Review: the Braun Oral-B PRO 6000 electric toothbrush—with bluetooth!

▼ I'll spare you the details, but I recently needed to up my game in the toothbrushing department. I've been brushing my teeth with an entry-level Oral-B electric toothbrush for almost a decade, but I thought I could do better with a more advanced one that provides a warning when you brush too hard. (This can damage your gums.) Turns out there's now a model that has bluetooth. After all, everything is better with bluetooth:

However, at first I decided against getting the model with bluetooth, as it doesn't really add much functionality: the Oral-B app will show you a timer during brushing, and keep track of how often and how long you've brushed. That's basically it. And the app can also do this by listening for the sound of the toothbrush! Also, the models I had my eye on come with a little wireless display that provides the same feedback as the app (not the statistics, though). But I got a rebate that made the Oral-B PRO 6000 the same price as the Oral-B Triumph SmartGuide 5000, so why not get the 6000 with bluetooth?

The price I paid online before rebate was € 100 plus € 5 shipping. The 6000 comes in a big box that contains:

• The toothbrush
• An inductive charger
• A holder for four brush heads that attaches to the charger
• The SmartGuide wireless display (with batteries)
• Seven brush heads
• A travel case
• A DVD
• Documentation

Out of the box, the toothbrush' battery is empty. It takes about 24 hours to completely charge, but I was able to brush my teeth after about half an hour. I needed to set the clock on the SmartGuide, but there was no need to do anything to pair it. The seven brush heads are all different, I assume they're meant as a sampling of what's available. I'm using the "sensitive" one, which has softer hairs and is easier on the gums. I wish they'd put the name/type of the brush head on the packaging, though! The documentation for these on the various Oral-B websites and the paper manual is fairly incomplete, but the video on the DVD shows them all. I've also seen displays in stores that will help you buy the right ones. Note that the DVD is smaller than usual and thus won't fit in most computer DVD drives.

The travel case is at least twice as big as it needs to be. But I guess if I want to travel with my electric toothbrush, I'll have to use it or risk the toothbrush starting to brush the rest of my luggage when the on/off button gets pressed inadvertently. I usually just take a regular toothbrush when I travel, but it's hard to go back when you're used to electric brushing. It really gets your teeth much cleaner.

I'm not sure which model I used before (there's no model number on the device), but the old one didn't have any lights. So you never knew when you needed to charge it. The PRO 6000 is much better in this regard: it has three (blue) LEDs that indicate the battery charge, which cycle during charging. There's also another blue light that comes on to indicate bluetooth is active. When brushing, every 30 seconds, a green light will flash and the motor will pause for a moment to indicate that it's time to move on to another quadrant of your mouth. And finally, there's the light that made me get this new toothbrush: a red one that comes on when you press the toothbrush against your teeth too hard. At first I thought this didn't work, but it turns out the warning light only comes on when you press the brush really, really, really hard. Much harder than I ever would. So buying this new toothbrush for this feature was a waste of money.

So what about the bluetooth?

I'm glad you asked. Although in retrospect the instructions are clear, I had trouble following because I assumed I needed to pair my iPhone with the toothbrush using the bluetooth settings. But that's not how it works. You set up your toothbrush using the settings inside the Oral-B app. The bluetooth comes on when you lift the toothbrush off of the charger, or you can press the mode select button. (The toothbrush has a bunch of modes which I don't use.) There's a bunch of additional settings for the app and/or the toothbrush, but nothing particularly exciting.

If you want feedback during brushing, make sure the app is open and on the timer screen. Then, simply start brushing and you get a counter that counts to two minutes, switching to different quadrants every 30 seconds. Same as the SmartGuide, which comes on automatically when you start brushing. (When idle, it shows the time.) As such, live feedback on your phone during brushing is not particularly useful. Even the SmartGuide is only somewhat useful. (And remember, if you have a non-bluetooth toothbrush, you can still use the app by using the microphone to detect when you start and stop brushing.)

However, one thing that is nice about the app is that it keeps stats on how long and how often you brush. At first I thought this wasn't all that useful, as I always brush my teeth before bed. But I'm actually not that good with brushing during the day. Studies have shown that you should brush twice a day—there's no benefit to doing it more often. Having the app keep track of this for me to keep me honest could be helpful in the long run.

The toothbrush only talks to the phone when the app is open. But it will store up to 20 toothbrushing sessions, and sync those back to the app if the app is open on the timer screen when you start brushing. So you only have to open the app before you start brushing once a week and you'll have accurate stats. Apparently the toothbrush has a built-in clock, because it knows how many times I brushed on which day.

You can share an electric toothbrush with family members by giving everyone their own brush head, which let you attach a colored ring to keep them apart. The container that sits next to the charger holds four brush heads, and attaching/removing them is easy enough. However, the app can't tell the different users apart, so the stats won't be very meaningful when the toothbrush is shared.

