TechRadar Reviews

Roku Ultra (2024): Two-minute review

Roku Ultra (2024) home screen interface (Image credit: Future)

The Roku Ultra (2024) is as capable a streaming player as I’ve yet come across, though whether it’s one of the best streaming devices will depend entirely on how you feel about Roku’s onscreen interface. I am a fan. While I’ll dig into that a little more below, I find Roku’s software (and hardware) approach one that prioritizes convenience. It’s one of the reasons there’s still a need for external streaming players even though most contemporary TVs have their own built-in smart capabilities, which are usually not all that user-friendly.

The Roku Ultra (2024) is twice the price of Roku’s next most expensive streamer, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K, and in the upper range of price when it comes to these types of devices. It’s still worth it, not to mention it’s ultimately not that expensive either. Plus, if you go cheaper, you could lose out on support for Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, HLG, and HDR10+, all of which are available here. The performance is speedy and the remote is about as good a remote as I’ve personally used. All it’s missing is a passthrough HDMI that might be a benefit in certain setups.

As far as the physical design, the Roku Ultra (2024) is about what one would expect from a Roku streaming player. It comes in the same matte black as all of the company’s products, with just a shiny “Roku” logo emblazoned on the top. There’s also a shiny patch on the front where its sensor resides and a little purple Roku tag on its right flank.

It’s fairly slim, only an inch in height (its full dimensions are 4.9 x 5 x 1 inches), and has just one physical button on the side that offers dual functionality, with one side used for power and the other triggering the “find my remote” feature. Pressing the find my remote portion will cause the remote to ping until you press a button to indicate you’ve found it.

The port selection is pretty streamlined, as is to be expected. There’s a single HDMI, an Ethernet port – Wi-Fi 6 is also available – and a USB-A port. The USB port is a nice addition as it will give you an on-unit port to charge the remote as it comes with a rechargeable battery.

Regarding the HDMI, I would have liked a pass-through HDMI port. Though this feature generally isn’t found on streaming devices, it would have made it easier to use the Roku Ultra as the main hub of a setup (for instance, if you have a gaming console).

On that note, if you have a relatively contemporary TV with HDMI eARC (I can’t speak to older ones), the Roku Ultra (2024) can be set up to automatically turn the TV on and off and also adjust volume levels. You don’t necessarily have to do any menu diving for this either, as it’s part of the streaming player’s setup to enable that feature.

The Roku Ultra (2024) comes with a backlit remote control (Image credit: Future)

Now, let’s discuss the remote. This is not my first rodeo with the Roku Voice Remote Pro (2nd edition) that comes stock with the Roku Ultra (2024). I was a fan of the remote when I reviewed the Roku Pro Series TV and I’m a fan now.

It’s only different than Roku’s other remotes on close inspection as it keeps the general shape and layout. It has a USB-C port on its butt for charging, which is an upgrade from previous rechargeable remotes that used micro-USB, a form factor I’ve had general reliability issues with. It has a toggle on one side for hands-free voice support (more on that later).

The Roku Voice Remote Pro also has a couple of extra buttons on it. There’s a reprogrammable launch button that can be used if you want a shortcut to launch an app that doesn’t already have a dedicated button on the remote, or to quickly turn on/off closed captions, just for a few examples. There’s also a guide button that launches Roku’s live TV guide channel and four app-specific launch buttons for Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+, and Prime Video.

My only gripe is that these should all be reprogrammable (in a perfect world) since not everyone is going to be subscribed to those four apps. But my remote complaints start and end there, as the fact that its keypad is backlit – it will automatically light up when you pick it up – is fantastic.

And the Roku hands-free functionality is nice. No longer do I have to press the “listening” button, though it’s still there, to use my voice to navigate the interface. I can just say “Hey Roku, launch Netflix” to launch Netflix. It’s not perfect that you don’t have to be very clear and concise about your requests, but it generally works very well.

As far as voice assistant support goes, the Roku Ultra (2024) is compatible with Roku Smart Home, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple AirPlay and HomeKit. It also has Bluetooth support so you can pair headphones with it for late-night viewing.

As far as the Roku Ultra (2024)’s performance, Roku advertises its streaming device as “30% faster than any other Roku player.” While the company doesn’t advertise what the CPU is inside or even its speed, it definitely feels very speedy. The fact that it supports Wi-Fi 6, something other Roku streaming players don’t, will in and of itself contribute to the player’s faster response.

I was able to compare the Roku Ultra (2024) to the Roku Streambar for a baseline. Loading the Roku Channel on the Streambar took seven seconds and loading a movie took four. The Roku Ultra (2024) took four seconds to load the same app and one second to load the same movie. Even navigating through Roku’s interface is almost immediate.

There aren’t any holes in what the Roku Ultra (2024) supports as long as you don’t care about a 120Hz refresh rate – none of the external streaming players support that at the moment, however. What you do get is Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, HLG and HDR10/10+. None of the other Roku streaming players support all those formats. The next most expensive one in Roku’s lineup is missing Dolby Atmos, for instance.

Lastly, we need to discuss the interface. To start, setup is easy like it always is with Roku. As long as you know your Wi-Fi password and Roku account password, all you have to do is follow the steps on the screen. Creating a new account or resetting a password (like I had to do) is easy as well. Just make sure to have access to your email for doing so.

If you’ve used previous Roku devices registered to your email and had apps installed also registered to your email, those apps will automatically be installed and logged in once you’re done with the setup.

As far as the interface itself, the main page with all the apps listed is easy to read and as intuitive as an interface could be. Deeper features, settings and such are all listed on the left side, including a few new ones like the dedicated “Sports” page. Getting through those is also intuitive. Everything makes sense in where they’re listed. For instance, when going to the section for remotes and devices, all external devices that you might connect would be listed here, or connected through settings here.

There’s also plenty of Roku-related and free content available for those of us hurting from the ever-increasing app prices. The only slightly annoying thing is the Roku content ads on the right side of the screen or during a screensaver.

I’ve always thought of Roku as a convenience-first company where making products that are easy to interact with is the priority. That’s the case with the Roku Ultra (2024), too, but in this case, performance is also a factor.

Ports on the Roku Ultra (2024) include HDMI, USB-A, and Ethernet (Image credit: Future) Roku Ultra (2024): Price and release date

• Price: $99.99 (about £80 / AU$150)
• Release date: September 2024

For whatever reason, Roku’s presence outside of the US is somewhat spotty. That means, at the time of writing, those in the UK or Australia will have to just look on in envy (or invest in a capable competitor).

The actual price is $99.99 (about £80 / AU$150) – at the upper price range for most streaming players outside of the Apple TV 4K – though it is already seeing discounts. That’s twice the price of the Roku Streaming Stick 4K, the next most expensive streaming-only player Roku makes (so excluding soundbars and TVs). You’ll have to decide if you care about Wi-Fi 6 support, Dolby Atmos, or the new backlit remote, which are all part of the Ultra package, but not the Streaming Stick 4K.

The new Google TV Streamer (4K) goes for the same price and has the same 4K, Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, and HDR10+ support, but not Wi-Fi 6 – a probable factor in how speedy these devices function. It does have a redesigned remote from the previous Chromecast players, so it’s to be seen how it compares to the new remote from Roku.

Of course, you can go a little cheaper and still keep most of the same support for HDR10+, Dolby Vision and Atmos with the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023), though Atmos is only available on select services. While it is cheaper at $59.99 / £69.99 / AU$119 (not including its many discounts), its OS is a bit heavy on Amazon Prime material, including a bunch of related ads, so keep that in mind with the price difference.

The rechargeable remote features a toggle button that lets you select the streamer's hands-free voice command option (Image credit: Future) Should you buy the Roku Ultra (2024)? Buy it if...

You want a really cool remote
I raved about it with the Roku Pro Series TV and I’ll rave about it here. The new remote is worth the extra cost, from the backlighting to the reprogrammable buttons to the “find my remote” feature.

You want speed
Whether it’s the Wi-Fi 6 support or some upgraded processor that Roku keeps under wraps, this is a speedy streaming player. You won’t have to wait for your favorite apps, shows, or movies to load.

You want support for all formats
Most streaming players support 4K at 60Hz these days. But only the more premium ones support HDR10+, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. And many don’t support all three, but the Roku Ultra (2024) does.

Don't buy it if...

You’re looking for a discreet streaming player
It’s not all that big, but it’s not going to tuck away the way a stick-type player will. If you want to go as minimal as you can, Roku’s Streaming Stick 4K or the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) are almost as capable.

You’re looking to save money
The cost of the Roku Ultra (2024) is really not that high. It is, however, still on the higher end when it comes to streaming players. You can find capable options at less than half the price.

Roku Ultra (2024): Also consider

Apple TV 4K (2022)
Apple’s streamer has a similar box form factor and an equally zippy and responsive interface that’s easy to browse and doesn’t saturate you with ads. It’s recommended mainly for Apple fans and offers multiple features that work seamlessly with the company’s other products.

Read our full Apple TV 4K (2022) review

Google TV Streamer (4K)
Priced similarly to the Roku Ultra, the Google TV Streamer (4K) is Google’s update on its Chromecast streaming players, pumped with faster processing, 32GB of storage, and support for Dolby Vision and Atmos, HDR10+, and 4K. It doesn’t have support for WiFi 6E, unfortunately.

Read about the Google TV Streamer (4K)

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023)
If you prefer the type of streaming player that’s a bit more discreet, the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) is of the stick variety, as the name suggests, so it hides behind your TV. It’s still fast with Wi-Fi 6E, not to mention 16GB of storage and Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and Dolby Atmos support. It is very Prime-centric, however, and shows ads for Prime content every time it’s on idle.

Read our full Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) review

Luna gaming on the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) (Image credit: Future) How I tested the Roku Ultra (2024)

• Used regularly for several weeks
• Tested with all sorts of apps
• Tested the remote

I used the Roku Ultra (2024) regularly for several weeks. I used it with Roku content, popular third-party content like Max, as well as free offerings from the company. I also spent time using the remote and its various functions.

I’ve tested a lot of tech gear over the years from laptops to keyboards and speakers, and so have been able to use my expertise towards giving an honest and fair opinion, not to mention a critical eye, to any product I test.

Read more about how we test

First reviewed November 2024

Lenovo is a well-known brand in the world of professional business computing. They make phenomenal computers of all shapes, sizes, budgets, and performance. The ThinkStation P3 Ultra targets design, engineering, and video editing professionals who need high-powered machines capable of some serious computing power.

The ThinkStation P3 Ultra is on the higher end of Lenovo Workstations, and can be spec'd up to a 14th Gen i9, Windows 11 Pro for Business, NVIDIA RTX A5500, up to 128 GB RAM, up to 4TB of storage, and even an M.2 RAID. This can be a pretty hefty computer with a pretty hefty price tag. But how does it compare to the best workstations we've reviewed? We put the ThinkStation P3 Ultra to the test. 

Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra: Price and Availability

Since there are so many upgrades available to the ThinkStation P3 Ultra, there are even more possible price tags thanks to the different possible combinations of these upgrades. However, what is easy to state is that the starting price for all base features is $934.45 at the time of writing this article, and the price, of course, climbs from there. The highest-end model can reach nearly $5,000. Compared to similar PCs, there is some competitive pricing for some of the features.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra is available in multiple regions, such as the US and the UK. For more information on whether this computer is available for you, the best place to start looking is on Lenovo's website. However, it is available on multiple other retailers as well.

(Image credit: Collin Probst // Future) Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra: Unboxing and First Impressions

Unboxing the Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra was about like unboxing any other Lenovo computer. The box is simple and contains the workstation, a power cable, an adapter for Wi-Fi, and setup guides. Right away, I could tell this machine meant power, partly due to the abundance of DisplayPorts in the back and partially because it looked beefy, like every square millimeter of space packed with power on the inside. The compact nature was immediately noticeable, yet it does not feel compact when using it; instead, it feels quite expansive, powerful, and like a supercar at the start of an open highway.

(Image credit: Collin Probst // Future) Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra: Design and Build Quality

As expected for a high-end workstation, the Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra has excellent build quality. It seems durable -- though I don't feel any desire to push this to the limit due to the cost of this machine -- it feels like it cools pretty easily, the machine is relatively quiet even when under heavy loads, and it has easy to access ports, without any being hidden, or in dumb spots, as some compact units choose to do to save space. However, one thing that I did notice that I did not love was the absence of Thunderbolt ports at the back of the unit. There are two in the front, which is helpful, especially for large file transfers, but none in the back. 

As someone who loves and gets to utilize some of the best Thunderbolt Docks on the market, I am pretty bummed none of mine will reach full potential unless the Thunderbolt cable is plugged into the front of the unit. Additionally, if I had a Thunderbolt or even a USB-C display I wanted to use, I would have to also run a DisplayPort cable up to my monitor of choice. But, especially with the newest Apple Computers releasing Thunderbolt 5, having the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the front of the machine will help with data transfer, and that's probably why they are there in the first place.

(Image credit: Collin Probst // Future) Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra: In use Specs

CPU: Intel 13th-gen Core (up to i9) or Xeon
GPU: NVIDIA RTX A2000 to A5000 options
RAM: Up to 64GB DDR5 ECC memory
Storage: Up to 4TB SSD
Ports: USB-C, USB-A, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, Thunderbolt
OS: Windows 11 Pro

The Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra is not the computer you would get to run a few Chrome (or any other browser) Tabs. It's different from one you would use for essential business or admin work. This is the kind of machine you get when you have advanced 3D rendering jobs, CAD projects, or even video editing that need to be done. During my testing, I pushed the RAM and GPU by exporting four lines of 4k footage through DaVinci Resolve, and it sliced through it like butter. I also used this to finish some CAD projects I had started for some 3D printing projects I am working on (for more, see our round-up of the best 3D printers). I found the workstation was able to render incredibly fast, and it sliced the .stl so I could send it to my 3D printer super quick, too.

I will be the first to admit I am a heavy and intense computer user, but at the same time, I am nowhere near the most powerful user there is. I wouldn't need this kind of power in my day-to-day, but it is very nice to have. This powerhouse would be helpful for professional video editors, those who use CAD for 3D renderings, and even some intense coders or programmers.

For the raw power that this computer can output, even when under heavy load, it remains pretty quiet. And, when it's not maxing out its cores, it's pretty quiet and could sit out on your desk without needing to be tucked away due to loud fans.

(Image credit: Collin Probst // Future) Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra: Final verdict

Overall, The ThinkStation P3 Ultra from Lenovo is an excellent choice for those who prioritize power and want a compact form factor. Granted, there are some limitations in ports when it comes to Thunderbolt placement and lack of HDMI, but even with that being the case, this computer is still highly versatile and incredibly powerful for those who need a powerful compact desktop.

For portable powerhouses, we tested the best mobile workstations and the best Lenovo ThinkPad laptops. 

Review info

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5
Release date: November 7, 2024

Offering you the chance to build a theme park (almost quite literally) brick by brick, Planet Coaster 2 builds on the series’ strengths and addresses some of its most glaring weaknesses. Couple these quality-of-life improvements with a brand new category of attraction – pools, flumes, and water parks – and it certainly seems to be offering a lot to a new generation of theme park fans.

As a creative person who shades on the obsessive side, I’ll admit I’m pretty much genetically predisposed to being a Planet Coaster 2 addict. The series offers almost complete creative freedom at the cost of hours spent meticulously arranging scenery parts and is almost pharmaceutically engineered to squirt dopamine around my pixel-addled brain. As a result, I’ve spent many hours boring the pants off my nearest and dearest about my latest rides and animal enclosures, to the extent I can almost hear the glop of their eyes glazing over as I talk.

But as the oenophile has the shrewdest expectations of the wine they imbibe and the true caffeine addict won’t sip anything other than locally roasted micro-lot beans from a tiny farm in El Salvador, I’ve also got pretty high expectations of my chosen vice. Both Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo helped me scratch my creative itch as PC games while also coming with some limitations that sometimes made me question my habit. So the announcement of Planet Coaster 2 did make me wonder: has developer Frontier Developments finally found a cleaner way for me to get my creative kicks?

(Image credit: Frontier Developments) Pool party

If you’ve seen any of the Planet Coaster 2 trailers, you’ll already be well aware of Frontier Developments’ big pitch for the sequel: water parks. In fact, in terms of new content, they are the only substantial addition the game brings. I was initially slightly nonplussed by this: could the inclusion of one new ride category encourage me to do any more than dip my toe into this sequel? Do pools and flumes really offer enough to justify sinking hours of my time into a new Planet game? In a word: yes. Yes, they do.

First of all, Planet Coaster 2 allows you to create a wide array of pools. Want to create a classy resort vibe, complete with cabanas, palm trees, and juice shacks? Or maybe you want to create a shallow kiddy pool, replete with donut-shaped swim rings and wave machines? You’re free to shape, customize, and decorate your pools however you like and, as in previous Frontier Developments titles, the only limit is your imagination. New tools allow you to carve out pools in any shape you desire, adjust the depth as you see fit, and adorn them with everything from sunloungers to beachballs.

Flumes also add a lot of fun to your water park. From basic chutes to gargantuan inner tube slides with switchbacks and speed bowls, you can create thrilling flumes that will draw more visitors to your pools. As with rollercoasters, they’re fully customizable – you’ll place them piece by piece, controlling both vertical and horizontal bends, adding special parts, and trying to hit that sweet spot between exciting and nausea-inducing that will encourage your guests to take the plunge.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

As with your rollercoasters, your flumes will need to be tested before they can be opened, to make sure they provoke just the right amount of excitement and not too much nausea or fear. While testing you can view the results as they change from moment to moment or check out heatmaps of the whole ride to spot problem areas.

It’s not all fun and games though: you’ll also have to watch over your guests’ safety and make sure the water stays free of pe… err, dirt. Nobody’s at risk of drowning in Planet games – they’re far too cozy for that – but swimmers will panic, so you’ll need to make sure your pool is covered by lifeguards to help calm their distress. Meanwhile, you’ll have to add pool filtration to make sure that water remains crystal clear, hooking up water filters to flumes or to the pool itself.

Speaking of pipes, the utilities in Planet Coaster 2 have had an overhaul as well. While the original Planet Coaster was seemingly a Tesla-inspired free-energy utopia and Planet Zoo just required a generator plonking down here or there, hooking up power and water in Planet Coaster 2 requires a bit more thought. Not only will your generators and pumps need regular maintenance from your mechanics but the resulting electricity and water will need to be distributed around your park. Using underground wires and pipes, you’ll hook them up to power distributors and water filters, which will provide the required resources to everything within a set radius. It hardly requires Factorio levels of micromanagement and can easily be switched off but it adds a little extra realism to your parks.

In comparison to the water parks, traditional rides in Planet Coaster 2 have had much less of an overhaul. You can still design a wide array of rickety wooden coasters, water rides, and super-modern hanging coasters, as well as place thrilling flat rides and customize their sequences. They’re as fun as ever to design and integrate well with your water parks but, if you’re expecting a sea change here, you’ll be disappointed. However, I feel like the water parks add plenty of new challenges and creativity to the game and definitely justify picking up Planet Coaster 2 over firing up the original.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments) A smooth ride

As you might expect, Planet Coaster 2 has had a bit of a facelift compared to its eight-year-old predecessor.

Unsurprisingly, the most work has gone into improving water effects – lakes and beaches now look much more realistic, with the gradation between shallow and deep water looking much more true to life. Not only does the sunlight glimmer across the surface of your swimming pools but this casts underwater ripples across the ceramic tiles as well. All the water in the game feels like it’s had a literal glow up and it does help to add some visual polish to your waterparks and natural water alike.

Terrain textures too have received some love. There’s a wider variety than ever: alongside familiar terrain from Planet Zoo, like long and short grass, hard and soft rock, there are now multiple rock types, gravel, scree, and several densities of shrubbery, which help really add variation to the landscape. Whether I was creating small coves or craggy peaks, these extra textures really helped make the terrain look richer and more organic.

This ties in nicely with some of the new Scenery Themes, making it easier to match your landscape to various regions. As well as the classic theme park style, the new game also offers Viking, Mythological (read: Ancient Greece), Resort, and, predictably, Aquatic themes. Some of these are fantastic: Viking offers fantastic runic statues, Aquatic beautiful corals and the Greek pack allowed me to relive some of my favorite Aegean destinations.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

However, I do miss the versatility of some of PlanCo’s original themes and the relative paucity of animatronics in the sequel does make sequencing ride scenery less exciting. Being able to perfectly program an explosion in a Wild West mine as a coaster roared past, complete with terrified miners leaping to escape the flames, was one of my favorite moments in the original and I hope new content packs will restore some of this creative potential.

I was expecting this graphical boost to have a noticeable impact on performance but I was pleasantly surprised. Playing on an Acer Predator Helios 300 with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, I found my frame rate rarely ever dropped below 65 frames per second, even on the Ultra graphics settings. With all of its AI pathfinding and animal behavior, I found Planet Zoo could get pretty sluggish on some rigs, especially at high guest counts, but Planet Coaster 2 seems to run smoothly even on an older graphics card.

