A
A shower head that isn’t
full of limescale can make
a massive difference,
and generally won’t mean
ripping anything off the wall or
calling a plumber when the
things you’ve ripped off the wall
won’t stop squirting water. Just
don’t go too bananas with the
wide-ended rainfall simulations,
particularly if your water pressure
isn’t up to it.
You might also like some tunes
to entertain you once the feeling of
‘I don’t want to get in the shower’
has transitioned to ‘I am never
leaving ever’; Guru personally
recommends the UE Wonderboom
2, a dinky waterproof Bluetooth
speaker. It’s listed at £90 but you’ll
find it for £70, and if even that is
too much you’ll probably find the
original Wonderboom for a
cheap-as-chips £50.
Why not combine the two?
Kohler’s Moxie showerhead (£234)
incorporates an Alexa-enabled
speaker, which is both incredibly
unnerving and undisputably cool.
The Alexa module is removable, so
no bathroom electricity required.GADGET GURU’S MAGIC BOX
A
There’s so much going on in
this space it’s hard to pick
out a single speaker that
Guru would call ‘best’. Not because
they’re bad (though there is a hefty
stack of duds out there) but because
they’re mostly pretty good.
Before GaGu upsets any
manufacturers by inadvertently and
advertently trash-talking their
hardware, let’s upset a whole lot of
coders (and fanboys) by talking
entirely objectively about the smart
AIs powering them and which is
best. It is Google Assistant. That is
the best one. It understands queries
more frequently, it deals with them
more effectively, and its wealth of
knowledge is deeper. Don’t take
Guru’s word for it: this is all based
on research from the guys at Loupe
Ventures. Alexa falls in the middle,
and Siri at the bottom – though the
latter earned commendations for
its abilities on a phone.
For Apple’s sake it’s a shame
we’re not talking about iPhones
here. Given that the only Siri smart
speaker is the HomePod, a thing
that is (in Guru’s opinion) too
expensive and not quite good
enough, that pretty much puts Siri
out of the running altogether.
So we’re looking for a smart
speaker that runs Google Assistant.
GaGu has little time for Google’s
first-party equipment, with the
smaller ends of its range perfectly
fine but doing little to excite your
expert’s hairy little ears, and the
Max variety plenty loud but (again,
personally) disappointingly muddy
in its delivery.
There are two third party
speakers which Guru is going to
recommend. They’re expensive
and needlessly portable, but they
support both Google Assistant
And Alexa, and they both offer
exemplary audio quality. Whether
you opt for the Bose Portable
Home Speaker (£330) or the fatter,
heavier Sonos Move (£399) is
really up to you.What’s the best smart speaker
that I can buy?
DAVE, CAMDEN
Can I upgrade
my shower?
LISA EGGERT,
WARWICKThis month has not been the best for Guru.
First came the death of his Samsung
American-style fridge, which admittedly
had spent the past eight years dribbling
water over GaGu’s kitchen floor and not
quite keeping its contents cold enough.
Given that Guru’s kitchen is due to be
ripped out, he skimped and opted for a
£580 Kenwood KSBSDB19 fridge (also sold
as the Hisense RS741N4WB11) – and only
now does he realise what he has been
missing. Things are cold! Frozen things are
not soft! It’s like living in the future.
Then came the
mysterious smell coming
from GaGu’s frontage. At
first he thought it was the
drains. The nice man from
the rodding company,
though, confirmed it was
not; Guru’s suspicion is
that his grounds are being
used as some kind of fox
latrine, so he attempted
to the employ the
services of the
18650-powered
Kami Wire-free
Outdoor Camera
(£80) to catch
them in the act.
Didn’t go so well: GaGu found its motion
sensing to be highly sketchy, and unless you
plunk down a whole heap of money on a
subscription it’ll capture a maximum of six
seconds’ footage before going on what
seems like an hour-long hiatus.
And then. And then! WWDC happened,
and Guru found himself even less affiliated
with the Mac than ever before. He’d truly
gone off Windows for a while, but Catalina
basically broke his 2015 iMac, which pushed
him back to the Microsoft camp. Putting the
classic ‘Apple updates which make old
hardware unusable’ conspiracy theories
aside, macOS Big Sur’s overt and
perplexing blending of the Mac and iPad
worlds makes no sense to GaGu; certainly
you may have a different opinion, and Guru
won’t judge (for once), but it’s not for him.AUGUST 2020 T3 23Gadget guru
ABOVE
So-so flow
making power
showers a no-go?
KO those woes
with a hose!