Gadgetory

this video is sponsored by bitdefender hey guys this is Austin it is almost 2018 and here are five tech items to get your year started up right to kick things off we have the BitDefender box - you guys have probably heard of fit defender before for their antivirus software with the box they're stepping it up to the hardware side of things to protect your entire network but on top of being able to cover things like your phone as well as your laptop it also can help protect against your smart home devices from being attacked that's quite the flowchart they've got right here pull this guy out of the box and it's actually surprisingly light so there's really not a whole lot to this guy you essentially get power in you get Ethernet in and you get Ethernet back out so after a quick setup we have the box up and running all we need is the BitDefender central app for iOS or Android and from here we can control pretty much anything so you can see notifications if it decides that there's any kind of vulnerabilities in your network you can also make sure that all your devices are protected if they need attention or if they're unprotected while the box will protect your device when you're at home on your own Wi-Fi the included total security software will also protect your other devices like Mac Windows Android from threats when your stay on public Wi-Fi since this is Hardware level security you can do some pretty interesting stuff with it so not only is it going to do its best to filter out any kind of suspicious activity but on top of that say you're on a website that isn't secured and you're trying to put in your credit card or your social security number well box is going to try to catch that and give you a warning saying hey are you sure about that you're also getting some protection against brute-force attacks as well as ransomware and because it detects all the devices on your network and gives you a full status report say you connect a old laptop that hasn't been updated in a while you're going to get a notification saying hey it's time to kill the update on that guy Windows XP is not cool anymore so if you guys want to check out the BitDefender box - for yourself like always the link will be in the description the next item is the Google home now this isn't brand new however I've just gotten a whole set of Google homes for my house and I love them well there's a lot to like with Alexa and I'm sure Syria on the home pod is going to be great if you have like 400 bucks Google Home has really had a nice sweet spot between sounding good as well as having these super useful Google assistants the real sweet spot for me though is the Google home mini so these guys launched at $50 which is a pretty decent price for what is still a nice speaker and gives you all the functionality over for the next little while guys are $30 and at that price I've got like three of them in my house but this doesn't matter at all to anyone besides me probably but even though the Google home does sound better I kind of prefer the many just because this to me looks like an air freshener hurt I don't know I just I don't like the way this thing looks where is this this is cool you can just slide this on like a desk or something and no one would ever really look twice there's a lot you can do with Google home but the main things I do is listen to music do like alarms as well as listen to a little bit of like podcasts and some news but for 30 bucks you should definitely consider checking this guy out continuing on the Google train we have the chromecast ultra now the chromecast has been one of my favorite ways to stream video for a few years now but the ultra is the way to do it in 4k if you guys caught our iPhone 10 is it worth the video this is actually how we were able to test HDR on YouTube so what we did was we would upload the video to YouTube wait for it to process for like three hours and then we would play it back on a OLED TV using the chromecast ultra to actually see what it would look like once it was fully processed this guy is pretty powerful considering just how tiny it is it's also really stuck in there so it is a little bit bigger than a standard chromecast but really not by much the same basic idea where you plug it in via HDMI to your TV there's a micro USB lead here for power once you set it up on Wi-Fi it's pretty straightforward so you get just a bunch of generic wallpapers at the beginning but you can stream pretty much anything to it from the app or from Google home hey Google Play the latest awesome Evans video on YouTube that is so cool so what's really neat about this is that not only can you control that with voice as well as of course from your phone but you can also have multiple Google homes as well as multiple chromecast set up in your house all these gadgets are great however you're probably going to want an actual phone to control everything which is where the Moto e 4 plus comes in this is the phone actually did a video on a couple months ago and I think it is Loki one of my favorite devices of the year so it's nice is is that for a phone that cost less than $200 you're getting a metal build a good screen good camera fingerprint sensor there's really not a lot to hate on one area a lot of budget phones skimp on is the screen and thankfully the Moto e for Plus isn't too bad so it is a 5.5 inch panel with the 1280 by 720 resolution no yes that's going to be a little bit on the low side but thankfully it's a good panel with solid color inside the specs might not look impressive with a snapdragon 427 processor 2 gigs of ram and either 16 or 32 gigs of storage but what really puts this over the top is the battery this guy is rocking a massive 5,000 milliamp hour battery put that in context that's almost double the size of something like the iPhone 10 no yes it does mean that the phone is a little bit chunkier than it might otherwise be but especially considering these fairly low-end internals this guy is going to last forever but that battery is really what pushes it over the edge for me this is hands-down the best battery life I've ever tried on a smart phone and when you consider that that's again less than $200 you should really give the Moto e four shots but say that a smart phone isn't what you're looking for this year well that is where the Acer Aspire d15 comes in I've actually wanted to do a video on this for a while for one big reason it is one of the most highly selling laptops on Amazon period right now you don't exactly get a lot in the box though so on one hand we get the laptop itself with some wonderful cardboard there's some cardboard shavings on paper it looks pretty good so you're getting a core i3 70 100 you four gigabytes of RAM as well as a one terabyte hard drive there are some nice features that separate this from other budget laptops starting with the display so it is a 1080p panel and while yes it's maybe not the best-looking 1080p screen in the world but it is a lot better than other laptops in the three to four hundred dollar price range nice touches like having a backlit keyboard as well as a full number pad is nice and the port selects is interesting on the website we have a good selection including a pair of USB 3.0 ports an HDMI VGA Ethernet as well as USB type-c now on the other side we get the headphone jack another USB 2.0 as well as the DVD drive because you know laptops with USB type-c ports and DVD drives are all over the place remove three screws and pop off this bottom panel though in only do we get access to the hard drive which is actually kind of slow and I would probably swap with an SSD but also our memory for gigs is fine for now it would be really simple to upgrade this guy to eight gigs Asia claims this guy has up to 12 hours of battery life and while the build quality does leave a little bit to be desired at 350 dollars there is a ton to like with this laptop I see why everyone keeps buying them as always links to everything I talked about including the box - will be in the description of this video so I'm curious which of these products would you guys want to pick up for 2018 let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one