Five home gadgets you think you don't need but are secretly great

Sydney Morning Herald

18-05-2025

Creative papercraft with no scissors needed
Cricut cutting machines are the kind of home gadgets that are a bit tricky to explain. Like 3D printers or soldering irons, they can be very handy for many different projects, but most people have never felt the need to own one, and wouldn't know what to do with it.
Looking like some kind of high-tech sewing machine, they're used for cutting textiles – paper, vinyl, stickers and so on – with extraordinary precision.
I tested the $700 Cricut Maker 4, but there are a few different lower-end models too. I threw myself into the deep end making cards, decorations and activity pieces for my son's birthday party, and it was a lot more straightforward than I expected. You create the shapes in Photoshop, mask them, sent them to the Cricut software (it works on PC or mobile and connects to the machine via Bluetooth), load some card and that's it.
The machine zooms the material up and down while a blade dances back and forth, cutting your desired shape in seconds.
You can make shapes entirely on the software as well, but it's a bit fiddly. You can also pay for a subscription that gets you thousands of pre-made patterns, or you can buy them individually on the app or on Etsy.
Cricut sells materials that let you cut custom stickers, decals or iron-ons, and it's easy enough to cut paper you've printed onto, or put together multi-cut projects and 3D objects. I also made bits and pieces for Book Week costumes, and decals for my wife's business. The only difficulty is that non-Cricut material needs to be stuck to a sticky mat, and if you cut too finely you may need sharp tweezing skills to rescue your project.
Every wall and roof is a theatre now
I don't test many projectors, but in my mind the idea was that they allowed for huge screens, provided you had a very dark space, never needed to move it and also owned a bunch of other equipment to make for a full at-home cinema. So I was a bit shocked to fire up the Hisense C2 Ultra and find that it's practically as easy as a TV, without the TV.
It does cost as much as a very nice TV, at $4500, but it also provides anywhere from a 65-inch screen to a 300-inch one.
This is a 'portable' projector (i.e. doesn't necessarily need mounting) that you sit a few metres away from a wall or screen, and unless you're putting it quite far away it's plenty bright enough to watch during the day with the blinds drawn. The 4K HDR image was just as clear and vibrant as on my TV, but with that slightly soft cinematic laser projector edge.
It automatically adjusts focus, keystone and colour (based on your wall) when you set it up or move it, though I found a little manual keystone tweak was usually necessary.
Most impressively the unit has a full sound system and sub built in, and while it won't beat a big soundbar it did a better job than plenty of TVs on their own. It also runs Hisense's full smart-TV software so you can run streaming apps from it directly, or you can attach a player via HDMI. It's great for games too, with support for 4K and 1440p resolution, 240Hz refresh and auto low-latency mode thanks to its HDMI 2.1 port, meaning it also supports eARC for connecting to external sound.
How much AI do you need in the bathroom?
Teeth brushing is one of the long list of activities I don't think needs AI intruding on it. And yet, here is Oclean's X Ultra S toothbrush, arriving at my desk with a box so emblazoned with the term 'AI' that I initially wasn't sure what it was.
Thankfully this is the useful analysis type of AI we've had for a long time, and not the snarky and constantly wrong kind of language AI. It does talk though, a feature I do not want in a toothbrush.
The thing is, this is an appreciably better sonic toothbrush than others I've used. It looks good, has a cool charger, a very nice travel case and a sticky wall magnet you can hang it from — all of which is bare minimum when you're paying $450 for a toothbrush — but importantly it's also smooth and comfortable, and the tracking is both useful and doesn't require brushing with my phone out.
A small display on the handle times the session and colour-codes a map of your mouth in real time, so you can glance at it to see which bits you've missed.
A clearly translated-into-English app makes setting up the toothbrush a bit of a head-scratcher, but once done I found I haven't needed to consult the app much, except to turn off the function that yells at you for brushing too hard. Even silenced, the end of the brush lights up red if too much pressure is detected.
Smart fridge no, clear fridge yes
If you've been in the market for new whitegoods recently, I'm sure you've noticed how much the terms 'smart' and 'AI' get thrown around. Of course, appliances that connect to the internet for dubiously useful purposes or have big honking touchscreens on them have been around for a long time. But now it appears that dishwashers also have some sort of AI that's difficult to discern, and absolutely everything has integration with its own proprietary app.
I've never really been impressed with a smart appliance, and the more complex they are, the less I tend to like them. What am I going to do with a smart hub in a fridge when the rest of my (far more often upgraded) tech makes it obsolete? But lately, I've been using a fridge that I actually like, a lot, thanks to its much less space-age tech.
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It's an LG Instaview with a glass front, so you can knock on it like a door and the internal light illuminates so you can see what's inside. Yes, it does require a bit of a rethink in stocking (anything that you tend to check before shopping should be in the door!) but it cuts down on opening for any reason other than grabbing stuff.
Now it is 2025, so of course there are more smarts than that. The fridge is Wi-Fi connected and lets you set the fridge and freezer temperature via app from anywhere in the world (why would I ever need this?), and also lets you activate a short-term 'express freeze' to really blast your stuff cold.