This Month's Best Gear, From Smart Speakers to Fancy Laptops

There’s no shortage of ways to get Alexa into your living room, and now Ultimate Ears is getting in on the action with a new line of bluetooth speakers. The $229 Blast and $299 Megablast are smarter, louder, and boxier than their predecessors. Use them to cue up tunes just like you would on the original UE Boom, plus bark voice commands at Alexa: turn the music up and down, play a podcast, check the weather, or control your smart home. Read the story here.

Google gets what a Chromebook can be, and the new Pixelbook serves the vision beautifully. This $1,000 gadget is equally comfortable as a tablet or a laptop, used with either a pen or keyboard. It’s a handsome, light, powerful device, with specs that stand up against any ThinkPad and a body barely bigger than an iPad Pro. Its one weakness? Android apps suck on Chromebooks. And they don’t seem to be getting better. Read the review here.

The latest drip machine from Breville, the Precision Brewer, comes with coffee-making superpowers. It has a particularly fast brew cycle and, most importantly, temperature control during brewing, that at 176 to 208 degrees Fahrenheit, ranges into an impressive and helpful top end that most run-of-the-mill coffee makers lack. At $299, though, it's not cheap. This is for serious coffee drinkers only. Read the full story here.

Every audiophile wants an Alexa speaker that sounds as good as the best speakers in the house. So join us while we raise a glass to the Sonos One, the company's first music player with Alexa built natively into the corpus. The $199 speaker does all of the Alexa things, but it's foremost a Sonos speaker, so it does all the Sonos things too: It works as part of a multi-room system, it streams from scores of services, and it obeys the company's controller apps. Read the review here.

You know what you need for your new Pixel 2? A pair of sweet, sweet earbuds. Google's $159 Pixel Buds stay connected by a rope-like cable that goes behind your head or around your neck, and bring all that Google Assistant goodness straight to your ears. Using a touch-sensitive control on the right bud, you can tap to play or pause your music, swipe forward and back to change volume, or long-press to talk to Assistant. You can even use them to translate language in real time, straight to your ear. Read the full story here.

Velomacchi’s 28L Roll-Top Backpack is designed with the specific needs of motorcycle commuters in mind. It’s a slim, low-profile, and weatherproof bag that uses a clever rotating harness system to cinch the bag tight, keeping your center of gravity fully intact. This bag’s patent-pending straps use a magnetic coupler that hooks over your sternum, with clavicle hinges that adjust as you wear it across your torso. Oh, and it has a mount for your GoPro so you can get clips of all your scenic rides. Read the review here.

Google’s latest smart speaker emphasizes smart over speaker. It’s a small pebble of a thing, about the size of a crosswise slice of a softball. Unlike, say, the Home Max, which Google built to sound great, the Mini’s just supposed to be so small, so cheap, and so simply designed that you’ll put it somewhere and never notice it again. Google imagines you’ll maybe place one in every home, ensuring there’s always a mic close by to hear you ask for the weather, set timers, or control your smart home. Read the full review.

The Surface Book 2 is the most combinatory device Microsoft's made yet. It's a laptop, with a keyboard and a trackpad. It's also a tablet (the screen detaches, you can use a pen, everything's touch-friendly), and a stupendously powerful desktop. The machine runs on Intel's new eighth-generation quad-core processors, in either a Core i5 or Core i7 version. The higher-end models come with Nvidia's GeForce discrete graphics, up to 16 gigs of RAM, and as much as 1 terabyte of solid storage. All that in a fanless body that gets up to 17 hours of battery life, and weighs about 3.5 pounds for the smaller model or 4.2 pounds for the larger. Power don't come cheap, though. The Surface Book 2 starts at a whopping $1,499. Read the review here.

Go Pro pumped up its video and photo cred with the latest Hero. The device packs a brawnier processor chip, which unlocks 4K video shooting at 60 full frames per second. While that may not matter to many consumers, to professional videographers, it’s another step to making silky-smooth ultra-high-resolution video capture possible anywhere. It also means that there’s extra bandwidth to do neat tricks—if you’re a slo-mo junkie, this little camera can reach 240 frames per second so your gnar kickflip can be seen in glorious, suuuuuper-slow motion. Read the review here.

Tired of not being able to hear your friends through the cheap headset that came with your console? Turtle Beach heard your cries for help and made the Ear Force Stealth 600, a completely wireless gaming headset that, at $100, won’t break the bank. They sound fantastic, and the 15-hour-long battery life will carry you long into your all-nighters. Read the review here.

The Everyday Messenger is a camera bag that doubles as a commuter bag. It has a number of features that will only be appreciated by photographers—like a stiff, dedicated strap on either side for hooking on Peak Design’s award-winning Capture clip, which lets you attach a camera. With leather touchpoints on the ash version, oversized webbing, and beautiful metal hardware, this bag is classier than the Obamas on vacation. Read the review here.

The latest in Bose’s line of popular noise-canceling cans, the QC35 II are perfect for travelers. There’s a long, flat button on the left can that lets your headphones communicate with Google Assistant. Press it, hold, and say almost anything: What’s the weather? Play Michael Jackson. Remind me to change the laundry. Call Anna. Your headphones will enable audio pass-through so you can hear yourself talk (and thus avoid shouting “WHEN’S MY FLIGHT” loudly at passersby), route your request to Assistant through your phone, then answer you or just do what you asked. Read the review here.

Headphones are like glasses: What works for you won't necessarily work for your friend. To some, bass-heavy cans bring out the beauty in classical music. For others, they can muddle the nuances of flutes and strings. So audio company Nura developed a pair of headphones that adjust to whoever is wearing them. The $399 Nuraphones measure an individual’s audio profile and tweak the resulting sound to her specific acoustic preferences. Think of them as a prescription for your ears. Read the story here.

Rushing home to sign for a package can be a chore, and nothing craters a day like having a delivery stolen from your doorstep. That's what Amazon hopes to solve with its new Cloud Cam and Key app, which opens your front door for authorized deliveries. The system, exclusive for Prime members, costs $250 to get started, a price that includes both the camera and a smart lock. While Amazon has gone to some lengths to minimize the creepiness of a definitionally invasive service, it still forces potential enlistees to consider just what kind of trade-offs they're willing to make in the name of convenience. Read the story here.

Huawei has joined the AI fray with its new handset, the Mate 10 Pro. This is the company's first smartphone with a chip tuned to power artificial-intelligence software. Inside the phone's new Kirin 970 processor is a component the Chinese manufacturer calls the Neural Processing Unit, and it's this corner of the phone's brains that fuels the machine-learning features: things like smart photography, machine translation, and predictive behavior. Read the story here.

Done right, a pour-over can taste like the best cup of drip you’ve ever had. Make it even better with the $60 December Dripper, a device that allows impressive control of the flow rate. Make the coffee flow from fast to slow, or bring it to a dead stop. Read the full review.

Motorola's new Moto X4 isn't 2017's most powerful smartphone. But the updated design is comfortable to hold, now waterproof, and has a suite of useful features unique to Motorola's handsets, like Moto Actions and Bluetooth speaker networking. And at $330, it's half the price of a Galaxy S8. Read the full story.