Tag: review

Kuhn Rikon Black Star Review: Perfectly Smooth Cast-Iron

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It’s a niche interest, but I’m always curious about peoples’ relationships with their pans, particularly the weight. Some people like or don’t mind them heavy, and some need them to be light. Recently, I found myself drawn to a heavy honker from Kuhn Rikon, parking it on the right rear burner of my stove while I tried to figure out where to store the pan before realizing it was already in the perfect spot.

The pan in question is the Swiss manufacturer’s Black Star, a 9-pound skillet in the size I tested, with a 24-centimeter cooking surface that’s 32 centimeters from rim to rim. It’s functional and good-looking, and at just over 9 pounds, it weighs a lot, even compared to the competition. At $250, too, it certainly costs a lot, especially when compared to something like a classic Lodge cast-iron pan, which weighs about a pound less and costs a mere fraction of the import.

Smooth Operator

I should state here that while I love cooking with cast-iron pans, including my Lodge skillet, I don’t treat them as fetish objects. Their level of seasoning comes and goes, but I rarely run into issues with sticking. I wash them with soap and water, which often frightens those fetish people. At least they can relax knowing I’m not an animal who runs mine through the dishwasher.

For example, some pan manufacturers recommend a break-in process, where you sizzle up potato peels with salt, in oil that has a high smoke point. This removes a layer of corrosion protection and begins to season the bottom of the pan, and then you’re on your way.

One key difference between the Lodge and the Kuhn Rikon is the incredibly smooth cooking surface on the Black Star. I’ve read that with use, the more nubbly surface of classic Lodge pans becomes seasoned enough that there’s little difference between its nonstick-ness and that of smoother models. That said, smoother always feels cleaner and more luxurious to me, and the Black Star was smoother on the day it arrived then my Lodge has become after years. Right out of the box, I stuck it over a burner and scanned the surface with a thermal camera. Everything looked nice and even as the pan heated, with no notable hot or cool spots.

One change from what I’m used to was using a model with two helper handles, Dutch-oven style, instead of the more classic cast-iron skillet style with one helper and one “regular” handle. This freed up a little space on the stove and made it more tidy. Once I got used to it, I didn’t miss it. (At this size and weight, the regular handle on the Lodge isn’t terribly useful, anyway.) I came to enjoy the Kuhn Rikon’s flared sidewalls, which made it a bit easier to access or flip the pan’s contents with a spatula. They also gave it a sort of extra cooking surface where I could lean food—bit of a cheat, but not an option at all with a more vertical wall.

Best Practices

Leaving a pan on the stove even when they’re not in use has probably been a thing since the invention of pans, stoves, and laziness, but doing it with this good-looking, high-performing pan had a great side effect, which is that I cooked more.

On my induction stove, the pan, which also comes in a slightly smaller size, handled the way all induction pans feel to me on there, like a sports car or precision instrument—fast to heat up, stable, and predictable. The combination works so well that it almost feels futuristic. The only improvement I could think of has to do with the stove, not the pans. It would be nice if the burners went all the way out to the edge of pans this large.

Something I enjoyed noticing was how little I used my traditional nonstick pans while I had this one in for months of testing. With that smooth bottom and a slick of butter or oil, I didn’t really need a nonstick. Yes, there are recipes where nonstick is the best option, but not that many, and that industry is in tumult. Teflon is on the outs, and ceramic tends not to work as well and wears out fast. On the Kuhn Rikon, if the scramble (or anything) I was cooking stuck a little, I could lean on my thin-bladed metal spatula and scrape the bottom clean without worrying about harming the surface. Easy peasy, no PFAS-zy.

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April 19, 2024
Audien Hearing Atom One Hearing Aid Review: Über-Cheap and Too Basic

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What the Atom One does do is make things louder—and by default, it makes all the things louder. Tuning is fairly blunt: A lone button on the back of each aid lets you cycle through five volume levels. Since the aids don’t talk to one another, each has to be controlled individually. The units also include three environmental modes that are designed respectively for conversation, noisy environments, and in-vehicle operation. To cycle through these—again, separately for each ear—you hold down the button on the back of each unit for a few seconds and wait for a lower frequency tone to alert you to which mode it has engaged.

If you’re prone to fiddling with hearing aids, you’ll probably accidentally hit the control button more than you’d like, inadvertently changing the volume and requiring you to cycle back through the five levels again to return to the volume you want. This is a bit of a pain, but a little hassle is perhaps to be expected at this price level.

