Cellphones

Best headphones (and earbuds) Bose QuietComfort Ultra & Austrian Audio Hi-X65 Noise-canceling headphones have gotten pretty great over the past few years, with Sony and Bose neck-and-neck with their various releases. But, to my ear, this year Bose stepped ahead with their QuietComfort Ultra range. They can’t compete with the sound quality of wired headphones — or the ultra-fidelity of the $1,549 Bang & Olufsen H100 — but they have the best sound quality you can get in sub-$1,000 Bluetooth headphones, and the best noise-canceling I’ve ever experienced. Background noise vanishes, and if you’re on a tube or plane, they’re essential.

Just five short years ago, Samsung released the first mainstream folding phone with their debut Galaxy Fold. It had some quirks — a small, slim, external display, thick bezels, an odd asymmetrical notch and an unprecedented $1,980 price tag — but what mattered most was the screen. Open the slim, TV-remote-shaped phone and you gazed upon a great, wide, 7.3-inch screen, bigger than any you could carry in your pocket before, with a folding crease in the middle. You could multitask, watch full-screen YouTube videos and browse the web as you would on a tablet. That is, you could do so temporarily. Early review units catastrophically broke at even the mention of a grain of sand, creating a run of viral tweets and videos.