Gadgetory

so basically since the 90s electronics companies have had this dream of a kitchen gadget a thing that you could use to listen to the radio and talk to your family and I don't know just play music with and they've always been kind of bad but now we've got this thing it's called the tribute and it does all that stuff you get hit buttons for the radio you get hit buttons to call your family and pop sticks right to your fridge oh yeah it does one more thing Alexa what's the weather right now in New York is 67 degrees with mostly sunny skies tonight's forecast has lots of clouds with showers with a low of 52 degrees pretty cool right so this is trimming it costs $199 and it does all the stuff that I just said that it did including talking to Alexa with just your voice now there's a lot going on with this thing so let me break it down for you you set it up with an app on your iPhone or an Android phone that's how you get that connected to Wi-Fi and it's how you set your preset radio stations and your family so that you can call them and the app I gotta tell you it's not very good it's pretty hard to figure out how to get around and there's just a lot of poking and guessing and digging for settings but the nice thing is once you have the app all set up you kind of don't need it that much because everything is right here on this Bluetooth speaker there's buttons for radio and you can even set one of the presets to a Spotify playlist so if I hit this button it'll just jump into my Spotify discover weekly similarly I can hit one of these buttons to call somebody that's in my family they have to have the trivia app installed on their phone to receive a call or make a call but it works okay now ask for audio quality when you do either of those things it's not very good it's certainly good enough to just have background music or a quick call or something while you're cooking but it does not hold a candle to the audio quality I'll get on a full Amazon echo or even a Logitech boom Bluetooth speaker asks for battery life it's good for eight or ten hours of listening and it's good about two weeks of standby unless you leave the Alexa listening mode on in which case it's gonna die after just a couple of days so if you leave this thing stuck to your fridge you're gonna want to make sure that you've got some kind of way to plug it in via this micro USB cable on the side and speaking of doing echo stuff this thing can do everything at the Amazon echo can including telling incredibly corny jokes Alexa tell me a joke what is spider-man's ideal job a web designer so yeah it works it is a little bit slower than the echo and the microphones aren't nearly as good so it can't hear you from across the room and I'll also say that if your Wi-Fi isn't pretty fast and pretty solid this thing just starts bugging out like crazy there's one more thing as the Trib you can do and it is pretty fun if you have the app on your phone you can use it to send little messages to the tribbey and what you do it receives a message on its e-ink screen and then the beauty flag pops out it's really cute when you get the message you can either push the flag back in and it will send a read receipt back to the person that sent the message and you can also use this weird button on the side to cycle through a bunch of emoji reactions like frowny faces and happy faces and whatnot it's really pretty slow and if you actually just want to have a conversation with somebody you should just stick to text messaging so this is the tribute it does all the things that the Amazon echo does and all the things that a Bluetooth speaker does it just doesn't do any of those things quite as well as either of those two devices but if you're willing to deal with a little bit of hassle here and there it actually might be worth it to you if it's not you should definitely stay tuned because Amazon is letting anybody put Alexa into their devices so we're gonna see a lot more stuff just like this thing really really soon I definitely cannot do the dance gülen's I can't do it don't have the moves not comfortable I'm not comfortable