The Samsung Gear S3: The watch that does everything

The Samsung Gear S3 is a monster of a smartwatch that might just do everything you need — if you can fit it under your shirtsleeve. It provides notifications for email, Twitter, Facebook and most other apps; it monitors your health, sleep and steps; it even completes payments on older-model magnetic card readers using Samsung’s Magnetic Secure Technology. Paying for your groceries is now as easy as punching the air by the card reader. (Just don’t hit the bag boy.)

The display is beautiful, the software is smooth, the phone capabilities … well, not everything’s perfect. But it is a step up over the Samsung S2. Is it worth your money for the LTE version? How does it compare against the Apple Watch and Android Wear? Can MrMobile walk, carry coffee, and talk into his wrist at the same time? Check out Michael Fisher’s Samsung Gear S3 Review and find out!

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All SwiftKey themes for Android and iOS are now free

SwiftKey is a pretty cool keyboard. It’s smart, too, and is the driving tech behind some other keyboards we really like. And starting today, all the themes that make it something other than boring black are free.

Getting them installed is easy. Slide or tap on the hamburger (the three vertical lines that open a menu) to the left of the Swiftkey prediction bar. Open the Themes panel and head to the SwiftKey store. You’ll find about 100 themes — including some new ones in eye-blistering vivid colors — and they are all free for the taking.

Everyone likes free. Thanks, SwiftKey!

Hands on with the new Mophie and Incipio Moto Mods for Moto Z

There are new Moto Mods on deck for the Moto Z family, and they’re coming in the next couple of weeks.

While we’ve already seen the first — a 3,000mAh battery add-on from popular accessory maker Mophie — we can confirm that it is available now in the U.S., at Verizon, for $79.99. That’s the same price as those from Incipio and Tumi, except with a 36% premium in battery capacity. It’s also slightly thicker as a result: 0.35 inches compared to 0.27 inches.

The Mophie Mod has another advantage: it can be separately charged via USB-C, which negates the need to have it attached to the Moto Z itself to juice it up, making it far more useful in a pinch.

Battery add-ons have proven the most popular category in the Moto Mods ecosystem, according to Motorola. Over 40% of those purchased to date have been batteries, and the company says that in an average week, 37 hours are spent with a battery add-on attached to the back of the phone. Many people leave their battery packs attached to the back of their phones on a semi-permanent basis.

Another new Moto Mod being introduced next week is an Incipio-built Car Dock, which leverages the magnetic back of the Moto Z series to make it easy to hold up the phone while driving. The dock itself uses a standard clip at the back to safely attach to a vent, but it overcomes the inherent problems of many of those designs by removing the weight-bearing clips in favor of a strong magnet.

At $64.99, the Incipio Car Dock is not cheap, and will only be useful for a certain type of driver, but because it automatically launches Android Auto upon connection, and has an Auxiliary cable to plug into a car stereo, its premium price does afford a few benefits.

Motorola is also committing to bringing four Mods to market every quarter going forward, which is an aggressive cadence for a nascent product category. That doesn’t mean you’ll see four battery packs, or even four Motorola-released add-ons every three months, but there’s a confidence within the company we haven’t seen since the first Moto X back in 2013. And it’s infectious.

Some of that confidence can be attributed to the Moto Mods Developer Kit (MDK), which Motorola is encouraging hardware creators to build for over the next year or so, incentivizing them through a series of hackathons and an Indiegogo campaign.

Right now, the new Mods are only available at Verizon, but will be coming to Motorola’s own online store fairly soon. As for the future, expect more Mods in early 2017, including one that enables Google’s nascent Tango tech.

Moto Z, Moto Z Force and Moto Z Play

• Our Moto Z review!
• Moto Z Play preview
• The Hasselblad True Zoom is a Mod to remember
• Moto Z specs
• Moto Mods custom backs
• The latest Moto Z news
• Discuss in our Moto Z forums

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Best Smart Smoke Detector

Nest Protect: the best Smart Smoke Detector you can buy today.

Best overall

Nest Protect

See at Amazon

When it comes to connectivity options, the Nest Protect has most everything covered. That’s an important reason to want or need a smarter smoke detector and gives the Nest Protect a clear advantage and our pick for the best Smart Smoke Detector you can buy.

The bottom line: You need your Smart Smoke Detector to alert you of fire, smoke, and CO2. The Nest Protect is great at its main task and is able to let you know no matter where you might be.

Why the Nest Protect is the best

The Nest Protect ticks all the boxes on our list when looking for a Smart Smoke Detector. It’s small and easy to install and has the three kinds of detection sensors you’re looking for — photoelectric, ionization and CO2. And once it’s been triggered, it has plenty of options to make sure you know when you’re away from home.

The connectivity is what sets it apart. Nest has excellent apps for Android and iOS, the Nest website can tell you what you need to know about any alarm state and an interface with Alexa and Google Home can link in and extend the ways you are alerted.

Of course, it has to be a great smoke detector, too. The Nest Protect is a two-sensor detector with a stand-alone CO detector. It’s designed to catch any fire early so there is less chance of any injuries or property damage and the latest software does a great job at ignoring false positives without missing any real ones.

