We're headed into the month of March. February is officially in the rearview mirror and we're left pondering the tech in the last 30 days or so. We got our hands on some of our favorite tech released in February to share with you. Are you ready? Let's get started.
Meze 99 Classics
The Meze 99 Classics are some of the most beautiful headphones I've ever laid eyes on. I'm not much of a big fan of gold but the gold accent against the walnut wood ear-cups manganese spring steel headband and soft leather covered memory foam cushions– well they look great and they feel great. As for the sound quality, they deliver a very balanced sound. Meze is actually tweaked the frequencies to provide for a balanced natural sound as opposed to a sound rich in bass. With that said, the bass is very much present in these headphones. It's very pleasant, it's enough to satisfy the bass centric craving all of us have without hurting your eardrums after long hours of playback. That's something that I've always had to endure. With an equalizer and/or amplifier, the sound truly does come alive. I've actually been using these headphones with the LG V10 and they sound amazing.
The Classics retail for $309. If you want a natural looking sounding pair of headphones, you can't really look past these Classics.
ConnectSense Smart Outlet
The ConnectSense Smart Outlet is a pretty neat piece of tech because it turns any ordinary outlet into a Smart Outlet. If you want to control a lamp from your smartphone, you can do so by plugging it into this outlet. And that applies for anything you plug into this outlet. You can control right from your smartphone. It even features Apple's Home Kit technology along YouTube programmed Siri to control various appliances.
Some of the features worth mentioning include the fact that each socket can be controlled individually as well as with a physical switch. There's even a 2.4 amp USB charging port for rapid charging of your smartphone or tablet. And to top it all off, it offers end to end, wall to wall encryption to provide data security.
The ConnectSense Smart Outlet retails for about $80 on Amazon.
TarDisk Pear 2.0
Another neat product we have come across in February is the TarDisk Pear 2.0. It's a uni-body aluminum on board solid state drive that fits directly onto the SD card slot in a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. What's neat about this product besides the obvious is that it sits flush with the aluminum chassis of the laptop. So nothing sticks out or protrudes from the laptop. It's all super smooth.
You can choose between 256 GB of flash storage and 128 GB of flash storage. I decided to go with the larger 256 GB to help store a lot of video files and multimedia content in general. Pear 2.0 actually does have the potential to double your storage in your MacBook. I would say it also has the speed to back it up since it's an SSD is not a traditional hard drive by any means. You're not going to be slowed down by much at all, at least I haven't noticed any really major speed issues on my end.
The TarDisk Pear 2.0 is a bit expensive, coming in at roughly $400 for the 256 GB variant but the price is reduced quite a bit if you go to a lower storage option. You can get the 128 GB variant for $150. But considering how well designed it is to sit flush against the MacBook aluminum chassis, I think it can seriously be worth it.
TravelCard 1500 mAh Battery
There are a few other products worth sharing in my opinion. This is TravelCard, the world's smallest charger for a micro USB smartphone. There's also a lightning adapter version as well. The idea is that it's slim enough to put in your wallet, purse or comfortably fit in your pocket. One of the reasons I like it so much is that they include the micro USB cable as well as a full size USB cable/connector to charge the card built into the card itself. The size of the battery is 1500 mAh which isn't huge but it should be plenty to charge your phone at least maybe halfway, when it's in dire need of some battery life.
If you're interested in the TravelCard, it retails for about $30.
BLU Vivo 5 and Huawei Honor 5X
The last two items worth mentioning are the BLU Vivo 5 and Huawei Honor 5X. These are two of the best budget smartphones of 2016, in my opinion. The Vivo 5 features some very decent specs. It features a 5.5-inch 720p AMOLED display, octa-core processor, 3 GB of RAM, 13 MP camera sensor and unibody aluminum build construction.
The Honor 5X features very similar specs. It features a 5.5-inch 1080p LCD display but with a quad-core processor and 2 GB of RAM, 13 MP camera sensor and it also includes an aluminum unibody build construction. What's neat is that these devices only cost $200 off-contract. I'm going to make an in depth comparison video between these two devices soon.
With that said, I hope you enjoyed the selection of tech in this video.