Hell, just now I asked Google Assistant, “When was the Galaxy S24 released?” Shoulda been a softball question, right? It said its number one response: “I don’t know, but I found these results on search.” Siri gave me the same bullshit non-answer, just in a more upbeat tone.

When ChatGPT was unleashed upon the public in November 2022, it was like somebody had pulled the curtains open on the future of voice assistants. Surely this technology would someday soon be integrated—or replace—voice assistants. Now, instead of peeking through a crack at the light of the future, we were staring through its window.

Among all the hubbub of news pouring out of the CES tech trade show this month, Google has only let out a meager peep about its plan to slip something wonderful into our pockets, like a reverse pickpocket visiting from the future. It’s Google Gemini, and it looks like it’s going to finally pop open that window into what we thought voice assistants could be.

two faces, two names?

Remember Gemini? It’s OK if you don’t. It hasn’t been “Gemini” for that long. Gemini used to be called Bard, until Google mercifully renamed it Gemini—a far, far catchier name, in my humble opinion—back in February 2024. Remember Bard, then?

No? Well, that’s OK, too. It kind of sucked. An also-ran lagging at the bag of the pack as ChatGPT ran away with the headlines—and our hearts. And fears, but that’s another story altogether.

Gemini has gotten a major boost in intelligence and competency in the months since, some of which were announced alongside the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2025 on January 22. What got us all excited when they unveiled the Galaxy S25 lineup was that when you call upon its built-in AI assistant, it’s not Samsung’s own Bixby that answers the call by default but Google Gemini. It’s built in, right from launch, although Bixby will remain a non-default option.

The Galaxy S25 lineup isn’t the first to support Google Gemini. Much of Google’s own Pixel 8 and 9 wield it, as do the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra and Razr 50 Ultra, Xiaomi 14T and 14T Pro, and the Galaxy S24 range that began to receive some features of it post-launch last year.

So how does Gemini differ, and why should you give a damn? For one, it’s a generative, conversational AI in the vein of ChatGPT, rather than a voice assistant like Bixby, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Google Assistant.

Last week, Google announced that Gemini would now be able to work across multiple Samsung apps. You can, in one voice prompt, ask Gemini for some high-protein meal ideas and then save them directly to a note on a notes app, an example Google gives.

Gemini Live, the conversational mode akin to chatting with ChatGPT, also gained at the same time the ability to handle uploaded images, files, and YouTube videos for it to use in answering your queries and commands.

And last week, Google inked a deal with Associated Press to provide “up-to-date news” through Gemini, too, although we’ve seen lately with Apple that it hasn’t gone well at all. Might Gemini be better able to deliver news notifications that aren’t totally made-up, potentially libelous, fake news? We’ll find out, I suppose.

The post Google Gemini May Be the Hottest Thing in Smartphones This Year appeared first on VICE.

I’ve got a chemical sensitivity that makes the indoor buildup of off gassing of various consumer goods a literal pain for me. Without an air purifier, I end up with effects similar to living with an unchecked allergy.

Not to mention the fact that homes leak a lot of air, drawing in outdoor air in large quantities. All that nasty particulate and chemicals expelled into the atmosphere through tailpipes and smokestacks? It’s invading your home, baby. And indoor air pollution harms your health.

And aside from waiting for heavy industry to literally clean up its act (may I suggest a sand timer that measures time in centuries?), your only recourse is to clean the air in your own little corner of the world with a home air purifier.

I bought a Coway Airmega 200M about five years ago, and it’s been a game-changer for me. In this review, I’ll go over some of the specs and features that make it, in my opinion, the best air purifier out there.

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Coway

Airmega 200M (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Available at Walmart

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Available at Coway

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Smarty Pants

I’ve been using the Coway Airmega 200M in a series of bedrooms in New York City since I bought it close to five years ago. Automatic mode is my preferred setting.

In this mode, the Coway uses its built-in air quality monitor to determine which of the three fan speed settings—low, medium, and high—are needed. Most of the time, it’s on low. If it detects higher pollution, it may kick it up to medium or high.

You can also manually set it to each of the three levels, if you’d rather. Then there’s eco mode, which turns the fan off if air quality has remained good for a solid 30 minutes, in order to save energy. It’ll turn on again as needed when pollution levels rise again.

There’s an ionizer you can turn on or leave off. Ionizers claim to release negative ions into the air that cause airborne particles to clump together, making them larger and therefore easier for air filters to trap.

I leave the ionizer off because I haven’t seen studies convincing enough to demonstrate to me that it’s as effective as it says.

“Ozone, a lung irritant, is produced indirectly by ion generators and some other electronic air cleaners and directly by ozone generators,” says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There’s no app integration, but I’ve never cared about that in air purifiers. I’ve just never found good reason to control them when I’m away from home, especially if they’re automatic. They’re designed to be left on, not turned on and off every time you come home or leave, anyway.

In those almost-five years, I’ve had my Coway running constantly without break. The only times I’ve unplugged it have been to move apartments. Beyond regular HEPA filter and carbon filter replacements, I’ve never had to fix it or replace any parts. It’s been flawless.

Air quality in New York City is surprisingly not that bad for a large city. Whether that’s to thank for the infrequency of filter replacements or not, I only replace the carbon filter twice a year and can about a year out of a HEPA filter. That keeps running costs nice and low.

