Fitbit Charge HR review:

I was a little bit wrong about the Fitbit Charge HR.

While I liked it when it first debuted, I thought it could do better. The Charge HR is Fitbit's step-counting band, plus a round-the-clock heart-rate tracker. It tracks sleep at night, exercise during the day, and active heart-rate levels when resting or working out, and it syncs with nearly every major smartphone and computer on the planet.

I expected more out of the Fitbit Charge HR's heart rate measuring, and how it translated that data into useful coaching. I wanted more app features, too. And I thought the band itself, a basic black device that doubled as a watch with its little LED display, could have been better designed

Most of a year has passed, and the fitness-wearable landscape hasn't been able to beat what the Fitbit Charge HR does. No heart-rate band costs this little, feels this small, and connects to as good an app. Fitbit folds nutrition-tracking, sleep-tracking, heart rate-tracking, and social challenges with friends into one pretty clean phone experience -- and syncing is fast and easy.

The Charge HR fits well and has impressive battery life for its size: over four days, beating most continuous heart rate-tracking bands. And its little LED display-slash-clock is basic, but it's easy to lift your arm and see the time, or tap the display to see steps and other data.
New software and firmware updates have improved syncing and tracking, adding automatic sleep and activity-session tracking awareness and making tweaks to how it measures heart rate. It's smoother and better than when I first reviewed it. And it now feels like a truly automatic band.

It's the all-in-one fitness band I'd buy, especially for its low price ($150 in the US; in the UK, £120; or AU$180 in Australia) -- and it can be had even lower if you catch it on sale, which we've seen frequently. It's not perfect, but few wearable gadgets are -- and none of the other watches and bands have been able to beat it at its own fitness game.

Editors' note: This review was originally published on January 29, 2015, and updated significantly on November 24, 2015. The rating has been raised from 7.8 to 8.0.

Design: Basic, but it works

The Charge HR looks nearly identical to the older Fitbit Charge, and the discontinued Fitbit Force before it. It has an innocuous rubberized wraparound band, with a narrow black LED display that tells time, steps, and other data. That LED display isn't always lit, but you can set the Charge HR to show the time when you raise your wrist, or show time and fitness data by tapping the screen. It's a functional but unattractive everyday watch.

The band attaches with a standard watch buckle-type clasp, making it more secure and less likely to pop off. It fits snugly, but sometimes feels uncomfortable on my wrist: an optical heart-rate monitor with green LEDs bulges out of the bottom, pressing against the skin a bit when the Charge HR's properly secured.

Fitbit recommends wearing the Charge HR a finger's length above the wristbone on your arm for ideal heart-rate readings, which is farther up my own arm than I prefer to wear things. But I found it generally worked no matter where I wore it.

The Charge HR comes in several muted colors; my review unit was black. It comes in several sizes, too, although each can be adjusted significantly.

The Charge HR comes with its own proprietary USB dongle for charging, plugging straight into the bottom. Don't lose it.

Heart rate: All day on your wrist

Once attached, the Charge HR immediately flashes its green LEDs to gather heart-rate data. It does it all the time. That, plus a built-in accelerometer and barometer gather data on steps, heart rate, elevation (steps climbed) and intensity of exercise (walking or running).

It works automatically, from the moment it goes on your wrist. The Fitbit Charge HR found my heart rate quickly and held onto the reading, so I could access it quickly by pressing the side button or tapping the display, cycling through to heart-rate mode. Like many other on-wrist heart rate readers, they're more accurate when resting. The reading fluctuated during active exercise. That's true of Apple Watch, the Microsoft Band and many others; it comes with the territory. The Charge HR feels as good as those.

The Fitbit Charge HR can also track individual exercise sessions by holding down the side button -- or, thanks to a software update, it will sense and track sessions automatically (a trend in recent fitness bands). This starts a separate timed event with its own heart-rate recording, which gets synced with the Fitbit app as its own discrete activity. It also tracks average and peak heart rate in that session. You might prefer to track a session yourself if you're an active runner or gym rat, but smarter awareness is a nice touch for average folks like myself who want credit for everyday activities.

Fitbit's app is cleanly designed, and heart-rate data is folded into the app with multiple charts to look at. Making sense of what to do with this data isn't always clear, but at least your heart rate is color-coded by different intensity zones. (Heart-rate trackers aren't medical devices, so use this information as a carrot on a stick to get exercise, not a health barometer.)
The app tends to count the minutes spent in higher heart-rate target zones and calculate it as exercise. The problem is, higher heart rate doesn't always mean active exercise. Sometimes, my own heart rate drifted into a "fat burn" mode, but I knew it was more likely due to having had too much coffee.

