Before You Buy 158 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: Coming up, a new dashboard cam from Papago, we'll review an $8 selfie stick, and I'm not kidding, they are glasses from Samsung,  and I'll show you how to stream live on Youtube with a parascope, it's time to watch Before You Buy.

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Leo: Welcome to Before You Buy, the TWiT review show where we take all of the best products- And sometimes not such great products. -Give them to our staff and say give us a real whirl what it's like to use this product in real life review. And that's what you're going to get today starting with this: The Papago Dashcam. OMGChad, he's the host of OMGCraft. You can find his patrion at patrion.com/omgchad and you've reviewed other Papago stuff....? I know that we have.

Chad Johnson: Well we have, we've reviewed Papago stuff.

Leo: This is a dashcam and I've got to tell you, this is a category that people are very interested in. We first became aware of dashboard cams of course, because they're heavily used in Russia, where nobody trusts anybody. And so we've been seeing, for the last few years, hysterical and sometimes not so hysterical videos of crashes from Russia. And remember, the meteor that hit the lake?

Chad: Absolutely.

Leo: And there were tons of videos because all of the Russians just had dashboard cams.

Chad: Right, and these are just perfect if you want to make sure that you have evidence. I have often seen videos of people pulling out of grocery stores and someone hits them and it's the other person's fault but then the other person is like, no it was your fault...

Leo: I've got video.

Chad: But you've got video of the whole thing so it's  a really good way to protect yourself.

Leo: Insurance companies will sometimes give you a lower rate if you have a dashboard cam. The ones we first saw in taxicabs would record all of the time I think but if there was an accident you could get footage of the last thirty seconds or so. How does this work?

Chad: So it's the same deal. On the camera you have a wide angle lens, on the top you have your power. And you're given a very, very long cable.

Leo: It's kind of ugly. But that's going to come out of the cigarette lighter.

Chad: Right. And it's so long so that you can take this and run it around the edge of your window, across your glovebox, and into the cigarette lighter so that you don't have wires hanging all over the place.

Leo: Where do they recommend you put the camera itself?

Chad: Just about near your rear view mirror.

Leo: If possible behind it so that it's not blocking your view.

Chad: Right.

Leo: In fact, we should mention, that in some states anything affixed to the windshield is illegal, so do check with your local authorities.

Chad: Right. So this does have that sensor you were talking about, if you were in an accident. It has a G-Sensor so it'll tell if it was in an accident. It has an internal battery so it will record for a few minutes after you turn your car off.

Leo: When you power it off.

Chad: Right, which is good because... Let's say you got pulled over and there was a police officer asking you to turn off your car, you'll still get about a minute. You can always reach over and hit record or here's an incident and it'll keep going. It's telling me right now that there's no SD card because I put it into-

Leo: So we can look at it.

Chad: Exactly. So along the top you have power, the power button. And then this is your emergency button so that if you ever have an incident and you want to make sure it's saved, you hit that. And it'll save it to another file on the SD card so it doesn't get deleted.

Leo: So it's saved from how far back?

Chad: From the beginning of the clip that it had been taking.

Leo: Okay so it could vary.

Chad: It could vary, yes. And I had one time when I wish I had done more but it was the beginning of the clip. On the side you have your SD card slot and then your HDMI Out so you can put this on a television and then on the other side there is nothing and nothing. But then you have your buttons beside the screen. The menus are pretty simple, they'll give you buttons that will change contextually based off of where you are so if you click onto something like this so you can go back and up and down. On the front you can mute your mic if you want, you can have it turn off the screen, that's what that button is. And I forgot what this 'M' is.... Photo Mode.

Leo: So it switches to stills instead of video I guess.

Chad: Right.

Leo: I don't know what to look for in a dashboard cam. What are we looking for?

Chad: So the cool thing about this one is that it has extremely high resolution. The resolution on this-

Leo: You've actually got some video we can play.

Chad: Right. The actual resolution is 2560/1080.

Leo: Oh okay so it's high-def.

Chad: Right so it's a wide angle, you can see from side to side-

Leo: You do want that, right? Because you don't know what angle that car is going to come from.

Chad: You absolutely do. And it's harder to tell because it is a video and viewers don't have the perspective of sitting in the car but this was a really far edge.

Leo: Is it like the whole windshield practically?

Chad: It really is. And you can also see, like when I'm turning here.... The area I'm about to turn is still in view at the edge of the frame. So-

Leo: This looks good. I'm amazed at how well it looks considering how dark it is.