Not only that but, despite assuming the game would be an absolute no-go on the Steam Deck, it actually runs pretty adequately. Yes, your graphics settings will have to plunge like you’re on a drop tower but the game still runs smoothly, averaging out at a decent-for-Deck 30fps. How true this will remain when you’re working with Disney World-sized parks remains to be seen but it shows there has been some effort to optimize things behind the scenes.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments) Breaking new paths

As someone who has sunk thousands of hours into the original Planet Coaster and Planet Zoo, I’ll be the first to admit that they can be… a little idiosyncratic. It’s become something of an inside joke among fans of the series that the games offer almost unlimited creative potential while also forcing you to butt heads with some frustrating design limitations. Paths and scenery placement in particular have drawn ire for being unnecessarily convoluted.

To its credit, Frontier Developments has tackled some of these complaints head-on in Planet Coaster 2. Object placement has received some much-needed love: you can now turn Snap Distances on and off for all objects, meaning you’re no longer forced to keep building parts on a grid but can also set props to move in relation to the grid when you want. And the new Scale Tool allows you to tweak the size of individual items, something I’ve been desperate to see for a long time, and makes it much easier to create organic variations in the sizes of objects. All in all, this adds a great deal of flexibility to the Blueprints you can create.

There are also plenty of labor-saving tweaks that have been made: the new scenery brush groups together similar items like tropical trees or Mediterranean rocks and quickly paints them across the landscape. You can also easily create your own presets by adding a selection of scenery items. The end result definitely requires some editing to get it looking natural but, as someone who has spent many hours in Planet Zoo getting each collection of bushes and stones looking just right, automating a part of this process is definitely something I appreciate.

Best bit: swimming pools

(Image credit: Frontier Developments)

Pools are a blast: not only are the flumes fun to build, there is a good degree of freedom in how you shape and decorate your pools. I can’t wait to start building a tropical indoor swimming paradise replete with beaches, slow rivers and smoothie bars.

In past games, paths were easy to place in general and maddeningly difficult to place in specific circumstances – anyone who has also lost a whole evening trying to stack paths on top of each other in multi-story buildings shares my pain here. Fortunately, path placement has had a complete overhaul: in addition to the Classic Paths tool, there is now an overhauled Line Builder tool, options to manually draw the edges of paths line by line, a Stamp Builder tool to place geometrically shaped paths, and an Edit tool to manually tweak paths point by point. This gives you a whole lot more variability in terms of the shapes of path you can create, making plazas, buildings, and a whole heap more much easier to create.

Water mechanics have previously been this series’ Achilles heel: creating natural ponds, rivers, and lakes was always a bit of a finicky process, often requiring a lot of tinkering before the games would acknowledge water placement as valid. Fortunately, Planet Coaster 2’s swimming pools utilize the new path mechanics – you can carve out pools using shapes or manually set their boundaries by drawing lines, then round their edges using the Smooth Brush. Depth is set according to presets at first – either shallow, wading, swimming, or diving – but you can set the depth to whatever you want with the Edit tool. And you can add paths around the edges automatically using the Customize Brush.

All in all, these features go a long way to reducing the slog involved in perfecting your park.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments) Off the rails

This isn’t to say that some of Frontier Developments’ more eccentric tendencies aren’t on display: you’ll definitely encounter bugs and odd design choices here and there.

Designing rollercoasters is still that same combination of childlike delight and frustratingly finicky refinement. Having spent roughly 20 minutes designing an old-school log flume that wound through forests, plunged down mountainsides, and splashed through salt lakes, I was pretty happy with my handiwork. But I then had to spend at least another 30 minutes closing the loop: there’s no auto-complete function for certain rides and trying to get the returning track on the same height as the station platform required a tedious process of trial and error.

Ride testing has also maintained some of its irksome habits from the original. Any time I’ve attempted a coaster or flume of significant ambition, it still required a high degree of testing and tweaking to keep speed and G-forces within safe limits. And there are still some glitches here. One of my early flumes repeatedly tested as being around a 15 in terms of fear overall – a bowel-liquefying level of terror that wouldn’t allow me to open the ride – despite the fact heatmaps showed the fear didn’t hit much higher than a 6. I’d imagine minor bugs like this will be fixed in future patches but it can be confusing trying to work out whether your design is at fault or an unpatched bug.

But, as I say, I’d maintain these kind of issues are the flipside of the creative freedom Planet Coaster 2 offers. What I’ve come to expect from the Planet series of games is the ability to create pretty much whatever I want and an inevitable side effect of trying to create something the developer never anticipated is the fact I may run up against the odd hard limit where the engine struggles to deliver what I’ve asked for. Ultimately: with great flexibility, comes great errors.

(Image credit: Frontier Developments) Should I play Planet Coaster 2? Play it if…

You want your theme parks to make a splash
The addition of pools and flumes adds a substantial new dimension to creating your fantasy theme park. If you felt the original was a little on the dry side, the sequel should whet your appetite.

You want improved tools over the original
While they’re still not foolproof, tools for object placement, path placement, and scenery creation have all had quality-of-life improvements that make them smoother to use.

Don't play it if...

You want a game you can casually dip into
As fans of the series will know, Planet games can require an obsessive attention to detail. If you really want to customize every element of your park, be prepared to sink a lot of time into this game.

You’re expecting to only have to pay once
The relatively limited scenery items and themes are likely to be augmented by paid-for DLCs. If you’re not prepared to sink extra money into expansions, you may miss out on some of the things Planet Coaster 2 has to offer.

Accessibility

Planet Coaster 2 has a reasonable number of accessibility options, although perhaps there’s room for improvement too. You can scale the interface if you find smaller type hard to read and can tweak color palettes to improve readability if you have protanopic, deuteranopic, or tritanopic color blindness.

For those who have auditory processing problems, you can set the game to mute all other audio when narrative dialogue is playing. Meanwhile, for those with reduced hearing in one ear, you can switch on a mono mix to ensure you’re receiving all sounds.

However, you don’t seem to be able to adjust gamepad controls, which might make things harder for those who require certain tweaks to be able to use controllers.

How I reviewed Planet Coaster 2

I sank over 23 hours into playing Planet Coaster 2. I tried to cover as much of the game as possible, dividing my time between Career Mode, Franchise Mode, and Sandbox Mode. I tried the game out on Low, High, and Ultra graphics settings.

In terms of hardware, I played Planet Coaster 2 on an Acer Predator Helios 300 with a 12th-gen Intel Core i9-12900H CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 GPU. During this testing, I used the laptop’s built-in keyboard and an external Logitech B100 mouse. I also played the game for hours on my LCD Steam Deck.

My past experience of the Planet series of games includes almost 400 hours on the original Planet Coaster and over 1,000 hours on Planet Zoo.

TicWatch Atlas: One minute review

The TicWatch Atlas is a brilliant rugged Android smartwatch and a fantastic alternative to mainstream options like the Google Pixel Watch or the Samsung Galaxy Range. It boasts an impressive chassis made of stainless steel, aluminum, and fiberglass that feels really premium and sturdy, and it’s competitively priced around other Android smartwatches while offering the rugged durability you’d expect from an Apple Watch Ultra or Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.

The dual display means you can switch between a healthy-looking AMOLED display or an essentials-only low-power option that’s good for 45 days of battery life. The TicWatch Atlas comes absolutely packed with fitness and health-tracking tools and features, including more than 100 exercises. It also features heart-rate monitoring, sleep tracking, blood oxygen monitoring, and more.

The Snapdragon W5+ chip ensures performance all-round is snappy with no hang-ups, and there’s a wealth of health data at your fingertips. The screen isn’t as vibrant as an Apple Watch display, and blood oxygen readings weren’t always spot on, but overall fitness tracking for calories and heart rate kept up with more expensive Apple Watch alternatives, and the GPS showed pretty solid accuracy.

The TicWatch Atlas currently runs Wear OS 4 with no sign of Wear OS 5 coming any time soon, but for those who can do without the latest software, it’s an extremely enticing option in this price bracket and one of the best Android smartwatches this year.

TicWatch Atlas: Specifications TicWatch Atlas: Price and Availability

(Image credit: Future)

• $349/£329/AU$519
• Two colors

The TicWatch Atlas is available now from Mobvoi.com and Amazon in a multitude of territories. There’s only one size and two colors, retailing at $349 / £329 / AU$519. We’ve seen it officially discounted through Mobvoi’s website and Amazon in the UK to just £264.99. In Wear OS terms, that’s around the same price as the list price of the Galaxy Watch 7, but cheaper than the similarly-sized Pixel Watch 3. It’s also, confusingly, the same price as Ticwatch’s other smartwatch offerings, the Pro 5 Enduro and the regular Pro 5.

• Value score: 4/5

TicWatch Atlas: Design and screen

(Image credit: Future)

• Premium design
• Very rugged and durable
• Dual display is enticing

Out of the box, the Ticwatch Atlas really dazzles as a rugged and well-designed smartwatch. The circular chassis measures 52.2mm in height by 47.8mm in width, and the whole package is just 12.05mm thick. The watch housing itself is a mixture of stainless steel, 7000-series aluminum, and nylon with fiberglass. That means you aren’t getting the premium titanium finish of an Apple Watch Ultra or the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, but the whole package exudes premium build quality and a rugged durability that really gives you confidence in the watch day-to-day. The TicWatch Atlas is Mobvoi’s adventure-going watch for the great outdoors and the company has really nailed it with this fantastic design.

Garmin fans will find themselves at home here thanks to a raised, chunky bezel that houses a circular AMOLED display, and to one side are a side button and a crown for scrolling. The latter is smooth and precise to operate, and the former takes you to Wear OS 4’s recent apps with a satisfying click, or Google Wallet with a double click.

The fluororubber band shipped as standard is also really excellent – the rubber is soft and grippy, and the metal clasp feels safe and secure to use.

The TicWatch Atlas boasts a dual-display configuration, with an always-on AMOLED and the Ultra-low-power display. Starting with the AMOLED, this tech definitely lags behind options like the Apple Watch Series 10, which looks altogether more vibrant. Upping the brightness to full really improved the experience, but at the default setting I thought it looked ever-so-slightly washed out. However, the text and metrics all look very clear, and the default Wear OS faces show good color performance. Raise-to-wake was a tad sluggish for my liking, but I’m really nitpicking what’s otherwise a very enjoyable experience.

(Image credit: Future)

There’s also the Ultra-low-power display, which gives you a slew of essential metrics (date, time, steps, heart rate, battery) in a crisp two-tone format. You can pick the color, and the low-power display also has dynamic color changes that reflect your heart rate, so you can gauge what HR zone you’re running in with the quickest of glances. The real selling point of this Ultra-low-power display, however, is the battery life, with TicWatch promising up to 45 days of use in Essential Mode using this feature.

Overall, the TicWatch Atlas is really comfortable on the wrist, with no noticeable wrist fatigue. At 47.2 grams it’s not a heavy beast, but you’ll definitely notice its presence. As noted, it’s circular and quite a bit wider than your average Apple Watch, which I’d say disqualifies it for use in strength training. That’s because the design, coupled with the protruding crown, lends itself to accidental button presses, a fatal flaw that also hamstrings the Apple Watch.

Worth mentioning design-wise are the Atlas’ durability ratings. It’s 5ATM waterproof-rated for open-water swims, and certified to MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability. Essentially, the TicWatch Atlas can handle almost everything you throw at it, rain or shine.

• Design score: 4/5

TicWatch Atlas: Features

(Image credit: Future)

• Packed with fitness-tracking features
• Heart rate monitoring and Afib alerts
• Wear OS 4

TicWatch Atlas arrives sporting Wear OS 4 and a host of impressive features. A lot of these will be familiar to anyone who’s used any of the best Android smartwatches on the market. There are workout tracking modes for over 100 different exercises, including all the usual suspects. You’ll also get 24/7 heart-rate monitoring, recovery time readouts, VO2 Max measurements, calories, blood oxygen, and more.

Overnight there’s sleep tracking which triggers automatically, and health features like irregular heartbeat sensing and atrial fibrillation detection, which are constantly monitored in the background.

Safety features include emergency SOS and Fall Detection, the effectiveness of which I can attest to because I accidentally triggered it during a gym workout when I flopped a bit too dramatically onto a bench while doing barbell bench presses.

Navigation is provided by GPS tracking, which can also give you retrospective routes for your outdoor workouts and is impressively accurate, even when not tethered to a phone. There’s also a compass and barometer, the latter of which will be of particular note to climbers and hikers, who can use it to gauge height and atmospheric conditions that could indicate changes in the weather.

Another standout feature that I wasn’t able to test was Heat Map. With GPS and network connectivity, you can track your heat map for ball games including American football, Aussie rules, basketball, rugby, soccer, and tennis, as well as Frisbee, with your activity displayed as a satellite image of your exploits that you can customize and share with friends.

There’s also TicMotion, proactive tracking for outdoor workouts that can detect walking, running, or cycling without the need for user input, providing heart rate, calories, and VO2 max info automatically. I’ve already mentioned the dynamic screen, which changes color to match your heart rate in Ultra-low-power mode, another epic feature for fitness enthusiasts.

You also get the usual slew of Wear OS features from Google, including G-Suite integration for Maps, Calendar, and Gmail, apps from the Play Store, messaging, Google Wallet, and more. 32GB of onboard storage ensures you can load music and playlists onto your device, so you can run without your smartphone if you’d prefer

Overall, the TicWatch Atlas is packed with features for a $329 smartwatch. The feature-set generally lends itself to the adventuring fitness enthusiast, there is a lot going on when it comes to fitness tracking, health, performance, and more. I’d be inclined to compare the Atlas more to some of the best Garmin watches on the market, rather than something like a Google Pixel Watch 3. As with TicWatch’s Pro 5 offering, LTE is the only glaring omission. Mobvoi has also confirmed to us that there isn’t currently any information about Wear OS 5 support, the rollout of which to old Pixel models was confirmed recently, so this doesn’t put it at a huge disadvantage versus other Android rivals.

(Image credit: Future)

• Features score: 4.5/5

TicWatch Atlas: Performance

(Image credit: Future)

• Snappy processor
• Accurate metrics
• Phenomenal battery life

In my three weeks using the Atlas TicWatch I’ve been really impressed by the overall performance. My daily driver is usually an Apple Watch Series 10, or latterly, the Ultra 2. Personally, I find that the animations of Wear OS 4 leave a bit to be desired, with the lack of bounce and responsiveness versus watchOS 11 making for a more clunky experience; however, the TicWatch’s Snapdragon W5+ chip is more than enough to handle Wear OS. The user experience overall is snappy and responsive, with no processor hang-ups. The Atlas can process a lot of workout data including heart rate metrics, steps and calories, and cadence, and it’s definitely a solid piece of kit.

Accuracy-wise, it leaves little to be desired. In side-by-side tests with my $699 Apple Watch Ultra 2, the TicWatch broadly kept up with heart rate measurements including changes to my pulse. In a 1km test walk, the TicWatch slightly over-egged the distance, giving me 1km when I’d only walked 956m, with a slightly ambitious GPS route that artificially inflated the distance. However, that’s not a massive margin of error, and the Atlas clocked my average heart rate at 89bpm compared to the Apple Watch’s 90, and calories burned at 58 vs Apple Watch’s 60. For almost everyone that’s a perfectly acceptable margin of error, and an impressive set of results. In fact, I was surprised that workout summaries and metrics generally felt more comprehensive than with the Apple Watch and iOS, with step count, VO2 max, average speed, and workout zones served up in addition to Apple’s data offering.

(Image credit: Future)

The only suspect reading I’ve found on the Atlas is blood oxygen, with a couple of erratic readings suggesting that my level was changing quite rapidly to as low as 92% percent and as high as 100%. It seems to have evened out over time, but I’ve wondered if the TicWatch has been giving me readings even when it wasn’t quite able to. On other occasions, however, it matched the Apple Watch in more controlled conditions. Given that this measurement relies heavily on you being at rest and having your watch fitted properly, this could be an error, and it’s one I’m keeping an eye on with continued testing.

Metrics and results are delivered via the Mobvoi Health app, available on the Google Play Store. It’s certainly comprehensive and colorful, but the app’s design and interface aren’t enthralling. Still, it’s practical and easy to navigate.

The aforementioned TicMotion workout detection is impressive, as is the automatic sleep tracking, however, the Atlas’ party piece is definitely its battery life. The TicWatch Atlas is rated for 90 hours of use as a regular smartwatch, or an eye-watering 45 days using the ultra-low-power display. In three weeks of use, I’ve only had to charge it twice, and it easily clears three days of constant use on a single charge, including one workout a day. Charging speed is also impressive, and the standard included cable is good for 2 days of usage from just 30 minutes of charging. Otherwise, a full charge in my experience takes about 90 minutes, and TicWatch’s interface shows the battery charging in real-time to two decimal places for a reassuring sense of progress.

• Performance score: 4.5/5

TicWatch Atlas review: Scorecard TicWatch Atlas: Should I buy? Buy it if...

You want a rugged Wear OS fitness tracker

The TicWatch Atlas excels at fitness and health tracking and has a brilliant, rugged durability.

You want a stylish alternative to mainstream Android smartwatches

The TicWatch Atlas’ design stands out against Pixel Watch and Galaxy alternatives.

Don't buy it if...

You own an iPhone

The TicWatch Atlas is an Android-only smartwatch.

You want Wear OS 5

The TicWatch Atlas doesn’t currently support the latest Android wearable software.

TicWatch Atlas: How we tested

I used the TicWatch Atlas for almost three weeks as my main smartwatch. It was connected to a Samsung S21 Ultra, on which I tested the Mobvoi Health app and connectivity. I used the watch to track my sleeping, as well as multiple strength and running workouts. I also conducted controlled testing to directly compare metrics to the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and the Series 10, including a 1km test walk to measure the accuracy of heart rate and calorie tracking.

TicWatch Atlas: Also consider

Samsung Galaxy Watch 7

One of the best Wear OS 5 watches on the market right now, packed with fitness tracking and health features, solid battery life, and more.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 review

Garmin Forerunner 265

With its brilliant OLED screen, comprehensive fitness tracking, and great battery life, the Garmin Forerunner 265 is a great alternative for runners, although slightly more expensive.

Read our full Garmin Forerunner 265 review

First reviewed: November 2024

Ninja Thirsti Max: one-minute review

Reduce the use of single-use bottles and cans by making your own carbonated beverages at home with the Ninja Thirsti Max. With a touch of the CO2 button, you can add a low, medium, or high level of carbonation for fizzy drinks or you can skip the carbonation entirely for a still beverage.

The Ninja Thirsti Max comes with four bottles of Flavored Drops, which you'll need if you want to make anything besides plain seltzer water. Ninja makes a variety of these flavor drops in different categories: Zero Soda, Seltzer, Fruiti Chill (electrolytes or B vitamins), and Fruiti Chill+ (with caffeine). You can also adjust the amount of flavoring that goes into your drink, either low or high. The machine holds two flavor drop bottles at once, so you can combine the flavors into one drink, proportioned the way you like. You can make four different drink sizes: 6oz, 12oz, 18oz, or one liter.

With some experimentation, I found the fizz and flavor level I liked best. I tested out eight different flavors, at least one from each category. I liked some flavors better than others, but overall the drinks were tasty. The flavored seltzer drops are unsweetened, similar to a La Croix or other sparkling water. All of the other flavor drops are sweetened with the artificial sweetener sucralose.

Ninja Thirsti Max: price and availability

• List price: $169.99 (about £132 / AU$259)

The Ninja Thirsti Max is available at all the major retailers you'd expect, both in brick and mortar stores and online. The price includes a CO2 tank and four bottles of Ninja Flavored Drops. If you order directly from Ninja's website, you can select the exact flavors you'd like, otherwise you get four pre-selected flavors in the box.

The Flavored Drops retail for $6.99 (£5.43 / AU$10.64) apiece. Each bottle yields 17-20 12oz beverages. The 60L CO2 tank runs $36.99 (£28.76 / AU$56.34), but you can save 30% by recycling your spent tank each time. Each canister should carbonate about 100 12oz drinks, depending on how carbonated you like your beverages.

• Value score: 4.5/5

Ninja Thirsti Max: specifications Ninja Thirsti Max: design and features

• Easy to use
• Choose your fizz and flavor intensity
• Choose your beverage size

The Ninja Thirsti Max is a nice neutral matte metallic gray that will probably look at home with nearly any kitchen decor. It's not a tiny machine, but it's reasonably-sized for what it does. Setting up the Ninja Thirsti Max is easy and takes just a couple of minutes. Plug it in, insert the CO2 tank, fill the water tank, attach the drink tray, place your Flavored Drops into their slots, and you're ready to go.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

The 60L CO2 tank is neatly hidden behind a door in the back, so once it's installed you don't notice it.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

The water tank also happens to have a 60L capacity. Ninja recommends that you use either very cold water or water plus ice in order to maximize your carbonation and taste. The water tank has a plunger so you can quickly chill your ice water by pressing it up and down a few times.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

The height of the drink tray can be adjusted depending on the size of the cup or glass you're filling. It can also be removed if you're using an extra large cup.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

• Design score: 4.5/5

Ninja Thirsti Max: performance

The Ninja Thirsti Max works exactly as Ninja describes. Once you have set up the machine, choose the flavor intensity you want from each Flavored drop bottle: none, low, or high. Choose your beverage size: 6oz, 12oz, 18oz, or 1L. Choose your carbonation level: none, low, medium, or high. Place your cup under the nozzle and press start. The Ninja Thirsti Max will beep when your drink is ready.

