The lockdown found most people unprepared for what was yet to come, and that includes boredom, isolation and also adjusting to a life of limited movements in confinements of our homes. In such isolation, there is no better companion than your gadgets to help you stay in touch with friends, family, workmates among others.
The gadget list below won’t only apply during the lockdown but can as well help you carryon when normalcy returns. It covers gadgets across entertainment, telecommuting, fitness, e-learning among others.
Should you not have any of the gadgets listed, you can easily buy them online from retailers but do due diligence before you hit the checkout button to avoid buying fake or non-warranted electronics.
The Smartphone
Smartphones are ubiquitous that we now have generations that have entirely skipped the PC and went straight to using smartphones as their first choice device when connecting to the internet.
Currently, they’re two dominant smartphone operating systems that being iOS and Android. Android, however, affords you the liberty of choice with devices from OEMs like TECNO, Samsung, LG, Huawei, Infinix among while you’re stuck with Apple’s iPhones should you choose the iOS route.
Smartphones as gadgets can do a lot more than just calls and texts besides connecting to the internet. You can use them as internet hotspots to power different gadgets in your household, video recording, play games among others.
Also, these are categorized in low, mid and high-end devices but at Techjaja we recommend you entirely ignore the low-end category as a whole given the computing limitations and focus on the mid-tier and high-end devices for the best experience.
Laptop
Laptops as gadgets are prized for being beefier in terms of computing power, versatility, and easy to carry around. Use cases can range from work, school, and general entertainment depending on applications being run and on what platform. The biggest one is Windows, then Apple’s macOS and the different Linux distros (These are ideal for developers)
However, each use case might require different computing power so keep that in mind. If you need a laptop for general education, an entry model might suffice but work-related tasks might call for a beefier processor, RAM, and storage. Entertainment like gaming, on the other hand, might need a dedicated gaming laptop with the spec sheet to go with it like dedicated graphics cards, cooling, power draws among others.
The Television
TVs these days can do a lot more than just watching news and movies. Depending on the model, some come with inbuilt smart features that allow them to access the internet. These are what we term as smart TVs. These gadgets run on different platforms like Android TV, Roku, FireOS, Tizen, WebOS among others. However, these come with their own restrictions especially when it comes to what content you can see in a given region. Notable must-have apps are YouTube and Netflix and others as you see fit.
ALSO READ: How to get started with using Airtel TV
However, in any case, you don’t have a smart TV, they’re available streaming boxes and dongles that can make it one. We highly recommend Roku’s set of dongles and streaming boxes and Amazon’s firestick. If you’re ingrained in the iOS camp, then you should outright go for the Apple TV.
Gaming Console
Casual or a hard-core gamer, the virtual worlds in gaming can kill boredom and often times challenge our brains to think harder. Should you have kids, we highly recommend the Nintendo Switch and the PS4 for everyone else given its ubiquity among Ugandan gamers. This means you can easily swap games with other players and also play with friends on the same friendly system.
However, these gaming consoles do a lot more than just playing games, you can stream content over them with dedicated apps for Netflix, YouTube among others
Wearables gadgets
When it comes to wearables, we shall mostly look at fitness and health. Much as most wearables do a lot more than this like helping you place and pick calls. The health-oriented features are the most attractive given the times. Such features include tracking calories burnt, steps taken, check the heart rate among others.
Top of the list here is Apple’s Watch Series 5 and 3.
Headsets
Headphones come in handy in case one is accustomed to making calls, listening to music, and also gaming. We highly recommend noise-canceling ones to filter out background noise in any case you’re doing the aforementioned tasks. Wireless headsets have started to take shape and that’s where your search should start from.
Home internet
The Internet is what connects most of the devices mentioned above. However, we highly recommend a fixed connection for stability and seamless experience. The internet will help you get the best out of these devices as it will allow you to stream and download services over them.
Most ISPs even provide bundles for home internet users to cater to this growing segment of users.