The verdict

I like Oral-B electric toothbrushes. I've never used any other kind, so I can't compare. But the Oral-Bs are all good—I'm not going back to brushing manually any time soon. The PRO 6000 is better than the cheap ones, mostly because of the battery level LEDs. The hardware also looks a bit more solid. The other LEDs, the SmartGuide and the bluetooth are nice, too, but not a game changer. So save your money unless you really want those brushing statistics. Until the toothbrush becomes smarter and gains more sensors so it can tell you more about how well you brushed which teeth, I'm afraid bluetooth doesn't really make brushing your teeth all that much better.

Permalink - posted 2015-05-29

Bring on the 2.5, 5 and 25 Gbps Ethernet!

▼ I'm at the RIPE meeting in Amsterdam this week. Yesterday, one of the first presentations was one from Alcatel-Lucent's Greg Hankins: Evolution of Ethernet Speeds: What’s New and What’s Next (PDF, see here for a link to the video recording).

Apparently, we're going to get some new Ethernet speeds in the (relatively) near future, such as 2.5, 5 and 25 Gbps. I can't wait!

My first computer with Gigabit Ethernet was the PowerBook I bought in 2003. It's now more than a decade later and my current Apple laptop... doesn't have any Ethernet at all. But for 20 to 30 euros/dollars you can get a 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet adapter that connects to either a Thunderbolt or a USB3 port. That's exactly as fast as the Ethernet port on my old PowerBook, even though according to Geekbench 2, my late-2013 MacBook Pro is more than ten times faster than the 1.25 GHz PowerBook (32-bit scores are 7110 vs 658). The SSD in the MBP is also about ten times faster than the HDD in the PB at about 800 vs 80 MB/s. USB is 5 Gbps instead of 480 Mbps, Wi-Fi 1300 vs 54 Mbps. It's just the Ethernet that's been completely stagnant.

So why is that? We've had 10 Gigabit Ethernet since the early 2000s. But the problem with that is that originally, 10GE was designed to work over fiber, which can easily handle that bandwidth. It took a lot of work to make 10GE work over copper, and that never got cheap in the way that GE got cheap so we never got 10/100/1000/10000 Mbps Ethernet ports the same way we went from 10/100 to 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports on our laptops and desktops. Even the biggest and baddest Mac that you can buy today, the Mac Pro, only has two 10/100/1000 ports, and no extension slots for adding 10GE.

The problem with all of this is that Gigabit Ethernet tops out at about 119 MB/s. That's more than enough to saturate any internet connection that a mere mortal can afford, but it's not enough to keep up with our SSDs or even a RAID array when copying files locally, with SSDs that easily go over 500 MB/s these days. With 2.5 Gbps Ethernet we'd get a lot closer at about 300 MB/s, and 5 Gbps Ethernet would be even better at about 600 MB/s. With modern designs, I expect that 5 but certainly 2.5 Gbps over regular twisted pair cabling can be made sufficiently cheap that these speeds will be supported routinely, and USB3 can easily handle 2.5 Gbps and probably also 5 Gbps. 2.5 and 5 Gbps are also intended to run over existing cat 5e/cat 6 cabling over distances of 100 meters, the same as Gigabit Ethernet. Traditionally, higher speeds over copper require more advanced cabling and/or support shorter distances.

There will also be 25 Gbps Ethernet that will be a nice step up for big servers that now use 10 Gbps, and perhaps 50 Gbps in the future. See the presentation for what's new for 10 and 40 Gbps and even 400 Gbps.

Permalink - posted 2015-05-12

Using a Dell P2415Q 4k monitor with a 2013 MacBook Pro

▼ A year and a half ago, in my review of the 2013 MacBook Pro, I wrote:

although it's great to be able to hook up two external displays, it's not so great to have to choose between the small, but high resolution internal display and the big, but low resolution external displays. I find myself working on the internal display a lot, but when I need more screen real estate I switch to the big external display. I sit relatively far from my external display, so the fuzzy pixels aren't too obvious. The high resolution display hasn't completely ruined regular displays for me, but it's certainly got me coveting an external 4k display.

4k displays have gotten pretty affordable now, do I decided to get one. I went for the Dell P2415Q, which I got for a little under 400 euros. However, it was on backorder everywhere when I ordered it and it took six weeks to get here. Perhaps Dell is discontinuing this display?

Anyway, it's a 3840x2160 display. It's 52.7 by 29.6 cm (60.5 cm diagonal), or 20.8 by 11.7 inches (23.8" diagonal). (There's also a very similar 68.5 cm / 27 in model.) That's only a hair larger than the Dell U2312HM monitor I've been using since 2011. The P2415Q has double the pixels in each direction as the U2312HM, so in HiDPI mode, the usable screen resolution is the same: 1920x1080 "points". That's a lot more than what I get on the internal display of my MacBook Pro, which is 33.8 cm (13.3"), with a resolution of 2560x1600 pixels and a cramped 1280x800 points.

The MBP's internal screen has 9 pixels per mm (227 pixels per inch), the P2415Q 7.3 px/mm (185 px/in). This means that you can sit 22% further back and get the same apparent size of stuff on the screen, which is not a bad thing for aging eyes.

