Review

I Finally Have A Smart Watch a.k.a. Garmin Instinct® 2 Solar Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I gave up wearing my analog watch a few years ago. I’d been wearing a watch since a teenager, and 20+ years of flicking up my wrist to tell the time was over; replaced by grabbing my phone out of my pocket to check the time. I figured I had to check my phone constantly for other alerts anyway, and I didn’t need to check the time that often – so why wear a watch at all? I’d also been tempted a few times to try a smart watch, but the idea of charging every day or two was an instant dismissal from me.

Browsing ozbargain.com.au, I came across a post about a Garmin watch with 24 days of battery life. This was sounding a bit more tempting; and I went into research mode. So many watches to choose from, just from Garmin:

Snipped from Garmin.com

I don’t use an iPhone so an Apple Watch was out of the question, and others such as Samsung and a potential Google Pixel watch were never going to focus on long battery life without an E-Ink screen like the Instinct series has, and the Garmin Fenix 7 series have colour E-ink screens with long battery life, but a pricepoint of over $1000AU that I really can’t justify.

As you can tell by the title of this post, I ended up finding a relatively newly released Garmin Instinct® 2 Solar on Amazon shipped from the UK for $481AU – a decent discount from the $699AU RRP (and for some reason, shops are still selling the previous generation at the exact same price?) and a watch that claimed unlimited* battery life!

A few weeks later, the watch turned up in a relatively small box.

The box itself wasn’t even sealed, which worried me a bit – but the insides seemed untouched. A fake display was stuck onto the watch face to show you what you’d be in for. Inside the box wasn’t much else, beyond a proprietary charging cable with a USB end, and some manuals which I refuse to look at. If you’d like to check out the 114 pages, you’re more than welcome to :)

On the wrist, the watch is quite comfortable. It only took a few hours to have a watch feel ‘normal’ again. The watch isn’t chunky or heavy, and the rubber wrist band doesn’t dig in anywhere and doesn’t slide around.

The experience of setting up the watch was better than I expected, but also not the smoothest possible. After starting up the watch, it will ask for you to pair with the Garmin Connect app. Easily found in the Google Play Store, I installed it and quickly paired. I then had to set up my profile of height, body weight, age, gender etc. One of the first options I was presented about custom watch faces as part of it’s ‘getting started’ wizard asked me to then install the Garmin IQ Store app. I installed that, picked a watch face, which then advised me to install Garmin Express. I couldn’t find THAT on the Play Store, and after a quick search worked out it was a Windows piece of software, so gave up there.

Apart from this, the setup process worked and I was up and running with a watch that I had no idea how to use. Eventually I worked out what all the buttons did – and although I won’t be using the watch for any sports specific activities, there’s still a bucketload of features that will take a long time to learn. The basics of receiving a notification that comes through from the phone just worked – and each notification I had (which lightly buzzed my wrist) the option of blocking the app, which was a useful way of slowly filtering out noise I didn’t need while leaving the important stuff. I also had the option of dismissing notifications from the watch, or if I did it from my phone, it would clear the watch notification which was useful in avoiding double up actions.

Information such as the temperature, date, and step count are on the watch face I’m using at the moment, but I might change to include more data such as heart rate. It’s hard to go through so many options – and the faces themselves can then have each section configured to display different types of data (e.g. changing the battery left % to sunrise time) which results in a huge amount of choice.

At some stage I’ll dive into the advanced options more – I’m not sure when I’d need the ‘area calc’ option which seems to be walking around an area using GPS then having the estimated floor space shown – but one day that might be useful. As might be a compass on my hand, or wind direction – or a bunch of data that I really don’t understand what it even is (I think there’s one for how far above sea level I’m at, and another for my ‘body battery’). I’m sure the point here is that not everyone will use everything, but you have a giant toolkit to use and configure as you please.

Navigating the watch itself is done via 5 buttons as there’s no touch screen – 3 on one side, and 2 on the other – and both acting differently if you just press them, or hold them down. The buttons are easy to press and I’m quite fine with this method rather than swiping on the face.

Unlimited battery life? Probably not based on how much time I spend in the sun (not much!) but I’ve gone from 47% which the watch had out of the box, down to 25% in a week. I’m expecting to charge it occasionally – but it will be more like filling my car with petrol; once it gets low enough I’ll leave it plugged in for a few hours (officially 123 mins to fully charge). Without solar and GPS usage, the non-solar version claims 28 days battery life, and the solar version requires 3 hours in the sun daily to be unlimited.

