Getting a robot vacuum cleaner to do the hard work for you is great, but they can be really expensive. Well the Ecovacs Deebot N79S provides a more affordable option.
Price
Even the high-end Deebot Ozmo 930 is cheaper than some rivals but £549/$599 will be too much for a lot of consumers. After all, a robot vacuum isn’t capable of being your only cleaner.
At a much more reasonable £249/$299, the Deebot N79S is a more stomachable price point. You can buy it from Amazon and Best Buy.
The N79S is your quintessential robot vacuum when it comes to design. It’s like a huge ice hockey puck: flat, round and black.
It looks pretty much like the more premium Ozmo 930 but doesn’t have the traffic control tower-like addition on the top which houses sensors.
The device is easy to use with a master power switch on the side and then an Auto button accompanied with LEDs on top. The dust compartment comes out at the back, which is used as a water reservoir on the 930.
You, of course, get a docking station for the N79S to charge and the vacuum even comes with a remote control making it even easier to use. You can even hook it up to Alexa for voice activation.
Also in the box are the two rotating brushes you’ll need to attach and the main brush which sits underneath. Do bear in mind that the robot plus the dock takes up a fair bit of space so make sure you have somewhere convenient for it to live first.
Features & Performance: You suck
The N79S is a lot more basic than the Ozmo 930, hence the price difference. This robot vacuum pretty much just does normal cleaning, but can handle both carpet and hard floors.
It doesn’t have mopping or any intelligent navigation so while the 930 cleverly goes up and down your floor methodically, the N79S will just go until it finds an obstacle. It then turns and sets off again. The end result means it bounces round the room sort of aimlessly like a ball in the classic game, Breakout.
There are some other cleaning modes available though including spot clean, edge clean and max mode. Using the app you can even drive the N79S around like a remote control car, which we found was often then best way to target dirty areas but defeats the point of it doing the work for you.
Sensors do stop it falling down stairs etc and generally they work well but we were miffed when the N79S got stuck by a chair and desk when there was plenty of space for it to drive away. It just went round in circles until we physically moved it.
Generally, the cleaning performance is good but we’d like it to be better. In normal mode (not Max), the N79S will pick up loose dirt but struggles to deal with anything more embedded into carpet. This combined with the way it navigates the room means that there will be unclean areas.
We’ve also noticed the vacuum skipping and bobbling over carpet frequently despite there being nothing obvious to cause this.
The Rakuten Kobo Forma is a poster child for the tug-of-war behind the design of every device you own. Companies strive to find the right balance of size, weight and features based on market research and what’s worked well for them in the past. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes things go awry.
Rakuten Kobo’s done well recently with large-format E-Ink devices like the Kobo Aura One. With the Forma, Kobo tried to give digital book lovers more of the same: It’s larger, and lighter than the Aura One, and comes packing more features.
Unfortunately, when you go larger and lighter at the same time, something’s got to give. Our experience with the Forma was marred by build quality issues and a number of technical missteps. Compared to Amazon’s most recent Kindles, it’s not a good look.
Design
Measuring 6.29 x 6.97 x 0.33 inches, the Rakuten Kobo Forma is currently the largest e-reader offered by a well-known brand in North America. While Onyx, Sony and Remarkable all sell larger E-Ink slabs that offer a rudimentary e-reading experience, they’re geared more toward electronic note-taking than they are for maintaining a digital library.
In its base configuration, the Forma is available with 8GB of non-expandable storage for $280. So long as you’re not stuffing it full of chunky Manga, comic books or PDF files, this is more than enough storage to contain thousands of books. A 32GB iteration of the device is also available for a whopping $330—the same price as a 32GB iPad.
Séamus Bellamy
The Forma’s power and page turn buttons can all be found on the device’s bezel, similar to the design of the Amazon Oasis 2.
One of the first things you may notice about the Kobo Forma is how much it resembles an Amazon All-New Kindle Oasis. Both devices boast large displays with an oblong bezel on one side, which hosts a pair of page -urn buttons. Pick up an Oasis or a Forma, however, and you’ll immediately understand that the similarities are shallow, at best. Where the Oasis sports a battery hump on one side of its chassis, the Forma is flat, both front and back. One would think this means that the Forma packs a smaller battery. Not so: where the Oasis contains a 1,000mAh battery, the Kobo device is equipped with a 1,200mAh battery. In either case, depending on on your habits, you’ll be able to enjoy weeks of reading, on either device, with a single charge.