There are two pinpoint lights for notifying you that it’s time to replace a filter, one for the carbon filter and another for the HEPA filter. There’s a large, color-coded light that displays how the air quality in the room is currently.

You can turn it off, but not the pinpoint lights, if they’re active, nor the pinpoint lights that show which setting the air purifier is set to. These smaller bulbs cast hardly any light, though. Certainly not enough to bother me or even notice as I lay in bed in the dark.

Changing filters is as easy as falling down. You pop the faceplate off without any tools (easy), then pull the old filters out and push the new ones in. It’s easy enough that you could assign it to your three-year-old, or if you don’t have one, any random three-year-old.

Scrub, scrub, scrub that air clean

Back in April 2022, my apartment building had a major fire. I say major, even though I’m no firefighter qualified to judge, because seven firetrucks showed up. Must’ve been major, right? As the fire moved into the HVAC system, the air conditioners blew black soot through my apartment.

Four hours after the first firefighters showed up, they saved the building shortly after sunrise. Some of my neighbors spent the next few nights elsewhere. I left my Airmega 200M (plus a Coway Airmega 250) on and went out with friends for lunch and drinks.

When I got home that evening, the air inside my apartment was surprisingly breathable. The HEPA filters were filthy with black soot, and doctors reading this are probably cringing hard enough to turn themselves inside out, but I slept there that night without issue.

We see the term “HEPA” thrown around a lot when talking about air filters, and not all air purifiers have them. Widely known as a desirable designation, what it means is that it’s capable of removing nearly all airborne particles. It stands for “high efficiency particulate air.”

“This type of air filter can theoretically remove at least 99.97 percent of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of 0.3 microns,” says the EPA.

Coway says the Airmega 200M provides coverage for rooms up to 1,748 square feet. If it’s placed in a room that large or close to that size, it’ll only purify all the air inside that room once per hour (1 ACH, or air changes per hour). It’s better than nothing, but not really enough.

As the Centers for Disease Prevention (CDC) recommends, you should aim for at least 5 ACH. The Airmega 200M is rated for 4.8 ACH (close enough) in a room up to 361 square feet, so I recommend that this is an ideal air purifier for rooms up to that size.

As wildfires become more common and more severe, air purifiers play a crucial role in keeping the air indoors breathable and avoiding the nasty health effects of breathing in smoke.

Wildfires aren’t just a West Coast phenomenon, either. When Canada tried to smoke us out of North America in June 2023, my Coway plowed on faithfully. My throat burned and I coughed a lot outside, but ducking indoors my apartment’s air was as fresh and breathable as ever.

The carbon filter has a different function. It neutralizes bad odors, including cigarette and cigar smoke, pet stank, food and cooking smells, trash odors, and old laundry. I clean my apartment regularly, yet I can tell a pleasant difference with the air purifier running.

finally, a quiet roomie

Most of the time, the Coway whispers along on its lowest setting at an almost imperceptible volume (24.4 decibels, says Coway). Five feet away from my face as I lay on my bed, I can’t hear it. Even light sleepers who need silence to fall asleep can share a room with this Coway.

On medium, the noise is noticeable but not overwhelming. From time to time the Coway decides it needs a bit of extra oomph and switches briefly into medium for a minute or two, but it almost always stays on the low setting.

On high, it’s not quiet at all (55.1 decibels, according to Coway), but I hardly ever hear it switch into high. Medium, sure, when I’m dusting and cleaning or if I flip my comforter around as I change the bedsheets, but witnessing it switch to high is rarer than witnessing a blood moon.

At 12.3 number of pounds and with a handle integrated into the top of its case, it’s easy to pick up and position. Measuring 16.8 by 18.3 by 9.6 inches, it’s slim enough that I’ve had no trouble tucking it out of the way in my small apartment bedroom.

You have to buy it separately, but Coway sells a reusable mesh pre-filter that prolongs the life of the other filters by catching larger pieces of dust before they ever reach them. You just rinse off the pre-filter when it’s dirty and pop it back behind the face of the air purifier.

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Coway

Airmega 200M & AP-1512HH Pre-Filter (opens in a new window)

Available at Coway

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“By effectively removing these larger particles, the inner filters are able to capture smaller particles, such as allergens, dust mites, mold spores, viruses, and bacteria, more efficiently,” writes Coway. I wish it came with the mesh pre-filter standard.

Still, you should go out and buy one. After running the air purifier for a year without it, I noticed the installation of the pre-filter kept the HEPA filter cleaner for longer, and now I don’t have to replace it as often. It’s quibbling, though.

The Competition

Coway Airmega 200M vs. Coway Airmega Mighty AP-1512HH

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Coway

Airmega AP-1512HH (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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These two purifiers are basically the same. They have identical machinery inside, use the same filters, have the same fan settings, and are almost identical in size and weight. Buy whichever one you can find for cheaper, unless you have a preference for looks.

Coway Airmega 200M vs. Blueair Pure 411a Max

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Blueair

Blue Pure 411a Max (opens in a new window)

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The handsome, automatic Blueair is the quietest air purifier I’ve used, at 18 decibels on low fan speed vs. the Coway’s 24.4. The downside is that it achieves only 4 ACH in rooms up to 219 square feet compared to the Coway’s 4.8 ACH in rooms up to 361 square feet.

