Braun BrewSense KF7150 review – CNET

The Good The Braun BrewSense KF7150 creates drip coffee every bit as good as gourmet machines that cost three times as much. It’s also compact, so it won’t take up much space on your kitchen counter.

The Bad It uses a glass carafe and hot plate instead of a thermal carafe. Pouring the carafe too quickly causes spills and drips. The water tank has a small opening.

The Bottom Line Fans of thermal carafes won’t like the glass pot and hot plate, but those looking for excellent drip at a low price will sing the BrewSense’s praises.

Every so often a product surprises me by performing better than I thought possible. Case in point, the $100 Braun BrewSense KF7150 coffee maker. Judging from its comparatively low price and modest appearance, I assumed that this kitchen gadget lacked the chops to whip up pots of excellent drip coffee. Boy, was I wrong. Time after time, the BrewSense KF7150 transformed my lowly test beans into quality joe, the type I’ve only coaxed from more expensive drip machines.

Sure, Braun did make some trade-offs to keep the cost down. Like the$140 Bonavita BV01002US, another aggressively priced coffee maker, the BrewSense KF7150 doesn’t feel as sturdy as luxury models. It also relies on a glass carafe and hot plate combo instead a thermal carafe. If these are deal breakers then consider the $190 Bonavita BV1900TS and $299 Technivorm Moccamaster KBT 741, both premium models aimed at the gourmet set.

Braun BrewSense looks basic but makes superb…
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Design and features

A rectangular block, 14 inches tall by 8 wide, with rounded edges, the BrewSense is lightweight, made from mostly black plastic. Adding a touch of class is a thin skin of stainless steel that covers three quarters of the coffee maker’s chassis.

The Braun BrewSense KF7150 coffee maker looks like many ordinary drip machines on the market.

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A square, perforated metal lid flips open to reveal a water tank and a plastic filter basket. The basket accepts either type #4 paper coffee filters or the bundled gold tone permanent filter. You can brew up to 12 cups (5 ounces each) of coffee, the appliance’s maximum capacity.

Flip the lid up to access the filter and water tank.

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On the front face is a control panel with a tiny LCD screen, with an illuminated digital clock. Nine buttons run along the bottom edge of the panel, with a circular power key under that. These buttons let you perform various functions such as starting a brew immediately or scheduling one in advance, setting the clock’s time and engaging the machine’s cleaning cycle.

The control panel has numerous buttons and a clock LCD.

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Instead of a double-walled thermal carafe, a basic glass carafe rests on a base at the center of the coffee machine. An electric hot plate below it provides warmth to brewed coffee inside the container. You can set the hot plate to operate at different temperatures: low, medium and high. This arrangement isn’t ideal if you don’t drink your coffee quickly and often leave it sitting in the pot for hours at time. That’s because the carafe isn’t air tight and brewed coffee’s subtle flavor quickly fades when exposed to oxygen.

Be careful pouring from the carafe too aggressively as well. I found that if I tilted the container at too sharp an angle, liquid tended to spill and drip along its sides. Filling the coffee maker’s reservoir with water can be tricky too, since its opening is quite a small target.

Plume Adaptive WiFi System Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Here’s an interesting idea for a Wi-Fi system. Instead of using two or three medium-size pieces of hardware (like the Eero, the Netgear Orbi or the Google Wifi) for your whole home, how about using a bunch of little ones, say, one for each room?

That’s the basic premise of the Plume Adaptive WiFi system. You can get up to six tiny identical units — as small as, well, plumes — in a pack. Each unit, called a Plume Pod, has a Gigabit Ethernet network port and can be plugged directly into a wall socket, resembling a typical powerline adapter. There’s no powerline involved though, this is a pure Wi-Fi device.

The Plume Adaptive Wifi system allows you to use an unlimited amount of tiny Wi-Fi extenders, called pods, in a home network.

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How the Plume system works

You connect one of the Plume Pods to an internet source, like a broadband modem and it works as your main router. Now plug the rest of the pods around the house and you have just created an extended or “mesh” Wi-Fi network. The Wi-Fi signal will propagate from one pod to another and the more pods you have, the larger the coverage area is. There’s no limit to how many pods you can use. One pod costs $69, three cost $179 and six cost $329.

Usually when a Wi-Fi signal is extended, it hops from one transmitter to another. When this happens, severe signal loss occurs, because the extender unit has to both receive and rebroadcast the signal at the same time. This means devices connected to the extender will have around 50 percent slower speed compared to those connected to the original broadcaster. So the more extenders you have in a system, the more times the signal will hop, exponentially reducing the speed. This is the reason most Wi-Fi systems have only three units, effectively making the signal hop only twice at most.