The amount of data the Garmin Connect app saves and shows is huge – and honestly I’m probably not going to really look at this very often, but I still respect the beauty of data:

Also when setting up, I was prompted to set up my credit card, and thought this might be a quicker way to pay using Paywave rather than my credit card. I had to look up on how to actually use this feature, and it’s a bit clunky, particularly entering a 4 digit passcode with up and down buttons on a rotary phone type display. I get the security side of it, but it’s clunkier than taking a credit card out of my wallet so probably won’t use this feature often.

Wrapping up, I’m very happy with this watch so far. Highly configurable and feature packed, despite not being touchscreen. Easy enough to navigate, and great at giving me wrist accessible notifications instead of having to pull my phone out of my pocket to check. Light and comfy to wear, with a great battery life. Viewing angles are alright – there is a noticeable difference between straight on and a very slight angle, but not enough to prevent me from reading what it says. For the price point I was able to get it for, I consider it a good purchase.

Four Generations of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Lenovo’s X1 Yoga is my favorite business laptop. Ever since the X1 Yoga Gen 1 came out, I liked it over the other X1 options as it was an all-rounder, while doing everything really well.

That first generation came out in 2016, and each year there’s been a new one, the 2nd Gen, 3rd Gen and now in 2019, we’re at the 4th Gen.

It’s about time I did a round up and comparison of these four models.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 1

The Gen 1 came out in 2016 as the X1 Carbon became lighter, thinner and lost it’s touchscreen. There was mixed reaction to this decision from Lenovo, and although the Yoga had existed in several forms previously, this was the first in the ThinkPad X1 series.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 1

Notable on this model is the OneLink+ connector – a shortlived port for a OneLink+ dock that only survived a single generation, to be replaced by USB-C/Thunderbolt. It has the standard rectangle style power plug hole, again this would not be seen on future X1 Yogas.

This is the only model to not have a dedicated Ethernet port, instead a special OneLink+ Ethernet dongle, USB2 100mbit dongle or USB3 gigabit dongle was required.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2

2017 saw this release with the 7th Gen Intel CPU and the OneLink+ port abandoned, replaced by USB-C. This was great, since it was now an industry standard and meant there was a lot of flexibility with what power pack and dock you could use.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2

This is the first model to have an OLED display option, and strangely this Gen 2 is slightly thicker and heavier than the Gen 1. There wasn’t that many improvements in this model, but overall it’s pretty well rounded solution.

Battery life on this was claimed to be a lot better than the Gen 1.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 3

It was the third model’s turn in 2018 which saw few changes again. Another generation jump on the Intel CPU, which this time doubled the core count from the 7th to 8th mobile CPU generation.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 3

Other smaller changes included the introduction of a shutter over the camera, a HDR display option with Dolby Vision, and the black colouring a bit different – the chassis is glossier, and anything silver has gone black including the hinges and ThinkPad logo (it still looks silver in this photo sorry!)

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 4

And finally, here we are in 2019 with the Gen 4 being released… and it’s a major jump. The biggest jump we’ve seen year to year so far. An all metal chassis, the laptop footprint has been drastically reduced (17% smaller footprint, 11% thinner), the colour is now ‘iron grey’ which I’m personally a fan of, and the screen to bezel distance is much smaller.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 4

There’s also a new connector for a different ethernet dongle, and support for a new style of dock that connects on the left hand side to the combo USB-C/ethernet slot. Of course it’s jumped a CPU generation again, up to Intel’s 8th.

The MicroSD slot has been dropped, probably as part of making the laptop smaller. If you really need that, then look at any of the previous generations.

One other interesting feature is a new privacy screen option called PrivacyGuard that can be toggled on and off, and stops people seeing the screen on an angle. The retractable key feature has gone again – there’s no rubber feet to protect the keys, but they might be minutely sunk in, I couldn’t tell with the naked eye.

The final note on this model is that it has a very similar CPU to the Gen 3, still an 8th Generation Intel CPU but a newer variant – Whiskey Lake rather than Kaby Lake.

