Apple Watch Series 5: The Watch Exits Beta

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Having worn Apple Watch Series 5 every day for the last month, I’m ready to give it a thorough evaluation. Every tech review is dependent on the perspective and priorities of the reviewer, so I’ll start by giving you mine.

I’ve been an Apple Watch wearer since the original released in 2015. I wear my watch every day from the moment I get out of the shower around 7:30am, till I hit the hay around 11PM. While I do make use of the fitness tracking features, I’m about as far from a “fitness guy” as can be imagined, and so my interests in wearable tech lie more in its ability to provide critical information at a glance.

Here’s my personal priorities for the Apple Watch, ranked from most to least relevant to me.

  • Functioning as a quality time piece
  • Providing useful interactive data such as to-do lists, weather reports, and notifications for messages, calendar events and phone calls
  • Consistent access to Siri for quick queries, setting timers etc.
  • Health and safety monitoring (I.E. EKG measurements, fall detection and 911/SOS functionality)
  • Battery Life
  • Fitness tracking
  • Wrist access to Apple Pay

I provide some of my rational for buying any smartwatch here, but if you’re looking to know why you’d buy a smart watch in the first place, check out my overview of Apple Watch.

On to the review!

As a Sci-Fi writer, I’m always more interested in the alternative viewpoint: how close is this product to its ideal iteration, regardless of what technology allows for right now?

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Nest: The One Google Product I Can’t Abandon

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I’ve never been Google’s biggest fan. Ask Mrs. Gremlin, and you’ll learn that my anti-Google tirades are frequent and annoying. I don’t use Google Maps, Gmail, or even Google Search when I can avoid it. Yet somehow, I’ve been using two thermostats by Nest (a Google/Alphabet subsidiary) for over five years. That’s how much I love this product.

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Apple Watch: What Is It Good For?

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The Apple Watch is a weird product. It’s expensive, almost all of its features mimic functionality of smartphones, and at its core, it’s reinventing a personal accessory widely viewed by (most) technophiles as an anachronism.

It’s also my favorite tech gadget ever. Here’s why:

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Life with a Roomba 960 (A Review)

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For the last few years, the Gremlin has followed the development of robotic vacuums with some interest. Any piece of technology that removes or mitigates a daily life annoyance is something I enthusiastically embrace, but until three months ago, I had avoided the Roomba.

Why? Because every Roomba owner I knew seemed distinctly “meh” about them. On paper, they seemed to be the perfect solution to minimizing time spent cleaning the house, but friends unfurled rumblings of navigation problems, poor performance over time, and a general sense that their robotic companions created as much hassle as they removed. In addition, we live in a two story house with a step-down family room on the lower level, meaning that a single automated vacuum could only clean part of the house. They’re also expensive, and even the most ardent fans admit that they don’t completely remove the need for a good old fashioned human controlled hoovering.

Today, the Gremlin is here to give you an honest assessment of how valid these concerns turned out to be, using my experience with the Roomba 960 over our initial months together.

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