Ninja recommends using ice water or very cold water in the water tank, and I agree that you get a better result if you do that. I'd also recommend emptying the water tank and adding fresh water once a day or each time the ice melts, otherwise your drink can have a stale 'melted ice' flavor.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

The real limitation of the Ninja Thirsti Max is the Flavored Drops. There are currently more than two dozen zero sugar flavors with more on the way. The seltzer flavor drops are unsweetened, but all of the other flavors are sweetened with sucralose, the artificial sweetener found in Splenda. There are no flavors with sugar or any other sweeteners in the lineup as of this writing.

I tried all of the Flavored Drops that Ninja sent me to test. There were four soda flavors: root beer, orange, cola, and Dr Thirsti. I also received a lemonade with added vitamins, strawberry kiwi electrolyte beverage, peach mango energy drink, and unsweetened black cherry seltzer.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

The sodas are new to the Ninja Thirsti lineup. They all tasted pretty much like the diet sodas they are intended to replicate. However, the cola and Dr Thirsti flavors wouldn't fool you into thinking they are Diet Coke or Diet Dr Pepper in a blind taste test.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

Ninja has changed the labeling on their original Flavored Drops, and I got both some of the old and the new. 'Hydrate' and 'Vitamins' became 'Fruiti Chill', 'Energy' became 'Fruiti Chill+', and what was called "Splash" is now "Seltzer."

All of the ones I tried were pretty tasty, once I got the right flavor intensity and level of fizz for my taste. All of the carbonation levels were sufficient, but I liked the highest level the best. I find I generally prefer a low level of flavor intensity since the higher level tended to be quite sweet, but your tastes may vary. In some cases, I even added extra plain seltzer to cut the sweetness a bit.

It's important to note that I do use sucralose in my everyday life, so I'm used to the way it tastes and I'm fine with it. If you don't, you might not enjoy it.

(Image credit: Karen Freeman / Future)

Of course, the seltzer flavor drops are not sweetened at all, and making sparkling water might be some people's main reason for buying the machine. I'm a big sparkling water drinker, and lugging home multi-packs of canned water is a hassle. I found the Ninja Thirsti black cherry seltzer to be comparable in both fizz and flavor to popular canned sparkling waters like La Croix, Polar, Waterloo, and others.

Keep in mind, there is nothing stopping you from making plain seltzer in the Ninja Thirsti Max and adding whatever you like to it. I tried adding a favorite powdered drink mix to the plain seltzer I made and that was great. You could also try adding fruit juice or even wine for a sort of spritzer beverage. You can always add flavor drops from any other brands.

• Performance score: 4/5

Should you buy the Ninja Thirsti Max? Buy it if

You love carbonated beverages

Whether it's soda, sparkling water, energy drinks, or vitamin drinks, you'll likely enjoy the convenience of making your own carbonated beverages at home.

You want to reduce your use of single-use containers

Rather than buying carbonated beverages in disposable cans and bottles, you can make your own at home and take it with you in any reusable container.

You like sucralose-sweetened sugar-free drinks and/or unsweetened seltzers

All of the Ninja Thirsti sweetened flavor drops contain sucralose, as many diet beverages on the market do. The seltzer flavor drops contain no sweeteners.

Don't buy it if

You don't like carbonated drinks

Technically, you can make non-carbonated drinks in the Ninja Thirsti Max, but what would be the point? I guess if you really like those Ninja flavor drops but not the fizz, go for it.

You don't like any of the Ninja Thirsti flavor drops

You can just make plain seltzer and add anything you like to it, but if none of the Thirsti's flavor drops sound appealing, it's probably not worth buying this particular machine.

You lack counter space

While this isn't a huge appliance, if counter space is particularly limited, it might be a deal-breaker for you.

Ninja Thirsti Max: also consider

If you're not sure about the Ninja Thirsti Max, here are some other options to consider...

SodaStream Spirit One Touch

The obvious competitor to the Ninja Thirsti Max is the slighter cheaper and smaller SodaStream. Unlike the Thirsti, it doesn't add the flavors directly, it just carbonates your water. Any flavorings are added after the fact.

Read our full review here.

Breville the InFizz Fusion

This gorgeous machine is a bit more expensive than the Ninja Thirsti Max, but it carbonates any and all of your favorite cold beverages.

Read our full review here.

How I tested the Ninja Thirsti Max

• I tasted a variety of beverages
• I tried different carbonation levels and different flavor intensities
• I made plain seltzer and added my own drink mix

I've been drinking lots and lots of fizzy drinks over the past couple of weeks. I tried all eight of the flavors that Ninja sent me, plus I tried adding my own drink mix to plain seltzer. I tried different fizz levels and different flavor intensities. Personally I liked the lower flavor setting, as the higher flavor setting yielded too sweet of a beverage for my taste. All of the fizz settings were really fine, but I kept it set to maximum carbonation for the longest lasting bubbles. I tried mixing some of the flavors together, though I didn't find a combination that I really loved. Everyone's tastes are different, though.

Read more about how we test.

First reviewed November 2024

Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max: two-minute review

The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is a simple-to-use and space-saving air purifier. It’s available from Amazon in the US and the UK at a list price of $69.99 / £79. It’s far from the most high-tech air purifier on the market but it seems to do a good job of purifying the air, despite its lack of bells and whistles and low price point.

Replacement Particle and Carbon filters are cheap, costing $21.99 / £18, and should theoretically last a long period, with BlueAir stating that they can last up to six months of 24-hour use. There are other filter options available, namely Allergenblock and Smokeblock, which offer more tailored protection.

An ideal air purifier for desktop or nightstand use, the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max measures only 11.4 x 6.8 x 5.9 inches / ‎172 x 172 x 289mm and is impressively lightweight. The reason behind this portable purifier weighing so little is down to the lack of protective casing over the filter itself. The colored fabric covering doubles as a washable pre-filter over the filter, and other than some structural plastic on the inside, that’s all the base consists of.

(Image credit: Future)

It’s possible to purchase further pre-filter coverings, and they’re available in a range of different colors, which is always a bonus for me. While this design is innovative and sustainability-conscious, it does mean that the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max could be at higher risk of damage than heavier plastic-covered alternatives.

The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is as low on features as it is in price, but that’s fair enough. It has no automated fan settings or particle detection, just three fan speeds that can be cycled through via the fan touch button on the top of the purifier. It is helpful enough to monitor the condition of the filter, however, showing a yellow indicator when the filter is due to be changed soon, and red when it needs changing.

The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max was a breeze to set up and operate. The touch buttons were responsive and the air purifier reacted quickly upon switching settings. Even though the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max lacked any kind of contamination indicators, the change in air quality was noticeable when the purifier was in operation. It had a surprising cooling effect on the surrounding environment, but as I was using it on a chilly November morning in the south of England, I consider this to be an indicator of how well the Blue Pure Mini Max was circulating the air.

(Image credit: Future)

In terms of volume level, the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max operated very quietly on the lowest fan speed, so it was no problem sleeping or working next to it. The two higher settings are more noticeable, but still at a satisfyingly low volume, with the top speed giving me a reading of just 47 dB.

Overall, you’re getting what you pay for with the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max. The price for the air purifier is great, and the filters are good value, especially considering their longevity and the cost savings from the filter subscription plan available in the US currently.

In closing, I was pleasantly surprised by the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max. I didn’t expect to be impressed due to this mini air purifier's low price point and lack of features, but the ease of use, good performance, and innovative design really won me over, and could see it sneaking its way into our selection of the best air purifiers before too long.

Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max review: price & availability

• List price: $69.99 / £79
• Available now in the US and UK

The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is a simple, desktop-sized, small-room air purifier that’s available in the US, and UK at Amazon for $69.99 / £79.

One element that often has the potential to catch people out is the cost of replacement filters compared to the initial cost of an air purifier itself. I’m pleased to say this isn’t the case with the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max, as replacement Blueair Particle and Carbon filters cost just $21.99 / £18, which is particularly good considering the filters can last up to six months, even when used 24 hours a day. This cost can be brought down further still with Blueair's filter replacement subscription, but at the time of writing the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max and associated filters are only showing up on the Blueair website, so we’ll have to wait for them to become available on the official site to take advantage of this offer in the UK.

There are other filter types available too: the Allergenblock filter, designed to reduce our exposure to dust allergens, pollen, and pet dander, and the Smokeblock filter, with double the activated carbon intended to remove wildfire smoke, plus heightened protection against other wildfire emissions.

• Value for money score: 4.5 out of 5

Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max review: specs Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max review: design and features

• No display
• Long-lasting filters
• Machine-washable fabric pre-filter

This is a very simple example of an air purifier, with no app support, visual display, or automatic detection – but at this price point, it’d be unfair to expect much more. The fact that the low-cost filters can last up to six months when running for 24 hours a day is certainly an attractive feature, and one thing the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max can monitor is the filter life, displaying a yellow light on the top of the unit to indicate that the filter will need changing soon, turning red when it actually does.

The outer fabric looks nice from a distance, but the finish gives away the budget cost of the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max; the fabric is a little loose, and the seam is wiggly and uneven, bulging out where it goes over the tan leather effect Blueair tag. The reason for this looseness becomes apparent as it’s not simply an aesthetic covering; it’s designed to be a washable fabric pre-filter.

(Image credit: Future)

I’ve never seen a design quite like this, as most air purifiers have plastic casing to protect the inner filters whereas the body of the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is simply some structural plastic sitting within the particle and carbon filter, covered in the washable pre-filter. This goes to explain its very light weight of 2.5 lb / 3.4kg but could make it vulnerable to damage.

Despite its minor flaws, it’s a nice touch that Blueair made the pre-filter part of the overall aesthetic, which has meant less material and wasted plastic, which we’re always happy to see at TechRadar. It’s also an advantage that they are machine washable and extras can be purchased in a range of colors, just in case you don’t want to wait for one to dry, or want to switch things up occasionally.

Not only is it delightfully light, it’s dinky in size, too. Measuring just 11.4 x 6.8 x 5.9 inches / ‎172 x 172 x 289mm. This cylindrical 360-degree design enables the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max to be placed in a variety of spaces, as there’s plenty of opportunity for it to pull air in.

(Image credit: Future)

There is no display panel on the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max, with only a power button, a fan button, a filter indicator light, and three fan speed indicator lights on the top of the air purifier. The fixed power cable extends out of the lower portion of the white plastic top section of the purifier. I found this placement odd at first but, of course, as the base is simply composed of the filters and plastic frame, this was the only logical place to put it.

There’s not much to dislike about the aesthetic of the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max. The finish along the seam of the fabric pre-filter could be better, and the cable placement looks a little unusual, but all things considered, it lives up to its name. It's satisfyingly small and lightweight, making it a perfect option for anyone wanting to relocate their purifier regularly, or for those who struggle with maneuvering things.

• Design score: 4 out of 5

Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max review: performance

• No display or smart features
• Operated quietly
• Easy to use

The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max proved easy to set up and operate. It was essentially just a case of removing the packaging and plugging the air purifier in, job done. The touch buttons were responsive, so it was quick to turn the purifier on and off and to cycle between fan speeds. The reaction speed was satisfyingly quick when changing between fan settings, whereas some purifiers take time to slow down, even when quickly cycling past the highest setting to get back to the lowest.

Despite the lack of air quality data to review, the Blue Pure Mini Max made the air around me feel fresher quickly upon first use when running it at fan speed 2. It had quite the cooling effect straight off the bat, which I’ve not encountered with other air purifiers, with cold air blowing quite strongly through the air vents at the top of the unit. This suggested to me that the air was circulating well, but after a while, on a grey November morning in the South West of England, it made the room uncomfortably cold, so that’s worth bearing in mind if you plan to use your air purifier in the winter.

(Image credit: Future)

In a 13 x 16 ft / 4 x 5 meter room, the sound of the air purifier is noticeable when on its second speed setting if there’s no other sound to drown it out. The pitch of the noise is interesting: it reminded me of the sound of a blowtorch, which is ironic considering it was cooling the room down. Blueair claims that their lowest fan speed is quieter than a whisper, and while I didn’t get a reading as low as they’ve stated, it was pretty darn quiet at 26 dB. It was barely audible to me from around four feet away. If I listened hard, I could hear a low humming, but it didn’t prove disruptive in the slightest when I was trying to sleep or working away at my desk.

Naturally, the higher fan speeds were louder, with fan speed 2 giving a reading of 35 dB, and speed 3, the highest setting, giving a reading of 47 dB. This was of course much more noticeable and made my cats a little wary at first, but compared to other air purifiers, such as the Molekule Air Mini+ whose lowest fan speed was 39 dB, it’s satisfyingly quiet.

As with other low-priced air purifiers I’ve tested, the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max couldn’t remove cooking smells. It did have some impact on the intensity, however, as I noticed that the cooking odor got a little stronger once I’d switched the purifier off, so I was pleased that it managed to make a small impact at least.

Overall, using the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max was a pleasant experience. It was small enough and light enough that I could find a space for it in every room, and it worked at a low enough volume that it wasn’t distracting.

• Performance score: 4.5 out of 5

Should I buy the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max? Buy it if...

You want multiple air purifiers without breaking the bank
The Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max works hard despite its small stature, and its low cost means that it isn’t above the realm of possibility to purchase more than one so that you can enjoy its effects in multiple spaces.

You want a lightweight air purifier you can relocate with ease
Due to this purifier’s petite size, and the base consisting of a lightweight frame, the filter, and the pre-filter, the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is gloriously easy to pick up and carry.

You want some peace and quiet
The sound of the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max is barely audible when on the lowest setting, making it a perfect nighttime purifying companion. Naturally, it is much more noticeable at higher speeds, but it’s still much quieter compared to other small purifiers I’ve tested.

Don't buy it if...

You want automated purifying
A budget price means basic features, and so this air purifier lacks particle detection. This means it can’t be left to its own devices and settings must be adjusted manually for it to clear the surrounding air efficiently.

You want something robust
It’s certainly a big pro that this air purifier is light and doesn’t possess a load of excess materials, however, the internal filters aren’t the most robust and are only covered by a layer of fabric. On the plus side, though, at least the filters are replaceable.

You want a display
There’s no display or companion app with this low-cost air purifier. There are no settings to alter other than the fan speeds and, as expected, without particle detection there is no contamination data to review, either.

Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max review: Also consider

Levoit Core 300S Smart True HEPA
It’s double the cost, but it features an insightful and intuitive companion app, and it performed well during testing. It’s larger than the Blueair purifier but has the added benefit of automatic detection and an LED touch display. If you want to learn more, why not check out our full Levoit Core 300S True HEPA air purifier review.

Molekule Air Mini+
A much more premium option for those who value a higher quality of materials and extra bacteria-busting technology. Its communication wasn’t ideal, and so although it is smart and has a companion app, it isn’t always reliable, but used manually it has some great purification features that might take your interest. To learn more about its medical-grade credentials, you can find out more in our Molekule Air Mini+ review.

How I tested the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max

• I used the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max for one week
• I tested how much of an impact it had on the surrounding air quality
• I tested its ability to tackle cooking smells

I checked how easy was to get the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max set up, how easy it was to operate, and how portable it was.

I tested it in different rooms in my home, and observed how quiet it was at night time and whether it disturbed my sleep.

I assessed its design and structure, paying close attention to quality and any sustainable elements.

I reviewed the impact it had on the air quality in my environment, and how well it handled cooking smells.

• First reviewed: November 2024
• Read TechRadar's Reviews Guarantee

Q Acoustics 3020c: Two-minute review

The Q Acoustics 3020c is one design in a five-strong range of (relatively) affordable new speakers from the British brand's 3000c series. Four different finishes are available, and no matter which one you prefer it will do justice to a braced, elegantly curved cabinet that’s just slightly longer than it is tall. Satin nickel driver surrounds behind magnetically attached grilles only add to the impression of a thoughtful and quite upmarket design.

A driver array consisting of a 22mm soft dome tweeter that’s decoupled from the main speaker baffle is bolstered by a rear-facing bass reflex port. Sat below is a 120mm mid/bass driver of the ‘continuous curved cone’ design that Q Acoustics first introduced in a far more expensive range of passive loudspeakers than this one. Claimed frequency response of 60Hz - 30kHz is the result and, if accurate, should be more than adequate for people who don’t prioritize ‘bass, and plenty of it’ over everything else. As well as the reflex port, the rear panel also features a single pair of extremely low-profile cable binding posts.

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

In action, the Q Acoustics 3020c prove a forthright, detailed and surprisingly assertive listen. No matter the type of music you listen to, and no matter its source, they sink their teeth in and let it know who’s boss immediately. Detail levels are high, drive and attack is plentiful, and both the tonal balance and the integration of the frequency range are completely convincing. Their stereo focus is impressive, their soundstaging abilities even more so, and the sort of momentum and urgency with which they can imbue a recording is always striking.

They’re not the heftiest speaker this sort of money can buy, it’s true – the low-frequency stuff they generate is taut and straight-edged, but could conceivably be punchier. And when it comes to dynamic expression, there’s a slight lack of headroom apparent. Because their default position is to be reasonably intense to start with, any changes in intensity are necessarily inhibited – just a touch, to be fair, but it’s a trait nevertheless.

Neither of these things prevent the Q Acoustics 3020c being a thoroughly enjoyable and quite invigorating listen, though, which warrants entry to our best stereo speakers roundup. Anyone with this sort of money for a speaker of this sort of size needs to hear them.

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas) Q Acoustics 3020c review: Price & release date

• Released August, 2024
• Priced $499 / £399 / AU$899

The Q Acoustics 3020c are on sale now, and in the United States they sell for $499 per pair. In the United Kingdom, they go for £399, while in Australia you’re looking at AU$899.

It’s an eye-catching price, for sure, and exciting when you remember just how much excellence Q Acoustics has demonstrated at the loudspeaker entry level. But competition is fierce: from Dali and Elac to KEF and JBL, there are numerous well-regarded alternatives – and they're far from alone...

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas) Q Acoustics 3020c review: Features

• 120mm mid/bass driver
• 22mm decoupled soft dome tweeter
• 60Hz - 30kHz frequency response

Like most passive loudspeakers, the Q Acoustics 3020c aren’t exactly overburdened with features. A couple of drive units, a helpfully positioned bass reflex port and some speaker binding posts are about all that can be expected – and sure enough, that’s about all the 3020c have.

Mind you, this being Q Acoustics those features are thoroughly implemented and entirely fit for purpose. The 22mm soft dome tweeter, for instance, is hermetically sealed and mechanically isolated from the baffle from which it protrudes. To all intents and purposes it’s floating, which prevents pressure modulations both from the energy it’s producing and from the mid/bass driver beneath it. The chamber it sits in is vented in an effort to minimize distortion, and has a lower-than-usual crossover point in order to make integration with the mid/bass driver as smooth as possible.

The mid/bass driver itself is a 120mm design of the ‘continuous curved cone’ type Q Acoustics first introduced on much more expensive loudspeakers than this one. Its continuous curve profile offers well-controlled frequency response, enhanced low-frequency dynamics and excellent dispersion characteristics – Q Acoustics suggests it offers the bass performance of a more common conic design with the midrange control of a flared cone design. The best of both worlds, in other words.

There’s a modestly sized bass reflex port venting from the rear of the cabinet, just above a single pair of extremely low-profile cable binding posts – Q Acoustics provides port bungs to help ensure the 3020c’s low-frequency activity is appropriate no matter where in your room they end up being positioned. The arrangement is good for a frequency response of 60Hz - 30kHz, according to the manufacturer, and with nominal impedance of six ohms and sensitivity of 87dB, the 3020c shouldn’t be any kind of problem for an amplifier to drive.

• Features score: 5/5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas) Q Acoustics 3020c review: Sound quality

• Positive, upfront and informative sound
• Impressive powers of resolution
• Not as out-and-out punchy or dynamic as they might be

Sit up straight and pay attention – that seems to be the 3020c's attitude when it comes to sound. This is an assertive and direct pair of loudspeakers, and while it has a range of talents to reveal, what’s most immediate about the 3020c is, well, just how immediate it is.

Once through a copy of Fela Kuti’s Water No Get Enemy makes the point in unequivocal fashion. There’s plenty of harmonic dynamism on display, a really impressive amount of detail retrieved at every turn, but it’s the sheer bite and attack of the recording, the blare and the stridency, that the Q Acoustics really zero in on. This kind of positivity could, if imperfectly deployed, seem like raucousness – here it’s more a kind of urgency. Music-making is a serious business, according to the 3020c, and there’s really no time to pussyfoot.

If this makes the Q Acoustics sound in any way uncouth, be assured that’s not the case. Their tonality is judged nicely – they’re a neutral and uncolored listen, from the top of the frequency range to the bottom. The integration of the two drivers is smooth, the contributions of the bass reflex port are careful, and the inputs of each area of the frequency range are properly balanced and entirely convincing. Details both broad and fine are confidently identified and contextualized throughout, and the minutiae of tone and texture is readily available as a result.

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas)

The soundstage the 3020c can create is large and properly organized, and there’s great stereo focus even when a recording is as packed with contributors as Fela Kuti’s. Switching to something on a much smaller scale – Anastasia Coope’s Woke Up and No Feet, for instance – allows the Q Acoustics to demonstrate how adept they are at opening up a recording and making each element available. That's even if, as with this recording, it’s lo-fi and lacking in separation in the first place.

