Before You Buy 164 (Transcript)
Father Robert Ballecer: Coming up, it's a high-res audio player, a brand
new venue from Dell, a first look at an Acer convertible tablet. Raspberry Pi
2, a smartphone for people who hate big screens. That's right, we're mixing it
up. That's why you've got to watch, Before You Buy.
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SmartThings is offering Before You Buy listeners 10% off any home security or
solutions kit and you get free shipping in the United States when you go to
SmartThings.com/twit and use the offer code twit at check out. And by Prosper.
Prosper is a peer to peer lending marketplace that connects people who are
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Fr. Robert: Welcome to Before You Buy,
it's the TWiT show where we give the latest gadgets
and gizmos to the TWiT staff to see what they really
think about the latest and greatest out of the consumer world. I'm Father
Robert Ballacer, the digital Jesuit. Now you may
notice that I'm not Leo Laporte. Well that's because
we asked Leo to take it easy, he's been hosting this show for the better part
of 3 years and we wanted him to relax so we gave him this. This is a high-res
all aluminum audio player. We said Leo, take some time. Exercise and just enjoy
yourself. So let's take a look at the Fiio.
Leo Laporte: Oh, Hi! Let me turn this
off here. Hold on a second, I'm working out. And you know, when you're working
out you want to listen to some tunes. I'm not listening to my iPhone though, I'm not listening to my iPod either. I'm not even
listening to my fancy-Dan Neil Young Pono Player. I'm
listening to something brand new. My review today is of this, let me take the
headphones out and show you my new Fiio X1. It's in
the silicone case, I do that to keep it from getting wet and it's sealed all
around which is kind of nice. Just exposure to the click
wheel and the screen. Inside a really pretty aluminum,
solid aluminum case. This is a high-res music player, so it can play
back any kind of digital file I have, not just AAC and MP3s but it will even
play FLAC, the lossless compression, FLAC, Apple lossless. And it will play
back bit rates up to 192 kilohertz, 24 bit. I mean the highest quality in
high-res files. Portable audio player like this wouldn't be any good if it
didn't sound good and they put some pretty good hardware inside of here. Fiio chose to use the Texas Instruments 1542 digital to
analog converter, it's a new part. Audio files haven't really weighed in on it
yet but it does have 112db signal to noise, that's very good, a lot better than
an iPhone for instance. Maybe not as good as some of the
higher end audio file decks but this is a high quality deck with a nice sound. Also a very good headphone amplifier in here, that's able to power even high
quality headphones. I've been using my Etymotic ER4s, these are excellent in
ear monitors but it will even power my high impedance headphones like my
magnetic planar headphones HiFiMAN headphones which
take a lot of juice, I think they're 35 Ohm headphones, that's a high
impedance. And there's enough juice here to listen at normal, even somewhat
loud listening volumes. The controls are good, this
has not a touch screen but a nice color screen that has a fairly useful
interface, lots of good stuff too. Gap-less playback, that's something Neil's Pono Player doesn't do. It also has a 7 channel equalizer
with presets and boy look at all the buttons on the front of this. Not only is
there an on/off button but volume up and down. Previous channel, next track,
back and settings button and the scroll wheel unlock the iPod actually scrolls.
You can even hit the big fat click wheel. So in some ways there's actually a
duplication of functionality but that's fine, I find it very easy to use, very
easy to find what I want. The screen displays album art in color also bit rate
information. I think this is well made, this is kind
of a post iPod portable audio player. I saved the best for last. The Fiio X1 is $100. $100! Now that doesn't include storage, in
a way I kind of like this idea. It uses micro SD cards and you supply your own
SD cards up to 120GB. So I bought a Sandisk 128 gig
micro SD card for $100, so $200 total for storage. And the Fiio X1. Nice though, you can have multiple SD cards, one for your workout, one for chilling. And you know, that's kind of cool. Certainly enough to store as big a music library as you'd
want. $100 for this. So let me give you the pros and
the cons. But for that I think I need to retire to my relaxation zone. Ah,
after a workout it's so great to relax in the hot tub with your tunes and the
X1 comes along with me, thanks to that silicone wrapper. It's not waterproof
but at least it keeps splashes off of it. And notice it's even powerful enough
to drive these high impedance HiFiMAN HE 560
headphones, at a reasonable level, that's pretty sweet. Probably shouldn't wear
those in a hot tub though. Let's take off the silicon wrapper and give you the
pros and cons on the Fiios X1. Pro, well it stands
right out at you, it's beautifully designed. This is aluminum, the functions
are easy to use, we're in the post iPod era, people pretty much understand how one of these is supposed to work. I love the return
of the click wheel. It's kind of rubberized, feels great. The big button makes
it very easy to use. It doesn't have a hold button but when you press the
on/off power switch, if you turn off you don't see the screen but also the
buttons become inactive so it doesn't really need a whole switch. I like software, I love the equalizer, the gap-less playback. Dark Side of the Moon baby, awesome. And it's great that I
can do both line out and headphone out, one jack. The USB, micro USB port means
I can charge it with pretty much anything and that's both charging and data
which is nice so if you don't have a micro SD card reader, don't worry. You
just plug it into your computer, copy your files onto it. 11 hours battery life
and Fiio says they're going to get to 15 with a
firmware update, that's more than enough for me. On the cons there's only a
couple... oh I left out the most important pro, the price. $100. On the cons, of course it doesn't include headphones but for $100 you have a
little extra to buy some high end headphones, you're not going to want your
Apple earbuds in this, you need some good high fidelity in ear monitors to
really get the most out of it. It also doesn't include any memory but I think
that's great, it gives me the flexibility to buy one or more micro SD cards to
fit my needs and with 128 gigs of storage and the player, I'm still only paying
$200. That's half the Pono Player. Okay, maybe the Fiio X1 doesn't sound as good to those golden ears as the Pono Player, I really can't tell. It sounds great to me and
it can play back all of my files, even the high res ones. It's a definite buy
for the Fiio X1. So I'm going to chill out, relax,
listen to some tunes and send it back to you Father Robert. You, you... you can't
tell I'm naked in here, can you?
