With Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T, you can enjoy the power of Windows based PC and convenience of the tablet. A Slate PC with light and thin design means you can take it wherever you go. On the other hand, the second generation Intel Core i5 processor and genuine Windows 7 offer powerful and familiar working environment. With genuine Windows 7 operating system you can enjoy interface like a PC, however with selection of input gadgets. It is easy to manage and create your own content, including videos and pictures. Input devices are capacitive touchscreen, Bluetooth keyboard, digitiser pen and docking cradle.

The Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T is equipped with solid state drive and state of the art Intel Core i5 processor for fast data access and you can rapidly open plethora of applications and get a lot done even while multitasking with its Intelligent Turbo Boost Technology that accelerates performance by dynamically allocating processing power when needed. With Fast Start technology of Samsung and SSD, you can be up and running within 15 seconds of turning on – around 60 percent quicker as compared to its predecessors. Experience a wide variety of user interface, including digitiser pen, wireless Bluetooth keyboard, slate PC dock and capacitive 8-point touchscreen interface for enhanced productivity and maximum convenience.

With Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T, you can simply write, type or touch to create documents/reports, take lecture/meeting notes, research online, enjoy the world of vivid entertainment and give presentations. The Touch Launcher of Samsung offers quick access to wide range of touch friendly applications and is pre-installed with regularly upgraded range of famous applications such as music, maps, movies, recipes and weather. It also allows you to access Windows applications, including email, messenger and use widgets for checking performance such as Wi-Fi connections and battery life.

The Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T is considered as one of the fastest Windows 7 tablet in the market and is paired with optional accessories, providing very notebook like experience. With all the hype surrounding Nook and Kindle Fire Tablet and favorites including Asus Transformer and iPad 2, it is easy to forget that there are quite a lot of other Windows tablets introduced to the market. These tablets have been in the market for quite a long time as both disappointingly underpowered consumer products and low key industrial tools. Samsung has expanded the Series 7 lineup by introducing the Series 7 Slate 700T, which adds Intel Core i5 processor making it a useful device as compared to underpowered Intel Atom tablets.

When fused with optional docking stand and Bluetooth keyboard, the Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T is powerful, tidy package. It is available for the price of $1349 and includes 128GB solid state drive. It comes equipped with 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M Processor; 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM; 128GB solid state drive; Intel HM65 Chipset; Intel HD3000 Graphics card and Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit). With edge to edge glass over front surface covering thick black bezel and display and slightly rounded back plastic panel, the Series 7 Slate feels and looks a lot like other models, including Samsung Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry Playbook.

Some of the connectivity options on Samsung Series 7 Slate 700T include Mini-HDMI (plus HDMI via dock); Stereo speakers, headphone jack, mic port; 1 USB 2.0 (plus 1 USB 2.0 via dock), micro-SD card reader; 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Ethernet (via dock). Its SuperBright 11.6 inch LCD screen generates sharp images and bright colors with 400nit brightness. Its outstanding text readability and picture quality also mean you can enjoy brilliant high definition entertainment almost anywhere you select. The rated battery life of Series 7 Slate 700T is five hours and 49 minutes, which is really impressive. In the meantime, the Series 7 Slate PC is a good, but not great, choice for mobile professionals.

For testing the Skullcandy Roc Nation Aviator Headphones, I used it over a week and didn’t have any complaints about the shape and fit of this set. Ear protectors are made of plush leather and they make a loose seal to let in ambient noise and still keep the music between the ears through adequate sound isolation. These headphones are quite light courtesy of the stainless steel accents and you get a lot of room inside the big pyramidal shaped earcups for accommodating different ear sizes.

A lot of headphones from Skullcandy appeal to younger audience which value bass over other instruments but here, the sound is more midrange. The treble is balanced and it can be compared with Klipsch Image One set.