Happily, thanks to the Forma’s IPX8 rating, you’ll be able to burn through a lot of the this time reading in a hot tub or at the beach. The Kobo Forma can be completely submerged in up to two meters of fresh water for two hours at a time and continue to work just fine. You should know, however, that unlike Amazon’s Oasis 2, it’s not possible to deactivate the Forma’s touch controls before exposing it to water. This could mean that the device will mistake the liquid on its display for input from your fingers. It makes for a frustrating reading experience.
With the amount of screen real estate that the Forma offers readers, Kobo had a tough choice to make: If they’d opted to provide the device with premium feel, through the use of heavier, more resilient materials, its large size and heavier weight would have made it unwieldy and uncomfortable to use one-handed for extended periods of time. Instead, Kobo opted for lightweight materials. The result of this decision is that the Forma is comfortable to hold and is light enough that it’s easy to forget it’s there when tossed in a backpack or purse. But it feels flimsy compared to Kobo’s excellent Aura One, and positively cheap when held up against Amazon’s aluminum-bodied Oasis 2. During testing, I discovered that going light instead of resilient might not have been the best idea.
Séamus Bellamy
Like a number of Kobo’s other devices, the Forma is waterproof.
During testing, I experienced issues with the build quality of the Forma on two separate occasions. First, while testing the device’s waterproofing, I submerged the Forma provided to me by Rakuten Kobo in a few inches of water. After three minutes, I retrieved the Forma and discovered that it would not respond to any touch commands, nor did it recognize input from its page-turn or power buttons. Its screen remained locked at 100% brightness until its battery was depleted.
Giving Kobo the benefit of the doubt, I went out and purchased a second Forma with my own money. It refused to charge via USB. As such, I returned it to the store and contacted Kobo’s PR team. They offered to send me a third device, which performed fine for me in every way. Via email, I asked Kobo’s PR for comment on quality control issues such as those I experienced. At the time that this review was published, no such response was given.
Display
Kobo fit an 8-inch, 1920×1440 (300ppi) E-Ink Mobius display into the Form’s ample frame. Mobius E-Ink displays tend to be lighter and a little more flexible than their E-Ink Carta counterparts, Given the large size of the Forma’s display and how thin the e-reader is, a little flexibility in the name of durability is a welcome feature.
Like the Kobo Aura One before it, the Forma features ComfortLight PRO front lighting. Instead of offering a single front lighting color, like Amazon does with its line of Kindle e-readers, Kobo’s ComfortLight front lighting LEDs offer several different hues, ranging from white to a soft blue or a deep yellow-orange. If you feel that taking in too much blue-spectrum light before bed is keeping you awake at night, a ComfortLight-equipped e-reader might solve your problem.
When perusing your digital library, you’ll be able to turn pages by using the Forma’s page-turn buttons or tapping at the device’s capacitative display. Thanks to a built-in accelerometer, it’s also possible to use the Forma as a right or left-handed device. Turn over the e-reader, and the display will re-orientate to accommodate your needs.
User experience
Granted, Amazon’s Kindle Store and Kindle Unlimited are still the best option for North Americans looking for one-stop eBook shopping. However, Kobo’s digital offerings have, in recent years, become a compelling alternative for those who choose to avoid Amazon or prefer to hunt down free content online to read. Excluding books that are available only through Amazon, the Kobo Store offers just as wide a variety of bestsellers and other titles as Amazon does. For those who often side-load their reading material, the Kobo Forma supports 14 different file formats, including EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, MOBI, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, TXT, HTML and RTF. As with Kobo’s other recent devices, the Forma also supports CBZ and CBR, file types often associated with comic books and manga.
The device’s large, crisp display makes reading comics and other graphic content a joy. Features such as a contextual dictionary, a lack of advertising (looking at you, Amazon,) and the ability to alter font spacing, weight, line and gutter spacing on a granular level all add to the Kobo Forma’s outstanding reading experience.
The greatest advantage that Kobo has over Amazon is the amount of free content made available through two of the services built into the Kobo operating system: OverDrive and Pocket. OverDrive makes it easy to browse, reserve, and read the digital content available via your public library. Simply enter your library card number and passcode: Boom, you’ve got free books. With the Forma, OverDrive is easy and pleasurable to use.
The same goes for Pocket. For those unfamiliar with it, Pocket it an online service that allows readers to select articles found online to archive and read later when they have the opportunity. I use Pocket to save research and long-form writing that I haven’t the time to dig into while I’m working. Reading these saved stories later on a Kobo device, the Forma included, is something I look forward to all week.
Unfortunately, one area where the Kobo, can’t compete with Amazon is in the area of audiobooks. None of the eBook readers in Kobo’s stable are capable of playing audio content. This includes the Forma. With the recent release of the latest iteration of Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, all of Amazon’s current generation e-readers can play Audible audiobooks. For some who were considering the Forma, this could be a deal-breaker.