Chad: Right. So I have seen other cameras that do a bigger boost in low light. But this is with street lamps and things like that. This is on a road without street lights. So it's a little bit harder to tell detail on this road, but still- From using it and looking at the video later, I felt like my human eye could see more, which is pretty reasonable considering this is a smaller camera.

Leo: Just shows you how good cameras have gotten. You can get an inexpensive camera that basically looks like Cinema Scope.

Chad: Yeah, it looks really really good.

Leo: It's amazing.

Chad: So this is the drive over, I was listening to music so I'm just going to turn on-

Leo: Let's hear the mic- Okay.

Chad: Here's the microphone. It's okay, it's not the best, are you hearing that?

Leo: It's not playing. Oh there it is.

Chad: There it is so yeah I was playing some music in the car-

Leo: Yeah, it's not great.

Chad: It's not the best.

Leo: Yeah but you could at least hear them scream....

Chad: Absolutely and you can also see that I need to clean my windshield pretty badly the sun is directly-

Leo: That's something to keep in mind though.

Chad: Yeah, it's a great example of if the sun is directly in the lens, what are you going to see?

Leo: You can see the dirt and stuff on the windshield.

Chad: Absolutely, so let me really quickly show off the file structure inside of the SD card. Woops.

Leo: We're hearing Chad talk...

Chad: That was actually something I was wanting to avoid. There's certain clips- Like I was actually using this every day and so I won't know what phone call I was on or if I say my credit card or whatever-

Leo: Exactly, everything is being recorded.

Chad: So the file structure is pretty simple. You have your event button so whenever you hit your emergency button it will save this event. This lady was jumping out of her car to close her doors and the file had just switched over so it didn't actually catch that.

Leo: That's not good. So it doesn't actually guarantee you the previous 30 seconds.

Chad: It does not guarantee that. And then here there was just this bicyclist who went by and I thought that was kind of a- Oh my God check out this bicyclist!

Leo: But had he gotten hit-

Chad: Right... To be honest, day to day- Sorry that this review doesn't have a catastrophe recorded but this is normally what you're going to get. So you can put a 32 gb card into the Papago and that will store over four hours of footage. On mine, from just driving of place to place, I have about ten days worth of footage before it overrides-

Leo: Look at that, wow.

Chad: I know, isn't that great? This was the drive up to Petaluma from San Francisco. And the sun is behind me now so you don't see as much crap on my window anymore. There's a few pretty good images I have. Here's going through a tunnel.

Leo: This is kind of cool, I mean even for shooting footage as you drive, it's kind of neat. And it saves everything it sounds like.

Chad: Absolutely yes. You plug it in and it will turn on when your car turns on.

Leo: How many hours can it get-

Chad: About 4-5 hours on a 32 gb is what I found.

Leo: Okay. So you could get a 128 gb SD card.

Chad: No, 32 is the limit.

Leo: Oh. So five hours recording time.

Chad: Yes, but you can also change the resolution and get more. This is at the highest resolution.

Leo: So unlike some dashboard cams where they only record in the case of an emergency or they have a loop of the last 30 seconds- This is really more just like a camera pointed out your window.

Chad: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you can hit the event button and it will make sure to not override the previous recording.

Leo: Was it so big that you found it distracting?

Chad: Not at all, I completely forgot about it. Especially with it being behind your rear-view mirror, you really don't see it.

Leo: And you turn off- I'm sure the LCD.

Chad: Exactly. There are a lot of settings on here that you can auto-configure. And some of the ones I turned on was that the screen would turn off after a while. The volume, I turned that down. Now, it also had some features that I really disliked that were turned on by default. Driving Safety is by far, one of the worst features that they are touting in this. I can calibrate it in here if you want and I'll let you see, what it wants you to do is point this at the road so that it lines up with the horizon and the stripes on the road. What this does, is it will look for brake lights, and looks for if the sun is setting and you've been driving for too long- And that sounds really great on paper but in practice all it does is send you this annoying barrage of beeps.

Leo: Oh.

Chad: There's no voice, and so you just have to know that the triple beep means the car in front of you's brake lights have turned off so you should move forward. But you're at so many redlights, the beeping is insane.

Leo: But you can turn that off right?

Chad: Yes, but it's just confusing for the consumer. Because I had to go in and search to find out why the heck this thing was beeping at me every 30 seconds. And then it has the fatigue alarm.

Leo: How does it know if you're fatigued?

Chad: Basically, if it's been on for over 2 hours, you've been driving for too long.

Leo: It's not going to wake you up if your head hits the steering wheel.