The lower frequencies aren’t the meatiest you ever heard from a pair of speakers at this sort of money, it’s true, but there’s no arguing with how well controlled they are. There’s an almost martial observation of bass attack and decay, and the result is a spring-heeled approach to rhythmic expression that keeps momentum levels high and means music really drives along. If that’s the trade-off for a slight lack of outright punch and substance, it seems fair enough to me.

What’s just a touch less easy to accommodate is a slight lack of dynamic potency. It’s not as if the 3020c ignore changes in volume or intensity during the course of a recording, but they don’t breathe quite as deeply as some alternative designs when it comes to making these shifts completely obvious. They’re direct and attacking by default, and it seems this doesn’t leave them quite as much room for manoeuvre as is absolutely ideal. In isolation it’s a shortcoming that almost doesn’t register, but when you’re competing in an arena as fierce as these Q Acoustics are, even the mildest weaknesses get pounced upon.

• Sound quality score: 4.5/5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas) Q Acoustics 3020c review: Design

• 279 x 175 x 281mm (HxWxD)
• 5.5kg
• Choice of four finishes

The 3020c are not the first Q Acoustics loudspeakers to be longer than they are tall – but just because it’s a familiar design trope that’s based on sound engineering principles, that doesn’t make it seem anything less than slightly strange. It certainly rules out the possibility of positioning the 3020c on a regular shelf-sized shelf, and it means there will be significant overhang when positioned on a speaker stand with an ordinary top plate.

Where build and finish are concerned, we’re on equally familiar Q Acoustics ground, which is an uncomplicatedly good thing. The curved cabinet corners look good, the satin nickel driver trim gives a premium impression (as well as being a magnet for fingerprints) and the vinyl wrap covering the MDF cabinet is flawlessly applied. The outside is available in satin black, satin white or walnut as well as the oak of my review sample, while the inside features the point-to-point bracing the company has been perfecting for some time now.

There’s a final design flourish in the use of magnetically attached grilles. Not only do they cover slightly less than the entirety of the front baffle (leaving the casual ‘Q’ logo exposed), but they don’t require any visible fixings – the baffle looks unsullied when the grilles are removed.

• Design score: 4.5/5

(Image credit: Future / Simon Lucas) Q Acoustics 3020c review: Setup and usability

• Position the speakers securely on a shelf or stand…
• Attach speaker cable using plugs or bare wire…
• ... And away you go

Just as with ‘features’, there’s really not a lot involved in the set-up or subsequent usability of passive loudspeakers. It’s really not rocket science, and it shouldn’t take long before you’re up and running.

So, you’ll need to position your speakers securely – they are supplied with little rubber feet in order to decouple them from the surface on which they stand. Ideally, you’ll be further from them than they are from each other when you’re listening, and ideally they’ll be ‘toed in’ just a little towards you. You’ll need to attach them to your amplifier using half-decent speaker cable.

After that, it’s just a question of putting some music on and letting them do their thing…

• Setup and usability score: 5/5

Q Acoustics 3020c review: Value

It’s hard to suggest the Q Acoustics 3020c don’t represent value for money. Even in terms of the amount of stuff your $499 / £399 / AUS$899 buys, they’re impressive – these are reasonably big cabinets by prevailing standards, build quality is impeccable and the standard of finish is top-tier, too.

And when it comes to sound quality, the 3020c – while being a quite specific flavor – have a whole stack of talents that will keep you listening long after you should have stopped and started doing something else.

It’s really only those listeners who want to be able to hear the low-frequency stuff from another room who might disagree.

• Value score: 4.5/5

Should you buy the Q Acoustics 3020c? Buy them if...

You’re after a vigorous, direct and detailed sound
They just about stop short of grabbing you by the lapels, but the 3020c are a positive and quite attacking listen nevertheless

You admire a standard of build and finish that belies an asking price
Between cabinets that are braced on the inside and curved on the outside, flawlessly applied vinyl wrap and shiny ‘satin nickel’ driver surrounds, the 3020c look like a more expensive proposition than they actually are

You have deep shelves or big speaker stands
‘Longer than tall’ is always a slightly awkward look in a loudspeaker, and you’ll need an appropriately sized surface on which to position your Q Acoustics

Don't buy them if...

You crave low-frequency impact
The bass the Q Acoustics create is textured, tonally convincing and carefully controlled – but other designs hit harder

You haven’t checked your options
The 3020c are deeply competitive, but they’re by no means your only choice at this sort of money and you should investigate the whole of the market

You feel strongly about loudspeaker proportions
If you’re even slightly freaked out by loudspeakers that are longer than they are tall then you’re going to find the 3020c more than somewhat strange

Q Acoustics 3020c review: Also consider

The Elac Debut 3.0 DB63 have a rather ungainly model name, but at around $470 / £369 per pair they’re cracking value for money. Not as visually sleek as the 3020c if you ask me, but they have the all-around sonic talent to really take the fight to the Q Acoustics.

How I tested the Q Acoustics 3020c

• Connected to a Naim Uniti Star and a Cambridge Audio EXA100
• Connected using QED XT speaker cable
• Playing a wide variety of music from a number of different sources

During my time with the 3020c the only amplification to hand was, to be absolutely honest, somewhat overspecified. But by the same token I know the way they sound pretty well, so was perfectly comfortable hooking the Q Acoustics to both the Cambridge Audio and the Naim devices using a QED speaker cable that falls just as readily into the ‘overkill’ category.

I listened to vinyl records, CDs and music streamed from Tidal in the course of the test – of all styles and types.

First reviewed: November 2024

Read more about how we test at TechRadar

The Uniformation GK3 Ultra has been a much-anticipated printer and follows on from the hugely popular GK2, just on a larger scale. Rather than an update to their other model, the GK3 is larger, boosts the screen resolution and adds features that help to improve workflows, something that will be of special interest to anyone wanting to use this machine professionally. 

Rather than just hitting us with one headline feature, the GK3 boasts three major updates, the first and most obvious being the scale, with this machine overshadowing many other resin printers out there and offering a print build area that is close to that of a standard filament printer. However, it also offers outstanding 16K resolution, and it's only once you start printing that you can see just what this means in reality with prints that show finer detail than anything we've so far seen at this price. While the resolution is impressive, when that resolution is coupled with a build area of up to 300 x 160 x 300 mm, you can start to see the potential for modellers as well as product design.

Then there's the auto-resin refill system, which is simple in design but helps to ensure that you don't run out of resin during some of those huge prints. What's more, the chamber is now heated to help to ensure that the resin is at the best temperature for printing, again ensuring the best possible quality,

Considering the price of the GK3 Ultra, this is one of the best 3D printers I've tested, appealing to hobbyists as well as professionals who need a machine that offers precision and reliability. 

Uniformation GK3 Ultra: Design

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

At 30 kg and measuring 455 x 400 x 575mm, there's nothing small or lightweight about the GK3 Ultra, and while that may seem big, you also have to factor in the flip-up lid, further increasing the height of the machine. However, if you're investing in the GK3, then the size really should be familiar, and neither should the weight. This is a machine that, once positioned, should have a permanent home, especially when you consider that much the same space is needed for the wash and cure machines.

When it comes to the construction of the GK3, the main frame is sleek and industrial, with a large hinged lid that provides easy access to the print area and helps prevent unwanted exposure to UV light. Our test review unit has gone through something of a transformation during the duration of the test, with slight tweaks having been made to the lid, which has transformed with several iterations arriving that have refined the design and function. All of the changes have been based on user feedback, and they make a huge difference.

The flip-over lid is a great idea and gives you access to the build area, which is substantial, as is the tank at the base that can hold up to 1.2 kg of resin. Uniformation has really looked at the mechanics of the build area, which is a point of the design that can so often be a weak point for resin 3D printers. 

While they haven't done anything groundbreaking, there are several points here that do improve the usability, such as the quick release for the resin tank and build platform. This means that both can be quickly removed, cleaned, and replaced as needed. 

The resin tank features the usual transparent film at the base, and this is held in place by a selection of screws. As is common, the procedure for changing films involves unscrewing two layers of screws in order to remove and replace the film, and as ever, this isn't a quick process, taking between 15 and 30 minutes from start to finish.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

While the tank is huge, with one of the largest capacities for resin that we have seen, it also features an auto-fill option. The design of this is simple with a refillable resin cartridge, which can be dropped into the back of the machine, and then, as the resin label drops, the machine releases more resin. Through the test, this worked incredibly well, with some prints taking a good kg of resin to complete, and the fact that you can have that quantity of resin in the system is a huge benefit.

On the front of the machine is the 5-inch capacitive touch display, which once again offers a nicely designed and intuitive interface that enables you to select prints as well as run through general maintenance tasks.

One other point about the design is that the build chamber is heated, which just helps to ensure that the resin is kept at the optimum temperature for printing—this is especially important if the machine is kept in a workshop where the ambient temperature can't always be maintained.

Uniformation GK3 Ultra: Features

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

The Uniformation GK3 Ultra is packed with features that set it apart from other resin 3D printers as, really, at present, there's nothing else in this price range or size that can compete. At the core of the machine is the high-resolution 16K LCD screen; we've seen this high resolution recently, including, but most top out at 14K, so instantly, the GK3 takes the possible quality of prints up a notch. This screen offers a resolution of 15120x6230 pixels and an XY layer height of between 0.03mm-0.05mm. 

When we looked at the GK2, we were impressed by the size, but when printing at a larger scale, having to fill the resin tank manually feels a little primitive. With the new GK3, this resin tank is auto-filled fill, and you place the resin cartridge, which holds 1 kg of resin each, into the back of the machine. Then, a sensor on the tank activates the release of the resin once needed. It's a very slick and neat system. When it comes to the actual size of the print area, it measures 300 x 160 x 300 mm, which should give you plenty of space for larger projects or bulk printing for small commercial print runs. 

With any printer FFF or resin, one of the biggest issues as the scale of the printers increases is the rigidity of the machine, a factor that can have a massive impact on the quality of the prints. It's good to see that Uniformation has addressed this with one of the most solidly built resin 3D printers out there with a weight of 30 kg, confirming that this is not lightweight. It also measures 455x400x575, so it is considerably larger than most. One other feature of the quality of the mechanical design is that the Z-axis features both dual linear rails and ball screws to offer smooth and accurate precision as the build plate rises through the height of the machine. 

Another key feature of this build area is the fact that the chamber is heated. We've already seen the difference that a heated chamber makes with other resin 3D printers, so this is an obvious step forward to ensure that the resin is at the optimum temperature required before the print process starts. The chamber also features a built-in air filtration system, which is an important addition for any resin 3D printer to stop the often strong smells of the resin leaking into the room.

Specs

Print Technology: MSLA (Masked Stereolithography)
Build Area: 300 x 160 x 300 mm
Minimum Layer Resolution: 0.03mm
Maximum Layer Resolution: 0.05mm
Dimensions: 455 x 400 x 575 mm
Weight: 30 kg
Bed: Heated chamber
Print Surface: Quick-release design
Software: Uniformation Slicer, Chitubox, Lychee
Materials: Resin
Print Speed: 2-3 seconds per layer

On the front of the machine is once again the large, clear 5-inch capacitive touchscreen that offers access to all the print settings and controls; it also enables you to pick up any prints sent wirelessly to the machine ready for printing. This connectivity is much the same as the GK2 and enables Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB options. However, the Wi-Fi setup is far easier than it was initially for the GK2, so any problems for anyone new to device networking shouldn't have an issue here.

When it comes to slicing, Uniformation provides its slicer, or you can use Chitubox or Lychee; we tested the machine on both Mac and PC systems, with the Uniformation Slicer being used on the PC while Lychee was used on the Mac. Both provide a huge number of options and settings, and they are able to wire transfer files to the machine.

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

There are a few other nice features around the design, such as the new quick-release design for both the build platform and resin tank, which makes it quick and easy to remove both without needing to undo bolts. In contrast, this style of quick release is common for build platforms, but it's less common for the resin tank and is a nice addition. Another nice touch is the resin drip hanger that enables the suspension of the build platform at an angle so all excess resin drips off. There are integrated LED lights and channels for resin drainage built into the build platform that helps avoid resin spilling into other parts of the system; all of the tweaks as the size increases to the design make a big difference over the GK2 (see our full review here).

Uniformation GK3 Ultra: Print quality

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

Getting started with the Uniformation GK3 Ultra is relatively quick once you've manoeuvred the machine into position. It's worth noting that at 30 kg, this machine is large, and while you can lift and position it relatively easily, having an extra pair of hands is definitely beneficial. It's checking that the work surface, or especially the desk that you're placing the printer on, is able to support that amount of weight. Once in position, the rest of the setup is straightforward, with the resin tank slotting and locking into place with the quick-release mechanism, a huge improvement over the usual bolt-down approach. Then, the build platform can be secured; again, this is quick release, and finally, the resin cartridge can be inserted into the back of the machine.

Next, with the power on, you can run through the usual setup process, and as our printer had yet to have the easiest trip to use, it went through a full calibration. When the box arrived damaged and the printer had quite obviously taken more than a knock or two, it was surprising that it had initially started at all. Still, the mechanics all seemed fine, and the machine was soon levelled, calibrated, and ready for action. 

Once the model was sent over from the Lychee slicer to the machine, the print process was started, with the tank filling automatically to the required level for the first print. The print process then started, and it's apparent that while the machine is large, it runs quietly. Also, the filter and heated chamber both appeared to do their jobs as the print started to rise from the resin. 

Print speeds for the first set of models were excellent and, again, surprising considering the size. Check over the first few character prints from the machine, and the quality really grasps you—while resin printers are good, the GK3 Ultra feels like a step up, and as the prints are washed and cured, the details that come through are outstanding. 

As we started with the printer, a few small prints were produced, slowly increasing the size and scale until we almost reached the print height of the machine. Again, when printing with this volume of resin, there is always the fear of running out; however, here, with over a kilo of resin used on a single print, that wasn't an issue, with the resin tank filled and with a full resin bottle loaded. This is one of only a few resin printers that you can happily leave to print at this scale over a 15-24 hour print. 

That was really one of the other surprising factors for the machine. While the scale of the prints is large, the print speeds are excellent, with full-sized and scaled prints developing in a relatively fast 24 hours. While this might not sound quick, the fact that it was able to print a model at this scale reliably and several times really marks this out as something different in the world of resin printing, especially at this price. 

When it came to the quality of the finish of the models, the resolution was superb, and the printer was able to handle fine details well. Checking over the prints that have been produced using some of the higher print settings and there are hardly any signs of layering and checking the dimension accuracy of the prints further highlights just how good this printer is. 

As a test, a production line of GoPro handlebar mounts was printed, and the quality across the board was excellent with no missed prints after five runs using the ABS-like resin. After each print, a tank cleaning exposure was run and peeled away to ensure that no debris had fallen into the tank; this cleaning process was carried out to help streamline the workflow, as changing a damaged sheet takes around 30 minutes. 

One of the first prints through the print process did drop support, and this fell into the resin tank. While that print was fine, we missed the fact that anything had dropped into the tank, which resulted in the film being pierced at the start of the next print. When the machine was stopped, the damage was apparent, and a new screen and tank film were installed. The screen protector was quick to install, with the old one peeling away so the new one could be stuck in place. The changing of the resin tank film, on the other hand, does take time, with a huge selection of screws needing to be removed before the new film can be put in place and tightened. So, using the cleaning function is a quick way to avoid any damage to the film or screen.

Overall, for a resin printer of this size, features such as the temperature-controlled chamber, quick-release build plate, and tank, along with the filter and touch screen, make using the GK3 Ultra incredibly easy. While there are other high-resolution and featured resin printers out there, the GK3 Ultra is easily the best at present in this size and price. If you want an accurate, fully featured resin printer for your business, then this is definitely the best value for money and quality at present. 

Uniformation GK3 Ultra: Final verdict

(Image credit: Alastair Jennings)

The Uniformation GK3 Ultra offers outstanding print quality and features that are designed to meet the needs of professionals and equally serious hobbyists. With its 16K resolution, auto-refill system, and large build area, it's a significant improvement over the already impressive GKTwo. 

The review of the GK3 Ultra has taken some time due to a few last minute tweaks and changes from the company, with each change improving the build quality, especially for the visor along with some of the other features. This is a substantial machine, and considering the price, it's a solid investment for anyone looking for a high quality machine for modelling, jewellery, or any other use where high precision and absolute quality are needed.

While the machine is able to print at huge sizes for a resin 3D printer—the ultimate test came when we printed the excellent Heracles and the Nemean Lion (https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-heracles-and-the-nemean-lion-presupported-395096) model courtesy of Nerikson (https://www.patreon.com/nerikson)—there is a version of this at full scale that can be printed in one, and while that would be beyond the capabilities of most resin 3D printers, the GK3 Ultra has the capacity to handle that with ease. However, printing it in parts highlights the accuracy, as high precision is needed so that each part slots together easily. While the detail of many resin printers is superb, accuracy isn't always carried across. So, not only were we able to print more parts of the model in a single print run, but those parts all slotted together easily.

Overall, this is an outstanding resin 3D printer, and considering the features, scale and price there really is nothing else on the market that can compete. 

Should You Buy the Uniformation GK3 Ultra?

We tested the best laser engravers- and these are the models we recommend.

Linxura Smart Controller: one-minute review

Smart switches are still a fairly burgeoning smart home technology, meaning it’s a rife space for creativity; enter the Linxura smart controller, a unique smart switch featuring an e-ink display and four-button clickable dial controls.

Slightly reminiscent of Apple’s iPod, the Linxura smart controller has a lot going for it, from its portability to its display and the small fact that it can be programmed with a whopping 52 individual devices across a range of smart home ecosystems and manufacturers. While these qualities do set it apart from many of the best smart switches available today, they aren’t without their drawbacks.

It works over 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, meaning there’s no added cost nor hassle from installing proprietary bridge or hub devices, and is compatible with Philips Hue, Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, Sonos, SmartThings and more, though there’s no HomeKit availability. However, not all pairings are made equal with Linxura; I had real difficulty setting up some, and others offer restricted toolsets.

It’s unique, and definitely useful for those who need a device that’s fairly ambivalent and offers a multitude of configurable commands, but ultimately it’s not possible to recommend the device unreservedly when the performance is so mixed depending on the ecosystem it’s paired with and the overall product quality when compared to its price.

(Image credit: Future) Linxura Smart Controller: price and availability

• List price: $99 / £80 (about AU$150)

The Linxura Smart Controller is fairly pricey for a smart switch at $99 / £80 (about AU$150) versus the average $50 / £40 / AU$80 price tag of its competition, though given that you can program so many devices you might be able to get by with just one Linxura device rather than four or five simpler smart switches.

It’s available in three different colorways; Snow Pearl (white), Midnight Onyx (black) and Sterling Moon (greige). There’s one accessory sold for the Linxura smart switch: a magnetic base plate, which costs $14.99 / £16 (about AU$25) and comes in the same colors.

• Value score: 2 out of 5

Linxura Smart Controller: design

Linxura’s smart controller is shaped like a rounded disc which can be attached to a wall-mounted magnetic base plate (sold separately) or carried around the home for easy access, making it a great option if you don’t want to use one of the best smart speakers to control your home but still want the semi-hands free smart home benefits.

The palm-sized dial is great for versatility and portability, but ultimately it looks slightly 80s sci-fi-inspired, which may or may not be the vibe you’re going for at home. Clad in all-plastic, the outer ring of the device is a clickable dial used to control the circular e-paper display it surrounds. It charges through a USB-C port placed on its bottom side, and attaches magnetically to the base plate.

(Image credit: Future)

The wheel isn’t quite as satisfying as Apple’s iPod despite their passing similarities, though I did delight in the little clicky sound as the wheel spins. To operate the dials, you need to press and hold and then turn the wheel, which led to some confusion when I first tried it. Otherwise, your options are to click and double click the wheel.

Because of the puck’s size, it’s not exactly discrete, and protrudes quite noticeably from the wall. Granted, in my home I affixed it with double-sided renter-friendly tape rather than the included screws, but even without the 2mm added by my tape, Linxura’s smart controller could do with being at least a little slimmer for a more contemporary, less obtrusive look.

(Image credit: Future)

The display shows four devices at once, and has thirteen pages you can flick through using the wheel - for all my criticisms of this smart switch, this is a huge boon, with many smart switches relying on stickers or tactile labelling to distinguish between buttons. In dim environments, a backlight will kick in, triggered by the in-built light and capacitive sensors; however, it’s uneven and cheapens the device further.

• Design score: 4 out of 5

Linxura Smart Controller: performance

To set up the Linxura smart controller, you’ll need to download the app and follow the instructions to pair; a fairly painless process to begin with. However, once paired, the switch is a bit of a hassle to set up.

It’s worth noting right off the bat that your Linxura experience will at least to some extent be characterized by the ecosystem you set it up in. For instance, on Alexa, it’s a bit of a nightmare, because the way it works is to register each combination of icon and action in the Alexa app as a unique ‘switch’ in your smart home.

That means for each of the 52 devices you can control with the Linxura smart controller, you’ll have to program the single click, double click, anti-clockwise wheel and clockwise wheel controls as separate triggers. If you’ve used Alexa-based automations before, you’ll know the suffering proposed by the necessity to manually configure over 200 triggers.

(Image credit: Future)

First-party software like the Philips Hue app work a lot more effectively, because once you’ve paired the two platforms you can configure everything directly in the Linxura app.

