Source : the age
As a tech reviewer, I get sent a lot of stuff to test. Often products will be more or less as I expected them to be. Other times I think they’ll be interesting but they go straight back in the box for the DHL man to take away. And sometimes I’m not really sold on the idea, only to find that they’re actually kind of great.
This a collection of that latter type of product. You might narrow your eyes or suck your teeth at some of them, but hear me out, they’re pretty good.
If you’re forced to be outside in winter to hear someone play guitar, you might as well be warm.
Heated pillows are the best
It’s almost time to start turning on the heating at home – if you can afford it. My 1970s rental home has gas ducted heating, which is extremely good at bringing the temperature up in every room, but disastrous for the gas bill, even if we use it judiciously. So it’s good timing that I currently have some new gadgets from Dutch sustainable lifestyle brand Stoov.
The pillows are like cushy hot water bottles, but without the hot water.
These things are not complicated. Stoov makes pillows, blankets and other items with infrared heating pads inside, bundled with rechargeable (and replaceable) batteries tucked inside to power them. I’ve been testing a $174 pillow (called the Ploov) and a $254 faux-sheepskin blanket designed to be draped on a chair or couch and sat on, both of which have three levels of heat and top out at around 60 degrees.
So at a fraction of the cost of running the ducted system, or even running a small electric fan-powered heater, you can get yourself pretty toasty. It won’t heat the room at all, but you can take the object with you since it’s cordless.
The batteries don’t last an especially long time, being exhausted in a matter of three hours, so this is an occasional or nightly solution rather than something for all day.
If you do leave it plugged in and turned on, the heat lowers over time and shuts off after eight hours as a safety precaution, and there are also battery safety measures that will turn the unit off if it gets too hot.
Creative papercraft with no scissors needed
Cricut cutting machines are the kind of home gadgets that are a bit tricky to explain. Like 3D printers or soldering irons, they can be very handy for many different projects, but most people have never felt the need to own one, and wouldn’t know what to do with it.
Looking like some kind of high-tech sewing machine, they’re used for cutting textiles – paper, vinyl, stickers and so on – with extraordinary precision.
I tested the $700 Cricut Maker 4, but there are a few different lower-end models too. I threw myself into the deep end making cards, decorations and activity pieces for my son’s birthday party, and it was a lot more straightforward than I expected. You create the shapes in Photoshop, mask them, sent them to the Cricut software (it works on PC or mobile and connects to the machine via Bluetooth), load some card and that’s it.
The machine zooms the material up and down while a blade dances back and forth, cutting your desired shape in seconds.
A Cricut machine is one of those tools that you won’t really have any use of until you get it, then you’ll use it all the time.
You can make shapes entirely on the software as well, but it’s a bit fiddly. You can also pay for a subscription that gets you thousands of pre-made patterns, or you can buy them individually on the app or on Etsy.
Cricut sells materials that let you cut custom stickers, decals or iron-ons, and it’s easy enough to cut paper you’ve printed onto, or put together multi-cut projects and 3D objects. I also made bits and pieces for Book Week costumes, and decals for my wife’s business. The only difficulty is that non-Cricut material needs to be stuck to a sticky mat, and if you cut too finely you may need sharp tweezing skills to rescue your project.
Every wall and roof is a theatre now
I don’t test many projectors, but in my mind the idea was that they allowed for huge screens, provided you had a very dark space, never needed to move it and also owned a bunch of other equipment to make for a full at-home cinema. So I was a bit shocked to fire up the Hisense C2 Ultra and find that it’s practically as easy as a TV, without the TV.
It does cost as much as a very nice TV, at $4500, but it also provides anywhere from a 65-inch screen to a 300-inch one.
The C2 has a base and hinges so you don’t need to mount it. But you still choose to.
This is a “portable” projector (i.e. doesn’t necessarily need mounting) that you sit a few metres away from a wall or screen, and unless you’re putting it quite far away it’s plenty bright enough to watch during the day with the blinds drawn. The 4K HDR image was just as clear and vibrant as on my TV, but with that slightly soft cinematic laser projector edge.
It automatically adjusts focus, keystone and colour (based on your wall) when you set it up or move it, though I found a little manual keystone tweak was usually necessary.
Most impressively the unit has a full sound system and sub built in, and while it won’t beat a big soundbar it did a better job than plenty of TVs on their own. It also runs Hisense’s full smart-TV software so you can run streaming apps from it directly, or you can attach a player via HDMI. It’s great for games too, with support for 4K and 1440p resolution, 240Hz refresh and auto low-latency mode thanks to its HDMI 2.1 port, meaning it also supports eARC for connecting to external sound.
An entire wall of my tiny office didn’t strictly need to become a 90-inch screen for Halo, but it looked great.Credit: Tim Biggs
How much AI do you need in the bathroom?
Teeth brushing is one of the long list of activities I don’t think needs AI intruding on it. And yet, here is Oclean’s X Ultra S toothbrush, arriving at my desk with a box so emblazoned with the term “AI” that I initially wasn’t sure what it was.
Thankfully this is the useful analysis type of AI we’ve had for a long time, and not the snarky and constantly wrong kind of language AI. It does talk though, a feature I do not want in a toothbrush.
The app is fine if you want to see your efforts over time, but the screen on the brush itself is all you need.
The thing is, this is an appreciably better sonic toothbrush than others I’ve used. It looks good, has a cool charger, a very nice travel case and a sticky wall magnet you can hang it from — all of which is bare minimum when you’re paying $450 for a toothbrush — but importantly it’s also smooth and comfortable, and the tracking is both useful and doesn’t require brushing with my phone out.
A small display on the handle times the session and colour-codes a map of your mouth in real time, so you can glance at it to see which bits you’ve missed.
A clearly translated-into-English app makes setting up the toothbrush a bit of a head-scratcher, but once done I found I haven’t needed to consult the app much, except to turn off the function that yells at you for brushing too hard. Even silenced, the end of the brush lights up red if too much pressure is detected.
Smart fridge no, clear fridge yes
If you’ve been in the market for new whitegoods recently, I’m sure you’ve noticed how much the terms “smart” and “AI” get thrown around. Of course, appliances that connect to the internet for dubiously useful purposes or have big honking touchscreens on them have been around for a long time. But now it appears that dishwashers also have some sort of AI that’s difficult to discern, and absolutely everything has integration with its own proprietary app.
The only downside is that you can kind of see into the fridge all the time, so put anything embarrassing at the back.
I’ve never really been impressed with a smart appliance, and the more complex they are, the less I tend to like them. What am I going to do with a smart hub in a fridge when the rest of my (far more often upgraded) tech makes it obsolete? But lately, I’ve been using a fridge that I actually like, a lot, thanks to its much less space-age tech.
It’s an LG Instaview with a glass front, so you can knock on it like a door and the internal light illuminates so you can see what’s inside. Yes, it does require a bit of a rethink in stocking (anything that you tend to check before shopping should be in the door!) but it cuts down on opening for any reason other than grabbing stuff.
Now it is 2025, so of course there are more smarts than that. The fridge is Wi-Fi connected and lets you set the fridge and freezer temperature via app from anywhere in the world (why would I ever need this?), and also lets you activate a short-term “express freeze” to really blast your stuff cold.
But more useful is a “smart learner” system that notes when you open the door most often and schedules extra cooling to compensate. Also appreciated, adjustable lighting so you don’t blind yourself doing a 3am fridge raid.
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