http://answers.world-of-newave.info/fly-tying.htm Latest news and articles about Fly Tying en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:08:26 GMT Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:08:26 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gear-gallery-giant-new-thinkpad-top-dslrs-and-more-20080966221.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gear-gallery-giant-new-thinkpad-top-dslrs-and-more-20080966221.htm Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:30:00 GMT : The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 is the most massive laptop Lenovo's ever made. This over-nine-pound monster is loaded in every way you can imagine and a few you probably can't. Two laptop "firsts" are already making waves. For starters you'll find a stylus secreted in the base of the W700 for a pint-sized Wacom digitizer that has been added next to the mouse pad. The second feature is built-in color calibration. Settings are tweaked automatically, and the before versus after images are striking in the effect the calibration has. Though groundbreaking, these two features actually add just $150 to a laptop that costs ? wait for it ? $4,473. It's all those other specs that add to the price tag: A gorgeous LCD, by far the brightest 17-inch model we've ever tested. Core 2 Duo CPU running at a blistering 2.8 GHz. 4 GB of RAM (and 64-bit Vista installed, so you can actually access it all). Dual hard drives. And finally, an Nvidia Quatro FX 3700M graphics card with 1 GB of video RAM. All this goodness powers the W700 to record-setting benchmarks, though not quite offering the highest gaming scores we've seen. The stratospheric price tag ensures the W700 will likely only find a home in the high-test worlds of CAD, 3-D imaging and professional photo editing. The rest of us will simply have to appreciate the thing from afar ? and wait for its features to trickle down to cheaper, smaller machines. WIRED: Digitizer and color calibrator set a new bar for features in a notebook. Top-notch performance all around. Unbeatable screen brightness at this size. TIRED: Seems bigger than it needs to be: Lid is 20 inches diagonally to fit a 17-inch screen. 87 minutes of battery life is 84 more than the W700 will ever spend on. DVD playback stuttered and ultimately crashed the system during our tests. Keyboard not up to usual ThinkPad standards. Blaringly loud fan. $4,470 (as tested), Lenovo Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad W700 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Nikon's latest offering, the 12-megapixel D90 is a feature-packed fistful of photo fury that?s sure to help pave your way to full-fledged Flickrati status. Straight from the box and out on the street, the D90 shows off its picture-making prowess. Our testing unit came bundled with a (bordering on) superwide 18-105mm f3.5-5.6 lens that we used for all of our evaluations. The 11-point focusing system speedily locks onto subjects, and the flash images show off a pleasing balance between the strobe and the ambient light even when just shooting in the full Auto and Program modes. The camera also makes three flavors of video, the yummiest being up to five minutes of 720p HD in a cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio. With the high-quality sensor and optics, video clarity and depth of field are on par with the D90?s stills. Nikon?s also loaded the D90 with the same high-res 3-inch LCD found on its $5,000 D3. If that?s not big enough, just plug it straight into your HDTV with the built-in HDMI connection. All told, this camera has scads of grin-worthy features that will continue to feed your frenzy filled lifestyle. WIRED: Enormous image sensor blows open the door to some of the finest 12.3-megapixel images we've produced yet. Nikon?s top-of-the-line high-res 3-inch LCD is prettier than looking at a supermodel with beer goggles. In-camera dust reduction is spot on at removing spots from the sensor. One-touch info button and simple, descriptive help screens clarify deep, detailed menus. Toss out your camcorder; the 720p, 24 fps video capture on the D90 will trump its performance ? especially in low lighting. Face facts: Face-detection system works quickly, accurately, effortlessly.. TIRED: Only manual focus in the video mode. Seriously, this is really the only problem we had with the D90 and even that was a stretch. $1,300 (as tested), Nikon Read our full Nikon D90 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Sony came out swinging for the fences with the introduction of its ?flagship? DSLR, the A900. It's packed with a memory-card bursting 24-megapixel full-frame sensor, crystal-clear high-def LCD, onboard image stabilization, and priced at $3,000, this one?s likely to give the vastly more expensive, highest-end Canons and Nikons a solid run for their money. Sony planted plenty of buttons and a ?multi-selector? joystick on the back of the body for no-menu-digging-necessary adjustments, and the viewfinder offers 100 percent coverage and is easily the brightest of any camera on the market today. Sony?s sensor-borne image-stabilization system is the first of its kind on a full-frame sensor. From the viewfinder to the LCD to images on paper, the A900 is truly an impressive camera. It?s got an ease of use that will most certainly appeal to aspiring photogs along with some industry-leading features that completely exceed expectations and, at this price point, may cause some professional shooters to step to the Sony side of the street. WIRED: Bright, vivid and spacious viewfinder. Excellent in-camera image-stabilization system. Easy, no-menu adjustments with multi-selector toggle. Killer price for the highest resolution; high-functioning, easy-to-use DSLR. TIRED: Focus points not big and bright enough in brightly lit situations. No latch for memory card cover. Pointless postage-stamp-sized LCD on top of the body. No continuous ISO in viewfinder. Power switch on left side of body. $4,750 as tested, Sony Read our full Sony Alpha A900 DSLR review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : As far as storage, the QA0005 is barebones at best. At heart, it's just a Maxtor One-Touch 4 Mini Hard Drive encased in armor. That's it. So, between the clunky backup software and the bulky design, we were thrown for a loop. Equally puzzling was the lack of a physical install disk. Having the manual suggest we "copy all files on the hard drive" in lieu of providing a solid install disk seems strangely low-rent. Loading up our precious movie and music libraries was easy enough courtesy of the unit's zippy write speeds. In general, accessing files on the 250-GB hard drive was simple enough, if not a little poky with larger files like DVDs. But isn't a love for pyromania/water torture what got us here in the first place? Right. So, after unleashing hell on the QA0005, we have to say we're impressed. Twelve hours of submersion (it's good for up to 24) and some quality time in the oven and fireplace (good for 30 minutes at 1550 degrees) didn't seem to phase the unit. However, the one thing the QA0005 didn't take in stride was shaking. Despite having a tough exterior, the unit seems to be susceptible to earthquakes. Or just old-fashioned clumsiness. For the non-disaster-prone, you're probably better off spending the extra dough on something cheaper with more capacity. WIRED: It's better prepared for the apocalypse than you are. Protects from dust and dirt in addition to fire and water. Whisper-quiet operation. Easy setup -- one USB Y cable and that's it. Offers protection via password and data encryption. TIRED: All that protection doesn't come cheap. Surprisingly heavy at 11 pounds. No expansion options -- in fact, opening the device voids the warranty. Occasionally sluggish access speeds. Clunky interface for scheduling backups. No shock-proofing. $400, Sentry Safe Read our full Sentry Safe QA0005 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : How many iPods are there in the world with music that never gets updated because their owners are too busy, uninspired or just plain lazy? A lot of them, says Slacker. The company designed its music ecosystem to function with the least conceivable amount of human effort. We enjoyed Slacker's first attempt at a portable device ? large and blocky as it was ? but this second version, the Slacker G2, now slips easily into any pocket, at 3.5-inches tall and 2.6-ounces. With the G2, you'll be able to carry around up to 25 (4-GB) or 40 (8-GB) stations that can be programmed by artist(s) or by selecting one of Slacker's 100 preprogrammed channels from its catalog of over two million songs (considerably more than Pandora has). Stations are affected by your clicks of the Heart and Ban buttons. So if you never want to hear "Total Eclipse of the Heart" again, under any circumstances, you won't. Slacker factory workers load each device with channels the buyer has already created on Slacker.com. And with a paid subscription, any song you "Heart" gets downloaded to your computer. But at its core, this is internet radio that works when there's no internet. Isn't it about time your portable player had personalized custom radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so. WIRED: Allows lazy music discovery. Lets you listen and edit stations on the device, Slacker.com, or Windows software. Also loads MP3s, WMAs and AACs the old-fashioned way too (Windows only). Clean sound. Nice in-ear headphones, controls. Displays album art, band bios on a 2.8-inch screen. Internet radio feature free if you can stomach skip limitations and the occasional audio ad; plans start at $7.50 per month if you can't. 802.11b/g. Two million songs in streaming catalog. TIRED: Updating via WiFi connection eats lots of battery life. The rubber stoppers that plug USB and (unused) docking port get lost easily. WiFi connection requires AC adapter if battery power is below 50 percent. Doesn't leave room for much music loaded from your computer. $250 (as tested), Slacker Read our full Slacker G2 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. Moreover, the MSI is running good old Windows XP, saving you from the frustrations of Vista, a Linux learning curve, or (perish the thought) the laughably underpowered Win CE. For look and feel, it slaps most of its rivals silly. The 10-inch widescreen can display most fixed-width web pages comfortably, and it lacks the extra-wide bezels that make other netbook screens feel smaller than they actually are. Its keyboard is large enough to house decent-size keys so you can type easily and the Wind finds room for three USBs, an SD slot and a display connector (take note, MacBook Air!). Of course, it's not perfect. We would have loved to see a DVD burner or a mini FireWire. But if you want a cheap and tiny companion for uploading pictures during a Malaysian jungle trek, or just a little buddy to hang out with you on the couch for IMDB searches, it's pretty hard to be against the Wind. WIRED: Grown-up looks (as opposed to "I want to sit at the big kids' table" found in other netbooks). Full keyboard and the largest screen among mini-notes. Plenty of ports to plug away at. 2.3-pound weight and rounded edges make it simple to pack and lug. TIRED: Lack of a DVD is understandable, but it still makes us cry a little. Hard drive sometimes makes mysterious swallowing sounds. Two-hour battery life is OK, but three would be better.? ?