Coway Airmega 200M vs Coway Airmega 250

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Coway

Airmega 250 (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Think of these as younger and older sibling. They’re both fantastic, my two favorite air purifiers for small- and medium-sized rooms, respectively. The Airmega 250 achieves 4 ACH in rooms up to 465 square feet, so it’s better for living rooms and larger bedrooms.

The pure takeaway

Air purifiers are appliances, and appliances should just be dependable, work as needed, and fade into the background without needing a bunch of handholding or complex operating instructions. Oh, and they should last a long time under frequent use without need of repair.

The Coway Airmega 200M and Airmega Mighty AP-1512HH do that in spades. My unit’s five year anniversary is coming up later this year. It’s spent nearly all that time plugged in and switched on, and it works as well now as it did when new.

My lungs give me less trouble from life’s inescapable pollution and chemicals, and I no longer notice the stink of sweat-soaked gym clothes and ripe trash cans. It may not be the thing I grab if I’m running out of a burning building, but I can count on it to welcome me back inside with clean air.

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Coway

Airmega 200M (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Available at Walmart

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Available at Coway

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The post Coway Airmega 200M Review: This Air Purifier Is a Must-Have (If You Like to Breathe) appeared first on VICE.

No doubt it’s the Apple grapefruit(?) of Samsung’s eye, then, when it had an entire event held its beloved device: Galaxy Unpacked 2025. Today on January 22, Samsung announced the three successors to its Galaxy S24 lineup.

Nothing too surprising or drastic, the Galaxy S25 is more of an evolution of a fantastic device than a revolutionary year of drastic redesign or killer new features.

pretty much what we expected

The screens carry over from the S24 across all three sub-types, except that the S25 Ultra gains 0.1″. Otherwise, the dimensions, resolution, brightness, and refresh rate are the same. All are 0.4mm slimmer than their S24 counterparts and a few grams lighter.

The cameras are all familiar from the S24 range, except the S25 Ultra’s ultra-wide lens is now f/1.9 with a 50-megapixel sensor, versus the S24 Ultra’s f/2.2 lens and 12-megapixel sensor. Batteries, too, remain the same, although the S25s seem to be more efficient and pick up an extra hour of expected battery life.

So let’s talk about what’s different. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is replaced by the faster Snapdragon 8 Elite, and while the S25+ and S25 Ultra have the same 12GB of RAM as their 24 predecessors, Samsung has also bestowed 12GB on the base-level S25, up from 8GB.

Except quicker performance from both. Samsung’s rollout of its AI assistant across its smartphone range means greater demands on the performance, and the littlest sibling of the Galaxy S25 lineup has to keep up.

We can breathe easily for another year that Samsung didn’t raise the price. The base-level S25 launches at the same $799 price that the S24 costs… for now. We wouldn’t be surprised to see the S24’s price receive a haircut once the S25s begin landing on the shelves.

hedging on the edge

Toward the end of the event, Samsung teased the particularly thin Galaxy S25 Edge, which we’d thought was going to be called the Galaxy S25 Slim. Honestly, I liked the latter better. The former makes me think of that part of Disney World done up like a Star Wars set, Galaxy’s Edge.

Meanwhile, PhoneArena featured a list of the 39 countries where the Galaxy Edge will be released, according to a “historically trusted source” that reached out to them. The U.S. isn’t on the list.

But then again, Bloomberg tech journalist and collector of smartphone leaks Mark Gurman says the Galaxy S25 Edge is coming to the U.S. in the first half of this year, priced below the $1,299 Ultra.

could it be your north star?

Choices, choices. If the standard Galaxy S25’s 7.2mm girth (0.4mm slimmer than the S24) is just too much for your pocket, you’ll have to watch and wait for the S25 Edge and its (rumored) 6.4mm thickness.

For the impatient, or those who don’t care about a millimeter here and there, pre-orders for the S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra are live now, and those orders will be filled when the Galaxy S25 range goes on sale on February 7.

My take? The Galaxy S25 is a fantastic device and among the very best Android has to offer. If you already have an S24, keep yours. The S25 isn’t that much of an upgrade, unless you’re going from S24 to S25+ or S25 Ultra.

But if your Galaxy is an S23 or earlier, or if you’re migrating from another smartphone family, the S25 appears to be another entry among the best in the galaxy.

The post Samsung Adds Four New Stars to Its Galaxy appeared first on VICE.

Cord cutting caught on initially as a financially savvier way to watch TV while saving money from the cable and satellite subscriptions that’d grown significantly more expensive, on average, over the 2010s.

But when the average household in the U.S. subscribes to four streaming services simultaneously, the uptick in prices adds up quickly. Cue the outrage, perhaps not from the extra dollar or two per month, but because Netflix has raised prices, on one subscription plan or another, at least once every year since 2018.

The basics

Netflix’s Basic With Ads was introduced in late 2022, which for the first time put advertisements on subscribers’ screens for $7 per month.

Basic began to be phased out for new subscribers in mid-2023, and when it was gone the ad-supported entry-level tier had already been renamed Standard With Ads and gained 1080p definition streaming. I guess nobody these days wants to be called basic.

