Before You Buy 126 (Transcript)

Show tease: Let’s get ready to game! We’ve got a roundup of gaming devices, including a monitor, mouse, and speakers! Something like, called the Neptor, that’s what this is, we’ll find out what it does! And, does it make any sense to have a special kind of computer for senior citizens? I’ll take a look at the WOW computer. It’s time to watch Before You Buy!

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Before you Buy is brought to you by Harry’s. For guys who want a great shave experience for a fraction of what you’re paying now, go to Harrys.com. Get five dollars off your first purchase by entering the offer code, BEFOREYOUBUY, when you check out. And by Nature Box. Where you can order great tasting, healthy snacks delivered right to your door! Forget the vending machine, and get in shape with healthy delicious treats like Whole Wheat Lemon Figgy Bars. Mmm. To get 50% off your first box, go to Naturebox.com/twit. That’s naturebox.com/twit.

Leo Laporte: Welcome to Before You Buy, the TWiT product review show where we get products people are interested in finding out more about, and give them to our staff, so they can give you a review of what it’s like to use it in real world conditions. We’re going to kick things off with Chad Johnson. The Host of OMG Craft. He’s a gamer and we gave him three, not one, not two, but three different gaming devices to try out. Chad!

Chad Johnson: Hello my name is Chad, I’m with TWiT and Before You Buy, and today I’m reviewing three different gaming products. First is a monitor by AOC. Next is a mouse by Roccat, and finally is a speaker system, a 2.1 speaker system by GX gaming. Let’s go ahead and start off with the monitor. This monitor is a 24 inch 1080P monitor. It has a 144 Hertz refresh rate. This is a twisted pneumatic film LCD, which means that… LED sorry. Which means that it’s not an IPS display. Many people understand what an IPS display is. This is twisted Pneumatic film. That means that it will have a faster response time, but it will not give you the same viewing angles that an IPS display will give you. One of my favorite things about this monitor is the stand. It has an adjustable height and tilt. So if you want to easily make this tilt for document viewing, you easily can. It is a 16x9 aspect ratio, so it feels very tall when it’s fully tilted. The base also swivels easily, there’s a plate on the bottom portion of the stand, which allows it to swivel back and forth very easily. The menu system is pretty easy, it comes up from the bottom here, you can switch between settings, and it has a small animation menu system. Was really good. And then it also has different modes, or has four different inputs. It has DVI, HDMI, display port. And VGA. Another feature that is has which I really, really loved, was it is a USB hub. It has two USB ports on the side. One of them is powered, and then on the bottom of the monitor there’s also two USB ports. Right now my keyboard, and mouse are plugged into those ports. So you can kind of see where they line up on the monitor. Because of the LED backlighting, it was very bright. This is an incredibly bright monitor, in fact I basically couldn’t look at it if it was dark in the room. I had to turn on extra lights otherwise my eyes would just be blinded. It also has a 144 refresh rate, and they claim a one millisecond lag time. Now we didn’t quite have equipment to review that in studio, but digitalversus.com did a review of the lag time, and they found that in their testing there was an average of 8.5 millisecond lag time, between switching from black and light, that’s how they test that. We’re going to save the pros and cons for later on in the review. Kind of like a refresher course on all the products. Now moving on to the Mouse. This is a ROCCAT Kova mouse. They have very interesting names for their mice. This is a gaming mouse, and one of the nicest features about it is that it’s both left and right handed. This can go up to 3,200 DPI, which is a very, very high DPI range for a gaming mouse. And that’s expected. Some of the features that it has, is it has up to 7 different buttons on the mouse. It has two over here, two over here, of course, your normal two buttons are here, that brings up to 6 and then your middle click button as well. This mouse supports a feature called easy shift. And I didn’t think I would love this feature right off the beginning, but I actually found I used it all the time. So what is easy shift? Well this button right here is your easy shift button, and whenever you have it pressed down, all the other buttons can do something while you’re in game, or even in a browser. Just browsing around. So as an example, if I click the easy shift button now, and I scroll the mouse wheel up and down, this will actually change the volume of my computer while I’m not in a game. So here I’ve been browsing Reddit. If I hold down the easy shift button and left click, it will go back, it’s like it’ll go back to the front page, or if I right click, it’ll go forward. I didn’t think I would love this feature, I absolutely adore it. Also in four places around the mouse, there are the RGB LEDS, so you can see it sort of flashing. It goes through a cycle if I haven’t selected a color with the driver. I tested this on my home computer so I don’t have a driver loaded up on this windows 8 machine here, but at home on my windows 7 machine I do, and you can choose specific colors. It will switch colors once you do easy shift mode, so that’s kind of an indicator of when you have switched into easy shift. But if there’s no set color, it will just cycle through a few, which is kind of a nice looking thing. The outside of the mouse, has sort of a soft touch feel to it. Especially along the sides right here, these grips, you can kind of sing how my finger, it does grip very well, especially right here. And then this is fort of a slick plastic. The whole mouse is sort of a slick plastic construction. Along the bottom there is a sticker, or a little piece of metal