concentrates. Interestingly, the DaVinci EQ also now supports flower, something that makes this $499 device far more interesting to average folks.

DaVinci has spent years building its reputation around dry-herb vaporizers, with a particular emphasis on clean materials, flavor and precise temperature control. The Electric Quartz, or EQ, takes that same philosophy into a new category. It is DaVinci’s first dedicated e-rig, one built around a replaceable quartz crucible, glass vapor path, and on-device touchscreen. DaVinci gives it a wide 450°F to 650°F temperature range, customizable Smart Paths, USB-C charging and dual 3000mAh batteries rated for up to 50 sessions.

The centerpiece, though, is the quartz. Instead of hiding the concentrate inside an opaque chamber, the EQ lets you see what is happening as it melts. DaVinci pairs the quartz crucible with a glass bubbler and zirconia mouthpiece and carb cap, an unusually transparent setup both literally and figuratively. The company is clearly betting that people willing to spend this much on an e-rig care as much about what their vapor touches as they do about cloud size. Further, the EQ looks damn good.

Looks great, vapes great

That decision also defines the EQ’s strengths and weaknesses. In testing, I found the lower-temperature vapor smooth, clean and particularly good at preserving the flavor of concentrates. I’ve used a few handheld vapes before — I’ve mostly focused on flower — and this gave far more nuance than similar, smaller device. Heat-up is quick, and having a touchscreen means you can select an exact temperature without memorizing LED colors or pulling out your phone. Further, there aren’t a bunch of difficult lock sequences you have to memorize to get it to start up.

Because it heats from the bottom you’re going to have less of a burnt taste after a few puffs. Further, it’s quite gentle and pleasant. For both concentrates and flower I found the EQ to be superior to stuff I’ve tried from Storz & Bickel and even earlier DaVinci gear.

The Bottom Line

At $499, the DaVinci EQ is hardly an impulse purchase. It’s a serious piece of hardware for people who care about temperature control, flavor and the materials their vapor passes through. The addition of flower support makes the price much easier to justify, especially if you’re looking for one device that can handle both concentrates and dry herb without much fuss.

There are cheaper and more portable options, of course, and the EQ’s glass-heavy design means you probably won’t be tossing it into a backpack. But as a home vaporizer, it’s one of the most enjoyable devices I’ve tested. The touchscreen is genuinely useful, the vapor is excellent and the whole thing feels thoughtfully designed rather than needlessly complicated. It may look like something a mad scientist would keep on his desk, but the results are anything but experimental.

Before every smartphone became a featureless rectangle of glass, there was the T-Mobile Sidekick. It was chunky, colorful, and equipped with a screen that flipped open to reveal a full keyboard. It was also one of the first phones that made being online all the time feel normal.

The Sidekick was more than a phone. It was a portable instant messenger (AIM was the service of choice), email client, web browser, and social hub. At a time when most people were still struggling to type text messages using a numeric keypad, Sidekick owners were firing off messages on tiny QWERTY keyboards, chatting with friends, and checking their email from practically anywhere.

The best part? Unlike the stodgy Blackberry and its janky operating system, the Sidekick was fun. Some models had a little rollerball that let you pick the app you wanted to launch and the entire package was trendy, colorful, and fun.

For a few years in the 2000s, it was arguably the coolest piece of technology you could carry.

The Beginning: Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop

The Sidekick story begins in 1999 with a Silicon Valley startup called Danger, Inc. Founded by Andy Rubin, Joe Britt, and Matt Hershenson, the company wanted to build a mobile device designed around internet connectivity rather than traditional phone calls.

Rubin would later become famous for co-creating Android, but his earlier work at Danger helped establish many of the ideas that would define modern smartphones.

Before the T-Mobile Sidekick became one of the most recognizable mobile devices of the 2000s however, it was supposed to be a $1 keychain accessory that received data over FM radio.

At the time, the internet was dominated by portals like Yahoo and AOL, which offered email, calendars, news, and other services through a single website. These companies wanted users to spend as much time as possible on their sites, but there was a problem: most people could only access the internet from a desktop computer.

As one early Danger employee, Chris DeSalvo, recalled, “The huge problem facing portal developers then was that they only had access to users while they were at their desktop computer, often only at work.”

Danger’s first answer was a small device code-named Peanut. It had a basic LCD screen and a few buttons, and its purpose was to carry information from a user’s online account, including calendar entries, to-do lists, and recent emails.

The business model was unusual. Danger planned to sell Peanut to consumers for just $1, then charge internet portals a monthly fee to keep the devices updated. The hope was that Yahoo and other portal operators would pay to keep their users connected even when they were away from their computers.

Getting information onto Peanut required some creative engineering. Users could place the device in a dock connected to a computer’s serial port, then visit a website that used a custom browser plugin to transfer data. Danger even experimented with synchronized advertising, displaying an advertisement on the computer while showing a related animated ad on Peanut’s tiny screen.

The company also planned to deliver updates wirelessly using FM radio subcarriers. Danger would lease bandwidth from radio stations across the country and broadcast small amounts of data to devices within range.

The technology worked, and the company considered ways to use it for location-based advertising. Retailers could install low-power transmitters that would send promotional offers to people walking nearby.

“We liked to talk about folks walking past a Starbucks, having their Peanut go <ding>, looking down at it, and seeing that they’d just received a 10% off coupon that was good for the next 5 minutes,” DeSalvo said.

Unfortunately, FM radio was a poor system for delivering personal data. Danger would have needed agreements with radio stations across the country, along with equipment installed at each location. The system also had no reliable way to determine where users were traveling.

Danger considered broadcasting a user’s information from the transmitter closest to their home ZIP code, then gradually distributing updates to other cities in case they traveled. It was complicated, expensive, and unreliable.

“Anyway, it turned out to be a really bad idea,” DeSalvo said.

The breakthrough came when one of Danger’s venture capital partners calculated that building a nationwide FM data network could cost roughly as much as developing a two-way wireless device using GSM cellular networks.

The newer GPRS data service offered something Peanut could not: a device that could both send and receive information without being connected to a desktop computer.

Danger also found a willing network partner in VoiceStream, a relatively small wireless carrier that had emerged from Western Wireless. VoiceStream was looking for devices that could demonstrate the potential of its mobile data network. The company would later be acquired by Deutsche Telekom and renamed T-Mobile.