Best for integration

First Alert Z-Wave 2-in-1

See at Amazon

If you’re looking for something with deep integration in a complete smart home setup, you should consider the First Alert Z-Wave 2-in-1 detector.

It has the same three-sensor setup all of the best models share but instead of using Wi-Fi to connect through its own service and app, the First Alert connects to a Z-Wave hub. This connection can be bridged into any self-built system and most package home automation systems like Nexia Home Intelligence and Samsung SmartThings play nicely with Z-Wave devices. For the more technical buyer, these low-priced battery operated detectors can be part of a great complete home monitoring system

Bottom line: Z-Wave radios are a flexible way to work a detector into a home monitoring and automation system but setting things up can be complicated.

Conclusion

For most of us, a Smart Smoke Detector that’s easy to set up and can “talk” to our phones is what we want when we’re shopping. Of course, it has to do its primary job — warning us early when there is a real problem — very well. The Nest Protect excels at both.

Best overall

Nest Protect

See at Amazon

When it comes to connectivity options, the Nest Protect has most everything covered. That’s an important reason to want or need a smarter smoke detector and gives the Nest Protect a clear advantage and our pick for the best Smart Smoke Detector you can buy.

The bottom line: You need your Smart Smoke Detector to alert you of fire, smoke, and CO. The Nest Protect is great at its main task and is able to let you know no matter where you might be.

Google launches Daydream View in new colours other than slate grey

Don’t like the dark grey colour of Daydream View? Well, you’re in luck.

When Google launched Daydream View a couple months ago, it only made the VR headset available in the colour “Slate”, which, during our review, we actually thought was quite pleasing to the eye. Google had promised new colours were in the works, and on 1 December, it finally announced you can get the headset in two additional colours: “Crimson” and “Snow”.

#Daydream View in Crimson and Snow is now available at @GoogleStore. Pre-order today: https://t.co/kSZ3uoxaJJ pic.twitter.com/Nu0TKM3JWN

— Google VR (@googlevr) December 1, 2016

The red-like model and white-ish model will cost $79 each, the same price as the dark grey model offered since autumn. To compliment the new colour schemes, the View’s controller has been changed to white. The original controller is charcoal coloured. If you want the Crimson or Snow headsets, they are available now for pre-order on the Google Store in the US and UK, with shipping beginning 8 December.

• What is Daydream and when is it coming?

Similar to Samsung’s Gear VR platform, Daydream requires a smartphone for power and to provide the screen of the VR experience. At launch, the first Daydream-ready phones were Google’s own Pixel and Pixel XL flagships, though more phones, including the Moto Z line, are getting support.

We think Daydream View’s success will boil down to the content that’s available for it through Android and the breadth of compatible devices.

And right now, naturally, that’s not a whole lot.

IHeartRadio app gets on-demand features through Napster partnership

Massive conglomerate IHeartRadio, which owns over 800 radio stations in the US, is getting into the on-demand music streaming market, just as it promised earlier this year. The company just added two paid plans to its iOS and Android app that bring many of the streaming features found in competitors like Spotify and Apple Music. First and foremost is the ability to search for and play any track you want, any time you want, without being beholden to whatever IHeartRadio’s FM stations are playing. That music library will be powered by Napster, which had been operating in the US at Rhapsody until recently.

The $4.99 IHeartRadio Plus plan is a way to augment the music-listening experience the app already offers. If you’re listening to the stream of a radio station and hear a song you like, you can instantly replay the track, save it to a “my music” playlist and then return to the live radio station. If you start a custom “artist radio” station (where you’ll get a generated playlist of similar songs to the artist you pick), you can skip as many songs as you want without limitation. And IHeartRadio says that users will be able to “search and play any song from a library of millions of tracks.”

That last feature sounds like you can get full access to the Napster online music library, a feature that’s typically reserved for the $9.99 tier in most streaming music services (Spotify’s free tier remains a notable exception). And indeed, IHeartRadio is also offering a $9.99 option: IHeartRadio All Access. So what’s the difference between these plans?

For starters, All Access gets you the ability to save tracks offline, a pretty big deal. Subscribers will also be able to fully build out a personal music library — we’re guessing that if you use the $4.99 tier, you’ll only have the ability to save tracks to the aforementioned “my music” playlist without being able to browse a collection by artist or album. IHeartRadio also says that you can create unlimited playlists at this top tier to organize your music, further supporting the notion that the $4.99 plan doesn’t offer much in the way of library management. It seems like you’ll be able to play any track you want from Napster’s library on either plan, you just won’t be able to build out your collection without shelling out more money.

It feels like the $4.99 IHeartRadio Plus plan is best viewed as a competitor to Pandora Plus — both plans cost the same and give users unlimited skips, but they’re not meant for curating and collecting music the way Spotify and Apple Music are. For all of that, you’ll need to shell out for the fully $9.99 IHeartRadio All Access option.

If you’re an FM radio junky, have been using the IHeartRadio app and don’t have a music subscription service, these new plans might be worth considering rather than the other options out there. But whether it’s worth your $10 over the many other options out there remains to be seen — we’ll have to take it out for a full spin before passing judgement. If you want to try it for yourself, IHeartRadio is offering 30-day trials to both Plus and All Access plans.

Source: Napster, IHeartRadio