- This video is sponsored by Bitdefender.
Hey guys, this is Austin.
It is almost 2018 and here are five tech items
to get your year started off right.
To kick things off, we have the Bitdefender Box 2.
You guys have probably heard of Bitdefender before
for their antivirus software, but with the Box,
they're stepping it up to the hardware side of things
to protect your entire network.
But on top of being able to cover things like your phone
as well as your laptop, it also can help protect against
your smart home devices from being attacked.
That's quite the flow chart they've got right here.
Pull this guy out of the box
and it's actually surprisingly light.
So there's really not a whole lot to this guy.
You essentially get power in, you get Ethernet in,
and you get Ethernet back out.
So after a quick set up we have the Box up and running.
All we need is the Bitdefender Central app
for iOS or Android,
and from here we can control pretty much anything.
So you can see notifications
if it decides there's any kind of
vulnerabilities in your network.
You can also make sure that all your devices are protected,
if they need attention,
or if they're unprotected.
While the box will protect your device
when you're at home on your own wifi,
the included total security software
will also protect your other devices,
like Mac, Windows, Android
from threats when you're staying on public wifi.
Since this is hardware-level security,
you can do some pretty interesting stuff with it.
So not only is it going to do it's best
to filter out any kind of suspicious activity,
but on top of that,
say you're on a website that isn't secured,
and you're trying to put in your credit card,
or your social security number,
well Box is going to try and catch that
and give you a warning saying
"hey, are you sure about that?"
You're also getting some protection
against brute force attacks as well as ransomware,
and because it detects all the devices on your network
and gives you a full status report.
Say you connect a old laptop
that hasn't been updated in awhile,
you're going to get a notification saying,
"hey, it's time to get an update on that guy."
Windows XP is not cool anymore.
So if you guys wanna check out the
Bitdefender Box 2 for yourself,
like always, the link will be in the description.
The next item is the Google Home.
Now this isn't brand new,
however, I've just gotten
a whole set of Google Homes for my house,
and I love them.
Well there's a lot to like with Alexa,
and I'm sure Siri on the HomePod is going to be great
if you have like 400 bucks,
Google Home has really hit a nice sweet spot
between sounding good,
as well as having the super useful Google Assistant.
The real sweet spot for me though,
is the Google Home Mini.
So these guys launched at 50 dollars,
which is a pretty decent price
for what is still a nice speaker,
and gives you all the functionality.
However, for the next little while,
these guys are 30 dollars.
And at that price, I've got like 3 of them in my house.
Now this doesn't matter at all
to anyone besides me, probably,
but even though the Google Home does sound better,
I kind of prefer the Mini
just because this to me looks like an air freshener.
I don't know, I just don't like the way this thing looks.
Where as this, this is cool.
You can just slide this on like a desk or something,
and no one would ever really look twice.
There's a lot you can do with Google Home,
but the main things I do is listen to music,
do like alarms, as well as listen to
a little bit of like podcasts and some news,
but for 30 bucks,
you should definitely consider checking this guy out.
Continuing on the Google train,
we have the Chromecast Ultra.
Now the Chromecast has been one of my favorite ways
to stream video for a few years now,
but the Ultra is the way to do it in 4K.
If you guys caught our iPhone X is it worth it video,
this is actually how we were able to test HDR on YouTube.
So what we did was, we would upload the video to YouTube,
wait for it to process for like three hours,
and then we would play it back on a OLED TV,
using the Chromecast Ultra
to actually see what it would look like
once it was fully processed.
This guy is pretty powerful considering
just how tiny it is.
It's also really stuck in there.
So it is a little bit bigger than a standard Chromecast,
but really not by much.
It's the same basic idea where you
plug it in via HDMI to your tv.
There's a micro USB lead here for power.
Once you set it up on wifi, it's pretty straightforward.
So you get just a bunch of generic wallpapers
in the beginning,
but you can stream pretty much anything to it
from the app or from Google Home.
Hey Google, play the latest 'Austin Evans'
video on Youtube.
That is so cool.
So what's really neat about this,
is not only can you control that with voice,
as well as of course from your phone,
but you can also have multiple Google Homes
as well as multiple Chromecasts set up in your house.
All of these gadgets are great,
however you're probably going to want
an actual phone to control everything,
which is where the Moto E4 Plus comes in.
This is a phone I actually did a video on
a couple months ago,
and I think it is lowkey one of my
favorite devices of the year.
So what's nice is, for a phone that costs less than $200,
you're getting a metal build, a good screen,
good camera, fingerprint sensor.
There's really not a lot to hate on.
One area a lot of budget phones skimp on is the screen,
and thankfully the Moto E4 Plus isn't too bad.
So it is a 5.5 inch panel with a 1280x720 resolution.
Now yes, that's going to be a little bit on the low side,
but thankfully it's a good panel with solid color.
Inside, the specs might not look impressive
with a Snapdragon 427 processor, 2 gigs of ram,
and either 16 or 32 gigs of storage,
but what really puts this over the top is the battery.
This guy is rocking a massive 5,000mAh battery.
To put that in context, that's almost double the size
of something like the iPhone X.
Now yes, it does mean that the phone
is a little bit chunkier than it might otherwise be,
but especially considering the fairly low end internals,
this guy is going to last forever.
Well that battery is really what pushes it
over the edge for me.
This is hands down the best battery life
I have ever tried on a smartphone.
And when you consider that that's again,
less than $200,
you should really give the Moto E4 a shot.
But say that a smartphone isn't what
you're looking for this year.
Well that is where the Acer Asprire E15 comes in.
I've actually wanted to do a video on this for awhile,
for one big reason.
It is one of the most highly selling laptops
on Amazon period right now.
You don't exactly get a lot in the box though.
So on one hand we get the laptop itself
with some wonderful cardboard
and some cardboard shavings.
On paper, it looks pretty good.
So you're getting a Core i3-7100U
4 gigabytes of RAM,
as well as a 1 Terabyte hard drive.
There's some nice features that separate this
from other budget laptops,
starting with the display.
So it is a 1080p panel,
and well yes, while it may not be the best looking
1080p screen in the world,
but it is a lot of better than other laptops
in the 3 to 4 hundred dollar price range.
Nice touches like having a backlit keyboard
as well as a full number pad is nice,
and the port selection is interesting.
On the left side we have a good selection
including a pair of USB 3.0 ports,
an HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, as well as USB type C,
but on the other side we get the headphone jack,
another USB 2.0, as well as the DVD drive,
because you know,
laptops with USB type C ports and DVD drives
are all over the place.
(laughs)
Remove three screws and pop off this bottom panel though,
and not only we get access to the hard drive,
which is actually kind of slow,
and I would probably swap with an SSD,
but also our memory.
Four gigs is fine for now,
but it would be really simple to upgrade this guy
to 8 gigs.
Acer claims that this guy has
up to 12 hours of battery life,
and while the build quality
does leave a little bit to be desired,
at $350, there is a ton to like with this laptop.
I see why everyone keeps buying them.
As always, links to everything I talked about,
including the Box 2, will be
in the description of this video.
So I'm curious, which of these products would you guys
want to pick up for 2018? Let me know in the comments below,
and I will catch you in the next one.