hey everybody it's Lon Cy and it is time for my annual video where we look at the top Tech products of the last year the ground rules for this video is that this is something that I had to have reviewed here on the channel over the last 12 months there's a lot of Great Tech out there that I did not review and that is why your favorite item may not be on the list here but we've got a good selection of stuff to look at and it's great that we're still finding things given how stagnant
the tech industry has been over the last couple of years so I'm looking forward to sharing this with you and you'll be able to find full reviews of all of this stuff down below in the video description along with affiliate links where you can find these things for the loved ones in your life right around the holiday season here now before we get into this I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that some of these items came in free of charge from their respective manufacturers I will point that out
as we work our way through the list here all the opinions though you're about to hear are my own no other compensation was received for this video nor did anyone review or approve what you're about to see before it was uploaded so let's get into it now and see what our top picks are of the last year so our first product category this year are PCS and I was very impressed with what I've seen out of the Intel n100 processor and one of the best computers running with that processor right now is this very inexpensive
box from gmk Tech this is called the G3 it is very easily upgradeable you can just pull the top lid off here swap out the RAM and put in more storage so it has an nvme SSD slot here you'll have one already occupying that spot when you get it and you've got an M SATA slot there for adding additional storage and I've been running Linux and Windows on this device and I boot off of the drive that I want for the operating system that I'm looking for at that moment this thing is incredibly powerful for
its price point it's amazing what you can do with these devices not only for general computing but also server tasks it's a great Plex server the transcoding capabilities of the n100 here are mindblowing especially given that it can do 4K transcoding down to like 720p in real time in addition to tone mapping the HDR to SDR at the same time it's just a remarkable little box you'll find plenty of things that you can do with it and this is definitely my favorite of the n100 devices out right now and and of course you can check
my review for all the details about what you can do with this little device and in full disclosure gmk Tech sent this Mini PC to the Channel free of charge this next item also came in from its manufacturer free of charge this is the heiau network attached storage device and what's nice about this thing is that it really is a Mini PC in a Nas form factor so you've got these Drive Bays here where you can pop in a SATA hard drive for storage and these can be hot swapped they have a 4bay version of
this also now it can function like a Mini PC and that you can put Windows on it or Linux or whatever but you can also run some of the popular Nas options out there like unraid and true nass and whatever else you want to run and this is a very nice package to run it in because you've got the n100 processor on here it's great for media encoding you have two 2.5 GB ethernet jacks on the back USB ports for plugging in external storage for backup there's just a lot you can do with this thing
and I found it to be a nice implementation of the n100 platform and if you've been looking to run your own server in your home this is a good option because you do get the power efficiency of the n100 along with more storage options and speaking of data storage that is our next topic and our first product in this category is unraid unraid is a commercial software package that will turn your computer or your little Nas boox here into a home server and I really like how they've implemented it it's very easy to migrate your
unrate installation from one device to another you just take the drives out put them in a new computer and reboot with the external drive that you boot unraid on that's a great uh feature especially if you're always moving to New Hardware you don't have to rebuild your arrays all the time they have a very different approach to how they handle a raid array and you can find out more in the full review that I did a few weeks ago and it's also one of the best ways to run Docker containers in my opinion with an
interface that is not as difficult to learn for new Docker users as it would be if you had to go through the whole command line thing so it's a great platform definitely check out the review that I did in the video description and I will be this year uh buying the 4bay version of the heu here and moving my media server over to it and I'm going to run unraid on and that will be the topic of an upcoming video so stay tuned for that and in full disclosure we were running the trial version of
unraid in the video that we did a few weeks ago this next item is a high capacity solid state drive from SanDisk this is designed for desktop use and these come in 8 tbte and 4 terabyte configurations the 4 terabyte right now is selling for just under $300 and these are a great way to store a large photo library or do backups with time machines or whatever Windows equivalent that you're running with and because it's solid state it doesn't make any noise the performance of the drive is certainly better than an external spinning drive you
might attach to your computer and what's also neat about it is that it's powered by its own power supply so you don't have to rely on the computer or your Hub or dock to provide power to the drive which is actually good for reliability purposes so if you were looking for a quiet high-capacity drive this one might be worth taking a look at and we've got a review of it down below in the description and in full disclosure sand disc sent us to the channel a little bit earlier this year for review free of charge
and next up we've got a smartphone that made the list this year this one came in free of charge from Google in full disclosure this is their pixel 8A and this is a mid-range phone you can get them for around 500 bucks or less and there's not much of a compromise on this phone versus their more expensive flagships so you've got the wireless charging on it you've got two ceras on the back it performs exceptionally well because it's got the tensor 3 processor which is similar to what you get on their higher end pixel 8
phone it just is a real fun phone to use because you're not compromising much for saving a little bit of money and that's always what I'm looking for it even has a nice OLED display on board a fingerprint reader facial recognition it does it all and I am very very happy with it one other neat thing about this is that you can plug it into external dis Blaze over the USBC Port that was a new feature they added this year in one of their pixel drops and because this is a pixel phone it does get
supported uh pretty well by Google over the lifespan of it and if you were looking for a phone that is functional but doesn't break the bank you're not giving up all that much by going to the 8A versus their more expensive flagships so good device here from Google and we'll see what they come up with next year in this price category now this next topic is the bread and butter topic of this channel which of course are TV streaming boxes and who would have thought that Walmart of all companies would be cranking out the best
