Brent Rose

Sony SmartBand SW10 Review: Swings For the Fences, Misses By a Mile

In the great pantheon of activity trackers (and it’s quite a crowded pantheon at this point), there are those that focus on style, those that focus on metrics, and those that focus on bells and whistles. And then there’s Sony’s new SmartBand SW10, whose modest ambition is simply to track every little thing you do…

Samsung’s Smart TVs Just Got a Pretty Sweet App (Finally)

For all the promises that “Smart TVs” make, they aren’t really all that smart. Generally, they’re just TVs with glorified streaming boxes built into them, plus a few unwieldy bells and whistles nobody wants or uses. So when a smart TV app comes along that actually looks cool, it’s pretty shocking. That’s the case with…

Project Morpheus Hands-On: The Virtual Future Is Very, Very Bright

When Sony announced its intentions to take Oculus Rift head-on, we were excited. The Rift (rightly) gets all of the attention and praise for its VR prowess, but a little competition would be good for the emerging technology. Today at E3 in Los Angeles we finally got to try Project Morpheus for ourselves. And man,…

Explore All 12 World Cup Stadiums (No Riot Gear Required)

The World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the known universe. The only thing is Brazil is a long trek for most of us, and, y’know things around the world cup tend to get a bit… rowdy? Well, Google Maps is bringing Street View to all twelve of the stadiums, so you can explore…

Google+ Stories Might Actually Make Photo Albums Beautiful (and Easy)

Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone on a vacation (or even to an event for a day), taken a bunch of photos, sworn you’ll put them in an album for your friends and family to see, only to leave them languishing on phone or SD card for many months. I do it pretty much…

Skylock Is the Bike Lock of the Future, and It’s Awesome

Bike locks, while incredibly necessary, are way behind the times. Even the best of them will break under brute force, and then where are you? Bikeless and alone. The new Skylock, from ex-Boeing and Jawbone engineers, is about to leapfrog the competition and bring bike protection into the 21st century. It looks amazing. Skylock looks…

Google is making a push to show Glass as a great tool for travel with the addition of TripIt, Foursquare, and Open Table apps for the $1,500 face computer (that’s in addition to Field Trip, Word Lens, Google Now, Search and Maps). Looks like they’re actually trying to sell it.

HTC One (M8) Google Play Edition Review: Great But For that Camera

Android purists have a common refrain they like to bust out every time a beautiful new piece of hardware comes out: “If only it ran pure Android!” in F-sharp. There’s a pervasive belief that unpasteurized Android—and only unpasteurized Android—directly from the great teat in Mountain View is all that’s needed to transform a good phone…

Google Maps Now Tells You What Lane to Get Into and More Goodies

El Goog is rolling out a bunch of improvements to its Maps apps for Android and iOS. Some of them are small improvements, and some of them are friggin’ awesome. Most significantly, when you’re using Maps for turn-by-turn navigation, it will tell you which lane you should stay in (or move to), so you won’t…

NASA’s New Orbiter Will Watch Plants Photosynthesize from Space

For the last 25 years, scientists have been able to monitor the “greenness” of trees from space and use that as a tool for evaluating plant health. The problem is that greenness isn’t a good indicator for stresses—such as drought—because some trees (think pines) continue to be a lovely green until they’re dead. Researchers are…

Sony Xperia Z2 Tablet Review: Hardware Triumph, Software Facepalm

Last year, the original Xperia Z Tablet was one of our absolute favorite tablets. It was so wonderfully thin and light, plus waterproofiness? Fantastic. But the laggy software Sony put on top kind of knee-capped its potential. This year, the hardware is even better. Bordering on masterful! But some lessons Sony just refuses to learn.…

Bourbon Chocolate Bunnies: Make Your Easter Basket Boozy

Easter egg hunts were fine and good when you were a kid and sugar was the only rush you needed. But it’s time to set the Peeps aside. It’s time to get drunk the Easter way. Origins We came across this recipe for Peep-Infused Vodka. A fun idea, except a) Peeps are disgusting, and b)…

The Best Action Camera: Spring 2014 Edition

You can’t just do something dangerous and insane these days without filming it for posterity. And while action cameras let us relieve these life-highlights over and over, they aren’t all created equal. We decided to see for ourselves which one could handle your extreme adventures best. Testing Methodology We tested a whopping six action cameras…

The Science Behind Making the Fastest Possible Pinewood Derby Car

You wouldn’t think that a four-wheeled car would go faster if one of its wheels didn’t touch the ground. Or if its axles were bent. Or if it was designed to grind against a wall. But you’d be wrong, and here’s the science to prove it. Our old friend Mark Rober—former NASA JPL engineer—has put…

Samsung Gear Fit Review: A Beautiful Wristable Gone to Waste

Samsung’s Gear Fit had every chance to be by far the best activity tracker you could own. It isn’t. Not by a long shot. And there’s nothing sadder than unrealized potential. What Is It? It’s a stunning fitness tracker slash smartwatch wristable. It counts steps, tracks sleep, displays notifications from your phone, and even takes…

Samsung Galaxy S5 Review: Less Is So Much More

If you can say one thing about Samsung’s Galaxy S line of smartphones, it’s that they consistently pair some of the best hardware with inexplicable software. The S5 scales back Samsung’s bells and whistles, which helps make it easily the best Galaxy phone yet. If only they’d gone even further. What Is it? Samsung’s new…

Latest Update Brings KitKat to Google Glass

It’s been a while since we last heard of a software update for Glass and now I guess we know why. The team over at Mountain View has been busy updating the face-computer to run on the latest version of Android (4.4.2 a.k.a. KitKat). It sounds like it won’t be a very obvious change, but…

Inside Jim Henson’s Creature Shop: Where Gadgets and Dreams Collide

It’s not often that you get a chance to see the place where your childhood memories were literally built. It’s kind of like peeling back the curtain on your dreams and finding the architects of them busily at work, pulling the strings, painting the scenery, and creating the characters you will vividly remember decades later.…

Garmin’s Edge 1000 May Be the Smartest Bike Computer Yet

While the phones in our pockets have been getting smarter and smarter at an alarming rate, bike computers (despite having the word “computer” right in their name) have been lagging way behind. But as sensors, radios, and chips have shrunk smaller and smaller, we’ve seen more and more intelligence come to the handlebars. The new…

DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ Review: Buttery Smooth Quadcopter Video

DJI has been making remote-control quadcopters for years. Originally, you had to strap your GoPro to it, but last year DJI introduced the Phantom 2 Vision, which had its own integrated camera system. It was pretty sweet, but every tiny turn you took your video shook enough to scramble your viewer’s brain. Today, DJI unveiled…