around the image sensor. And I found that, I have two cats, and I got cat hair in here all the time, and I’d have to rip it out every once in a while. I kind of found that for my situation, a little bit of a bummer. Moving on to the speakers. These are GX gaming speakers. This is a 2.1 set up, not surround sound. Two being you have left and right and .1 being that you have a subwoofer. This uses a normal 3.5 millimeter jack to plug into the back of your computer, and then it plugs into this controller. Now this controller might seem big, but I really love the functionality that this included. You have a really nice volume knob on the front, as well as an independent bass knob, and this does respect to the volume. So if you have your bass cranked all the way up, you’re not just going to get really loud bass even though the volume knob might be turned down. It does respect the volume knob, which I really liked. You also have a standby button, which seems a little bit redundant, because you also have a power button on the back of the device. You have a power toggle right here, so that seemed pretty redundant. You can see the back of this, you have your inputs, and your outputs. You get just a single RCA for each left/right speaker, and then another black RCA for the subwoofer. And then I used the left/right RCA for the computer, and then this is another auxiliary input right there, which you can plug into say a phone, or maybe another stereo system if you want to route it over. On the front, you also have a headphone mic and another auxiliary in. So you have a total of three inputs into this little bass station here. How do you switch between the inputs? Well that’s the last button here, this source, you can easily switch blue, and the blue LED is basically for the RCA connector. The green is for the line in on the back, and the orange is for the line in on the front. If this gets confusing to you, they’ve made it a little bit simpler because the included the wires sort of match the color of the LED is. This is as close as the oranges I could get. If I switch back to blue there isn’t a blue, well there is actually a blue, you could either use this blue cable, so you could flip it around, I did it the other way, so that it is close to green, so it kind of matches, so I could keep my cords and colors in the right order. As far as how does it sound? It sounds really well, everything was crisp and clear, I was a little bit worried when I was listening to Skype audio, things were a little bit muddy.  But I never found that it was un-understandable at any point in time. I have a little bit of music that I can play from my phone. Let me switch sources, and we can listen to a little bit. And then also take a look at this Sub while we’re doing that. Because it will, there’s a LED light in there that will light up anytime this Sub gets going big time.  I really, that’s really, really useful. Okay time for the pros and cons, let’s go ahead and start off with the monitor. On the pro side, the motion and lag time I found was pretty great, even though 8.5 milliseconds, you will never notice that, especially when playing on a multiplayer game. Also I really love this stand, the swivel, the high adjustment, the fact that it could tilt all the way over. The stand was a really nice feature. And finally the USB hub was really great having four extra USB ports right in on the monitor. On the cons, the fact that other monitors in this category do have 3D support, and this one does not was a little bit of a bummer. And those speakers were really, really crap, so don’t use the speakers on this monitor. Next for the ROCCAT mouse, on the pros, I like that it was left and right handed, so f r both types of gamers. The RGB LEDS were really nice, and that shift 3.2, and that easy shift button I found that I really enjoyed. On the cons, it’s a little bit light, and the finish did get a little bit tarnished after a while, normally with just rubbing it down with a cleaner got rid of most of it, but there is still a little bit of tarnish after doing that. Now moving on to the speakers from GX gaming. On the pros I really liked that it would take from multiple sources. There are wall mounts on the back of the two speakers, which is really, really nice. And I liked that the SUB lit up with that LED as gimmicky as it is. For the cons, the jacks on the front and backs of the bass station felt very cheap. And I almost needed two hands to re-plug in something. It feels really, really cheap and difficult to use. And there’s no, there’s no anti-slip feeding on the side of the speakers, so I found that they would get bumped around on my desk an awful lot, even if I had them close to my mouse, they could get sort of pushed around a bit, by just moving my mouse around. So by, try, don’t buy for these three gaming peripheral’s. Starting off at the monitor, this comes in at a price of $269.99 on line. MSRP is a little bit higher. I’m going to give this one a buy! I really liked the extra features, the USB. I didn’t find that the lag time significantly impacted anything. 8.5 milliseconds was just fine for me. I liked all the features except for the speakers in the back. Moving on to the ROCCAT mouse, I’m going to give this one a buy! It only costs 40 dollars. $39.99. And the easy shift was a feature that I am sorely going to miss on other mouse, mice. I found that the button placement was perfect for my thumb, and I could easily use that easy shift button. Finally, with the speakers from GX Gaming, I’m going to give these guys a try, mostly because of the feel. They feel just a little bit light, and a little bit inexpensive. They come it at 100 dollars, although that’s not that bad of a price for speakers. So, I’m giving this one a try, just because I don’t feel 100% about these guys after living with them for a few weeks. But some really nice features with the different sources that you can use. And that about wraps it up for these three gaming peripherals. I’m Chad Johnson for Twit and Before You Buy. See you next time!