With a cellular network available, Danger abandoned Peanut and began developing an entirely different product.

“We weren’t exactly sure what it was going to be, but we all knew that we wanted one,” the DeSalvo said. “Since there wasn’t really anything in the marketplace to model ourselves after we just built the thing we all wanted to have.”

That decision eventually produced the Hiptop, launched in 2002 and sold in the United States as the T-Mobile Sidekick.

The original Sidekick had a monochrome screen, a physical keyboard, a scroll wheel, and a distinctive rotating display. Instead of opening like a clamshell phone, the screen swung sideways to expose the keyboard underneath.

The mechanism was instantly recognizable. Opening a Sidekick became part of the experience, and the movement itself was almost as satisfying as using the phone.

More importantly, the Sidekick was built around data. It offered web browsing, email, instant messaging, and a constantly connected experience over T-Mobile’s GPRS network.

The Sidekick II and the Birth of a Cultural Phenomenon

The original Sidekick was a technological curiosity. The Sidekick II, released in 2004, turned it into a cultural phenomenon.

Manufactured by Sharp, the second-generation device featured a slimmer body, an integrated camera, and a more refined design. It retained the rotating screen and full keyboard, which had become the Sidekick’s defining features.

By this point, the device was finding an audience among teenagers, musicians, actors, and celebrities. Paris Hilton famously carried one, and the Sidekick became a fixture in celebrity photographs and entertainment coverage.

Part of its appeal was practical. AOL Instant Messenger was enormously popular, and the Sidekick made it possible to maintain conversations without sitting at a computer. Its keyboard made long messages easy to type, while its interface put communication at the center of the experience.

There was also a sense of exclusivity. BlackBerry devices were associated with executives and businesspeople. The Sidekick was for people who wanted to talk to their friends.

The phone became a fashion accessory as much as a communications device. Special editions, including collaborations with Juicy Couture and tattoo artist Mister Cartoon, reinforced that identity.

In retrospect, the Sidekick II helped establish the idea that a smartphone could be a personal expression rather than simply a business tool.

The Sidekick III and the Peak of the Platform

The Sidekick 3 arrived with a new trackball navigation system, Bluetooth connectivity, a music player, and support for faster EDGE data connections. It also offered expandable storage, bringing the device closer to the multimedia smartphones that would soon dominate the market.

T-Mobile continued expanding the lineup. The budget-oriented Sidekick iD appeared in 2007, followed by the larger-screen Sidekick LX and the Motorola-manufactured Sidekick Slide.

The Slide abandoned the traditional rotating display in favor of a sliding mechanism, but the LX retained the familiar design.

The Sidekick LX became particularly popular thanks to its larger screen, distinctive appearance, and emphasis on messaging. By this point, the Sidekick had developed something that few consumer electronics products achieve: a recognizable identity. You could spot one across a room.

That identity was also becoming a limitation. The Sidekick’s software and hardware were designed around messaging at a time when the broader smartphone market was beginning to change. That said, what the Sidekick was doing before anyone else was vitally important and points to the future of mobility.

The Sidekick Was an Early Cloud Smartphone

One of the Sidekick’s most important innovations was largely invisible.

Danger designed its platform around servers that synchronized information between the device and the internet. Contacts, calendars, messages, and other information were tied to online services rather than existing exclusively on the phone.

Today, this sounds ordinary. In 2002, it was a significant departure from how most mobile devices worked.

The architecture allowed Sidekick users to access online services without managing complicated synchronization software. It also supported an application catalog, providing a relatively simple way to add functionality to the device.

In many ways, the Sidekick anticipated the connected smartphone ecosystem that Apple and Google would later popularize. Long before cloud storage became a standard feature of mobile phones, Danger had built a system that automatically synchronized contacts, calendars, messages, and other personal information with remote servers. Users could lose or replace their phones and recover much of their data simply by signing into their accounts. The Sidekick also offered downloadable applications, instant messaging, web browsing, and email in a single device, years before the modern smartphone became commonplace.

But there was a catch. Unlike phones that stored most personal information locally, the Sidekick depended heavily on Danger’s servers to manage and preserve user data. This made the device remarkably convenient when everything worked, but it also meant that users had limited control over their own information. A problem with the central servers could affect thousands of customers at once, regardless of whether their individual phones were working properly.

That weakness became painfully clear in October 2009, when a major server failure left T-Mobile Sidekick customers unable to access personal information stored in the cloud. Microsoft, which had acquired Danger in 2008 for a reported $500 million, initially warned that contacts, calendar entries, photographs, and other data might have been permanently lost. The incident quickly became a public relations disaster for both Microsoft and T-Mobile, particularly because the Sidekick had been marketed around the convenience of keeping personal information synchronized and protected.

Microsoft eventually recovered most of the affected data, but the damage to the Sidekick’s reputation was considerable. The outage showed that cloud storage was only as reliable as the systems maintaining it. It also exposed the risks of placing essential personal information in the hands of a single service provider without adequate backup and recovery procedures.

The irony was that the Sidekick had helped establish many of the features that would define the next generation of smartphones. Its dependence on centralized services was not fundamentally different from the direction Apple and Google would take with their own mobile platforms. The difference was that those companies would build much larger ecosystems around their devices, with more developed systems for storing, synchronizing, and recovering user information. The Sidekick had demonstrated the appeal of a constantly connected phone, but the 2009 outage also showed what could happen when the infrastructure behind that connection failed.

The Last Sidekick

T-Mobile stopped selling the original Danger-based Sidekick models in 2010.

The following year, the company attempted to revive the brand with the Sidekick 4G, manufactured by Samsung.

The new phone ran Android rather than Danger’s original operating system. It featured a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a five-row physical keyboard, and a new pop-tilt mechanism that paid tribute to the rotating displays of earlier Sidekicks.

It was a reasonable attempt to combine the Sidekick’s identity with a modern smartphone platform.

But the market had moved on. Touchscreen smartphones were becoming the default, and the physical keyboards that had once made the Sidekick so appealing were increasingly viewed as unnecessary.

On May 31, 2011, the original Danger online services shut down, marking the end of the platform that had powered the Sidekick for nearly a decade.

The Samsung Sidekick 4G would be the last conventional smartphone to carry the name.