The price for Standard With Ads has stayed the same $7 per month, though, until now. It’s received a $1 price bump to $8 per month. Certain movies and shows are blocked from that plan, though, and you can’t stream in 4K, unlike Hulu’s and Prime Video’s cheapest plans.

earning that premium title

The Standard plan ditches the ads and lets you watch all titles on the service, but that’s receiving a heftier price increase from $15.50 to $18 per month. And still no 4K. The last time the Standard plan had its price hiked was January 2022, the longest interval of all Netflix’s plans.

Top of the line, there’s Premium. That’s the one that unlocks 4K streaming to take advantage of all those 4K TVs that now clog the TV aisles and Amazon search pages. Now costing $25, it’d been $22.50.

But what gives? It had just seen a price increase in October 2023. Prior to that, it had been $20. So in 14 months, its price has gone up 25 percent, from $20 per month to $25.

Might this be the end of Netflix price hikes? Hardly. We doubt it. Netflix beat predictions posting its largest-ever, quarter-wide jump in subscriptions in Q4 2024, picking up 18.9 million subscribers and almost doubling the projection of 9.8 million, according to Barron’s.

Add to the fact that Netflix shares soared in the wake of the news, and yeah, we haven’t experienced our last taste of Netflix price increases by any means.

The post Netflix Raised Its Prices, Now Costs Bigbux appeared first on VICE.

Or maybe it’s more like Wooly Willy, that road trip toy with the metal whiskers that you manipulate with a magnetic wand to give Willy a full head of hair and then, like nature, to take it all away. It’s the toy that first taught most of us about the cruelties of aging.

Either way, the important takeaway here is that my face is like a cheap game you can buy at Cracker Barrel. And a key tool for keeping that cheap game looking presentable in public is the Braun Series 9 beard trimmer I picked up last year.

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Braun

Series 9 All-in-One Grooming Kit (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Available at Walmart

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no bite!

Other shavers I’ve used in the past had a tendency to bite me. Now, when I’m saying bite, am I saying these machines showed actual malice and, dare I say it, immorality? Or just poor function? Both, honestly. The bastards bit me habitually, and I never forgave them for it.

There was a corded Andis adjustable shaver, gleaming polished metal, that I used for a couple of years on the recommendation of my then-barber. It was a professional model aimed at people who cut hair for a living. What could go wrong, right?

The Andis plastic guides that I bought separately for it had rough edges that tended to scrape and cut my neck.

It happened just infrequently enough for me to keep using it and hoping I’d get through the day without pain, but frequently enough that I began to develop an involuntary cringe every time it got close to my face.

Then, fast-forwarding a few beard trimmers, I used a Braun Series 3 All-in-One Grooming Kit for a while because I was trying to balance my long-term preference for Braun shavers with my long-term preference of being a fiscal cheap ass.

Braun uses a particular naming convention to denote which model is top of the heap. Series 3 is the bread-and-butter model. Then Series 5 is bit better, and Series 7 a bit better than that, and the Series 9 is the cream of the crop.

The Series 3 had a sweet adjustable head, operated by an integrated dial on the body of the shaver, with a pair of plastic shaver guides included in the box. The guides themselves weren’t sharp-edged like the Andis’, but the shaving head had a tendency to periodically pull hairs.

I’d be shaving, not particularly fast or all willy nilly, and every once in a while I’d feel it yank a beard hair right out of my face. I don’t know if you’ve ever had it happen, but beard hairs are thick. It hurts several orders of magnitude worse than yanking out a head hair.

I began to develop the same fear-based hesitation I’d had with the Andis. And despite the fact that the box said “all-in-one grooming tool,” I wasn’t thrilled that I had to use other tools to finish off my shaving ritual each day.

There was no fine-detail head for shaping my beard. There was no nostril trimming tool to make sure I didn’t leave the house looking like my nose was holding Chewbacca in a headlock.

Thinking (a)Head

I haven’t had a clean shaven face for a day since I was 18, and even after owning a few Remington, Andis, Wahl, and Philips Norelco shavers and beard trimmers over the years, too, I steadfastly preferred Braun.

I’ve been using my Series 9 for a bit over a year, and it hasn’t scratched me or yanked out any hairs yet. Finally I can shave without feeling like in a hostage situation with my trimmer.

The trimmer body is plastic, but solidly built enough. The textured back does a good job of improving grip so that I don’t fumble it when my hands are damp after having gotten out of the shower. It’s comfortable in my hand and fairly ergonomic.

There are two plastic guides that slip over the head when you want to trim the length of whiskers, one for lengths between 0.5 mm and 10 mm and another for lengths between 10.5 mm and 20 mm. You then spin a rotary wheel to set the length in 0.5 mm increments.

There’s a lock that’ll keep the length from being accidentally changed. In the past, with a trimmer that didn’t have a lock, I screwed up a nice playoff beard this way. The lock is a very welcome feature. Go ahead and trim your eyebrows without worrying you’ll accidentally shave one off.

On the cheaper Braun Series 3 trimmer I had before this, the numbers eventually began to wear away on the rotary wheel after daily use. Time will tell if that’s an issue on the Series 9, which has the same dial, but after a year so far there’s no noticeable wear.

Without the 0.5-20 mm guides, you can use the bare metal head to get close to a smooth shave. This is more for shaping and outlining the edges of your beard than going clean shaven on your whole face.

The mini-foil head is fine for taking small areas down to smooth skin, but it’s not as good as the foil heads on a Braun electric shaver. Frankly, I don’t use it much, as I have a separate shaver for areas I want clean shaven, such as my neck.

