Hello! It's that time of year again, so here's my pick of the best gadgets you might want
to buy for Black Friday and Christmas 2019!
[Electrical spark sound effect]
Hello and welcome back to another Switched on Network video I'm paulfp and this channel
covers technology, gadgets and the internet so if you're not already subscribed and you
like that sort of thing, it would be great to have you stick around as a subscriber!
Right, now with all that YouTube stuff out of the way let's dive into the gadgets!
So first up is this smart wallet from Ekster. “Hang on a minute,” I hear you say, “Smart
Wallet?! How can a wallet be smart?!” Well I'll get to that in just a moment, but to
start with it's a really nice, small minimalist leather wallet with space for cards and bank
notes - but not coins. Banknotes can fold up and go inside this section here, and it
has space for up to 10 bank cards apparently: you can fit in the back there, a couple here
and then the main ones go in this section here which is activated by this leaver here
and when you press that they pop at the top there, which is quite cool, and then you can
take the card you need and then pop ‘em all back down again.
The main structure of the wallet and where those cards go in there is made of aluminium
and it forms a sort of Faraday cage around your cards which means that if you've got
contactless cards, its first “smart” feature is that it’ll block any contactless signals
from being stolen from anyone, so if anyone wants to come up with one of those machines
and try and scan your cards when you're not looking to get your information or steal money
off your cards that won’t work if you’ve got this wallet, so that’s pretty cool!
The internal Faraday cage isn't the only smart thing in this wallet and that leads us nicely
on to the second gadget it in my list which is the Elkster Tracker Card now - this is
where it gets really smart!
Now this tracker card is designed specially for the Ekster wallets although you can buy
them separately and it would work great in any other wallets or even things like bags
and briefcases and camera bags and stuff like that. It's about the same size albeit slightly
thicker than a credit card and it's got a little solar cell on here to charge it.
Now, what does it do? This is great for if you lose your wallet because what you do is
you pair it to the app on your phone and then if you lose your wallet you can just take
out the app on your phone, tap the button and make it ring!
So here we are, the tracker card is inside the wallet there I'm going to open up the
app on my phone, select my wallet and then tap the “ring to find” button and in a
moment it should sta... there we are, it's started ringing straight away! And then once
you’ve found your wallet you can either press the “stop ringing” button on your
phone or you can tap the button on there to stop it ringing. Another great feature is
that it also works the other way round so if you've got your wallet but you've lost
your phone you can just press the button on here to make your phone ring. Nice idea!
You can also connect it up to Alexa and the Google Assistant so if you lose your wallet
you can say, “Hey Google, ask chipolo where my wallet is!”
[Google:] Getting Chipolo...
[Chipolo:] Your Chipolo is at *************** Road, Liverpool L** ***. UK. Should I try to ring
it?
Yes please!
[Chipolo:] Your Chipolo has started ringing. [Ringing sound.]
[Chipolo:] Do you want me to stop ringing it?
There we are, and now it’s ringing. Yes please!
Now, I was sent this for free but I'm genuinely really impressed by this little tracker card
and I'm not being paid to say that! I think this would make an excellent present for someone
who's always losing things or maybe even a present for yourself!
Now Ekster have got some nice discounts coming up on both the wallet and the tracker this
year so if you have a look in the video description I put a link there and there's going to be
40% off for Black Friday and if you miss Black Friday and it's coming up to Christmas don't
worry you can still get 30% off there. The tracker is part of the wider Chipolo family
and I've also put a link in the video description to get 20% off their other products as well.
Next up is this, the “Cololight” which won the 2019 CES Innovation Awards. It's a
modular smart RGB LED light panel system which can be controlled by voice, by sound and music,
by mobile app or via the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.
The UK distributor kindly sent me this, the three panel starter kit and the Pro controller.
Now the 3-panel kit doesn't really do it justice because the magic really starts when have
you a lot more panels and you can start to make all sorts of shapes and patterns and
things. You’re limited really just by your imagination there! You can use this stand
to mount it on a table or a shelf and since there're so light you could also mount them
on the ceiling or on the wall with some 3M pads or something. You can control the colours
and animate different patterns on the app or if you connect it to your smart speaker
you can do something like this:
“Hey Google, set my Cololight to Red!”
