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This plasma TV has the best picture ever tested – The Panasonic VT60
CNET Editors’ Rating
4.0 stars – Excellent
A Roku alternative for media hoarders
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CNET Editors’ Rating
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4.0 stars – Excellent
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iPhone 5 full review: Finally, the iPhone we’ve always wanted
CNET Editors’ Rating
4.0 stars – Excellent
Acer Aspire S5 Review: A Serious MacBook Air Challenger
PCWorld – If you’re looking for an Ultrabook with the superslim good looks of a MacBook Air, enough computing oomph to handle multimedia and general business tasks, plus a good-enough battery life, take a long hard look at the Acer Aspire S5. Especially the superslim good looks part.
The S5 is less than three quarters of an inch at its thickest and weighs 2.6 pounds–impressively light for a notebook with a 13.3-inch display. In almost every way, the S5 fulfills the promise of the Ultrabook as articulated by Intel: It’s extremely portable, very fast, and endowed with decent battery life.
True, you can find several Ultrabooks with better battery life, and maybe one or two with superior performance–and the Aspire S5 has its fair share of minor drawbacks. But none of the ones we’ve seen are thinner.
That’s thanks in no small part to an innovative motorized panel that Acer calls the MagicFlip, which rolls down to conceal ports on the rear bottom edge. This both protects them when not in use and slims down the S5′s profile so it’s both thinner and lighter than the current 13.3-inch MacBook Air.
But the motor makes a somewhat grating noise, and sometimes it seemed to roll up of its own volition. Also, I worry that the motor, activated by a button on the top right of the platen, adds one more part that could break.
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Review – Acer Aspire V5-171-686
The good: An excellent set of specs and features in the Acer Aspire V5-171-6867 include a Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive, HDMI, USB 3.0, and even Bluetooth, all for a surprisingly low price, and stuffed into a very small Netbook-like body.
The bad: It has a cramped-feeling keyboard and touch pad, weak battery life, and poor speakers, plus an uninspired, thick design.
The bottom line: The Acer Aspire V5-171-6867 crams the horsepower of a full-fledged budget ultrabook into an 11-inch ultraportable, for several hundred dollars less than most equivalent products. It’s a great budget laptop to consider, but sacrifices have been made to shrink down that much computer into a tiny package.
The $99 Sony Xperia Ion for AT&T
CNET -
The good: The affordable Sony Xperia Ion has solid call quality and swift 4G LTE that ties into Sony’s vast entertainment empire.
The bad: Lackluster images and video belie the Xperia’s claimed 12MP camera. It’s also held back by an old processor and an outdated OS.
The bottom line: The $99.99 Sony Xperia Ion looks like a good Android deal but its weaknesses make it not worth even the budget price.
Microsoft Surface RT
Microsoft Surface RT
CNET -
The tablet wars are no longer a two-horse race between Apple and Google.
Four days after Microsoft invited the press to Los Angeles (and after four days of Web-wide speculation as to why), on Monday, June 19, 2012, the company finally unveiled Surface.
Surface is a line of tablet devices running the company’s next-generation Windows operating system and marks Microsoft’s first foray into the ever-expanding tablet market.
Yes, you read that correctly: Microsoft will be building and branding its own tablets, effectively competing with its own hardware partners such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo. More
Dell Inspiron 14z (June 2012) Review
CNET -
When it comes to laptop design, you generally get what you pay for. There are, however, rare exceptions when more expensive laptops feel like budget models, and low-cost systems look like they should cost more.
The recently refreshed Dell Inspiron line has a bit of that price-bending effect, especially in the form of the Inspiron 14z, a modestly priced ultrabook that looks great, includes discrete graphics, and costs only $899. (Less impressive configurations start at $699.)
Insanely great plasma TV – Panasonic TC-P55ST50 review
CNET –
The good: The affordable Panasonic TC-PST50 series exhibited outstanding overall picture quality, characterized by exceedingly deep black levels with great shadow detail, accurate colors, and solid bright-room performance. Unlike LCDs, as a plasma it has superb off-angle and uniformity characteristics. The styling is attractive and the feature set well-chosen, including excellent onscreen help options.
Samsung Chromebox Series 3 review
The good: The Samsung Chromebox offers an attractive, low-risk entry point to the experimental world of Google’s Chrome OS.
The bad: Absent features and occasional software and hardware incompatibilities mar a supposedly simple user experience.
The bottom line: The attractive, fairly priced Samsung Chromebox desktop turns Google’s Web-based Chrome OS into a not entirely unreasonable option for certain low-cost PC shoppers.