The narrow, fine-detail head gets a lot of use for me in shaping the angle where the muttony-choppy part of my beard meets my jawline, and shaping the whiskers below my lip. It cuts as close as the bare main head, and it’s nimble. It’s a major pro in recommending this trimmer.

There’s also a T-blade, a wider version of the regular head, that functions identically but is a bit wider, perfect for making long, straight edges, such as on the neck and near the jawline. By needing fewer passes, there’s less chance you’ll make an uneven edge.

The body guide head is plastic, rather than metal, but I’ve used the regular metal one for that and have never snagged an edge or hurt myself. It glides like butter, so the plastic body guide seems unnecessary.

Go ahead, get attached

There are a pair of plastic guide attachments for fades, which slant upward from 1 to 5 mm. One guide does this left to right, and the other right to left. It’s only useful if you want that very particular fade. These guides are nice to have, but not crucial for most people.

The ear and nose attachment, though, is the cherry on top. I can’t say how it performs on ears, since that region is a barren desert rather than a lush rainforest, but for trimming the nose it performs well enough. Not as well as a standalone unit, but I prefer its convenience.

With this attachment, I need to make a higher-than-average number of passes. But it doesn’t pinch, nick, or pull hairs, so I’m overall happy with it and glad not to need yet another separate nose trimmer taking up space in my drawer.

Removing and installing the various included heads is easy and smooth. The pieces are plastic sliding into plastic notches, so we’ll see about durability as the years pass by, but every day I remove and pop on at least three different heads, and I see no wear after a year.

Regardless of the heads or guides on it, I never had to make a bunch of passes over an area of beard, especially compared to cheaper trimmer where I’d need to take a lot, and it cuts very evenly at all lengths.

Even when I’m not shortening my beard, it’s great for maintaining a uniform appearance and mopping up all the stray long beard hairs that come with not trimming for a few days.

Braun says the “ProBlade” metal head is their sharpest, and as much as I tend to squint my eyes in skepticism about claims like that, I can vouch that the bare heads of the Series 9 do cut closer than cheaper Braun trimmers I’ve used.

It’s Portable af

The padded, zippered organizing case that holds everything is pretty sweet. Every time I want to call it bulky I have to remind myself of how much is packed in there. Only the charger doesn’t fit inside.

Sometimes the fade guide attachments slip out of the fabric pockets, and the ear and nose trimmer rides sort of sidesaddle in an afterthought of an area, but for the most part all the pieces stay securely in place.

Last year I took the whole shebang on a one-month, off-road motorcycle journey across Southeast Asia. Inside a bag strapped down to the back of my Honda dirt bike, it withstood a few wipeouts. Nothing inside took any damage, so I’d consider it pretty bombproof.

Braun says you can get up to 180 minutes of shaving time. I’ve never shaved myself for three hours continuously, and God willing I never will.

I’ve used it for a solid 30 minutes at a time and barely dented the battery charge, though, so it’s unlikely anyone will lose so much charge that they have to stop shaving before they’re done, as long as they’re not starting with a close-to-depleted battery.

The internal, non-removable lithium ion battery charges much more quickly than the old nickel-metal hydride batteries of older shavers.

If you leave your charging stand plugged into an outlet 24/7, then charging time might not mean much to you, but if you lack outlets in your bathroom like me, it’s a godsend to top off the charge on a nightstand for 30 minutes before leaving the apartment.

The Series 9 is waterproof, so you don’t have to worry about errant splashes killing your new toy. Some folks shave in the shower and require a waterproof trimmer. I find I get a better cut when I trim right after a shower, though.

Other PRoducts you might Consider

Braun Series 9 All-in-One Grooming Kit vs. Braun Series 3 5-in-One Grooming Kit

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Braun

Series 3 5-in-One Grooming Kit (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Available at Walmart

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

The Braun Series 3 has way fewer attachments, so it doesn’t do nearly as much. The heads don’t cut as closely, and there’s no lock for the length adjustment. Then again, it’s a third the cost. In its price range, it’s still a forerunner, but if you have the coin, go with the Series 9.

Braun Series 9 All-in-One Grooming Kit vs. Braun Series 9 Shaver

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Braun

Series 9 Pro+ Shaver (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Available at Walmart

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

Confused? Well, that comes down to Braun’s naming convention, which is shared by its trimmers and its shavers. It has a different purpose. As a one-trick pony, it’s for going clean shaver. It cuts more closely than the trimmer, and that’s all.

You may find a use for both. I use a shaver on my neck and the tops of my cheeks, which I want clean shaven, and a trimmer for the rest.

Braun Series 9 All-in-One Grooming Kit vs. Wahl USA Pro Series High Visibility Skeleton Style Trimmer

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Wahl

Wahl USA Pro Series High Visibility Skeleton Style Trimmer (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Available at Walmart

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Buy Now (opens in a new window)

In our Wahl USA Pro Series High Visibility Skeleton Style Trimmer review, the tester said “the HVT’s thin body and excellent grip makes it pretty easy to control,” and the way the head is situated makes it easier to see all four edges of the blade as you maneuver it.