Chad: No it won't notice that you're drifting out of lanes or anything like that. So those are some of the features that they tout that I really disliked. So for the pro's, I really liked the high-resolution of the sensor. I also really liked the wide angle lens and I also really liked the continuous recording that would over-write a file. Cons, there's no way to turn off the chimes, and all of the driver fatigue stuff I really found difficult when I was first setting up the camera. The start of using this wasn't all that great. But it's cost is about $230.

Leo: Okay.

Chad: That is MSRP but I've found it for $213 online, not a lot of a discount. There are less expensive cameras on the market but I do like a lot of the features that the Papago camera has. So buy try, don't buy for the Papago GoSafe520 camera, I'm going to give this a buy. I didn't find anything wrong with it, so if this is in your price range and these are along the line of the features that you want, I recommend it.

Leo: The only thing that concerns me at all is it's recording clips and if the accident should occur after the start of a new clip, you've lost that video and no longer have it.

Chad: Right.

Leo: Alright, a buy on the Papago Dashcam 520. Thank you Chad Johnson, you can catch Chad's work here on Before You Buy, on the Giz Wiz every Thursday on the TWiT network and of course, at omgcraft on youtube. Youtube.com/omgcraft. If you want to support him- This poor boy, he's wasting away, if you want to help him out, go to Patrion, patrion.com/omgchad. Thank you, Chad.

Chad: No problem, thank you.

Leo: I'm going to take a walk here in just a second and we're going to learn about selfie sticks. You know, everything you need to know about narcissistic photography. The wand of Narcissis' it's called. But first, let's talk about prosper.com. It's a peer-to-peer lending marketplace- And is actually a brilliant idea. -Bringing people with money to lend together with people who need to borrow money. Everybody needs a little hand once in a while. There aren't many ways to borrow money when you need it, are you going to go to friends and family? I don't recommend that, it's kind of humiliating, plus it can end a friendship pretty darn fast. Credit card companies? Not at those rates. Traditional bank loans? No. Now you can get a low fixed rate loan with prosper.com without ever even entering a bank. Borrow up to $35,000 and get it in as few as five days. You can use the money for just about anything you want, pay off high rate credit cards, fix up your house, start a business.... Prosper.com/twit. Prosper's online marketplace has money to lend. This is the form, by the way, it's very easy to fill out and it doesn't ask for a huge amount of stuff. You can take a look at the rate you might get and this does not affect your credit. Prosper.com/twit. One more nice thing, for a limited time prosper is offering you a $50 Visa pre-paid card when you get a loan. That's nice. Go to prosper.com/twit. That's just for our viewers, up to $35,000 in just five days, plus that $50 Visa pre-paid card at prosper.com/twit. Alright I've got to find out about this Selfie Stick, let's take a walk here and see what Father Robert Ballacer is up to. Oh my gosh, he's using the Selfie Stick to shoot real time video- Here I come Roberto, -On his smart phone. Father Robert Ballacer is the host of This Week in Enterprise Tech, the Coding 101 show, and Know How. We're sorry about having to close down the Know Hole.

Fr. Robert Ballacer: Yes, it was a big fire bomb.

Leo: Apparently, we found out that the Know Hole was hiding the sprinkler valves, so should the sprinkler system go off for whatever reason, we would have to crawl through bean bag chairs and we-yu's and beat up old drone chairs to get to the valve so....

Fr. Robert: We probably should have thought about that during the planning phase. Just- Minor detail.

Leo: He's the king of planning. So come on, why do we need this?

Fr. Robert: We don't. In fact, at CES-

Leo: They were everywhere I bet.

Fr. Robert: They were everywhere, and Carson and I made a concerted effort to avoid Selfie Sticks. We didn't want to cover it, we didn't want it in any of the videos, we didn't even want to get the freebies. There was actually a Selfie Stick there for $400! It was like made out of titanium and extends up to 16'!

Leo: What?

Fr. Robert: No, they're annoying little devices, so we figure if we were going to cover one on Before You Buy, we were going to get the cheapest piece of junk we could find that could act as a Selfie Stick.

Leo: Okay, what makes a Selfie Stick a Selfie stick?

Fr. Robert: It's just a monopod.

Leo: But it needs to be able to hold your phone and you have been fortunate enough not to have seen somebody use these, they're very common- They've been common all over Europe and Asia, we saw a lot of them in London. -And they're apparently coming this summer to our shores in a great way.

Fr. Robert: Yeah, they're great when you slap people in the head as you try to take a picture of yourself. It's very neighborly.

