Here we are, halfway through the year 2015 and our tech is better than ever with assisting us with our everyday lives. We now have smartphones with apps that can track our fitness, help us find answers to our everyday problems and keep our lives organized. But among all of these tech tools, I definitely have five favorites for you.
First up is the Amazon Echo, a voice assistant much like what is built into your smartphone. The unique thing about his black cylinder is you can talk to it hands-free when you’re doing your daily activities around the house. All you have to do is say its name, Amazon decided upon “Alexa”, and then a command. You can ask “her” to look up just about anything on the web like sports, news, weather, geography, facts, unit conversions, or anything in Wikipedia. You can even ask her to tell a joke or reorder something you periodically order on Amazon. Perhaps the greatest part of Alexa is her ability to play music with Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, etc. Just say: “Alexa” followed by any album, band, song, or genre and she’ll play it on her rich-sounding Bluetooth speaker.
Perhaps the most groundbreaking tech improvement to be brought into 2015 is ResearchKit, a software toolkit that lets researchers write iPhone apps for medical studies. Before this software, scientists were unable to use the data that our fitness trackers enabled in our smartphones take daily. With ResearchKit, scientists can potentially unlock and analyze this data and draw conclusions about medicine and health, all without violating anyone’s privacy. As the phone owner, you have total control over how much data you want to share and which studies you want to join if any. The best part about it is that even though it’s made by Apple, it’s open source. That way Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and anyone else are all welcome to incorporate it into their software and devices. Apple doesn’t make a dime but provides a priceless resource for medical discovery.
The next best gadget to be pushed in 2015 has to be the Apple Watch. Though it wasn’t the first smartwatch of its kind, Apple was the first company to create a media storm with it’s seemingly novelty device. But much like their iPod and iPhone, Apple found a way to make their unoriginal product seem like their own. They found a way to fit nearly an entire smartphone onto your wrist–and make it sell. So now with the Apple Watch you can check Twitter, news, weather, calendars, and other small amounts of information without having to suffer the embarrassment of pulling your smartphone out. While the Apple Watch is quite the technological feat, third-party app developers are continuing to struggle to adapt their applications to fit onto your wrist. Like most Apple products, improvement with time is promised.
Two of the best smartphones this year were definitely the Samsung Galaxy S6 and LG G4. While Samsung’s latest Galaxy brags an attractive display, svelte metal body, fingerprint reader and mobile payment system the LG G4’s camera outperformed every other smartphone’s camera on the market. So there you have it, for the most attractive display go with the Galaxy S6, but if you want an amazing camera buy the LG G4.
So there you have it, the latest and greatest tech to grace the year 2015.
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