Fr. Robert: Huh. Yeah. Okay. So um...
now I know why it says naked aluminum on the sheet. That was Leo Laporte, with the Fiio X1 high
res audio player. Thank you very much for that... comprehensive review, Leo and
you go on relaxing. Make sure you relax a lot. And next time work on the crop a
little bit. Alright so when we come back, we've got plenty more. We're going to
be looking at cell phones for people who are tired of big screens. It's not
that simple, I mean I know there are people who like all different types of
phone and if you've gotten tired with the space race to get bigger and bigger
screens and you're tired of looking like you hold a tablet up to your head,
you're going to want to take out Myriam's review of
the Sony Xperia. It's the latest and greatest from
the giz whizzes over there. But before we do that,
let's go ahead and talk about something that I hold near and dear to my heart
because I was at CES this year. And at CES, one of the big buzzwords was
automation. Specifically home automation. How do you
make your home smart? Now there were a lot of solutions at the show and most of
them required you to use your home and your appliances and your things in the
way that they wanted you to use. I mean it's only natural, they design it, they
create it, they make it so you use it that way. But
you could it a different way. You could do it the SmartThings way. SmartThings
quite simply is a way to speak to everything. It doesn't matter what equipment
you use, it doesn't matter what you want to automate, it doesn't really matter
what you buy because SmartThings speaks to it all. That's right, it's seen as
highest rated smart home system. It allows you to monitor, control and automate
your home from anywhere using your smartphone. Now your lights, your locks,
your thermostat, your home security are all connected through a single app.
Think about that, it's a single pane of glass to control everything in your
house. It has intuitive controls that allow you to set the rules on your smart
home through their free iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps. With SmartThings
you can customize the way your smart devices talk to each other. So now you can
tap goodnight on your phone and the lights will turn off, the thermostat will
adjust and the doors will lock. You can set your lamps to brighten each morning
at sunrise, or when you want to wake up. You could even keep your home
protected with SmartThings with home security, motion detection, water
detection and more. Now, Brian, go ahead and go to the table here because I
want to show you some of the things that smart home can give you for your smart
home. SmartThings... this is the hub. This is where it all starts, but all of
these sensors around me allow you to customize your smart home the way that you
want it to work. For example I could have this present sensor on me so that
when I walk towards my home it automatically knows that it should unlock my
doors, it should change the thermostat, it should turn
on my Sonos system. It should look at the drop cam to make sure that no one is lurking my entryway. These
are all the rules that you could work with. For example, if you want to
integrate this with If-T, I call it If-T. It's not just that it works with
these modules, it works with the home automation that
you already have and that really is the genius of the SmartThings smart home.
Again, SmartThings was named CES 2015 Editor's Choice Award, so if you are
looking at a home automation system, something for your internet of things...
this is where you need to go. Now to get you started setting up your smart home
right now, SmartThings is offering Before You Buy listeners 10% off any home
security or solutions kit, and you get free shipping in the United States when
you go to SmartThings.com/twit and use the offer code TWiT at checkout. That's SmartThings.com/twit. And we thank SmartThings for their
support of Before You Buy. Now let's get back to it, again I like big screens
but some people don't like having a laptop in their pocket. That's why we had Myriam Joir take a look at the
new Sony Xperia for those people who want something a
bit more petite.