$500, MSI (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com) Read our full MSI Wind U100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Here's a hard truth: Even if Apple decided to carve its new Nano out of petrified poo and bless it with a Braille display, the interface alone would still make Cupertino's latest flash-based music player leagues better than the competition. So what's our opinion of the new Nano? Well, it's just like the old Nano, just a little roomier (fine) and shaped like an airfoil (weird). This new aerodynamic form doesn't seem to have any discernible functional purpose, but the Triscuit-shaped Nano had some distinct advantages over this new fourth-gen model: It was a better piece of fitness gear, fitting more comfortably into sporty armbands and the tiny pockets so common to the backs of running shorts. The old screen-orientation also allowed you to control video content more intuitively, though the new elongated shape is better for navigating long playlists. Sure, that's a decent upgrade -- as is the price-to-gig ratio -- but unless you absolutely need to shake-to-shuffle (spazz) or will be building an airplane out of iPods (paging Mr. Branson), the best thing about the new Nano is how flooded eBay's gonna be with cast-off third-gen models. ?Joe Brown WIRED: Enough colors to make you second-guess dropping that third hit of acid before hitting the Apple store. Up to 16 gigs of storage. On the fly Genius (should be called Lazy) playlists let you quickly suit your music mood. Energy saver mode is clutch. Eight gigs for 150 bones is our kind of upgrade. TIRED: Why no love for the squarePod? Shake-to-shuffle is a nightmare. Tapered design is just curvy enough to be fey, but not quite severe enough to be sharpened. $149 (8 GB), Apple (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com) Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Put simply, the Boom is an all-in-one take on the Squeezebox Duet. By adding three-inch woofers (and some tiny tweeters), the Boom is the first of the Squeezeboxes capable of both streaming and playback. Like the incredibly awesome Duet, the Boom grants access to all the network-accessible (and non-DRMed) music stored on your computer. The Boom also provides easy access to streaming content from Sirius, Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody. As a device, it's not quite enough to cause Sonos to break a sweat, but for a single-room music-streaming experience, Logitech seems to have adequately covered its bases. Like the other Squeezeboxes, the Boom is easy to sync up with the office 802.11 but little device tweaks via Logitech's desktop hub can be slow and plodding. The system has great clarity, clean mids and a pleasing amount of bass given its class. For what the Boom is designed for -- namely, streaming digital audio throughout a house or office -- it's more than adequately powered. Unfortunately, that's not enough to make it the be-all end-all for streaming music setups. Squeezebox perks like the Duet's fancy remote have been sidestepped in favor of a much more drab and utilitarian design. Between this and the Boom's lack of audio outputs, the device seems to occupy this awkward space between fuller-featured streaming systems like the Duet or Sonos, and a blah desktop radio/alarm clock. That's not to say that the Boom doesn't excel in that limited niche, but we were expecting Logitech to "squeeze" a little more pizazz and a lot more flexibility out of the Boom. WIRED: Fantastically clear audio quality given its size. Supports a host of alarm and snooze functions. Magnetic remote sticks to the top of unit. Dual antennas ensure buttery smooth audio streams. Offers two-week backup battery for alarm functions. Supports a bevy of audio formats: MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, APE, MPC and WavPack. TIRED: Unexciting (yet functional) design. A veritable desert for audio outputs. Occasional slow response from the remote. No DRM support can mean trouble for protected iTunes/Zune libraries. Stick to the remote -- the glossy black chassis is a fingerprint magnet. Reliance on AC power limits mobility. $300, Logitech Read our full Logitech Squeezebox Boom review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most earbuds take a direct path to your auditory nerves, aiming their miniature speakers straight down your ear canals like the Batmobile rocketing through the Holland Tunnel. Not so with the Purebuds, whose "reverse sound" design positions the speakers pointing outwards, towards the rest of the world. A plastic cover then bounces the sound waves back into your ear and through one of three different sets of silicone tips, which are intended to provide three different sound profiles: surround sound, bass heavy and neutral. The advantage of this bass-ackwards arrangement? These buds, unlike others, deliver hefty beats without distortion -- or danger to your eardrums. In practice, the Purebuds deliver decent quality sound, albeit it's a little muffled on the high end. And you can crank your iPhone all the way to 11 with no perceptible distortion. Your ears may be bleeding, but it won't be on account of the earbud speakers peaking. ?Dylan Tweney WIRED: A damn sight better than the default buds that came with your iPod. Bass-boosting tips augment the bass only slightly -- but they do stick in your ears nicely. "Safe listening" spiel might get your mom off your back. TIRED: Variety of tips provide little actual difference to sound. "Surround sound" tips prone to falling out of your ear. Still possible to hurt your ears by cranking Minor Threat all the way up. $50, Purebud Read our full Purebuds review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Behold, the Novint Falcon. It sits on your desk and provides force feedback with powerful motors within the device that provide a full range of responses, whether you're bouncing a ball on a string or reloading a shotgun. Using the Falcon's new Pistol Grip, titles like Half-Life 2 suddenly become an entirely different game. Forget fragging as you know it. With the pistol grip coming dangerously close to flying out of your hands after a few quick bursts with a submachine gun, you may wonder how you got along without this level of feedback in the first place. Every weapon takes on new life, from the meager jostling of the standard pistol, to the forceful thunder of a rocket launcher's blast. Of course, there's more to force feedback than weapon recoil. Whether or not the Falcon replaces your prized gaming mouse will be a matter of proper ?training,? you might just end up frustrated. WIRED: Incredibly precise feedback. Very stable, with strong motors that resist lots of abuse. Makes playing Virtual Pool a lot more interesting. TIRED: Time-intensive learning curve might turn off folks used to their controls. Takes up quite a bit of desk space. $190, Novint Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Novint Falcon review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Bushnell BackTrack aims to help you find your parking spot every time by pairing a digital compass with a high-sensitivity SIRF Star III GPS receiver. The BackTrack, once set with any of three location modes, will guide you back to a marked spot with directional arrows and distance estimations as your guide. To test it, I took it to an outdoor music festival. On day one of the event, I didn't bother using the BackTrack and when it came time to return to my vehicle, I led three friends around in the dark on a 45-minute wild car chase. On day two, I set my location with the BackTrack when I parked in the morning. I recalled the spot later that night and Voila! the BackTrack lead me back to my vehicle in less than 10 minutes. Sure, other devices provide a similar service, but here's the thing about the BackTrack: It's smaller than any GPS unit and gets reception better than any cellphone. If you find yourself getting lost easily, and don't mind porting around an extra gadget, then give the BackTrack a try. WIRED: Simple, two-button operation. Backlight assures you're never left in the dark. Compact size makes it a manageable accessory for any outing. Weather-resistant. Self-calibrating compass. GPS tracking works both in and out of civilization. TIRED: Clumsy fingers can sometimes erase original locations, rendering the BackTrack useless. If you don't set your location, you're screwed. Aside from being a compass and a GPS tracker, it does nothing else. Runs on AAA batteries -- make sure you bring backups. $86 (as tested), Bushnell Read our full Bushnell BackTrack review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : First, a word to the RAZR fans. (There are some still left.) Though the V750 has similar looks and ergonomics, this isn't the second coming of the world's favorite fashion phone. With military-grade protection from dust, shock and high and low temperatures, it's a different creature entirely. Even though it casts the same fragile silhouette as the RAZR, my review unit took repeated 4-foot drops and dirt naps with ease (and just a few cracks). After brushing the phone off, I was still able to make and receive calls with reasonably clear audio. If you're concerned with the average accidental drops and collisions a cellphone endures on a day-to-day basis, the V750 has you covered, hands down. Ohhh, but that doesn't mean all is well in Rugged Town. The phone's hard plastic chassis and keypad did fine in my splash tests, but without the official certification in place, it's unlikely that the V750 could take a full dunk. Luckily, Motorola defied rugged convention by outfitting the V750 with an impressive array of multimedia features. Be it pictures, video, music or (gasp!) mobile web, the V750's brisk interface and capabilities match pace with most midlevel multimedia phones. Its 67 MB of memory and crippled Bluetooth keep it from groundbreaking status, but paired with its price, these features make the V750 a solid investment for the weekend adventure-seeker. WIRED: Sensible balance of utility and entertainment. Fantastic data speeds via EV-DO Rev A. 1,000-entry phone book stores multiple numbers per entry and postal addresses. 