Let’s have a look at the 4 generations stacked together, going bottom to top Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3 and Gen 4:

Front – X1 Yogas
Back – X1 Yogas
Left Side – X1 Yogas
Right Side – X1 Yogas

You can see that footprint difference in the photos above. The 4th Gen looks completely different to the rest.

Each of my individual reviews lists out the possible specs for each model if you want to dive a bit further into the technical differences;

Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 1
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 2
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 3
Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen 4

The X1 Yoga will never be as small and light as the X1 Carbon, and never be as portable as the X1 Tablet, nor the powerhouse of the X1 Extreme – but it is all of these devices at once in it’s own way. It’s still my pick of the X1 series for it’s flexibility, but the other choices could also be better for your personal needs if you know how you’re going to use it.

Oculus Quest Review – Standalone VR Unit

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It’s been two and a half years since I tried the Google Daydream, which I felt was a disappointment. Since then, there had been nothing that sounded like it was much better. Everything was either wired into a PC, or just an incredibly entry level experience with very little reason to bother.

That was, until I heard about the Oculus Quest. A standalone device, but with ‘proper’ controls like the PC connected Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or any of the various Microsoft Mixed Reality headsets. I started to read up on it, and the more I read – the more it sounded like a winner. It had only just launched in the US, and people were raving about it online.

After a lot of consideration, I decided to order the 64gb Oculus Quest unit for $649AU (there’s a 128GB version for $799 which has no difference beyond the amount of storage doubled). That price point was probably the top I was willing to pay – $700+ just felt too expensive. There was also nowhere in Australia I could go to buy this device or check it out – Oculus has an online store, or via Amazon AU – I had to make the call to buy it unseen and untested.

I am really glad that I did. There’s not much to this – a headset, two controllers, 2 AA batteries and a very long USB-C cable for charging the headset.

What’s in the Oculus Quest box?

This is the first ‘proper’ VR device that really is consumer friendly to the masses. You take the headset and controllers out, put the batteries in, turn on the headset and you’re ready to start setting it up.

The quick tutorials shown are easy to understand – you’ll need to use your phone to set up the Oculus Quest once (like pointing it to a wifi network) but after that, you never have to use your phone again.

Like older VR units, you’ll need to set up your ‘boundary’ – that is, the area you map out in your physical space where you’ll use VR without hitting anything. Older headsets needed you to walk a controller around the room, but the Quest (and I believe the new Oculus Rift S) improves on this greatly.

First, you’re able to see the outside world with the headset on, when it’s in passthrough mode. It will show a black and white live footage of what you’re looking at/ In this passthrough mode, you can draw on the ground where your play area is, which then creates a grid wall. The wall only shows up when you get too close to it, and the closer you are, the thicker the grids are.

You can also just set a boundary for sitting experiences, which just creates a circle around you.

Passthrough also kicks in if you go outside the boundary you’ve set up which I think is a great safety feature (or if you just want to go get a drink and can’t be bothered taking the headset off, either way).

Setting up your Oculus Quest

Once set up, there’s the ‘First Steps’ tutorial for using your device. It teaches you how to use the controls, while giving you a sandbox to play around and experiment with what’s possible. This is the app to show anyone who hasn’t used VR properly before – it’s immersive, easy, and actually fun.

The graphics on the Oculus Quest are not going to match what’s possible from a PC, but they are good enough to be immersed and not think the visuals are lacking. If you came from PC VR you’d notice the downgrade in quality of course, but that’s the cost of portability.

Check out this comparison of Robo Recall as an example. It’s quite a fun game and I was more than happy with the graphics:

Most games also support streaming via Chromecast to a TV, so others can see what the headset wearer is doing – I can see this as a great small party device where people take turns, especially with a game like Beat Saber:

The controller quality in my opinion, is great. I’ve seen some online discussion around the magnet-secured battery clips falling off, but I’ve experienced no issues at all. They’re the same controllers that come with the PC powered Oculus Rift S, and have touch-sensitive controllers to know when you’re pressing certain buttons or not – allowing your virtual hand to move around a bit.

The tracking is also great – the 4 cameras on the device are enough to work out where your controllers are and what they’re doing, with a very high level of accuracy and low latency. I don’t notice any lag at all when moving my hands around in a virtual world – it’s as good as instant, while being incredibly smooth.