Plume says that with its Auto channel hop feature, the pods use different channels or bands, deliberately picking those that aren’t crowded, so the signal loss from each hop is minimized, if not eliminated. This should translate into faster and more reliable performance, allowing the Wi-Fi speed to remain constant when extended. This is similar to the Netgear Orbi, which has a third dedicated band exclusively for extending the signal.

So that’s the theory. And in theory, it’s a great idea. In reality, you should prepare yourself for some disappointment.

You can plug a pod directly into a wall socket.

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Easy to use, flawless operation

As long as you have an Android or iOS phone or tablet, the setup process is quick, easy and even fun with the Plume app. (There’s no web interface option.) OK, you do need to tap on the screen a few times but really, everything was self-explanatory and every step happened exactly as expected in my case. It took me less than 5 minutes to get five pods up and running. (I couldn’t immediately find a free wall socket to plug the sixth in; more on this below.) And after that everything just worked, flawlessly. I didn’t run into any trouble at all.

By the way, you do need an account with Plume before you can use the app and the system will stay connected to the Plume at all times. This is the case with many Wi-Fi systems, including the Eero and the Google Wifi.

Once setup, in any room where there’s a pod, you’ll have full-bar Wi-Fi signal. However, full bars just means you have a strong connection to the pod you’re closest to. It has no bearing on the actual speed of that connection to the rest of the network and the internet.

Plume Adaptive Wifi System
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Slow speed, short range, no features

And in my testing, standing just a few feet from a pod, the max sustained speed I got was just 90 megabits per second. For comparison, the Eero can deliver some 200Mbps from 75 feet away and the Negear Orbi is even faster, at 230Mbps. When I move farther, say at about 20 feet away, the Plume fluctuated at around 20 to 30Mbps. And I couldn’t move much farther away because each pod’s Wi-Fi range is short, especially when there’s a wall in the way, and in a home, you don’t need to move very far before getting a wall or two in between. In fact, the range is so short that I couldn’t be one room away from a pod (so with two walls in between) and still get a strong signal from it.

This short range can make it tricky to find an ideal wall socket to plug the Plume pods in for the mesh network to function optimally. If you want good performance, you can’t put them more than 25-30 feet away while within line of sight, or no more than 15-20 feet way if there’s a wall between them, and never put them two walls apart. This is the reason I had a hard time finding a good spot to plug the sixth pod into. In the end, I found that with all six pods I could make the system cover a home of some 1,800 square feet (plus a basement) with decent internet speed. But my single Asus RT-AC88U router — strategically placed right in the middle — can do that with much faster speed.

The Plume system has no features at all, including those commonly found in other Wi-Fi systems, like bandwidth priority, parental control and so on. You can only make it work in router mode (where it’s the only router in the house) or in Auto mode (where it works as a Wi-Fi extension of an existing network) and change the name of each pod. Other than that it has a cool visualization of your home network that resembles a floating solar system where each Plume pod is a planet and each connected client is a satellite. And that’s it!

The Plume app has a cool way to display the home Wi-Fi network but offers almost no settings or customizations at all.

Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET

Expensive solution

The Plume system is definitely slow, but it’s fast enough to deliver midtier broadband connections, which tend to have somewhere between 30 and 50Mbps download speeds. So if you just care about surfing the internet, or even streaming Netflix, its speed won’t be a big concern. (You only need 25Mbps for streaming 4K content, anyway.) Its price will be, however.

You can get one Plume pod for $69, a set of three units for $179 and a set of six units for $329. The problem is six units can barely cover an 1,800-foot three-bedroom home. If you have a larger home, you probably will need more than six: one pod for each room in your home, and if you have a very large living room, you might want to use two for it alone. If you live in a small apartment or studio, a set of three pods will likely get the job done, but so does an AC1200 router that you can get for around $50 (less than the cost of one pod) and it will give you faster Wi-Fi speed and a ton of features.

Also, keep in mind that while the Plume pods are small, they still take up space at the wall socket. In my personal experience, they kinda stuck out a bit too far from the wall. And with the amount of things we want to plug in these days, chances are you’ll need a few power strips if you want to use that many pods in your house. I had to get one in during my trial.

