Before this, I got to review the HP TouchSmart 600 and it immediately became my favorite because of the useful features that it had to offer. But I am not so sure about the HP TouchSmart 300 which is a lower end machine. It costs $899 and this all-in-one touch screen PC has decent performance but the screen is smaller and it lacks a lot of impressive features that were found on the higher end model. There is a cool recipe organizing software which will certainly appeal to housewives looking for kitchen PC but there are better alternatives for the price if you are looking for a home entertainment solution. Of course, there is also an option of full fledged desktops if you are looking for general purpose productivity. HP TouchSmart 300 is fixed configuration machine and it is available at a lot of retail stores. There are few preconfigured version of the TouchSmart 300s and also a fully customizable version on the manufacturer’s Website. You can play with the CPU, hard  [...]

The original MacBook Air was pretty much a definition of a luxury system and it was hard to recommend it for everyday use. I think Apple made that laptop just to show people ‘Wow, look what we can do!’ The design was really cool but there were some shortcomings like limited connections that really offset the whole deal. The processor too was seriously outdated considering what other laptops were running on. You couldn’t help thinking that the original Air was made more for a small sliver of consumers. However, things have changed a lot in the second generation. I got the 13.3 inch version of Apple MacBook Air Fall 2010 and was glad to see that the manufacturer has answered a lot of requests from the Air fans. There is a second USB port now which lets you connect one more peripheral. The earlier one had just one and if you connected something like an external mouse, you couldn’t connect anything else. The presence of a second USB port will answer a lot of issues.  [...]

Desktop machines are rare these days as everyone is going for either slim line PCs or all-in-one desktop computers. But this doesn’t mean that there is no demand for full fledged desktops in the market at all. HP Pavilion p6720f is a proof that people still buy them because of the versatility that they give in terms of expansion. Upgrading all-in-ones or slim PCs isn’t that easy; for the latter, you need to use smaller hardware. Pavilion is giving you one vacant PCI Express graphics card slot along with 3, 1x PCIe slots for putting other upgrades. Gateway has a graphics slot and one single 1x PCIe input. These free slots don’t really translate for offering out of the box functionality instantly but I would recommend you to pay more for the upgrade potential. I wasn’t really surprised to see that the HP Pavilion p6720f had great performance in my lab tests and this is due to the presence of AMD quad-core processor inside.  [...]

Optoma Neo-i is projector having a dock for connecting iPod Touch or iPhone. You can connect the Apple devices and view the content on a larger screen. The projector even comes with speakers built in. For testing the sound and picture quality of this device, I played a Blu-ray movie by connecting Blu-ray player through HDMI and played some digital movies that I’d stored on my iPhone. The movies were all full length and their sizes were around 1.4 GB. 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  [...]

Nokia N96 has a huge reputation to live up to since it is the successor to Nokia N95 which was a really popular smartphone from Nokia. N96 has 3G data, 5 megapixel camera, 8GB internal memory and a very powerful S60 user interface. All this high end hardware guarantees a super hit cell phone and it rightly is. There aren’t a lot of devices in the market that can compete with this. Going through the phone, I realized that the manufacturer has just remodeled it from the earlier model and there aren’t a lot of new goodies inside. The big inclusion here is integrated DVB-H tuner for watching TV. This along with the kickstand would make the phone a great alternative to your TV. Nokia N96 is a dual sliding phone just like the N95 but the new handset feels sleeker and more modern. Everything on the phone is flush with the surface except for the multimedia button and direction pad. This gives the phone a minimalist appeal as compared to N95. The N95 had sharp corners but  [...]

Sony XNV-770BT has a huge touch screen with a really big resolution for watching videos. The quality is awesome and it will keep you entertained for hours in your car. Sony has been known for its prowess in graphics but I was still surprised since such high resolutions are rare in car video devices. For GPS, there is a TomTom GPS module bundled along with cradle and it goes in a user accessible location in your car. This GPS module can be removed from the cradle for connecting to computers for updating through TomTom’s Home application. Once you complete the update process, just pop the GPS module back in to the cradle and then resume your navigation tasks. The Sony XNV-770BT works even if you don’t have the GPS unit in place but for navigation, the module needs to be there. Depending on your installation methods, the external magnetic GPS antenna will give you enhanced positioning sensitivity and the vehicle speed sensor connection will help in tracking vehicles when the satellite  [...]

Sony VAIO Y Series VPC-Y218FX has a 13.3 inches screen (diagonally measured) and it has a resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. This isn’t the brightest screen that I’ve ever seen to date but the colors are still vivid and the videos play smoothly. On the top of the keyboard, there is a speaker bar which produces tinny sound but I won’t complain about this since it is hard to laptops to produce a lot of sound. The bad quality too is forgivable. Sony VAIO Y Series VPC-Y218FX has a good amount of connectivity options especially for wireless. There isn’t eSATA but you get three USB 2.0 ports and HDMI port along with VGA jack for computer monitor connections. There are also two media card slots (MemoryStick and SD) and 34mm ExpressCard slot. Apart from 802.11n Wi-Fi, this notebook offers mobile broadband (you will need to subscribe with Sprint or Verizon for this). There is also Bluetooth antenna which is another wireless option. A tiny on/off toggle for the Wi-Fi is located  [...]

Kodak PlayTouch or Zi10 is the successor to the Zi8 and the new device now has a touch screen but the video quality is compromised on. Beneath the cover on the body’s right side, there is a SDHC/SD card slot and there is almost no internal memory for storing videos. On the left, there is AV jack and a door which protects Mini-HDMI and the Micro-USB ports along with a flip out USB connector. There are cables provided by the manufacturer for watch of them. Kodak PlayTouch has a single Select/Record button on the back close to the three inch touch screen LCD. The display is bright enough and the manufacturer has put in LCD Glare Shield feature which sounds fancier than what it actually is. This feature will make the screen more visible in bright sunlight by changing from Normal picture to Black & White or high saturation. These settings don’t have any effect on the video but they can still help while shooting. You will hold  [...]

Looking at the escalating trade-in programs and offers for the original iPad are taken as an indication, the sales of newly launched iPad 2 easily could exceed even the blatant predictions. Trade-on programs offered by eBay, NextWorth and Gazelle have all reported the soaring levels of interested users. In the mean time, Apple is also offering a $100 discount on the iPad 1. Trade-in Offers Fetches Thousands of Customers The first reCommerce company to promote and advertise the buyback rates for the original iPad was Gazelle.com. Considering the unexpectedly high demand, and on top of that Apple’s decision to drop the price of original iPad unit by $100, has made the company to adjust their rates just hours after the Apple keynote. According to one of the official for Gazelle the company saw more than 2,500 iPad trades on  [...]

Apple recently revamped their Pro line up of laptops and I got the 13 inch version in my labs for review. This is a great new laptop since it has improved specs for the same price. The new 13 inch model is as powerful as last year’s 15 inch model. One disappointment here is that Apple dropped the Nvidia 320M GPU and these laptops now have Intel graphics. But you get better battery life now. The 13 inch model costs $1,499 and the 15 inch one costs $1,799 and if you are wondering whether to spend the extra $300 on the bigger version, I would say that it is totally worth it. But the bigger model is not recommended for frequent travelers. In terms of design, there is not much difference about the Apple MacBook Pro Winter 2011. In fact, it is really hard to tell if the new version is indeed the ‘new’ Mac. It has the same unibody construction and iconic design. The port layout too is the same. They are located on the left side and on the right, there is the slot loading  [...]