The biggest negative is the cost. The headset isn’t crazy expensive, but the games are. They’re generally between $20AU and $50AU per game, which is going to make you think long and hard about what you buy. It might not sound that bad, but a lot of the games don’t have huge replayability – you’ll finish once after 1-2 hours then move on. Beat Saber for example is $46.99, but at least that’s the sort of game you’ll want to play again and again while improving. There are some free games, and the store is highly curated so there’s no rubbish apps, but it’s worth being aware of.

Being the tinkerer that I am, I wanted to see what else was possible for free on the Oculus Quest, and wrote up a separate post around some utilities I’ve been using – check it out if you want to sideload apps (including custom Beat Saber songs), stream PC games to the Oculus Quest via Wifi and making Steam think it’s a supported plugged in device, or mirror everything you do on the Quest to a computer, rather than just certain in-game support.

With all of the above in mind, I still strongly recommend the Oculus Quest, as long as you don’t have a PC powered VR unit already. It’s a great all-round experience, with good-enough graphics and a lot of fun to be had. It’s the sort of thing I want to go back and play again and again because it is so different to other gaming experiences. Playing in a virtual world where you need to actually look around and react will both give you a bit of a workout, and make you forget where you are in the real world.

Lenovo Yoga 910 Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Just over a year ago, I received the Lenovo Yoga 900 laptop to review. Since then, an unfortunate accident occurred when I closed the laptop onto the end of a USB cable, creating a horrible crunching sound and cracking the screen.

Lenovo Australia have come to the rescue and provided me a newer Yoga 910 to review instead! How does it compare to the Yoga 900?

The new boxed Lenovo Yoga 910

For starters, here’s the specs with the red options matching what my laptop has:

Processor
• 7th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-7200U Processor (3 MB Cache, 2.5 GHz, 3.1 GHz max)
• 7th Gen Intel Core i7-7500U Processor (4 MB Cache, 2.7 GHz, 3.5 GHz max)

Operating system Windows 10 Home 64-bit Display
• 13.9″ FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS
• 13.9″ UHD (3840 x 2160) IPS

Graphics
Intel HD Graphics 620 in processor

Memory
8 / 16 GB DDR4 2133MHz

Webcam
Integrated 720p HD Camera

Storage Solid State Drive (SSD), via PCIe NVME:
256GB / 512 GB / 1TB

Dimensions (W x D x H)
323 x 224.5 x 14.3 mm

Weight
Starting at 1.38 kg

Case colour
• Champagne Gold
• Gunmetal Grey
• Platinum Silver

Case material
Aluminium

Battery life
• FHD model: 15.5 hours

Keyboard
Full-size keyboard, backlight, 6-row, multimedia Fn keys

Touchpad
One-piece multi-touch touchpad

Fingerprint reader
Yes, Hello support

Audio
HD audio, 2 x JBL® stereo speaker with Dolby® Audio Premium certification dual array microphone combo audio/microphone jack

Wireless LAN
11ac, 2×2, Wi-Fi + Bluetooth® 4.1

Ports
• 2 x USB 3.0 (1 x Type-C with video-out, 1 x Type-A)
• 1 x USB 2.0 (support DC-in function)
• Combo audio/microphone jack

Specs on the box

The Yoga 910 is another high end consumer laptop, following in the steps of laptops such as the Yoga 900S, 900, 3 Pro and 2 Pro. It feels very solid, and is slightly heavier than the Yoga 900, probably due to the aluminium chassis. Eric Xu did a great writeup comparing the two which is worth reading if you’re deciding which one to get.

Lenovo Yoga 910 Ready to go

While looking incredibly sleek and professional (especially in this gunmetal grey version, which to me is just black), it is a fingerprint magnet. That’s the price you pay to look this nice it seems. Another point that stands out is the bezel around the screen – very thin on all edges apart fro the bottom. At first this looks a little strange, but I quickly got used to it.

I’m happy with the 1920 x 1080 screen resolution this particular laptop has, and the screen quality itself was high with great viewing angles – so don’t feel that you have to go for the 4K res option unless you really want it.

The watch hinges are back again, and they seem even sturdier than previous models. They allow the laptop to bend all the way around (as all Yogas do), and I didn’t experience any screen wobble at all when typing.