Leo: So your phone is there, and you hold this there. And instead of when you take a selfie you always have your arm moved out of the picture, this you can avoid that. First of all, this is telescoping. You obviously want it to be light because you're holding it in the air for a while.

Fr. Robert: Also we wanted something that was inexpensive- Again, there's that $400 Selfie Stick-

Leo: I can't imagine spending that much....

Fr. Robert: Me either. And this is something that's probably going to get lost once or twice. It's going to get destroyed when you move-

Leo: It's like an umbrella.

Fr. Robert: It's like an umbrella. You use it if you need it, we wanted to give people something that they could buy inexpensively, try it out, and then decide, no I don't really want this-

Leo: So which- Is this it?

Fr. Robert: This is it. This is the UFCIT and we've got a little video that's going to show you, I guess why you might want this?....

Leo: Father Robert Ballacer and the Selfie Stick!

Recoring: This is the UFCIT Extendable Selfie Hand-Held Stick Monopod with adjustable phone holder and bluetooth wireless remote shutter for iPhone and Android. That's a ridiculously long name for what is essentially a Bluetooth Selfie Kit so I'm just going to call it the Blufie. The Blufie is $8 and comes in 3 pieces. Extendable monopod, universal tripod mountable phone holder, and a bluetooth remote control. The monopod extends from 9-43 inches with it's friction-held telescoping barrel. The head of the monopod has a ratchet-style pivot and a standard 3/8 inch thumb screw. A rubberized handle and armstrap keep the monopod in place, and on the bottom of the monopod is a 3/8 inch mount in case you want to attach your Selfie Stick to another Selfie Stick. You know... Yo dog, I hear ya' like Selfies so I put a- Nevermind. Of course, this is the Blufie so there must be a way to mount your phone on the monopod. That's where this comes into play. The phone holder is simple but it works surprisingly well. On top of the 3/8 inch mounting point are two spring-driven arms that can be expanded to hold just about any size phone. But what keeps the Blufie from being just like any other Selfie Stick is it includes a bluetooth remote that will act like a shutter on iOS and Android devices. Simply turn it on, pair it with your device, and it will trigger the shutter on most updated devices even without a supplementary app. Using the Blufie is simple. Screw the phone holder to the monopod, mount your phone, turn on the camera, extend the monopod to desired length, and use the Bluetooth remote to snap a picture. Of all the Selfie Sticks I've seen, this is definitely one of them.

Leo: I love this idea where you can have like Selfie-Ception and attach a Selfie Stick to the bottom of this Selfie Stick and then I realized, oh my God! I've invented something that we've all needed- The Belfie Stick so that you can take butt pictures easily and simply with articulated-

Fr. Robert: You know, you joke but somebody is actually going to market that...

Leo: Aha, go to belfie.com, I've got bad news... I didn't invent it. So this is a couple of things you want to look for is that you want a place where you can attach a camera. These I've seen before, it's just a simple spring loaded clamp, that makes it really easy. But the key is you can't reach the camera to reach the camera. You don't want to have to press the timer and then go like this...

Fr. Robert: Right, I don't understand the ones that don't include the remote. Because the remote here, is the only part here that I think is worth it.

Leo: That's worth $8.

Fr. Robert: Right. It's worth $8. Because you can take this and now you can put your phone anywhere and trigger photos, either iOS or Android. This is a super cheap monopod, it's probably not going to last for very long-

Leo: You wouldn't cry if you lost it...

Fr. Robert: I wouldn't cry if I lost it. If I were to buy this thing alone, this pole and mount by itself costs like $3. So get this and get the Selfie Phase through....

Leo: Pros and cons.

Fr. Robert: Pros: Cheap, super cheap it's a good way to feed your addiction without breaking the bank. This is nice, the shutter is actually very useful. I'm probably going to dump the Selfie Stick but I will keep this. The cons: It's super cheap, so it's liable to break with ease. And it's a Selfie Stick, so yeah. It's a Selfie Stick.

Leo: Would you buy it?

Fr. Robert: I would actually buy it. For $8, including shipping on Amazon, why not?

Leo: Why not? We should point out that some phones have the kind of Selfie Stick enabling feature. For instance for iPhone, you could put the headphones down this way and press the button. The Moto X for 2014 you could actually go, okay Moto X, take a selfie so even if it were on the end of this it would go 3, 2, 1, take the picture.

Fr. Robert: Brian was actually saying how his watch can actually trigger-

Leo: And Android Wear Watch, when you launch the Camera app, you already have something like this because your Android Wear can do that sort of thing. So you may not need this, but you definitely need this.