Why the Sidekick Still Matters

The Sidekick occupies an unusual place in technology history. It wasn’t the first smartphone, and it certainly wasn’t the most powerful. Its cameras were primitive, its internet connections were slow, and its software eventually became outdated.

But it understood something about mobile computing before much of the industry did: people wanted to be connected to their friends all the time.

The Sidekick made that possible through a combination of hardware, software, and online services that felt remarkably cohesive for its era.

It also made smartphones fun. The rotating screen, colorful designs, physical keyboard, and emphasis on instant messaging gave the device a personality that is largely absent from modern phones. Today’s smartphones are vastly more capable, but they are also remarkably similar. Most are thin slabs with large touchscreens and nearly identical interfaces.

The Sidekick came from a period when manufacturers were still experimenting with what a connected mobile device should look like. There is a reason people still remember the satisfying movement of its screen, the feel of its keyboard, and the experience of chatting with friends on AIM.

The Sidekick wasn’t simply a phone that happened to have internet access. It was an early example of what would happen when the internet became something people carried everywhere.

And for a few years, it made that future look pretty cool.

SteelSeries is bringing ultra-wideband wireless technology to gaming mice with the launch of its new Sensei Pro and Rival Pro series. The company claims the new mice can maintain an 8,000Hz polling rate without the interference associated with traditional wireless connections, while a hot-swappable battery system lets players keep gaming without stopping to recharge.

The new lineup includes four models: the Sensei Pro, Sensei Pro Mini, Rival Pro and Rival Pro Mini. All four cost $179.99, come in black or white and are available in stores beginning October 13.

The big change here is the wireless connection. Most wireless gaming mice use the crowded 2.4GHz spectrum, which is also used by keyboards, headsets and numerous other devices. SteelSeries argues that interference on this band can prevent high-performance mice from consistently delivering their advertised polling rates.

Its solution is ultra-wideband (UWB), operating between 6.4GHz and 9.056GHz. According to SteelSeries, this gives the mice access to roughly 20 times the bandwidth of traditional 2.4GHz wireless connections. The system can also use multiple wireless channels simultaneously, which the company says improves connection stability in environments crowded with competing devices.

That extra bandwidth is designed to support a true 8,000Hz polling rate. A mouse running at 8K can report its position to a computer up to 8,000 times per second, compared with 1,000 times for a conventional gaming mouse. In theory, that reduces the delay between a physical movement and the computer registering it, although the practical benefit will depend on the game, hardware and player.

SteelSeries has also introduced a Max Performance Mode that keeps the new TrueMove 42K optical sensor operating at its highest performance settings. The sensor supports 20,000 frame captures per second, tracking speeds of up to 800 inches per second and acceleration of up to 70G. The mice also use optical switches rated for 100 million clicks, with a claimed click latency of 0.35 milliseconds.

Of course, running a mouse at 8,000Hz consumes considerably more power than running it at 1,000Hz. SteelSeries addresses this with what it calls the Infinite Power System, which is essentially a pair of rechargeable, hot-swappable batteries.

Each battery provides up to 16 hours of use at 8,000Hz or 60 hours at 1,000Hz. With both batteries, users get up to 32 hours at 8K or 120 hours at 1K before needing to recharge. The idea is to keep one battery charging while the other powers the mouse, allowing players to swap batteries rather than plug in a cable.

The new mice are also relatively light. The full-size Sensei Pro and Rival Pro weigh 53 grams, while the Mini versions weigh 49 grams. SteelSeries has retained the general shapes of the original Sensei and Rival mice, which debuted in 2011 and 2013, respectively, while updating the internals for modern competitive gaming.

Software customization comes through the SteelSeries GG suite. Players can adjust lift-off distance, sensor rotation and scroll behavior, as well as use tools to find appropriate sensitivity settings. A sensitivity converter helps translate DPI preferences between games, while a 3D aim trainer provides practice for competitive shooters such as Counter-Strike 2, Valorant and Fortnite.

The interesting part of this release is that SteelSeries is trying to address two of the practical limitations of high-polling-rate wireless mice: connection reliability and battery life. An 8,000Hz polling rate looks impressive on a specification sheet, but maintaining that performance consistently is more important than simply reaching the number under ideal conditions.

Whether UWB produces a noticeable advantage over existing high-end wireless mice remains to be seen. The technology promises a cleaner connection, but the difference between 1,000Hz and 8,000Hz is already small enough that many players may struggle to notice it during normal gameplay. Independent testing will be needed to establish how consistently the mice deliver their claimed performance.

The Sensei Pro and Rival Pro series went up for preorder on September 29 and reached retail stores on October 13. All four models are priced at $179.99 in the US, €199.99 in Europe and £169.99 in the UK. SteelSeries also offers a separate wireless travel dongle for $24.99.

For competitive players who want the fastest possible wireless connection without being tied to a charging cable, the new SteelSeries mice offer an interesting approach. The real question is whether the move to UWB makes enough of a difference to justify the premium price.

Buying records is the fun part. Cleaning them is the chore. Record Doctor’s latest machine, the XI, is aimed at making that second part a little less annoying.

Billed in the launch announcement as a 25th-anniversary model, the Record Doctor XI is a $599.95 vacuum record cleaner. The announcement says it will ship in October. Its main pitch is straightforward: clean both sides of an LP at the same time, and make less noise doing it.

According to Pangea Audio, the XI uses dual vacuums and two-way automatic rotation. Cleaning fluid, felt cleaning strips and suction do the work of removing residue from the grooves. The company recommends applying fluid to both sides of the record, so this isn’t a drop-it-in-and-walk-away machine. You’re still part of the process.

The hardware includes a direct-drive, high-torque motor, an aluminum top and a large clamp designed to protect the record label. Pangea lists a goat-hair cleaning brush and a 4.5-ounce bottle of its RxLP cleaning fluid among the included accessories.

The more interesting claim is the noise. Pangea calls this its quietest Record Doctor yet and says it can clean an LP in under a minute. Those are manufacturer claims, not results from a hands-on test. There is no measured noise level on the product page, so “quieter” doesn’t tell us how pleasant it will be to use in a small room.

At nearly $600, this is a purchase for someone who takes record care seriously, rather than an impulse accessory. The appeal is easy to understand: two-sided cleaning could cut some of the handling out of the routine. Whether it does that well enough to earn a place beside your turntable is the question a review needs to answer.

