Before You Buy 140 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: Hey, coming up we've got the brand new Lumia 1320, we've got the MeMo from Asus, they have 2 new tablets, we've got the Nikon P600 if you can imagine a camera with a 60x zoom, our first look at the round Moto 360, and yes, the first review you will see anywhere of the Apple watch. It's time to watch Before You Buy.

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(Intro music plays)

Leo: Welcome to Before You Buy, the product review show here on TWiT where we get some of the most interesting new products together with our talented staff so that you get a real world look at what a product would be like to use. We are going to start off with our News Director Mike Elgan, who is not known as a Windows Phone aficionado.

Mike Elgan: Not really.

Leo: We are trying to woo you over. You use an iPhone.

Mike: I do. Well, I've been using a Moto X, and then before that I had a Nexus phone.

Leo: Oh, so you are an Android guy.

Mike: But I'm moving back to the iPhone because of the iPhone 6.

Leo: Okay.

Mike: Because it's gigantic.

Leo: I have to say; those of us who have used the Nokia Lumias are very impressed with the hardware.

Mike: Yep, yep.

Leo: Nokia has got some of the best cameras in the smartphone market. Many people like the elegance of the Windows Phone. So we thought we would plague you with a brand new Nokia Lumia 1320.

Mike: I'm impressed. Let me tell you about the 2 essential qualities of this device. That is, it's huge; a 6 inch screen, which is gigantic.

Leo: I loved that on the 1520. It's pretty, too. It's orange.

Mike: Let me start this up. It's very, very nice and bright. It's cheap. This is the Cricket Wireless prepaid one; $279.99.

Leo: Wow.

Mike: Yes. It's cheap and big. So this is a fablet that is really good. We are going to get into the details of how good it is, but it is very inexpensive. Of course, normally the 1320 comes in orange, yellow, black, and white. This one is just orange because this is the Cricket Wireless and of course Cricket is a prepaid wireless company that is owned by AT&T.

Leo: So they have orange.

Mike: That's right. This phone only works on AT&T within the United States. So it's a 6 inch screen, 720 phd, so it's not a super high resolution screen. That's one of the ways that they are saving money; 1280x720, and it's a 245 ppi screen, which is not very good. It's not super high res as some of the bigger and better fablets are. It's 7.76 ounces; that's pretty heavy. So it's a half of a pound basically. Half pound phone! But again, one of the reasons for that is that it has a really big battery and you get 2 days of battery life from this thing, which is a really great thing. Twenty one hours according to Nokia. In my usage I got a little bit better than that actually. It only has 1 GB of RAM. It's a Snapdragon s4, so it's not the latest and greatest, but the performance is very good. Microsoft is very good, actually, of getting a lot of performance out of minimal hardware.

Leo: Most of the Windows Phones have 1 GB, and that seems to be plenty. In fact there are a lot with 512 MB. It's snappy.

Mike: I have not seen any lag or any problems with this at all. Now one of the downsides of this hardware wise is that it only has 8 GB of built in storage and only 5.5 GB of that is available to you because Windows Phone takes up so much of it in the other system software that Nokia puts into it.

Leo: Now, its big brother the 1520 has an SD card slot. Does this have an SD card slot?

Mike: It does. It does in fact. The camera, you mentioned that Nokia has really great cameras; this does not have a great camera. It has a very mediocre 5 MP rear camera and a VGA camera. So this is not for camera fans at all. It's a good utilitarian camera for everyday use, the performance is so so. This is not a camera photo fan's device at all. It comes with lots of goodies on the software front. It comes with Office, Xbox games of course, the Bing Music Identifier, Nokia HERE Maps, which are fantastic and I will get into why they are fantastic here in just a sec, and it comes with lots of partner apps and so on. This does support NFC so if you want to use Google Wallet or whatever you can do that with NFC.

Leo: It's interesting; they are calling this a business phone.

Mike: They are, and it's kind of an odd thing. I think that it's perfectly great for somebody who isn't going to use it for business.

Leo: It's not a business phone.

Mike: We talk about low cost and getting a big bang for the buck for various devices, but in fact it's really your overall strategy for your overall mobile life. This is a great strategy for that because basically 1 device at this low price serves as a small tablet and also a big phone. That's what fablets are supposed to be all about, and this will do it for you at a very, very low price. The fact that it is prepaid on Cricket there are some savings to be had there as well.

Leo: Is Cricket the only US carrier that offers the 1320?

Mike: AT&T and Cricket are the only carriers.

Leo: AT&T and Cricket.

Mike: Exactly. Now internationally this is basically an international phone that Nokia basically said, you know, let's just go ahead and sell it in the US too. Now internationally the LTE is fantastic on this, and you get this really cheap on Amazon for the international version. So if you travel a lot and want a phone that is going to be great while you are abroad this is a great phone for that. You can get it for literally less than $200 on AT&T and then you get to take advantage of making international calls.

Leo: I like that big screen, and you know 720p on a big screen like that, it's not that bad. It's close to what Apple calls retinas for 200 dpi.

Mike: It's really pretty good. Now I'm going to show you these pictures are not great. This is without the flash, that is with the flash. This is sort of still life and so on. It's not horrible.

Leo: That's probably why they are saying that it's a business phone.

Mike: Yeah, it's not an enthusiast's phone.

Leo: Is it the latest Windows Phone 8.1?

