Airmotion Aura Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Aloysius Low/CNET

I live in Singapore, where the air is usually clean, but for about a month every year, the island gets shrouded in terrible smoggy haze from burning forests in nearby Indonesia. While you can get disposable masks, these can be very uncomfortable, especially in Singapore’s hot and humid weather. The Airmotion Aura air mask has a filter to protect your lungs and a ventilator to pump in fresh air to keep things cool. I got to try it out.

This new gadget is modular: the air filter is replaceable, and the ventilator swappable. It retails for around S$98, which converts to approximately $70, £50 or AU$95. Its straps are adjustable and the ventilator promises a charge of around 3 hours.

Air pollution isn’t just about the lowered visibility that happens when smog fills the skies. Much of the danger to your health from polluted air comes from particulate matter (PM) that’s thinner than a strand of hair, PM2.5. The number designates the size of the particle — in this case, 2.5 micrometers — and your respiratory tract isn’t quite capable of filtering particles of such sizes and smaller. You’ll need a special N95 mask that’s capable of doing so, and Aura meets this standard.

A ventilator helps to circulate air.

Aloysius Low/CNET

Designed by a Singaporean living in Beijing — where the air is famously polluted — the Aura is modular, which means you’re able to swap out parts such as the ventilator for other, as yet unannounced, features in the future. The N95 filter is replaceable, so you don’t have to buy a completely new set every time it wears out. The medical grade silicon seal and straps don’t chafe on the skin, and are washable with warm water and soap.

Key specs

• Modular system
• N95 filter to block out PM2.5 pollutants
• Ventilator helps keep things cool
• Medical-grade silicon straps and face seal

You will look like Bane wearing this, which I didn’t quite appreciate. I did find that the ventilator helps keep things a little cooler, though I still found myself perspiring thanks to Singapore’s humid weather. I did quite a lot of brisk walking with the ventilator in sports mode, and found that it does help to circulate air. A normal disposable mask would have trapped my exhalations, which isn’t ideal due to CO2 buildup, of course.

Compared to a regular disposable mask, the Airmotion Aura isn’t cheap, but it can be reused and the ventilator helps if you’re looking to exercise even in polluted weather.

Because it’s modular, you can easily replace parts that have broken down, or get longer straps if needed.

Aloysius Low/CNET

YI Erida Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

At the end of July, GoPro announced its Hero5 camera and Karma drone will launch ahead of the holiday season. YI Technology, on the other hand, has already released its $250 YI 4K camera and now it’s got a drone to go with it — the YI Erida.

Made of light-yet-strong carbon fiber, YI says the tricopter can reach speeds of up to 75 mph (120 kph) and stay in the air for up to 40 minutes. If true, this is longer than any other ready-to-fly drone. Two of its three prop arms rotate and fold back for travel.

Yi Erida carbon fiber drone flies fast, folds…
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On its belly is a motorized gimbal to stabilize the included YI 4K camera. The drone will be completely controlled with a mobile app, so you’ll just need your smartphone and the drone when you head out to fly.

No pricing or availability was announced. However, if the Erida looks or sounds familiar, it might be because YI is making the drone with Atlas, a team of developers and engineers that tried to get the Erida crowdfunded last year. The contribution amounts start at $499, but the retail price is listed at $1,100. That’s about £380 to £840 and AU$660 to AU$1,500.

Petnet SmartFeeder Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Petnet

Have you ever wished your cat could open a can of food himself? Or that your dog could pour the giant bag of food pellets into her own bowl? While it can’t teach your pets new tricks, Petnet’s $150 new gadget might be a step in the right direction.

The SmartFeeder is essentially a feeding bowl with a holding tank above it. Beyond simply supplying more food when the bowl goes empty, though, the SmartFeeder will control portions for your pets. How does it know how much to feed them? This is where it gets interesting.

During setup, you enter your pet’s weight, age, activity levels and other information in the SmartFeeder app. Once the SmartFeeder starts portioning out food for your pet, it continues to monitor behavior, like whether your pet is eating all the food, how quickly and whether that involves multiple trips to the bowl. This data plus the originally entered info gets plugged into a massive database that not only determines serving sizes, but also decides what types of food might fit best for your pet.

