Author: Bill Murrell
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10 Best Smart Plugs for Holiday Lights (October 2026)
Most smart plug failures I have seen happen in the first two weekends of November, not because the plug is bad but because the wrong one got plugged into a wet receptacle. If you are searching for the best smart plugs for holiday lights, the deciding factor is almost never the app. It is the…
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10 Best Video Doorbells for Apartments (October 2026) for Renters
The hardest part of apartment security is not the camera. It is the lease, the hallway, and the fact that you cannot run a wire through a wall you do not own. So the best video doorbells for apartments are not the ones with the longest spec sheet. They are the ones that mount over…
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8 Best Smart Thermostats for Older Homes (October 2026)
The best smart thermostat for an older home is the Google Nest Thermostat, because it runs on the power already in your heating and cooling wires and needs no C wire on most conventional systems. I have installed and troubleshot thermostats in houses where the wiring was original to the build, and the failure points…
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10 Best Smart Displays for Kitchens (October 2026)
If you want one screen that handles timers, recipes, music and smart home control while your hands are covered in flour, the Amazon Echo Spot is the best smart display for a kitchen right now, with the Echo Show 15 taking over the moment you need a bigger, wall-mountable panel. I have run all ten…
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12 Best Smartwatches for Android Phones (October 2026)
The best smartwatches for Android phones in are not one watch, they are three very different answers to three very different questions. If you own a Samsung Galaxy phone, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 gives you the deepest health and sleep picture of anything in this group. If you want to charge your watch once…
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10 Best Smartwatches for Kids (October 2026)
Choosing the best smartwatches for kids is harder than it looks, because two very different products sit under the same name. One is a screen-free toy watch for a four-year-old. The other is a wrist-mounted phone with GPS, video calling and an app on your phone. I have been sorting through both kinds for weeks,…
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12 Best Fitness Trackers for Sleep Tracking (October 2026)
Every fitness tracker claims to track your sleep. Almost none of them tell you, before you buy, that the accuracy depends as much on where you put the thing as on the sensor inside it. Our team spent six weeks rotating twelve wearables through overnight wear, cross-checking every morning against a handwritten sleep journal, so…
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9 Best GPS Watches for Hiking (October 2026)
A good GPS watch does one thing better than a phone: it keeps working where the signal ends. When the trail drops into a canyon, a drainage or a snowfield with no bars, the watch on your wrist still locks onto satellites, plots your line on a topographic map and logs a track you can…
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10 Best Smartwatches for Running (October 2026)
Most running watches are sold as smartwatches first, with the run tracking bolted on afterwards. That is why so many of them flatten your pace, lose the satellite signal under tree cover, or make you charge the thing every single night before a long run. Our team ran the same routes with each of the…
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8 Best Gaming Earbuds for Mobile (October 2026)
Most gaming earbud roundups are written for people sitting at a desk. This one is not. The best gaming earbuds for mobile are judged here by what happens in your hand during a phone session: whether the connection is wired, Bluetooth, or a 2.4 GHz dongle plugged into the only port your phone has, how…