Leo: A buy, buy, and a try! Thank you Chad Johnson. Chad hosts OMG craft. Our show all about gaming, about Minecraft on this network, and of course, produces many of my best shows. And is now the host of a brand new show called Reddit up with Sarah Lane. All about Reddit. I was doing a little reading while Chad was doing reviewing on how to shave. Here’s a little secret. Your facial hair grows differently from everyone else’s. So introduce your hands to your face and get acquainted with your beard. It’s alright Tonya, you don’t have to do this. And it will come in handy later. Your facial hair is as course as copper wire, so sweet talking into submission is time well spent. Soften your beard with warm water. Squeeze a quarter sized dollop of shaving cream onto your fingers, and massage it into your beard to soften while you whisper a love song option. Now that you now your face like the back of your hand, it’s time to get to work. Start shaving with the grain and stay with it everywhere. Then if you want to visit a level of smoothness, reminiscent of you in the fourth grade, go lightly against the grain, or get a time machine. Gently splash cold water on your face, pat dry with a nice fluffy towel, we’re pretty sure you’re going to look great, but please refrain from whistling at yourself, or winking. Confident smiles are permitted. That’s the Harry’s shave guide that came with my Harry’s shave kit. This is the Winston. Harrys was founded by Andy and Jeff, who knew there was a better way than going down to the local drug store, finding the clerk, and getting them to unlock the high-priced razor blades. Those fusion blades, the other blades, they’re so expensive they’re actually locked up at the drug store now, can you believe that? And really they’re overpriced. You can get a great razor, and a great shave for a lot less with Harry’s. Harrys.com. Jeff of Jeff and Andy was actually one of the cofounders of Warbi parker, and a similar situation, a business that was dominated by a monopolistic couple of companies who over charged. And just like Warbi parker, Harry’s has come along to give us another way. This is shipped direct to your door. This is the beautiful Winston razor, you can get it engraved with your name, for Father’s day, what a great gift this would be. And it comes with Harrys shave cream, and if you’ve heard Steve Gibson wax on and on about this, he just raves about. Smell that, doesn’t that smell good?

Tonya Hall: Yeah, it actually does.

Leo: It’s got a little menthol, and it smooth’s your skin beautifully. So you can put it on like that. What? Well I just thought I’d be nice and clean shaved for the show. And then Harrys blades, these are five blade razors, made in their own factory in Germany, I didn’t even use any water, and I’m getting a fabulous shave, look at that. Look at that, you know what? It it’ll turn shaving into something you look forward to. Go ahead, just touch it right there. Ding! That is great! Harrys is a perfect gift for dad, this father’s day, or your grad this June. They even have a father and son shave kit. Now this is kind of fun, that orange one has no blade, so it’s for a little son to shave with dad safely. Oh that’s so cute!  Oh man! I’m going to have to rent me a kid! Anyway, Harrys.com. You get five dollars off your first order if you use the offer code BEFOREYOUBUY. A great shave! At a fraction of the price, we love Harry’s. I feel like it’s reinvented shaving for me. Harrys.com. The offer code is BEFOREYOUBUY. And you’ll be supporting Harrys, and Harry’s is supporting our show. Thank you Harry’s.  Let me get that little guide to shave. See look at that. Smooth, that’s like a fourth grader, right there! Tonya Hall is here. She’s the host of Marketing Mavericks. Boy, is that a great show. I listen, what is it? Tuesday morning? Monday morning?