For now, the XI looks like a practical update built around a familiar annoyance. Less flipping and less vacuum racket would be welcome. We’ll need more than a launch announcement to know how well it delivers.

Home security company Vivint has announced something super cool. It’s a product called Comfort IQ and it uses a central thermostat and the company’s motion sensors, door sensors, and other security devices to tell their app how and when to turn on your HVAC system.

Other smart thermostats aren’t very smart. Because these wall warts usually hang out in one room or in the middle of a hall, they can “see” only a small portion of your house. Busy in the basement and your thermostat is upstairs? Many thermostats would simply turn off because they think the house is empty. Vivint’s system would sense you moving around and note that you hadn’t left the house and keep you toasty or cool as needed

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That makes sense because heating and cooling are among the biggest energy expenses in a typical home. A thermostat programmed to keep the house at 72 degrees until 5 p.m. doesn’t necessarily know that everyone left at noon. Vivint already has sensors throughout many of its customers’ homes, so Comfort IQ essentially gives the thermostat access to more of that information.

Vivint says the system works with existing gas or electric HVAC equipment and runs largely in the background. Users set their preferences in the Vivint app and Comfort IQ handles the adjustments rather than requiring them to build and maintain a thermostat schedule.

The company is making some substantial savings claims. According to Vivint, an independent year-long study by Tierra Resource Consultants looked at 50,000 Vivint households across five U.S. climate zones and found that Comfort IQ reduced HVAC runtime by an average of 13%. Cooling runtime fell by nearly 16% and heating by almost 12%.

Vivint says that translated into average annual household energy savings of about $210, with savings reaching as much as $300 in some areas. The company also says homes using Comfort IQ produced three times the energy savings of the average ENERGY STAR-certified smart thermostat. Those figures come from the study commissioned around Vivint’s system, so your actual savings will depend on the house, climate, energy prices and how you already use your HVAC system.

There are a few other practical touches. Comfort IQ can track actual HVAC runtime and use it to remind you when an air filter needs replacing rather than simply nagging you every few months. It can also connect with virtual power plants and utility demand-response programs, potentially allowing HVAC use to respond to conditions on the electrical grid.

Vivint says more features are coming, including cameras, better occupancy and scheduling models, additional HVAC intelligence, personalized energy capacity scores and tools for tracking savings over time.

You won’t need a new air conditioner or furnace to try it, but you will need a Vivint Smart Thermostat and, naturally, you’re going to get more out of the system if you already have other Vivint hardware feeding it information. Current Vivint thermostat customers can opt into Comfort IQ for free through the company’s app.

The interesting part here isn’t really the AI label. Smart thermostats have been trying to automate temperature control for years. Comfort IQ’s advantage is potentially the amount of information it can use to make those decisions. If your security system already knows whether people are moving around the house, it makes sense to let the thermostat know too.

This is literally the first time I’ve seen anything like this which is wild. After a decade of smart thermostats that claim to save energy and keep tabs on who’s in the home, Vivint has finally pulled it off.

Say, for example, you’re in an apartment without a dishwasher. What do you do? Outside of immediately moving to another place or giving up entirely and perishing, you’re going to want to consider a countertop dishwasher. The model I tried, the Hermitlux Countertop Dishwasher, is an brand with a name evocative of an old man living in a cave who wears Gucci but is, despite that, a solid solution for folks who don’t have the ability to run water and waste lines in their kitchens.

The Hermitlux Countertop Dishwasher has a compact 16.85 x 16.73 x 18.23-inch design that can, theoretically, hold up to five place settings. It’s a practical option for apartments, dorms, RVs and other spaces where a standard dishwasher may not fit. It can hold dishes up to 10 inches in diameter, which means you could feasibly stuff it full of Thanksgiving dishes and let it clean while you relax.

A built-in 5-liter water tank means it can operate without being connected directly to a water line. You can also connect the dishwasher directly to your tap, allowing it to refill as needed. The dishwasher offers seven washing programs for different loads and cleaning needs, while its glass door and interior LED light let you check on dishes during a cycle. Despite its small footprint, it can handle everyday plates, bowls, cups and utensils. The real trick is learning how to load this little guy. Interestingly, it also has a fruit-washing setting that lets you rinse off your produce.

In terms of usage, the system is dead simple. You load it up, place a pod or soap in the washer, and start it. It’s surprisingly quiet, with only a light susurration noticeable from the kitchen when it’s running.

How does it clean? The first few tries left a bit of a soap smell on the dishes until we dialed in the timing and positioning. Ultimately, you need to rinse your dishes fairly well before putting them in the machine, which could be annoying to folks looking for a fire-and-forget solution. That said, the dishes were as clean or cleaner than they would be out of a larger unit.

Who is this dishwasher for? Well, a single person in a smaller apartment will love this thing. If you measure your counter space before purchasing, you’ll be able to place it in an out-of-the-way spot and route the waste hose into a bucket or drain. You’ll then be able to load a day’s worth of dishes, a breakfast plate, a soup bowl, a few plates, and some cutlery, and you’re golden.

For bigger families, you’ll find that this augments your dishwashing setup but won’t really replace a full-sized dishwasher. I’d say a couple that doesn’t eat much, or a couple with one small child, would be about the maximum number of people able to use this comfortably.

The unit comes in a number of styles including a model for narrow spaces at 14 inches. There’s even a “color screen” model with realistic icons on the front.

The bottom line? The Hermitlux has a funny name but works really well. At $299 on Amazon it’s one of the cheapest countertop dishwashers I’ve seen and the build quality is excellent. While it will never replace a Bosch under-counter monster, it’s absolutely a good choice for folks looking to wash a few dishes a night without digging in dirty sink water.

Wired earbuds are supposed to be obsolete. Bose is betting that they are ready for another run.

The company has introduced the Bose Noise Cancelling Wired Earbuds, a $99 pair of USB-C earphones that combine old-school wired audio with active noise cancellation. They go on sale October 15 in black, white and a limited-edition mint green.

It is an interesting reversal for Bose. The company discontinued its last wired noise-canceling earbuds in 2022, as AirPods and other true wireless headphones became the default. But corded headphones have quietly returned, particularly among younger users attracted to their simplicity, retro appeal and reliable microphones.

