I’ve been using some cool new mobile tech and AI tech over the last few weeks, and the gods of cool tech have been kind to me - each of the four new tech items shown above have been performing very well.
So the four new tech items are the OnePlus 13R smartphone, the Amazfit Balance fitness tracker/smartwatch, and on the AI tech side the Claude 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro models.
And here are some quick take reasons why I say they’re working well for me:
OnePlus 13R
I used the OnePlus 13R’s bigger sibling for a few months. I agree with a few top mobile tech reviewers who say it’s a strong candidate for best smartphone of the year, Over time though, I found that it was a bit too heavy for all the time I was using it every day. I went way lighter after that with the Samsung Galaxy S25+. That’s a really good phone too, but I still find it hard to love Samsung’s Android skin, and having to use a third party launcher app to push some of that aside.
It turns out the OnePlus 13R is just as phenomenal to use as its bigger sibling, and a good bit lighter. What’s to love about it?
Very clean, near pure Android experience - with little tweaks and additions that make it even nicer to use - one example being a well-placed physical Alerts Slider that’s easy to use to switch the phone to Silent, Vibrate, Ring.
A gorgeous, big 6.78 screen
A Qualcomm SM8650-AB Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, along with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage
Its huge 6,000 mAh battery and 80W charging speed. This makes me for an easy 1.5 to even two days of usage and charging back to 100% while you make coffee on many days.
Amazfit Balance
I have been using the Pixel Watch 3 since it came out and the Pixel Watch 2 before that, with their Fitbit integration. I know that very few (or even none) of these fitness trackers provide one hundred percent accuracy, but the Pixel 3 started to feel like it was being far too generous with some of its core metrics. The biggest example of this was crediting me with a lot more active zone minutes than it felt like I earned. A low energy, lower activity day should not generally result in 90 active zone minutes, unless I was highly stressed during those days, which I definitely have not been.
I’ve been browsing for Pixel Watch alternatives for a long while, and had always ended up sticking with the devil I knew. Then last weekend I read a roundup of the best fitness trackers of 2025 (at Wired or maybe Tom’s Guide) and Amazfit had a couple entries on it. I looked at those and then saw that the Amazfit Balance is newer and has a bigger feature set. So this week (Tuesday) I started using the Amazfit Balance.
The companion app for the Amazfit Balance is called Zepp (cool name) and that’s the Zepp home screen/Overview section shown above. Things to like about the Amazfit Balance include:
After just about 5 days use it does not seem to be overrating my efforts
It has huge number of supported exercises and workout types that it can track
It seems to have more and deeper exercise and general health metrics than the Pixel Watch - or at least I’ve found these more accessible in the Zepp app, like the Core Metrics section:
Then there’s its big list of features, which I’ll borrow from its Amazon listing:
EXPERT SLEEP TRACKING: Experience sleep quality insights with our health tracker watch. Wear your Balance smartwatch overnight to analyze heart rate, breathing, and temperature to track how mentally and physically recharged you are each day
ADVANCED WORKOUT MEASUREMENT: Enhance your fitness journey using our fitness watches by tracking with precision via dual-band GPS and syncing with Strava, Google Fit, and more for detailed data
COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH ANALYSIS: Our Amazfit smart watch monitors key health metrics like heart rate, blood-oxygen, and stress with alerts, providing detailed insights into your overall wellness
DETAILED BODY COMPOSITION MONITORING: With our fitness tracker watch, track body fat, muscle, and more accurately, offering insightful analysis of your health and fitness progression
EXTENDED BATTERY PERFORMANCE: Enjoy up to 14 days of battery life or 25 days in saver mode with our smartwatch that can call and text, always ready to support your dynamic lifestyle
That battery life claim looks like it may be at least close to accurate. It’s at 63% charged after 5 days and two system updates that (in my experience) can be a more than usual activity drain on the battery.
The charger for the Amazfit Balance is the easiest I’ve ever seen for any fitness tracker or smartwatch, and the band is comfortable and easy to put on, adjust, and take off.
All that for $149 is kinda nice too.
Oh, and this is right up my alley, using ChatGPT 4o for integrated AI:
Claude 4
Claude has been my 1 or 1a most used GenAI app alongside ChatGPT for a long time. I’ve had good use and good use cases - for all of its models - so it’s no surprise to see that Claude 4 is great to use. Claude has been know as one of, or the, best AI tools for coding for some time now, and my favorite thing it’s done for me is in that category. It is getting me closer and closer to automating a big chunk of a cybersecurity threat alerts brief that I do at work once a week. I wrote about this over at Cyber Sherpas.
Gemini 2.5 Pro
Gemini is starting to feel like it me the most improved GenAI app over the last couple months. The Gemini 2.5 Pro model, even though it labeled experimental, is leading that charge. I have found it to be far more consistent at providing solid responses, responses that are comparable/competitive with those from ChatGPT and Claude. It has also suddenly become a much better writer. I find myself wanting to use Gemini almost as much as ChatGPT and Claude, every day. Here’s a prompt from this week that it did well on. You might think “of course it did, that’s another thing that’s in its Google family, a cousin or something”, but this is the sort of prompt where just a handful of months ago, Gemini would often fail in comical ways on, so hurray for Gemini progress.
I keep thinking I should get a smartwatch ... who has the time?