Myriam Joir: Hey there it's Myriam Joir for BYB and this is the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. Yes,
compact. That's why it looks so small next to my gigantic head. But you know
what, there's a lot to be said about flagship devices that are compact and this
is one of the few. Right now if you want a flagship phone, you can't get
anything that's easy... small and 5 inches really. And this is one of the few,
and probably the only one that doesn't sacrifice in any way shape or form on
specs or performance. I really like this phone, this
is a really really good device. So let me walk you
through it a little bit. This is a cool orange color, it comes in a bunch of colors if you go to Sony's website. Be aware this is
sold unlocked in the US through various retailers, including Sony, I believe
Amazon as well and... I don't have an exact price point but it's around $450
which is really quite affordable for a fully fledged device with working LT bands for the US and a very nice version of Android. Very little contamination in terms of manufacturer or carrier. Obviously no carrier software of any kind whatsoever. And it's running the latest, well not quite the latest, it's not the latest
Android but it's 4 point 4 point something so it's
pretty good. Let me walk you through a little bit so you can have an idea
what's in the package and so you can understand this is actually really
worthwhile in terms of being a flagship device. First you've got the display,
it's a gorgeous display. It's only 720p, 4.6 inches. But it's got Sony's Triluminos technology I believe it's called. And what it is
it enhances the brightness, the colors, the blacks are really black which is
really beautiful because this is not an OLED panel it's an IPS panel. You can
see here the colors are, it's kind of just floating on
top of the display. Very very nicely made, you've got
the usual sensors and speakers and stuff, you've got a speaker right on top
with the Sony logo here, 2 megapixel front facing camera, you've got another
speaker at the bottom, and if you flip it over you get the pièce de résistance,
just like the Z3 non-compact, this phone has a 20 megapixel camera. Yes, 20. By
default it shoots at 8 megapixels and I actually recommend you leave it in that
mode because it adds a whole bunch of functionality like image stabilization,
auto HDR, a bunch of other really helpful things. So the camera you know, looks
great on paper but it's I would say one of the better ones but not nearly as
great as Sony would like you to believe. It also shoots 4k, which is pretty
awesome. In terms of specs internally you've got a Snapdragon 801, 2 gigs of
RAM and only 16GB of storage but thankfully there's a micro SD card slot so
you're not completely stuck with terms of storage. But that's one of the areas
that I think Sony could have done a better job, you've an LED flash obviously,
NFC, all the things, bells and whistles you'd expect. What is cool is that if
you do a tour of the sides here on the right hand side there's a power key
volume rocker but there's also dual to ten camera button. So you know, you can
take a photo by just half clicking and then for focus and fully clicking. I
think every Android phone should come with this. Very few do, but if you're
into photography this is a really major thing to have. On the bottom you have a
microphone and a nice little spot to put a lanyard. I wish more phones went
back to doing this, a lot of phones used to have a lanyard hole and it's nice,
you don't drop your phone if you have it, especially if you're taking photos
with it. You're on a boat or something, put the strap around you, nothing bad
happens. On top you've got obviously the 3.5mm headphone jack, secondary microphone
for noise reduction and you know, that's it essentially.
On the left hand side a bunch of ports and so this is interesting, this phone
is water resistant. You can immerse it in a sink or do the dishes with it, drop
it in the sink when you do the dishes nothing bad is going to happen as long as
these flaps are closed. There's two flaps on the left
hand side. One on top which has the micro USB and the SD card slot, micro SD.
And then on the bottom there's one that's actually interestingly not labeled. But
underneath it is where you'll find the nano SIM for
this phone. So it's a nano SIM I think more and more
devices seem to be headed in that direction so you'll probably have to get used
to it, and of course closing these little flaps is important because that's
what the water resistance is all about. So just be careful that you close it
properly. There's also a custom connector that's magnetic, it's for a dock that
Sony makes, I've never seen it in person and you know I've seen a lot of Sony
products so don't count on this being quite useful. But in terms of this
overall, this phone if you're looking for a high end phone but you have small
hands or you don't want to go for something that's going to take a lot of real
estate, this is the phone. 4.6 inch, 720p display. Could be 1080p I guess but
at 4.6 inches it's really not a big deal and most importantly, it saves battery
to have less pixels to drive and speaking of battery, this is a 2500 or so
milliamp power battery. Battery life is great, Snapdragon 801 is very
efficient. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. I like high end phones as
you know, and again the camera really you know, is being pushed really hard by
Sony but honestly I think if this had OIS, optical image stabilization, which
is really a technology that's becoming more and more popular on high end
phones, this might actually be my daily driver. This would probably be the
phone I use every day. For me as a photography buff the OIS is really what's
missing from this device, but other than that everything about it is
delightful. So, pros... as I said, top specs, small,
water resistant, probably the big three. And it's, I think, a really beautiful
design. The fact that you get a very plain version of Android
to work with, no glut here. And cons... you know, probably the camera. Not that it's a bad camera, don't get me wrong it
will definitely get the job done, but Sony has hyped the camera so much that it
just doesn't live up to the oh my god 20 megapixel because it lacks OIS. In
closing, to me the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is an
absolute no doubt buy, it's probably one of the top 5 or 10 phones on the
market today. Comes in funky colors, is small, compact, beautiful, you know,
Sony's done a really good job not cutting corners on this except for perhaps
OIS on the camera. So there you have it, the Sony Xperia Z3 compact, here on Before You Buy, I'm Myriam Joir and I'll catch you next time.