Mike: That's exactly right. It's just fantastic. This is also running at a sort of Nokia mod that puts the tiles full screen like this and gives it bit of a performance boost, which is really nice. Nokia Black I believe it is called. That's really nice. There are lots of downloadable abilities. Let me give you an example of how this can be really cool. There are multiple tiles here for the HERE Mapping software. There are 2 actually; there's HERE Maps and HERE Drive. One of the great things about HERE, I'm discovering, is that you can download offline maps. So you can download the entire state of California, right? Then without a connection you can drive around and it's really convenient and really nice. Of course it has every region around the world.

Leo: Microsoft is licensed HERE for Windows Phone, but Nokia owns HERE and they've decided already to make it available on other phones. So that is interesting. It was a competitive advantage for Windows Phone when it was just Nokia. I really like the HERE Maps. I agree with you.

Mike: Now the pros are that it is big and cheap. The performance is plentiful good. It's really nice to use actually. The screen actually has a nice benefit. In bright sunlight this screen looks great, it looks fine. It is far better than average in bright sunlight, so that is a real benefit. Again, great battery life, Nokia claims 21 hours. Lots of truly good Nokia goodies, you know, the MixRadio, the Molly Player for video, and so on. Those are really great features that you don't get on a lot of other phones. The cons are that it is not super high resolution, the battery is not removable, it's heavy, it's half a pound basically, and you can't take advantage of the LTE...

Leo: Oh, it doesn't use LTE in the US?

Mike: Not in the US.

Leo: It's only European.

Mike: Exactly. So when you use it as a phone and put it up to your ear it's a little hard to place the speaker. It's a little awkward in that sense; you kind of have to work at it. The sound quality is not spectacular; it's acceptable in both directions. So that's kind of generally speaking a con. The fact that it only has 5.5 GB of available storage is a downside. And the cameras are not great. However, I'm giving this a buy because at that price this is a really great device for general purpose use that can be used as a tablet and a phone, super cheap. I think this is a really solid device, and I like it.

Leo: Wow. You are not switching?

Mike: No. Well, I could see myself buying this for international travel, or as a secondary device, or whatever.

Leo: At that price.

Mike: Instead of buying a mini tablet this would be a great alternative.

Leo: I just threatened my kids that if you break another iPhone you are getting a Lumia.

Mike: This won't do it. They will like this actually.

Leo: Oh dang it. That's the Lumia 1320, a definite buy from News Director Mike Elgan. You see him, of course, every Monday through Friday at 10:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern, 1700 UPC on Tech News Today.

Mike: That's right.

Leo: I want to look at the MeMo. Coming up in a just a little bit we are going to take a look at this round watch. Mike, you have one of these too, the Moto 360.

Mike: I do, I do indeed.

Leo: I'm trying to decide. There it is, there are two of them now. Buy, try, don't buy. We will also take a look at, believe it or not, speaking of watches, the new Apple iWatch, or Apple Watch I guess they are calling it. We are going to have our first review of that. It's not even out yet. Meanwhile, Jason Howell is here, host of All About Android, he produces TNT Poof it's Magic.

Jason Howell: Poof. I turn from Mike Elgan into Jason Howell.

Leo: We do have to adjust the camera so that we can fit his head in the frame, however.

Jason: I will lower my seat. Does that work?

Leo: I saw you earlier today. I was doing MacBreak Weekly and you were running around the studio shooting pictures with this thing. 

Jason: Well yeah, these things actually. We have the Asus MeMo Pad 7 and the MeMo Pad 8, two different tablets, same line. These are kind of notable in the Android Tablet world because they are running the 64bit Intel Atom Z3745 Processor.

Leo: They are not ARM Processor, they are Intel Processor.

Jason: They are Intel Apple Processors. So, honestly, so we've got the 7 and the 8; I've never done a dual review here necessarily. Thankfully they are both very similar. One is just a little bit larger than the other. I can give you kind of the specs that match on both and then how they differ. So let's start there. This is of course, a 7 inch 1280x800 IPS LCD display. The other one has an 8 inch of the same technology. 1 GB of RAM in these devices, 16 GB of storage, MicroSD slot on the side, we've got a 5mp rear facing camera back here, and then a 2mp front facing camera. This is a 3910 mA power battery, and of course, this is a Bay Trail Processor, so battery performance is actually one thing that I really liked about this. It's very conservative as far as the battery is concerned. I hardly had to even worry about plugging these things in and I was using them relatively regularly because I've had them for a few weeks now. Other things have come along to kind of trump them on this show. It's also kind of hard to share your time between 2 tablets.

Leo: It is. You have to force yourself. The 7 inch looks a lot like the Nexus 7.

Jason: Yes it does actually. What can I say about the 7 inch versus the 6? I would say the 7 inch actually performed a little worse than the 6.

Leo: Wait a minute, this is the 8 inch and that is the 7 inch. I don't see...

Jason: I meant the 8 versus the 7, I'm sorry. I'm getting them all mixed up.

Leo: It's very confusing.

Jason: Yes, the 8 inch has a 1.33 GHz quad-core processor. The 7 inch has a 1.86 GHz.

Leo: It's faster.

Jason: So it's a little bit faster.

Leo: That's weird.

Jason: And you actually, you do perceive a difference. When I was gaming on the smaller tablet I actually noticed an improvement, a marked improvement between the two. Also, the camera; so I don't normally spend a whole lot of time reviewing camera performance on tablets. Personally, my own use case, I don't really take a whole lot of pictures, but I know that people do. But it's important to know that the larger tablet, the 8, actually produces much better pictures than the 7. Brian, I don't know if you have some of those lined up in there.

Leo: Now you are making this hard because this is a faster processor but the bigger one has a better camera.

