Life is hard enough as it is sometimes. So take advantage of technology and make your life not only easier but less stressful, more efficient, greener, and cheaper. Here are our top ten recommendations for genius gadgets to hack your life with. Best Tech Gadgets.
Eliminate Household Chores
Step one: nobody, but nobody likes cleaning. So why do it? They’re expensive at $799, but the iRobot Roomba i7+ cleaning robots are a miraculous invention. The Roomba makes its own map of your house to thoroughly hoover it for you without getting stuck or breaking things on the way. You can control the Roomba from your phone so that your chores are done while you work (or play!), and it even self-empties. Almost like owning a pet, except hair ending up everywhere truly won’t be a problem. Best Tech Gadgets.
Never Lose Your Keys Again
A cheap way to save so much time and unnecessary angst. Merely attach a smart fob to your keys (or anything else vitally important that you manage to lose daily), et voila, you will be able to track those pesky valuables instantly. Tile is a good brand, coming in at $24.99.
Never Miss a Parcel Again
Why does the doorbell always ring when you’re in the bathroom, and Hermes always delivers when you’re “out”? Solve the embarrassment and the inconvenience of having to rush downstairs (albeit too slowly) in your towel with the nifty Ring Video Doorbell which shows you who is at the door from your phone and allows you to answer from wherever you happen be. “This way, you’ll never have to waste time going to the depot to track your long-awaited parcel down ever again. At $199 a pop, this is also a sound investment for making sure that you feel safe when answering the door,” says Valerie Wiegand, a tech writer at Oxessays and State of writing.
Hire a Personal Assistant
How many times have you just wished you were rich enough to be able to hire a PA? Well, fortunately, Amazon and Google have come to your rescue. Amazon’s incredible Echo device comes in at $100 and plays your favorite song on demand (even if you can’t remember the exact title), reminds you what was on your To-Do list, does your grocery shopping for you, and even knows what time of day to call your Grandma if you want to catch her before her siesta. There’s also the mini version of this home assistant, the Amazon Echo Dot, which retails at a much more affordable $49.99. To rival Amazon’s ever-present Alexa, Google has also entered the market with their GoogleHome SmartSpeaker, undercutting Amazon by a fraction at $99.
This boasts similarly helpful qualities, allowing you to Google anything at the drop of a hat and, like the Amazon Echo, enabling you to adjust any connected devices. It might seem mundane, but being able to alter the settings on things like your thermostat, your lighting, and your alarm systems will not only save you time and money in the long term but keep you comfortable from your armchair when you need to be. For example, if you happen to also invest in a set of Smart bulbs such as those that Philips Hue now offer ($130), you can connect the two devices and turn your lights on or off from the next room, from the next town, or an entirely different continent.
Hire A Personal Chef
So many of us lament the difficulty of fitting good, homemade meals into our daily routines these days. Well, now, technology is here to help us do just that. With the advent of new, state-of-the-art kitchen aides such as Crock-Pot’s smart slow cooker ($118), you can program this pot from wherever you happen to be. If you are home later than the planner, turn the temperature down from your phone mid-meeting. If you’re feeling particularly lazy, link it to your Amazon Echo Dot and do this from the comfort of the next room, without even having to pause your movie night to check if your dinner is burning. Best Tech Gadgets
Train Smarter, Not Harder
Do you know what makes everything feel a whole lot easier? Being fit and healthy. It can be challenging to weave workouts into a busy lifestyle, but if you invest in some smart tech like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch, you can keep all your appointments on track while you are literally on the track. Smartwatches like these will also make sure that you are not wasting your energy, giving you all of the feedback and statistics to help you ensure you are getting the best of yourself.
Here, the extremely popular Fitbit is the more affordable option at $99, tracking your step count and your sleep cycle while also receiving your calls and notifications. “If you can stretch to Apple’s rather more princely $385, their watch also cleverly incorporates the patented Siri and ApplePay so that you can find out what your resting-heart rate really should be in the moment, and pay for your gym session even if you’ve forgotten your wallet. With this kind of tech on your wrist, there really are no excuses, but it still does come in handy for when you need to catch that Uber home mid-run,” says Chandler Deckow, a business blogger at Paper Fellows and Lia Help.
Charge Your Phone Anywhere
An external phone charger will save your (phone) life every time. We all forget to plug in while we have the chance sometimes, so if you’re on the road a lot, try the Anker Powercore 10000, which is one of the best on the market, available for $25.99. As long as you remember to sling this bad guy into your rucksack, the intrepid explorers amongst you will no longer be constrained to hop from home to cafe to car begging for a charging port to juice up your phone and get yourself out of a sticky situation. Instead, bring on those days out trekking, fearlessly losing your way, and taking hundreds of cool shots while you’re at it.
Stay Connected Everywhere
For those of you who are tempted to ditch too much tech and “stuff” for the freedom of (insert hashtag) van-life, or indeed, for the always on the road businessman with a presentation to nail, the RAVPower Wifi Hotspot is going to be your new best friend. If you need to avoid the expensive roaming and data charges associated with moving around a lot, then you’ll want to take a look at this 300 Mbps, multi-device piece of kit that will enable you to get online wherever you are. At $56, it really is a smart, one-time investment.
Stream Seamlessly
And for when you are at home, with a supposedly trusty internet connection, make sure it works for what you need it to. Save time and frustration at a minimal $39 with a Wifi-range extender from Netgear. This handy tool will enable faster streaming of all of your favorite things like games and movies so that you can relax at a moment’s notice when you’re too tired to fiddle around with the router. For families, a range-extender like this one will also solve endless quarreling over who uses up the most bandwidth. Best Tech Gadgets.
Read Endlessly
And, with all of that spare time you now have thanks to your toolbox of life-hacking gadgets, why not kick back and relax… with the book you didn’t forget to bring with you, because it’s on your Kindle ($90). The Kindle will also provide you with the choice of any other kind of book you might want to download instead, just in case you change your mind, and it will even keep your page marked for you too.
This is one of the most eco-friendly things you can do to save paper, let alone storage room in your already-overfilled apartment or over-stuffed carry-on suitcase. When the cabin lights dim, you can carry on reading thanks to its backlit display and adjust the font size of whatever text you’re reading to suit your needs. Best Tech Gadgets.
You Read Endlessly
Not all of these gadgets are necessary for everyone. Still, depending on your lifestyle, there certainly is something out there to suit all requirements, and technology is constantly evolving to keep pace with our ever-increasing demands. While there are many small purchases you can make, such as a phone charger or a key fob that will remove those small but important inconveniences from your day-to-day routine, some of the larger investments are worth considering too.
Gadgets like the Roomba or the Apple Watch may seem extravagant at first, but when you consider how much they could influence your quality of life or how much time and energy they will save you in the long run, they could be well worth the splurge.
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