So yes, the Plume Adaptive WiFi system is an innovative idea, super easy to use, and its Auto channel hop actually works — I didn’t experience noticeable speed reduction when moving between the pods. But in reality, you will be much better off, both in terms of cost and performance, getting a normal router or, if you have a large house, a more traditional Wi-Fi system, like the Eero or the Netgear Orbi.

Cost aside, though, if all you care about is a moderate connection to the internet, a basket full of Plume pods, plus a few extension cords, will quickly and surely bring reliable Wi-Fi to every corner of your home.

The Last Guardian review – CNET

The Good The Last Guardian is a larger-than-life tale of a boy and the gigantic beast he befriends. It’s a charming, smart and beautifully designed puzzle-platformer that tells a unique story of companionship almost without saying a word.

The Bad There are a number of technical issues in The Last Guardian, from its erratic framerate to its often frustrating camera. The game’s controls take some getting used to and aren’t always as responsive as you’d want them to be.

The Bottom Line The Last Guardian might show some of the wear and tear that comes from a decade of on-and-off development, but as a whole, it’s a fantastic adventure that players of all tastes can enjoy. And if you’re among those who’ve enjoyed the developer’s other games, The Last Guardian will seem like a near-perfect hybrid of those two classics.

Back in 2001, development studio Team Ico released a self-titled game called Ico for the PlayStation 2 that won over critics and players alike with its endearing story and unique brand of puzzles. Ico was well received when it was released but its popularity continued to grow well beyond its debut, propelling it to cult status as years passed.

Four years later, Ico was followed up by Shadow of the Colossus, a game that many believe is the PlayStation 2’s absolute best. Shadow delivered something no one had ever really witnessed before, giving you an incredible sense of scale and triumph as you took down larger-than-life colossi one by one.

With two instantaneous classics cemented on the developer’s resume, the gaming world patiently waited for the next adventure from Team Ico. The Last Guardian was announced at E3 2009 for a 2011 release on PlayStation 3. But soon after that initial tease, Sony and Team Ico went radio silent. The wait became grueling, to the point of being downright laughable. The game itself became a piece of lore that the community fantasized about, with little hope it would ever actually see the light of day.

That changed in June of 2015, when from seemingly out of nowhere the game reappeared as a surprise announcement during Sony’s E3 press conference, complete with a gameplay preview. The spot ended with a simple screen title: 2016. The Last Guardian had a date. Finally, 18 months later, it’s arrived exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

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Of course, a game with this kind of build-up has a disproportional amount of expectation attached to it. The Last Guardian isn’t a result of a decade’s worth of programming and finessing, it’s just the result of the realities of the world of interactive entertainment, its politics and the fact that it is — and continues to be — very hard to make a videogame.

But even with that disastrous track record, remarkably, The Last Guardian is an excellent game and is certain to trigger the memories of those players who’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. It’s like stepping into a videogame time machine.

On its face, there are a ton of similarities to draw. You play as a young boy who meets and befriends a towering beast named Trico and together you must escape a desolate and massive crumbling world.

The Last Guardian has its own set of rules, and is cut from similar cloth to its spiritual predecessors. There are cerebral puzzles to figure out, strange items to use and the ominous feeling that you’re about to slip and fall off a cliff or be abducted by a haunted guard.

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The Last Guardian plays eerily similar to Ico and Shadow, especially the latter. In fact, the game is such a spot-on throwback to those earlier titles that it sometimes feels like you’re playing an 11-year-old game.

Oculus Rift review – CNET

The Good The Oculus Touch controllers add impressive finger and hand movement, plus physical buttons for traditional games. The Rift headset is well designed and compact. A strong collection of software offers many apps to explore.

The Bad The motion tracking lacks the HTC Vive’s full-room scale. It takes a while to adjust to the controls. Total cost of headset plus controllers is expensive — and that doesn’t include the pricey gaming PC you need, too.

The Bottom Line The Oculus Rift now offers a great combination of controls and apps for next-level VR and some room tracking, but it offers a less expansive experience than the Vive.

Hey — it’s my hands.

I can see them as I look down. I lift my finger. That floating, glowing hand moves its finger. I grip my fingers into a fist. I point.

I pick up a slingshot on the table in front of me. It takes a little practice. Now I’m holding it. I pull the elastic band back. I aim, and shoot paint pellets across the room.

Am I really holding my virtual slingshot? Yes and no. In my hands are controllers that I’m resting my fingers on, with buttons and triggers. I lift my fingers and control those hands. But when I let go completely — oops, my controller falls to the floor.

Virtual prosthetics take time to understand.