Bose is giving the format a significant technical update. Four microphones, two in each earbud, monitor outside noise for the active noise cancellation system. The earbuds plug directly into a device over USB-C and draw power from it, eliminating batteries, charging cases and Bluetooth pairing entirely.

There are other benefits to staying wired. A physical connection supports lossless audio, while virtually eliminating the latency that can appear when gaming or watching video over Bluetooth. Bose has also put playback, volume controls and a microphone directly onto the 4.2-foot cable.

The tradeoff is that the $99 earbuds do not match the noise cancellation of Bose’s more expensive wireless models. Early testing found they could noticeably reduce subway and cafe noise, but not to the same degree as the company’s $299 QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds.

Still, Bose is making a different argument here. These are not $19 EarPods dressed up as a nostalgia product. They are an attempt to take what people once liked about wired headphones, no charging, no pairing, low latency and dependable audio, and add one of the features that helped convince everyone to go wireless in the first place.

Maybe the headphone cable wasn’t dead. It just needed an upgrade.

There was a time when watching your television somewhere other than your house was a fairly radical idea. Before Netflix became a streaming service, before the iPhone, and years before every television network had its own app, three guys came up with a fairly straightforward solution: take whatever was playing on your television at home and send it over the Internet.

That idea became the Slingbox, one of those strange pieces of transitional technology that makes much more sense when you remember the problem it was designed to solve. In 2005, television was still attached to a place. You could have hundreds of cable channels, a TiVo full of recorded shows and a fast Internet connection, but the moment you left your house, most of that entertainment stayed behind.

The Slingbox changed that by putting your own television connection online. You plugged the box into your cable or satellite receiver and your home network, and it encoded the video so you could watch it remotely using SlingPlayer software. An infrared blaster even controlled the cable box, meaning you could sit in a hotel room in another state, change the channel on your laptop and watch the physical cable box sitting back in your living room respond.

Sling Media called the idea “placeshifting,” a play on the “timeshifting” that TiVo had popularized. TiVo let you separate a television program from the time it aired. Slingbox separated it from the place where your cable company expected you to watch it. Twenty years later, that sounds completely normal. In 2005, it was weird enough that Sling needed a new word to explain what the box did.

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Epson is expanding its Home Cinema range with three new 4K HDR laser projectors aimed at people who want a very big screen without stepping up to the company’s $4,500 LS11000.

The new Home Cinema LS5000, LS6000 and LS7500 start at $1,999 and use Epson’s 3-Chip 3LCD projection system paired with a laser light source. Depending on the model, brightness ranges from 2,500 to 3,500 lumens for both color and white brightness.

All three use Epson’s 4K display technology to produce an 8.29-million-pixel image and can project images up to 300 inches. They also support HDR10 and HLG, with 10-bit HDR processing and Epson’s Automatic HDR Scene Correction.

The biggest differences between the models come down to brightness, contrast and where you can put them.

The $1,999 LS5000 is the entry point, while the $2,199 LS6000 moves further up the range. Both use Epson’s Cinema lens. The $2,699 LS7500 gets a short-throw lens that allows it to sit closer to the screen than a conventional projector. That could be particularly useful if you want a large image but don’t have a room deep enough to mount a traditional projector far behind the seating area.

Installation flexibility is a big part of the design. The projectors have front-exiting airflow, which should make them easier to place in cabinets or tighter spaces, along with manual lens shift of up to 59 percent vertically and 21 percent horizontally. They support both conventional 16:9 content and wider cinematic formats including 21:9.

Epson is also clearly going after gamers with this generation.

Both HDMI ports can handle 4K HDR signals at up to 120Hz, and Epson claims input lag below 20 milliseconds. Auto Low Latency Mode is included, while one of the HDMI connections supports eARC for sending audio to a compatible receiver or sound system.

That combination makes these considerably more interesting for a PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X or gaming PC than an older home theater projector designed primarily around 24 or 60 frame-per-second video.

There’s also Bluetooth 6.0 for two-channel wireless audio. That means you can connect Bluetooth headphones directly to the projector for late-night viewing rather than running everything through a separate audio system.

The move to laser is probably the bigger reason for owners of older projectors to pay attention. Lamp projectors gradually lose brightness and eventually require replacement bulbs. A laser light source removes the recurring lamp replacement from the equation while providing the brightness needed for a large HDR image.

And Epson is making an increasingly compelling argument for projection as televisions continue getting larger.

An 85-inch or 98-inch television is now relatively easy to buy, but once you start talking about 120, 150 or even 200 inches, projection remains one of the few practical ways to get there. A retractable screen also disappears when you’re finished watching it, rather than leaving a giant black television dominating the wall.

There are compromises. These are still projectors, so room lighting, screen choice and installation will have a major effect on the final image. And while Epson quotes dynamic contrast ratios ranging from 800,000:1 to 1,200,000:1 across the new models, manufacturer contrast specifications rarely tell the entire story about actual black-level performance.

Still, Epson has pushed several features that used to distinguish more expensive home theater projectors further down its lineup. Laser illumination, 4K HDR, 120Hz input, lens shift and large-screen support now start at just under $2,000.

The Home Cinema LS5000 will cost $1,999.99, the LS6000 $2,199.99 and the short-throw LS7500 $2,699.99. All three are scheduled to go on sale in late September.

The existing LS11000 remains at the top of Epson’s Home Cinema lineup at $4,499.99.

For someone still running an aging lamp projector, the LS5000 may be the most interesting number here. You can now get into Epson’s 4K HDR laser lineup for less than half the price of its flagship.

In February 2006, Steve Jobs took the stage at Apple and announced that the company was about to reinvent the home stereo.

During his presentation, he talked about the iPod. By 2006, iPods were a huge business. Apple was making $8 billion a year on the devices, and it was selling millions a quarter. This meant they were everywhere. People were carrying them on the train. The ubiquitous white earbuds were visible in bank lines and on city streets. We were connecting them to our cars and stashing them in our pockets. Apple also allowed for a constellation of hardware makers to build docks for the iPod. And Steve Jobs didn’t like that so well.

He wanted something better. He wanted to show the world something new.

What he gave us was a large white box with an iPod sticking out of the top.

What he gave us was the iPod Hi-Fi.