1.6-inch external LCD makes on-the-go media playback a breeze. Looks and handles like a sleek, non-rugged phone. TIRED: Modestly rugged at best. Push-To-Talk setup is convoluted and clunky. Muddy speakerphone audio at high volumes. Flimsy battery door flies off during impacts. Verizon OS cripples Bluetooth, video message length and file sharing. Flashless cameras are the stuff of the Dark Ages. $260, Motorola Read our full Motorola V750 Adventure review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Dell Studio Hybrid doesn?t run on ethanol and D-cells, but it does consume about 70 percent less electricity than those hulking desktop towers. This über-cute little media-cruncher comes in your choice of rich automotive colors (or bamboo, for Pier 1-themed abodes), and you can swap colors on demand with interchangeable sleeves. The Hybrid starts at $500, but by the time you trick it out with goodies like a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, Wireless-N adapter, Logitech?s diNovo Mini Keyboard (a must if you?re planning couch time), a digital TV tuner, and the bamboo sleeve (a $130 upgrade -- WTF?), the price rockets north of $1,300. Hybrids can serve desk duty or accent your living room: Even the base model comes stocked with HDMI port (DVI, too), so it?s a cinch to pair with HDTV. Blu-ray movies at 1920 x 1080 did just fine aside from a video stutter every time we adjusted the volume. Dell scores big points for style, power conservation and customization. WIRED: Sips power, unlike those heinous watt-guzzling towers. Swappable color sleeves let you change the paint job to match your mood -- or paint job. Reports for media-center duty with HDMI port and slot-loading Blu-ray drive. Metal stand cleverly morphs between vertical and horizontal positions. TIRED: Wussy integrated graphics choke on 3-D games. Looks rigged for silent running, but actually runs a little noisy. $130 bamboo sleeve will only appeal to aristocratic pandas. $1,365 (as tested), Dell Read our full Dell Studio Hybrid review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : To instantly win the mine's-better-than-yours camera contest, show friends the Z150's gorgeous 3-inch LCD. It's mammoth for a camera with a sub-$200 price tag, and bright enough to see in direct sunlight. You can also fire off a group shot without having to take the customary 20 steps back to fit everybody in: The Z150's wide-angle lens (28mm) offers a dramatically broader field of view than most pocket cams. Meanwhile, the lens zooms to 4x before the digital faux-zoom kicks in -- that?s a whole "x" better than other models in this price range. Idjit-proof controls and logical onscreen menus make the Z150 a camera anyone can pick up and use sans manual. A dedicated video-record button captures YouTube-friendly movies at 30 fps. The Z150 tops out at 8.1 megapixels -- more than adequate for the party scene. But as you might expect, the camera produces considerable image noise when the lights are low and the ISO high. Only the color reproduction disappoints: It's good, but lacking that zing we see in competing models from, say, Canon. Of course, some of Canon's pocket shooters tend toward the bulky as well, so we can forgive the EX-Z150 its slightly excessive carriage. And we're mad for its big-screen, sweet wide-angle lens, and affordable price. WIRED: Wide-angle lens just plain kicks ass, and 4x optical zoom gets you close. One-touch video recording and YouTube-upload software make this the perfect camera for Paris-Lindsay-Bigfoot sightings. TIRED: Too thick and heavy to leave in your pocket all day. Small, stiff control pad. Snapshot colors lack pop. Battery must be removed for charging. $200, Casio Read our full Casio EX Z150 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Everything?s getting tiny. The once-sexy V-8 engine is now an automotive pariah while the Smart Car gets all the chicks; HD video cameras are now damn near Twinkie-size, and we?ll probably be implanting the next-generation iPod in our molars. But at least one company isn?t succumbing to all this smaller-is-better madness: TiVo just announced the TiVo HD XL. Stuffed like a Cornish hen with a terabyte hard drive, it?s the highest-capacity DVR available, with room for 150 hours of HD content. That?s, like, every Olympic event you actually care about plus all 60 episodes of The Wire. It?s an entire season of Sunday Night Football with more than enough space for your Food Network-obsessed roommate to go balls-out on Batali. -- Joe Brown WIRED: Western Digital hard drive is nearly silent. THX-certified audio and video (finally). Say goodbye to the ugly stick -- the XL gets the same slick programmable remote as the Series 3. TiVo-easy, as expected, with the company?s ever-expanding catalog of downloadable videos (YouTube!). TIRED: Remote collects more greasy fingerprints than a secondhand sexbot. Annoying info screen hovers over the picture a few seconds too long with each channel change. Cutesy TiVo noises are a little grating, and your only other option is to turn all the sound effects off. We noticed an increase in video artifacts when recording off both tuners simultaneously. In San Francisco, at least, you have to deal with Satan Comcast to get service. $600 plus the $20 $12.95 monthly fee is a lot of cheddar. $600, TiVo Read our full TiVo HD XL review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Need to juice up your desktop music scene? Nuforce has just the thing. Its new Icon is a miniature, multithreat amplifier that can be used to pump music from a computer or audio player to your speakers and headphones. Although it's only 12 watts per channel, the Icon is powerful enough to act as a pre-amp to full-fledged stereos and on its own can drive most bookshelf speakers, producing a wide, spacious sound stage. The sound quality from the headphone jack on my laptop is thin and distorted, but when I hooked up the Icon via the USB port and patched in my Grado SR80 cans, it was a revelation. The Icon uses a high-quality digital-to-analog converter to convert the computer's digital signal to sweet-sounding analog, and all of a sudden the music was crystal clear, the bass cleaner and deeper, and the overall sound infinitely better. The only downside here may be that you'll realize how crummy some of those downloaded MP3s actually sound. In the end, the beauty of the Icon is that it can be used in so many different ways. I've got it powering some outdoor speakers on my patio -- and it excels wherever you rig it. WIRED: Sturdy silicon-like stand holds it vertically. Rad design and color choices: red, black, blue, silver. Small enough to take on vacation. TIRED: Ethernet speaker cables are cutting-edge, but standard banana plugs would be better. Bass can be a touch thin in heavier (rock, hip-hop) music. Price/maker: $250, Nuforce Photo: Christopher Jones/Wired.com Read our full Nuforce Icon Desktop Amplifier review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Treo Pro sports a shiny, rounded, tuxedo-black exterior and a handful of practical OS "shortcuts." Aside from the industrial iPhone-like design lines, those shortcuts are enough to make even the most die-hard Machead grin and bear Windows Mobile (almost). At the top of our shortcut list are the dedicated WiFi button on the right side and customizable button on the left (ours was set for camera). Circumventing the main menu and tiresome nav made the phone a joy to use. The touchscreen, on the other hand, was far from blissful. Laggy and unresponsive, we found ourselves double- and sometimes triple-tapping -? even with the stylus. Palm is definitely flexing its once-mighty muscle and trying to say it can build a stylish multimedia device with a touchscreen. But for $550, a touch interface should have more precision than this. We can only hope Palm continues to fine-tune the screen and ditch that archaic stylus permanently. WIRED: Trim, light and pocketable. Shortcuts prove beyond useful. Decent 2-megapixel pics. MicroUSB Battery lasts almost two full days. 3.5mm headphone jack. PPT/Excel/Word and PDF-reading, of course. Google Maps and TeleNav GPS, which offers turn-by-turn directions plus target searches; e.g., gas stations by price. Ships unlocked. TIRED: Menu scrolling is about as fluid as a piece of dolomite. Slippery "obsidian" plastic casing retains more fingerprints than the NSA. Noticeable screen glare. Curved design comprised by bottom-side USB/headphone jack that should be recessed more. Bluetooth not included in image send options. Only way to access microSD? Remove battery cover. Price/maker: $550, Palm Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Palm Treo Pro review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Look! Hardware that breaks ?- on purpose! The Z10's apparent bendy kick-slide design may be flashy, but turning out an innovative design is about the only thing this phone has going for it. Though it's billed as a "pocket-sized mobile studio," this 4-ounce, platinum-trimmed phone is certainly no substitute for even a mediocre minicamcorder (Exhibit A: the Flip Mino). So why drop $500 on the Z10 when you can get a 5-megapixel camphone (Exhibit B: the Nokia N82) that shoots crisper stills and comparable vids? Beats us. Maybe it's the intuitive editing suite: The Z10's storyboard feature let us cut together a montage of clips and pics with cinematic fades, circle dissolves, music and title cards in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the OS wasn't nearly as user-friendly. We literally had to break out the instruction manual just to send a Bluetooth pic (no joke). Had Motorola spent even half as much time making the software as innovative as its breakaway hardware, the Z10 would have wowed us. But with its lacking OS and underwhelming camera, the phone didn't feel ready for prime time. WIRED: 30-fps vid clips don?t look too shabby. Quick, easy uploading to YouTube and Shozu. Storyboarding was a cinch. Camera shortcut button, plus autofocus, great for snapping pics on the fly. Easy-to-access external microSD card slot is ready for 32 GB. TIRED: 2.2-inch screen isn't ideal for peeping videos. Only 3.2-megapixel cam? (Tarantino wouldn?t settle for less than 5 megapixels). Only a measly 1-GB microSD included. Nav and Symbian UIQ more difficult to penetrate than Fort Knox. Curved slider makes lower keypad buttons harder to press. Price/maker: $500 (unlocked), Motorola Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Motorola Z10 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Sylvania G Netbook is a fairly direct response to the Asus Eee PC 900 series, with an 8.9-inch screen, Linux OS and chicklet keys that make touch typing a fever dream fantasy. And while some of Sylvania's choices here are merely dreadful (the arrow keys are a mere 12mm wide ? thinner than my pinky), it's actually the OS that royally blows it for the Netbook. Ubuntu is known for being one of the most stable and simple versions of Linux on the market, but Sylvania somehow turns it into a nightmare on this system. For a computer ostensibly designed for inexperienced users, it's a disaster. I had trouble with the Ubuntu installation on the Netbook from the start: Blank screens on bootup. MPEGs wouldn't play and codec installations repeatedly failed (or even crashed the machine). Help files weren't installed. And most annoying of all, the battery meter couldn't decide whether the computer was plugged in, and pegged battery life remaining at 0 or 2 percent no matter how long we charged it. The Netbook abruptly shut itself off on at least one occasion, possibly convinced that it was out of juice. With stability this dismal, the specs are largely irrelevant. But if you're willing to invest the time to work through the Netbook's quirks and faults, it could make a great replacement for your desk calculator. ?Christopher Null WIRED: Has a real hard drive (80 GB) instead of flash storage. Includes three USB ports and an SD card reader. Comes in colors. Bright screen for this category. TIRED: Slower than a sedated slug at just about every app despite 1.6-GHz Atom chip and 1-GB RAM (standard $399 model includes just 512-MB RAM). Cartoonish styling. Considerably heavier than advertised (and the Eee PC 900) at 2.6 pounds. Far too buggy to be taken seriously. Price/maker: $450 (as tested), Sylvania Photo courtesy Sylvania Read our full Sylvania G Netbook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Think of this 26-inch TV from Samsung as any one of last year's larger models, shrunk down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's only 720p, but its bright, detailed picture is impressive and its vivid color is surprisingly accurate for a set this small. It scores surprisingly well in our video-processing tests, even besting many of this year's small models. Sure, this model is a bit challenged in the areas of de-interlacing 24-fps film-based HD sources and removing jaggies from diagonal lines, but then so are many of the 32-inch and smaller TVs we've tested this year. And who really worries about 24 FPS film sources on a 26-incher besides geeks like us? Unlike many small sets, though, the Samsung's noise reduction performs beautifully. We saw good results leaving it in "auto" for all but the crappiest video, and only had to really adjust for our truly hideous NR test clip. Hardcore testing aside, the Samsung's good NR combined with its great picture and color delivered where it matters the most: Our HD and SD test movies looked awesome, as did satellite HDTV and output from our 360. ?Chuck Cage WIRED: Attractive, simple remote-control. Side ports (HDMI, S-Video and composite) make hooking up a 360 or camcorder a breeze. Optical digital audio out -- perfect for tying into that massive dorm-theater sound system. TIRED: Some video-processing issues. 