Both trimmers score high in our book. The Braun, though, has more attachments and therefore more versatility. So there!

the five o’ clock shadow

Now, any beard trimmer I’ve used is no substitution for an electric shaver when you’re trying to take whiskers all the way down beyond stubble and get a baby smooth shave. The two are complementary, not rivals. Whether rotary or foil head, a shaver is for being clean shaven.

When it comes to retaining some whiskers and maintaining their length, though, the Series 9 trimmer is top of the mark out of anything I’ve used before. It can help maintain shorter hairstyles, too, or the sides of your head if you keep them cut shorter.

As a bodyscaping tool and fine-detail beard trimmer, the Series 9 also shines. Add to that the ear and nose trimmer, and you have a full kit. In the past I’d need a regular beard trimmer, a fine-detail trimmer, and a nose trimmer. With the Series 9, I don’t have to buy all three.

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Braun

Series 9 All-in-One Grooming Kit (opens in a new window)

Available at Amazon

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Available at Walmart

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It’s a pricey trimmer, but given that it can replace several standalone trimmers, it makes financial sense for all but the most basic needs. And it nails the two most important things: uniformity in cutting performance, and not hurting the user.

You can stare at specification sheets all day long to compare trimmers, but none of them will tell you how any trimmer performs on these two fronts. The Braun Series 9, in actual day-to-day usage, ticks all the boxes of what I’d always wanted from a trimmer.

The post Brains vs. Braun? How About Both? Braun’s Series 9 Beard Trimmer, Reviewed appeared first on VICE.

My freshman year of high school, I was taught Mexican Spanish by a white lady from Chicago who once spent a year in college studying in Mexico. The next year, Peruvian Spanish by a kind lady from Peru.

The next, Argentinian Spanish by a woman from Buenos Aires. Then nothing my senior year, because high school is just as nonsensical as the real world.

Cut to adulthood. I was still desperate to get a working grasp of Spanish—so I dove into all the apps: Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, and iTalki, plus books and in-person language learning groups on Meetup.

I began watching TV shows without captions and trying to strike up conversations with locals on vacation without understanding first the elementary underpinnings of the language. (One thing I didn’t try: bingeing speed).

Nothing worked. Everything sucked. Then on a desperate Google search one day, I came across an awful lot of language enthusiasts on Reddit talking highly of Pimsleur. “What the hell have I got to lose?” I thought. “There’s a seven-day free trial, anyway.”

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Pimsleur

Pimsleur Language Learning App (opens in a new window)

Available at Pimsleur

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Well, I stuck with it a lot longer than seven days. After decades of rough starts and stops, Pimsleur brought my threadbare Spanish up to a conversational level. And then through Pimsleur I learned Swahili, which I’d always wanted to do.

Ninafahamu na ninasema kiswahili kidogo… si vzuri sana, lakini naweza kuongea kiswahili. Poa, ndio? Then recently I began using it to learn French.

So why the change after three decades, from someone who told people I’m just a big dummy who can’t learn languages to someone who’s learning three of them for fun? Turns out I wasn’t incapable of learning a language after all. I just needed to find an instructional method that didn’t suck.

Pimsleur Review: A World of Choice

For each of the 51 languages Pimsleur teaches, there can be up to five levels of 30 lessons each. Both their Castilian and Latin American Spanish courses have five lessons. I hopped into level three of Latin American Spanish because I already knew the basics.

What I needed was help breaking out of beginner Spanish and turning a rudimentary classroom understanding into a language I could use in the real world. How else could I confound Dominicans and Cubans with my bizarre and inhuman requests for sugarless black coffee?

How It Works

Each Pimsleur audio lesson runs for about 30 minutes. The first Pimsleur courses were offered to consumers in 1980. As funny as it may seem, the audio lessons on the app aren’t that different from these original courses on cassette tape.

You listen to conversations and are asked to answer questions and repeat phrases out loud. Each lesson tends to focus on one or two unifying scenarios so that the new phrases and words you learn aren’t a random grab bag of information.

Instructions are given in English, although later in the course, instruction is increasingly given in the language you’re learning. Saying the phrases out loud helps with understanding and remembering them.

And while I could pause the audio track for a bit more time when I needed to think of the right phrase for longer than the given pause, I found that keeping my finger off the pause button propelled me to start thinking more quickly on my feet, a vital skill in real-life conversations.

New words and phrases are peppered into each lesson, but not too many as to be overwhelming. I’ve always thought that people understand and remember conclusions they come to themselves (or at least feel that they’re coming to themselves), rather than having it spoon fed to them in a super dry way.

What I noticed early on is that one reason Pimsleur works as well as it does is because that it may not, say, tell me outright that a verb has a certain ending, if I’m speaking about multiple people doing it.

But after I learned enough of these phrases to recognize the pattern, I’d think, “Ohh! This is a foundational rule of the language, and I can apply it to any verb in this tense when speaking about a bunch of people, not just the verbs I learn in the app.”

That sort of instruction wedged into by brain far better than any book, teacher, or competing language learning app ever did.

Take it day by day

Pimsleur says the method works best if you do one audio lesson each day. No more, since you want to give your brain enough time to absorb each lesson, but no less.

While I very occasionally skipped a lesson because (insert bullshit excuse), I’d notice it was easier for me when I did the lessons daily. Each successive lessons builds on the previous ones, so you’ll continue to hear and practice phrases and words from prior lessons.