Tonya: It’s Tuesday mornings.

Leo: Very early.

Tonya: It is.

Leo: How early?

Tonya: 8:30.

Leo: I listen every morning. I should know.

Tonya: You should know.

Leo: It’s awesome.

Tonya: Thank you.

Leo: Yeah, you had the CMO of Overstock.com on last week.

Tonya: Actually I had the CEO of overstock.

Leo: He’s the CEO?

Tonya: CEO.

Leo: He was great, I loved what he said.

Tonya: I know, so feisty.

Leo: Yeah feisty is a good word. Fastening show for people who are interested in how companies are using the internet and social media to market, and think about how they do their business and stuff. We’re so glad you came along and joined us just a few months ago. We also gave you something very attractive. What color is that?

Tonya: So this is the Neptor 5600 Milliamp lithium polum battery. And they do come in a variety of colors, you’re talking about the color so we can start there. There is a variety of colors. This is actually...

Leo: Is that pink?

Tonya: It kind of is. They say it’s purple, that would be the only thing I would kind of say about that. It just, they do list… the other colors are red, green, blue, and orange. This is the one I have. The cord here is actually kind of interesting. It’s actually flat, which I actually really like.

Leo: Oh I like that because they don’t get tangled when they’re flat like that.

Tonya: Exactly. Its five ounces, so it’s not very heavy. It’s got two charging points, and if you can see those right there.

Leo: Here I’ll hold it for you.

Tonya: Thank you.

Leo: Because you’re talking, I’ll hold it. This is a very crowded category really. And I wanted to know, besides the color, what’s different?

Tonya: It’s actually very similar to its competitors except for price, we’ll get to that. It’s got two charging points, it’s got one that’s a one amp, and it’s got a two point one amp.

Leo: Well that’s good, so you can charge an iPad on that.

Tonya: Exactly. It doesn’t have an AC adapter, which I would actually really like, but it does have a…

Leo: So you charge it with a USB cable, but it’s the same cable, you just plug it in the other side to charge it.

Tonya: One of the features is this light right here. If you can see that.

Leo: It’s got a flashlight built in.

Tonya: It’s a little flashlight, and LED light

Leo: I don’t think it’s working.

Tonya: You’ve got to do it twice, I just turned it back off.  You’ve got to be smarter than the battery, right?

Leo: That’s how charged it is.

Tonya: That’s the charge, and there’s the flashlight. Which, you know, I don’t know that there’s a huge purpose for that except maybe in the middle of the night.

Leo: Let me just try it and see if it’s blinding. No. I’m looking right into it. But you know what this is good for? Finding your way to the bathroom in a hotel room.

Tonya: Finding your way to the bathroom.

Leo: That’s what I need that for.

Tonya: Or maybe a keyhole. I do like this cord….

Leo: You shouldn’t pee in keyholes, I’ve found! Stick with the bathroom. Oh you mean to like unlock the door!

Tonya: Yeah!

Leo: Oh okay.

Tonya: Alright. What I’ve found is it took me about an hour to charge my phone when it ran completely down, so it didn’t take that long. It did take about 5 hours to actually recharge this once it when down, so it does take a little bit of time to do that, and you can turn this off pretty quick. And it does have a place for a lanyard. It’s kind of small. I don’t know what you’d use that.

Leo: I’m not going to wear my battery around my neck, thank you. I’m glad I can, if I choose to.

Tonya: Yeah exactly, or maybe around your wrist, or something like that. Actually, this design is probably one of the things I like the most, because it really fits nicely in your pocket, of if you’re out hiking or something, and your phone runs dead and you forget to charge it.

Leo: How many milliamp hours did you say? That’s the key.

Tonya: Yeah. So it says it’s got 500 charges and it also says it’s got, I think they claim…

Leo: How many milliamp hours? That’s all that matters.

Tonya: It says 5600 milliamp.

Leo: Okay. So that’s a small battery

Tonya: Right. So they did have bigger ones.

Leo: So you can charge a galaxy S4 two and a half times.