1366 x 728 native resolution makes it a not-so-great computer monitor unless you're over 40 and want to read without your glasses. Price/maker: $550, Samsung Read our full Samsung LN26A450C1 LCD TV review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The HP TouchSmart IQ506 is an update to last year's all-in-one touchscreen, the TouchSmart IQ770. This year, HP went for a countertop-friendly design by packing all the components into the IQ506's brilliant 22-inch, touch-sensitive display. As a whole, this makes for a much more streamlined and clutter-free presentation compared to its predecessor. In terms of general ease and responsiveness, the IQ506's touchscreen does a marginally good job. Common maneuvers like double taps and click-and-drag highlighting can be pulled off with minimal hassle. Even problem areas like corners were accessible with relatively effortless finger pokes. Save for a pinch/zoom gesture, however, all the image-rotating fun we were expecting was largely nonexistent. In its defense, leaving notes, creating calendar reminders and a host of other "bulletin board" tasks were a cinch using the TouchSmart dashboard. But even though you can incorporate non-dashboard programs like Firefox into the interface, opening these applications kicks you back out to the Vista desktop. On one hand, the system is a great value when one compares the sticker price to the components, but it's disconcerting that a $1,500 computer lacks the flair and usability of a relatively inexpensive device like the iPhone. We've got our fingers crossed for next year's model. WIRED: Elegant space-saving design. Speaker bar produces booming lows and clear highs. Bright 22-inch screen hides smudges and fingerprints. Integrated TV tuner adds living room chops. Blazing connectivity via gigabit Ethernet and integrated 802.11b/g/n. 500-GB hard drive offers plenty of room for media storage. Whisper-quiet operation. TIRED: Not the smoothest touch-based interface. Handoffs between TouchSmart/Vista programs are slow and awkward. Very limited upgrade options. Midrange GPU puts a damper on hardcore gaming. Retractable bezel feels cheap and rickety. Sluggish processor given its all-in-one class. What? No Blu-ray? Price/maker: $1,500 (as tested), hp.com Read our full HP TouchSmart IQ506 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dubbed the "Boulder," this angular, candy-colored handset is the offspring of the Gadget Lab's crumpled Type-V, Type-S and Type-SL review units. The Boulder isn't another rugged rehash, though. In fact, Casio finally threw a curve by including some fairly useful multimedia features. Welcome additions like music playback, a more powerful (but still lacking) camera, and zippy EV-DO connectivity fatten up this phone's already rock-solid resume. But let's face it -- Casio is extremely late to the party with these commonplace features. Previous pratfalls like the laughably low-res external LCD, and an annoying light show for incoming calls have returned too. Foibles aside, a lot of the "new" features were actually well integrated into this otherwise hard-knock handset. Tasks like downloading and playing music, mobile messaging and accessing webmail were brisk and painless due to a sensible layout and speedy EV-DO network. Little usability improvements (and smart additions like a waterproof cover for the microSD port) reinforced Casio's obvious commitment to achieving a rugged/user-friendly balance. Casio definitely gets kudos for bringing a tank like the G'zOne into the multimedia era. However, the Boulder is more a patchwork of desirable features, rather than a cohesive marriage of entertainment and durability. WIRED: Armored cross section where mud meets multimedia. External LCD doubles as wanderlust-friendly e-compass. Awesome camera flash/flashlight combo. Expanded memory via microSD card slot. Solid call quality -- even after 12 rounds of tough love. Included cradle doubles as a travel charger. Also comes in "less-flamboyant" black. TIRED: Terrible speakerphone quality for both voice and music. Far too expensive. Annoying multicolored lights show signals incoming calls. No file sharing via Bluetooth. Lackluster 1.3-MP camera sucks for both stills and video. Sweet angles still can't hide a brick-ish profile. Price/maker: $130 (after $50 rebate), Verizon Read our full Casio G'zOne Boulder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Out of the box and straight up to the eye you'll immediately enjoy the D3's spacious and bright viewfinder. The noticeably improved 51-point auto focus system is whip-fast and works in concert with an outstanding 1005-pixel metering sensor that gets it right in the most challenging lighting. Images are beautifully consistent with a wide dynamic range and improved noise-reduction settings that give the pictures a more natural look. To achieve that end, Nikon pulled back on the sharpening levels, leaving the choice of added "crunchiness" to a photographer's post-production predilections. Nikon's new three-inch high-res LCD is a revelation. If you do take the plunge, be ready to spend a good chunk of time learning the feature set to exploit the D3's capabilities. From resolution to speed, color control, bit-depth and so much more, the D3 is incredibly customizable. Dial it in for lightning-quick 11-fps sports action, superlow-light shooting (ISO up to 25600), handheld or tripod-mounted live view -- you name it, whatever and however you want to shoot, the D3 does it exceptionally well. WIRED: High ISO shooting is fantastic with relatively low noise at settings up to ISO 3200 and beyond. Live view function the best of the top-end DSLRs. Dual CF card capability. TIRED: So many functions it could take a lifetime to learn them all. No in-camera dust-reduction system. Price/maker: $5,000 (body only), Nikon Read our full Nikon D3 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The U110 ultralight we received looks striking, with a scarlet paisley-etched aluminum lid paired with a shiny jet-black keyboard area. As soon as you open it up and power it on, you come face to face with one of the U110's most interesting yet unsettling features: VeriFace recognition. After booting up, the webcam embedded in the bezel starts scanning the room. When it finds you, it superimposes disturbing cross hairs on your eyes in an attempt to recognize you and unlock the PC. If you haven't registered your peepers, the system will hang, so you have to shut it down, turn the notebook away and open it up again to get it to boot. The 11.1-inch display is bright and sharp, though it can look a bit iridescent at close range. The glossy black keys are big and square but the thin membrane beneath the keys is flimsy and deforms as you type. There is a decent set of ports, but the designers couldn't find room for an optical drive. Seriously, we're pretty disappointed. The included external DVD drive looks cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Not needing an external drive at all. For work purposes, the Lenovo is a capable little machine. The U110 excelled in our PCMark tests, far outdistancing most other ultralights. Overall this is a good PC; it just has a few annoyances. WIRED: Charming good looks will attract the Lenovo faithful who are sick of looking funerary. Excellent business performance will silence office critics of your "red PC (Harumph!)." Delightfully light and slim. TIRED: The keyboard, though pretty, is pretty flimsy. Terminator-style face recognition will give you the heebie-jeebies and make you torch all your Schwarzenegger flicks (Especially Batman and Robin). External DVD means one more gadget to tote. Price/maker: $1,800 (as tested), Lenovo Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad U110 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dishing out a hefty helping of HD, the SR12 is a lot of camera, both in your hand and under the hood with its 120-GB hard drive. The upgraded CMOS sensor and Bionz image processor have significantly improved image quality and stomped out even more noise. Sony?s face-detection system, which works snappily for video and the 10.2-megapixel stills, is very effective both up close and at long range. OK, so it makes great video, but what about the controls? For those who fly on manual, the Cam Control Dial is like piloting an F22. Neatly nestled next to the lens, the silver nubbin is a twisty-twirly festival of videographic functionality, providing quick access to manual adjustments of exposure, focus, white balance and aperture. There?s also an ?easy? button on board. A quick tap on the little blue button and all you?ve got to do is point the camera in the right direction to get the good stuff. In spite of all this Sony video goodness, the SR12 has one glaring flaw ? terribly difficult Mac integration. To get it working you?ve got to have iMovie '08. Previous versions of iMovie don?t have the capability to natively read the AVCHD codec meaning that you had to convert the video to other formats in order to do any post-production. WIRED: Excellent AVCHD video quality got better this time around. Extra-wide 3.2-inch touchscreen LCD is a big bonus. Outstanding sound quality. TIRED: Massive internal hard drive makes it somewhat chunky and a bit of a load to carry. The ?easy? button should be bigger and easier to find. And it should be red. Yeah red and all glowy. $1,400, Sony (Photo by Jackson Lynch for Wired.com) Read our full Sony HDR-SR12 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : With Kensington's Wireless USB Docking Station, the moment you open your Wireless