I spent about a week listening to the different types of music and got the impression that the Skullcandy Roc Nation Aviator Headphones is made more for genres that are driven by string instruments like country and rock. On the other side, Image Ones have a richer and fuller tonal balance which lends itself to techno and hip-hop well. I am not saying that Skullcandy Roc Nation Aviator Headphones cannot handle tracks that are laden with synthesizers and drum machines. I played Pink Friday by Nicki Minaj and the sound was more defined through Aviators. Picking out individual harmonies is easier and the focus is on clear vocal without any obtrusive peak of bass throwing off other frequencies.

If you like booming nature of the extended bass in headphones, I would recommend you to purchase Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Studio which are low-end-heavy due to the extra boost from digital amplifier. You will have to pay a premium though; the set costs $300, double the price of Skullcandy Roc Nation Aviator Headphones.

This set is compelling and it is made for people who are looking for natural sound over bass that is artificially enhanced. There is in-line remote which is quite handy with the portable devices.

If you are touch typist, you will be disappointed because the keys don’t give you any feel while typing. However, if you like to keep your gadgets clean, this keyboard is a must buy for you because it is very easy to clean up. The surface is very shiny and the manufacturer has included a cleaning cloth which means that it must attract a lot of fingerprints easily.

This keyboard will be released on May 13th in Japan and the USB keyboard has 108 keys. You can use it only with Windows for now. The manufacturer is saying that they will be making a Mac version soon and the product will be rolled out in Japanese version first. Other formats of Italian, French, German and English will follow after that.

For testing, I played ‘Avatar’ Blu-ray version on the Dell UltraSharp U3011. The blacks were deep and the color too was accurate. Content looked great on a 30 inch screen. The faces were natural looking and there weren’t any egregious color tint problems.

For game tests, I played StarCraft II or SCII; it is my new tool for judging the color quality and the vibrancy in games. I played it at full resolution of 2,560×1,600 and with such high quality, it is difficult for any game to look bad. The pictures were indeed stunning on the monitor. Take a look at the quality of this monitor and you will never look at a 24 incher again.

The vibrancy and colors on the Dell UltraSharp U3011 are the best ever. Everything looked really detailed and it popped up from the display. There are plenty of options for color calibration and display presets and you can tweak the output in a lot of ways. The refresh rate of this monitor is seven milliseconds and the streaking was a bit more than Samsung PX2370 which had refresh rate of two ms.

In photo tests, the Dell UltraSharp U3011 delivered clear looking pics having accurate color stints and good color saturation. This monitor is using LG H-IPS aka Horizontal In-Plane Switching panel inside and the viewing angle is twice as wide as that of the standard TN panel.

The movie and game presets on the Dell UltraSharp U3011 were quite accurate when viewing the respective content. For general use, I would recommend you to use the Standard preset. Just like most IPS panels in the market, this Dell monitor is made for professionals who need accurate color reproduction. Professional graphic artists will have nothing to complain here, the quality is absolutely top-notch. It is also great for watching movies, viewing photos, playing games, etc.

You can set the OSD or onscreen display of the Samsung SyncMaster P2770FH to be on the screen for 200, 20, 10, or 5 seconds. Array consists of Menu button, Down and Up button, Enter button, and Auto button. The up/down buttons also double up as the brightness and the preset shortcut keys respectively. The options for picture include sharpness, contrast, and brightness. The color tone can be set to Custom, Warm, Normal and Cool. They let you change the attributes of blue, green and red manually. There are 7 presets in all – Text, Custom, Game, Internet, Sport, Dynamic Contrast, and Movie. These presets just change the brightness, color temperature or both according to the relevant task. The manufacturer has also put in option for changing overall color tone of this display to grayscale (black and white), aqua, green and the sepia tones.

Samsung SyncMaster P2770FH was tested on its DVI port and I connected it to Windows Vista PC. The manufacturer has given a DVI cable in the box. The biggest problem of the panel was the color. The images had green tint and it adversely affected my color tests especially in terms of color tracking. I lowered the green attribute from 50 to 44 and the things were improved by this but I could still see the green tint as compared with Samsung PX2370 which was running the same picture. When I lowered the green attribute to less than 44, the image started getting red and hence it is necessary to increase the blue value. You will have to tweak the monitor a lot for finding the sweet spot.