The iPod Hi-Fi was Apple’s attempt to take the iPod out of your pocket and make it the center of your living room. Apple called it a “high-fidelity speaker system,” and Jobs said it offered “true high-fidelity sound quality” from a single enclosure. At $349, Apple was not treating it like another little iPod dock. This was supposed to replace a stereo.

It was also, in several ways, a very good product.

Inside the 17-inch-wide enclosure were two 80mm wide-range drivers and a 130mm woofer. There was an integrated 30-pin iPod dock, an Apple Remote, touch-sensitive volume controls, and an auxiliary input that accepted both analog and optical digital audio. It charged your iPod, and you could even load the Hi-Fi with six D-cell batteries and carry the whole thing somewhere like a sexy, sleek boombox.

The design was pure mid-2000s Apple. It was made of white plastic with a black removable grille, almost no visible controls, and very little setup. There wasn’t even a power brick hanging behind it because Apple built the power supply into the enclosure.

And contrary to the reputation it later acquired, the iPod Hi-Fi actually sounded pretty good.

Ars Technica tested it against the Altec Lansing inMotion iM7 and Klipsch iFi, two serious competitors of the period. The reviewer came away surprised by the Apple system, writing that it produced a full sound, managed respectable stereo separation for a single-box system, and measured with the flattest frequency response of the three systems tested. There were complaints about somewhat muddy vocals and uneven bass in certain situations, but the basic verdict was clear: this thing could play music.

The one thing that happened during this time was the hemming and hawing by reviewers. People who got the Hi-Fi to test loved it. They could easily ignore the $350 price tag and the device looked decidedly futuristic. Just look at ti compared to the wonky, Wired-circa-1998 aesthetic of the Xbox.

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Most video doorbells are very good at showing you who stole your package. SimpliSafe would rather stop them before they get that far.

The company has launched the SimpliSafe Video Doorbell Series 2, a $199.99 wired video doorbell that combines a new 2K camera with AI detection and, if you’re willing to pay for SimpliSafe’s higher-end monitoring plans, a live security agent who can step in when something looks wrong.

That last part is what makes the Series 2 interesting.

When connected to SimpliSafe’s Active Guard Outdoor Protection service, the doorbell can detect a potential threat and alert one of the company’s U.S.-based security agents. The agent can view the camera feed, talk through the doorbell and activate its siren. If things get bad, the agent can also request police dispatch while the system records what is happening.

In other words, instead of getting a notification that someone is standing on your porch and deciding what to do yourself, you’re paying SimpliSafe to have someone else watching too.

That’s a significant change from the basic video doorbell model.

A better camera, too

Even without the live monitoring service, SimpliSafe has given the Series 2 some useful hardware upgrades.

The camera now records at 2K resolution and has a wider head-to-toe field of view. That second part should be especially useful for packages since a conventional doorbell camera can give you a great shot of the delivery driver’s face while completely missing the box sitting a few feet below it.

There’s also up to five seconds of pre-event recording, so the camera can save what happened immediately before it detected an event. Enhanced two-way audio handles conversations at the door, and dual-band Wi-Fi adds support for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks.

SimpliSafe has also added what it calls Smart AI. The system can distinguish between people and packages, with vehicle detection promised soon. Activity Zones let you tell the camera which parts of the image matter so you’re not getting alerts every time somebody walks down the sidewalk or a car passes your house.

The hardware itself has been changed as well. There’s a black face surrounded by a white LED ring, with different status lights showing who’s using the camera. Amber means a SimpliSafe monitoring agent is speaking, while blue means it’s the homeowner.

It’s a small detail but a smart one. If a voice suddenly starts coming out of your doorbell, the person standing outside should probably know whether they’re talking to you or a security company.

Security ain’t cheap

The Video Doorbell Series 2 costs $199.99, but getting its most interesting feature costs considerably more.

Active Guard Outdoor Protection is available through SimpliSafe’s Pro plan at $49.99 per month or Pro Plus at $79.99 per month. That’s $600 or nearly $960 a year before considering the cost of the hardware.

You also can’t simply buy the Series 2 and stick it on the door. It requires a SimpliSafe Base Station and Keypad, plus an existing wired doorbell setup with a compatible transformer and mechanical or digital chime.

The doorbell can still be used as part of a SimpliSafe system without professional monitoring, but at that point you’re losing much of what separates it from the growing pile of smart doorbells already on the market.

Still, SimpliSafe is making a good point about where home security cameras are heading. Recording a thief walking away with your package is useful evidence, but it’s not particularly good security.

The Series 2 tries to move the camera from recording an event to actually responding to it.

Whether having a human security agent living somewhere inside your doorbell is worth $50 to $80 a month is another question. When it comes to protecting a $1,000 TV Amazon just delivered, however, that 50 smackers might be worth it.

If you can’t fit a bottle of bourbon into your cargo shorts why are you even really wearing cargo shorts? And if your cargo shorts look like something from a Vietnam War cosplay session with bulging pockets and sloppy inseam, should you even wear them at all?

The SCOTTeVEST Hidden Cargo Shorts try to fix both of those problems by hiding most of the cargo. These things are definitely dad shorts but darn if they don’t do exactly what they advertise: they hide everything you’re carrying so well that you’ll barely notice them until it’s time to fish a jar of peanut butter out of your left from pocket.

On the surface, these are $99, 100 percent cotton shorts with eight pockets, including layered and deep pockets that are far less obvious than the huge pouches hanging from the sides of traditional cargo shorts. They have a 10-inch inseam, magnetic closures, and SCOTTeVEST’s expandable “Fiesta” waistband. They can also hold devices like tablets measuring up to 6.4 by 3.25 inches.

Most interestingly, they rarely look like they’re full, even if you stuff large items into the deep side pockets. In fact, SCOTTeVEST has created something that is far closer to a pair of ordinary shorts than a pair of cargo monstrosities.

SCOTTeVEST has always been a strange and useful company. Its basic idea is that clothing can replace at least part of what you would normally carry in a bag. That makes plenty of sense with a vest. Applying the same thinking to shorts is harder because eight pockets full of junk can quickly become eight pockets pulling your pants toward the floor.

The Hidden Cargo Shorts handle this by spreading the storage around. There are pockets inside pockets and deeper sections for things you do not need every five minutes. Your phone, wallet, keys, earbuds, passport, and other small items can have their own places rather than forming one uncomfortable lump in a front pocket.