The bottom line
Those who consume a lot of graphic content, or whose eyesight requires them to use a larger font size while reading, will love the Kobo Forma’s crisp, expansive display. That the Forma is waterproof and insanely light, and offers multiple methods to stock it with content, could make it appealing to some readers. However, quality control issues, and a high price could make others wary.
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If you’re looking to get started in virtual reality (VR), or are hoping to show some friends VR for the first time, it’s not a great idea to dive right into the wildest games out there.
The best PC VR games for beginners shouldn’t be too chaotic – there’s a good reason headset makers list comfort levels for games.
TechRadar & PC Gamer’s VR Month
TechRadar and PC Gamer are diving deep into virtual reality this month with a series of guides, how-tos, and features digging into every aspect of VR that we’re simply calling VR Month. It’s all being made possible by Oculus, which stepped up to support this month-long project. Thanks, Oculus!
Adjusting to movement in VR can be tricky, especially for anyone sensitive to motion sickness.
If the in-game camera moves much while the player stays stationary, they can quickly start feeling queasy.
That’s before factoring in the need for players to familiarize themselves with the controls in VR and the objectives of the game.
Because there’s a lot to get used to and the potential for discomfort, the usual top picks for VR aren’t going to be the best PC VR games for beginners.
Instead, we’ve focused on games that keep movement simple, comfortable and that give players time to adjust to the VR world.
While the games on this list aren’t placed in order of quality, we’ve put them in a loose order with the more comfortable games coming first.
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a perfect beginner VR game for a number of reasons. For one, players can learn the game outside of VR. Once playing in VR, everything is kept simple. There are no flying objects to avoid or enemies that will spring up. Instead, the player in VR will focus on manipulating and disabling a bomb as players outside of VR will try to provide instructions on defusing it. It’s a fun game for groups, and a comfortable one for first-time VR players.
Moss
A great VR game doesn’t have to put the player into the perspective of the protagonist. Moss is a compelling action-adventure game that uses VR as a way to look around the world as players guide the mouse protagonist through puzzles and combat. Beginners can enjoy the familiar platformer-style gameplay while getting comfortable with using their own perspective to look around in VR.
Fruit Ninja VR
What better way to enter VR than with a familiar mobile game? Fruit Ninja is almost perfectly adapted to VR. This version lets new players stand perfectly in place as fruit and the occasional bomb fly up in front of them. There’s no complex movement required, just the addictive satisfaction of stabbing and slicing bushel after bushel of colorful and cartoony fruit.
I Expect You to Die
Not only is I Expect You to Die one of the best PC VR games for beginners, it’s simply one of the best VR games. All of the levels are seated, so player comfort is high, making it easier for beginners to enjoy. Once in the game, players will take on the role of a spy challenged with a series of clever escape room-like missions. The game is loaded with clever interactions that are great for learning how realistically players can interact with the VR world.
Space Pirate Trainer
Space Pirate Trainer is a great step up from Fruit Ninja VR. The gameplay is fairly straightforward, and plays like a basic Galaga-esque arcade game adapted for the modern VR age. Players stand on a platform in space as a variety of flying droids attack. They can walk around their VR environment by walking in the real world, which helps avoid any motion sickness, and use an assortment of weapons to battle the droids.
Beat Saber
Beat Saber is an amazing VR game, with exciting and frantic gameplay. Players have to follow the music as they slash through colorful cubes with correspondingly colored blades. The graphics are like something straight out of Tron, and cutting up cubes will be a blast for fans of Star Wars and Guitar Hero alike. Since the player is mostly stationary, beginners can get used to VR while playing, though the flying cubes and obstacles hopefully won’t psyche them out.
Lone Echo
After getting a bit more comfortable in VR with some of the other titles on this list, Lone Echo is a great next step. The gameplay can get intense, as you jump into the role of a robot on a space station helping the captain of a mining operation. Of course, a space game like this wouldn’t be great if things didn’t go wrong. Beyond the compelling story, what makes this title great for beginners is the movement mechanics: using thrusters in zero-g and pushing off surfaces to move around. While it’s a bit less comfortable than simply standing in one place, we’ve found it to be substantially less nauseating than using a joystick to walk in-game.
Superhot VR
Superhot VR is an exciting title for beginners as they’ll have the opportunity to get comfortable with VR at their own pace. That’s made possible thanks to the game’s core mechanic: time only moves as fast as the player moves. For the most part, players will be standing in one spot, turning around, ducking and leaning. These are all generally comfortable movements in VR. And, they’ll be forced to get more and more comfortable, as the game throws them into more and more challenging situations, with waves of heavily armed enemies coming from every direction.