USB (WUSB)-enabled notebook, all your desktop devices are ready to go. We were amazed at how seamless the process is: The station recognized our 20-inch monitor, wireless USB mouse, keyboard and printer. It was as if they were always connected to the notebook. Of course, there are a few gotchas. WUSB is a new standard and some notebooks can't hook up with this docking station. Dell and Lenovo offer a few models, and other companies should be out the gate by this fall. With its plain, geeky looks, the 11.4-ounce antenna-topped station could get lost in a field of wireless routers. But that's not quite enough to put our Battlestar boxers in a knot: The Kensington Wireless Docking Station is a snap to set up and makes mobile computing, well, mobile and hassle-free. You know, the way it's supposed to be. ?Michael S. Lasky WIRED: Drop-dead, simple setup and instant wireless connection of all desktop peripherals makes moving a notebook to and from the desk a hassle-free, nothing-to-plug-in experience. Small footprint means no great loss of desktop real estate. TIRED: Still few WUSB-enabled notebooks on the market. Audio handling could be smoother; default requires USB-powered speakers. First generation device is still pricey. $230, Kensington Read our full Kensington Wireless USB Docking Station review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : This standard-definition lightweight shoots better video and has a much smarter feature set than most of its competitors. In fact, JVC knows that YouTubers can't bear missing the latest police beating or Matthew McConaughey shirtless in the grocery store, so the MS100 is lightning-quick on start up. The 35x optical zoom allows you to capture the crushing blows and bothersome blemishes while keeping a safe distance. Plus, the nifty laser-touch LCD makes you feel like a real cinematographer with speedy access to manual features. While it's nicely appointed, you've got to bridle at a couple things. First, there's no optical image stabilization. But shaky image stabilization aside, the very nature of this camcorder calls into question its usefulness. While neither big nor expensive, there are other, better, ultrasimple run-and-gun camcorders out there. Most are smaller and cheaper, too. With this form factor at this price, the MS100 is kind of stuck in the middle between the svelte flash-based AVCHD camcorders and the shirt-pocket shooters from Flip, Kodak and Creative. WIRED: 35x optical zoom brings the action right to your doorstep. Superb video quality. Formula 1 start-up speed. Easy to use laser-touch LCD. TIRED: No optical image stabilization. Lack of Mac compatibility is inexcusable and utterly perplexing. Three hundred and fifty bones for a camera that's made to record for YouTube? The Flip Mino does the same thing for about half the cost. $350, JVC (Photo: Jackson Lynch/Wired.com) Read our full JVC Everio GZ-MS100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Through some loophole, wormhole or deal with the devil, Gateway has produced a massive desktop replacement that's fast, good and cheap. How fast, you ask? Fast enough to go toe-to-toe with -- and school -- a $4,800 Alienware Area 51 m15x: In our Quake 4 test, the Gateway posted a score of 167.8 fps to the m15x's 167.2. This is partially because the Gateway's 512-MB Nvidia Geforce 9800M is running the show. The FX also has Olympic endurance for larger-class notebooks, going 2 hours, 23 minutes to play a DVD. And that brings us to the cheap part. The Gateway is just $1,400 -- more than three times less than the Alienware and hundreds (and more hundreds) less than most other desktop replacement machines. Sure, it lacks the latest processor (it's got a 2.27-GHz Core Duo), but it has a whopping 4 GB of RAM to help it attack processing tasks and a spacious 200 GB of drive space for your stuff. The big bummer here is the missing Blu-ray drive, which is what is likely keeping this thing so affordable. WIRED: Some of the best gaming performance ever recorded on a PC. Long battery life for a desktop replacement. Comfy and solid keyboard withstands heavy hands. Multimedia controls and slide volume look cool without glowing too brightly. TIRED: No Blu-ray is a letdown for HD-heads, and you can't configure your PC to include the drive. The battery sticks out a bit in the back, and the power brick is monstrous. Power lights on the front, unlike the multimedia controls, are too bright. Price/maker: $1,400 (as tested), Gateway Read our full Gateway P-7811FX Notebook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Alienware prides itself on its tower rigs and desktop replacements, but several of its earlier forays in to the mid-size laptops were disastrous; the branding was intact but the performance wasn't. Not so with the m15x. This 15.4-incher is plenty portable, yet it has all the gaming trappings and the performance to back it up. From the unboxing onward, you can tell that you are paying for the experience as well as the hardware. A baseball cap with an alien head on it, an extra battery, VGA-to-DVI adapter, FireWire adapter and entertainment remote show that Alienware will risk no dissatisfied customers due to lackluster goodies. With specs that include a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 512-MB nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX, the m15x performs impressively, but not out of this world. It all comes down to the loot; this is a luxury item and there are far more affordable PCs with comparable performance. WIRED: Tip-top business and gaming performance. Lots of included extras for gaming elitists. The solid and handsome design will please gamers, and cool lighting effects will titillate geeks. TIRED: Exorbitant price that only a space tourist could pay without wincing. For all the expense, it's not the very best gaming PC. Dual batteries take a long time to charge up. The Blu-ray drive must be removed to accommodate the secondary battery. Price/maker: $4,880 (as tested), Alienware Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Alienware Area-51 m15x review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Archos 605 WiFi is a damn fine portable media player. Now it?s slightly mo' better due to this new GPS accessory, which for $130 adds full-bore street navigation that's on par with a Garmin or TomTom system. Well, a low-end Garmin or TomTom from a few years ago, anyway: This lackluster accessory does not have many of the bells and whistles of modern nav systems, and the one it does have -- real-time traffic updates -- works only in Europe. On the plus side, the software locks in satellite signals faster than NORAD. However, it navigates like a base commander heading home from the officer's club. On several occasions the GPS tried to route us totally out of the way instead of continuing on the road right in front of us. To make matters worse, the software doesn't announce street names, only directions. The GPS Car Holder would look pretty good if this were, say, 2003. And it does get you where you're going, if not always by the fastest or most logical route. At $130, it's a decent deal for current owners, but definitely behind the GPS times. WIRED: Cheaper than a standalone GPS, at least if you already own an Archos 605. High-resolution screen makes maps look mighty purty. Lightning-fast satellite lock. TIRED: The 605 can?t navigate without the car holder, so you can?t go on walkabout. Doesn?t say street names. Requires you to move to Europe if you want traffic features. You have to manually restart the GPS app every time you power on the 605. Price/maker: $130, Archos Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Archos 605 WiFi GPS Car Holder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : As one of six new Fujitsu offerings equipped with Intel's Centrino 2, the Lifebook A6120 more than makes up for its dull exterior with features that will have prettier laptops quaking in their neoprene sleeves. Opposite its no frills glossy shell resides a gorgeous 15.4-inch LCD capable of brightening even the darkest depths of Mordor. Battery life and performance are equally impressive. The new 2.26-GHz CPU more than did the job when it came to photo editing, gaming and pretty much every other benchmark we threw at it. What's more, we squeezed a respectable four and a half hours of battery life under normal usage out of A6120. In fact, after playing with the Lifebook for a week, we were hard pressed to find anything significant to complain about. Would Fujitsu be well served by spending a little more time and effort on design and shrinking down that plump chassis? Sure. But this reviewer is more than happy to overlook a 1.7-inch waistline as long as it hides enough goodies. WIRED: Great bang/buck ratio. The A6120 starts at only $1,150 and jumps but $200 for a Radeon HD 3470 card and Blu-ray drive. Sharp, beautiful screen is one of the brightest we've seen on a laptop. Screw the chicklet-style keys found on other notebooks: Fujitsu's old school keyboard provides near perfect "clickiness" (to borrow a term from designer Amar Sagoo). TIRED: Small trackpad makes for a less than thrilling multitouch experience. Runs consistently hot -- don't rest it on your lap for long or risk a scorched crotch. While certainly not ugly, design is blander than a plate of lima beans. Price/maker: $1,350 (as tested), Fujitsu Read our full Fujitsu Lifebook A6120 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : GeTac clearly had utilitarian users in mind with the E-100, which makes for a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to function. On the bright side, this surprisingly light ultramobile PC is military certified to withstand splashes of water, dust, humidity, shock and even freezing temperatures. Even common vulnerabilities like exposed ethernet and USB ports have been sidestepped with a bevy of watertight rubber stoppers. In fact, my review unit was able to smoothly stream South Park episodes while taking repeated tumbles down a flight of stairs. But it was when I looked under the hood that I found kinks in the armor. Mission-critical applications like Office ran at a reasonable clip in a number of bumpy environments, but for the E-100's price I was expecting a little more "oomph." The 100-GB shock-resistant ATA hard drive and 1 GB of RAM tilt the balance a little bit, but honestly, even the unassuming Eee PC comes stock with Intel's newer Atom chips. Mediocre specs aside, this rough and tumble UMPC performs solidly in a number of harsh environments and boasts a host of connectivity options. WIRED: Rock-solid construction, ergonomics and field performance. Responsive 8.4-inch touchscreen looks phenomenal in direct sunlight. Web ready with 802.11b/g, gigabit ethernet and SIM card slot. Waterproof combination SmartCard/PCMCIA slot. Decent battery life at 3.5 hours (WiFi on). 