Furthermore, you get a very different experience in terms of the level of control between different platforms. When paired with Philips Hue’s platform directly, I could use the clockwise and anticlockwise dial spin to increase and reduce the brightness and color temperature by a set parameter; on Alexa, it just tuned the light to a set level.

Lag proved to be an issue, too, though during my testing seemed to fix itself. Using the Linxura to turn on my fan when I first began testing took anything from five to twenty seconds to trigger the response, though when I retested just before writing up my review it seemed to consistently change its settings within a few seconds.

(Image credit: Future)

However, I must say its portability did come in extremely useful, and I was impressed with its battery life. The advertised three months battery isn’t quite the case if it’s in regular use, but I found that with moderate use it lasted almost two months, and with frequent use just over a month. There are thoughtful inclusions like the ‘find my controller’ beeper in the app, and compared to display-less smart switches I’ve used in the past, the Linxura was far easier to use and remember which controls were bound to which action.

Conceptually, it’s a fantastic idea, and had it come out just a few years earlier I’m sure it would have scored more favorably. As it is, however, the Linxura feels too limited and too overpriced to compete with the best smart speakers and mobile apps it's up against.

• Performance score: 3.5 out of 5

Should you buy the Linxura Smart Controller? Buy it if

You want one controller to rule them all

If your priority is having one puck to operate all of your smart home devices, you’re in luck - the sprawling 52-device menu on the Linxura smart controller is unparalleled. View Deal

You want something portable

Linxura doesn’t need a constant power supply, and can comfortably last a month on a single charge with frequent use. View Deal

You use multiple platforms

With an ever-growing compatibility list, the Linxura offers control comparable to some major platforms across a wide range of ecosystems and manufacturers.View Deal

Don't buy it if

You value svelte design

It’s not ugly, but the puck-shaped Linxura has a distinctly dated feel to it, not aided by its e-paper display and cheaper build materialsView Deal

You're on a budget

Value for money isn’t the Linxura smart controller’s strong suit, and it’s an expensive choice of smart switch, coming in at almost double the cost of its competitors.View Deal

First tested November 2024

Metro Awakening is note quite for me. There’s definitely something here for the right kind of VR game fan; namely someone with a better connection to the Metro franchise (this is my first entry), who enjoys slow-burn stories with splashes of horror, and who can stand spiders. That’s just not me, unfortunately.

Review Info

Platform reviewed: Meta Quest 3
Available on: Meta Quest 3, Meta Quest 3S, Meta Quest 2, PSVR 2, Steam
Release date: November 7, 2024

I do enjoy some good ol’ survival horror, mind. Resident Evil 2, 4, 7, and 8 – including the Meta Quest Resident Evil 4 port – are among my favorite games of all time. The gameplay loop of facing your fears and exploring spooky environs to better face the dangers wandering those spaces is one I can’t get enough of, and in this regard, I think Metro Awakening does so much right.

Even the smaller beasts of the Moscow Metro feel intimidating, and there’s an inescapable tenseness to wandering the claustrophobic tunnels. Resources seem reasonably sparse to make management and stealthier approaches essential, but not so sparse that you feel like survival’s an impossible task – as long as you make every bullet count.

I also adore the game’s realistic weapons handling as it adds to the title’s overall terror; there’s nothing worse than hearing *bang* *bang* *click* as you realize you’re out of ammo as a monster charges you, and the only way to reload is to properly eject a cartridge, insert a new one and cock your firearm – simple enough except when you’re terrified. These moments wouldn't feel the same if your gun simply refilled its ammo at the push of a button.

That’s true for a lot of Metro Awakening’s interactive elements. There’s a realness to everything, including miscellaneous props you can find lying around, that makes this world feel fairly alive – which is fantastic for immersion.

Though these high-quality VR aspects are to be expected from Vertigo Games, the team behind Arizona Sunshine and its sequel – shining examples of the post-apocalyptic VR shooter.

Wandering through the dark

Set five years before Metro 2033 we play as Serdar, a doctor who is on a mission to rescue his wife Yana from the haunting voices of her traumatic past. On the quest, Serdar will discover the man he is destined to become: Khan, the mystic ally of the main series’ protagonist Artyom.

Best Bit

(Image credit: Vertigo Games)

While I wish it came sooner, that first jump scare into your first proper combat was an excellent inciting incident that instantly frightens you in a way you can't shake as you play further.

While the story is well written – creating an intriguing blend of sci-fi and folklore – things take too long to get going. The intro made me feel like I was stuck in an over-extended cutscene broken up by unnecessary exploration between exposition.

There were some moments of action – a big fight scene with a mounted machine gun – near the start but I didn’t feel like I was being immersed in the survival horror setting I was promised. When I finally was, the inciting jump scare gave me whiplash as things went from zero to 100 in an instant.

Fans of a slower burning story will likely enjoy this more gentle pace – perhaps even how it juxtaposes with the titles’ more action and terror-filled segments – but I unfortunately found the intro a slog and from this bad start, I failed to feel compelled by the story. The plot felt like a roadblock to the game I wanted to be playing rather than an integral part of it.

I also had issues with accessibility. We have a whole segment of our reviews dedicated to this aspect so I’ll save some for that but I found the smooth locomotion vignette entirely ineffective – so where I was able to play Arkham Shadow until my headset ran out of charge just fine I kept having to pause Metro Awakening every 20 to 30 minutes, or make do with teleportation movement.

(Image credit: Vertigo Games) A difficult journey

The last of my gripes is I did notice a few performance hiccups, particularly just after passing through a loading zone. I was playing on a Meta Quest 3 and suspect more powerful systems – PSVR 2 and PCVR headsets – would struggle less on this side of things though I can’t confirm that for myself.

Though nothing I experienced was game breaking and it was always only a few seconds of noticeable framerate drops before Metro Awakening returned to

Overall then I think Metro’s VR entry has a lot to offer, especially to fans of the series who want to immerse themselves in the franchise’s iconic setting. The story isn’t for me, but for someone who feels more invested in the plot, I can see how its more gradual pace creates this unignorable tension as even in safer areas you’re agonizing about when the next monster will crawl its way out of the shadows.

Being dropped into this world through VR there’s some proper terror that feels so much more impactful than with a flat game. Horror fans will love what Metro Awakening has to offer, but if you prefer more light-hearted adventures this is one to skip.

Should you play Metro Awakening? Play it if...

You love the world of Metro
This Metro 2033 backstory will help you learn more about the world and one of Artyom's closest allies, as well as give you the chance to truly experience the Metro's horrors firsthand.

You love horror
Metro Awakening feels intimidating in a way many flat games can't emulate. Be ready for a good fright fest if you pick this game up.

Don't play it if...

You hate slow-burn stories
If you want survival horror action right out the gate this won't be for you, the story takes some time to cook but, equally, that'll be a positive for some players.

You get very easily motion sick when VR gaming
While there is teleportation movement it's very slow, and the smooth locomotion has a weak vignette option that left me queasy.

(Image credit: Vertigo Games) Accessibility

As with many VR games, Metro Awakening requires you to have a full range of upper body movements – though it can be played standing or seated. It also boasts teleportation movement which is ideal for players who can’t yet stomach smooth motion.

Unfortunately, while smooth motion does have a vignette option it’s very weak – so much so that in the game’s darker environments I didn’t notice it at all. The upshot is while I’m generally fine with smooth movement with vignetting on I had to swap to the less enjoyable teleportation style because I was struggling to stay immersed for longer stretches.

Another issue is Metro Awakening has a fair few spiders, and while an arachnophobia mode is coming it isn’t out yet. I found the spiders in the more comedic VR title Kill It With Fire too much to handle so you can bet the spiders of Metro VR were beyond what I wanted to deal with. Horror is meant to be scary, yes, but there’s a distinctly unfun kind of terror that spiders instill in me so I’ll gladly wait for that update.

How I tested Metro Awakening

For this review I played through Metro Awakening using my Meta Quest 3 with the Razer head strap and facial interface, otherwise, it was the standard modeI. While I explored the Moscow Metro I tried a range of approaches to the game's various encounters to test different strategies, and I explored the game's settings to get a good grasp of its accessibility features.

myFirst Camera 50: Two-minute review

As technologies continue to collide, cameras for kids become more and more like camera phones, compared to the point-and-shoot cameras of yesteryear. The myFirst Camera 50 is a prime example: effectively, it's a tiny 4-inch tablet with a custom Android operating system that runs the camera and editing features. There's a 20MP rear camera, and for young content creators there's also a 16MP rear-facing camera and a built-in soft selfie light.

This might sound like a lot of technology for a child to manage, but with the camera designed to be used by children aged from 5-12, the controls are simple. There are just three buttons: the power button, a button to turn the light on and off, and the shutter button. The shutter button acts like one on a ‘proper’ camera, with a half-press focusing and a full press taking the photo.

There are, of course, the usual onscreen controls, such as another shutter button and the ability to touch the screen to focus. There's even the usual slider to adjust exposure. Holding down the onscreen shutter button switches to video recording, and while there's no optical zoom, there is the option of a 1x, 2x, or 3x digital zoom.

The camera is powered by a 2,000mAh built-in battery that's claimed to have a life of up to 240 minutes. In practice, how long it will last depends on what you're doing with the camera, but in the hands of a child, expect it to last a few days before it needs charging via the USB-C socket on the side.

Although the myFirst Camera 50 couldn’t be described as a tough camera, it does have a rubberized plastic finish that will help kids grip the camera, and there is a nice pronounced grip. Personally, I would also add a screen protector, as kids will be kids and the camera will get dropped. Within the box, you should find a wrist strap and lanyard so that kids can hold it safely, but these items were missing from my review sample.

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What kids really want from their cameras these days is the ability to edit images and add photos and stickers, and the myFirst Camera 50 offers this and more.

The custom Android operating system that powers the camera also enables image-editing features. There's a good selection of different filters that can change the color and brightness of images, as well as a few different effects, such as Fisheye, Cross Process, and Vignette.

There's also the option to draw on images or add stickers – kids love stickers. The small array of cartoon stickers proved particularly popular with my children, who enjoyed adding sunglasses and random slices of watermelon to their photos.

Older children will also enjoy the myDiary journal feature. This can be password-protected so that children have some privacy. It allows them to save voice notes alongside images and videos, and then it presents these in a calendar view so that kids can look back on their adventures without needing to have a social media account.

(Image credit: Future)

Something else that can be saved to the myDiary are the AI-generated videos. The user selects a series of photos or videos, and the camera uploads these to a server which analyses the content and edits it to create short video complete with music. I found that it did this chronologically, and I’m not entirely sure how much true AI goes into the process, but it does an okay job of creating short highlight videos. (NOTE: When I was writing this review, there appeared to be a bug with saving the AI-generated videos to the camera and uploading them to myFirst Circle).

Those who are more hands-on can use the built-in templates to load their photos and videos, then have the video edited and music added. It's a basic introduction to video editing and is easy to use, although it may be too basic as your child gets older.

One of the key selling points of the myFirst Camera 50 is its integration with the myFirst Circle messaging service. Once you've connected the camera to a Wi-Fi network you're prompted to download the myFirst Circle app and link your camera to an account. Once set up, photos and videos can be uploaded. Parents can invite family and friends to download the app, and can authorize who's able to see their child’s posts and interact with them.

It is a great way to teach children about social media, and about what they may or may not want to share. It's also great for grandparents and other family members to see what the children are up to and keep in touch with them. It also works with the myFirst Frame Live or Doodle, which are Wi-Fi-enabled digital photo frames; when new photos or videos are uploaded to your myCircle account, they will be shown to those within your circle on the digital photo frame. Again, this allows for a passive way for friends and family to share moments almost in real time.

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I found the process of setting up the Wi-Fi on the camera, and also a myCircle account on my iPhone, straightforward. The app feels rather basic and simple, which is largely by design to make it easy to use. It feels safe and secure, as much as sending any of your images to a random server could be.

Personally, I would rather wait until my child is a little older before they start getting too involved in social media, but a device like the myFirst Camera 50 and myCircle app seems like a good way to develop an awareness of the social etiquettes and understanding of posting online.

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(Image credit: Future)

Going back to the image quality of the camera, the images produced are about on par with what you would expect from a cheap smartphone. With good light, colors, and exposure, they look good, although the detail and sharpness of the image do break down when you view at 100% – the deterioration in quality is due to the small size of the sensor and the associated noise reduction. That said, given that most images will only ever be viewed on the camera, or on a smartphone or tablet screen, they're acceptable.

It's a similar story with the selfie camera, with images showing even lower quality when zoomed. The selfie light works surprisingly well, although the soft, warm light can often cause bits of the face that are in shadow to shift to a much cooler color.

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Video is a little below par. While the myFirst Camera 50 can record at Full HD 1920 x 1080, there's no stabilization, and footage can be very shaky as a result. Exposure and autofocus also tend to jump very noticeably when shooting video.

Again, though, most children, certainly younger ones, will care little about these technicalities, and will simply be delighted to capture and share their moments.

All the images and videos can be saved to the built-in 4GB memory, or to a microSD card up to 128GB. It's worth noting that if you save images to the internal memory you will need to connect the camera to a computer to save them; they can't be transferred to a microSD card or via a Bluetooth or WiFi connection. Images also can't be downloaded via the myFirst Circle app.

Overall, the myFirst Camera 50 is a simple camera with basic features that will keep a young child entertained while encouraging their creativity.

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(Image credit: myFirst) myFirst Camera 50: Price and release date

• Available now in the US, UK, and Australia for $129/ £109 / AU$149

The myFirst Camera 50 is available in Vibrant Blue or Cool Purple colors and comes with a wrist strap, lanyard, and some fun stickers so that your child can decorate their camera. It's available to buy now and costs $129.99 from the myFirst store (US) / £109 from myFirst's UK store and AU$149 from the myFirst Australia site.

(Image credit: Future) myFirst Camera 50: Should I buy? Buy it if...

Your kids constantly want to take photos with your smartphone
The easy-to-use camera is essentially the same as a smartphone camera. If your children are constantly borrowing your phone to take photos or videos, this should offer them some independence, while you can continue scrolling Instagram.

You want to teach your children about social media
The secure, closed-loop MyCircle app allows children to upload videos and images, but parents have the reassurance that they can see all of the images, and have complete control over who sees the images. It's also great for family members who don't see your children often.

You want to foster child's creativity
Not only does the first Camera 50 provide a means of taking photos and video, it also offers the ability to edit images and video, and even use templates to add music and voiceovers, while the diary feature encourages journalling and reflection. It's great for creative young minds.

Don't buy it if...

You have an older child
Although the camera is recommended for children up to 12 years old, I feel that by the time most children reach around 10 they'll probably be ready for something more advanced in terms of features, particularly when it comes to editing photos and videos, areas where the camera is kept simple by design.

You have a younger child
Although my younger 5-year-old son was fine using the camera and taking photos, some of the editing features were still too complex and caused him a little frustration when he started to use them. It's something that he will grow into, but I would say around 7-10 years old is probably the sweet spot for this camera.

You want the best image quality.
The camera is inexpensive, and although it can produce half-decent images in good light it falls behind contemporary smartphones. If it's important to capture your child's images in as high-definition as possible, let them use your smartphone, or better yet, buy them an entry-level mirrorless camera.

(Image credit: Future) myFirst Camera 50: also consider

If our myFirstCamera 50 review has you interested in instant cameras, here are a couple of other options to consider...

Fujifilm Instax Pal
Not much larger than a golf ball, the Fujifilm Instax Pal is tiny camera that connects to a Fujifilm Instax Link printer via Bluetooth of via the Instax app. Your kids will have the freedom to run around snapping away without staring at a screen, with the fun of seeing the photos later, and printing them off so they can share them with family and friends.

Read our full Fujifilm Instax Pal review

Camp Snap
The Camp Snap is a modern reimagining of a disposable camera. It's a basic digital camera with no screen; you must transfer your images to a computer to see your photos. This makes it perfect for those who want their children to live in the moment rather than spending time staring at a screen looking at or editing images. The image quality may not be very good, but for children, the experience and simplicity make up for it.

Read our full Camp Snap review

myFirst Camera 50: How I tested

• My two children aged 5 and 8, both used the camera on holiday
• I also tried all of the camera's features

I set up the myFirst Camera 50 and made all the relevant Wi-Fi connections, before I passed it over to my 8-year-old daughter, who used it while on a few days of holiday. She happily shot family photos, mostly of her brother and me, while doing mundane things like eating lunch. She also shot some selfies and even a short vlog, needing no assistance from me.

I then used the camera on our return. I was able to see how easy it was to adjust the exposure and the overall image quality, and how difficult it was to use some of the more advanced features of the camera, such as social media and video editing and creation.

Finally, I connected the camera to my MacBook and transferred the images so that I could view them on a larger screen and upload them for this review.

• First reviewed November 2024

Behind every great website is a reliable host keeping things running smoothly. In this review, we’re diving deep into UltaHost, a fresh face in the hosting world that’s been turning heads.

Launched in 2018 by ScriptSun Ltd in Istanbul, UltaHost has quickly made a name for itself. The company offers a diverse range of services, including shared hosting, WordPress, VPS, dedicated servers, and even game, ecommerce, and social network hosting.

Unlike many competitors, UltaHost owns and operates its own data centers. This level of ownership often translates to faster performance, stronger security, and fewer headaches for you. With data centers spanning 15 countries across 5 continents, including the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, and India, it ensures faster loading times and reliable service for worldwide audiences.

We’ve taken UltaHost for a full spin - checking its speed, uptime, and giving their support team a good workout. And trust us, we know hosting inside and out. We’re here to give you the truth so you can decide if UltaHost is the right fit for you.

(Image credit: UltaHost) Plans and pricing: What types of hosting does UltaHost offer?

Whether you're just starting out or managing a large-scale operation, UltaHost offers a variety of hosting plans to suit everyone. Their options - including shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, and reseller hosting - are designed to meet any challenge you throw at them.

If you're ready to commit to a three-year plan, shared hosting starts as low as $2.99 per month. Alternatively, if you prefer the flexibility of a month-to-month subscription, you can get started for $5.99. It's a small price difference, but a solid entry-level deal if you're new to hosting.

The shared hosting plan comes with perks like unlimited bandwidth, free backups, a free domain transfer, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, the "Starter" plan only offers 30 GB of disk space, which can quickly become a bottleneck for sites with heavy media or rapid growth. As a result, you may need to upgrade to a higher-tier plan sooner than expected.

For those who need more control or power, UltaHost offers VPS hosting starting at $4.80 per month. This includes 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM, and 30 GB of NVMe SSD storage, providing dedicated resources for your site. Plus, managed server support and added security like firewalls and a dedicated IP to ensure everything runs smoothly and safely.

If you’re looking for even more control, dedicated servers start at $116.91 per month, providing a full server dedicated to your needs. With powerful specifications and the flexibility to handle high-demand applications, these servers are perfect for large-scale operations. UltaHost also offers virtual dedicated server (VDS) hosting, which offers similar benefits to dedicated servers but at a more affordable price point, starting at $37.50 per month.

While the initial pricing is budget-friendly, it’s worth noting that some plans renew at a higher rate. For instance, the shared hosting plan increases to $5.99 per month once the promotional period ends. Still, there are no major hidden costs, and the money-back guarantee allows you to test it out risk-free.

UltaHost offers a variety of payment options, including credit/debit cards, PayPal, and Bitcoin, giving you plenty of flexibility. You can also choose from a range of control panels, including Hestia, CyberPanel, Plesk, and cPanel, with Hestia and CyberPanel available for free.

(Image credit: Future) Ease of use: How user-friendly is UltaHost?

Starting out with UltaHost is a cinch - whether you’re launching your first site or managing a bustling online business, the entire process is designed to be as simple as possible.

(Image credit: Future)

Signing up with UltaHost is fast and hassle-free. Once you choose your hosting plan, you’ll either register a new domain or transfer an existing one. After that, just select your preferred payment plan, fill in a few personal details, and you’re all set. Once the payment is complete, one thing UltaHost excels at is simplicity - cPanel is included in all shared hosting plans, making management a breeze. If you're already familiar with cPanel, you’ll feel right at home. The intuitive dashboard lets you manage everything from emails to domains and databases. Want to set up a site or install apps? It's all just a couple of clicks away.

(Image credit: Future)

For VPS hosting users, UltaHost offers several control panels to choose from, including Hestia, CyberPanel, Plesk, and cPanel. Hestia and CyberPanel come at no extra cost, while Plesk and cPanel require a bit more investment. This flexibility lets you pick the control panel that best suits your skill level, whether you're a beginner or need advanced features.

If you're planning to use WordPress to create your site, you’re in for a treat. UltaHost offers automatic WordPress installations, complete with staging tools, plugins, and backup features. The platform also supports one-click installs for a variety of other apps and software. Need an ecommerce tool or a different content management system? Just click and go. This makes it easy to dive right into building your site without getting bogged down by setup tasks.

All shared hosting plans come with NVMe SSD storage, which means faster site load times, unlimited bandwidth, and free backups. Plus, you get antivirus protection to guard against DDoS attacks, and free backups keep your data safe, even if something goes wrong.

All in all, UltaHost nails user-friendliness. Quick sign-up, a simple control panel, and features like auto WordPress install and daily backups make hosting effortless. Even beginners will have an easy time getting their site online and running smoothly.