Samsung has used the finest quality TN panel on the PX2370 but same cannot be said about P2770FH. This might be the reason behind our color problems. I won’t recommend this computer monitor to you because the price is a bit high at $330 and the quality isn’t worth it. There are other panels which are less expensive and give better picture. Samsung is asking more money for this monitor due to the good looks and it doesn’t have anything to do with the picture quality.

I could have tested more video apps on iPhone but I realized that most of them don’t support output of videos. This is certainly the limitation of Apple of the app developers and Optoma Neo-i has got nothing to do with it. You won’t be able to watch videos from iOS Netflix app.

The manufacturer says that you can project images up to 120 inches but in my tests, I stayed within 42-50 inch range and had to keep the room dark. Turning off all the lights makes a big difference to the quality of the picture. The quality of video is good for just casual viewing and it is much brighter and better than what you get on tiny pico projectors. They can’t offer the same amount of brightness especially the non-HD versions. The images start getting softer if the projected image gets bigger.

Another problem is that Optoma Neo-i doesn’t really support input of 1080p. But the 480i, 1080i, 720p, and 480p will work fine. This is not a big deal for non-HD projector but initially, it did create some confusion for me when I first connected a Blu-ray player and set it at 1080p.

The projected Blu-ray picture is sharper than the iPhone’s digital copies. The difference is noticeable but it isn’t really huge. Remember, that you aren’t projecting HD image when you are projecting Blu-ray disc with this projector. The experience is quite similar to watching DVD or a bit less in quality especially if you are going for bigger picture.

Optoma Neo-i has speakers built in but it won’t be fair to expect the world from it. The quality is not even as good as TV speakers but they are loud enough for listening to the dialogues. This is an important upgrade from the predecessor which had muted sound from almost all pico projectors. The Optoma Neo-i has a lot to like and I would recommend it to people who like to wish to watch their iPhone videos on a bigger screen.

Connectivity on the Mitsubishi HC6000 is quite generous considering this is a front projector. There are two HDMI ports which is better than HC500 (its predecessor) which had one DVI and one HDMI port. A 15-pin VGA port and single component video input can be configured for the component video. They are also available here. A single composite video input and single S-Video for the older legacy sources like the VHS decks are there too. Finally, there is a RS-232 control port along with 12 volt trigger.

There is no doubt that the Mitsubishi HC6000 is improved as compared to its predecessor, the 5000. The biggest improvement is the greater contrast ratio and this is mainly due to the improved performance of black level. The blacks here are much deeper than the previous model and it is due to the use of best 1-chip resolution of 1080p for DLP projectors feature technology of Dark Chip.  For instance, the JVC DLA-HD100 which is LCoS based is a bit better but the price is twice.

Other highlights on the Mitsubishi HC6000 include good gamma, accurate grayscale tracking, and excellent color decoding. It is a big shame that the secondary and primary color accuracy is beyond the mark and this dilutes the overall color accuracy. The video processing is courtesy of the Silicon Optix and their HQV scheme of processing gives you a lot of quality levels. The de-interlacing is pretty good and this is evident in the Silicon Optix HQV test DVD in Blu-ray. Mitsubishi HC6000 does a good job at both the film based and video based HD material.

The router part too lets you access the settings of the router like firewall, default IP address, etc. The Wireless part lets you customize the wireless networks. You can also turn on the third network here for use with the host legacy slow clients or guests.

I found that the Vizio XWR100 dual-band wireless router interface was responsive and intuitive. It has most of the basic features that you’d want in such a device. But it doesn’t let you do in-depth configuration. Aside for disabling or enabling the optimization for the video streaming, Quality of Service feature, you cannot do much like optimize the connection for game applications or VoIP. You cannot change the features of the router’s network storage either.