100-GB hard drive has its own heater for cycling up in freezing conditions. TIRED: Too little processing given the amount of buck. Near three grand price tag? Seriously? No option for a solid state drive?! Recessed USB and headphone jacks are a hassle to plug into. Tinny speaker is more of an afterthought. Lose the stylus and you're S.O.L. Looks that only a FedEx driver could love. Price/maker: $2,880 as tested, GeTac Read our full GeTac E-100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. The 10-inch widescreen can display most fixed-width webpages comfortably, and its keyboard is large enough to house decent-size keys so you can type easily without resorting to Homer's dialing wand. While even some larger laptops are short on ports, the Wind finds room for three USBs, an SD slot and a display connector (take note, MacBook Air!). Of course, it's not perfect. We would have loved to see a DVD burner included, and with all its ports, a mini FireWire would be welcome. Also, don't expect high-end performance from the unit or hearty battery life from its slim, three-cell battery. But if you want a cheap and tiny companion for uploading pictures during a Malaysian jungle trek, or just a little buddy to hang out with you on the couch for IMDB searches, it's pretty hard to be against the Wind. WIRED: Grown-up looks (as opposed to "I want to sit at the big kids' table" found in other netbooks). Full keyboard and the largest screen among mini-notes. Plenty of ports to plug away at. 2.3-pound weight and rounded edges make it simple to pack and lug. TIRED: Lack of a DVD is understandable, but it still makes us cry a little. Hard drive sometimes makes mysterious swallowing sounds. Two-hour battery life is OK, but three would be better. $500, MSI Mobile Photo: Jon Snyder/ Wired.com Read our full MSI Wind U100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Behold, the new Eee Box! Like the rest of the Eee bloodline, these varicolored desktop boxes are small, cheap and adorable (think AppleTV or Mac Mini). Intel's 1.6-GHz Atom processor, up to 2 GBs of memory, four USB ports, an SD card slot, 802.11n and Bluetooth are plenty for the Eee Box to hit that elusive "good enough" mark with aplomb. Once again, you'll get your choice of running either Linux or Windows XP. Then there's the size. While it does have a slightly larger overall footprint, it's much trimmer than the Mac Mini. Not only will this elegant 8.5 x 7 x 1-inch box fit anywhere, but you also have the choice of mounting it directly to the back of any extra monitor you happen to have lying around. To be clear, the Eee Box is not for sweaty frag fests or heavy-duty HD video decoding. But if you have a hankering for a killer kitchen PC or just an über-cheap second or third home PC that runs Linux or XP, it simply can't be beat. WIRED: Small, lightweight and cuter than a bowlful of kittens. More than enough processing power for everyday computing. Cheaper than an ounce of Da Kine bud. The option of running Splashtop for preboot access to Skype, web browsing and IM clients. TIRED: Where's the optical drive? No HDMI output, which actually doesn't matter much because there's also no hardware to decode acceleration. By itself, the Atom processor can barely handle 720p H.264 streams, dashing our hopes of this being the ultimate home-streaming box. $300 as tested, Asus Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Asus Eee Box review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Iomega's own $190 solution for a filled DVR is a 500-GB drive that plays nice with two DVRs in particular: Scientific Atlanta's 80-GB standard definition 8300 and the more recent 160-GB 8300-HD model. We tested the drive out on the latter model and found it more or less did what it promised. It even worked with a neighbor's Series 3 TiVo, which (to its credit) is known for being something of an eSATA slut. Setup in both instances was quick and painless, and involved simply turning off the DVR, plugging in the Iomega drive, and then turning everything back on again. Voila, no more having to choose between Emmanuelle: The Art of Love and the latest episode of Mad Men. WIRED: Reasonably priced. Your grandmother could probably set it up. Instantly adds an additional 300 hours of SD TV, or 60 hours of HD content. TIRED: Only one way to connect the drive to a DVR (that would be eSATA). Limited compatibility, although Iomega claims the drive will work with future SA eSATA-enabled DVRs. No way of controlling what gets stored on the expander drive and what gets stored on the DVR. Transporting DVR'd content to your computer is verboten, and plugging the drive into a computer will automatically reformat it. $190, Iomega Read our full Iomega DVR Expander Drive review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Samsung U900, aka Soul, aka Magical Touch, doesn't really have any supernatural abilities. What it does have is a tiny, touch-sensitive OLED nav-pad that is one of the coolest, most efficient touch interfaces we've seen on a handset. The small display (situated below the main 2.2-inch QVGA screen) features icons that morph based on whatever application is currently on the screen. Switch to camera mode and controls for snapping pictures. Toggle to the music player and buttons for fast-forward, rewind, pause and play pop up. The big selling point is the phone's pocketability. The picture quality and dynamic range could be better (LED flash, we're talking about you), but at 0.5-inches thick and 7 ounces, this slider is more svelte than just about every 5-MP cam we've tested. Ultimately, our biggest complaint is that you cannot use the camera without sliding open the phone first. This design protects the lens from dust bunnies and pocket grime, yes, but shooting with a fully open device was a tad awkward at times. WIRED: External microSD slot makes it a cinch to swap cards on the fly. Bluetooth (+A2DP). Competent image-editing suite. Video editor allows you to layer additional audio tracks. Decent facial detection. Haptic feedback can be tweaked to three different levels of intensity or switched-off entirely. TIRED: Bundled proprietary ear buds sound duller than Ben Stein. No Xenon flash. No GPS. No WiFi. Lower-res video clips. Proprietary headphone jack positioned on the side = hard to pocket when phones are plugged in. Noticeable screen glare when outdoors. $400, Samsung Photo: Issac Brekken/Wired.com Read our full Samsung SGH-U900 Soul "Magical Touch" review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The biggest selling point of the new Sidekick is supposed to be the customizable "skins" you can order to replace the solid-color ones (we opted for jet black). But apart from flashy aesthetics, the pocket-friendly 2008 is 0.4-inches shorter and 0.9-ounces lighter than the pricier LX. It also packs features that were sorely missed with the tragically minimalist iD. Most notably, a 2.0-megapixel camera that can also capture video clips (albeit crappy ones). Though the 2.6-inch WQVGA swivel screen?s received a slight -- and necessary -- boost in pixels (400 x 240), the resolution?s still not fantastic. And neither is Bluetooth. We found data transfers not only paused the media player (annoying), but afterward, we had to go back and manually un-pause whatever track was playing (doubly annoying). For the price, though the 2008 is a solid option compared to the LX -- but only if you live and die by instant messaging and you don't mind being seen with Paris Hilton's device of choice in public. WIRED: Spacious, comfy QWERTY. 3.5-mm headphone jack. Surprisingly loud, radically clear music player. Wide screen excellent for web browsing. Solid battery life. Quick video recording/sharing. Comes with two skins (we got black and iridescent lime). Bluetooth with A2DP (great to have, even if it does disrupt tunes). TIRED: Screen retains more fingerprints than the Feds. No flash. No WiFi. Mike captures poor sound when recording video. Only 20-second video clips. Only 512-MB microSD card included. Apps are mostly in the $2.99+ range (except for the janky free Calculator). No 3-G. Price/maker: $150 (with 2-year contract), T-Mobile Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Sidekick review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Cyclists know it's plum foolish to roll around on two wheels sans helmet, but it can be just as dangerous to bike about at night without a light. A good headlight affixed to your handlebars is just the thing to help cut through the murk and get you to your destination safely. Here we pit two of the top dogs on the market against each other and see which comes out on top. ?Eric Smillie Planet Bike Blaze This one-watt LED cannon goes the extra mile, and we don't just mean it shoots light a ridiculous distance. Due in no small part to its particularly aggressive blinking mode, accurately called superflash, it didn?t just help us catch drivers' attentions; it had them anxiously craning their necks to check whether we were trying to pull them over. Drawing on only two AA batteries, this baby cuts down on weight but its CREE XR-E diode, coupled with a specially engineered Fraen lens, still pumps out the brightest light of all the lamps we tested -- enough to bounce off signs, license plates, and other reflective materials up to four blocks away, giving us plenty of time to make an impression. All we have to worry about now is whether some cop-hating, GTA IV-overdosing motorist trying to run us down. WIRED: Recessed switch only works if pressed firmly, which means it won?t turn on in your bag while you jostle your way to the bar, leaving you in the dark at closing time. Planet Bike spends 25 percent of its profits on bike advocacy. TIRED: The brightness and reduced weight come at a price: 20 hours of battery life in blinking mode, and only seven on high. Though it installs without the use of a tool, the handlebar bracket is tricky to tighten and slips easily. $50, Planet Bike Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : While not the sharpest bulb on our handlebars, the WhiteLite HP AA is in it for the long haul. Don?t get us wrong -- just like other 1-watt LED headlamps, this portable, all-in one lamp is more than a glorified blinky. When engineering this light, Topeak got all snippy, cutting the cords to one of its external power-pack lights and reengineered it to accept three AA batteries. Its widely diffused beam covers plenty of surface area and earned our trust by helping us dodge nasty potholes and tree roots on unlit paths. But where this guy really shines is in perseverance, by lasting 30 hours on high and a whopping 120 on flash. WIRED: The mounting bracket screws tight with a finger knob and adjusts five degrees left and right to get a straight aim even on angled handlebars, although it does require an Allen key to tighten. Little red LED signals when batteries are low. TIRED: Blinks come slowly and lack urgency in flashing mode. Pushing the rear on/off push button can rotate the mount and mess up the light angle. Sound like a small problem? It won't be when you look up just in time to face plant into the bumper of a lifted pickup. $60, Topeak Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The E71 looks more like a Blackberry Killer, but don?t be fooled: This great white hope gives the iPhone a run for its money in a lot of different areas (yes, really). Despite its obvious lack of an oversize touchscreen interface, Nokia wins points for a remarkably trim profile (10mm vs. 12.3mm), decent 3.2-megapixel camera (instead of 2.0), and the fact it's not tied to any carrier (yet). Setting up Nokia's Mail for Exchange program