Trending gadgets that deliver for your digital lifestyle.
Epson L805
These days, it’s unusual to find a colour printer that is not also a scanner and photocopier, but this model is ideal for the home where sometimes printing, especially photo printing, is all you really need.
Our print results were superb, on both plain and photo paper, and even on par with more specialised photo printers. Documents were extremely crisp and virtually indistinguishable from laser prints.
This is a six-tank system, which includes light cyan (turquoise) and light magenta (pink) on top of the
standard colours, which allows for much more subtle shading in photo prints, especially of skin tones, which
are notoriously hard to print. The large, refillable ink tanks are ideal if you’re doing dozens of prints each month.
We struggled a bit without a control pad and screen to help with configuration, but once the printer was connected to the WiFi network it was cinch to print from phones and PCs.
Polk Signa Solo speaker bar
As TVs get thinner, they also produce a weaker audio performance. The irony is that we now need to buy special speaker bars just to make our skinny TVs sound better, but the right speaker bar can create a marvellously engaging sound that adds exciting new multimedia depth to your HD movies.
Polk is an audiophile brand associated with some of the most sophisticated and stylish home-theatre speakers around, but the Signa Solo is strictly at the budget-end of the range. That means there’s no bass bin, which saves space and hassle, but some extra boom is provided by a special chamber behind the four-speaker array.
If you’re into dialogue-driven stories for your standard TV fair, this is where the Signa Solo shines. Loud action movies? A lot less so. There’s connectivity by aux cable, Bluetooth or high-quality optical connections from your TV, hi-fi or media player but, sadly, it won’t easily replace your hi-fi speakers for great music sound.
Fitbit Versa
Fitbit’s basic trackers are very efficient with fantastic battery life, but the screens are tiny and spartan. Enter the Versa, which looks not unlike an Apple watch, at a glance, but costs far less, and is potentially a lot more useful.
The 3.4 cm touchscreen is a delight with rich colours and a variety of downloadable faces and add-on apps.
We also like the control buttons, which we find work better than touchscreens when you’re sweaty and shaking from a heavy workout. It’s also completely waterproof for swimmers.
There’s still no GPS, where Garmin now holds the high ground, but you can upload music on to the watch or use the Deezer music-streaming app, and Bluetooth your tunes directly to your workout headphones.
For the full article on gadgets for your digital lifestyle, grab your October issue of Tech.