(Image credit: Future) Speed and robustness: How fast and reliable is UltaHost?

If there’s one factor that can make or break your site, it’s speed. Thankfully, UltaHost doesn’t disappoint. With a 99.99% uptime guarantee, backed by tier-3 and tier-4 data centers, reliability is clearly a top priority. Using UptimeRobot for our tests, we found zero downtime. The tool pings your site every 5 minutes, and the fact that it recorded no issues speaks volumes about UltaHost's reliability.

But what about speed? UltaHost leverages NVMe SSD storage, which provides faster data retrieval compared to standard SSDs. This means your site loads quicker, even during traffic spikes. Plus, their built-in caching and use of HTTP/2 help reduce server load, further boosting speed. The WordPress-optimized servers also bring performance enhancements specifically tailored for WP sites.

In practice, this translates to a smooth user experience with fast loading times and zero interruptions. Whether you’re running a small blog or a high-traffic ecommerce site, UltaHost delivers. Simply put, UltaHost excels at both speed and reliability.

Security: How does UltaHost protect your data?

UltaHost is backed by a strong security suite, including firewalls and automated malware scans, providing solid protection for your site and data.

It utilizes a web application firewall (WAF) to detect and block potential threats before they can harm your site. This proactive layer of defense shields your site from common attacks like SQL injections and cross-site scripting. Plus, DDoS protection is included, safeguarding your site from malicious traffic spikes that could cause outages or slow performance.

However, security doesn’t stop at the firewall. UltaHost offers automatic malware scanning to detect and remove harmful code before it can spread. Additionally, two-factor authentication (2FA) for account logins provides an extra layer of security, protecting your admin credentials. This helps prevent unauthorized access and keeps your hosting account safe from hacking attempts.

In the case of a security breach or technical issue, daily backups ensure you can quickly restore your site to its previous state. UltaHost provides these backups at no extra cost, giving you peace of mind that your data is always safe. A free SSL certificate is also included with all plans, encrypting data exchanged between your site and visitors, which helps secure sensitive information like payment details and personal data.

UltaHost also includes advanced tools like BitNinja to monitor your server and block threats before they cause harm. Plus, there’s IP whitelisting for controlled access, allowing you to specify which IP addresses can connect to your server via SSH or SFTP. This feature is especially useful for developers who want to maintain tight control over server access.

(Image credit: UltaHost) Support: What is UltaHost's support like?

With round-the-clock support, UltaHost ensures you’re never left stranded. You can choose from live chat, phone, email, or ticket options to get the help you need at any time.

The live chat was a highlight for us. We connected with an agent quickly, bypassing any automated hassle. The assistance was fairly prompt and helpful, but it was a bit annoying when the chat window disappeared after minimizing the browser.

For those who prefer phone support, UltaHost offers dedicated helplines in the US and Turkey. However, our attempt to reach them from outside these countries wasn’t successful.

Email support is another solid option, which is becoming less common among hosting providers. You can also submit a support ticket, which is ideal for more complex issues, as it keeps an ongoing conversation with an assigned agent until your problem is resolved.

For those who like to troubleshoot on their own, UltaHost’s well-stocked knowledge base is packed with FAQs, guides, and video tutorials. We found these video how-tos particularly useful - they’re well-made and simplify complicated topics.

The competition: What are the best alternatives to UltaHost?

When it comes to web hosting, there are several alternatives to UltaHost, each with its own strengths.

Bluehost is an excellent choice for WordPress users, with direct backing from WordPress.org and strong WordPress-focused tools. It excels in customer support and performance, but UltaHost holds an edge with its broader flexibility and free features. While Bluehost is a solid competitor, UltaHost offers better long-term value, especially with its transparent pricing and added flexibility beyond WordPress.

Hostinger is another budget-friendly option, but UltaHost takes the lead with more server location choices, giving users better control over performance. Hostinger’s pricing is attractive, but UltaHost delivers more consistent service and flexibility, making it the better choice for users who need a well-rounded hosting experience.

SiteGround is a superb option for business sites, offering robust performance and advanced tools. However, its pricing is higher than UltaHost’s, and while SiteGround excels in business hosting, UltaHost offers similar performance and better value.

Final verdict

For small to medium-sized sites, UltaHost delivers solid and cost-effective hosting solutions. With strong uptime, NVMe SSD storage, free malware scanning, and multiple server locations, it packs a punch for the price. The user-friendly dashboard is an added bonus, making it a superb choice for those new to hosting.

The limited disk space in shared hosting plans could be a challenge for bigger sites or those scaling quickly. Additionally, keep in mind that renewal prices rise after the initial term.

Still, UltaHost delivers great value, but if you want more space from the start, you might want to explore higher-tier plans or other providers.

FAQs UltaHost FAQs Can UltaHost be trusted?

Yes, UltaHost is a trustworthy hosting provider. The company has built a solid reputation for delivering reliable, affordable hosting services with excellent customer support. It also offers features like free malware scans and a web application firewall (WAF) to help keep your site secure.

(Image credit: UltaHost) Where are UltaHost's data centers?

UltaHost’s worldwide network of data centers should keep your site running smoothly, no matter where your audience is. With locations spread across the US (Seattle, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York), Canada (Toronto), Germany (Frankfurt), the UK (London), Turkey (Istanbul), Singapore, India (New Delhi), South Africa (Johannesburg), Japan (Tokyo), Brazil (Sao Paulo), Mexico (Mexico City), the UAE (Dubai), Saudi Arabia (Riyadh), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam), you have plenty of options to choose from.

Thanks to its wide network of data centers, UltaHost guarantees fast and reliable performance with low latency, delivering a superb experience for your users no matter where they are.

Does UltaHost provide an uptime guarantee?

Yes, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, UltaHost meets the industry standard. This means they’re committed to keeping your site online and accessible with minimal downtime. While no host can guarantee 100% uptime, UltaHost’s track record of solid performance and reliability makes it a trustworthy choice for keeping your site running smoothly.

Ivanti Neurons is a platform that helps businesses and MSPs secure their IT devices and infrastructure through remote management and patching tools. Founded in 1985, the company has an experience of almost 40 years and now caters to 40k+ customers worldwide. 

It offers diverse tools to identify various IT assets within a network and then patch them automatically through pre-set rules. Unlike other RMMs, it prioritizes the most vulnerable security issue, ensuring you have a safe environment. Plus, it can secure a vast range of devices, from Windows and Mac to Android and iOS. The onboarding, implementation, and integrations are also simple to execute.

However, Ivanti may be a slightly complex tool for new users and may require a degree of training to get the hang of its functions. Plus, Ivanti does not reveal its pricing, meaning you’ll have to contact their sales team to get a quote.

Ivanti Neurons: Plans and pricing

Similar to RMMs like Datto and NinjaOne, Ivanti Neurons also doesn’t reveal its pricing. You’ll have to fill out a form with your requirements to get a custom quote from the sales team.

This is certainly a time-taking process, as you’ll have to lay down everything you need. However, with Ivanti offering a lot of products for different IT functions, this gives you a chance to customize the entire product and only pay for the features you actually need.

Ivanti Neurons: Features

(Image credit: Ivanti Neurons)

Ivanti Neurons' Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) gives IT teams single-pane visibility on all the endpoints and helps automate the entire lifecycle management of every single device, from onboarding to retirement.

Unlike other RMM solutions, Ivanti follows a risk-based patch management approach, which ensures you can patch the most vulnerable risks as soon as possible. While most RMM platforms follow the human validation of exploits from penetration testing, Ivanti employs a more comprehensive Vulnerability Risk Rating (VRR) method. 

Besides CVSS, the VRR method considers Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) data, open-source threat intelligence, OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project), subject matter expertise, and trending information. 

All of this data is correlated to arrive at a VRR score between 0 and 10 –  the higher the score, the higher the risk. This allows technicians to prioritize patches that are more critical.

Mobile device management is as important as monitoring desktops. This is exactly what Ivanti is good at. In addition to Windows, you can also access other operating systems, such as iOS, iPadOS, Android, and macOS. 

Irrespective of the device of the end user, you can use apps like Ivanti AppStation, Ivanti Sentry, and Ivanti Email+ to establish and monitor various safeguards on the devices. However, you’ll have to contact the sales team to get the exact quote for this feature.

What's more, Ivanti also has a dedicated BYOD portal, which allows end-users to bring their own devices into the company infrastructure without compromising the organization's security.

Ivanti also boasts comprehensive application control for Windows, Windows Server, and Linux systems. For example, it allows IT teams to manage user privileges and application access across your asset estate. 

Technicians can even use Trusted Ownership checking to mitigate zero-day malware by checking the NTFS owner of an application. If the owner is non-trusted, the application will not be able to run on the system.

Similarly, Windows privilege management allows you to give end users access to only the apps or tasks that they need and not the entire endpoint. This reduces endpoint vulnerability and helps manage security costs. Technicians can also enforce device-based software license control to set usage and access limits on various applications.

Ivanti Neurons: Interface and performance

The Ivanti Neurons dashboard is clean and defined by user roles. You’ll only (and easily) be able to view the elements critical to your functions. 

A few useful dashboard widgets include Asset Manager (it shows all your assets in different locations) and Asset Manager Analyst (it displays your open tasks, requests, and unassigned tasks). Similarly, the Asset Manager Management dashboard shows you all active asset requests from your team.

(Image credit: Ivanti Neurons)

The dashboards are filled with color-coded charts, such as bar charts, pie graphs, pivot tables, and grouped lines. This helps you get a quick overview of the data instead of skimming through complex data records. You can add, modify, or delete a chart (as well as other elements on the dashboard) as per your user role.

Overall, the interface may come across as a bit old at first glance, but it gets the job done. It’s laced with information and can be customized by the admins as per user needs. This is ideal for large organizations with clear-cut role-defined employees.

Ivanti Neurons: Security

Ivanti Neurons offers airtight security, which is evident from the wide range of certifications it has received. For instance, the platform complies with Service Organization Control 2 (SOC2), which requires companies to adhere to certain security standards for data storage, and ISO/IEC 27001, which helps protect it from data breaches and security threats. 

Ivanti is also in active compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and has a designated data privacy team that oversees its processes, policies, and standards. The platform also conducts periodic penetration testing to ensure its systems are free of any possible vulnerabilities.

Ivanti Neurons: Support

We were quite impressed by the assortment of support options on Ivanti. For starters, there are dedicated phone numbers for various locations, such as the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. 

The platform also offers a dedicated success portal where, along with viewing other details, you can raise a ticket and request a callback from the support team. If your problem is ‘Severity 1 - Critical,” the team will call you back even outside of business hours, ensuring prompt support. Severity 1 - Critical problems are those where the product isn’t working and cannot be restarted or there’s an unstable third-party, mission-critical application.

Ivanti also has a very active community forum where you can ask questions and expect quick resolutions. What we liked the most is that there are several groups within these communities based on the product type. 

So, there’s a separate group for automation, IT asset management, service management, and so on. These communities also have MVP members along with their LinkedIn IDs to help you reach out to experts.

Ivanti Neurons: Final verdict

Ivanti Neurons is a diverse RMM platform that goes beyond vanilla remote management functions. It offers a lot of products that can be mixed and matched and customized into a unique plan for your  business needs. In addition to automating patch management, its Discovery feature lets you maintain a real-time inventory of your company's digital assets, ensuring no endpoint is missed. 

Ivanti supports Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Android, and macOS, so businesses can manage almost every type of device. The platform has also recently introduced AI-powered automations, which allow teams to manage endpoint patching and technical issues through behavioral analysis. 

Overall, Ivanti is a feature-rich and multi-dimensional RMM platform, ideal for large teams. However, one drawback is that you may have to spend a bit of time learning the ropes around the software since there are a lot of features to work with.

Ivanti Neurons: FAQs What products do Ivanti Neurons offer?

Ivanti Neurons is an all-around security solution offering various products for different teams. For example, there’s an Ivanti Neurons Suite for IT asset discovery and a separate one for IT automation bots called Neurons for Healing. Next, there's a separate module for Unified Endpoint Management, Network & Endpoint Security, and Service & Asset Management, respectively.

Is Ivanti Neurons legit?

Yes, Ivanti Neurons is a legitimate automation platform that allows you to manage complex endpoint structures with ease. It was founded in 1985 and has a rich experience of over 40 years and thousands of positive customer reviews. It's super secure, too, with compliance with GDPR, SOC2, and ISO/IEC 27001. Overall, the platform is trustworthy.

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TeamViewer is a widely popular remote access and device monitoring tool. It was founded in 2005 and currently has more than 640,000 customers worldwide. The platform’s ease of use makes it a popular choice among IT professionals and MSPs.

With easy remote endpoint access, it offers features like endpoint threat protection, mobile device management, automated alerts, and patching. Its pricing structure also caters to a wide market – from single users to large-scale enterprises, there’s something or everyone. Plus, thanks to its robust cybersecurity structures, you can rest assured that your data will remain private. 

However, it's worth noting that TeamViewer can be a slightly costly pick for small teams with less than 100 managed endpoints. Let’s dive deeper into TeamViewer to find out its best features, pricing, support, and security structure to find out if it's the best choice for you.

TeamViewer: Plans and pricing

TeamViewer offers a lot of plans for single users, teams, and enterprise-level businesses. 

As you can see, TeamViewer offers a lot of options for businesses of all sizes – from individuals and small teams to full-blown enterprises. All of the plans allow connection to Windows, macOS, and Linux systems from Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and ChromeOS devices.

However, the number of concurrent connections can vary depending on the plan. For instance, both the plans for single users as well as the TeamViewer Premium subscription support only one concurrent connection, whereas the TeamViewer Corporate plan supports three.

Furthermore, every single tier comes with its own set of features. For example, you do not get asset management and device monitoring functions in the TeamViewer Remote Access plan. 

That said, we found the Teams plans more value for money since they come with almost all the features the platform has to offer. For example, the Premium plan, which can support up to 300 devices, boils down to a rate of $0.38 per endpoint, making it one of the most affordable RMMs around. 

However, this is only true if you have 300 endpoints to manage in the first place. If you don't, it will only increase your per-endpoint management cost.

TeamViewer: Features

TeamViewer has an impressive list of remote management features. You can get a complete view of all IoT assets in your environment with detailed metrics like asset type, disk space, and network monitoring details. 

The platform’s device monitoring features help IT teams keep an eye on various IT aspects, such as S.M.A.R.T. errors, software installations, and bad log-in attempts. You can even set various thresholds for CPU and memory usage.

(Image credit: TeamViewer)

TeamViewer will send you an alert when there’s a new OS update available for download. What's more, you can even automate patch management through pre-defined policies – for either a particular end user or an entire set of assets. The platform also supports third-party application patching.

Integrated ThreatDown Endpoint Protection, powered by Malwarebytes, helps you protect your endpoints from malicious actors such as malware, ransomware, spyware, and even zero-day threats. 

With both signature-based and signatureless detection methods, combined with behavioral analysis with the help of modern machine-learning algorithms, ThreatDown ensures your endpoints are not compromised. 

You also get Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) features, which monitor suspicious activity in real time and isolate files that are infected. Endpoints can also be protected from accessing malicious websites over the internet, suspicious links, and malvertising attempts.

The best part is that you do not need to install any app or extension to deploy ThreatDown. It comes fully integrated with TeamViewer and deployment is as easy as pressing a button.

TeamViewer has also partnered with Ivanti to offer robust mobile device management. This includes onboarding, roll-out, and troubleshooting devices from a single dashboard. IT teams can deploy security enhancements, manage in-app controls and permissions, and enforce policies and standards. 

It’s also possible to remotely lock and wipe devices in case of emergencies and also monitor a device's location in real time.

TeamViewer: Interface and performance

TeamViewer's main dashboard is intuitive and has a modern touch to it. You can quickly look at information like total devices managed, active devices, and devices missing patches. 

(Image credit: TeamViewer)

There’s a sleek panel on the left that helps you navigate through various functions and settings on the platform. These options are divided into functions like asset management, endpoint protection, backup, and mobile device management. Under each of these options, you’ll find several other drop-down clickable paths, which simplifies using the entire platform. 

Moreover, every single function has a separate ‘overview’ tab, which helps you quickly drill down on important issues. This also ensures the main dashboard isn’t too cluttered and is easily skimmable.

TeamViewer: Security

TeamViewer pulls no punches when it comes to security. It has designed various policies and internal procedures and set up proper information governance structures according to the GDPR rules. 

It goes a step ahead of other RMMs around and complies with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGDP), which regulates the use of personal data by businesses in Brazil, and the California Consumer Protection Act of 2018 (CCPA), which establishes data privacy rights for customers in California.

To protect your accounts on TeamViewer, you can set up various security checks, such as two-factor authentication. In case you forget your password and have trouble logging in, you can rely on the platform’s zero-knowledge account recovery process, where you’ll need to enter a unique 64-character Zero-knowledge Account Recovery Code. All of this happens without any intervention from TeamViewer’s internal team.

We were also impressed by TeamViewer’s brute force protection. After every unsuccessful password entry, the time you need to wait for the next attempt increases. It can take as long as 17 hours to enter 24 passwords. This will come in clutch when a malicious threat actor is trying brute-force algorithms to compromise your TeamViewer account.

TeamViewer: Support

There are several ways you can reach out to the TeamViewer support team: live chat, phone, and email support tickets. Chat support is available from Monday to Friday between 8am to 6pm EST, whereas phone support can be accessed from Monday to Friday between 8am and 8pm EST.

The only downside is that you do not get 24/7 support. Yes, you can indeed submit support tickets anytime you want, but the response may not be instant. However, there’s a special Service Level Agreement (SLA) option, where you get access to the phone number and email address of a dedicated TeamViewer expert, who will then promptly help you with any issues you might have. 

Although not necessary for small teams, the SLA is essential for large enterprises with a lot of managed endpoints. That said, even SLA’s premium support is only available on weekdays.

TeamViewer: Final verdict

TeamViewer is a global remote management and access software that allows IT teams to manage and resolve IT issues remotely from any part of the world. Along with regular RMM features like device management and automated patching, TeamViewer has also teamed up with Malwarebytes to offer endpoint protection on all connected devices. 

Additionally, you can also manage mobile devices in your IT infrastructure, thanks to its collaboration with Ivanti. This makes TeamViewer more than just a regular RMM platform.

The platform’s pricing structure is meant for both individual users and businesses with large teams. With the ability to manage 200-500 endpoints across its plans, TeamViewer is ideal for mid-sized and large businesses. However, small IT teams and MSPs handling less than 100 endpoints may find TeamViewer slightly on the expensive side.

TeamViewer: FAQs Who is TeamViewer ideal for?

TeamViewer offers plans for individuals, small teams, as well as large businesses. However, you get the best value for your money if you have 200-300 managed endpoints, owing to the platform’s tiered pricing structure.

For example, if you only have 100 endpoints, you’d still have to choose the TeamViewer Premium plan, priced at $112.90 per month, which will bring your cost per endpoint to $1.12.

However, with the same plan, a 300-endpoint IT team will incur a cost of only $0.37/endpoint. Therefore, TeamViewer is more suitable for large and mid-sized teams and may be slightly expensive for small businesses.

Does TeamViewer offer integrations?

Yes, TeamViewer offers 30+ integrations, including popular apps like Slack, Google Meet, Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Microsoft Intune, and Zoho. You also get access to TeamViewer API, which lets you connect other applications and systems to the platform to establish continuity between the endpoint and IT teams.

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Datto is a cloud-based RMM software provider founded in 2007. Built for MSPs, the platform has more than 1 million users in 20+ locations. Datto was acquired by Kaseya in April 2022 for a whopping $6.2 billion. However, to this day, Datto RMM exists as an independent RMM product, catering to MSPs all around the world.

Datto aims to simplify remote endpoint management. You can automate patch management through pre-made and customizable scripts. The platform is also well-known for its integrations, especially Microsoft 365 Management, which allows MSPs to monitor the endpoint’s Microsoft suite from a single dashboard. Plus, it’s the only RMM platform that comes with native ransomware detection tools.

With that said, there are a few downsides as well. For starters, it’s very secretive about its pricing – you’ll have to get a custom quote if you want to purchase a plan. What's more, patch management only works on Windows endpoints, meaning you’ll have to employ a workaround for macOS. Read on to find out everything about Datto, including whether it's ideal for your requirements.

Datto: Plans and pricing

Datto RMM offers custom pricing, which means you’ll have to contact their sales team with your requirements for a customized quote. This means you’ll be able to get a highly tailored deal ideal for your needs. 

However, this can be a time-consuming process – you’ll first have to explain your requirements and then negotiate with them to arrive at a workable deal. Plus, even after spending so much time, it's hard to guarantee that you’ll be satisfied with the pricing you get. 

For this reason, we believe that it's better to know upfront how much you’d be paying so that you can make a quick decision. However, this is indeed a subjective matter, and companies may just as well like Datto’s custom pricing.

Datto: Features

One of the standouts about Datto is that it’s the only RMM where you get native Microsoft 365 Management, which helps you administer your Microsoft 365 tasks through a single-user management platform. 

Once you connect an endpoint, you get a dedicated Microsoft 365 menu and a comprehensive overview for each client. Plus, you can seamlessly navigate to the various Microsoft client portals for each endpoint.

(Image credit: Datto)

Like other RMM software, Datto also supports automated patch management for operating systems and third-party applications, such as Google Chrome, Oracle Java, and Adobe Acrobat.