required no IT help or time. QuickOffice let us create, edit and send Word/Excel/PowerPoint files on the fly while we browsed PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Reader. The E71 is stocked with enough apps and goodies to keep even the most overworked road warrior on the ball, but it didn't feel too "business" due to two separate customizable home screens. One is designed to house all of your work apps while the other is geared more toward entertainment with programs for audio, video and gaming. The phone's 2.36-inch, 320 x 240 QVGA display is only slightly smaller than the iPod classic's, and though the resolution can't top the iPhone's, with 15 fps, the E71 is still solid for YouTube clips. Oh, and did we mention the E71's got battery life for days? Yes, literally, three of them. WIRED: Up to 8 GB in an easy-to-access, external microSD slot. Quick and seamless OS. GPS, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth (you name it, it's basically got it). Vivid screen (even in direct sunlight). Textured stainless steel backing prevents slippage. Relatively lightweight (127 grams = six grams lighter than iPhone). Hit any letter on the QWERTY pad and predictive text calls up that section of your address book. TIRED: No standard 3.5-mm headphone jack. 3.2-megapixel camera's optics could be better. LED flash could be way better. N-Gage gaming platform not available. Screen's wide, but not wide enough to do a feature-length film justice. For $500, you could get two 8-GB, 3-G JesusPhones (with $100 left over to put toward AT&T's data plan). $500 (unlocked), Nokia Photo: Max Buck/Wired.com Read our full Nokia E71 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. Wired.Com Gear Gallery: Giant New ThinkPad, Top DSLRs and More ^{{new window}}   Www.Wired.Com - : The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 is the most massive laptop Lenovo's ever made. This over-nine-pound monster is loaded in every way you can imagine and a few you probably can't. Two laptop "firsts" are already making waves. For starters you'll find a stylus secreted in the base of the W700 for a pint-sized Wacom digitizer that has been added next to the mouse pad. The second feature is built-in color calibration. Settings are tweaked automatically, and the before versus after images are striking in the effect the calibration has. Though groundbreaking, these two features actually add just $150 to a laptop that costs ? wait for it ? $4,473. It's all those other specs that add to the price tag: A gorgeous LCD, by far the brightest 17-inch model we've ever tested. Core 2 Duo CPU running at a blistering 2.8 GHz. 4 GB of RAM (and 64-bit Vista installed, so you can actually access it all). Dual hard drives. And finally, an Nvidia Quatro FX 3700M graphics card with 1 GB of video RAM. All this goodness powers the W700 to record-setting benchmarks, though not quite offering the highest gaming scores we've seen. The stratospheric price tag ensures the W700 will likely only find a home in the high-test worlds of CAD, 3-D imaging and professional photo editing. The rest of us will simply have to appreciate the thing from afar ? and wait for its features to trickle down to cheaper, smaller machines. WIRED: Digitizer and color calibrator set a new bar for features in a notebook. Top-notch performance all around. Unbeatable screen brightness at this size. TIRED: Seems bigger than it needs to be: Lid is 20 inches diagonally to fit a 17-inch screen. 87 minutes of battery life is 84 more than the W700 will ever spend on. DVD playback stuttered and ultimately crashed the system during our tests. Keyboard not up to usual ThinkPad standards. Blaringly loud fan. $4,470 (as tested), Lenovo Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad W700 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Nikon's latest offering, the 12-megapixel D90 is a feature-packed fistful of photo fury that?s sure to help pave your way to full-fledged Flickrati status. Straight from the box and out on the street, the D90 shows off its picture-making prowess. Our testing unit came bundled with a (bordering on) superwide 18-105mm f3.5-5.6 lens that we used for all of our evaluations. The 11-point focusing system speedily locks onto subjects, and the flash images show off a pleasing balance between the strobe and the ambient light even when just shooting in the full Auto and Program modes. The camera also makes three flavors of video, the yummiest being up to five minutes of 720p HD in a cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio. With the high-quality sensor and optics, video clarity and depth of field are on par with the D90?s stills. Nikon?s also loaded the D90 with the same high-res 3-inch LCD found on its $5,000 D3. If that?s not big enough, just plug it straight into your HDTV with the built-in HDMI connection. All told, this camera has scads of grin-worthy features that will continue to feed your frenzy filled lifestyle. WIRED: Enormous image sensor blows open the door to some of the finest 12.3-megapixel images we've produced yet. Nikon?s top-of-the-line high-res 3-inch LCD is prettier than looking at a supermodel with beer goggles. In-camera dust reduction is spot on at removing spots from the sensor. One-touch info button and simple, descriptive help screens clarify deep, detailed menus. Toss out your camcorder; the 720p, 24 fps video capture on the D90 will trump its performance ? especially in low lighting. Face facts: Face-detection system works quickly, accurately, effortlessly.. TIRED: Only manual focus in the video mode. Seriously, this is really the only problem we had with the D90 and even that was a stretch. $1,300 (as tested), Nikon Read our full Nikon D90 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Sony came out swinging for the fences with the introduction of its ?flagship? DSLR, the A900. It's packed with a memory-card bursting 24-megapixel full-frame sensor, crystal-clear high-def LCD, onboard image stabilization, and priced at $3,000, this one?s likely to give the vastly more expensive, highest-end Canons and Nikons a solid run for their money. Sony planted plenty of buttons and a ?multi-selector? joystick on the back of the body for no-menu-digging-necessary adjustments, and the viewfinder offers 100 percent coverage and is easily the brightest of any camera on the market today. Sony?s sensor-borne image-stabilization system is the first of its kind on a full-frame sensor. From the viewfinder to the LCD to images on paper, the A900 is truly an impressive camera. It?s got an ease of use that will most certainly appeal to aspiring photogs along with some industry-leading features that completely exceed expectations and, at this price point, may cause some professional shooters to step to the Sony side of the street. WIRED: Bright, vivid and spacious viewfinder. Excellent in-camera image-stabilization system. Easy, no-menu adjustments with multi-selector toggle. Killer price for the highest resolution; high-functioning, easy-to-use DSLR. TIRED: Focus points not big and bright enough in brightly lit situations. No latch for memory card cover. Pointless postage-stamp-sized LCD on top of the body. No continuous ISO in viewfinder. Power switch on left side of body. $4,750 as tested, Sony Read our full Sony Alpha A900 DSLR review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : As far as storage, the QA0005 is barebones at best. At heart, it's just a Maxtor One-Touch 4 Mini Hard Drive encased in armor. That's it. So, between the clunky backup software and the bulky design, we were thrown for a loop. Equally puzzling was the lack of a physical install disk. Having the manual suggest we "copy all files on the hard drive" in lieu of providing a solid install disk seems strangely low-rent. Loading up our precious movie and music libraries was easy enough courtesy of the unit's zippy write speeds. In general, accessing files on the 250-GB hard drive was simple enough, if not a little poky with larger files like DVDs. But isn't a love for pyromania/water torture what got us here in the first place? Right. So, after unleashing hell on the QA0005, we have to say we're impressed. Twelve hours of submersion (it's good for up to 24) and some quality time in the oven and fireplace (good for 30 minutes at 1550 degrees) didn't seem to phase the unit. However, the one thing the QA0005 didn't take in stride was shaking. Despite having a tough exterior, the unit seems to be susceptible to earthquakes. Or just old-fashioned clumsiness. For the non-disaster-prone, you're probably better off spending the extra dough on something cheaper with more capacity. WIRED: It's better prepared for the apocalypse than you are. Protects from dust and dirt in addition to fire and water. Whisper-quiet operation. Easy setup -- one USB Y cable and that's it. Offers protection via password and data encryption. TIRED: All that protection doesn't come cheap. Surprisingly heavy at 11 pounds. No expansion options -- in fact, opening the device voids the warranty. Occasionally sluggish access speeds. Clunky interface for scheduling backups. No shock-proofing. $400, Sentry Safe Read our full Sentry Safe QA0005 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : How many iPods are there in the world with music that never gets updated because their owners are too busy, uninspired or just plain lazy? A lot of them, says Slacker. The company designed its music ecosystem to function with the least conceivable amount of human effort. We enjoyed Slacker's first attempt at a portable device ? large and blocky as it was ? but this second version, the Slacker G2, now slips easily into any pocket, at 3.5-inches tall and 2.6-ounces. With the G2, you'll be able to carry around up to 25 (4-GB) or 40 (8-GB) stations that can be programmed by artist(s) or by selecting one of Slacker's 100 preprogrammed channels from its catalog of over two million songs (considerably more than Pandora has). Stations are affected by your clicks of the Heart and Ban buttons. So if you never want to hear "Total Eclipse of the Heart" again, under any circumstances, you won't. Slacker factory workers load each device with channels the buyer has already created on Slacker.com. And with a paid subscription, any song you "Heart" gets downloaded to your computer. But at its core, this is internet radio that works when there's no internet. Isn't it about time your portable player had personalized custom radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so. WIRED: Allows lazy music discovery. Lets you listen and edit stations on the device, Slacker.com, or Windows software. Also loads MP3s, WMAs and AACs the old-fashioned way too (Windows only). Clean sound. Nice in-ear headphones, controls. Displays album art, band bios on a 2.8-inch screen. Internet radio feature free if you can stomach skip limitations and the occasional audio ad; plans start at $7.50 per month if you can't. 802.11b/g. Two million songs in streaming catalog. TIRED: Updating via WiFi connection eats lots of battery life. The rubber stoppers that plug USB and (unused) docking port get lost easily. WiFi connection requires AC adapter if battery power is below 50 percent. Doesn't leave room for much music loaded from your computer. $250 (as tested), Slacker Read our full Slacker G2 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. Moreover, the MSI is running good old Windows XP, saving you from the frustrations of Vista, a Linux learning curve, or (perish the thought) the laughably underpowered Win CE. For look and feel, it slaps most of its rivals silly. The 10-inch widescreen can display most fixed-width web pages comfortably, and it lacks the extra-wide bezels that make other netbook screens feel smaller than they actually are. Its keyboard is large enough to house decent-size keys so you can type easily and the Wind finds room for three USBs, an SD slot and a display connector (take note, MacBook Air!). Of course, it's not perfect. We would have loved to see a DVD burner or a mini FireWire. But if you want a cheap and tiny companion for uploading pictures during a Malaysian jungle trek, or just a little buddy to hang out with you on the couch for IMDB searches, it's pretty hard to be against the Wind. WIRED: Grown-up looks (as opposed to "I want to sit at the big kids' table" found in other netbooks). Full keyboard and the largest screen among mini-notes. Plenty of ports to plug away at. 2.3-pound weight and rounded edges make it simple to pack and lug. TIRED: Lack of a DVD is understandable, but it still makes us cry a little. Hard drive sometimes makes mysterious swallowing sounds. Two-hour battery life is OK, but three would be better.? ?