Tonya: Yeah. Actually I think it was about twice is what I hooked it up for.

Leo: yeah, twice is more likely.

Tonya: So the pros are, its design, because I like the fit.

Leo: It’s pretty.

Tonya: It’s flexible cable, and it’s got two charging points. The cons are its recharge time. I thought it took a long time to recharge it. And there’s no AC adapter, I would really like that. So those are my...

Leo: How much?

Tonya: It’s actually listed at 50 dollars. But I found it cheaper, I found it at $34, and its competitor which is almost the exact same thing is around roughly 79 dollars.

Leo: No, no, there’s lots in that category, that’s actually overpriced. So are you going to say, buy, try, don’t buy? You liked it!

Tonya: I said it was a buy!

Leo: It was pretty. I think it’s a little over priced for what it is, because that’s not a lot of milliamp hours. You can get 12,000 for that price. Don’t you want more milliamp hours for your dollar?

Tonya: I do. I do want more milliamp hours.

Leo: Neptor and it’s a buy from Tonya.

Tonya: There is one con that I didn’t list.

Leo: What’s that?

Tonya: In the middle of the night, if you are grabbing for this, you don’t want to accidently, you don’t want to accidently grab this.

Leo: What is that? Is that your tazor?

Tonya: That is my tazor!

Leo: Give me that! You have a pink tazor?

Tonya: Don’t judge me Leo.

Leo: Go ahead, taze me.

Tonya: No I will not! I wouldn’t anyway, but I’ve been instructed not to.

Leo: Is that actually a tazor.

Tonya: Now you’re scaring me. Yeah!

Leo: How many milliamp hours does this have? You could charge your phone with this. This is called the Smack. Wow!

Tonya: I heard a no coming from…

Leo: Yeah, well she knows what I’m about to do. Right to the cheek. Compare the hairy shave to the tazor shave.

Tonya: No, no. No!

Leo: No? Alright!

Tonya: So that’s more of a personal con, you just don’t want to accidently…

Leo: Don’t accidently grab your tazor when grabbing for your Neptor instead. The Neptor, is it like the Neptor 3000?

Tonya: No it’s not that sexy.

Leo: It should. Thank you Tonya Hall. Marketing Mavericks. And you did such a good job. I feel like Pavlov here. You deserve a snack! Would you like big island pineapple rings? Coffee kettle popcorn, I had this this morning.

Tonya: Lisa said that one’s really good.

Leo: It is very good. Although don’t eschew the coco waffle wafers.

Tonya: Oh I like those!

Leo: Nope, you can’t have them. Sour…

Tonya: Do you remember what I just showed you, Leo?

Leo: Oh okay. She’s got a tazor and she’s not afraid to use it. This is our nature box. We love nature box.  You get delicious snacks, healthy snacks delivered right to your door, every month. Choose from three different box sizes and you can, now I recommend you choose kind of the wild card, give me an assortment, but you can narrow it down, for instance if your vegan, they have vegan snacks. If you’re gluten conscious they have gluten conscious snacks. That kind of things. You can also choose from salty, spicy and savory. I’m sorry, sweet, spicy or savory. I don’t know where I got salty from. These are delicious snacks, nutritionist approved, no HFCs never ever! No GMOS, no! They don’t have any Trans fats in them. Zero artificial sweeteners or flavors, just delicious stuff. You get the three, six, or twelve month subscription for that someone special in your family. It’d be another great father’s day gift. Or grads. Grads if you’re going off to school, someone just graduated from high school, you know, and they’re going off to college. A nature box, it’s like love coming to your door once a month. It’s like your momma, just hugging you, saying I love you, I miss you. Have a nature box! Naturebox.com you can try it out for 50% off your first box, when you use our offer code, twit. No, no you can keep that!

Tonya: But you wouldn’t let me have the popcorn.

Leo: Which one do you really want?

Tonya: Let me think about it.

Leo: So this is Kettle corn, and then mixed in, it’s not all the way through it, mixed in, there is coffee infused popcorn. This is fabulous, it’s one of the reason I’m a little feisty today, because I had a whole back of that.

Tonya: You’re always feisty. You must eat a lot of Nature box.

Leo: Oh man! Now Lisa says the big Island pineapple is the best. We ordered a whole box of these we liked them so much.

Tonya: Those are those Sour Go…

Leo: Sourdough cheddar pretzels.