Its advanced Software Management gives technicians access to more than 200 additional applications, ensuring a wide range of third-party patching. Furthermore, you can set flexible parameters to deliver patches to all your endpoints.

Datto also allows technicians to set up policy-based patch approvals along with device-level compliance reporting. We liked that there’s an extensive library of pre-designed scripts and policies so that you don’t have to build one from scratch.

One downside is that Datto does not inherently support macOS patch management. For that, you’ll have to download “Install Updates with SUPER [MAC]” – a ComStore component. ComStore is a page with data scripts, installers, and device monitors, which are collectively called components.

With that said, however, Datto RMM goes a step ahead of traditional patch management and offers native ransomware detection. In fact, Datto is one of the few RMM software to do so.

Sure, patched antivirus helps you detect all kinds of digital threats. However, it’s always good to have an extra layer of protection, which is exactly what Datto RMM does. The platform uses behavioral analysis to detect ransomware on connected endpoints and send alerts to MSPs so that they can take preventive steps in time.

Datto also isolates the infected device from the network so that the ransomware does not spread through other client devices. This helps businesses reduce downtime and losses from ransomware.

MSPs often use dedicated network scanning platforms to configure all points and devices in a particular client site. However, Datto comes with built-in network topology mapping that gives technicians a detailed tree-style map of all discovered components. This ensures that no device is accidentally left unmonitored.

Datto: Interface and performance

Datto RMM offers a graphics-oriented dashboard that helps you grasp the status of all your endpoints at a single glance. You get a total of 3 dashboard options: blank dashboard, default dashboard, and Datto EDR & Security dashboard. 

(Image credit: Datto)

The blank dashboard, as the name suggests, is just like a blank piece of paper, where you can add as many widgets as you want from Datto’s widget library. You get 28 widget options to choose from, with various graphs such as line, doughnut, table, and tree map.

The default dashboard comes with widgets like antivirus status, Windows patch status, open alerts, offline devices, and recent alerts. Needless to say, you can customize the board the way you want.

Lastly, the Datto EDR & Security dashboard focuses on the security aspect of connected endpoints. You get information about security threats, ransomware status, and Windows Defender status of all the devices.

Overall, we like the information-oriented approach by Datto, and unlike other RMM software, you get a lot more control with the dashboards.

Datto: Security

Datto RMM employs several security protocols to ensure all its users and their data are safe. For instance, it uses industry-standard AES-256 encryption to encrypt all the data on its platform. Users are required to set strong 9-character passwords, which expire every 30, 60, or 90 days (optional), for added security.

Besides this, you can also enable two-factor authentication and use one-time passwords to add an extra layer of protection.

The good news keeps coming as the platform is hosted on a separate AWS Account with no shared access, which is housed in nondescript facilities. AWS also complies with several certifications and attestations, such as SAS70 Type II, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, and FISMA.

Apart from this, Datto conducts regular penetration testing in partnership with approved authorities to ensure that there are no exploitable vulnerabilities in their systems.

Overall, Datto takes online security as seriously as a top-notch company should and leaves no stone unturned to ensure its users and partners have a safe experience.

Datto: Support

Datto RMM offers 24/7/365 support through various channels such as live chat, call, and email tickets. What we liked the most is that it has dedicated phone numbers for various regions and countries with more than 500 support team members worldwide. This ensures that users get priority support with quick response times. 

The platform also authenticates every single user and ensures that the information submitted in the ticket is private and protected.

Additionally, we found a lot of documentation, help articles, official YouTube videos, and troubleshooting guides from Datto that will sort out common queries. Plus, Kaseya’s active peer-to-peer community ensures that there’s always someone to help you out immediately.

Datto: Final verdict

Datto is a well-known remote management solution crafted specifically for MSPs. Founded in 2007, Datto is super secure and is the only RMM solution that offers native ransomware detection. It alerts the technicians if it finds traces of ransomware on any system and even isolates it from the rest of the network. 

Much like other RMMs around, it allows you to automate patch management for your client. However, what we liked the most is that it gives technicians access to more than 200 third-party applications, making it one of the best RMMs for third-party patching. 

Overall, it’s a top-notch RMM solution, especially if you’re a MSP. However, there are also a few downsides worth factoring in before you commit. For instance, it cannot patch macOS systems, meaning you’ll have to download a custom component from its store – a workaround that may not work as well as inherent macOS patch management. Plus, Datto's doesn't reveal its pricing publicly, so you’ll reach out to their sales teams for a quote.

Datto: FAQs What does Datto RMM do?

Datto is a cloud-based RMM software that allows MSPs to remotely manage their clients’ endpoints. Technicians can install updates, patch the system, and even scan for ransomware on the endpoints using Datto. A standout is that Datto supports third-party patch management like no other RMM tool. MSPs can access 200+ applications on the endpoints and set up policy-based approvals and deployment rules.

How much does Datto RMM cost?

Datto doesn’t reveal its prices, unlike most RMM platforms. You will have to contact their sales team with your requirements to work out a deal. This can be a bit of a hassle, especially for small businesses with limited time and resources.

Is Datto acquired by Kaseya?

Yes, Datto RMM was acquired by Kaseya in April 2022 for $6.2 billion. However, Kaseya hasn’t discontinued the Datto brand. In fact, it has made the product better with improved innovations and integrations. Customers now get excellent support, thanks to Kaseya’s widespread knowledge hub. As per Kaseya’s announcement, it has also promised a 10% decrease in the average price of Datto products post acquisition.

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Viofo A329 Dash Cam: one-minute review

I’m a big fan of any dash cam, no matter what the brand or its capabilities. They just make good sense, and offer some peace of mind when I’m behind the wheel. And, while I really liked recent arrival the Nextbase Piqo for its no-frills setup and operation, the Viofo A329 Dash Cam is an altogether more sophisticated offering.

The Viofo A329 Dash Cam is a step up from the Viofo A229 Pro Dash Cam, which preceded it, but it’s also up against some very stiff competition from the other best dash cams out there. Bear in mind, this is a premium model, so while it comes with lots of features and functions, the Viofo A329 Dash Cam carries a high-ish price tag too: in excess of $300 / £300, though exactly how much you'll pay depends on the bundle you choose.

However, the upside to that added expense is lots of great features. The Viofo A329 seen here also arrives as a two-channel offering, which means there’s a forward-facing camera and a smaller supplementary unit that captures video out of the back of your vehicle. As a result, there’s more work involved in getting it set up and running, with plenty of cable concealment to be done as part of the process.

Nevertheless, I'd say it’s well worth the effort, as the Viofo A329 Dash Cam offers 4K, 60 frames per second, Ultra HD footage at the front and 2K at the back, with each camera equipped with a Sony Starvis 2 image sensor and HDR recording. Add in 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, voice control, and notifications, along with advanced parking mode capability plus support for external SSD storage, and the Viofo A329 Dash Cam soon starts looking like very good value for money.

It’s all about the performance with this premium dash cam. I found the Sony Starvis 2 IMX678 1/1.8-inch 8-megapixel image sensor and rear-facing Sony Starvis 2 IMX675 1/2.8-inch 5-megapixel image sensor more than able in most driving scenarios. Footage captured after dark was no less impressive than the footage taken during dull and grey days, with both cameras adept at picking out details such as license plates and road signs.

Thankfully, Viofo has taken into account the fact that 4K files soon bulk out microSD cards. Therefore, it’s possible to hook up an available SSD drive and store content directly to that, using the benefit of integrated Wi-Fi 6 technology. This is a practical solution for dealing with bulky chunks of data, and promises to be three times quicker, operating in the 5GHz band at speeds of up to 30Mbps. The specification also means that the A329 is optimized so that you can view and manage files quickly and easily via a phone too, using Viofo's own very decent app.

(Image credit: Future) Viofo A329 Dash Cam: price and availability

The Viofo A329 Dash Cam is available now with a single front camera directly from Viofo being reduced by 18% to $329.99 at the time of writing, while the front and rear camera from Viofo is currently reduced by 15% to $399.99. It’s a similar story for the UK market with the former costing £329.95 (currently reduced to £299.95) and £399.95 (currently £359.95) for the latter two-camera bundle.

Viofo A329 Dash Cam: specs Viofo A329 Dash Cam: Design

When it comes to design Viofo hasn’t changed too much compared to the Viofo A229 Dash Cam, with the A329 having a virtually identical front-facing camera unit. That’s no bad thing, as I liked the way the A229 was styled, with some neat design touches that make it a little more practical than its rivals. I particularly like the way the camera it can be attached to your windscreen, using the sticky patch on the mount or via static sheets for easier removal. The lens can then be moved into the perfect position using a click-based lever movement that adjusts it upwards and downwards.

There’s also the benefit of a sizable rear screen, which is crisp and clear, with operational buttons directly beneath that. This arrangement allowed me to access most if not all of the controls without the need for the supporting app. However, I also found that it’s possible to squeeze even more from the Viofo A329 Dash Cam by exploiting the software features, especially when it came to file management if I was hooked up using the SSD external drive option.

(Image credit: Future)

The unit itself is chunky, without being overly bulky, and feels nicely made, as the A229 did. Viofo includes everything you need to get up and running in the box, although if you’re very enthusiastic about your dash cam it might be worth considering the additional Viofo accessories for this model. These include a polarizing lens filter and a wireless Bluetooth remote control. In addition, there's an optional hardwire kit, which enables a more permanent installation than plugging the camera in via a 12V vehicle socket.

For the rear-facing camera, Viofo has kept the design lines simple and straightforward. The camera is easily mounted to the glass using another sticky pad, and can be angled into the optimal position using the same type of lens adjustment method.

(Image credit: Future) Viofo A329 Dash Cam: Performance

The Viofo A329 Dash Cam does feel like a step up from the competition. Much of that is down to the fact that it records video in 4K at 60fps. Having this capability means it trounces many rivals, with many lesser models shooting 4K at 30fps, and upping the frame rate potentially results in smoother and crisper video. I found having the HDMI 4K video-out port made it very quick and easy to view even sizeable chunks of footage too.

Being sure that things like license plates are being captured legibly is reassuring, but this unit is good at helping to pick out things like badges, car logos and even facial features too. The beefier specification is also good for high-speed scenarios, thanks to the faster capabilities of the camera. Of course, there’s a slight trade-off in that this creates a larger bank of video files over time, but Viofo has thought of this by making the A329 Dash Cam fully compatible with external SSDs, so a drive can be used as a backup if my microSD card starts groaning under the weight of content.

(Image credit: Future)

Up front, the Sony Starvis 2 IMX678 1/1.8-inch 8-megapixel image sensor proved very impressive, with footage showing plenty of crisp detail. Even the rear camera, which has a smaller and lower-resolution Sony Starvis 2 IMX675 1/2.8-inch 5-megapixel sensor, was very good when it came to capturing things like license plates. Better still, after dark it proved quite good at capturing the faces of drivers sitting in the car behind, which is notable in itself.

(Image credit: Future)

All this 4K content soon stacks up mind, so Viofo has integrated Wi-Fi 6 technology for this model. This, it claims, is three times more potent at operating within the 5GHz band and offers up to 30MBps. Viofo reckons a one-minute 4K video can be downloaded in under 10 seconds and, during my time with the dash cam, I see no reason to disagree. Using this in tandem with an external SSD is a good way to go, allowing storage of lots of content for as long as it is needed.

Should you buy the Viofo A329 Dash Cam?

(Image credit: Future) Buy it if...

That price tag is fine
This is a premium dash cam bundle and the combination of twin cameras and a beefy specification means it’s not cheap to buy. However, the Viofo A329 Dash Cam offers potent performance in return.

You need two cameras
The two-channel, twin camera approach is handy if you’re keen to keep all bases covered. This is a serious bit of kit that also benefits from being hardwired into a vehicle in order to get the best from all the features.

You want top quality footage
Sometimes it’s the little things that can make all the difference in the event of an incident or insurance claim. Having the benefit of crisp and clear 4K 60fps video could be invaluable and even the rear-facing camera is impressive too.

Don't buy it if...

You like things simple
The Viofo A329 Dash Cam is intuitive and easy to use, but the dual camera arrangement could be a little too labour intensive for some. There’s quite a lot of cabling to plumb in and the connectors are excellent, though very hard to undo if you’ve plugged the ends in the wrong way around.

You don’t need lots of features
While it’s certainly potent, the Viofo A329 Dash Cam might be more than some want or need. A basic dash cam will capture video and offer the same stripped down features for a lot less money.

You’re not after dual cameras
The simple solution to this is to plump for the single camera edition, although having a rear-facing unit does offer additional piece of mind. Viofo does offer three camera bundles too, however.

How I tested the Viofo A329 Dash Cam

• I installed the dash cam into a test car for a set period of time
• I used it for several journeys during both day and night
• I connected it to my phone and downloaded recordings for comparison

I reviewed the Viofo A329 Dash Cam during the course of several days, when it was faced with capturing footage in a range of weather conditions. The camera units were installed in a test vehicle and powered via the 12V socket, rather than being hardwired in. As always, it should be noted that this temporary route does occasionally limit some of the features and functionality, especially when it comes to parking surveillance.

• First reviewed November 2024

ConnectWise was founded in 1982 as an IT solutions provider, making it one of the most experienced players in the industry right now. Over the years, it has continued to introduce and improve its products that have helped IT professionals worldwide. 

It recently won the 2024 Channel Futures MSP 501 Gala Award in the ‘Preferred vendor’ category for its RMM product. Additionally, it has also won 25 other awards in 2024 across various categories. This speaks volumes abouts its reputation, reliability, and effectiveness.

ConnectWise RMM offers excellent value for money for teams of all sizes. From automated patch management to AI scripting, there’s a lot you can do with ConnectWise. Plus, its informative dashboards, coupled with unified UIs, make it an easy-to-navigate tool, even if you use multiple ConnectWise products. In this article, we'll take a deep dive into ConnectWise, explaining what makes it such a sought-after RMM solution.

ConnectWise: Plans and pricing

ConnectWise offers three plans: Essential, Pro, and Premium. As the name suggests, Essential is the entry-level plan, with features like automated OS and third-party patching, AI scripting, intelligent monitoring, and several third-party integrations. We found this plan sufficient for most small and medium-sized businesses and MSPs.

However, should you decide to upgrade to the Pro plan, you’ll get additional features like advanced intelligent monitoring​, network monitoring, and backup monitoring.

The Premium plan is meant for cloud and SaaS management, as it comes with features like unlimited ScreenConnect Remote, remote camera sharing, and Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 SaaS backup.

However, to find out the exact pricing of each of these plans, you’ll have to contact ConnectWise’s sales team. It's worth noting, however, that most RMM platforms maintain an on-request pricing structure because they offer customized plans, which isn’t the case with ConnectWise. The plans are all well laid out in advance with pre-determined features. So, keeping an on-request pricing seems a little odd in this case.

ConnectWise: Features

ConnectWise offers a lot of handy features that make remote management a breeze. For instance, it’s one of the few RMM platforms to come with integrated ScreenConnect – its proprietary remote desktop access management software. The best thing is that you get this right from the most basic plan. 

(Image credit: ConnectWise RMM)

This brings in functions like seamless and quick endpoint connections, a shared toolbox, and universal compatibility. IT teams can solve problems remotely via the user’s camera without any additional downloads. With other RMMs, however, you have to integrate a third-party access software, which doesn’t work as seamlessly as an out-of-the-box solution like ConnectWise.

Speaking of integrations, BrightGauge is another addition we liked. It’s basically a reporting tool that consolidates all your information in one place, giving you access to insightful business intelligence (BI) dashboards. It can capture data to convert it into skimmable charts, which helps you analyze trends and patterns quickly. Just like ScreenConnect, BrightGauge is also available on the Essential plan.

ConnectWise supports both OS (Windows and Mac) and third-party patching. You can even automate the patching function with customizable scripts. What’s more, you don’t have to write a script from scratch, either, thanks to the platform’s AI-generated scripting function that does it for you.

ConnectWise also offers dedicated NOC services, where, essentially, the platform takes the workload off your shoulders. This applies to regular patching activities, day-to-day BDR, routing management, and recovery backup. 

This allows your IT teams to focus on more critical client issues, ensuring a better overall customer experience. However – and it's not very surprising – that this comes at an extra cost and isn’t included in any of the pre-designed plans mentioned earlier.

ConnectWise: Interface and performance

The main ConnectWise RMM dashboard is clean and neatly showcases various widgets. You can find information in the form of charts and graphs, and a quick glance will be enough to know the status of your endpoints.

However, it is ConnectWise’s Asio dashboard that steals the deal for us. Unlike other RMMs, the Asio dashboard combines all of ConnectWise’a product functions and 20+ UIs in a single place.

(Image credit: ConnectWise RMM)

You can get live endpoints, patching, and network statuses from the ‘Unified Monitoring & Management’ tab. The ‘Solutions’ tab lets you manage your PSA functions, such as assigning and resolving customer tickets. Next, the ‘Centralized Data’ tab at the bottom combines all your data across various products to avoid repetitive functions and enable hyper-automation across various functions. 

The best part is that the dashboard isn’t limited to ConnectWise products – you can also add third-party vendors to extend your data into Asio, ensuring that all your apps share only a single data portfolio. This eliminates constant back and forth and makes data management seamless and unified.

ConnectWise: Security

ConnectWise has put in a lot of effort to build a robust security architecture. It has adopted the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) and complies with ISO27000 standards that focus on network security, vulnerability and threat management, and incident management, among other things.

The platform employs a formal change control process, which reviews, approves, and tests changes to network devices, information systems, and other system components. ConnectWise also maintains audit logs, with a detailed access history of various systems.

The endpoints are also secured through regular and thorough penetration tests, vulnerability, and phishing assessments. Plus, in case there’s any loss of data during a major catastrophe, ConnectWise has active disaster recovery programs running across their cloud environments.

However, it's worth mentioning that ConnectWise’s ScreenConnect was hacked in February this year when malicious actors exploited two vulnerabilities in its system. Both issues were patched in time and ConnectWise has, since then, strengthened its security infrastructure. 

Overall, the platform has put in a lot of thought into designing and enforcing its safety measures to ensure users have a safe experience.

ConnectWise: Support

The level of customer support you get from ConnectWise depends on your plan. Here’s a quick look at the support channels available. 

It’s good to see that email and live chat support are available to every single user, irrespective of their plan. However, do note that if you’re on the most basic plan, you’ll only be able to connect to the service team on weekdays between 8am and 5pm. For users of the Standard plan, support is available 24/7, and Premium users can access assistance even on holidays.

Additionally, there’s a dedicated community forum where you can discuss your queries with platform experts. We also found a good deal of product documentation on the website that will help you out with common issues or questions.

ConnectWise: Final verdict

ConnectWise is a fairly robust RMM software offering functions like intelligent monitoring, automated patching, and AI scripting. However, its unified Asio dashboard is the showstopper and easily what impressed us the most. 

Even if you have purchased a number of ConnectWise products, the Asio dashboard combines the data of all the platforms into a single panel. This saves you a lot of data duplication and gives teams a holistic view of the statuses of various endpoints. 

Next, the entry-level Essentials plan, according to our testing, is more than enough for most modern IT teams and MSPs. It comes with integrated features like ScreenConnect, which lets you remotely access and troubleshoot endpoints. Plus, its Business Intelligence reporting tool, BrightGauge, pulls out information-driven reports in no time.

However, you will have to reach out to ConnectWise’s sales team to get a quote, even though the website has well-laid-out pre-configured plans.

ConnectWise: FAQs How much does ConnectWise cost?

Although ConnectWise does not reveal its pricing, it has three clear-cut plans: Essential, Standard, and Premium. The entry-level plan comes with all essential RMM functions, such as remote Windows and Mac monitoring, OS and third-party patching, and automations.

The Pro plan comes with advanced intelligent monitoring capabilities​ and basic network monitoring​. Lastly, the Premium plan offers unlimited remote access and support and Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 SaaS backup.

Is ConnectWise legit?

Founded in 1982, ConnectWise is a trustworthy and legitimate company. With over 40 years of experience in the IT industry, ConnectWise has grown to be one of the most reputable names in the RMM space. Its 25+ awards in 2024 are a testament to its quality and reliability of products.

Plus, it takes security measures seriously and has detailed policies for vulnerability management and threat mitigation. These are based on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), and the platform also complies with ISO27000 standards.

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Founded in 2000, Kaseya is a well-known name in the IT and security management industry. With more than 24 years of experience, it now caters to more than 45,000 customers in 21 countries. In addition to its VSA RMM platform, Kaseya also offers a lot of other IT solutions, such as PSA, BCDR, cloud backup, email security, and pen testing. This makes it a one-stop destination for all your business's security needs.

Its VSA is an award-winning RMM platform offering features like device monitoring, IT automation and patching, remote access and control, omni-network SNMP monitoring, and mobile device management. You also get native ransomware detection and 600+ out-of-the-box scripts that help achieve quick automation.

However, a slightly steep price tag and a recent cybersecurity incident may have you wondering if it's the best network monitoring tool for your business. Read on to find out.

Kaseya VSA: Plans and pricing

As is the case with most RMM platforms, you’ll have to request a custom quote from the Kaseya sales team. However, after some digging, we found out that the prices may fall between $4-5 per endpoint per month, which, in our experience with RMM platforms, is a bit too high.