“Set my Cololight to Yellow...” “Set my Cololight to Blue...”
“Turn off my Cololight.”
You can also set a variety of different effects and animations depending on what shape you've
built and there are some presets built into the app as well like this hourglass one, or
you can design your own.
[Music - “Amsterdam” by Venus Demilo.]
You can also set it to be sound activated so it will react to any voices or music in
the room, and I can see that being really cool especially with some bigger installations...
and the Christmas tree effects you can make a really cool as well. So if you're thinking
about getting one of these I'd definitely recommend investing in some extra panels.
Although at £10 a pop that will get quite expensive pretty quickly... but it is very
cool!
Now, if you’re a subscriber to this channel you may have already seen this gadget as I
did a review video on it recently. This is great for anyone who needs access to the roof
on their car but struggles to reach all the way up to the top. What this is is a clever
little gadget which provides a step and it just hooks onto the car latch. This would
be great for camping trips or maybe reaching a bike that's attached to your roof or if
you just want to reach into your roof box when you're away on a long family weekend
trip. Tt's really simple design; it's just a step which hooks onto the latch of your
door and creates that step halfway up the door frame so that you can stand on it and
reach all the way over to your roof without having to use a step ladder and without having
to get your feet all over the seats. It also features this pointed tip which means you're
effectively getting 2 gadgets in 1 and that's useful for if you crash your car and you go
underwater or something like that and you need to smash the window to get out. So as
I said you're effectively getting 2 gadgets in 1 but one of them could literally be a
lifesaver!
At number 5 and the only “big name” gadget on this list is the new Nest Mini from Google.
Now I won't go into too much detail on What's New and all the differences etc. here because
I've already done two videos on that. First of all there's my “first look” video explaining
all the new features and the differences. Click the “i” just up there to watch that,
and then secondly this video where I did a side-by-side comparison testing the sound
quality from the new Nest Mini vs the new [old] Google Home Mini. The difference is
really quite astonishing, the Nest Mini sounds absolutely fantastic in comparison so make
sure to watch that video, and watch it with headphones on as well.
If the person you're buying for has already got a Google Home Mini or a Nest Mini, then
these two mounts are worth looking at. This one here lets you mount the device nice and
neatly underneath the plug there and it includes cable management round the back so that looks,
er, really nice up on the wall there. Or these ones from KIWI Design which come in two colours
to match the Mini feature a magnetic design; pop it onto it like that, so you can plug
it strange the plug socket, so that’s pretty cool as well.
If you like the look of either of these mounts there's a link to each in the video description
as well as to the Nest Mini if you've not already got one.
Do you want 1 more as a bonus? Ok then... This isn’t a sponsor slot - as NordVPN don’t
currently sponsor Switched On Network, but we are an affiliate of theirs and I think
the 3-year plan from NordVPN, which comes with 1 month free, would also make a great
gift if anyone travels.
There are lots of wild and exaggerated claims that get made about VPNs, in fact Tom Scott
did a great video on them recently, and I’ve been planning a mini-series on VPNs for a
while too, including how to build your own which can be useful for all sorts of things.
However, using a commercial operator like NordVPN can be really useful if you want to
cover your tracks online for whatever legitimate reason, so that people like your college or
university network administrators, your ISP or your Government can’t see what you’re
doing. Or for more mundane reasons, like if you’re going on a business trip or holiday
and want to be able to access services like BBC iPlayer, for instance, which may not be
available in the country you’re travelling to, or you may want to be able to access your
- or another country's - version of Netflix. Or you might want to test your website or
its search rankings from elsewhere in the world by making it seem like you’re there,
when in fact, you’re here.
So to get 1 month free and sign up to the excellent value 3-year plan from NordVPN,
click the link in the video description. It works on Windows, Linux, Apple Mac, Android,
iPhone and pretty much everything else, and there’s a 30-day money back guarantee too,
so if you decide it’s not for you, there’s no worries.
So thanks for watching this video and I hope you enjoyed it - let me know which of the
gadgets I featured you’ll be buying either for yourself or for your loved ones this year.
Don’t forget to do all the YouTubey things, too, like giving the video a thumbs up, subscribing
to the channel and sharing the video with all your friends, family, colleagues, co-workers
and everybody you’ve ever met in your life...
Oh, and Happy Christmas!