Fr. Robert: I think it's a piece if junk, but it's an $8 piece of junk so get it, why not?

Leo: So is this on Amazon?

Fr. Robert: It is on Amazon. Look for UFCIT, just put in UFCIT and you will find the Bluefie.

Leo: Ultimate Fighting Champion?

Fr. Robert: Yeah, something like that, Ultimate Fighting Selfie Stick?

Leo: Yeah. Thank you Father Robert Ballacer, the host of This Week in Enterprise Tech, Coding 101, Know How, and I almost forgot Paco my favorite show in the TWiT network, Padre's Corner tonight, and every Tuesday night once we shut everything down he just takes over.

Fr. Robert: Yeah, leave the lights on.

Leo: Alright I'm going to walk over here, Can I borrow your-

Fr. Robert: Yeah take it with you. Here, let's do this-

Leo: We'll show you how professional production facilities work. Many people don't know this, it looks like I could do a tracheotomy with this. Alright. Now let's take a walk and see what else is happening on Before You Buy. Holy cow... This actually is kind of cool, I think I could use one of these. I'm serious. This is good, you're all fired I've got a Selfie Stick. There's Jason Howell, say hi Jason.

Jason Howell: Hi, how's it going?

Leo: Jason Howell is here with a review of something we saw- Okay can I turn it off now? It's pretty funny, you get kind of interesting videos that way.

Jason: I don't know if I could walk around with a Selfie Stick all of the time, like where do you put it when you're not using it?

Leo: We're going to talk about something we saw at one of the Samsung events. It's the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR and we saw the Samsung announcement for this and though, hmmm....

Jason: Kind of scratch your head a little bit because you hear all of the kind of asterisks involved here. Obviously it's a well-built VR headset. Although, I don't have a ton of experience with VR headsets, but it's pretty solid.

Leo: But you need a Galaxy Note to go with it.

Jason: You need a Galaxy Note 4.

Leo: That's not as weird as it sounds because the Oculus Rift uses Galaxy phones for it's display and it says with Oculus Rift inside.

Jason: Right, this is a partnership with Oculus actually. It look similar to the Oculus headset-

Leo: Except it's not black it's a lot cooler.

Jason: It's definitely a little bit more bold.

Leo: And it's also cheaper because you supply the Note 4.

Jason: That's right, you supply the thing that's really powering this. It's $200 and you can buy it in the US.

Leo: You bought it? He's got a Note. Show us the controls. I see that it grips very tightly onto the Note 4 in the front.

Jason: You've got a little touch pad on the side, this is how you do the navigation or actually when you're playing games, you can swipe and use it like a navigation directional pad. There's a button up there that goes back and it's a little bit- I played around with this for 20 minutes. Basically this is more of a preview than an actual review because Jason got this today and was like, do you want to play with it? So I played around with it, strapped it to my head, and got lost in the experience.

Leo: Is it that good?

Jason: It's actually very cool, very very cool.

Leo: Can I try it?

Jason: Yes.

Leo: Is it geared to your brain cells or can I just-

Jason: You can just pop it on.

Leo: This is the view I'm going to see here.

Jason: We have it streaming to Chromecast right now. So you'll want to line up the pointer on no and just tap the touchpad.

Leo: Breaking news, Apple and Google are tracking your every move. What? That was the breaking news?

Jason: So there you are.

Leo: Okay, I'm looking at the planet.

Jason: You're looking at the planet. I really like this look, it goes up, down, all around, everything, it's totally immersive-

Leo: That's the problem though with wearing these is while you're enjoying this totally immersive experience in your head, to the rest of the world you look like a moron.

Jason: Yeah it's true and another thing I noticed is you'll want to do exactly what you're doing right now. You want to move around in your seat and you can't see your surroundings-

Leo: Oh it's a new movie.

Jason: It'd be very easy to bonk your head.

Leo: Yeah you should definitely stay sitting down while wearing these. Oh my gosh I can see behind me, I even have a shadow!

Jason: Yeah, you even have a shadow.

Leo: Holy cow! This is amazing!

Jason: It is really cool I think.

Leo: Now I could use the Oculus Rift this is actually- Is it using the full high res display on the Note 4? I'm sitting in somebody's tent....

Jason: It is using the Note 4 display. Now isn't this cool?

Leo: I'm in Tibet in a tent. This is incredible!

Jason: This is also showing you the power we heard not too long ago about Samsung's 360 degree recording camera. It's kind of what some of these are, it's a camera in the middle of the room.