Jason: Yeah, so what is most important to you?

Leo: That's good detail actually.

Jason: I would say, so the first one is the 7, is that right? The second one is the 8. I might be hard to see here, but you will probably kind of notice as we go through these. 

Leo: This is a tough picture for lighting.

Jason: 7, front facing camera and then 8, little bit sharper, little bit more vivid. 7, you can see a little bit of blurring around the lights, and then the 8 kind of sharpens a little bit farther out to you. You get a little bit wider camera perspective there.

Leo: It's almost as if they are over sharpening on the 7.

Jason: Yeah, they are doing something, and I really noticed on a desktop computer being able to blow these pictures up and take a good look at them. The 7 was consistently poorer pictures, pretty noticeably, than the 8. So if that's important to you, there you go. I don't know how many people see, but you can really see it on that one.

Leo: You can see that was 7a, right? The 7 is a little softer, and the 8 is a lot crisper, right?

Jason: Totally. So there is that. As far as the design is concerned on these tablets; I didn't mention the price on these yet. The MeMo Pad 7 is $149.99.

Leo: Wow.

Jason: So consider this in the budget tablet category.

Leo: Even less than the Nexus 7, wow.

Jason: Oh yes, definitely less. The larger, the 8, is $199.

Leo: $50 more.

Jason: Yeah, $50 more and you get a little bit larger size. The design I'd say is pretty unassuming. I don't hate the design at all actually. I kind of like it, it's just kind of nondescript for the most part. So if you are looking for style you aren't going to get much style points out of these, but they are super solid. They don't do the creaky thing.

Leo: When I saw you taking a picture with this Asus 7 MeMo Pad I thought it was a Samsung.

Jason: I can see that actually.

Leo: You've got a really big Samsung phone there.

Jason: Yeah, I could totally see that from afar especially. The UI is of course Asus's Zen.

Leo: The UI, did they customize it a lot?

Jason: They don't customize it a ton. It's obviously a little different here. They've made some changes, but overall everything is where you expect it to be. They've definitely skinned that, it almost has a material design quality to it with the colors, and the dots, and everything. I'm not sure how I feel about that to be honest.

Leo: It is Kitkat?

Jason: It is Kitkat, its running 4.4.2.

Leo: A little behind, alright.

Jason: What else have I not talked about here? There are some interesting software enhancements to the camera, things like Smart Remove so you can remove motion, things in the background that are moving.

Leo: You know what is amazing? For under $200, I'm sure there are pros and cons, but these are pretty incredible entries.

Jason: I would absolutely agree with you.

Leo: And for that price it just shows you the commoditization of tablets.

Jason: Oh, it's kind of crazy right now especially when you consider tablets sub $150 versus what you get for phones for $300.

Leo: Or $500, or $700.

Jason: $500 or $700; meanwhile you are talking about larger or more capable devices in a lot of different ways.

Leo: SD card memory, extra storage?

Jason: Yes, both have Micro SD card slots on the sides.

Leo: Speakers?

Jason: They have dual stereo speakers on the back.

Leo: Dual back ported stereo, yeah.

Jason: You can kind of see them down at the bottom there.

Leo: Sound is okay?

Jason: Sound is alright, yeah.

Leo: I wouldn't expect much.

Jason: A part of the gaming performance issue that I did notice on the larger tablet was a weird sound issue when I gamed where things would repeat sometime. Audio was almost as if it was being run through a delay. I'm not sure whether it was a hardware issue or a software issue, but I definitely noticed that. I didn't notice it on the smaller tablet.

Leo: Thank you for forcing yourself to use both of these.

Jason: It was hard. I've got to tell you. This was not an easy review to do when you talk about 2 tablets.

Leo: Let's get the pros and cons.

Jason: Let's do that. So the pros, obviously it's super affordable. It has a sturdy design, I actually really like the design; even though it's unassuming it's pretty great. I'd say they perform pretty darn well. They are very capable little tablets, particularly with that Atom Processor in there. The cons, definitely the camera. I would say more so on the smaller of the two, on the 7 versus the 8, but camera performance overall wasn't amazing. 1 GB of RAM potentially in the long run might be a little low.

Leo: Top Android phones now have 3 GB.

Jason: Oh yeah, now they are coming out with 3 GB.

Leo: And it does make a difference with performance.

Jason: Yeah it does. It absolutely does. The display maybe because these are not super high res displays. They are 216 pixels per inch. That's really a maybe. I think when you are talking budget category these are perfectly capable.

Leo: 720p is pretty typical.

Jason: Yeah, yeah. So a verdict? I would say that I would recommend that you buy the 7. I think $150 roundabout is a really good price for this kind of technology. I would say try the 8. See if $50 is really worth it for the 8, because it does have some drawbacks I thought between the 2.

Leo: There you go. The Asus MeMo Pad 7 and 8. Twice the review for our money. Thank you Jason.

Jason: I can breathe.

Leo: Host of All About Android, the brand new app arena to look at great Android apps every week.

Jason: That's right. This week we are going to be looking at apps that are taking the material design approach and embracing it, which is kind of the next design language of Android.

Leo: A little preview of what we are going to get in the next version of Android. Thank you Jason.

Jason: Thank you.

Leo: I'm going to take a walk.

Jason: Alright, see you later.

Leo:  I'm going to unplug here, I've got a ways to go. Miles to go before I sleep. I had a camera, over the weekend we went to the 49ers game, from Nikon, the Coolpix P600. This camera had 60X zoom.

Jason: Wow, perfect for a game, right?

Leo: Yeah, but we also thought that we would give it to a professional photographer. So we will walk over here and we will say hello to Paul our reviewer. So our photographer is here, Colorado based photographer Paul D deBerjeois. Did I say that right?

Paul D deBerjeois: You did.

Leo: That wasn't easy. Hi Paul, it's good to see you.

Paul: Hi Leo, great to be here

Leo: What kind of shooting do you normally do?

Paul: I specialize in hot air balloon photography. I am an official photographer for the largest annual balloon event in the world, which is the Albuquerque International Balloon Festival, which is coming up in just a couple of weeks.

Leo: I've always wanted to go to that. Boy those are great images. I've seen your images. The air is clear, the colors are vivid and bright, there you go, and it's just gorgeous to see that. Do you go up in the balloon to shoot that too?

Paul: I fly and I shoot from the ground, that's right.

Leo: Wow, what fun! Well we thought, who better to try out a camera with 60X Optical Zoom? This is a wild camera, a little under $500; it's the Nikon Coolpix P600. We thought, sure we could review it, but who better than a guy who goes up in balloons to review a camera with that kind of zoom. Paul, what did you think?

Paul: I liked it. You mentioned the 60X zoom; I think that is the major feature for that camera. If you shot 35mm film, the lens equivalent there is like having the range from the 24mm on the wide end, which is a really nice start, to 1440mm on the long end, yeah.

Leo: Holy cow! Are the shots we are seeing now from this camera?

Paul: Yes, everything that you have shown so far is from that camera.

Leo: Including the video?

Paul: Including the video, yes. There is a really cool feature in the video. I did one of those. That is a high speed capture that allows you to play it back in slow motion. One of the videos that I did there was the balloon burner flame. There I'm zooming in on the summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs trying to show you the capability of the zoom and then backing way off. Absolutely that lens is the key feature for that particular camera.

Leo: What do you normally shoot?

Paul: I'm a Nikon guy. I shoot Nikon DSLRs, both full frame and crop frame ASP-C sensors.

Leo: Okay. The first thing that I noticed was compared to a DSLR was of course a permanent lens, but it also feels a little light and plasticy compared to a DSLR. It does have one advantage that a lot of Nikons, the Coolpix has introduced; this articulated sensor that has allowed you to shoot from up, from down, or you could be surreptitious and shoot from your belly like it's an old Rollie. What did you think of that?

Paul: I found it to be a really useful feature. At balloon events you have a lot of crowds standing around the balloons as they are inflating and it was really great for me to be able to put the camera up over my head, twist the LCD, and be able to see exactly what I was shooting. That was very helpful. Also, as you said, the surreptitious part; many times if I am trying to get crowd reaction shots I will actually carry the camera down at my waist. It was handy to be able to twist that LCD up and take candids from unsuspecting participants at the balloon rally with their expressions, and emotions, and things like that.

Leo: I've found the image quality on the LCD fine for shooting. I don't know how it was in the bright sunlight. I would imagine it was a little more difficult to read.

Paul: I didn't really have a problem with it. I did use it. On that kind of camera I won't put my eye to the viewfinder, I will use the LCD.

Leo: That was what I was going to bring up. It better be okay in bright sunlight, because normally you want to use the viewfinder, but it's the smallest, worst video tap that I've ever seen. It's terrible.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: Unusable probably. So you are going to be using the articulated LCD, and I doubt very much that you will be using it. It looks like you are watching a 1950's television set. It's terrible. No raw in this either. If you are a pro you are going to have to shoot jpeg.

Paul: Right, and that is probably my biggest disappointment with the camera because I shoot exclusively in raw. So yeah, that was one drawback, but I also checked the competitive cameras.

Leo: Wow, look at that.

Paul: Yeah, that's the high speed video; slow motion of heating the inside of the balloon.

Leo: The colors seem very rich and accurate as well. Especially unusually so for video.

Paul: Yes.

Leo: Alright, so I will tell you some of the other things that I didn't like about this. Maybe you didn't notice these. If I shoot in portrait it didn't rotate them. I had to go through them all and manually rotate them. That is something, not an annoyance, but an odd thing for a company like Nikon that ought to know better. It's a 16 MP?

Paul: 16 MP, the image sensor itself is about the size of Lincoln's head on a penny.

Leo: Oh.

Paul: Yeah, so it's not a very big image sensor and 16 MP is plenty to put on a sensor that size.

Leo: How was it in low light shooting? Did you try anything? In bright sunlight it's not very hard for a camera to do a good job, but it's very hard for a digital camera to do a good job in low light.

Paul: The lens itself is a relatively slow lens. At the widest zoom length it is a f/3.5. At the telephoto end it is f/6.5. It does want to work in brighter subjects. Those were some sunrise shots that I shot in Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. That particular shot you are showing right now I wanted you to be able to see the out of focus, called Bokeh. I wanted you to be able to see what the best you could expect. A small image sensor camera is not known for great Bokeh, but this camera did okay.

Leo: It's not bad, yeah.

Paul:  Yeah.

Leo: Not bad at all, the shallow depth of field, the mountains out of focus, and the flowers in focus. Is this macro? Does it have a macro setting?

Paul: It does and that is what I used for those up close on the flowers.

Leo: That looks pretty darn nice. Now I took some pictures of the football game to give you a sense, and I think Bryan Barnett our Technical Director can show you. We were at the 9'ers game. This is zoomed out. We were way up in the stands, the American flag you know. Way down there in the middle you can see the lead singer from Train singing the National Anthem. Zoomed in at 60X you can see the picture, the details. This is better than binoculars. I was blown away. Now there is another one, that's Jerry Rice and Joe Montana on the right, Ronnie Lott on the field. I can tell you that they looked like little dots from our seats in the stands. As well as binoculars you can zoom right in. However, I found it very hard to shoot at 60X without a tripod because if you moved the camera just a little; I got a lot of pictures of people's feet and the tops of their heads.

Paul: Yes, yeah.

Leo: I've always said this, when something has that much zoom you are going to need a tripod or just be very careful to hold it steady as you are shooting.

Paul: Absolutely. I sent you a couple of pictures of the moon; full moon and crescent moons that I shot, and yeah. 

Leo: Oh my goodness. Paul, that is amazing.

Paul: Thanks. I used the moon as my test subject because not only is it far away and there is plenty of detail if you are able to pull it out, but it's also moving so you not only have to be able to expose properly for it but the camera has to have a good enough lens to be able to capture that image at full zoom while the subject is moving slightly. I though it passed my test.

Leo: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah, definitely passed my test for moon shots. 

Leo: I'm sure that's on a tripod.

Paul: Yes.

Leo: And what were you shooting at? What shutter speed and aperture on this?

Paul: I used the sharper aperture, which is in the mid-range on that camera, f/4, f/4.5.

Leo: So that gives it better focus.

Paul: Right, and the shutter speed for the moon is pretty fast. It can be up around 1/200th of a second or 1/400th of a second.

Leo: Wow. Well, it's bright.

Paul: The moon is bright, yeah.

Leo: Those first two images, the black and white, did you process those a lot in Photoshop?

Paul: I processed them only a very tiny bit in Nikon's Capture nx2.

Leo: Those are stunning.

Paul: Yeah, one of the benefits that I see for that camera is that if you want a long zoom lens for bright light work and you don't want to pay the $4,000, $5,000, or $8,000 that it would cost to put an 800mm or a 1200mm lens on your camera this is a really good option for a low cost bright light situation for a long zoom.

Leo: Boy, this is where I wish we had Raw. I mean this is a gorgeous shot. Wow, that is just spectacular. Let's talk about the pros and cons. We are talking about the Nikon Coolpix P600. $429 list, so it's inexpensive, and a 60X zoom. What did you like about it Paul?

Paul: I loved the lens, the long lens; great obviously. Also, the camera has exposure modes for all skill levels. If you are a beginner it has got the preset screen modes where it is basically point and shoot. White balance, shutter speeds, all of those things are figured out for you, so you just set it to landscape, or portrait, or fireworks, or whatever and it's there. If you are more advanced and you want to take control of the exposure settings it has the typical PASM that Nikon offers, program aperture, shutter priority, and full manual. So that, I thought, was a very strong point for the camera; also, the articulating LCD. The electronic viewfinder, if you use that has a diopter control so that if you wear glasses you can adjust it and you will be able to see sharp without your glasses or to adjust for your eye. Finally, a very tiny thing, but it could be important; the lens actually has filter threads so that you can put a polarizer or a neutral density filter. Those are the things that are really hard to duplicate in Photoshop, so that's handy.

Leo: And sometimes something unusual in a camera like this with point and shoot. Boy, these images are gorgeous. How about negatives? What didn't you like about this?

Paul: Well you've already mentioned this, that there is no Raw capture, it only saves in jpeg. So from the standpoint if you like the post process your options are very limited. The second thing is that, I've already mentioned, the relatively slow lens at f/3.5 on the wide end to f/6.5 on the long end. So your subject, especially if you are zooming in to them, has to be pretty bright. A couple of small things, the battery has to be charged in the camera with the camera turned off.

Leo: Yeah, they don't give you a standalone charger.

Paul: No, you can buy them after market from other than Nikon, but if you have a second battery you still can't pop that battery and then shoot some more. Then finally, if you look at the bottom of the camera at the battery door and the memory card door, if you have a tripod plate and you are mounted to a tripod mounting plate you have to take that mounting plate off to get to the memory card or the battery.

Leo: That bugs the hell out of me. Although I have to say that some high end cameras have the same problem. It's a little annoying. Yeah, you have to take it off the tripod. I had one other thing, and I don't know if you noticed this problem, but sometimes the zoom was unresponsive. I was doing a lot of zooming in and out, maybe I broke it.

Paul: I'm spoiled because on my DSLRs I turn the lens to zoom. You have to wait for the motor to move the lens in and out on that. It was a little bit difficult with some of the faster moving subjects on the balloon field.

Leo: So at $429 with a 60X zoom now it comes down to your try, buy, or don't buy. Paul, what do you think?

Paul: Well, I'm going to land right in the middle of the fence on this one Leo. I think that it's a try because there are so many different ways that a photographer uses their cameras. Again, if you are looking for an inexpensive long lens that you would use in bright light this would be a great choice. If you are interested in growing with that same camera and getting into Photoshop and post processing the lack of Raw is a definite show stopper for me. But I think that if you want a very light, fully capable camera to take on travel, on trips, on vacations to shoot the family shots, it's great for video, I think that it's definitely one worth considering. So I'm definitely a try and possibly a buy if it suits what you want to do.

Leo: Well if you are ever going to shoot the moon this costs less than most telephoto lenses. I tell you, I was a little skeptical on this camera until I saw those shots, Paul. It's not the camera, it's the photographer. Paul D deBerjeois is at colorbandit.com where you can see his amazing photos; hotairphotos.com as well. He is going to be at the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Festival in a couple of weeks. Look for him there. That should be a lot of fun. Of course, we will look for your images at colorbandit.com. Paul, really great to get a pro looking at this camera. I really thank you.

Paul: Thank you Leo, I appreciate it.

Leo: Take care. Paul D deBerjeois, again a try, not an unequivocal buy, but some really nice features on this Coolpix P600 from Nikon. Alright, well I don't know how this is possible. It seems unlikely, but somehow we have a review of the Apple Watch. Here with me right now from OMGcraft I've got Chad Johnson. He's of course one of our talented producers and talent. He is also at RedditUP and The Giz Whiz. How? The Apple Watch?

Chad Johnson: So they announced this brand new watch. This was very recently. You said the Apple Watch; this is actually the iPhone Watch actually. It's very similar, it's brand new, but it's really cool. It mirrors absolutely everything your iPhone does right on the screen.

Leo: Let's see that.

Chad: Yeah, here, I can just show it off right here. 

Leo: He made one.

Chad: There we go.

Leo: Very nice.

Chad: Nice.

Leo: Hey, there is a downside, though. You have to have an iPhone to use it.

Chad: You know, how did you see through my... Right, dang it.

Leo: I thought it was a Samsung watch, what did I know? It looks just like the new Samsung.

Chad: So, we are joking around.

Leo: What is that strap, though? I like that.

Chad: So this is an armband, this is called the PureView PureMove. You would use this is if you were running.

Leo: For exercising, yeah.

Chad: For exercising, for moving around.

Leo: I have bought a number of these; they fall apart and they don't hold the phone well. This looks pretty sturdy.

Chad: This is a really, really great one of these armbands. The first thing is that whatever strap you are using on one of these armbands is one of the most important things. It's right on your arm, and when you are running around this is the thing that is going to be the most annoying. It's one of the best straps I have ever felt. It uses sort of a foam strap. It's odor resistant, its machine washable, and it has Velcro that's the softest Velcro I have ever felt. You know Velcro has two sides, it has the soft side and it has the hard side, but even that prickly side; feel this.

Leo: Oh, that's soft.

Chad: It's like soft prickly. It's insane, it's really crazy. It stays really attached to itself is the other thing. It's very solid; the glue that they've used to make sure that the Velcro is attached is really nice. Like I said, machine washable and it feels incredibly secure.

Leo: Do you run? Are you a runner?

Chad: Yes. Zombie's, Run! is my favorite.

Leo: Isn't that a great game? So that's what this is something really good for, you could have music and stuff, but Zombie's, Run! chases you as you are running down the street, and it's an iPhone app. That's perfect.

Chad: Right now I have it upside down. Here are the notifications and here are the settings. That's so that you can look at it. So it looks a little weird. I realize that it looks a little weird.

Leo: No, but that makes sense for what you are doing with it.

Chad: So it comes in two colors, this is the black and green variety. It comes in white and pink as well. It also comes in two sizes, there is a small / medium which is about 9-12 inches in diameter, but this one is the medium / large which is 10-15 inches for the strap here. The strap is anti-bacterial, it also comes with a cord keeper so if you want to you could take this and there you go.

Leo: It kind of arranges things to store it all together, which is nice.

Chad: So you can keep that attached.

Leo: It's pretty nice. How much is it?

Chad: So this costs $39.99 on Amazon. That's the street price. Now, for the pros it has a very tight fit on the screen. Whoops, I'm opening up one of Anthony's apps here. It has a very, very tight fit on the screen. No matter how much I shake this to try to make sure that this phone doesn't fall out it doesn't fall out. Also, the band moisture wicking, very comfortable and then finally the Velcro is very comfortable. It won't rub if you are running for a long time. It's a great, great material. For the cons, the one con that I had is that on the side you have your controls, your volume up and down and your lock. These are a little difficult to get into. You need to kind of dig your finger in here to make sure that you can hit the silent. The volume up and down is a little difficult. The hard plastic on the side makes it a little difficult to use those on the side. So try, buy, don't buy for the PureGear, PureMove sport band. This is a buy. I really enjoyed it. Really great materials and $40 is a great price point. It also has extra reflective bits on the logo here and on the other side so that when you are running and a car sees you.

Leo: That's actually important, yeah.

Chad: Very important safety feature. All in all I felt like it was definitely worth the money and one of the better sport bands on the market.

Leo: Thank you Chad Johnson, host of OMGcraft, RedditUP, and the Giz Whiz. Good boy, you get a cheddar fry. There you go.

Chad: Thank you Leo.

Leo: You know, when you are feeding your coworkers cheddar fries and other kinds of snacks...

Chad: Otherwise it would just be awkward.

Leo: You don't want to use cheap, junky food.

Chad: No.

Leo: You want to use delicious, healthy food from NatureBox. Isn't that good? 

Chad:  That's really good.

Leo: Have you had that one before?

Chad: No.

Leo: Me either.

Chad: No, I've had the baked cheddar, the one with flax chips, and it tastes a lot like Cheetos.

Leo: These taste like French fries with cheddar cheese. Here, I will give this to you.

Chad: Oh, the whole thing. You are too generous.

Leo: Well I've got Lone Star Snack Mix. So here's the deal with NatureBox. These are delivered to your door every month. You get three sizes of boxes so that you can get a box that's right for you and your family. If you are a business you may want several. We order, what is it, 4-5 boxes a month for our TWiT staff. Nutritionist approved, no HFCs, High Fructose Corn Syrup, no Trans fats, no artificial flavors or colors, just good stuff.

Chad: That tastes really good.

Leo: See, if you are an employer you should get these because your staff becomes happy.

Chad: It's just the right amount of salt. Apparently this chip is made of potato crackers.

Leo: There are over 100 choices of NatureBox snacks. You can either just get a complete assortment or chose what you want from sweet, savory, and spicy. They also have snack for vegans, for gluten conscious folks, non GMOs, carb conscious...

Chad: Carb conscious, they have like less than 15 carbs.

Leo: Isn't that good?

Chad: Yeah, that was great.

Leo: All of these packages are resealable so it kind of encourages you not to overeat. You don't feel like you have to eat the whole package, you can just have a little treat. It's got a Ziploc seal and you seal it right back up. They are delightful and I want to give you a box free. How about that?

Chad: For free?

Leo: Free, naturebox.com/twit to start your free trial. The only challenge is which snack to pick.

Chad: Choosing which snacks? They have hundreds.

Leo: Yes.

Chad: They have so many.

Leo: We love those pineapple rings, those are the best dried fruit. Here's Sriracha Roasted Cashews.

Chad: I was about ready to say, they have some of the best nuts. Really expensive nuts.

Leo: Good nuts. Oh yeah, you know, this is a heavy bag of nuts.

Chad: Yeah.

Leo: This is a lot of nuts in here.

Chad: Yeah. Their nuts for giving us that many nuts.

Leo: They are crazy! Go to naturebox.com/twit to get your first free. NatureBox. You did such a good job Chad. You keep those fries. I look like a dork, I admit it, but I am wearing 2 watches today.

Chad: You know, I would say compared to my watch those screens are very small.

Leo: How do you survive?

Chad: I have a much larger screen.

Leo: How do you survive? Motorola released the, these are Android Wear watches, these are not Apple watches. We have to wait until next year for those. Google announced at the Google IO this year the Android Wear platform. The thing to understand about Android Wear is, and you were the one who observed this, they are all essentially the same software wise. It's the hardware where there is some variation. That's mostly true, although there are some software customizations. This watch on the left is the one that came out first along with the Samsung. This is the LG, and it's square.

Chad: And you wear that like all the time, right?

Leo: And I wear it like this all the time.

Chad: Both watches the same.

Leo: No, because I've been trying the Moto 360. This is the one that everyone was waiting for. It just came out; sold out within a day. In fact, just this morning as we speak they put it back on sale. They may be sold out already again. The thing that attracts people about the Moto 360 is its looks; its round. That's nice. Very nice leather band compared to the white rubber band that I got with my LG. In both cases these are 22mm watch bands, so you could theoretically buy another watch band and replace it. This leather you are not going to want to replace right away. It also does something interesting that I want to point out. Unlike the Apple watch, unlike the LG watch; the band joins the Moto 360 right at the bottom. Even though these watches tend to be thick for battery this one is tight right above the band so it feels like a normal watch. There is another thing that I really like about this, and this will not be true of the Apple iWatch, you can put your sleeve over it. It really is more like a real wrist watch. The iWatch is so thick that your sleeve won't actually cover it. In some cases the square watches will catch on the sleeve. Let me show you the watch itself, because that's why you are buying it; for its functionality. Android Wear ties to an Android phone, it has to be an Android phone but it can be any Android phone. Now the difference between the square watch and the round watch is just that the corners are cut off on the card. It's always cards. You can swipe through the cards by swiping left or swiping right. Swiping right gets rid of a card. Swiping left will give you more information about a card. You can also dictate to it, you see that it's already hearing my dictation. That means you can send text messages. You can take a note, you can show your steps, your heart rate; in some cases you can even respond to text messages. It depends on which text messaging app you are using on your smartphone. With Google Hangouts when a message comes in it will show up on my watch, I can swipe over, press reply, and dictate a response immediately. That's pretty handy. It does a good job. I use this for alarms and I use this when I'm cooking to start a stopwatch. It's really great for that feature. The other thing that is great about these kinds of watches is that of course the face is customizable. Let me just get rid of some of these cards. Oh, it's 20 degrees in London. By the way, if you swipe right you get more information. Actually that's swiping left, right? Then if you swipe right, I never get this right, it gets rid of it. Whoops, we've got a text message from Lisa. By the way, let me show you that. When you get a text message from somebody, this is Hangouts; it automatically puts their picture in there. That's neat, right? I can swipe right and I can respond. "You bet I am." It's going to send that reply. I can cancel it, but typically you just want to let it go. I'm going to get rid of some of these so that I can actually show you. This is part of the demo, so I'm going to say, okay, got it. If you have a Nest Thermostat you can program your Nest Thermostat. Let me swipe all of this out of the way so that we can get back to, you see this is a lot of information. This is basically Google Now. It also had a pretty good step monitor, and as you can see down here it has a heart rate monitor, too, on this. This is one of the type faces. Motorola has unique type faces, which is nice. You customize these by going into the settings, so I will scroll down to the settings and show you some of the other type watch faces. But you will notice as I do this, one of the things that people don't like about this watch, the flat tire look. Motorola put some information, some controls, and here in the bottom. You can't see so much on the black watch face, but if I switch to a white watch face you will see what I mean. It's just cut off a little on the bottom there. That doesn't bother me as much as it does some people, but it is certainly something to be aware of. I like the customizable watch faces. Now when this came out The Verge and others reported that battery life was bad on the Motorola 360. They said that you can't even get through a full day. Now, I will have to explain something about that. That's both true and false. By default it has the same battery life as the LG, but the default setting is slightly different than the other Android Wear watches. There is an ambient watch face on the LG. It's always on. It dims, but it is always on. That is turned off on the 360. The way the 360 is set up, if you are not looking at it, and you could see that early on when I was showing it, it's dark.

Chad: It's off.

Leo:  It's off. And if you turn this ambient face on you are not going to get a full day. So the default settings will get you through the day plus. Easily 20 hours; I got through a 15 hour day with about 50% left, so there is plenty of battery life on this if you can get used to the idea that the watch face is not always on, if it's only on if you look at it. Here's the other problem, it's not even then always on because sometimes it's not responsive. I've flipped it up and it comes on, but it doesn't always do that. I think that's why Motorola gave you a stem; it's the only Android Wear watch with a little button. If the watch face doesn't come on when you tip it up you can also press the button to bring up the watch face. I think in many ways I like Android Wear. I'm a little concerned about the Apple watch because it feels like they have put in too much functionality. This is pretty simple, it's basically Google Now cards, that was a Facebook notification, that you can swipe off, you can dictate to it, you can tap it, set a timer for 5 minutes and it will do that. It actually didn't do that. Set a timer for 5 minutes. I do this with cooking all of the time. It's really handy because now it's going to say in 5 minutes from now my watch will go off.

Chad: Now does it have the issue of, okay Google?

Leo:  No, you don't have to do that. You can do that.

Chad: Well I can say it.

Leo: Yeah, anybody can say it. It's not trained. It's not a big deal and, in fact, if you don't say anything it will time out after a while.

Chad: That's funny because I can say, okay Google, remind me to pick up the milk.

Leo: Not really worried about that too much. I guess somebody could set a reminder for you without you knowing. No, because you would be shouting.

Chad: They would be yelling right next to you.

Leo: The other thing that they do really well with this, Jason can you bring me the dock for this? Jason Howell, this is Jason's watch. I gave it back to him. Most of these Android Wear watches have POGO pins on the back and a little magnetic dock that you have to put it in to charge it overnight. By the way, yeah, you are going to want to charge these overnight, that's just kind of the nature of these smartwatches. That doesn't bother me as much as it bothers some people. I charge my phone every night, too. I take the phone out and put it on the charger, take the watch out and put it in the charger. I do really prefer Moto's charger. Its a little dock and you put the watch in sideways like this. It's not going to do anything because it's not plugged it, but it changes to a dim clock face and a charging ring. This makes actually an excellent bedside clock. There is no POGO pins, it just sits in there and does wireless charging. So I have to give them positive grades for this. Look, this category is brand new. I think that people were right to say let's wait to see what the 360 is like compared to the LG and Samsung Android Wear watches. I definitely think this is the best Android Wear watch. Let me give you the pros and cons, though, before I give you my recommendation. First of all, round is good. This is definitely the best looking, the most stylish. You could wear this to a dinner party, to a concert, to a black tie affair and not feel like you are wearing some sort of weird, geeky watch. This is a nice watch. It's not great that it's dark all of the time, but maybe they think you are a secret agent or something. I don't know. There are customizations that Motorola offers, its own fit app that is a little bit better I find than the other Android Wear watches. I just love the smart charger, the wireless charger that doubles as a bedside clock. I think they did that very nicely. See, there it is.

Chad: Oh wow.

Leo: Unfortunately, the battery life requires that you leave the screen off unless you are looking at the watch. That's a negative. It's the only Android Wear so far that requires that. As you notice, it's not always real good about popping the watch face up.

Chad: Do you think that is because of the screen technology that they used, that it's not LED, or that it's just a smaller battery?

Leo: Well, after I fix it to where it is down we found out that it has a smaller battery and a 4 year old system on a chip from TI, and omap that is a very much higher power processor. For reasons that I don't fully understand, Motorola didn't design this to have good battery life. Again, if you turn off, the default setting that the watch face goes off when you are not looking at it, plenty of life, it's not a problem. I mean I use it all the time, it's not a problem. It's only a problem if you turn that ambient face on all the time then it won't get through a whole day. I think that is a negative. The flat tire also bothers some people. So there are a couple of cons; battery life, flat tire, and doesn't always come on. However, and I really agonized over this last night because this morning more Moto 360s came on sale. I wasn't able to get it when it first came out. I didn't order it in time, so I had a couple of weeks to think about it. I finally decided to buy it. So I did buy this this morning, so I think I'm putting my own money where my mouth it. By the way, two choices of bands; that's the grey. I always like the black. That's the one that I've got, but they do have the grey band as well. It's also a little more expensive than the other Android Wear watches at $250, but still $100 less expensive than the least expensive Apple Watch. I think that for some time to come this Moto 360 is going to be the smartwatch for most of us if you are using an Android device. A definite buy on the Moto 360. I want to thank Chad Johnson and Mike Elgan. I want to thank Paul D deBerjeois, our photographer, for his reviews. Thanks also to Jason Howell. Thanks to all of you for watching. That concludes this edition of Before You Buy. We do put this show out in a number of different ways. Of course it's out on the website, twit.tv/byb. That's the full show. But you can also get individual reviews of each of these products if you want to share it with a friend or family member at the YouTube channel. That's youtube.com/beforeyoubuy. You could subscribe, too, and get each show each week as we put it out. It comes out on Tuesday afternoon, Tuesday evening, right after we record the show. If you want to ask us to review something, byb@twit.tv, that's our email address. I thank you for joining us, and I hope that you join us next week. Remember, you have to watch Before you buy! Bye, bye.