Tonya: I’ve got to say…

Leo: Pick one, I’ve been told I cannot eat two snacks, I’ve done that before. Which one would you like? You get to pick on.

Tonya: I’ll pick this one.

Leo: Really, cocoa waffle wafers? Or coffee kettle popcorn? Get a whole box, that way you get a choice. Naturebox.com, use the offer code, TWiT. And now we’re going to put this away until next time. No peeking where I put it. So you might even remember this, maybe a month or two ago somebody called the radio show, and said I have an 81 year old mother, as I do, and I want to get her a computer, she had an iPad, It was too hard for her to use, she has arthritis. And I saw this computer, it was at firststreetonline.com. It was called the Wow! It was over 1000 bucks. I think it was $1,200 at the time. And I, at first, my first reaction was no don’t get that. We’ve seen computers for seniors before, and they were never very good. But as I looked at the specs, during the call, I realized this may not be so bad, so we contacted the manufacturer, they’re called Telikin, telikin, they also sell the Wow directly from their site, as the Telikin computer for seniors, and we got one. Now this is 1,079 dollars. Geeks are going to say oh it’s a Celeron processor, 2 gigs of RAM, 500 gig hard drive, it’s not very powerful. 22 inch screen. But actually, as I play with it, and read about it, I got more and more excited about it. It’s very simple, comes with a CD and DVD player, that’s built into the side. USB keyboard, and mouse and then you plug it into the wall. It has WIFI and I’ve connected it to our WIFI network. This is the startup screen, although the first time you run it, by the way, this is a touch screen, so let me tap the help button. The first time your run it, you’re going to get a video that’s an introduction to the computer. A nice young lady comes on and explains the computer to you, and then any time you want to know more about what the computer can do, you’ll see there’s all these different videos and text that you can read. So it’s really designed to be easy for somebody who’s not only not computer literate, but perhaps a little bit afraid of the computer. Let me close this. The touch screen is kind of cool, although, I have to say, this you may say, what is it? Is it windows? It’s not windows, it’s a version of Linux running on here, and I wasn’t able to figure out what version, because the shell on top of it, you can’t get out of. Which is good. You want that. There’s a couple of things, it does have speakers, surround sound. It has external microphone and speaker ports. HDMI, SD card reader. It’s a fairly complete hardware computer. These are the speakers down here. In fact, I’ll play it a little bit for you so you can hear what it sounds like. Let me play the CD player, I’ve got a little opera in there. I don’t know how well you can hear it, this is as loud as it goes. But if you’re setting next to the computer, that’s okay, the sound quality is decent, but if you want better speakers you can connect it out to the speakers. It has video chat, and what’s interesting. Oh let me stop the player here. There we go. It has video chat, this is Skype. So I can make a Skype call. Email, remember this is Linux so it’s a real email program, presumable some Linux program with a shell on top of it. Photos, which is great. You can get pictures of the kids on here. It’ll even go into a slide show as a screen saver mode, or I can just press the slideshow button. The mouse does work, too by the way. Notice how big the pointer is, you can change that size, but that’s a good thing for people who might have a little difficulty seeing the screen. Complete calendar, contacts, weather, and it knows where you are automatically. Gives you weather maps. So if you want another location, if you want to know how the family is doing somewhere else. News too, and you can change these news settings, I have it set to Fox, news but it can be AP, CNN, ESPN, if grandpa likes sports, or grandma likes sports. And we can click on a story, just tap on it and it’ll pull the story up. It’s fairly snappy given the Celeron processor. Full Web browser too. Here’s a telicin website. Now here’s another feature seniors might appreciate. The magnifying glass, you just tap on it and I can make something a lot bigger. In fact, I can probably make it big enough so that somebody who has real vision problems can probably see pretty well. Also it comes with games, I’ve got Mahjong here. In fact, it has a pretty complete, let’s get out of this, a pretty complete set of aps. Now here’s the key, you can’t install new apps, it does what it does. It does have a spread sheet and word processor. It focuses on email, of course, video chat which is great, news and so forth. I have to say, I found this very friendly, very easy to use. The videos are great, and it has some other nice features. You can assign a tech buddy. I love this idea. That lets you find somebody who is going to be able to access your computer remotely, you nominate them, and give them a password, and you could also say I want, an unattended computer support. You can check that. So your tech buddy can actually get in there and fix your computer from another system. So