With Black Friday just a few days away, we are already seeing some great discounts you can take advantage of right now. Amazon’s Black Friday sale, in particular, is offering big savings on iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, and smartwatches. They aren’t the only retailer taking part in early deals, though. Best Buy and Walmart’s Black Friday sale have kicked off as well, and some of the best price cuts we’re seeing so far are on smartwatches.
Amazon is dropping prices on smartwatches left and right. With up to $130 off the Samsung Gear Sport and $50 off the Fitbit Versa, now is a great time to get a decent fitness tracker at a very affordable price. Though there are likely to be some better smartwatch deals coming this weekend, and through Cyber Monday, these savings are too good to pass up right now.
The Samsung Gear Sport smartwatch came out about two years ago. If you’re a Samsung phone user, you’ll find all their smartwatch needs in this fitness watch. It includes GPS, heart rate monitoring, calorie counting, personal fitness coaching, and more. When you spin the bezel you can receive and reply to texts, get calendar notifications, and connect compatible smartphone devices. This watch is meant for both athletes and outdoors enthusiasts alike. It’s water-resistance up 50 meters letting you track all of your activities this summer.
Normally priced at $300, Amazon is dropping the price to $170. That’s a huge $130 Black Friday discount that makes this wearable surprisingly affordable.
Fitness trackers are becoming more and more like fully functional smartwatches, with wearables like the Fitbit Versa offering color displays and extra connectivity. It’s probably more accurate to call the Versa a fitness smartwatch rather than an activity tracker considering the similarities to the Apple Watch. It offers a full set of tracking capabilities as well as a heart rate monitor, and can provide coaching and real-time activity readouts to help you reach your goal.
This wearable also delivers smartphone messages and notifications to your wrist, and you can stream music with Pandora or store up to 300 songs for when you don’t have your phone with you. The Fitbit Versa fitness smartwatch is on sale for as low as $120 after a $50 discount from Amazon.
This smartwatch is actually 2 generations old, but with a sale price of $199 at Amazon, it’s much more affordable than the Series 4 or Series 5. You’re still getting Apple’s great build quality, sleek design, and upgrades over the Series 2 and Series 1. Overall, it’s one of the better fitness smartwatches you can buy for this price. This model includes a snappier Apple S3 processor, making the watch a lot faster than previous versions, and it includes more RAM and a barometric altimeter for enhanced activity tracking. Like the Series 2, it sports built-in GPS and a brighter display.
A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server run by the VPN provider. Websites see the VPN server’s IP address instead of yours, and you can get around geo-blocks, censorship, and ISP throttling. The best VPN services are paid, but there are still a handful of free options that do the job well.
Most free VPNs come with a hidden cost, because running servers isn’t cheap and a company that doesn’t charge you has to make its money somewhere else. Many do so by logging your browsing activity and selling it to advertisers, while others flood you with ads and track you across apps.
Choosing a note-taking app is not easy. What note-taking app you choose depends on your needs, the platform you use, and of course, the cost. The process becomes even more complicated as it seems that there’s a new shiny app released every other week.
That’s why I always suggest choosing a note-taking app that has all the features you need and can last you for a long time. Also, don’t chase new apps. The real power of a note-taking app comes when all your notes live in one place, making it easy to spot connections between them.
There's no shortage of messaging apps out there. The past decade has given us more options than we know what to do with, largely because smartphones demanded something better than plain old SMS.
Both the App Store and the Play Store are packed with apps that promise to revolutionize the way we communicate. Most of them didn't make it. The truth is, a messaging app is only as good as the number of people using it, and most apps never cross that threshold.
