Our gear of the year.   I’m Fred Fishkin with technology BootCamp, a report on gadgets and gear.    We’ll soon be hearing about all the new gadgets coming out this year.  But before we start looking ahead, we’ll take a quick look back at what impressed our team in 2015.

Amazon’s Echo, also known is Alexa, brought a personal digital assistant into the home.  Somewhat like Apple’s Siri,  Alexa gets smarter and more capable all of the time and is a very good sounding Bluetooth speaker too.    Apple, by the way, has brought Siri into the family room too with the newest Apple TV. Virtual Reality is going mainstream in a hurry.  Samsung’s Gear VR powered by Oculus, which works only with the new Galaxy S6 and Note 5 phones,  is giving users a taste of what’s to come.   If you don’t have one of those phones,  VR devices using Google’s Cardboard can give you a an idea too.   There are lots of systems to make our homes smarter.   SmartThings…owned by Samsung, continues to grow.  A screen based unit called Sentri…with an i…is showing a lot of promise too.   We’ll have more in our next report.  You can find us at BootCamp.com.   I’m Fred Fishkin.