Thirty minutes per day may seem like a big ask compared to all the apps that promise you only have to commit to 10 or 15 minutes per day. And there’s no gamification that promises to make learning “Easy! Quick! Fun!”

You don’t get magic rings or treasure chests for correct responses. But the point is that it works. I don’t care how many wacky noises an app spits out at me if it doesn’t deliver. I learned more in a week of Pimsleur than during my 550-day streak on Duolingo.

Over time, I began to do my daily audio lessons while I performed mindless chores about the apartment. Unloading the dishwasher, doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning.

Because the main parts of each lesson—the audio—was entirely hands-off, I could layer my daily learning over an otherwise mind-numbing chore. I couldn’t do that with Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Memrise, or Babbel.

conversations with myself

Completing each audio lesson unlocks “skills,” or phrases mentioned in the audio track, that you can review and save. There are a lot of more interactive, optional components to each lesson that are designed to be reviewed after the audio part.

There’s Voice Coach, in which you not only have to translate a given English phrase, but you have to pronounce it correctly, too. It grades you on a 100-point scale not just on whether you put the right words in the right order, but how well you pronounced them.

Speak Easy gives you a screen full of sentences spoken by native speakers, and you try to match your pronunciation to theirs without time limits or grades.

The voice recognition software worked very well through my iPhone 15 Pro. Duolingo had always pissed me off because it never understood what I was saying, but Pimsleur was quite accurate.

Even my Google Nest Hub’s Google Assistant and my iPhone’s Siri have a harder time understanding me than Pimsleur. Reading lessons begin at certain points further into each course. As Pimsleur itself says, reading and listening are different skills processed uniquely in the brain.

Nailing down the spoken components first and introducing the written components later and separately like this worked a lot better for me than other apps that vastly prioritize written content, like Duolingo, or blend them together from the start, like Memrise.

Flash cards were useful for routine practice. I could select whether I wanted English to (target language) or vice versa. It’s an excellent tool for staying sharp and not forgetting previous words and phrases.

There are a few optional games in each lesson, too: Quick Match and Speed Round. These were my least favorite parts of Pimsleur, mostly because they were so stupid-easy.

no more false starts

You can sign up for a free lesson to try Pimsleur out, or you can get a seven-day free trial if you sign up for a subscription. The app is available on Android or iOS, or you can use it on the desktop.

And you can always cancel before the seven days are up. (My skeptical self thought I’d be canceling, too, when I signed up.) A monthly subscription runs $20 for a single language, but for $21 a month you can access all 51 languages.

The extra buck a month was a no-brainer for me, so after my trial was up I let my money ride on the $21-per-month subscription and began learning Swahili, too. And I’ll point out here that I didn’t ask Pimsleur for a discount or complimentary test period or even let them know I may be reviewing it. I paid full price out of my own pocket from the start.

There aren’t a ton of resources for learning Swahili. That Pimsleur not only has Swahili but did just as well teaching it to a native English speaker as it taught me Spanish, a much more common language closer to English, sold me on the idea that the Pimsleur method is sound.

So you can teach me Spanish, French, German, Italian—the typical languages? Fine. But you can teach me an East African Bantu trade language from the 8th century? Now that’s impressive.

There was only one Pimsleur level for Swahili, and its 30 lessons ran at a quicker pace than the Romance language courses. Some individual lessons were more heavily packed with information than Spanish lessons, but the method was solid.

With my Swahili journey on Pimsleur wrapped up, I picked up the French course. Like Spanish, it had five levels. By now Pimsleur had done well polishing up my beginner Spanish and teaching me from scratch a language entirely unlike English. How well would it do teaching me French, a common second language for Anglophones, as a complete beginner?

I’m only a few weeks into it, but it’s going wonderfully. Spanish and, especially, Swahili are very straightforward in how written words are pronounced. French sure as hell isn’t. The few times I took a stab at French, I’d get my brain all tied up in knots trying to read a French word and then pronounce it.

Taking the reading out of the equation and letting Pimsleur’s audio lessons be my introductions into new phrases got me over that roadblock. Later on I’d consult the French reading lessons, but then it was more, “Oh, so that’s how it’s spelled,” rather than, “Well, shit. How in the world would I say that?”

Five levels of French mean that if I keep up with my daily practice—and I have been—then I’ve got five months of coursework. Like with any language, I can always return to the flashcards I’d saved of especially useful or tricky phrases, plus reading lessons and quizzes that I can practice on the subway to keep myself sharp.

it’s no competition

Pimsleur Vs. Rosetta Stone

Once the bliss of not having to stumble through Spanish for grades wore off, I decided to pick it up again in my 20s. Rosetta Stone made no impression on me.

Rosetta Stone often says in its marketing, “By mirroring the way you first acquired language as a child, Dynamic Immersion provides maximum exposure to your new language through audio spoken by native speakers, written words, and real-world images.”

But it never clicked for me. Showing images on screen and blasting me with the spoken phrases felt too clumsy, too much error in “trial and error.” Besides, I thought, how many years did it take to learn a language as a child? Do I have that kind of time on my hands? If I pour five years of learning into this and end up talking like a (Spanish) five-year-old, I’d be pissed.

Pimsleur Vs. Duolingo

Duolingo was mostly a multiple choice quiz. It was catchy and fun, but I was only halfway decent when a list of possible phrases was put before my eyes. There’s a reason schoolchildren like multiple choice tests (as much as anyone can like a test).

