Echo vs. Google Home Max vs. Sonos One Should you buy now or wait? What to look forward to Sources. What we like about the Apple HomePod.
Sonos One. The most important limitations for most people to know are:. The HomePod can damage wood furniture: An unhappy discovery after we placed a HomePod on an oiled butcher-block countertop and later on a wooden side table was that it left a defined white ring in the surface. Other reviewers and owners such as Pocket-lint , and folks on Twitter have reported the same issue.
Apple attributes the problem to the oils diffused between the speaker's vibration-dampening silicone base and the wood, and suggests wiping the marks off with a damp or dry soft cloth, or else moving the HomePod to a different surface. This really undermines the design aspect of the HomePod—especially if you were thinking of displaying it on some prized piece of furniture—and it will surely be a sore point for many potential buyers. In other testing, we have seen no visible damage when using it on glass, granite countertop, nice MDF, polyurethane-sealed wood, and cheap IKEA bookcases.
But you cannot ask Siri to play those or a particularly galling gap streaming Internet radio. In comparison, though, both Alexa and Google Home speakers support a huge range of third-party streaming services as well as Internet radio by default, and Amazon devices can stream Audible books.
Both Alexa and Google Home speakers support voice recognition, which prevents that. This is more of a push, as any Apple device can use AirPlay, a built-in feature of Apple devices, to send third-party audio directly to the HomePod; however, Alexa and Google Home speakers can receive audio via Bluetooth from any source.
Should you buy now or wait? What to look forward to. Apple has held the crown for best smartphone video for a very long time now, challenged but not losing only briefly by the Samsung Galaxy Ultra series phones in the last year or two. This year, video quality is simply amazing, at least on the wide angle camera. Apple will also let you shoot video in ProRes this year.
Each is fascinating in its own way. Cinematic Mode is essentially Portrait Mode but for video, while Picture Profiles change the default way the iPhone takes photos. Profiles are a new setting in the camera app that change the way your photos look by default. Each one has its own little sliders that you can manually tweak for both Tone and Warmth. When you set one of these profiles, it becomes the new default way the camera takes pictures, though it will also pop up a button that lets you toggle it off.
Samsung and Google are both more willing to tune their images to be more pleasing to their customers than Apple is. With Profiles, Apple is essentially giving its customers the option to get pictures they like better without having to edit them after the shot. Understanding how Profiles actually works is a little complicated. Part of that process involves making choices about white balance, color, contrast, and so on.
Another part of that process is the iPhone semantically recognizing different things in the scene — things like faces, people, grass, sky, cats, or whatever and exposing them differently. When you set a profile, the iPhone makes different choices during the Smart HDR capture about white balance, color, contrast, and so on based on the preference you set. It also uses that semantic recognition to make better choices for things like skin tone.
Profiles are not something you can undo in the edit — though Apple does label them in the metadata when you view them in the Photos app. The reason Cinematic mode makes for such a great demo is that it can automatically shift the focus when something happens in the scene. It locks on to the biggest face that it sees, but if that face turns away, the iPhone can automatically shift focus to somebody else in the background.
It is fun to play around with and works with both the rear and front-facing Selfie cameras. The iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max finally offer iPhone users a screen feature that flagship Android phones have had for quite a long time: higher refresh rates. Historically, the iPhone has been able to refresh its screen at 60Hz or 60 times every second , but the new iPhone 13 Pros can vary the refresh rates from as little as 10Hz all the way up to Hz.
It has a wide dynamic range, can get much brighter, and also uses less power because it can ratchet down the refresh rate. What all this means practically is that scrolling and animations look much smoother. This is doubly true on iPhones because Apple has gotten away with not putting a high refresh rate screen on an iPhone for so long because iOS is itself a very smooth OS without very much jank in its animations. When I scroll on the iPhone 13 Pro, the text stays readable instead of turning into a blur.
Things moving on the screen are smoother. It feels more like a direct interaction with my finger because the iPhone can literally change its refresh rate to match my movement. So the screen matches the 24FPS frame rate in video apps, for example. Apple tells me apps coded with its default tools like Swift will get these benefits for free and that developers will have access to tools to update their apps to support ProMotion if they like.
I get if all this sounds very silly. It is very much a premium feature that is more about experience than anything practical. Once many people experienced the nicer thing, they were bothered by its lack. Now, finally, they do. Crucially, Apple did an excellent job with its implementation. As for the camera, I can see it both ways. One of the most successful Swiss watches of , in my opinion, was the Breilting Endurance Pro. Offered in a selection of hip colors, this is an easy-to-appreciate entry-level Breitling sports watch that is perfectly suited to the times.
The Endurance Pro is also a collection that, for many people, can be easy to miss. Most watch collectors want mechanical versus quartz watches, and it would not be wrong to refer to the Endurance Pro as a fancy flavor of G-Shock. But Breitling has a response for all of that. This means that the Endurance Pro could easily fit into the modern Breliting lineup at a lower price point because doing that was never uncommon for the brand.
This is TAG Heuer territory, but for a different type of client. The Endurance Pro design formula is also dead simple. Breitling first decided to once again make use of its Breitlight material carbon , and focus on a quartz movement.
Inside the watch is the Breitling caliber 82, which is a base ETA thermo-compensated quartz movement. This time, date, and complex chronograph movement has a quartz crystal regulation system with a sensor that measures temperatures.
Changes in temperature negatively affect the ability of these already accurate movements to operate at peak levels. Able to compensate for changes in temperature normally experienced by watch movements worn on the wrist, the caliber 82 movement is accurate to around 10 seconds per year. That is compared to accuracy of about 10 seconds per month for standard quartz movements.
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