As for performance, the amplification effect is, to put things plainly, rather blunt. Around the house, when at max volume, it sounded like everyone was screaming, and even the slightest sound was deafening. Typing this review with the aids in was nerve-racking, even at more moderate volumes, like tiny firecrackers popping beneath my fingers. My voice became an echoing boom from the heavens that drowned out everything else.

Eventually, I found better luck in more intimate environments at lower volume settings and was able to see some value in hearing television audio and one-on-one conversations with a modest amount of added clarity—but in busy, noisy environments, the Atom One couldn’t keep up. In a bowling alley test, the aids were effectively useless no matter how I configured them.

Ugly Hiss

In all mode settings and at all volumes, there’s ample background hiss that makes it feel a bit like you’re sitting on an airplane. I found it more difficult to concentrate with them in my ears even if I was in a silent room. Combined with the booming reports of keyboard taps, footsteps, and crinkling wrappers, I found the Atom One to be significantly more nerve-racking than I’d like. (Which is none at all.)

On aesthetics, I wouldn’t call the Atom One ugly—the mostly in-ear design is at least less obtrusive than behind-the-ear models—but the beige color palate doesn’t feel very modern. Perhaps this is something Walmart requested, but a more modern white or black earbud-like design would probably go over better with most wearers.

Photograph: Audien Hearing

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April 19, 2024
Botany Manor review: This cosy, charming puzzle game has you saving forgotten plants

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You search the grand house’s rooms and gardens for clues in Botany Manor

Botany Manor

Balloon Studios

PC, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

Whatever the opposite of a green thumb is, I’ve got it. While both of my parents are keen gardeners, I’ve never had much interest in plants, apart from eating them. Despite this, I found myself drawn to Botany Manor, a charming puzzle game for even the most unhorticultured among us.

First, there is the setting – an English manor in 1890 is fairly unusual as…

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April 19, 2024
Rad Power Bikes Radster Road Review: Safety First

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There’s eight gears, five levels of assistance, a twist throttle, and also a zero assist mode. Rad now has a new torque sensor which makes it feel infinitely better and so much more natural to pedal. It’s also much quieter. I previously put Lectric’s bikes in a similar category of affordable direct-to-consumers, but my husband rides a Lectric and became angry when he realized how smoothly and quietly I was pedaling, while he buzzed along.

It also has hydraulic disc brakes, front suspension with 80 millimeters of travel (feels great! feels comfy!), and a ton of features that make it seem way more expensive than it is. For example, you may have noticed I did not mention what class of ebike it is. While it ships as a Class 2 ebike, you can scroll through the menu and change which class it’s in, and thus what the legal top speed is, depending on whether you’re in the city or the country. It is very cool. In the menu, you can also do things like wipe trip data or set a passcode to lock the display.

Photograph: Adrienne So

It also has a bell! And signal buttons! What people I know have reported is that I often turn the signal on and forget to turn it off, or accidentally turn it on when I’m switching the assistance, and then my hand flies up to the point where I’m going automatically because I’ve been signaling with my arms for 30 years. That’s fun. Rather than turn signals, I would’ve preferred a brighter front headlight. Two hundred lumens is brighter than forgetting your front light, but I would really prefer 400 or even 1,000 when biking at night in the rain, which I often do.

A big reason why people often buy direct-to-consumer bikes is the proprietary accessories. Cars don’t ship without lights or storage options, so car substitutes have to have them too. The Radster Road does ship with fenders, a chain guard, and a rear rack with a 55-pound payload. It fit my Po Campo backpack pannier without issue. As compared to other direct-to-consumers, Rad Power Bikes has a whopping array of accessories; I would be remiss if I did not admit that as I was biking around with my children and spouse, I did think about attaching some locking storage and a pet trailer so that my elderly dog could come along too.

I do think $2,000 is the sweet spot for electric commuter bikes. It’s enough to cover some very solid components, but not so expensive that it deters you from biking because you’re worried about it getting stolen or damaged. It slots nicely into regular bike racks, and I can use a regular U-lock on the head tube, although I did feel more comfortable double-locking it on multiple parts of the frame. Unlike the Santa Cruz Skitch (9/10, WIRED Recommends), I did grab the Radster Road and hop on it when I had to run to the Grocery Outlet. Not every ride needs to be so dazzlingly fun that you can’t stop giggling—sometimes you just need to get somewhere, and you hate parking your car, and you’re super late.

I was wary of Rad Power Bikes for many years—it’s hard for a gear tester to set things aside like a bike arcing on you, or multiple lawsuits. However, it is clear that very many lessons have been learned over the past few years. The Radster Road does that well, for miles and miles.