Android TV boxes money can buy right now at least from a value standpoint this is the on 4K Pro this is their top-of-the-line box it's less than 50 bucks it has 3 gbt of ram it performs exceptionally well I was really impressed with just how well everything uh navigates here and how quickly things pop up no issues here it supports Dolby Vision you can do some light gaming on it it even has ethernet and a USB port on the back as well ethernet is only 100 megabit it's not really the best box for Plex users
at least those looking for 4K Blu-ray performance but for all of your streaming needs this is a great way to make your TV smarter and you get access to all of the great apps in the Google TV and Android TV ecosystem they're actually doing a pretty good job of keeping these things up to date so this has the latest Google TV interface on it and you really can't go wrong with these devices especially if you're looking for something affordable this one also has a speaker built in you can do voice commands to it when the
TV is off and just really pleased with how much value they've packed into this I paid for this with my own funds and I'm sure we'll have another onbox to look at in 2025 they seem to crank them out every eight or N9 months or so all right next up is our gaming category and we're going to be focused a bit on Retro Gaming this year and the first item is this really fun do-it-yourself Game Boy kit made by a company called funny playing I bought mine from retro game repair shop over in Rhode Island
and that's where I would recommend you go to get yours and what you do is you pick out all your components the case the buttons the motherboard the display and you can put it all together and make yourself a modern fpga powered Game Boy Color that feels exactly like the original I've been so impressed with how this game boy functioned and how easy it was to put together you don't have to do any soldering you just put all the components together and get yourself a Game Boy complete with a rechargeable battery and a beautiful back
lit display it's not all that expensive I think I paid a little over $100 for it and one of the fun things about it is that you get the satisfaction of knowing you built this thing yourself which is always a lot of fun so check it out a great gift idea it'll keep the kids busy for at least an hour or two as they put their game boy together all right next up we have a new version of a product that made the list a couple of years ago this is the 8bit D Pro 2
it remains one of my favorite game controllers and the new version now has more sensitive and longer lasting hall effect thumb sticks on it so these are less prone to wear and drifting over time the controller is still incredibly comfortable in the hand they've kind of combined the Super Nintendo look here with PlayStation handles and it all just comes together very nicely it works with just about everything the only thing it doesn't work with are Xbox and PlayStation consoles but iPhones iPads Apple TVs PCS Macs raspberry pies Android devices it pretty much works with everything
it even works with the Nintendo switch so a great controller it's got great customization software too and not all that expensive one other new thing they added this year are some of these cool translucent colors like this blue one and in full disclosure this came in from 8 bitto free of charge in keeping with our retro theme of this year I found this great tool called retrat This is free and open-source software and what this does is it allows you to more easily manage your emulation of retro games on Windows PCS it can run off
of an external drive it is totally portable so this drive I keep down here for testing computers and I can just pop this in and have my emulator already configured and ready to go so here we've got a PS2 game that I'm loading up right now and all of my save games basically live on that external drive so when I boot up a new PC to review I just pop the drive in all of my controls are set the game is ready to go even my save game I can get to quickly this installs usually
the best emulator for whatever you are looking to run so it will keep everything up to date for you as well so there's not much to think about here you just put your ROMs and dis images in the folder on the drive and retro bat takes care of the rest completely free and open source and definitely worth taking a look at and I did a full review of it that you'll find Down Below in the description all right next up is our smart home category and the best smart home device that I've picked up this
year is the yui e340 in fact I've bought three of these now and I paid for all of them with my own funds this is a great doorbell what I like most about it is that there is no monthly fee to use it so you get all of the features that it offers without having to pay more than the cost of entry and what's also nice about this one is it's got a camera that points at the ground and it's got some AI that will notify you when packages are left by your door you can
talk to people through it all the things you can typically do on a smart doorbell are here with great image quality and again no ongoing cost of ownership the build quality is great on this the batteries are easily removable it stores its video on device but they've got a couple of different ways you can bring that footage inside the home they sell a chime that has an SD card on it that will download the footage from the doorbells I'm also experimenting right now with their Home Server product that does it on a hard drive and
I'll be looking at that a little bit later in the year once I get all these things set up along with a couple of cameras I got as well so pretty good stuff here from yui I do want to eventually manage my own security system where I'm storing everything with things that don't work or require the cloud but I like this product line quite a bit high quality stuff with no monthly fee which is always a good thing let's take a look at our last category now and that last category are tablets and I found
one this year that I thought was rather interesting I don't have much of a use for it myself but it's one of these things where I can see it being useful for others and that is the books Palama it's about the size of a smartphone but it runs with an e in display similar to what you would get on a Kindle however it's running Android so you can not only install the Kindle reader on it but you can inst all the other readers that are out there on it too the screen looks great the battery
life is spectacular and there's a lot of things that you can run on the books Palma that are just regular Android apps that actually do quite well with that e in display so if you're someone who can find some value in this I think it's worth checking out because I do think there's a lot of folks out there that might enjoy this device and I did hear from a number of you who commented on the video about how much you love yours so I wanted to pass that along as a very Innovative product that made
the cut this year so that is it for this year's top Tech products it's getting harder and harder to do this video because so much of what we use now has been Consolidated into these smartphones but there's still stuff out there and as always I rely on you all to tell me about the things that you're finding that are pretty cool so please continue to give me recommendations I'll try to get as much of the stuff in over the next 12 months as I can and hopefully some of those devices will make the cut next
year let me know what you thought of this list down in the comments section and until next time this is lon cbin thanks for watching