If you’re a large business with many endpoints, you’ll have good bargaining power. However, there are several other RMM platforms like TeamViewer that cost less than $0.50 an endpoint.

A silver lining when it comes to Kaseya VSA’s pricing is that you get a 14-day free trial. This gives you ample time to try out the platform before committing to a paid plan. It's worth noting that N-central RMM, another fantastic platform, also offers a free trial (30 days).

Kaseya VSA: Features

Kaseya VSA offers several monitoring and patch management functions, making it a complete RMM platform. You get the benefits of zero-configuration SNMP device monitoring for all your switches, printers, and routers in the IT network.

All you have to do is check a box, and Kaseya will start detecting and responding to alerts to various SNMP IT incidents. You can also automate actions to be taken whenever an alert is triggered. These include creating an alarm or a ticket or sending emails to recipients.

(Image credit: Kaseya VSA)

There’s also a VSA Network Topology Map, which shows you all the devices. Here, you can quickly identify an open alert – just look for a red alarm badge.

Kaseya automations can also be used for auto-remediation of IT issues by running scripts. For example, simple tasks like restarting a printer or rebooting a system after installing an application can be automated. There’s also an automation library with 600+ scripts, reports, and monitor sets, which gives you a head start, ensuring you don’t have to build a script from scratch.

IT technicians can remotely access endpoints with Kaseya to resolve any issues with full console access. There’s also a stealth mode remote control tool called Live Connect which gives you access to an endpoint without the user’s knowledge.

You can access the device’s desktop, memory utilization, and file and directory transfer. Feel free to even browse their drive, add, modify, or delete files, and make changes to files locally. The best part is that you can launch multiple sessions simultaneously.

Plus, just like Datto RMM, Kaseya VSA also comes with native ransomware detection, which detects any crypto-ransomware on endpoints using behavioral analysis. It immediately sends a notification to the IT technicians and starts the process of quarantining the affected files. This can come in handy even if you have a dedicated antivirus solution. After all, an extra layer of protection is always good to have.

Kaseya VSA: Interface and performance

Kaseya follows a simple interface with a white background laced with blue headers. All the functions can be accessed from a panel on the left. You’ll find various sub-options under each function, allowing you to quickly access any feature you need. All in all, it's nothing out of the ordinary, which, by the way, is a good thing!

(Image credit: Kaseya VSA)

Although the interface may appear to be too basic at first glance, it’s super effective and gets the job done. There are no lags or technical glitches with the platform, ensuring a seamless experience.

Just like with Datto RMM, you can create custom dashboards in Kaseya as well. This can be done using various widgets and charts. The default dashboard houses important pieces of information, such as system statuses, active alerts, etc. You can also edit each of these widgets – add or remove them as per your priorities.

Kaseya VSA: Security

Kaseya VSA complies with various security standards. For instance, the company conducts SOC 2 Type II audits, which validate the operating efficiency of its internal controls.

They're also in active compliance with the ISO 27001 standard, which lays down guidelines for the management of ISMS (information security management system). Users can also exercise their data privacy rights under GDPR and CCPA with Kaseya VSA. All communications between Kaseya agents and the Kaseya server are protected with industry-standard AES 256-bit encryption.

Apart from this, the company also conducts regular penetration tests (both internal and external) to ensure there aren't any unnoticed vulnerabilities in their system. You can also set up various role and scope-specific access permissions and enable two-factor authentications. Overall, Kaseya’s security structure is among the most robust we've seen.

With all that in mind, the fact remains that Kaseya was a victim of a ransomware attack this year. However, there wasn't any damage reported and the attack was neutralized in time. While this incident can be considered a black mark on Kaseya’s integrity, it has only helped the company bolster its security infrastructure.

Kaseya VSA: Support

Kaseya offers technical support through three channels: support tickets, email, and call. Phone support is available from Monday to Friday between 6am and 6pm EST. An advantage of using a global product like Kaseya is that there’s an active global community of users and technicians, where you’ll find answers to all your common queries.

Plus, Kaseya itself offers a lot of documentation, help, how-to articles, and YouTube videos that help you climb the platform’s learning curve.

Kaseya VSA: Final verdict

Kaseya VSA is a feature-rich RMM solution ideal for large IT teams and MSPs. VSA’s network discovery and SNMP monitoring will not let any device go undetected in your IT environment. You can then monitor them and get alerts in real time.

It’s also possible to auto-remediate common alerts with pre-designed scripts. There’s also a stealth remote control tool that gives technicians full access to any endpoint, with the authority to modify files without the knowledge of the end user. The Kaseya dashboard is likable, too. It's simple and allows you to drill down on various endpoint parameters with custom filters and reports – and you can also add a custom dashboard with widgets of your choice.

However, while Kaseya is certainly not short on features, they're priced at a premium. Although it doesn’t reveal its pricing, final costs may fall anywhere between $4-5/endpoint/month, which may be a tad too expensive for most businesses.

Plus, Kaseya suffered a cyberattack this year when the Russian ransomware gang REvil exploited a vulnerability in its systems. Although the issue has been resolved, the same cannot be said about the customers’ confidence in the company, which has affected its business as well. With that said, however, the company boasts a beefed up set of privacy and security credentials, which includes regular penetration testing to avoid such incidents in the future.

Kaseya VSA: FAQs Is Datto RMM part of Kaseya?

Kaseya acquired Datto RMM in April 2022 for $6.2 billion, but it still exists as a standalone RMM platform separate from Kaseya VSA. With Datto, you can natively administer your Microsoft 365 tasks through a single-user management platform.

It also comes with automated patch management for OS and third-party applications, as well as native ransomware detection. There’s also a built-in network topology mapping, which gives you a clear view of all the devices in your IT environment.

Is Kaseya safe?

Kaseya is an experienced IT company that complies with various standards, including GDPR and ISO 27001. Plus, it has established various internal security policies. Despite this, though, Kaseya was attacked by a ransomware gang this year, who managed to exploit a vulnerability in its systems.

However, the attack was quickly neutralized and no damage was reported. In fact, this incident has helped the company further strengthen its security structure. It now conducts regular penetration testing to avoid such incidents in the future.

What products does Kaseya offer?

Kaseya is a multi-product company offering a range of IT solutions. You can use its VSA RMM to manage and monitor all your endpoints. Additionally, the company also offers PSA tools, data backup solution, cloud management tools, and email security suite. There’s also Kaseya 365, where you get multiple product functions bundled into a single solution.

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Cookiebot is a comprehensive consent management platform designed to help businesses comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Founded by Cybot in 2012 and now part of Usercentrics, Cookiebot aims to streamline the process of managing user consent through customizable banners and detailed tracking reports. It's particularly geared towards small to medium businesses that need user-friendly and efficient solutions.

While the platform excels in its integration capabilities and user interface, it has its drawbacks. Notably, there's no mobile app, and many advanced customization features are locked behind paid plans. Despite these limitations, Cookiebot remains a popular choice for businesses seeking a reliable consent management solution.

Cookiebot: Pricing

(Image credit: Usercentrics/Cookiebot)

Cookiebot offers a variety of pricing plans designed to meet different business needs and budgets. The pricing structure allows businesses to choose a plan that fits their requirements.

The Free plan is a great starting point for small websites with up to 50 subpages. It includes essential features like pre-made banner templates and Google Consent Mode support, making it ideal for businesses looking to meet basic privacy regulations without spending extra money.

For more advanced features, Cookiebot provides several Premium plans: Lite, Small, Medium, and Large. The Lite plan starts at $8 per domain per month and includes all premium features. The Small plan is priced at $16 per domain per month and supports up to 350 subpages. The Medium plan costs $34 per domain per month for up to 3,500 subpages, while the Large plan, at $56 per domain per month, is for websites with over 3,500 subpages.

Each Premium plan comes with advanced features like custom banner creation, multi-language support, and detailed analytics. Cookiebot's pricing reflects the value of these features, offering a scalable solution for managing consent across multiple domains and subpages.

Overall, Cookiebot's pricing is competitive and offers flexible options to meet various needs and budgets. The platform provides excellent value for money with its comprehensive feature set, making it a smart choice for businesses wanting to ensure privacy compliance.

Cookiebot: Features

Cookiebot helps businesses easily comply with data protection regulations while ensuring that users are informed and in control of their cookie preferences. Here are some of its top features:

Customizable consent banners

One of the best features of Cookiebot is its customizable consent banners. Users can adjust the design, layout, and compliance settings to meet regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others. The platform supports both explicit and implicit consent types and provides options for different banner display formats, color schemes, and logo integration. This level of customization ensures that banners are legally compliant and match the brand.

(Image credit: Usercentrics/Cookiebot)

Detailed compliance reports

Cookiebot provides detailed compliance reports that give insights into user consent activities. The platform tracks the number of detected trackers and points out compliance issues, all organized into easy-to-read reports. This feature is essential for businesses that need to show compliance to regulatory authorities quickly.

CMS integrations

Another advantage of Cookiebot is its integration capabilities, making it simple to add to existing websites. The platform works with major CMSs like WordPress, Hubspot, and Shopify, allowing for easy implementation and management of consent banners across various web environments.

(Image credit: Usercentrics/Cookiebot)

Automatic consent record storage

Cookiebot automatically collects and securely stores consent records using SSL connections and strong encryption. This centralized consent log can be easily exported, making it simpler to demonstrate compliance to authorities when necessary.

Google consent mode support

Cookiebot also supports Google Consent Mode, allowing users to manage consent records effectively while ensuring privacy compliance. This feature is especially useful for websites that rely on Google services, helping to maintain analytics and advertising functionality without compromising user privacy.

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Cookiebot: Setup

(Image credit: Usercentrics/Cookiebot)

Setting up Cookiebot is a simple process designed for users with different levels of technical skills. After signing up, users find a well-organized dashboard that clearly shows the available resources and tools. The platform's clean and user-friendly interface makes it easy to configure consent banners and privacy settings with little effort.

For first-time users, Cookiebot provides various resources to help with the learning process. Detailed help articles and video tutorials offer step-by-step guidance on setting up and customizing the platform to meet specific business needs. The onboarding process also includes a guided tour of the main features, quickly familiarizing users with the interface.

To implement Cookiebot, users just need to copy a script tag and insert it into their website's HEAD tag. Although this may seem challenging for those with limited technical skills, the platform offers clear guidance to ensure a smooth setup. For more complex integrations, Cookiebot's compatibility with Google Tag Manager provides an easier alternative.

Throughout the setup, Cookiebot focuses on being user-friendly and accessible. The design allows even novice users to manage consent banners and privacy compliance without feeling overwhelmed. Overall, Cookiebot's setup process is efficient and well-supported, making it a great choice for businesses of all sizes.

Cookiebot: Support

(Image credit: Usercentrics/Cookiebot)

Cookiebot provides strong customer support to help users manage their consent needs effectively. The platform offers various support options, including email and live chat, to accommodate different user preferences and time zones. Additionally, there’s a comprehensive help center filled with detailed articles and guides on different aspects of the platform.

Support quality is consistent across all plans, meaning users receive the same level of help regardless of their subscription tier. Response times are generally quick, with most inquiries addressed within 24 hours, which is impressive for a platform of this size.

Besides traditional support channels, Cookiebot also features a community forum where users can connect, share tips, and find solutions to common challenges. This forum is a great resource and helps foster a sense of community among Cookiebot users.

One area for improvement is the lack of phone support, which could enhance the overall user experience, especially for those who prefer direct conversations. Still, Cookiebot's customer support is reliable and effective, providing users with the resources they need to make the most of the platform.

Cookiebot: Final verdict

Cookiebot is a user-friendly consent management platform that provides strong compliance solutions. It offers customizable consent banners, detailed tracking reports, and easy integrations with content management systems, making it a great option for small to medium-sized businesses. The platform features an intuitive setup process and responsive customer support, adding to its appeal.

However, some users might find the lack of a dedicated mobile app and limitations of the free plan to be downsides. Still, Cookiebot delivers good value for money, with competitive pricing and options tailored to different business needs.

In summary, Cookiebot is a solid choice for businesses looking for an effective and scalable consent management solution. Its features and support help ensure privacy compliance in a more regulated digital world.

Review info

Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch
Release date: November 14, 2024

Who doesn’t love Lego? From intense building challenges to comedic film and game adaptations, what began as simple clicky bricks has expanded well beyond ABS plastic and into a media genre of its own. Joining the ranks of other block-based game adaptations like Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman, Lego Horizon Adventures adapts the events of Guerrilla’s post-apocalyptic robo-animal kingdom adventure Horizon Zero Dawn for a younger audience, turning its cast of survivors into a handful of quippy Minifigures. Yet despite all the witty exchanges and endearing left-field gags, Lego Horizon Adventures stumbles in the gameplay department, presenting players with a monotonous combat system and a series of repetitive levels lacking the depth and intrigue to help maintain interest beyond its affable opening hours.

Lego Horizon Adventures begins with a young Aloy being cast out from the superstitious Nora Tribe to be raised by her Golden Retriever of an adoptive father, Rost. Players assume control as Aloy enters young adulthood and journeys towards the village of Mother’s Heart to search for answers about their past. Conveniently, this trip doubles as a speedy tutorial that acquaints you with the approachable movement and combat systems you’ll master throughout the campaign. Alongside basic platforming challenges and quirky power-ups, you’ll get to grips with aiming, charging, and shooting arrows in the direction of the meddling machines that block your way.

For toppling the tutorial, Rost also rewards you with Aloy’s trusty Focus, which you can use to highlight weak spots on enemy machines and deal extra damage. It’s a manageable set of verbs that manages to evoke the gameplay of Horizon Zero Dawn without deviating too far from the kid-friendly Lego setting. Plus, if the process begins to feel a little too easy, you can conveniently switch to a more challenging difficulty at any time from the menu.

(Image credit: Guerrilla Games)

Soon enough, Aloy arrives at a ravaged Mother’s Heart, which becomes the central hub where much of the game revolves. From here, you’ll access missions that propel the story forward, earning studs and gold bricks to revive the surrounding area between levels, decorating it with all manner of new plots and yards, complete with alternate color schemes and theming from Lego brands like Ninjago and Lego City. The additional decor and costumes earned with studs and bricks also act as collectibles here, as there aren’t any hidden across the levels.

Later, you unlock the ability to purchase upgrades that provide classic XP, defense, and damage boosts for the quartet of playable protagonists — Aloy, Erend, Varl, and Teersa. A Community Jobs Board also rewards you with bonus progression-gating bricks for completing specific tasks. The cosmetic changes you can make to Mother's Heart result in a pretty play space but one that also feels empty. You can build a rocket ship that blasts a minifig into space, but these little sidecars are one-and-done experiences that might’ve worked better in a different part of the game, perhaps peppered through the levels to freshen up the formula.

(Image credit: Geurrilla Games) Rinse and repeat

The first few levels of Lego Horizon Adventures feel stacked with exciting details and beautifully lit exploration opportunities — chests hidden under broken highways and glistening waters flowing from industrial pipes. However, it’s not long before the levels begin feeling familiar. The game is split into four biomes, and upon leaving Mother's Heart, you’ll spend your time platforming around these themed environments, collecting studs, and picking up powerups amid repeating set dressing. Occasionally, the pace will be split by a shop zone where you can pop chests and collect unique gadgets that modify your abilities in battle. Most missions end with an arena encounter leading to a level-ending gold brick and one of the many hilarious cutscenes to send you back home with a smile.

Aside from a few boss battles and refreshing visits to Horizon Zero Dawn’s Cauldrons, this rinse-and-repeat formula follows you throughout the game, all the way until the story’s final moments. While the cutscenes give you the broad strokes of Horizon’s plot among all the gags, the gameplay surrounding them feels noticeably distinct from the narrative. It’s a far cry from Lego Star Wars, where you tend to engage in the beat-to-beat activities of the movie with an aloof Lego veneer layered on top.

Best bit

(Image credit: Guerrilla Games)

Across Lego Horizon Adventures’ runtime, the cast’s commitment to their silly personas feels sincere, adding playful layers to historically stoic characters. This sincerity extends across the game's more emotional moments, which still land despite the cutesy Lego veneer.

Thankfully, environmental hazards like character-freezing ice pools and piercing flora bring welcome considerations to the game’s encounters and allow for moments of tactical intrigue. You can lure a Grazer into an electrified field of water to stop it in its tracks and target weak points. Gadgets (from the games and beyond) also help spice up fights, presenting an alternate means to take out machines and antagonize cultists. My personal favorite, the Tripcaster, lets you engage your inner Kevin McAllister. You can drop two pegs to create a wobbly wire and then lure machines into a comical demise.

As enemy types and numbers add up, upgrades become key and help stack the odds in your favor. As a lifelong min-maxxer, I mainly spent my studs on the XP-boosting options, so Aloy and Co would deal more damage in the long run. But there are plenty of defensive and offensive options to fit how you play, whether you want enemies to drop more health globs or start levels with powerful gadgets. You can pick from the game’s four cast members throughout or have friends embody the troupe in co-op, which helps flip the odds on the robots. While I rarely deviated from the satisfaction of Aloy’s targetted arrow attacks, it was nice to have the option to switch to the bomb-toting Teersa or the clumsy spear-throwing Varl – if not just to enjoy their unique quips and animations.

Once you’ve conquered one of the biomes, you can also try your hand at Apex Hunts, which involves jumping into the levels you’ve completed to destroy mecha-monsters sans cutscenes. Success here earns you more cosmetics to flesh out Mother's Heart as well as the pride of knowing you bested a burly beast.

(Image credit: Guerrilla Games) Built brick by brick

Despite its mediocre framework, Lego Horizon Adventures picks up much of the slack with its spirited visual style. Soft lighting reflects off semi-matte structures, giving areas a playful diorama look—a feeling amplified by the game's bokeh camera effect. Up close, pieces look worn and scratched, as if ripped from real playsets and scanned into the game. Plus, the buildings and bridges look like they’ve been made from actual Lego, as opposed to being digitally created to fit the scene. I was especially impressed by how tactile the machines looked in battle and how convincingly they fell apart when I crumpled a weak spot.

With so much thought put into the world, I was confused about why other Lego properties like Amusement, Ninjago, and Lego City had been shoehorned into the game beyond the cosmetic options available in Mother’s Heart. Each biome is themed around a Lego property — so in the jungle missions, you’ll spot Ninjago pagodas and other assets thrown in, for example. It’s a cute gag, but this assumes a level of Lego understanding from players and confuses the art direction, particularly for a game set in post-post-apocalyptic America.

Moreover, Lego Horizon Adventures’ biggest sin is switching to cutscenes for some of its most pivotal moments. Despite a beautifully animated world and plenty of screenshot-worthy dialogue, I longed to feel more instrumental in significant Horizon lore events that would help to ground me in the experience. Yet, more often than not, I was met with an animated sequence showing me something I wished I was doing instead. Ultimately, this lack of interactivity does a disservice to the source material and makes the moments that do land feel less meaningful overall.

(Image credit: Guerrilla Games) Should I play Lego Horizon Adventures? Play it if...

You want to relax with a breezy game
Lego Horizon Adventures' straightforward nature makes it a superb companion for a night of low-effort cozy gaming.

You're looking for a game to play with a young family
Quippy writing, couch-coop, and togglable difficulty settings provide Lego Horizon Adventures with a family-friendly appeal.

Don't play it if...

You expect it to be like other Lego games
For better and for worse, Lego Horizon Adventures is a much different beast to something like Lego Star Wars or Lego Lord of the Rings. The combat is a bit more engaging, but it’s not as concerned with adapting the moment-to-moment plot beats of its source material.View Deal

You want to relive the entire Horizon series in Lego
Lego Horizon Adventure covers the base campaign of Horizon Zero Dawn, but it doesn’t touch on the plotlines of Horizon Forbidden West or Horizon: Call of the Mountain. View Deal

Accessibility

Lego Horizon Adventures offers five difficulty options (Story, Scout, Adventurer, Machine Hunter, and Hero), and you can toggle them anytime from the pause menu. You can also toggle on invulnerability while playing with these options. For combat, there are three aim assist options (Precise, Assisted, Auto) and a throwing sensitivity scale. Additionally, there are three color blindness modes (Deuteranope, Protanope, and Tritanopia), as well as a Colour Correction Strength scale in the Accessibility menu. Plus, if you want assistance seeing interactable objects or hazards in levels, you can choose to have them appear when you Focus Scan an area.

You can toggle subtitles on for cinematic, conversational, and ambient dialogue, choose the font size (small, medium, large), and tweak the text’s background opacity (0-10 scale). If you prefer to move between lines of dialogue manually, there’s a dedicated option for Conversation Control.

Where audio is concerned, you can tweak individual streams such as sound effects and music and switch between a mono mode. There is also an option to turn on Midnight sound mixing, which raises the volume of quiet sounds while lowering the volume of louder sounds.

(Image credit: Guerrilla Games) How I reviewed Lego Horizon Adventures

I completed Lego Horizon Adventures on PlayStation 5 in around eight hours, across which I tried various difficulty settings, from Story to Hero. I also played each character option, including Aloy, Varl, Teersa, and Erend. I jumped between single and couch co-op across the campaign and in Apex Hunts. I used an AOC CQ27G2 27-inch QHD VA 144Hz gaming monitor with my PS5, and for audio, I used my external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers.