I Tried It: 30 of the Coolest Products We’ve Tested Lately

Online shopping has a lot of advantages: You can check out multiple retailers at once, compare prices at the push of a button, score surprise deals, and get it all delivered to your house without having to step outside. But there's one clear downside to shopping online: You can't actually try out the items until they're already on your doorstep, bought and paid for.

Even more frustrating? There's no cyber-salesperson strolling the virtual show floor to help highlight the pros and cons of a certain product ... which means if you want to hear how a product works from someone with firsthand knowledge, you have to brave a review section that often hosts the kind of folks who emphatically believe the toothpaste they bought allowed them to talk to Martians, or that their pillow “doesn’t work” because they couldn't sleep after knocking back 3 gallons of espresso. Wouldn't it help to have a friend on hand to let you know whether something really works?

Well, now you always do. When your IRL friends can't weigh in on a potential purchase, you can turn to your Best Products pals. Our team is always scoping out seemingly helpful products, whether brand-new or new to us. So, when something catches our eye, we don't just rely on secondhand reviews or company-sent PR factsheets: We like to get our hands dirty (sometimes literally) in a series we call “I Tried It.”

If there’s a product covered in this series, you can go in with the confidence knowing that we’ve firsthand learned its ins and outs—and the ups and downs. We’ve tested it out for however long it took to get a full, and fully honest, opinion. Here’s just a sampling of the coolest and best products our team has taken for a test run in “I Tried It.”