The hidden aspect is also useful for travel. A passport or wallet can sit deeper inside the shorts instead of sticking out of a conventional back pocket. It is not some magic anti-theft system, but keeping important items out of sight and harder to reach is plainly better than carrying them in an exposed pocket.

SCOTTeVEST also includes magnetic closures, which are one of those small details that make more sense once you start using this kind of clothing. You can get into a pocket quickly without dealing with a zipper every time.

The shorts themselves are refreshingly old-fashioned. They are made from cotton rather than the thin synthetic fabric now common in travel clothing. That should make them feel more like normal casual shorts, though it comes with a tradeoff. SCOTTeVEST’s newer $109 Covert Cargo Shorts use its TEC|Flex fabric, which has four-way stretch and is water-repellent, wrinkle-resistant, and quick-drying. The Hidden Cargo Shorts do not get those features. The Coverts look a little more formal, as well, which could turn off some travelers.

Ninety-nine dollars is a lot for a pair of cotton shorts. But here you are paying for the pocket system rather than some exotic material. If you normally leave home with a phone, keys, and wallet, there is little reason to spend this much.

If you are the person who leaves home with a phone, wallet, keys, AirPods, battery pack, cables, sunglasses, a bottle of bourbon, vitamins, and a small kitten, the argument becomes much stronger.

Again, these are for travelers. I love SCOTTeVEST for that simple reason. Rather than making bigger, bulkier pockets, the company has turned your shorts into a storage system. I’ve been wearing their gear for years, and I love being able to slide phones, keys, and whatever else into the deep, deep pockets and know that when I sit down in the car, I’ll be dealing with things slipping out onto the seat. Instead, I’m secure in the knowledge that my shorts will always be vaguely dad-esque but amazingly useful and surprisingly cool.

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Steve Jobs was pissed.

He stalked the stage like a tiger. He was angry. You could tell he hated this “One more thing” moment.

This wasn’t the product he wanted to be showing, let alone holding in his hand.

“There’s one more thing about iTunes that we’re announcing today. You’ve probably heard about this,” he said. He was angry at his team. Product news had leaked like a sieve, and anticipation for the phone was high. The tech press was in a tizzy, imagining a phone that was either better than an iPod or, as we read in this 2005 Forbes article, a dud:

For more than a year, Apple and Motorola’s plans to release an iTunes-enabled phone have tantalized the music and mobile phone businesses. Now, with the two companies set to unveil the long-rumored handset Sept. 7, they might be underdelivering.

A person who has seen a version of the phone says it was designed to accommodate just 25 songs, which would be “sideloaded” from a user’s computer using iTunes. The phone was equipped with a 128-megabyte Sandisk TransFlash memory card—just one-quarter the capacity of Apple’s smallest iPod, the 512-megabyte shuffle, which holds about 120 songs.

The product, even in rumorville, sounded like garbage. Hilariously, the tech press thought this mock-up by an LSD-addled design undergrad was going to be the real deal.

Meanwhile, Apple was ruling the world. Their products were flying off the shelves, iPods were status symbols, and Macs were popular again. Jobs didn’t need to do this, and he clearly didn’t want to.

So there he was, faced with releasing a phone with a partner that he would consider inferior at best and shitty at worst. But he kept slogging through.

“Today, we are introducing the iTunes phone. This is a phone that we have worked on with Motorola that has an iTunes client in it where you can play iTunes music that you’ve gotten from your CD library or bought from the online store right on your phone,” he said. Listen to his language. “We worked on it with Motorola,” he said. He didn’t build it. Apple didn’t have a hand in the hardware. They put an iTunes client on it. Back in those heady days of Apple, everything was a premium walled garden. You could have an amazing interface, great design, and solid tech, or you could have, well, a Motorola. And he underscored that multiple times.

“The phone is made by Motorola. We have designed the iTunes client and work with them to integrate it into the phone. It’s called a Motorola ROKR. And it’s a pretty cool phone,” he said using language we’d normally reserve for a toddler we don’t know showing us a particularly colorful booger. “It’s a quad-band GSM phone. It’s got a built-in camera, built-in stereo speakers that are quite good actually. Stereo headphones with a headset on them as well.”

I’d go on, but it’s not worth it.

Long before the iPhone put a computer, camera, music player, and phone into one little slab, there was the Motorola ROKR E1. And it was the biggest hunk of crap ever announced at an Apple keynote.

But if it hadn’t been for the ROKR, we’d never have the iPhone.

ROK down to E1 avenue

The Motorola ROKR E1 was the first mobile phone to feature official iTunes support, combining Motorola’s E398-based candybar design with Apple’s music software. It was clad in a pearly off-white and orange. It had none of Apple’s design language except for a nod to iTunes in the interface.

The phone featured a 262,000-color display, a dedicated iTunes button, and a joystick for browsing music by song, artist, album, genre, or playlist. It supported MP3, WAV, and AAC files, including DRM-protected tracks purchased through the iTunes Music Store, as well as album artwork, playlists, shuffle playback, podcast bookmarks, and song ratings. Music had to be transferred from a Mac or PC rather than downloaded directly to the phone, with transfers handled over the relatively slow USB 1.1 connection. The ROKR also included side-mounted lights that could flash and vibrate in time with music. And it had “quite good” speakers.

Apple, Motorola, and Cingular pitched it as a way to take your iTunes library out of your computer and put it directly onto your phone. Steve Jobs called it, in effect, an iPod shuffle built into a phone.

It was also kind of terrible.

The ROKR came from a very different period in mobile technology. Phones were becoming cameras, music players, email devices, and tiny web browsers, but nobody had quite figured out how all of those things were supposed to fit together. The ROKR represents one of the strangest attempts.

Consider the interface. The phone had a full set of regular features — a calendar, an address book, and a bit of email and web. It also had that iTunes icon and the iTunes button. Both look like they were slapped on by committee, some lazy exec saying “Make it easy to see but don’t remove the garish Cingular and Motorola logos.”

In other words, iTunes was an afterthought in an era when it “Rip. Mix. Burn.” was the battle cry for turn-of-the-century music lovers. At a time when people were carrying hundreds of songs on their iPods, the ROKR was simply silly.