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Desktop computers are notorious for being bulky, towering machines that take up a ton of desk space and are no fun to transport. The Fusion C Mini PC, however, is looking to change that. You can get it on sale and save an extra 15% when you use the code MERRY15 at check out, lowering the final price to only $153.
The Fusion C is a fully realized personal computer that runs all your favorite productivity apps with ease but is small and lightweight enough that you can take it wherever you go. It’s perfect for students, business professionals on the go, and everyone in between. If you need portable computing power, the Fusion C is exactly what you’ve been searching for.
Not much larger than a small cigar box, the Fusion C comes with a built-in Intel quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a pre-installed version of Windows 10, so you can easily power through your daily to-dos. It’s engineered with flash storage that’s up to 15x faster than regular 5400-rpm hard drives, letting you load your essential files in a flash. Plus, the 3dB WiFi antenna makes connecting to WiFi a breeze.
The Fusion C is also big on connectivity, with HDMI, VGA, LAN, three USB 2.0 ports and a Micro-SD card slot built in. That way, you can easily connect your Fusion C to your monitor, phone, printer, and the like seamlessly.
What’s more, the Fusion C is so small, it doesn’t need a fan to keep itself cool, meaning you can work throughout the day in sweet silence.
A new leak suggests that AMD is working on up ten new Ryzen 3000 processors, including a chip that offers a huge 5.1GHz clock speed over 16 cores.
The leak comes courtesy of AdoredTV, a YouTube channel which claims to expose a range of details about AMD’s upcoming Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
You can view the whole video below, and while the information provided is certainly exciting, we should point out that the specifications and prices mentioned in the video (which we’ll go into in more depth in a bit) are unconfirmed at the moment.
AMD Ryzen 3 3300 series
According to the video, AMD will release three new entry-level Ryzen 3 processors. The Ryzen 3 3300 is a six-core, 12-thread CPU with a 3.2GHz base clock, 4GHz boost, 50W TDP and a price of $99 (about £80, AU$140).
Next is the Ryzen 3 3300X, again a six-core, 12-thread processor, this time with a 3.5GHz base clock and 4.3GHz boost, 65W TDP and a price of $129 (around £100, AU$180). Both of these CPUs are rumored to debut at CES 2019.
Finally, the Ryzen 3 3300G is a six-core, 12-thread CPU with a 3.0GHz base clock, 3.8GHz boost and 65W TDP. Unlike the other Ryzen 3 processors, this one will apparently come with an integrated Navi 12 GPU with 15 compute units, making it the first ever six-core desktop APU from AMD.
It will cost $129 (around £100, AU$180) and is hinted at being released in the third quarter of 2019.
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 series
Three mid-range Ryzen 5 processors in the 3000 series have also been rumored.
The first, the Ryzen 5 3600, comes with eight cores and 16 threads, a 3.6GHz base clock, 4.4GHz boost, 65W TDP and a price of $178 (around £140, AU$240).
Then, there’s the Ryzen 5 3600X which is again an eight-core, 12-thread processor clocked at 4GHz, with a boost of 4.8GHz, a TDP of 95W and a price of $229 (around £180, AU$320). Both of these could be revealed at CES.
There’s also the Ryzen 3600G, an eight-core, 12-thread CPU with a 3.2GHz base clock, 4GHz boost clock and TDP of 95W. This comes with a 20 compute unit Navi 12 GPU, making it AMD’s first 8-core desktop APU. It is rumored to cost $199 (around £160, AU$270) and will release third quarter of 2019.
AMD Ryzen 7 3700 series
For the high-end market, the rumors suggest that AMD is readying two Ryzen 7 processors. These will apparently both be CPU-only, so no integrated graphics, and will use similar architecture to AMD’s EPYC 2 server chips.
So, they will apparently have two Zen 2 dies that make up 12 cores and 24 threads.
The Ryzen 7 3700 will have a base clock of 3.8GHz and a boost of 4.6GHz, a TDP of 95W and a price of $299 (around £230, AU$400).
The Ryzen 7 3700X will have a base clock of 4.2GHz and a boost of 5.0GHz, with a TDP of 105W and a price of $329 (around £260, AU$450). Both could be unveiled at CES.
AMD Ryzen 9 3800 series
AMD is also rumored to be preparing two seriously-impressive enthusiast-class Ryzen 9 CPUs, which will apparently feature two full 8-core Zen 2 dies, which gives them 16 cores and 32 threads.