Leo: That, I kind of like. This is Cirque de sole... A couple of things I like about this are, I'm not getting as sea sick as I do when I play games. I think it's because you're static and you're just looking around.

Jason: Right, look up look up. And yes, it's super immersive and very impressive. So just to give a sense of some of the hardware here, the Note 4 is driving most of this with it's SnapDragon 805 Processing. The Gear VR headset itself comes with 16 gig micro SD card with content so there's an SD Card adapter and a zipper case that I have in this box right here. The phone obviously snaps into place on the front as you saw. There's headphones you can wire right into your ear-

Leo: I'm hearing audio...

Jason: Although if you don't have that, there are on-board speakers, which I wouldn't say they were that amazing but....

Leo: The res is not as super as I- 1080p, I would guess this is 720p right?

Jason: Yeah well the res on the Note 4 is 2560x1440 and you're using about half of it.

Leo: Oh I get it.

Jason: So you could go down to Temple VR with the touchpad.

Leo: What should I do? Temple VR? Is this going to make me sick?

Jason: Yes.

Leo: Okay, get the cold wash cloth ready to put on the back of my head.

Jason: I installed this while I was using it and I played with it a little bit and as it's going I was like, yeah this is a little weird.

Leo: So this is Temple Run.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: I see the controls, not the ones on the left, just the ones on the touchpad. Jump, left, right and......

Jason: Getting started is tricky but once you get it moving it's going to be crazy. Just start spinning forward to run.

Leo: Run.... Run!! It's not working.

Jason: Oh, double tap it.

Leo: Well thanks I got eaten because of that.

Jason: Well, it's okay.

Leo: Wow, this is cool... So tap it to run....?

Jason: Apparently. They don't do a good job of telling you that but-

Leo: Well I looked at the instructions but I didn't read them of course.

Leo: Ruuuuuun!!!!

Jason: There you go, now you're moving... And see now you don't need to tap anymore since you're already going.

Leo: Holy camole.

Jason: When you come out here swipe left and right.

Leo: Now it should sensor your head movement instead of me having to swipe, right?

Jason: Yeah. It'd be nice if it did that.

Leo: This is immersive.

Jason: It is immersive.

Leo: I've got to jump! Ooooh....

Jason: They're right behind you man!

Leo: Right behind me?

Jason: Yeah, that shadow is them.

Leo: That's not me?....

Jason: They're on ya'....

Leo: Jump! Oh, I didn't jump. Okay.... Hey this is kind of fun....!

Jason: It is. I have to say one of the things that really blew me away- And I'm unsure how to get to it because Jason got me there. -Was something called A Moment With Patrick Watson. And it's an artist, a musician in his studio environment with his 3-D camera set up in the middle and he's just kind of sitting at the piano kind of producing music-

Leo: See I think that's a very interesting use.

Jason: And you get-

Leo: You're there.

Jason: You are there, sitting in the room with him while he's making music, it's really impressive. But I agree with you about the display. You can see some pixelation.

Leo: Yeah I agree, it's very pixelated but so is the Oculus Rift but I haven't seen the new Oculus Rift that they showed at with they showed at CS.

Jason: And when they start doing like quad HD on this kind of stuff, it's going to look even better.

Leo: I think the human- Oh wait! It has to adjust....

Jason: Come back to us, Leo! Come back to us. You don't look funny at all by the way, you look perfectly normal.

Leo: Aaaah....! I must have hit something or gotten bit 32:26

Jason: There's a content store inside with tons of free content. Most of it's kind of like Demo content but it gives you a real sense of the power of-

Leo: So you back out by pressing the back button?

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: Exit to Oculus Home, yes this time, right? You know what? This is 'Strangers With Patrick' this is the one you were talking about.

Jason: Yes, yeah. This will put you right in the middle of his production space. I got lost in it.

Leo: I think that's amazing, and well you're a music guy, right?

Jason: Yes.

Leo: I think that's what's so interesting about this. It's just how you're in an immersive environment- It's a static camera but it's a 360 degree camera I guess.

Jason: Yeah, so you can look up, down, back around, entirely. You're there and he's just  doing his thing.

Leo: Imagine if it were live video and you could interact with him? He's got a very interesting little space.

Jason: Yeah, it kind of gave me chills at this point. So very cool stuff and there's a lot of Demo content. I'll be curious to see how much content gets pushed through to this but being that it's a cooperative development with Oculus, I imagine all of the developing that's kind of happening with Oculus is going to rollover into this. And Samsung has specifically said in interviews that they are not interested in this being a "viable product" a big seller. This is proof of concept. If people buy it and are willing to spend their money on it, do they enjoy it, do they show it to their friends? If so, we wiil spend more time developing for it.

