Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Gadget Reviews in 2014

_DSC9402This has been an exciting year of gadget reviews here on this blog. I’m a gadget guy. The opportunity to try out and write about the numerous gadgets that come my way has been most enjoyable. No, I did not buy them all. I’m most thankful to the many companies who have sent evaluation units for review.

As 2014 comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on the gadgets that have been reviewed. I’m not listing them in any particular order, although I add some further thoughts and commentaries to some of them.

Last year, I bought the parts and built my own mini-ITX PC to serve pfSense router. I didn’t have time to blog about them until the beginning of this year. The hardware specs is a little dated by now. There are faster processor and chipset options if you’re thinking of building your own.

We all need storage to store the bits and bytes of our digital life. I built my own cloud storage box, using Btrfs as the underlying filesystem, and ownCloud to front the cloud service. Many people don’t DIY their own box, but prefer to buy storage solutions. I’ve reviewed several products in this storage category, many from Western Digital. I happen to really like many of their simple standalone portable hard disk drives.

I reviewed a couple of smartphones. All budget friendly ones, though not necessarily all entry level.

  • OnePlus One Review – It may be cheap, but it has flagship specs, and seeing how many accolades it has picked up, I’m clearly not among the few that think this is a really outstanding smartphone.
  • The Redmi Comes To Singapore
  • OPPO Neo 5 Review – 4G, and really compact, good option for those who dislike the big screen sizes of other smartphones.
  • OPPO Find 7, 7A and OnePlus One – OPPO Find 7 and 7A are really close cousins to the OnePlus One. They are really good too, and still considerably cheap compared with other brand name offerings. Just not as cheap as the OnePlus One though.

Looking back, I’m quite surprised at the number of audio related products that I reviewed. It almost looks like I have a particular interest in audio gear.

I’d love to review more notebook computers and tablets, but just only a few came by.

There were a number of computer peripherals or accessories. I’m sure some of these will turn out useful to you.

Finally, although certainly not the least, here are the things that I could not fit into any of the above categories, and they are too few to put them into new categories, so they are all just summarised below.

There were more posts that would have qualify as reviews, such as the one on UnoTelly, the Coffee Bean mobile app, or Android L Developer Preview. I wrote about LEGO toys too. But just so that this post will not become a year-in-review summary, I’ll leave these out since they don’t really count as a techie gadget.

It has been a really busy and exciting year. I’m looking forward to more review opportunities in 2015!

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