Vizio XWR100 can host any of the external USB hard drive that is formatted in NTFS and FAT 32. But it can read only NTFS drives which means that the network computers can just read data that is connected and it cannot make changes. This is a big drawback because most of the external hard disks are formatted in the NTFS file system as it has better support for file sizes and the storage capacity too is large.

Once you have connected the Vizio XWR100 dual-band wireless router, the content of the external drive can be shared through public share folder known as ‘default’. All the computers in network can access it and you cannot restrict the computers access to this drive. Vizio XWR100 can also stream digital media content that is stored on the external hard disk to the players that are DLNA compliant but I couldn’t figure out how to get this feature working.

I liked the set of features on the Vizio XWR100 dual-band wireless router are the nice Web interface. Networking enthusiasts might be disappointed to see that there aren’t a ton of features here but general consumers will be pretty satisfied. It is less intimidating than other routers.

Put horizontally, this console weighs 8.8 pounds and is 12.15 inches wide x 3.27 inches high x 10.15 inches deep. This makes it smaller than the previous Xbox. You can prop up this console in vertical position and there are also interchangeable faceplates which cost about $20. Also noteworthy is that the system’s beige color clashes with the back and silver colors of the modern AV devices.

Xbox 360 60GB has a laptop styled hard drive inside and this is the secret behind its slim chassis. The earlier model had desktop styled hard disk inside. However, the drive of this console is wrapped in proprietary snap on module as compared to PS3 which can take in any standard 2.5 inch hard disk. There is a 120 GB version available for $180 but if you really yearn for bigger storage, I would recommend you to go for Xbox 360 Elite with 120 GB hard disk.

Xbox 360 60GB costs $299 and you get a wireless controller bundled with the gaming console. There are wireless capabilities built-in but it is just for the controllers and you cannot connect any other Wi-Fi devices. A single console can take in four wireless controllers at a time and there is a green LED on both the controller and console which shows the controllers that are connected (from 1 to 4)

Xbox 360 60GB is a very powerful computer which can be used for a variety of purposes. In the hood, there are 3 processing cores running at a speed of 3.2 GHz each. One of the most important feature of this console is it ability to output HD quality graphics. Every game for Xbox 360 has 720p minimum output and it can be upscaled to 1080p or 1080i if your TV supports it. You just have to choose the preferred resolution in the settings page of the console.

HD output is received through the bundled component video cable and you can also use your own HDMI cable instead of this. Microsoft and Joytech are selling VGA video adapters for $40 and $20 respectively and through this, you can connect the console to computer monitors or HDTVs.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the performance of this product; it was better than a lot I have previously seen. Rocketfish Universal Wireless Rear Speakers Kit consists of power amplifier/wireless receiver and wireless transmitter which can be used along with any surround speakers brand provided they use a standard speaker wire (not the proprietary hardwired connectors). This wireless rear speakers set add quality to your existing front speakers. The price too is quite low at $100 and hence I would recommend it for budget systems and a lot of HTIBs (home-theater-in-a-box systems).

The receiver and transmitter of the Rocketfish Universal Wireless Rear Speakers Kit have a plain style with plastic black boxes. The transmitter isn’t larger than an iPod. It is meant to be connected to the surround right/left speaker of the HTIB amplifier or AV receiver. The manufacturer has included 24 inch cables but you can still use any old speaker wire. The dimensions of the receiver are 1.5 by 8.75 by 6.4 inches and it is bigger than the transmitter. Due to the 2.4 GHz wireless technology of the system, you can position the transmitter in the front of the room and two audio surround channels on the rear. They are attached to the 2 surround speakers. The surround speakers are powered by the receivers 2, 25 watt digital amplifiers.

You will have to connect the receiver to the rear speakers through a wire. Both the receiver and transmitter need a power adapter. This dilutes the whole wireless connectivity concept of the system but I won’t complain much about this because the problem is seen in all rival products. The ‘wireless’ here refers to signal transmission between the receiver unit and transmitter. You don’t have the 2 longest wires in the surround system which sounds good. The receiver can be placed flat on the shelf or you can wall mount it.