Leo: I think it's very interesting.

Jason: I do too.

Leo: You know I was a Kickstarter supporter of Oculus Rift and I've had the development kit, as well as used several different generations of Rift. This is very easy to use, well-built, but you have to have a Note 4, that's going to limit the market a little bit.

Jason: I just dropped my Nexus 6, what should I do?

Leo: I would steal Jason's Note 4, here I'll see if I can get it out.

Jason: I was actually more blown away by it than I expected, and not because I doubt VR, because I think VR  is very cool and interesting but I don't know... You put those goggles on and I realize to everyone watching, it's kind of hard to understand the level of awe that you get when you're surrounded in that experience. It's really cool.

Leo: Yeah. And I've been skeptical especially with the motion sickness thing. But that one is better than the ones I've used previously. At least, I didn't get sick yet.

Jason: Do you feel back to reality now or....?

Leo: It's disorienting. I want to go back to it.

Jason: I actually began to get a headache after about twenty minutes.

Leo: Well you know, our biology isn't designed to work with this kind of stuff at all, in any sense. But yeah.

Jason: Cool stuff.

Leo: You know, as somebody who read, "Snow Crash" and wants the Metaverse, this is a step in that direction. Thank you Jason Howell. He not only is the greatest host in the world on All About Android, he does a good job on that, but also helps me out on all of the shows I do like TWiT, MacBreak Weekly, This Week in Google, you do a great job, thank you Jason. Really, really neat stuff.

Jason: Thank you.

Leo: We're going to take a break and when we come back I'm going to show you how you can stream live on Youtube anywhere you are but first let's talk about SmartThings. I love SmartThings. It's kind of like VR, I always believed in the idea of a smart house but always kind of felt like we weren't there yet. We couldn't really figure it out and there were all these different kinds of protocols like ZigBee, Z-Wave, and X10; nothing talked to anything else. My Sonos' didn't talk to my Hue's, my Hue's didn't talk to my Nest but SmartThings said we're going to make a hub that will talk to everything. We'll of course develop our own, and they have doo-hickies that go with it and this is the SmartSense Motion Detector. It can do things like turn on something when there is a movement, like lights. Send you an alert when there's motion while you're away. But see, because this hub talks to not only the SmartThings devices, but everything else, you could have this motion sensor, play barking dogs on your Sonos system when it detects motion in the backyard. That's cool, and these are really designed to get you started, in fact they have solution kits that will do simple things like detect water in the basement, or motion and so forth. They also have home security kits and most people can understand what those are for and what they do. But each one of them comes with a hub and gives you a chance to expand after that. This is the Smart Things Open Close Sensor, something you've probably seen on home security systems, this is a  two-parter. It can tell you when doors and windows and cabinets are open or closed, and it can also tell you what temperature it is. Now there's some really useful applications there, but the thing is, you control this thing with your iOS or Android smart phone and you can do things like, if this then that. Let's see, that's the motion sensor. Look at all of these I have so many doo-hickies here, although I don't think that's what SmartThings calls them. This is the moisture sensor, probably best in the basement. Anyways, take a look at smartthings.com/twit we'll give you 10% off any home security or solution kit if you use the offer code: TWIT at checkout. Smartthings.com/twit the sky is the limit with SmartThings. Wherever you are, by the way, you don't even have to be at home. Use your smart phone to control your house. You're at work and you say- By the way Samsung said, we're going to start tying these into Samsung appliances. So you can say things like, start the dishwasher and all of a sudden you've started washing your dishes on the way home from work. Or you can say, turn the oven on, set your lamps to brighten each morning, whenever you want to wake up, I just love it. Smartthings.com/twit. CES 2015 Editor's Choice Award from Time.com, so congratulations to SmartThings, you deserve it. I've been a supporter since the kickstarter and have been a fan of SmartThings for some time and I'm really glad to see them getting the recognition they deserve. Get your smart things kick started, smartthings.com/twit. I think this is kind of cool. You've got your VR glassses, I've got this asthma inhaler. I'm sorry, parascope, I'm sorry it's the HTC RE and this is another example of something we saw HTC announce at one of their events, maybe Mobile World Congress.I don't remember exactly when. It has just come out about a month ago for $179, it's called the RE and it's a camera. It's essentially the same kind of camera you'd find in a camera phone 13 megapixel for stlls and there a wide angle view and it need to sbe bause there no view finder so if I'm going to take a picture of Jason all I have to do is roughly aim it in your direction, press this big silver button here, and the front button is for slow motion, it shoots video as well. But the key is to really tie this into your Android phone with a reapplication, I'm going to do that right now.