that’s nice if you’re a grandson or daughter giving this computer to an elder, you can actually help them with the computer. I do that with my mom all the time, that’s a really nice feature. It does print, but only to HP printers. Although Telicin offers a 39 dollar HP printer, so that’s probably fine. You can see information about it, the free space is 415 gigs as it comes out of the box. That’s plenty. Lots of space. It even has, if you pay for the VIP support, which is 10 dollars a month, you get great support, plus backup, built in off-site backup. It does have a couple of USB ports, so you can hookup an external drive, and back it up locally without paying for it. But I think for inexperienced users, 10 bucks a month is not a bad thing. I have it hooked up to our home Wi-Fi. You will need to get access for a WIFI for your family member. Let me turn the sound up, you know what, I don’t think I had it all the way up, so let’s go back now to our CD and see how it sounds now. Actually better than that, let me play a YouTube video. How about that? Youtube.com/beforeyoubuy. It does support YouTube, plays the video very nicely in the YouTube player. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by this. 1,079 dollars for the touch screen version, they have a smaller 18 inch screen without touch for less. Let’s play one of our videos and see how it sounds. It’s able to keep up! Looks pretty good! You could play back video DVDS as well, so if mom and dad have movies they want to watch. This is flash, so it supports flash. I think pretty good. So let me give you the pros and cons. On the pro side, this is easy to use, and secure. Mom and dad can’t get into any trouble, they can’t download and install malware, they can’t accidently do something and get locked up. I found it fairly to use, these big buttons are pretty clear, they have photo editing software, I can rotate, crop, remove red eye. I think a lot of the things, even non seniors, a lot of the things normal people want to do are automatically built into it. But remember, you can’t add anything more. Updates are provided directly from Telicin, they do have a Kindle reader in here, which I think my mom particularly would like. It’s a good screen, not a fast processor, but decent enough processor to do what you want it to do. All in all, those are all pros. There are a couple of cons. You know, you can’t, it’s a touch screen, but the web Brower on the touch screen isn’t designed, that’s a Linux problem, it’s not designed, so I’m just moving the pointer around. I think people will get use to that pretty quickly. And of course, it does fully support the mouse. Also unaccountably, even though there’s no windows on this, it comes with a Windows keyboard. So you’re going to have a windows key and a menu key that don’t really do anything. And maybe this is a little bit more complicated keyboard than I’d like to see. Here’s the good news. There’s lots of third party keyboards, standard USB keyboards you could add. With bigger keys, easier to read, and maybe less confusing things. You know, what’s num lock? What’s print screen sis request. Those things don’t make a lot of sense for somebody who’s not a computer wizard. The price is also a negative. 1079 bucks is expensive. But remember you’re getting support, you’re getting features, and you’re getting something designed specifically for an unsophisticated user, a senior in particular. I have to say, I’m very impressed with this and I’m going to definitely say, if you can afford it, it’s a buy. This would be a computer that you could give an elderly parent, or grandparent, and I think they would get an awful lot out of it, without being too confused. And the ability for you to get in here and remote service it, remote support it. Or to pay 10 bucks a month and give them a superior service, the VIP service that Telicin offers is great. Telicin has been selling this computer for a couple of years, they’ve been around for a while, they’re not a fly by night company. And, you know, you’re not out anything if they go out of business, you just won’t be able to use the VIP support. So you may be stuck supporting them, but I have no reason to think they aren’t going to do will. This is a great idea. So pricy, but I have to say, if you can afford it, it’s a definite buy. On the Telicin computer for seniors. And that wraps up this edition for Before you Buy, I want to Thank You Tonya Hall for doing your review and not tazing me.

Tonya: You’re welcome. But I still have it.

Leo: I’ll be nice. Keep the snack, please! By all means. Chad Johnson too. And of course Tonya and Carston Bondy who produce the show, thank you for doing a great job. And, thank you for watching. You can see the entire show at twit.tv/byb. We also put it on YouTube, in fact, we put individual reviews as we saw on YouTube, so if you want to know just one thing, or share your review of this computer with your mom or dad and say you think you’d be interested in this? You can do that at youtube.com/beforeyoubuy. Email us at byb@twit.tv if there’s something you’d like to see reviewed. Thanks for joining us, I’ll see you next time! And remember, you’ve got to watch, Before You Buy! See you later.