Fr. Robert: That's Myriam Joir with a buy for the Sony Xperia Z3 compact, so if you're taking a look at a smaller phone, who knows maybe
that's your next purchase. Now coming up next, we asked Jason Howell to take a
look at the Dell Venue 8. This is, looks like a standard 8 inch tablet, but
this thing has an absolutely gorgeous screen. The question is whether or not that's
going to impress a man who takes a look at these day in and day out, so without
further ado, hey Jason tell us all about the Venue.
Jason Howell: Hey what's up, I'm Jason
Howell and I am here with the Dell Venue 8 7000. This is Dell's new tablet,
they unveiled it at CES this year and had a lot of buzz around it because of
its thin profile, you'll see it's very very thin and
I'll talk about that here in a second. It's $399, you
can pick it up at Dell.com. So let's take a look at the specs, it's an 8.4” OLED
2560x1600 resolution tablet, that's 306:1 pixels per inch, it's running an
Intel Atom Z 3580 2.3GHz quad core CPU. That's a 64 bit chip inside there, so
it will be 64 bit capable when Lollipop comes around which Dell actually says
is going to be soon. It's running KitKat right now, which is kind of
unfortunate that they didn't launch with Lollipop but that's just how it goes.
It has 2 gigs of RAM inside, 16 gigs of internal storage, it does have a micro SD card slot that's expandable to 512 gigs on the side so
you can pack a lot of storage in there if you want to. Now it has an 8
megapixel rear facing camera up at the top there, but you also notice two other
cameras on the side. These are both 720p cameras that are included for depth
sensing and then down at the bottom of the tablet you can see that there is a
single 2 megapixel front facing camera shooting forward. It does have stereo
speakers as well on one side of the tablet. And a 5900
milliamp hour battery. Alright so let's take a look at the design first
and foremost. Its definite key feature here is that it's thin, it's the world's thinnest tablet as Dell says, and pretty light as well.
Thinness, it's right around 6 millimeters and that's thinner than a pencil.
Still feels pretty solid, definitely solid build, it's
an anodized aluminum body. There's front facing stereo
speakers like I said and they're loud enough, the only problem with the
stereo speakers is that they're only stereo when you're in portrait mode. You
go into landscape for a movie or gaming and suddenly those stereo speakers are
just kind of pointless, it's just on one side of the
screen, kind of a bummer. The buttons on the side are pretty stable, have nice,
kind of a nice feel to them and it feels super sturdy but maybe just a little bit
too flush I'd say. But overall they're alright. Thin bezels all around as you
can see here, but obviously the bottom bezel is the large one and that's just
because it's packing everything else. It's got the cameras built into it, the
speakers, everything you need inside that single portion of the tablet. And I
would say the design in general has pretty sharp edges, so if you're holding
onto it for a long enough period of time, it starts to kind of wear on your
hands. Overall, design looks nice, I don't know if it's the most functional
design in the world, I did register some phantom touches on the sides because
of the thin bezels at times so consider that. As for the display, I definitely
say it's a key feature of this device. There isn't a whole lot to say about it
other than that it's excellent. It's vibrant, saturation is a little strong but
still there's enough detail in there and things look good so I'd say it's
definitely a strong point of the tablet. Performance-wise, did a little web
browsing which I actually put it through the Verge test, switch to desktop mode
to see how well it did and I'd say it performed pretty well more or less on the
Verge site. As well as general web browsing. Gaming,
played some games, my favorite to test right now is Riptide GP2 and it's, you
know, I thought it was pretty sturdy, pretty stable on gaming though the device
did heat up a little bit over prolonged use. Battery
efficient, definitely battery efficient through daily use. I was able to
get through a couple of days of using this as my regular tablet so good there.
I'd say overall, few minor issues with performance here and there but I was
pretty happy with it. Alright now let's move onto the camera which I would
definitely say is one of Dell's key features here. It has the Intel Realsense cameras built in, that's the two cameras on the
side and then the camera up at the top. This camera up at the top is the main
camera and that's what you see through the camera app and that you take
pictures through. These other cameras are there, and you can preview them
through the app while you're taking pictures but they're pretty much just
providing depth information into the photo allowing you to kind of go back and
do some you know, rack blurs and that sort of stuff. Unfortunately the position
of the camera is down at the bottom so if you want to take pictures, you
actually do have to rotate it upside down and they advise you of doing that.
