Best Buy Canada showcases emerging technology at the Best Buy Life and Tech Expo

Toronto:  Best Buy Canada takes over Canada's busiest intersection and Yonge and Dundas Square for this year's Best Buy Life & Tech Expo – a free event offering an interactive look at the latest and greatest in emerging technology.

The three-day long expo from September 12^th to 14^th boasts one of the country’s largest consumer technology showcases featuring more than 60 top exhibitors from around the globe.

This year’s event presents the most innovative and advanced technologies in market – everything from drones, virtual reality, wearables and more – with a special focus on three product categories that are helping to improve Canadian lives: smart homes, connected health, and connected toys and games. I’ve included a sneak peak of the latest product offerings below along with a list of participating vendors.

Review: Alcatel A50

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

At a time where smartphone prices are at an all-time high, it is refreshing to see an affordable smartphone which also brings modularity and innovation to the market. Alcatel's A50 may seem a little plain at first sight, but this smartphone has multiple personalities which can be changed easily thanks to SNAPBAK cover accessories.

The Alcatel A50 is unapologetically an entry level phone. But, you wouldn't know this from the build and the materials that Alcatel has employed and which make quite an impression. There's solid plastic and a metal backplate which make it feel more premium than some of the LG-made Nexus devices from a few years ago.

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Two new Amazon Fire TV devices are reportedly headed our way

A new report from AFTVnews claims we’re getting more Amazon Fire TV options this year. There will be two new devices, supposedly, and one is coming next month. Both devices will have 4K HDR video support at 60 frames per second. The “mid-tier model,” which looks like a square Google Chromecast is the one we’re expecting in October and will reportedly be priced within the US$60 to $80 range.

Meanwhile, the more exciting model, which is expected to come out later this year or early in 2018, is considered the high-end Fire TV. It’ll reportedly have far-field microphones and an integrated speaker, meaning it might be able to support remote voice commands. With an LED light bar, it might mean this model gets Alexa support. The estimated price for this model is over $100.

Google’s Safe Browsing anti-malware software looks after over 3 billion devices

You might or might not know about Google’s phishing prevention tool. If you haven’t seen it work for you, then it means it’s doing its job. The search giant announced that the Safe Browsing program for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox has protected over a billion more smartphones, desktops, and laptops compared to last year. Safe Browsing is also enabled for popular social media app Snapchat. How do you know Safe Browsing is working for you? You’ll get the big red warning page.

The tool was created a decade ago for personal computers but has seen growth with more mobile devices out on the market. "Over the last few years, we've rethought how Safe Browsing delivers data," Google's Stephan Somogyi and Allison Miller wrote in a blog post. "We built new technologies to make its data as compact as possible: We only send the information that's most protective to a given device, and we make sure this data is compressed as tightly as possible."