Petnet

The appeal of the SmartFeeder is twofold. First, since the tank holds about 7 pounds of food, you only need to refill it once every week or two. That’s a big part of the work of pet ownership, taken care of. Second, if it works as intended, Petnet’s device should help your pet be healthier. Proper serving sizes are important to a pet’s long-term health.

The SmartFeeder also offers a pet food marketplace. The idea is that the device will prune down the thousands of pet food options to a select few — ones that are supposed to be appropriate for your pet. You choose which to buy, and the SmartFeeder app will order the food for you when supplies get low.

Personally, I’m cautious about any device that orders products with my credit card, but for people who have comfortable patterns and understand what’s involved, the service could be a helpful relief.

The SmartFeeder won’t work for everyone. The size of the bowl is about 2 cups, so it’s too small for larger dogs. And because of the design, the feeder can only dispense dry food.

The Petnet SmartFeeder is available now online and at Petco stores.

ZTE Warp 7 (Boost Mobile) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Warp 7 is ZTE’s latest offering for Boost Mobile.

ZTE

ZTE’s latest affordable handset is the Warp 7, a $100 phone available on September 5. The device is compatible with carriers using both CDMA and GSM technology, but it will be sold through Boost Mobile, which uses Sprint’s CDMA network.

The Warp 7 features a 5.5-inch display (720-pixel resolution), a 1.2 quad-core processor and a removable 3,080mAh battery. For your photo needs, it has a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel shooter in the front. It runs Android Marshmallow 6.0 and has 16GB of memory that you can expand up to 64GB with a microSD card.

The Warp 7 follows ZTE’s other $100 prepaid handset, the ZMax Pro, which was announced in July for MetroPCS. Despite a similar price tag, the ZMax Pro has slightly better specs, including a 6-inch screen with a sharper 1,080-pixel resolution, an octa-core Snapdragon 617 processor and a 3,400mAh battery.

Still, Boost Mobile’s handset is a pretty decent deal and we’ll know more once we get our hands on it. But on paper, the ZMax Pro looks to be the better choice (for now) if you’re looking for an inexpensive prepaid phone.

Kwikset Kevo 2nd Gen Bluetooth Smart Lock (2016) Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Pair the Kwikset Kevo Bluetooth Deadbolt with your phone or with a keychain fob, and you can unlock your front door just by tapping on it. It’s a cool, convenient, one-of-a-kind smart lock, and we liked it a lot when we first tested one out back in 2013 — but a vulnerability to a very specific kind of brute-force attack kept us from recommending it outright.

Now, three years later, Kwikset is back with a second-gen Kevo. Save for a smaller, sleeker interior design, it looks largely the same as before, but Kwikset is promising a host of subtle improvements — including easier installation and better defense against those kinds of brute attacks.

At a retail price of $229, the second-gen Kevo costs $10 more than the original Kevo did back in 2013. That’s the same price you’ll pay for the newest version of the August Smart Lock, so it looks like we’ve got a bit of a smart-home showdown coming to your front door.

We’ve already installed a second-gen Kevo at the CNET Smart Home, and we’ll have a full review in the coming weeks — including a look at how it holds up to the sort of torque attacks that defeated it before. For now, here are our first impressions.

The inside half of the second-gen Kevo is noticeably more compact than before.

Tyler Lizenby/CNET

Smart, subtle tweaks

The new Kevo isn’t much different than the old one. You’ll still pair it with your Android or iOS device, then touch the lock when you want it to open. If the Kevo detects your phone in close proximity outside the door, it’ll flash green, unlock and let you inside. You can still control it remotely using the app whenever you’re in Bluetooth range, and you can still pair it with the optional Kevo Plus Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi plug-in bridge accessory if you want to control it from anywhere. From outside of your house, as before, the Kevo Kwikset second-gen still looks like a normal, everyday dumb lock.

The Kevo app does a nice job of walking you through the setup process. All you really need is a screwdriver and a tape measure.

Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNET

The key differences (sorry) are on the inside. Most noticeable among them: the interior design, where the battery housing is much smaller than before. It’s also a full metal enclosure now, an upgrade from the first Kevo, which had a plastic housing. There’s also a new screw that you can tighten to lock the interior housing shut — that’ll help prevent people from opening the lock and resetting it.