Jason: So did that picture just zap right over to your phone?

Leo: It has been immediately picked up by the phone. There are some interesting things about the RE. For instance, this body is capacitive so whenever you touch it, you'll turn it on immediately. So I'm now recording a video of Jason. Watch this, this is kind of interesting because you can also tie it into your Youtube account and now, when I do this, it's going to do live stream. It takes about 30 seconds after you start the video for it to show up on your Youtube account but in about thirty seconds you can go to my Youtube account- I've made this public, and you can obviously make yours private, which is probably best. Now, I've already posted at youtube.com/leolaporte videos we shot last week, I've been shooting all week long. The idea that I can stream just that easily to Youtube live, I think is very intriguing. It's doing some processing right now and by the way it will only do 30 minutes total of live streaming to Youtube. But you know what? That's enough for your blog.

Jason: Is that a technical limitation or-

Leo: I'm not sure if Youtube makes that limitation or what. I know it requires a certain amount of free space in order for it to stream live. The kit comes  with the camera itself and an 8gb micro SD card but you can put larger ones in there, so don't feel limited by that. Also a USB cable you can connect, but it uses Bluetooth to connect to your camera. You also might be considerate of the fact that Youtube's streaming is not going to work great on a 3g or 4g network unless it's really excellent. Here's the live feed of me here, and the audio is quite fantastic. The angle is wide but that's okay.

Jason: For as small as it is I think it kind of has to be.

Leo: There's also a slow-mo button that is not super slow-mo but non the less. I'll give you the pros and cons: The still pictures are not so great, that's the complication for me behind this thing is that you are essentially paying ridiculous amounts to duplicate something your phone already does. You can do everything probably better with your smart phone. I don't know if smart phones in general allow people to stream live to Youtube, I guess I should look that up. But I just love how simple this is to use and how compact it is. There are threads on the bottom so you could put this on a Selfie Stick.or a tripod but also because of the form factor, it sits quite comfortably on any flat surface. So it would be fairly simple to every once in a while, turn towards the camera do your little video blog or video diary, Again, you can save it private, you don't have to make it public. Cons: Expensive,  not great image quality. Pros: This live streaming thing is amazing and I really kind of like the ergonomics of it believe it or not.

Jason: It's easy to poke fun at it at first until I really thought about the idea of live streaming from your phone- Can be kind of inconvenient.

Leo: Exactly. Your phone makes a very good view finder. I find this fascinating and I'm going to have to say try because I think at this price $179. Most of you probably have a phone you already get everything you could want from it. The other few of you, particularly video bloggers or people who use Youtube for posting videos daily, might find this kind of cool. I like the capacitive turn on, it's got great battery life, tons of storage and I don't know the video is okay but your smart phone is probably better if you own one so I'd say a 'try.' Neither a buy nor a don't buy. All i mean by that is if you look at this and think, yeah I know what I could use this for then definitely buy it, it's reliable, works exactly as described. So unless you have the thought in your head, oh I know exactly how I'd use this, probably don't buy. That's the HTC RE and again, I always like to applaud people who try to something new and different. So my video is now available at youtube.com/leolaporte. Leo Laporte saying: Thank you RE and now I press this button. Done.

Jason: Done. This would actually be a very good archive for anyone who has a lot of subscribers, typically on Youtube. So now that I said it's a 'try' after using it for 1 day I immediately went online.

Leo: Yeah, that's exactly what I though though. I could do an everyday video blog with just this. Very simple and straight forward. Thank you Jason Howell, enjoy your Oculus.

Jason: I will I'm going to spend some time in here and look kind of crazy. You don't look all that crazy honestly I think we're getting use to the look of them. Thanks to Father Robert Ballacer and of course, thank you to Chad for his review of the Papago. We do Before You Buy right before TN2 every Tuesday on the TWiT network, usually around 3:00-3:30pm Pacific; 6:00-6:30pm Eastern time; 2300 UTC and we make it available not only as a whole show but also chopped up  as swell. So you can get it as a whole show; twit.tv/byb but you can also go to our Youtube channel; Youtube.com/beforeyoubuy. You'll find the entire show there and a review as well. Email us byb@twit.tv if you have questions, comments, complaints. Thanks for joining us, I'm Leo Laporte, and it's time to watch 'Before You Buy!' See ya next time.