3840x2160 is twice as many pixels as the 2560x1600 of the internal screen, and four times as many as a 1920x1080 HDTV resolution screen. And unfortunately, the 2013 13" MacBook Pro simply can't push that many pixels out at the regular framerate of 60 Hz: you have to run a 4k screen at 30 Hz. (Or get a 15" MBP or this year's 13" model.) I was a bit worried about this, as it makes any movement on the screen, such as scrolling, much choppier. In practice, it hasn't been a big deal so far. Yes, scrolling Safari windows is a bit choppier, but it's not like that's always silky smooth at 60 Hz, and also not exactly a huge deal anyway. But for things like gaming and video, this can be more annoying and even potentially be a deal breaker. Note that 30 Hz means the Mac updates the screen 30 times per second, but between those updates the screen doesn't flicker, so for non-moving content 30 vs 60 Hz doesn't make any difference.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After setting up the display and hooking it up to the Mac using the supplied miniDisplayPort-to-DisplayPort cable, the screen came on at 2560x1440 at 60 Hz. Which certainly isn't terrible, but not as nice as the native 4k in HiDPI (pixel doubling) mode. The Mac didn't have any options to change to 4k resolution. However, out of the box, the DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (MST) option isn't turned on. After enabling MST and setting the screen up as the primary, the only thing I got was a black screen. Unfortunately, making any changes was impossible at this point, because the menu doesn't come on if there's no valid DisplayPort signal and the option is grayed out when using the HDMI port. However, after half a minute or so the display said there was no signal, and asked if I wanted to switch to secondary mode. I did, and after that the screen came on in 3840x2160 mode at 30 Hz. The Mac offers the following resolutions:

I'm not sure what the deal is with only recognizing the display's resolution with MST turned on and then addressing it as a secondary display. The P2415Q has a DisplayPort and a miniDisplayPort input and an HDMI input—but no VGA. It also has a DisplayPort output, which allows you to daisy chain a second display. So I hooked up my U2312HM to the P2415Q, hoping that I'd be able to use both screens using a single port on my computer. But that didn't work—the Mac doesn't recognize the second display. However, the P2415Q does forward the signal to the U2312HM, so when using a resolution that the U2312HM supports, both screens will show the same image.

However, the MacBook Pro can drive two external displays using its two miniDisplayPort/thunderbolt ports and HDMI port:

I mirrored all the displays, optimizing for the P2415Q's resolution. You can of course also use each screen independently, or close the lid of the laptop and only use one or both external displays. I thought that when using only the P2415Q and not the internal screen, perhaps there would be enough bandwidth to run the monitor at 60 Hz, so I used SwitchResX to set up a custom resolution for that. But that didn't work. However, SwitchResX does let you run the display at many different resolutions and framerates, such as 24 Hz which is much better for a lot of video content that is 24 Hz.

Note that I actually had the lights on at full brightness, the screens are just so bright that the room looks dark. This was always an issue with the U2312HM: even at its lowest brightness, it's very bright and hard to use in a dim room at night. The P2415Q is much, much better in this regard. It also has much better saturated colors at 99% of the sRGB gamut and the contrast is better. However, the MacBook Pro's internal screen is still a bit nicer in this regard. But the P2415Q comes with a factory calibration report!

This is what text looks like on the U2312HM:

And on the P2415Q:

Finally, the MBP's internal screen, running at a scaled 1920x1080 point resolution:

A very nice feature of the P2415Q is that it has an audio out port. This means you can send audio over DisplayPort or HDMI and listen to it using speakers hooked up to the display. The audio is automatically routed to that port when you connect the Mac. The monitor also has a built-in four-port USB 3 hub, which I use for hooking up my IBM Model M keyboard and my Anker USB 3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Unfortunately, all the USB ports are on the back of the monitor. Also, for some strange reason Dell removed the option to automatically select the right input. However, you can set up two of the buttons to select an input with just two key presses.

I tried to use the DDC Panel utility to change the display brightness from the computer, but that made my computer hang.

After using it for 24 hours, I really like this display, and expect to get a lot of use out of it. Highly recommended.

Update: on Twitter, someone mentioned issues with 4k screens being recognized as TVs and showing poor colors in YCbCr rather than RGB mode. Fortunately, it looks like I'm not having this issue, according to the System Information tool:

Update 2: the pixel depth info doesn't tell you whether the video is sent as YCbCr or RGB. What you need to look for is "Television: Yes":

That's with my MacBook Pro hooked up to my HDTV through the Onkyo receiver:

For some strange reason, the MBP now thinks the HDTV supports the same resolutions as the Dell monitor. Although that's not completely unexpected as the Onkyo supports 4k, it didn't used to do that before. The only way to select 1080p as the resolution is to click "Scaled" in the display setup in the System Preferences while holding the alt/option key. Then you get a lot of other options. Unfortunately, even that way I only get 30 Hz as the refresh rate for the Dell P2415Q.

Permalink - posted 2015-03-22