Physically, it wasn’t particularly new. Motorola essentially took the existing E398 candy-bar phone, gave it a white-and-silver finish, and added Apple’s music software. It had a 176 x 220 color screen, a VGA camera, Bluetooth, stereo speakers, and a 512MB TransFlash memory card. It cost $249.99 with a two-year Cingular contract.

Further, the ROKR was one of the first devices to support iTunes loading. Plug the ROKR into your Mac or PC and it showed up in iTunes. You could move purchased music, ripped CDs, podcasts, and audiobooks onto the phone. Album artwork appeared on the tiny screen. When somebody called, your music paused so you could answer.

There was just one ridiculous problem.

You could only carry 100 songs.

Not 100 albums. Not as many songs as would fit on the memory card. Exactly 100 songs.

Even if you installed a larger memory card, the iTunes software wouldn’t play song number 101. The restriction was especially odd because Motorola’s separate music player could play additional MP3 files stored on the card.

Then there was the transfer speed.

The ROKR used a painfully slow USB connection for loading music. Engadget reported that transferring 100 songs took about 42 minutes. There was no iTunes music transfer over Bluetooth and no way to buy songs directly from the phone. You bought or ripped music on your computer, plugged in the ROKR, and waited.

This was particularly strange because Apple introduced the iPod nano at the same event.

The nano was thinner, prettier, and could hold as many as 1,000 songs. So Apple effectively introduced its first iTunes phone and then immediately showed everyone a much better way to carry music.

Reviewers noticed. TechRadar complained about the 100-song limit, slow transfers, and inability to download music over the air. Engadget found the interface sluggish. Stuff later described the ROKR as feeling like an experimental side project rather than a serious Apple product.

But that’s what makes the ROKR interesting today. The ROKR arrived near the end of an era when phones were still sold largely on hardware design rather than a unified software experience. The constellation of devices produced by Samsung, LG, and Nokia at that time were differentiated not by features but by design. The Nokia 8210 was interesting because it was tiny. The Nokia 8110 had a slide out key cover. The Motorola 120t looked like a bar of soap. There weren’t any special features and each model was approximately the same. Adding iTunes to the ROKR made Motorola stand out, even though they didn’t know how to market the product.

There was also this:

But the ROKRy showed Jobs that people didn’t want to carry a phone and a separate music player forever. Their music library would eventually live on the same device they used for calls, messages, photos, email, and the web. The ROKR tried to make that happen while the old mobile-phone business was still focused on the phone versus the software.

The ROKR was widely regarded as a flop. Apple wanted out.

TechEBlog writes:

Behind the scenes, the ROKR E1 was a learning curve for Apple. Teaming up with Motorola and Cingular was a bumpy ride, exposing the headaches of split design duties. Apple poured its energy into the iTunes software, while Motorola’s hardware gave the phone a clunky, un-Apple vibe. Clashes over song limits, branding, and looks—some called the prototype “ugly”—dogged the project, with Steve Jobs himself labeling it an “experiment,” per Jon Rubinstein, then iPod division chief. This stumble convinced Apple to seize total control, birthing the iPhone, and by September 2006, the ROKR was dropped as Apple chased its own vision.

Less than two years later, Apple introduced the iPhone. The ROKR showed Apple what it didn’t want, and it energized Jobs. Even as smartphones entered the market, he ridiculed them for having styluses and cheap screens. He didn’t like plastic because of the ROKR, so the first iPhone was made of metal. He hated phone interfaces, so he forced his engineers to build skeuomorphic representations of reality that allowed the screens to “rubber band” when you pulled down on lists and date pickers to feel like physical dials. To zoom you pinched with two fingers instead of tapping on an ugly joystick.

Further there was no 100-song limit, no Motorola interface surrounding Apple’s software, and no need to bolt iTunes onto somebody else’s handset.

The ROKR became a technological dead end almost immediately.

But sometimes dead ends are the most interesting gadgets to collect. The ROKR captures a brief moment when Apple knew the phone was going to swallow the iPod, Motorola knew music was going to matter, and neither company quite knew what the resulting device should look like.

The answer wasn’t the ROKR. But for a few months in 2005, this funny little Motorola was the closest thing we had to the future.

SteelSeries has been making gaming gear for 25 years, and its latest controller is aimed squarely at players willing to pay for just about every feature you can fit into a gamepad.

The new SteelSeries Aeon Pro is a $259.99 wireless controller for Xbox and PC built around something the company calls its QuickSwitch Dock System. SteelSeries says it is the first system of its kind, but the more useful part may be what sits inside the dock: a second battery.

The Aeon Pro ships with two hot-swappable batteries. Keep one in the controller and the other charging in the dock. When the first battery runs down, swap it for the charged one and keep playing. SteelSeries calls this its Infinite Power System. The name is a little grand, but the idea makes sense. As long as you remember to put the dead battery back in the dock, you shouldn’t have to plug the controller in during a game.

The dock also acts as storage for the Aeon Pro’s interchangeable thumbsticks. Players get standard concave, tall concave, and short convex options, letting them change the feel of the controller without keeping a bag of loose parts around.

SteelSeries went hard on the controls as well. The Aeon Pro uses Hall Effect thumbsticks designed to avoid the stick drift that can develop in traditional analog sticks. Mechanical switches are used throughout the controller for quicker, more tactile button presses, while contoured rear buttons can be remapped for commonly used functions.

There’s even a small OLED screen built into the controller. It lets players switch profiles and change settings without having to jump back into a PC application every time they want to make an adjustment.

For those who do want deeper control, the Aeon Pro works with the SteelSeries GG software on PC. Users can remap controls, adjust triggers, set the strength of the controller’s four rumble motors, change power settings, and set up GG and Sonar integrations.

A wrap-around textured grip rounds out the hardware, and the controller comes in either black or white.

The obvious catch is the price. At $259.99, the Aeon Pro costs considerably more than a standard Xbox controller and sits firmly in premium controller territory. SteelSeries is betting that serious players will pay the difference for hot-swappable batteries, Hall Effect sticks, mechanical controls, an OLED display, and a dock that keeps the whole system together.

At least there’s one problem you probably won’t have to deal with anymore: reaching for a cable in the middle of a boss fight.

The SteelSeries Aeon Pro is available beginning September 8, 2026, for $259.99 in the US, £229.99 in the UK, and €259.99 in Europe.