In the spirit of gifting this holiday season, the host of MediaTech Ventures’ show connecTed, Ted Cohen, offers his thoughts on the best technology to help you with your holiday shopping list. After much investigation, Ted found Wired’s Gift Guide to be the most thorough list of tech. Taking from that list, check out Ted’s selection of his favorite tech from 2022 with a variety of price ranges. (Obvious choices such as a Quest 2, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and AirPods were intentionally omitted!)
10. Roku Streambar – ($100.00) Roku’s Streambar is a simple device that does its job well. On top of being a solid soundbar, it comes with Roku OS on board. You can plug it into your TV and stream movies and TV shows from it, rather than relying on a separate streaming stick.
9. Insta360 One R Twin Edition – ($408.00) The Insta360 One R Twin Edition is an action camera that can double as a 360-degree camera. Its interchangeable lens blocks let you attach a 4K camera, a dual-lens 360-degree camera, and a wide-angle Leica lens paired with a 1-inch sensor for 5K video. It’s one of the more versatile systems you can get in such a compact package.
8. LG C1 OLED 55-Inch TV – ($1297.00) LG’s C1 is one of the best TVs currently available. It has gorgeous black levels, hyper-fast gaming response times, and is one of the best smart TV interfaces on the market. You could use this as a gaming monitor for your PS5 or Xbox Series X, or just enjoy the rich colors of the latest blockbuster movie.
7. Lenovo Yoga 9i—Core i7, 16 GB RAM, 512-GB SSD – ($1250.00) For a high-end laptop, this is a great deal. It features a 14-inch, 4K HDR touchscreen with an Intel Evo Core i7 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512-GB SSD. The Yogi comes with Windows 11 Home, and you’ll be able to handle most everyday tasks with it; just don’t expect to do much gaming or heavy video editing.
6. Primula Burke Cold Brew Coffee Maker – ($14.00) Primula’s Burke immersion brewer can make up to 32 ounces of coffee at a time in a couple of simple steps. Just put coarse grounds into the mesh basket, pour water through it, and in 24 hours you’ll have smooth, flavorful iced coffee.
5. Amazon Fire TV Cube – ($75.00) If you’re more of an Amazon household, the Fire TV Cube may be more your speed. It’s designed for “hands-free” streaming via Alexa voice search. In our experience, it didn’t handle this task super well, but thankfully it also comes with a remote.
4. Chromecast With Google TV – ($40.00) The Google Chromecast is the best version of Google TV, it finally comes with a remote in the box (unlike most previous Chromecast devices), and it has Google Assistant built-in. You can search for a show or movie to find out which of the numerous streaming services has the content you want to watch and even add movies to your watch list from Google searches on your phone or computer.
3. Razer Kiyo Pro Webcam – ($100.00) This 1080p cam delivers great picture quality with its large, adaptive light sensor. However, you may want to tweak the settings in the Razer Synapse app to make it look even better.
2. Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Android Tablet – ($499.00) If you don’t mind spending a little extra, you can get the Galaxy Tab S7 with a sharp 11-inch LCD display and a 120-Hz refresh rate, and it even includes an S Pen stylus. There aren’t a lot of good tablets that support the Google Play Store, and this is one of the better ones.
- Google Pixel 6 phone – ($549.00) This is the first Pixel to use Google’s custom Tensor processor architecture, which lets it handle complex machine learning tasks on the phone itself, without sending your data back to Google. This makes voice dictation super-fast, and the new Magic Eraser feature can intelligently remove people or objects from the background of your photos.
No matter which you pick this holiday season make sure to share your tech recommendations from 2021 in our community!