Which isn't a deal breaker as you can see the desktop actually re-positions
itself when it's upside down, it's just kind of
awkward to do. And then of course you have the power buttons, the volume
buttons down here that you're managing around and you press the wrong thing and
suddenly the volume goes down or the screen goes off, so you just kind of got
to keep that in mind when you're taking pictures. Definitely the depth sensing
technology requires a lot of really good light and it also has a requirement of
objects being 3-16 feet away and it's kind of a sweet spot, it takes a little
practice to get in there and even when I got it I wouldn't say that it
necessarily looked amazing. I had a couple pictures that looked okay with it.
And then just general gripe with cameras on tablets is that low light
performance, just the image quality in general is never 100%. A little grainy and just not the best. As for the software,
this is running KitKat and it's a pretty unchanged version of KitKat, you can
see just kind of bouncing through that everything looks pretty stock, pretty
standard to the way Google designed KitKat. A few touches here and there, but
not a whole lot. There are a few Dell apps built in, some of which I've shown
off already. The camera app, that supports the Realsense depth cameras, there's the gallery that you can
actually sync Google Plus, Facebook and Dropbox inside that app and also use
some of its advanced photo editing features for, you know, that Instagram
effect. There's Dell live wallpaper which you can kind of see on the background
right now, I have a little bit of wallpaper that when I move you get a little
parallax view. It's subtle and it's neat and the Dell live wallpaper app allows
you to select a few of those. And then My Dell is a support app which kind of
gives you some diagnostic access there. And finally the Dell Cast. And this is
an app that we're going to go into just really quick here, it's an $80 dongle. HDMI dongle that Dell sells as an additional accessory and
this tablet can be used as basically a desktop computer, you plug that HDMI
dongle into the back of a TV, you sync it up with a wireless keyboard and mouse
and plug it all in and run the Dell Cast app on here and voila, your tablet now
becomes a desktop environment on any external TV that has HDMI input. I would
say in my experience it was pretty laggy, pretty
fiddly, it's all wirelessly done so you know random issues arise and you get
little break ups and pixelation and all that kind of
stuff, and ultimately I'm just not convinced in Android in the desktop
environment. I feel like it just makes things... you know their aim is to make
things more productive, I feel like it just kind of slows me down. I'm sure
over time maybe I can get used to it a little bit more but I'm not sure I give
it that time because of my time playing with it, it just wasn't that successful
in convincing me that it needed to happen. Alright so the pros of the Dell
Venue 8 7000, it's incredibly thin and incredibly light and that's nice. The
display definitely pops, got a nice visual representation on the display.
Desktop mode with Dell Cast could be a win for some, for me I wouldn't say that
it was but some people want desktop on Android so there you go, and the Realsense cameras on the back are definitely different. But
in the cons I'd say Realsense still feels like a
gimmick. It doesn't feel like a reason to purchase a device, just a nice added
feature that maybe you're going to use a little bit more than you think.
Picture quality, of course it's a tablet I don't expect a whole lot in image
quality, but it definitely didn't stand up. And that awkward
chin down at the bottom, with the awkward crazy placement of the cameras just
kind of gets in the way more often than I would hope. Now as for my
verdict, I was kind of hedging between don't by and trial because it's not the
tablet for me but I do know that a lot of people are looking for Android in a
desktop environment and maybe that's convenient to them, so I'm going to go
ahead a try. It's $400 and that's the same cost as a Nexus 9 which personally I
would buy over the 2 but if you want Android in a desktop environment, if you
want to play around with some of the advanced photo features that Realsense cameras bring to the table in here, then you
know, definitely take a look. This is the Dell Venue 8 7000 for $399. Thank you
so much for watching my review, my name is Jason Howell, you can catch my other reviews on All About Android on TWiT.tv/aaa, thanks a lot.
Fr. Robert: That's the Dell Venue 8
7000, that was Jason Howell our Android expert. Don't forget you can always
find him on All About Android, Tuesdays at 5:00 and
for Android App Arena 4:30 on Wednesdays. He gave it a try but if you are
looking for an Android tablet in a desktop format, maybe that's going to be for
you. We want to do something a little different for this next item. Most of you
who have watched any of my shows know that I'm a big fan of the Acer S7. This
is my ultra book of choice. It's light, it's
powerful, it's beautiful and it's just incredibly well designed. I've been
rocking this thing for two years, but recently I called out over to the folks
at Acer if there was something else that I should be using, something I should
take a look at and they sent me this. Now this is just a first look, I really
want to give you an in depth look of what this is. This is the R13, this is
essentially an upgrade of the R7 that we took a look at, it must have been like 14 months ago. It's a new generation of notebooks, a
convertible. If you were at CES this year, go ahead and back out to the wide,
you know that this is what happened to tablets. Tablets all but disappeared
from CES and that was because manufacturers are going back to
convertible/hybrid notebooks. That's exactly what this is. It's an easel
design, so this screen doesn't completely detach from the notebook but what it
does do is it allows you to hinge it so that I can put this in a couple of
different configurations. I can use it like this if I want to sort of have an
easel or even make it float above the keyboard, I can flip it around and it
will auto rotate so I can use it as a presentation space or I can just fold it
back on itself to use it as a tablet. The nice thing about designs like this is
that it's no longer a compromise. In the past it felt as if you were losing a
little something, something with your notebook by having a hinge like this. But
this is a full featured Windows 8 notebook. It's got an Intel 5410U, so it's a
very snappy processor. 8 gigabytes of memory, it's got a 2k screen, that will
do 2560x1440 resolution and it's also got a feature that I really like and that
is it keeps the RAID 0 SSD that I found so very useful with the S7. Essentially
it's two SSDs that they've put together on a board running in performance RAID.
RAID 0, which just gives you a ridiculous amount of performance out of a 512GB
SSD. One of the other things that they changed between this and the R7 is this
keyboard is solid. I think that was my biggest complaint about the old one
which was it felt a little mushy. If you hit a key directly it wasn't going to
really go over but this one is sharp, it's responsive. And combined with the multitouch touch screen... I think this might actually
replace my S7. I'm going to spend, I think the next
three weeks or so just putting this through its paces. I'm going to let this
become my daily driver here at TWiT. I'm going to see
if it can do everything I needed out of my S7, plus all the features they
promised out of an easel PC which includes handing this over to our crack
artist, Greg Bernett who's going to see if maybe the
stylus pen that comes with it is the thing for artists. Now, take a look at
this, this is the Acer R13, I'm going to give you an honest to goodness look. A
long term review of whether or not this is going to become the new laptop for
padre. Now, when we come back we need to take a look at something that's near
and dear to my heart, and that is stuff in the maker space, specifically, we've got Aaron Newcomb and the Raspberry Pi
2. That's right, the brand new version, he's going to let you know if it's
something that you should buy if you want to get into making, programming, and
doing yourself. But before you do that, let's go ahead and thank the second
sponsor of Before You Buy, and it's Prosper. Now if
you've watched TWiT you probably know a little bit
about Prosper. Prosper is a lending marketplace, it's not a traditional place
to go when you need resources. Prosper is all about going from people who have
money to lend to people who need money to be lent to them. Oh, face it. There
aren't that many good ways to borrow money when you need it. You could call
friends, you could call family, you could put it on
your credit card. But those just aren't really good, especially traditional
bank loans which have all sorts of stipulations and take a long, long time. If you need money quickly for your next project, for your next
investment, for your next thing... Prosper is the place to go. You can
borrow up to $35,000 in as few as five days! And you can use the money for just
about anything you desire. To pay off those high rate credit cards, to fix up
the house, and maybe even put it into your business. I remember before I
entered the priesthood, before I was working at TWiT,
I actually ran my own business and at one point, my contracts were such that I
had outstretched my cash resources. I wish Prosper had existed back then
because I was forced into the bank shuffle. Going from bank manager to bank
manager trying to show them that I was cash positive, I just needed a bridge
loan so that I could collect my next month's pay. Well I wouldn't have to do
that with Prosper. I can go to the people who have that money, who understand
what I'm trying to do and get the cash that I need to keep doing business.
Really that's what Prosper is all about. Don't rack up more debt on your credit cards, you can pay them off with Prosper. Prosper's online marketplace does connect those people who
have money to lend to those people who need it and what better way can we have
it in the generation of the internet? To check your low rate instantly, right
now, without a checking, without affecting your good credit, go to
Prosper.com/twit and see if maybe their one click custom rate is for you. Now,
and for a limited time Prosper is offering TWiT viewers a $50 Visa gift card with your low interest loan. You can get up to $35,000
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Prosper.com/twit. That's right, Prosper.com/twit for this special offer, just
for TWiT viewers. Do it now, Prosper.com/twit and we
thank Prosper for their support of Before You Buy. Let's go ahead and take a look at what the new Raspberry Pi 2 has in stores for
makers.
Aaron Newcomb: Hi everybody, Aaron Newcomb
here for another review, this time it's more technology. I love being on BYB
and reviewing all these really cool gadgets. This case, I'm super excited about
this as you can tell. This is the Raspberry Pi version 2. I was on a while ago,
I reviewed the Raspberry Pi Model A when it came out and at that time, you
know, Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi foundation
said they weren't going to come out with a new version of the Raspberry Pi B,
the one that usually people use for projects and things until like 2017, hello?
But here it is about 6 months later and they have indeed come out with the
model 2. This is a great little device, you can buy it
online just about everywhere. Amazon or you can buy it directly from a lot of
the partners that Raspberry Pi uses to distribute these things. So let me just
go over what's different about the Raspberry Pi 2 B Plus. It has a really long
name. What they did in this model is they put in a new Broadcom chip. And what
that means is that number 1, it's not running at 700 MHz any more it's running
at 900 MHz, and they've given you four cores. So the previous model was 700 MHz
single core, this is 900 MHz quad core processor. That means that there's so
much more processing power available for each use, not only that, they've added
some additional memory so now there's 1 gig of memory on this device which is
fantastic. Almost nothing else changes, the device is basically the same. It's
really easy to identify these by the way, because you can see the memory chip
right here on the back, if you're ever wondering if it's a model 1 or a model
2, version 1, version 2. You can always tell by just looking at the back and
seeing that little chip there. Not to mention that it does say right on the
front that it's a model 2. But so you have the extra CPU, the extra processing
power. Everything else is the same though, the form factor's the same, you've
still go the same number of USB ports, Ethernet
ports, audio, video, power. Everything else is the same but it's just much much more powerful. What this means in real life is that
you're going to see a huge jump in boot time, loading of programs, you're going
to be able to run things that you weren't able to run before. I'm really
excited about this because I can now run my, all my emulators, my video game
emulators basically at full speed. And not even really tap into the power of
this ship. It's really really fantastic, and I think
you're really really going to love it. Not only that,
the only thing that really changes programmatically on this board is there's a
new kernel to support the new CPU. Other than that, everything should run just
as it did before on the original model B. So you won't have to worry about
changing any of your programs, all of the tutorials out there that you've, that
you go to to run your projects on these boards won't
change, you can go do that, you just have to make sure that you load the
version for model 2 which has the updated kernel, and that's it. Everything
should run, so this is a fantastic board. I'm really excited about it. In my
tests, I've been able to see huge jumps in performance. Boot time, this thing
boots up way faster than my Windows machine does and it boots up about as fast
as my Linux machines do so... boot time is tremendously improved. I think what
you'll see in the future is you'll see people modifying their programs to run
with the multi-core chip. So for right now, things will run faster just because
you're running on a faster CPU even on a single core. But as people start to
recompile their programs to take advantage of the multi-core system you're
really going to see the performance jump. So I think you're really going to
love this. The kicker of this is though, I mentioned this before, is that it's $35 still. It's always been $35, it's still $35 but
you're getting an incredible bump in performance with this particular platform,
this upgrade that they've done. You're getting a really good performance boost
and the price is exactly the same. So if you've been holding off and you've
been wondering well, should I get one, should I... could I actually use it as
my desktop PC or maybe as the desktop PC for a kid? You absolutely can do this
now so it's really really wonderful. The pros on this thing, first of all everything is compatible.
There is no difference in programmatically except you just have to load the new
kernel version when you load your image. You'll see that there's a model 2
version in the kernel is really the only thing that's changed. Secondly, the
form factor is the same, everything stays the same. You're getting a ton of
performance improvements, 1 core to 4 core and 512MB to 1GB of memory, those
are the real advantages. In terms of cons, there's no cons to this. Go out and buy it, enjoy it. And you know, start hacking on something.
Start creating a project. If you were waiting til the
performance got better, your wait is over. Go out and buy one of these things
today. $35, I really think you're going to love it. So once again, this is the
Raspberry Pi Model 2 B Plus. This is Aaron Newcomb, thanks for watching.
Fr. Robert: That's Aaron Newcomb and he
gives a buy to the Raspberry Pi 2, if you're a maker that's really a
no-brainer. Go pick yourself up one right now, and start experimenting. Now,
you can also find Aaron here on the TWiT TV network,
he does FLOSS many days, he also does All About Android so just watch TWiT TV and eventually you'll see Aaron pop up, and don't
forget he is very heavily involved in the Benicia Mini Maker Faire so if you
feel the maker spirit and you're in the bay area, why not come out? Now, we've
got a little something special starting with this new era of Before You Buy. We
always get products in the back room that look interesting sometimes, but don't
really merit a full review. We're going to call it our parting shot and here
with our very first parting shot is our very own Megan Morrone.
You've got this Byrobots droney thingy.
Megan Morrone: Yeah... droney thingy. We didn't intend it to be a parting shot, although from the beginning
when I got this, you said it's not so good.
Fr. Robert: Well I mean I said it wasn't for me.
Megan: Yes.
Fr. Robert: It's a mini drone, it can
be flown indoors, it's really designed for kids. It's
got a couple of interesting features like the ability to play fighter, you can
shoot each other down.
Megan: Right. But you pointed out
that the way it trains people, it trains kids is not great because all of the
quad-copters don't work like this.
Fr. Robert: Yeah.
Megan: And so it can train a child
to use it wrong and then they get another one and it's just not so great. So I
went into that but then it was fine for my kids for a while, and then... this
happened.
Fr. Robert: Wait.
Megan: Uh oh.
Fr. Robert: Actually this is one of the
problems... uh oh! So yeah, not flying straight is not a great... is not a
great thing to have in your product.
Megan: Right, and we did all the things like we checked the motor for hairs, that's what happens
a lot with these, you know. They get hairs in the motors. But should we try it
again?
Fr. Robert: Yeah let's see where it's
going to go this time.
(drone flies off screen)
Fr. Robert: Well that was the Byrobots... uh...
Megan: And we should say how much
it costs right too because I mean it's not cheap.
Fr. Robert: Yeah, that's the thing.
I've seen products like this and you can forgive them because they cost $20,
$30. And it's like okay, well you break it but this is a little pricey yeah?
Megan: Yeah it was like $100.
Fr. Robert: Okay, yeah. That's a
problem. Now as a mother I know you're always very interested in having
products that are safe for your kids. That can also teach them things.
Megan: Right.
Fr. Robert: Does this fit in that
category at all?
Megan: Not really. It wasn't
dangerous. And we didn't put the guides on it because it didn't really fly very
well with the guides. It never hurt anyone, and as you can see I'm not very
good at even flying the ones that are easy to fly.
(drone flies off)
Fr. Robert: Oh, I caught it!
Megan: Oh you're good at drone
catching!
Fr. Robert: Oh hey reflexes!
Megan: So no...
Fr. Robert: I've also noticed this,
every time you have an impact this battery tends to get knocked out.
Megan: Yes, yeah.
Fr. Robert: Which is awesome because it
means that if you hit a wall you have to go over and pick the thing back up.
But yeah, that not flying straight thing that sounds like a deal breaker.
Megan: Yeah it really is.
Especially for kids who are young. I mean my boys are 9 and they get really
frustrated and it's no fun when you spend $100 on something and it makes them
really frustrated.
Fr. Robert: Yeah, yeah.
Megan: So yeah, I mean we've had
other ones. We have the bee copter, you know the quad copter that is a little
bee and it's about $40 and it's great.
Fr. Robert: See, that... I think that
kills it. It's not that this is a bad thing, it's just
that for that expense, for that price you could get something else that's much much better.
Megan: Right.
Fr. Robert: And yeah, that kind of
kills it. So I'm not sure if I even have to ask you for this out of a parting
shot but it's probably not a buy.
Megan: No.
Fr. Robert: And it's probably not a
try.
Megan: No, probably not. I would
say no.
Fr. Robert: I'm sorry.
Megan: I mean I like to be nice to
everything and we tried but, I would say no.
Fr. Robert: Now if, we are going to
have another segment on Before You Buy, we're going to call it redemption where
we're going to allow manufacturers to come in, and maybe they sent us a faulty
product. Or maybe they've improved it. If you were going to take another look
at this, what would be the thing that you tell Byrobots that they need to fix before we take another look.
Megan: Well I would say for it not
to break.
Fr. Robert: (laughing) Okay. We'll
start with that.
Megan: For the battery to fit in
better. Maybe a little cheaper if they could. I mean it's designed for fighting
too with the lasers and everything so I mean those are all great features, it
had a camera, those are great features to keep. But I
would say a little sturdier.
Fr. Robert: Well, that's Megan Morrone, this is the Byrobots Drone Fighter and this has been before you return... and there goes the
battery. You are also all over the TWiT TV network.
This last week you were really busy because Mike was in Barcelona so you had to
cover 10 shows over the week. But usually you are our star for Tech News
Tonight which they can find every evening at 4:00 right?
Megan: Right, yeah it's coming up
in 20 minutes. If you guys finish on time.
Fr. Robert: And for those people who
maybe haven't caught Tech News Tonight, maybe they're
living in cave or under a rock, what do you say is the thing that should
attract them? What does Tech News Tonight give them?
Megan: Well just the short bit of
the news that you need to hear about in 10 or 15 minutes, sometimes 20.
Depending on how much I have to say.
Fr. Robert: Megan Morrone,
catch her every day 4:00 here at live.twit.tv.
Megan: And iFive for the iPhone.
Fr. Robert: And iFive for the iPhone, that's right.
Megan: On Wednesdays.
Fr. Robert: On Wednesdays. I want to
thank everyone who joined in, and especially all of our hosts who gave us
reviews, especially to Leo Laporte, stay in that tub.
Megan: I couldn't even watch.
Fr. Robert: It's a new generation of
Leo, and I think we just got the first taste of it.
Megan: Right.
Fr. Robert: To Jason Howell with the
Dell Venue 8, to Myriam Joir for the Sony Xperia phone, to Aaron Newcomb for the
Raspberry Pi 2, to you for our before you return product and we'll catch you
next time. Don't forget Before You Buy has moved to Fridays, that's right.
Every Friday supposedly at 2:00 you can find us looking at all the latest and
the greatest in the consumer world. Until next time, I'm Father Robert Ballecer, this has been Before You Buy
and remember, you've got to watch Before You Buy!