The Charge HR calculates heart rate "burn zones" based on a formula of 220 minus your age included in the Fitbit profile, but you can customize your own as well in the app. Zones are color-coded as yellow, orange or red (fat-burning, cardio and peak), and on the Charge HR you can see your heart icon in one of three positions to indicate whether you're currently in that zone.

I should get a certain amount of cardio a week, or so my cardiologist says, but the Charge HR doesn't make it all that easy for me to target and achieve those goals. I didn't even know what the "burn zone" data meant until I dug up the information under Heart Rate in settings, and even the pop-up icon on the OLED display isn't all that intuitive. But, it's still better to have this information than not -- and it makes exercise tracking on stationary devices possible, like bikes.
Varying smarts

The Fitbit Charge HR can show incoming call notifications, like the Fitbit Charge. It's useful in case someone's calling while you're at the gym, but the Fitbit's buzz is so quick that I missed it a few times.

Notifications require you to turn on an extra pairing setting in the Fitbit app, that allows for notifications and continuous syncing. Pairing happens quickly, and syncing is fast.

The Charge HR can also automatically track sleep, a feature in other recent Fitbits, too. Yes, it noticed when I drifted off and logged my hours resting, but its measures of restfulness seemed more forgiving than other, richer sleep-tracking monitors. The Fitbit's sleep tracking just showed big chunks of blue with tiny, tiny, lines of interruption. There's no way I slept that well. But, at least it knew when I went to bed most of the time. You can also set silent alarms to wake you up with on-wrist vibrations, a personal favorite of mine.

Battery life: Five days, more or less

I was able to get a solid five days of use out of the Fitbit Charge HR, while continuously connected and measuring heart rate, and with notifications turned on. That's better than nearly any other heart-rate wearable I've ever seen. It's less overall than standard pedometer-type trackers, but I think the addition of heart rate to the equation is worth the slight drop in battery life.

Is the Fitbit Charge HR worth it? (Yes.)

If the Fitbit did that better, and dangled the fitness carrot on the proverbial stick in ways that motivated me more, I might love it more. As it is, it's the best all-day heart-rate-tracking casual-use fitness band that's currently available. That could be good enough for you. It's the platform most people use, and it works easily. Maybe, next year, it'll take another step forward with its coaching smarts.

Home8 prioritizes security with its Smart Garage device

Many people use their garage as much as their front door, so buying a device to remotely control or automate it seems like a pretty logical investment. But a new company called Home8 says simple app-connectedness isn't enough -- security is just as important. Enter the Smart Garage Starter Kit.

At $230, the Starter Kit costs about $30 more than Garageio and $100 more than the Chamberlain MyQ. But unlike both of those competitors, Home8's kit includes security gadgets, like a camera and an alarm. For anyone worried that the garage isn't just another door, but also another home security vulnerability, the Home8 Smart Garage Starter Kit could be a useful solution.

The Kit will contain three devices. First, you'll get the garage door opener itself. This will connect with the electric opener already in place, adding smarts retroactively. The second device is the Shuttle Intelligent Hub, which will act as a bridge between your phone and the opener. That means you'll be able to control your garage remotely. In addition, the Hub contains an alarm, so you'll be alerted in the case of a break-in.

The final device in the package is a Mini Cube HD camera. The camera itself is proprietary, so how well it works remains to be seen. But with 720p resolution, a ball-and-socket mount for manual swiveling, motion detection, night vision and two-way audio, it seems to have its bases covered.

While the $230 price tag feels a little high at first glance, for a high-quality cameraand a connected garage door opener, it could be a great deal. The Starter Kit also works with integration platform IFTTT, and Home8 is working on Amazon Echocompatibility as well.

Between these strategic smart-home integrations and the security-centric approach to garage door automation, Home8 is taking a big step in the right direction. Now the question is whether the Smart Garage Starter Kit's performance will match the idea behind it.

For four grand, an LG fridge that jams

Manufacturers are always looking for new ways to tempt you into upgrading your appliances. Most of the time, that means fancy, new designs and bold claims of better performance.

And sometimes, it means we get refrigerators with built-inBluetooth speakers.

Specifically, I'm referring to the LFXS30786S, a new fridge available now from LG. It's a pretty typical-looking, large-capacity French door model that slaps a Bluetooth speaker up along the top rim. Price? Four grand.

Now, in fairness, that's the same price that LG charged last year for a very similar fridge that had no speaker to speak of. In other words, this fridge is expensive because it was an expensive design to begin with, not because LG added in a Bluetooth speaker this year. The speaker is just an extra incentive to get you to splurge.

It's not the worst idea. Plenty of us listen to a kitchen radio as we eat our morning oatmeal, or stream a favorite playlist as we cook something up for supper. Packing a Bluetooth speaker into an always-powered appliance seems like a perfectly reasonable use of real estate, and potentially a good means of clearing some clutter off of your countertop.