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April 18, 2024
LG MyView Smart Monitor (32SR85U-W) Review: A Fun 2-In-1 Screen

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you might think a “smart monitor” might have some tie-in to the smart home, but it’s more akin to modern-day smart TVs. LG’s MyView 4K Smart Monitor has a smart TV built into it, complete with a homepage of apps, just like your Roku or Google TV.

“Can’t I just use a web browser?” you might ask. Yes, you can. This led me to wonder why I’d need a smart TV interface on a device that can typically surf any corner of the web, including directly accessing streaming services. To my surprise, I liked using my desktop monitor as both a normal PC monitor and a smart (albeit imperfect) TV. I often preferred the built-in streaming apps over a browser page. It created a nice separation between my work and relaxation time, offering some peace at the end of a long day.

Screen Time

The 32-inch MyView is fairly well rounded for its $600 price, considering it’s a 4K (3,840 x 2,160 resolution) monitor with a large and bright IPS screen. It has already dipped as low as $500, making it an even better value. It comes with a remote, which is how you navigate the TV interface.

There’s a selection of picture modes accessible through the remote’s Settings button, ranging from a dim power-saver mode to ones calibrated for watching movies and sports. They all do something different—Cinema and Sport modes both raise the brightness to 100 percent but choose different levels of contrast, while Auto Power Save cuts down on brightness but uses a high amount of local dimming to respond to your space. These modes are pretty standard fare on monitors and TVs.

The screen was bright enough that I usually chose the Power Save mode, and the local dimming usually landed on around 10 to 15 percent brightness. I also toggled on Eye Care Mode—which reduces blue light on the screen—whenever a yellow-toned screen wasn’t an issue for my tasks. All of this was so much easier to access via the remote compared to the usual buttons you’d find on some corner (or the back) of a monitor. No more guessing what button does what!

Photograph: Nena Farrell

You’ll see fewer options if you connect the monitor to your PC using a USB-C cord with display-out support instead of an HDMI—Vivid, Standard, Game Optimizer, and a couple of movie-related modes. There’s no Auto Power Save option, and I ended up manually dimming the brightness to replicate the mode I used when I was connected via HDMI.

The 60-Hz refresh rate is a bit of a bummer but unsurprising on monitors that don’t specifically cater to gamers. Whether you’ll notice it depends on what you play; Baldur’s Gate 3 still looked beautiful onscreen, particularly with the Game Optimizer picture mode. I also liked playing Stardew Valley on it, though I found it better to play with the Standard or Auto picture modes, since the art style isn’t as dynamic. If you have a hefty gaming PC and often play fast-paced games, you’ll want to look elsewhere for a monitor that can handle higher refresh rates.

Streaming is where this monitor shines. The large 32-inch screen feels immersive and cinematic when you’re perched right in front of it. It’s big enough that even if you’re sitting slightly farther away, it works OK, but sit more than 5 feet away and it’ll look too small. I spent a good amount of time watching Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, and the Cinema mode did a lovely job of improving the picture quality. (It looked good even on the Auto mode.)

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April 18, 2024
GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker Review: Only So-So

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In my mind, GE is a manufacturer of big, boxy appliances. They’re the folks for reliable and relatively affordable stoves and the manufacturers of the monolithic silver Monogram-line fridge that I once carted across town with my brother-in-law. That kind of thing.

I don’t usually think of them as Mr. Coffee’s competitors, yet their new coffee maker is. Part of the company’s artsy, tech-savvy Café line, it’s also one of a small group of coffee makers to have Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) approval, a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal for coffee nerds that fairly guarantees a good cup for consumers. It’s a fairly attractive coffee maker, but for the price, it just doesn’t make a very interesting cup.

Worn Off White

At first glance, the GE Café Specialty Drip Coffee Maker is easy to like. Pop it out of the box and you’ll be able to make a pot without looking at the instructions. The GE Café has an app, and you can connect it to your Wi-Fi network, but all of the key features are accessible on the machine, so you can leave the app in the App Store if you’re not interested.

There are four brew strength options: Light, Medium, Bold, and Gold, the latter being set to SCA specs. The water temperature for the non-Gold settings can be adjusted between 185 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing you to dial in your brew. (In the GE, the Gold setting is the same as the Medium setting, but the temperature is locked in at 200 degrees.)

It’s good-looking thing, available in stainless, matte black, and what I might call “Tatooine kitchen” white. My review unit was one of the matte white models, and while that finish looks cool, it’s a peculiar option considering coffee’s ability to stain.