The Ryzen 9 3800X comes with 16 cores, 32 threads, a 3.9GHz base and 4.7GHz boost clock, 125W TDP and a $449 (around £350, AU$600) price tag. It’s rumored to be unveiled at CES.
Finally, there’s the Ryzen 9 3850X, which is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with a base clock of 4.3GHz base clock, 5.1GHz boost, 135W TDP and a price of $499 (around £400, AU$700). This is rumored to release in May.
Not only are these rumored specs seriously impressive, the prices are worth noting as well, as they are a lot cheaper than the AMD Threadripper 1950X, a 16-core CPU priced at $999 (£999, AU$1,439), or the Intel i9-7960X, which costs $1,700 (£1,500, around AU$2,300).
If these specs and prices are real, then AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series will be a very formidable family of processors, and something that Intel may struggle to match when it comes to price and power.
If you’ve been thinking about making a high-end GPU purchase from Nvidia’s latest crop of cards, then you might be interested to learn of a major discount on the current flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which has been reduced by £225 over at eBuyer.
The retailer is selling Zotac’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti AMP Edition graphics card for £1,159.98, knocked down from the usual asking price of £1,384.97.
Okay, so this isn’t the cheapest model on the market, but the AMP Edition is a beefy 2080 Ti card with a boost clock speed that pushes up to 1665MHz. Plus there’s likely good overclocking headroom, with triple 90mm fans, and active fan control technology that can increase airflow and therefore cooling to where it’s most needed.
It’s also well worth bearing in mind that you get a five-year extended warranty with this GPU, for extra peace of mind when it comes to a big purchase such as this.
We’ve just seen the big reveal of the Titan RTX, which will take the crown as the top Nvidia GPU when it’s launched in December, but that card has an asking price of a staggering $2,499 (around £2,000, AU$3,400) – and the 2080 Ti is plenty fast enough, in all honesty.
In our review of the GeForce GTX 2080 Ti, we noted that it was powerful enough to facilitate 4K gaming with high frame rates as a single graphics card solution. At any rate, if you’re tempted, grab the deal below…
BT has said it will not use Huawei’s equipment within the heart of its 5G mobile network when it is rolled out in the UK.
The British firm, however, still plans to use the Chinese company’s phone mast antennas and other products deemed not to be at the “core” of the service.
BT also confirmed that it was stripping out Huawei equipment from the core of its existing 3G and 4G networks, as revealed by the Financial Times (FT).
Huawei denies having any ties to the Chinese government beyond those of being a law-abiding taxpayer.
However, critics point out that its founder, Ren Zhengfei, was a former engineer in the country’s army and joined the Communist Party in 1978. There are also questions about how independent of state influence any large Chinese company can be.
Long-lived partnership
BT has has long made use of Huawei’s equipment within its fixed-line network, having signed a pioneering contract with the supplier in 2005.
However, the BBC understands that BT introduced an internal policy a year later that restricted use of Huawei’s equipment to the “periphery” of its infrastructure.
This kit is sometimes referred within the industry to being “the dumb stuff at the end of the pipes”.
It meant in theory that were Huawei’s equipment to be compromised, some customers would be affected but the wider network would not collapse.
In 2016, BT also acquired the mobile phone firm EE, which had been using the Shenzhen-based firm’s kit to push about its customers’ data.
Shortly after, BT began removing Huawei equipment that it determined to be at the “control plan” – or core – of the network.
Although this has been going on for two years, it was only publicly disclosed in response to a question by the FT.
“In 2016, following the acquisition of EE, we began a process to remove Huawei equipment from the core of our 3G and 4G networks, as part of network architecture principles in place since 2006,” said a spokesman for BT.
“We’re applying these same principles to our current RFP [request-for-proposal bid requests] for 5G core infrastructure.
“As a result, Huawei has not been included in vendor selection for our 5G core. Huawei remains an important equipment provider outside the core network, and a valued innovation partner.”
One of the benefits to BT of having kept the restriction private until now was that other equipment-makers might have been encouraged to have tendered lower bids if they believed they were competing against the Chinese firm.
Huawei has previously promoted its partnership with BT, and as recently as February issued a press release that said the two were working together on the “development and live trials” of 5G core network technologies.
However, the BBC understands the Chinese firm did not expect to win any such contracts from BT and had been focused instead on selling 5G equipment for use elsewhere in its network.
“Since it acquired EE in 2016, the BT Group has been actively bringing EE’s legacy network architecture in line with this long-standing agreement,” said a spokesman for Huawei.
“This is a normal and expected activity, which we understand and fully support.
“Working together, we have already completed a number of successful 5G trials across different sites in London, and we will continue to work with BT in the 5G era.”
Séamus Bellamy
Séamus Bellamy