It's also not an idea that's all that new. Whirlpool introduced its CoolVox fridge speakers at CES 2014, and was selling a French door fridge with built-in audio hardware as recently as last year. And let's not forget the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator, which has its own Wi-Fi radio and 21.5-inch touchscreen (and, you know, a set of speakers).

As for LG's fridge, it's a 30 cubic-foot model with LG's "Door-in-Door" feature, so if you press that button on the right door handle, the front panel of the door will open rather than the door itself, giving you quick access to the in-door shelves without actually opening the fridge. That's a pretty popular gimmick at this point, so if you want it, there it is.

As for me, I'm more a fan of the "Slim SpacePlus" ice maker, which simply means that LG packs the entire ice maker into the left door. Other models place it in the upper corner of the fridge, and since the ice needs to tumble down through the door into your glass, you end up with an unsightly hump in the inside of the door that blocks off the shelves. No such problem with LG models like these -- although the trade-off is that they make a little less ice.

The LG LFXS30786S is available now from select retailers. We'll try and test one out here at CNET Appliances HQ -- keep an ear out for a full review at that time

4 tablets so good you don't need a stylus, but they have one anyway

Some people just prefer the handiness of a stylus; maybe you're an artist who draws online comics, a writer who depends on hand-written notes or a germaphobe who doesn't want to smudge the screen too much.

Whatever the reason, you have a few options if you're interested in buying up a tablet you can scribble on. Below you'll find a list of Windows, Android and iOS tablets that might suit your needs. Just note that some styluses, like most accessories, are sold separately.

HP Spectre X2

If you're interested in a laptop inside of a tablet's body, the HP Spectre X2 is a prime candidate. It has a slim, portable design with a keyboard that's included in the base price. It's not as sleek as the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (below), but it makes up for lack of style with a lower price.

Microsoft Surface Pro 4

The Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is one of the best laptop-replacing tablets and it comes with a stylus, the Surface Pen. It also offers one of the best keyboards for a tablet; however, it's sold separately. You can't win them all.

Apple iPad Pro

Aspiring artist? Apple's biggest fan? Either way, you won't be disappointed by thelatest iPad Pro. Though it's smaller, sitting at 9.7 inches (like the iPad Air 2), it's more powerful than the larger 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil is an excellent stylus that's comfortable to use, and it's great for graphic designers and other creative professionals. Of course, it's sold separately.

Huawei MateBook:
The Huawei MateBook hasn't hit stores yet, but it's worth adding to this list because its optional stylus has a built-in laser. Yes, a laser. Whether you use it to make a point during a business presentation, or to entertain your cat, is up to you. I'm not judging.

Nintendo 2DS

Remember the Nintendo 2DS? Yeah, that little wedge-shaped portable console without all the bells and whistles the 3DS XL has? It's now even cheaper.

Starting May 20, the price of the 2DS will drop from $100 down to $80 -- and that's still including a free download code for Mario Kart 7. That's 38 percent less than the $130 price at which the 2DS debuted in October 2013.
It's important to reinforce that the 2DS is Nintendo's no-frills, entry-level portable. The 2DS plays nearly all games for the Nintendo 3DS platform, but it can't display anything in 3D. It also has the smallest screens of any of the current DS models, and it doesn't have a great-sounding speaker.

Moreover, there's no hinge to keep it closed, so you'll want to protect it with a case. It also feels cheaply made and likely wouldn't survive a decent fall. But if you can look past those issues, I think the 2DS is perfect for younger players.

Editors' note: This review has been updated from its original publication in October 2013 to reflect a major price drop and changes in the competitive landscape.

Is this a good deal?

At $80, it's tough to argue against the purchase of a 2DS, if only for the huge library of 3DS games it opens the door to. Between the gamut of releases already available on the platform and all of the software available in the Nintendo Online Store, you'll never run out of things to play.

At the same time, the 2DS isn't likely to get many new blockbuster releases down the road. It feels like that door is all but closed. But for $80, access to this rich, established legacy of great exclusive games that you can't play (yet) on your smartphone or tablet -- the Marios, Zeldas, Donkey Kongs and Star Foxes -- is where the value is. And, ultimately, that's what you're paying for.

Who is this good for?

Of course, anyone can have fun with the 2DS, but I really think it's the perfect intro piece of hardware for a younger player. Older gamers might be disappointed with the
2DS' small screens -- especially compared to the flagship New 3DS XL.

Should I get one?

Teens or adults who like Nintendo games should still opt for the New Nintendo 3DS XL. That model provides the best overall mobile experience, thanks to its improved screen and head-tracking (the 3D effect looks better than it did on the older 3DS models). However, the best will also cost you more: that model goes for $199, £165 or AU$249.