It’s because it’s the easiest one to guess at if you don’t know or aren’t confident in the answer. Works the same way with languages. I’d score hundreds on Duolingo but never feel like I had a grasp of actually using the language. The spoken component was focused more on sounding exaggeratedly slow and silly than realistic.

Pimsleur Vs. Babbel & Memrise

Memrise and Babbel, at least, had real people speaking normally. It was better for comprehension, but I was still selecting from multiple choice answers.

It wasn’t as hands-off or seamless as a Pimsleur audio lesson, and it felt to me that selecting from written answer choices interfered with my conversation comprehension. I prefer how Pimsleur delays the optional written lessons until after you complete each audio lesson.

I even went vintage and bought a famous Spanish language instruction book called Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, published in the 1950s. Aside from learning lots of ways to ask for a smoking pipe and buying the latest vinyl records from shopkeepers, the method was too dense and dry to translate into a conversational tool for me.

Plus, there was no spoken element. If I wanted to talk with people in Spanish, I needed to learn by hearing people speaking it. Dropping into Puerto Rico for a visit and, later, living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City confirmed that while I’d learned about tenses and conjugating, I was still trash as far as navigating actual spoken conversations.

the world is now your oyster

So what’s next? For honing my Spanish and Swahili into fluency, Pimsleur has been a wonderful foundation for bringing my learning into the real world. I’ve yet to find another Swahili speaker in person, but I’ve got a few people to speak Spanish (and French) with in real life. (You know what I use ChatGPT for? Practicing conversations in these languages.

It’s the best use I’ve found yet for this double-edged technology sword.) And I’m watching television shows and movies in Spanish. (Frontera Verde? Buenisimo.) No language learning app is going to bring you to complete fluency along. They’re not designed to.

The good ones will imbue you with a functional grasp of the language and springboard you on a path toward fluency as you move your learning into the wider world.

As for my next steps with Pimsleur, I’ve been eyeballing their three-level course in Levantine Arabic. And I once took some halting steps toward Russian in my pre-Pimsleur days, in which I’d never progressed beyond dim-witted three-year-old or clever parrot.

I wonder if I picked up Pimsleur’s five levels of Russian instruction, whether I could finally say da svidanya to those Russian children’s books on my bookshelf, with which I’d apparently been wasting my time.

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The post I Was Trash at Learning Languages for 30 Years—Until I Tried This App appeared first on VICE.

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Glad you asked. We’re here to invigorate your knowledge base about all of the wild, crazy, life-changing, awe-inspiring products out there, and we’re looking at the good, the bad, and the ugly. We definitely want to help you find the “good,” or maybe even the “ugly” if that’s what you’re into (some people are!), and avoid those pangs of regret that come from unboxing a cruel disappointment (a.k.a the “bad”). We know it can be rough out on the World Wide Web, with all of the fake reviews and hustlers, and there are countless (very warranted) examples to inspire that “when you order it online vs. when it comes in the mail” meme. But we love to shop until we metaphorically drop (we are very juiced, and never actually drop), and are here to make your online pursuit of worthy Cool Shit easier and more fun. We also hope to help you decipher some internet trends that you might have seen around, from the basic (mustard bed sheets) to the advanced (goblincore TikTokers). 

You have probably seen other recommendation sites out there, and wonder what makes ours different. We get it, and we can easily answer that: We like our online shopping with a spicy salt rim. We don’t just look at Amazon bestsellers or compare the wattage of air purifiers or whatever—there are plenty of other sites that can do that for you. We want to help you find things that you will feel excited about, because they’re unique, high-quality, and ideally, show some personality. We want people to point at these picks and say, “Whoaaa, where did you get that?” We want them to make you feel good, whether that means finding the best sex toys that will give you mind-bending orgasms, helping you turn your living room floor into a baller guest room, or explaining smokeable CBD hemp that can help you mellow out while listening to your dad’s Marvin Gaye records. Oh yeah, and we love deals, deals, deals. 

Our editorial policy

Rec Room is reader-supported. Here’s how: If you read one of our articles, click through to one of the products we recommend, and buy it, we may make a small commission from the retailer as a little thank you for sending readers their way (at no additional cost to you).

The Rec Room team and contributors independently select all of the products featured in every single article. If we think something is wack, we are not gonna recommend it, and no brand or retailer can pay us to be included in these articles. In other words, this isn’t sponsored content, or “spon con,” as the media Twitterati like to say. We never guarantee editorial coverage in exchange for free stuff, and our staff does not make any personal commission from purchases made by our readers. Additionally, we operate separately from VICE’s newsrooms, so you don’t have to worry that our team’s love of “the good stuff” will impact VICE’s reporting.  

We solemnly swear… 

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Meet Our Team

Jaina Rodriguez Grey

Jaina is a staff writer with over a decade of experience as a journalist and as a sex worker. She’s covered civil litigation for Westlaw and Thomson Reuters, PC hardware for Digital Trends, and most recently she was on staff at WIRED where she did a bit of product illustration and wrote about sex toys, coffee pots, and gaming culture. Here at VICE she covers a little bit of everything but primarily sticks to her truest loves: sex, coffee, and games. She lives in Seattle with her partner and their two pets, a cat and a rabbit. You can find her on social media: Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram.

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