Plus, with a rectangular footprint and controls on the long axis, it forces you to position it on your countertop in a way that hogs space, a trap that my personal favorite, the OXO 8-Cup Coffee Maker (9/10, WIRED Recommends) avoids. And while the OXO has dishwasher-safe parts, the GE has none.

Photograph: Amazon

Tinkering With Taste

Good coffee is the result of a host of factors like bean and roast quality, grind size, brew time, water temperature, and water quality, to name a few. Start from a good base and you can tweak your way to perfection, one variable at a time.

In my test kitchen, comparing it to nothing but itself, that base felt solid—the SCA approval at work! The coffee was good, but I wanted to go deeper with my friends from Olympia Coffee in their Seattle lab. I met co-owner Sam Schroeder and retail trainer Reyna Callejo, who had brought her Breville Precision Brewer Thermal coffee maker (7/10, WIRED Review) from home, which was a big help. It’s an excellent machine and direct competition for the GE Café, perfect for head-to-head testing.

Sam and Reyna immediately did the thing coffee nerds do around a new gadget, hovering over it, enthusiastically pressing all the buttons, opening and closing anything that could be open and closed, marveling at the little replaceable water filter, appreciating the nice, wide shower head—the part where the hot water emerges above the grounds—and wondering aloud if it would actually distribute the water evenly. Looking back, it was about here where tiny metaphorical cracks in the matte plastic began to show.

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April 18, 2024
Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a) Review: Third Time, Still Charming

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Not everything needs to reinvent the wheel. Iterating on products year over year has produced some of the best wireless headphones money can buy, and that’s precisely the route Nothing is going with its latest earbuds, the Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a). Sure, at its founding the company vowed to do so much more than make headphones and smartphones—it hasn’t quite followed up on that promise yet—but at least we get affordable earbuds that don’t look the part.

The new Ear and Ear (a) are Nothing’s third generation of AirPod clones, resulting in a pair of mature products with competitive sound, pricing, and user experience. From good-looking cases that easily fit in your pocket to smaller, more thoughtful design touches, these are some great wireless earbuds to consider if you’re hunting for a pair under $150.

Neither are groundbreaking audio products—there are better headphones if you spend a little more and plenty of comparable models—but they’ll more than satisfy just about anyone. They work well and look great; what more can you ask for?

What’s the Difference?

The Nothing Ear costs $150 and the Nothing Ear (a) is $100—following the “a” designation Nothing uses on its cheaper Nothing Phone (2a) versus the Nothing Phone (2). The company started with the Nothing Ear (1) in 2021 and followed up with the Nothing Ear (2) last year, so why the latest Nothing Ear isn’t called the Ear (3) is confusing.

The biggest physical difference between the Nothing Ear and the Nothing Ear (a) is the size of the earbuds, and the pricier model includes wireless charging support in its carrying case. The Ear is identical in looks to 2023’s Ear (2), but they’re a tiny bit larger and heavier. The Ear (a) are smaller and lack some of the fancy processing in its pricier sibling, but it comes with fun bright yellow accents (or white or black, depending on your preference) on the case and headphones.

Nothing Ear (a)

Photograph: Parker Hall

Both wireless earbuds come with three sizes of ear tips, with the medium installed as standard. They fit me just fine for my extremely average ear size, with the Ear feeling a bit snugger and probably less suited for anyone with smaller ears. The Ear (a) reached Goldilocks’ porridge territory in size, stability, and long-term comfort. I don’t dislike wearing the larger, more feature-rich Ear, but if I had to choose based on comfort alone, the Ear (a) would get my money.

Inside the Ear (a) you get a less powerful chipset, but the earbuds still boast the same level of noise canceling, the same driver, and the same number of microphones for better calls as the Ear. The weaker chipset does have one benefit—longer battery life. The Ear (a) can hit up to 5.5 hours with active noise canceling turned on, whereas the pricier Ear lasts 5.2 hours. One other change? The Nothing Ear employ a different driver material—a form of ceramic, which is unusual for earbuds— whereas the Ear (a) have more traditional polymers. I go into more detail on what this entails further below.