But for kids under 10, it's tough to beat the price and value of the 2DS. And the included Mario Kart 7 game is like a cherry on top. Just be sure to invest in apadded case (widely available for under $10).

Heat your food anywhere with this mini microwave

Gone are the days when microwaves were relegated to the kitchen -- or even the house. Startup Wayv, in partnership withNXP Semiconductors, has created the $199/£135/AU$275 Wayv Adventurer, a handheld cooker that can go anywhere you go.

Intended for use during outdoor activities, as a backup cooker for busy parents in transit and even for defense and humanitarian purposes, the 200W thermos-esque Adventurer is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and is supposed to work for 30 minutes or more on a single charge. Wayv claims the Adventurer can work with solar energy, too.

While the team hasn't shared details on availability just yet, this $199 gadget has caught my interest. As someone who occasionally camps in areas where fires are banned, a device like this could really come in handy.

Weight is a slight concern, though. At 2.6 pounds (1.2 kilograms), I certainly wouldn't consider it an essential for a long-distance thru-hike, but it would probably be fine for a shorter trek.

And with just 200W of power, it will likely take longer than a regular microwave to heat up food or a drink (a traditional microwave typically has 600 to 1,200W; check out my microwave buying guidefor more details). That makes the 30-minute battery limit seem a little low. Still, I'm definitely interested in taking one on the road to see just how well it works.

Android N: 7 top features we're looking forward to

Back in March, Google gave a sneak peek at its upcoming mobile operating system, Android N. While the final version of the OS won't be available until summer, the company announced more Android N features, as well as a few other initiatives, at its annual developer's conference in May.

Currently, Android is the most popular mobile OS in the world. In addition to beefed-up security updates and new emojis, N will integrate Google's interactive Assistant service and better battery efficiency. For now, we're getting a taste of what the new flavor of Android will have, with more features to come. Let's take a look at the top new features Google has divulged so far.
Google Assistant

The new Assistant software will let you engage in more natural back-and-forth dialogue with the Android device than you can with Now (Google's current digital and search assistant), in order to get things done, like research a restaurant and make a reservation through OpenTable.

Instant Apps

Timed with the release of N but also available on phones running OS versions as old as Android Jelly Bean, Instant Apps lets you access or use certain apps without having to download and install said apps. This is especially useful for digital payment transactions, where you can pay with Android Pay instead of whatever system the app would have made you use.

Multiwindow

Looking at two apps at once will become standard on Android phones and tablets. With multiwindow, you can see apps in a split screen. This feature has been available on Samsung and LG phones for a few years, and now it'll come to many more Android devices. It's also very similar to what the Apple iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4 and iPad Pro can do, thanks to Apple's latest OS, iOS 9.

Google's adding a picture-in-picture option for apps that play video, too, similar to what we've seen on the iPad Air. That means, you should be able to watch a YouTube video while also browsing Twitter, or perhaps check email while watching a movie through Google Play.

Reply in a notification

Brought over from Android Wear watches, Google now lets you reply to text messages from the notification shade. When you get a new message, a little alert will pop up at the top of the screen and you can type your reply right there and go back to what you were doing. iOS has had a similar feature for awhile, so it's great to see it come to Android.

Bundles of notifications

If your notification menu is a mess of alerts, this feature might help. Developers will be able to group together notifications from their app. You'll see a bundle of notifications from each app in the menu, and you'll just tap the bundle to expand it and see each individual alert.

Again, iOS has something like this for its notification menu that you have to manually toggle on, so it's a welcome addition to Android too.

Doze on the Go

Android 6.0 Marshmallow was the first to get Doze, a battery-saving setting that halts background computing that kicks in when your phone is not in use and sitting still. Doze on the Go does the same thing, except your phone can be in motion (like if it's inside your pocket sitting idle). Google's also working on Project Svelte, which aims to reduce the amount of memory Android needs. The goal is to bring the latest versions of Android to more devices, especially those with lower-end specs.

Night Mode

Similar to Apple's Night Shift feature, Night Mode aims to reduce eye strain from viewing a bright display at night. This setting tints the screen yellow, which keeps you less revved up in later hours than the usual blue tint. You can also adjust the brightness and tint of the sepia hue.

Android...Nougat...Nutella?

Though we've seen a lot of sneak peeks, we still don't know everything that'll come to the final release of the OS. We don't have a version number or a sweet-themed name yet (though Google will "allow" fans to submit suggestions). If you can't wait until the summer rollout, however, a beta version is already available for Google Nexus 6P, 5X, 6, 9 and Pixel C tablet owners to test.