Lenovo Yoga 910 Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard buttons are nicely laid out, with full size arrow keys. Home and End require the Fn button, but they’re easy to reach. The trackpad itself is quite large, with the single clicky style rather than being a solid no-click style that’s found on most of the X1 series, such as the X1 Yoga. The backlit keys also work well to see in the dark, and the addition of the fingerprint reader combined with Windows Hello allows for a very quick and effortless login.

Test

Lenovo Yoga 910 Right Side

Lenovo Yoga 910 Left Side

As you can see in the above side shots, there’s very few ports. Power is provided by the new standard USB-C which was also on the X1 Tablet, and will probably be standard on all laptops eventually. Beyond that, there’s one USB-C out and one USB 3.0 port. Of course a USB hub will give you more ports if you need it, or you can look into a USB-C dock that will provide a bunch of connection types. Yes, we still call them ‘docks’ even though we don’t dock them anymore.

The battery life is impressive – 15.5 hours. It’s hard to test and keep track of that time to see how accurate it is. Windows 10 thinks there’s still over 10 hours left on 50% remaining, and I’ve been using it sporadically in the last few days next to me.

Performance wise, there is nothing lacking in what you’d expect from this laptop. High end gaming or running several virtual machines isn’t what this laptop (nor most laptops) can do, but it’ll serve most purposes for years.

The Yoga 910 contains some small benefits and improvements over the Yoga 900 – price being equal, the 910 is the laptop to pick. There’s no reason to upgrade from a 900 to a 910 though, and anything older is a decision you’ll need to make for yourself. If you have a laptop that works for you and isn’t slow, then stick with what you have.

JB Hifi’s display on the flagship Dell, HP and Lenovo consumer laptops

If you’re looking to compare similar laptops, Dell and HP have their own offerings. Dell has the XPS 13 while HP has the Spectre x360. As I haven’t used either, I can’t comment on which I think is better, so check them out for yourself.

For myself, the Yoga 910 will be my new main laptop for personal use. It’s powerful, sleek and really nice to use. I can’t really fault anything about it – maybe more USB ports would be nice but I’m generally only going to use one for a USB memory stick occasionally, so that doesn’t bother me.  While on a recent cruise, the laptop was used in tent mode to watch some movies – the long battery life meant I didn’t need to worry about having it plugged in while watching. Warning: If you do go on a cruise, watch out for those towel animals. They get up to a lot of mischief!

Quick Review – Convertpdftoword.org

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I was sent an email asking to review this by someone at CometDocs, and it’s free, so I figured why not. It’s called Convertpdftoword.org which is also the website it’s hosted at, by no amazing coincidence. What is it? An online PDF to Word converter. Owned by Cometdocs.com who do a lot of different online file conversions.

PDF to Word? I know I get a lot of requests for this sort of thing, but historically the answer is either getting expensive software to convert, or ask the originator for a non-PDF version of the document.

This is cloud based, which always rings alarm bells for me. Do you want to send your documents to an unknown 3rd party, just because they’re offering a free service? That’s what you’ll need to decide, but this company resides in Canada and the servers for holding your files are located in the United States which matters to some people (the more security minded just won’t use this service).

So, how does it work? You just go to http://www.convertpdftoword.org/ , browse and upload your PDF, put in your email address and wait for the resulting Word document to arrive.

A few minutes later, and I’ve got emails for the two test PDFs I uploaded. They take you back to the site to download them, where they’re hosted for 24 hours. I don’t believe there’s any security behind this, apart from a unique URL – so again, you’d only do this with data you don’t care about others having.

Once you get back to their webpage to download, it sits ‘Processing’ for a few seconds and then starts downloading. It might be buggy with Internet Explorer 10, as it didn’t stop the ‘Processing’ dialogue even after the file had downloaded. This happened on both files.

The results were very impressive. They looked identical to the PDFs I had uploaded, with coloured pictures and all in the exact same positions. The file size blew out from 131kb to 2787kb on one of the examples, but probably expected with Word vs PDF compressions.

In summary, it seems to work really well in my random sample size of 2 documents. Handy if you want to edit a publicly available PDF, but I’m not sure how much demand there is for this.

As pointed out by the person who emailed me, the site gets it’s revenue from adverts. I didn’t get paid anything to write this, so I must have been in a good mood.