The Oculus Rift arrived way back in March, but all that came with it was a headset and an Xbox controller. It didn’t have real VR hand controls, like the HTC Vive or PlayStation VR. You could sit down and play games, but you couldn’t move anywhere. There was the promise of exciting things, but the reality was less than what we expected.

This is what we thought of the Rift then: potential. Now, it’s time for reality.

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The Oculus Touch is the necessary other part of the equation: wireless controllers that also act as tools for your hands in virtual spaces. They’re fantastic. They’re $200 (which converts to £160 or AU$270). They’re required hardware if you already own an Oculus Rift.

But if you don’t? You’ll need to pay $800 (roughly £630 or AU$1,075) for the Rift and Touch controllers combined, plus have a VR-ready gaming PC. That’s an expensive bundle. In fact, it’s the same as what the Vive costs. Oculus is now a complete package, and a compelling journey into VR worlds with lots of games and apps to try.

Oculus’ collection of unique games and apps gives it a more polished edge over the Vive, but Vive’s more open Steam platform feels like it has an edge on larger-scale VR experiences that Oculus is still trying to catch up to.

An updated review of the Oculus Rift — including how the Touch controllers change the equation — follows.

If I were rating the Touch controllers on their own, I’d give them an A. Anyone who already has a Rift should definitely get them. But that doesn’t make the Rift a slam dunk for buyers coming into VR from scratch. With an expensive VR headset that has limited room tracking, the Oculus Rift as a whole is still a work in progress.

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Touch combines buttons, motion controls and even finger-tracking.

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VR for your hands

What’s particularly brilliant about the Touch controllers is that, while they can be used as motion-sensing tools, they also have regular buttons and analog sticks. They’re almost like a split-apart gamepad held in two hands.

The HTC Vive and PlayStation VR also have handheld controllers, but theirs look more like wands and lack some standard controller-button functions. With the Touch, you can play a regular game as well as a VR motion-enabled one.

The Touch is also unique because it senses finger position, whether your fingers are pressing the triggers or not, and it even senses when your fingers are resting on particular buttons. Raising a thumb off the controller can make your virtual hand do a thumbs-up. Extending your forefinger will make your virtual hand point.

It’s not full analog finger-sensing, but moving your forefinger, thumb and middle finger can create hand gestures that feel like real grasping. The controllers vibrate with feedback, and when you pick something up, it generates a hand feel. After a while, it started to feel like my hands were really somewhere else.

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This could be you.

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What do you with these crazy controllers?

The dipping-your-hands-into-VR feel of Touch gives it an edge over the PlayStation’s Move VR controllers, or the wand-controllers of the Vive. But they all allow pretty similar things. That being said, the Touch aims to simulate actual hand movements, like grasping objects. Sometimes this works really well, and other times it feels like trying to grab chopsticks with gloves on.

There will be dozens of touch-enabled games on Oculus, and I’ve played over a dozen that are already available. But the biggest problem with the Oculus Rift and Touch isn’t the controllers themselves, it’s the limited range of motion tracking which means more standing in place, instead of moving around. And that’s because of the limitations of Oculus’ two-sensor motion-tracking system.

The Touch controllers are brilliantly designed, though, and are everything I’d want in a VR controller right now. Plus, they use AA batteries — one per controller — which are easily popped in via a magnetic sliding cover. In two weeks or so of mixed use, I haven’t had to replace them.

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Those camera sensors need a table or shelf to sit on, and they need to be wired to your PC.

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Setup and room tracking: A slight headache

The Oculus Rift Touch controllers need two camera sensors to track movement: one that comes with the controllers, and the other that comes with the Rift headset. Both need to be placed on a flat surface like a computer desk or a shelf and set several feet apart — not too far, not too close, and angled for maximum coverage of the playing space (3-7 feet, roughly). Oculus has some setup guides in its PC software, but it’s not as easy as the one-camera setup of PlayStation VR. This requires some finesse.

It also needs two separate USB 3.0 ports on your PC, one for each sensor. (That’s in addition to the one the Rift helmet is using, and possibly a fourth one if you have the wireless dongle for the Xbox controller.) The cables are fairly long, but not long enough for a PC to be across the room. Good luck, because it’s not easy to get right.

Much like HTC’s Vive VR, you then have to draw a boundary around your play area, which shows up like a glowing blue cage in virtual reality. Oculus calls it the “Guardian.” Get too close to your play area limits, and the cage reappears to warn you. But that doesn’t help with accidental tripping over furniture, cords, pets, kids, sandwiches or roller skates — so clear your room before playing.