Watch, Read, Listen

The best smart lock for a front door right now is the Schlage Encode Smart WiFi Deadbolt, because it combines built-in WiFi, a physical key backup and the most heavily reviewed build in this group. Twelve locks went through our hands this season, and this one survived the most owner scrutiny. That matters more here…

Bag trackers fall into two families, and the choice between them matters more than any brand. A Bluetooth network tracker has no GPS chip of its own — it broadcasts quietly and lets passing phones relay its position back to the cloud, which makes it cheap, battery-friendly, and dependent on how many people are nearby.…

The best handheld GPS units for hunting are the ones that keep working when your phone does not. A dedicated satellite navigator draws its fix from the GNSS constellations, runs all day on AA cells or a lithium pack, and keeps your waypoints, tracks and routes in memory whether or not a single bar of…

If you own a boat under about 20 feet, the best marine GPS chartplotters for small boats come down to a very short list: a bright 7-inch or 9-inch screen, a real chart onboard, and a transducer that speaks the same language as the display. I have spent the last two boating seasons swapping units…

The Garmin DriveSmart 76 is the best GPS navigator for cars in for most drivers: a bright 6.95-inch capacitive touchscreen at 480 x 272, North America mapping, hands-free Bluetooth calling, Garmin voice assist, and live traffic delivered through a paired phone app. I spent weeks driving these seven dedicated navigators on daily commutes, highway runs…

Choosing the best solar panels for portable power stations is harder than it looks, because the panel that flattens out fastest in a spec sheet is often the wrong one for the station sitting in your car. I spent six weeks pairing different panels with different capacity stations, watching real output rather than nameplate numbers,…

If you have ever pulled into a boondocking site at dusk and started doing mental arithmetic about whether the 12V fridge will still be cold at 4am, you already understand the problem this roundup solves. The best portable power stations for RV trips are not about running everything on board. They are about quietly running…

If you want one answer, take the Jackery Explorer 300. It holds 292Wh, pushes 300W of continuous AC with 600W of surge, weighs about seven pounds, and has more than 11,000 owner reviews behind it. For most people shopping the best power stations under 500 dollars, that is the balance of capacity, output and portability…

Yes, a portable power station will run a CPAP machine overnight, and most of the models in this roundup will run it for more than one night on a single charge. The catch is that a CPAP pulls far more power with the heated humidifier attached than most buyers expect, so the difference between a…

The best solar generators for home backup are the battery-and-panel units that keep a refrigerator, medical device, internet connection and a handful of lights alive for days without a single drop of fuel. I spent six weeks reading through thousands of owner reviews of eight current models, comparing nameplate watt-hours against measured runtime, checking surge…