Review: Sonos One Smart Speaker

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Sonos is considered the originator of wireless streaming audio. The company’s innovative MESH network solution enabled high fidelity audio streamed across multiple rooms simultaneously (or independently). Sonos speakers have been considered the gold standard in audio quality and precision while their software has long been the envy of other speaker manufacturers.

2017 has been a challenging year for Sonos. While the company continued to unveil well-received speakers and sound bars, they are seeing unprecedented competition not just from cheaper smart speakers with built-in assistants. They are also seeing companies like Google and Apple jump into the premium connected speaker space, presumably with smart assistant functionality. Now, Sonos has answered that challenge.

Click to read more ...

Review: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Microsoft has released the second of this year's updates to Windows 10. Called the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, the latest upgrade comes free to existing Windows 10 users and brings a surprisingly large set of updates.

I've been testing Windows 10 FCU as a Windows Insider for a few months now and despite a few glitches (Mail App shutting down for no reason while I'm composing an e-mail), it's been rather stable. For the rest of my review hit jump.

Click to read more ...

Google Home Mini is now available in Canada

Canadians can now preorder the Google Home Mini which is expected to start shipping on November 5. Google Home Mini is the smallest member of the Google Home Family which is a smart speaker with a built-in Google Assistant which is the only assistant that's specifically tuned for English and French Canadian users and handles local information and nuances. We reviewed Google Home Mini here. 

With a price of CAD $80 as well as three attractive colours, Google Home Mini is the ideal trojan horse for consumers to get started with Google Assistant as well as smart home control and all the advantages of AI.

Hands on with Canadian Made Apple AR Kit powered Apps

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

I recently had an opportunity to discover some of the latest Canadian-made ARKit apps for iOS. AR or Augmented Reality is a huge part of Apple's iOS 11 and the Apple ecosystem going forward.

I've seen implementations of AR before, around a year or so ago Lenovo and Motorola showed off their Project Tango smartphones. These were large phablets that used special cameras and sensors to 'project' 3D images into reality (as viewed through their screen). While the demos looked impressive, the hardware felt awkward and certainly more cumbersome than a regular smartphone.

With Apple's ARKit, Augmented Reality comes to existing iPhones and iPads, no extra hardware required. More impressive is that Apple's made it possible for existing app programmers to port their apps and enable AR functionality.

Click to read more ...