Nothing Ear

Photograph: Parker Hall

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April 18, 2024
Fallout review: This jaunty trip to the apocalypse is lots of fun

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Lucy (Ella Purnell) leaves her bunker to face life on the perilous surface

JoJo Whilden/Prime Video

Fallout
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy
Amazon Prime Video

If you have read this column before, you may have seen me declare my apocalypse fatigue, what with the sheer volume of doomsday drama on TV today. I still am fatigued, for the most part, but a new series from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy has given me pause. Based on the hit video games of the same name, Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout is a jaunty,…

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April 17, 2024
Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra Review: A Powerful Laptop

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It’s been a long time since I’ve used a laptop with a screen larger than 13 or 14 inches for any length of time. It’s so refreshing to have the room to spread my apps out … even if the machine no longer fits in my backpack. Maybe being able to fit your bag under the seat in front of you is overrated.

Compared to the cavalcade of 13- and 14-inch laptops that cross my desk, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Ultra, with its 16-inch touchscreen (2,880 x 1,800 pixels), is a behemoth. Weighing in at 3.9 pounds (but only 19 mm thick), it has a heft that’s backed up by its top-shelf specs, which include 32 GB of RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card. The centerpiece is the new Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, the current top-of-the-line processor in Intel’s Core Ultra CPU lineup.

Photograph: Samsung

As benchmarks go, the Galaxy Book4 ran rings around all the other Core Ultra laptops I’ve tested in the last few weeks since the new chips launched, though none of those had an Ultra 9 or a discrete graphics processor. On some CPU-based tests, the system doubled up on the performance of the Lenovo X1 Carbon, and on graphics-based tests, I was regularly able to get three to five times the frame rates I saw on machines that used the Core Ultra integrated graphics processor. The Book4 is certainly credible for use as a gaming rig if desired. Plus with 12 hours and 43 minutes of battery life, as tested via my full-screen YouTube rundown test, you need not fret about being away from an outlet all day.

The larger chassis gives Samsung room to squeeze a numeric keypad into the picture, though I longed for full-size arrow keys when working with the device. The responsive keyboard is paired with one of the largest touchpads I’ve ever seen on a laptop. At 6 x 4 inches, it’s considerably bigger than a standard passport—arguably too big, as there’s barely room on the left side of the touchpad for your palms to rest. I generally disliked working with this touchpad, as I found it both missed clicks and inadvertently registered unintended taps much too often.

Photograph: Samsung

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April 17, 2024
Review: DJI Avata 2 Drone

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If I need to stop suddenly, I can tap the brake button and it’ll bring the drone back to a safe hover. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to crash, and I managed to bring the drone down once by steering it directly into the post of the aforementioned fence. It dropped about 8 feet onto the stones of a beach, but was fine to resume flying, without a visible mark on it. This thing is impeccably built, and while I don’t doubt repeated high-speed crashes will damage it eventually, it’s clearly designed to withstand some punishment.

But what of those mind-bending aerial stunts on YouTube? Sadly, you can’t really pull them off with the motion controller. The drawback to its user-friendly simplicity is that it doesn’t work in the same way as a twin-stick controller. Think of it as a controller with training wheels. If you stop flying—to dive for instance—it will eventually stop moving and hover in place. Clever, but limiting.

For those that want to graduate to trickier manual flight, DJI sells the $199 console-style Remote Controller 3, which allows you to fly the drone in manual mode. Here, the training wheels are off and the slightest error can result in an embarrassing and potentially costly crash. You can also perform incredible tricks, if you know how.

For me, who’s keen to return the Avata 2 sample back to DJI in one piece, the RC Motion 3 feels like enough for now. It’s allowed me to capture some wonderful footage using the Avata 2’s electronically stabilized camera, which records video at 4K/60 fps or 2.7K/120 fps. There’s also the option to use a 10-bit D Log M color profile for more postproduction color grading too. The drone comes with 46 GB of built-in storage for videos and 12 MP photos, plus a microSD slot for those requiring more space.

My First FPV

Ultimately, the Avata 2 is the latest in a long line of DJI drones that makes it easy for amateurs to achieve great results. In this case, it makes FPV flying incredibly simple and intuitive, and its camera allows you to create some thrilling, smoothly cinematic sequences with very little effort.

There’s also very little in the way of comparable products on the market, with most FPV drones being kits built by enthusiasts, rather than consumer-friendly designs. As a result, the main alternative to the Avata 2 is the original DJI Avata. And for those who own the first-generation model, I’d say, aside from the Goggles 3, which aren’t retro-compatible, the improvements here don’t really warrant an upgrade.

Photograph: DJI

But if you’re new to the FPV game, I strongly advise you to choose the latest version. It is only $179 more, but there are improvements across the board, with enhanced flight performance, longer flight time, intelligent flight modes, and advanced safety features. If you’re looking for a gateway to FPV fun, they don’t come any more accessible than the Avata 2.

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April 16, 2024