Kwikset worked to make the installation easier, too. You’ll still find a helpful, step-by-step walkthrough in the Kevo app, but now it’s beefed up with interactive graphics, animations and videos. Inside, the two halves of the lock now connect using a single wire that’s less finicky than before. The separate calibration process — an annoying but necessary part of the setup last time around — is gone now: the second-gen Kevo will automatically calibrate itself.

You can manage users and view each lock’s activity history in the Kevo app for Android and iOS devices.

Screenshot by Ry Crist/CNET

App-enabled entry

Something that bugged us last time around was that Kwikset charged $1.99 for each “eKey” you created to allow someone else to unlock your Kevo. That’s roughly as much as you’d pay to make someone a copy of your key, but it still felt pretty stingy, given that an eKey is really just an email from Kwikset that grants a user permission to access your lock in the Kevo app.

Three years later, Kwikset handles eKeys a little bit differently. They come in three types: Anytime eKeys, Guest eKeys, and Scheduled eKeys. Like the name suggests, Anytime eKeys will work indefinitely until you revoke access — you get two for free, and then you’ll pay $1.99 for each one after that.

Guest eKeys are just Anytime eKeys that only work for 24 hours, then expire. You get as many of those as you want for free.

Scheduled eKeys come with optional schedule restraints — you can give them an expiration date, or restrict them to work only on certain days or at certain times. They cost $1.99 each.

That’s a step in the right direction, but still, it’s disappointing that Kwikset sees fit to charge you for the luxury of using the luxury smart lock you already spent hundreds of dollars on. Full user management should be a default smart lock feature, not a pay-as-you-go add-on.

Kevo has also added some notable third-party smart-home integrations since last time around. You can sync it up with the Nest Learning Thermostat or with the Honeywell Wi-Fi Thermostat to trigger your HVAC system as you come and go. It’ll also work with the Ring and Skybell HD video doorbells, letting you use the phone to unlock the door for people who need to get in.

Let’s talk about the lock

Like with the first Kevo, the deadbolt at the heart of the lock is Kwikset’s SmartKey deadbolt, which comes with a special tool that allows owners to re-key the lock without need for a locksmith.

As far as security, the SmartKey deadbolt has a lot going for it. For starters, it uses a patented horizontal slider in place of the traditional key and pin tumblers, which means that would-be thieves can’t get in by “bumping” the lock. It also passes UL 437, the most stringent test against lock picking conducted by the independent researchers at Underwriters Laboratories. Even security expert Marc Weber Tobias, a vocal Kevo critic, told us that the SmartKey deadbolt was nearly impossible to pick.

Kwikset claims the Kevo’s SmartKey deadbolt is stronger than before.

Josh Miller/CNET

Tobias was the one who identified the SmartKey deadbolt’s vulnerabilities to brute-force torque attacks in 2013. No single lock is going to prevent someone from breaking into your home if they’re determined to do so, but we were concerned with what Tobias found, since it’s a SmartKey-specific attack that relies on common tools like a screwdriver and a hammer. When we tested it for ourselves, we were able to use the technique to successfully bypass the first-gen Kevo in less than a minute.

Now, Kwikset tells us that the SmartKey deadbolt in the second-gen Kevo is an updated model — and the company assured us that the same bypass technique won’t work this time. If that’s the case, it’ll be a legitimate security upgrade, and a useful addition to the lock’s existing protections against picking and bumping.

Of course, with smart locks, you have to consider security against hacking and other cyber threats, too. Kwikset deserves some credit here. A recent investigation into Bluetooth lock security found flaws with several smart padlocks and deadbolts, including the August Smart Lock (a hack we were able to verify). Despite their best efforts, those same researchers were unable to hack the Kwikset Kevo at all.

Outlook

Kevo’s unique touch-to-open approach sets it apart from other smart locks and makes it a tangible convenience upgrade for your front door. On top of that, Kwikset’s approach to handling eKey access, while still not ideal, seems easier to swallow than last time around. If it works as reliably as last time and also performs better against brute force attacks, it could be the new smart lock to beat. We’ll have the full verdict from the CNET Smart Home after we’ve had some more time to test it out.