$500, MSI (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com) Read our full MSI Wind U100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Here's a hard truth: Even if Apple decided to carve its new Nano out of petrified poo and bless it with a Braille display, the interface alone would still make Cupertino's latest flash-based music player leagues better than the competition. So what's our opinion of the new Nano? Well, it's just like the old Nano, just a little roomier (fine) and shaped like an airfoil (weird). This new aerodynamic form doesn't seem to have any discernible functional purpose, but the Triscuit-shaped Nano had some distinct advantages over this new fourth-gen model: It was a better piece of fitness gear, fitting more comfortably into sporty armbands and the tiny pockets so common to the backs of running shorts. The old screen-orientation also allowed you to control video content more intuitively, though the new elongated shape is better for navigating long playlists. Sure, that's a decent upgrade -- as is the price-to-gig ratio -- but unless you absolutely need to shake-to-shuffle (spazz) or will be building an airplane out of iPods (paging Mr. Branson), the best thing about the new Nano is how flooded eBay's gonna be with cast-off third-gen models. ?Joe Brown WIRED: Enough colors to make you second-guess dropping that third hit of acid before hitting the Apple store. Up to 16 gigs of storage. On the fly Genius (should be called Lazy) playlists let you quickly suit your music mood. Energy saver mode is clutch. Eight gigs for 150 bones is our kind of upgrade. TIRED: Why no love for the squarePod? Shake-to-shuffle is a nightmare. Tapered design is just curvy enough to be fey, but not quite severe enough to be sharpened. $149 (8 GB), Apple (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com) Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Put simply, the Boom is an all-in-one take on the Squeezebox Duet. By adding three-inch woofers (and some tiny tweeters), the Boom is the first of the Squeezeboxes capable of both streaming and playback. Like the incredibly awesome Duet, the Boom grants access to all the network-accessible (and non-DRMed) music stored on your computer. The Boom also provides easy access to streaming content from Sirius, Slacker, Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody. As a device, it's not quite enough to cause Sonos to break a sweat, but for a single-room music-streaming experience, Logitech seems to have adequately covered its bases. Like the other Squeezeboxes, the Boom is easy to sync up with the office 802.11 but little device tweaks via Logitech's desktop hub can be slow and plodding. The system has great clarity, clean mids and a pleasing amount of bass given its class. For what the Boom is designed for -- namely, streaming digital audio throughout a house or office -- it's more than adequately powered. Unfortunately, that's not enough to make it the be-all end-all for streaming music setups. Squeezebox perks like the Duet's fancy remote have been sidestepped in favor of a much more drab and utilitarian design. Between this and the Boom's lack of audio outputs, the device seems to occupy this awkward space between fuller-featured streaming systems like the Duet or Sonos, and a blah desktop radio/alarm clock. That's not to say that the Boom doesn't excel in that limited niche, but we were expecting Logitech to "squeeze" a little more pizazz and a lot more flexibility out of the Boom. WIRED: Fantastically clear audio quality given its size. Supports a host of alarm and snooze functions. Magnetic remote sticks to the top of unit. Dual antennas ensure buttery smooth audio streams. Offers two-week backup battery for alarm functions. Supports a bevy of audio formats: MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, WMA, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, APE, MPC and WavPack. TIRED: Unexciting (yet functional) design. A veritable desert for audio outputs. Occasional slow response from the remote. No DRM support can mean trouble for protected iTunes/Zune libraries. Stick to the remote -- the glossy black chassis is a fingerprint magnet. Reliance on AC power limits mobility. $300, Logitech Read our full Logitech Squeezebox Boom review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most earbuds take a direct path to your auditory nerves, aiming their miniature speakers straight down your ear canals like the Batmobile rocketing through the Holland Tunnel. Not so with the Purebuds, whose "reverse sound" design positions the speakers pointing outwards, towards the rest of the world. A plastic cover then bounces the sound waves back into your ear and through one of three different sets of silicone tips, which are intended to provide three different sound profiles: surround sound, bass heavy and neutral. The advantage of this bass-ackwards arrangement? These buds, unlike others, deliver hefty beats without distortion -- or danger to your eardrums. In practice, the Purebuds deliver decent quality sound, albeit it's a little muffled on the high end. And you can crank your iPhone all the way to 11 with no perceptible distortion. Your ears may be bleeding, but it won't be on account of the earbud speakers peaking. ?Dylan Tweney WIRED: A damn sight better than the default buds that came with your iPod. Bass-boosting tips augment the bass only slightly -- but they do stick in your ears nicely. "Safe listening" spiel might get your mom off your back. TIRED: Variety of tips provide little actual difference to sound. "Surround sound" tips prone to falling out of your ear. Still possible to hurt your ears by cranking Minor Threat all the way up. $50, Purebud Read our full Purebuds review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Behold, the Novint Falcon. It sits on your desk and provides force feedback with powerful motors within the device that provide a full range of responses, whether you're bouncing a ball on a string or reloading a shotgun. Using the Falcon's new Pistol Grip, titles like Half-Life 2 suddenly become an entirely different game. Forget fragging as you know it. With the pistol grip coming dangerously close to flying out of your hands after a few quick bursts with a submachine gun, you may wonder how you got along without this level of feedback in the first place. Every weapon takes on new life, from the meager jostling of the standard pistol, to the forceful thunder of a rocket launcher's blast. Of course, there's more to force feedback than weapon recoil. Whether or not the Falcon replaces your prized gaming mouse will be a matter of proper ?training,? you might just end up frustrated. WIRED: Incredibly precise feedback. Very stable, with strong motors that resist lots of abuse. Makes playing Virtual Pool a lot more interesting. TIRED: Time-intensive learning curve might turn off folks used to their controls. Takes up quite a bit of desk space. $190, Novint Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Novint Falcon review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Bushnell BackTrack aims to help you find your parking spot every time by pairing a digital compass with a high-sensitivity SIRF Star III GPS receiver. The BackTrack, once set with any of three location modes, will guide you back to a marked spot with directional arrows and distance estimations as your guide. To test it, I took it to an outdoor music festival. On day one of the event, I didn't bother using the BackTrack and when it came time to return to my vehicle, I led three friends around in the dark on a 45-minute wild car chase. On day two, I set my location with the BackTrack when I parked in the morning. I recalled the spot later that night and Voila! the BackTrack lead me back to my vehicle in less than 10 minutes. Sure, other devices provide a similar service, but here's the thing about the BackTrack: It's smaller than any GPS unit and gets reception better than any cellphone. If you find yourself getting lost easily, and don't mind porting around an extra gadget, then give the BackTrack a try. WIRED: Simple, two-button operation. Backlight assures you're never left in the dark. Compact size makes it a manageable accessory for any outing. Weather-resistant. Self-calibrating compass. GPS tracking works both in and out of civilization. TIRED: Clumsy fingers can sometimes erase original locations, rendering the BackTrack useless. If you don't set your location, you're screwed. Aside from being a compass and a GPS tracker, it does nothing else. Runs on AAA batteries -- make sure you bring backups. $86 (as tested), Bushnell Read our full Bushnell BackTrack review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : First, a word to the RAZR fans. (There are some still left.) Though the V750 has similar looks and ergonomics, this isn't the second coming of the world's favorite fashion phone. With military-grade protection from dust, shock and high and low temperatures, it's a different creature entirely. Even though it casts the same fragile silhouette as the RAZR, my review unit took repeated 4-foot drops and dirt naps with ease (and just a few cracks). After brushing the phone off, I was still able to make and receive calls with reasonably clear audio. If you're concerned with the average accidental drops and collisions a cellphone endures on a day-to-day basis, the V750 has you covered, hands down. Ohhh, but that doesn't mean all is well in Rugged Town. The phone's hard plastic chassis and keypad did fine in my splash tests, but without the official certification in place, it's unlikely that the V750 could take a full dunk. Luckily, Motorola defied rugged convention by outfitting the V750 with an impressive array of multimedia features. Be it pictures, video, music or (gasp!) mobile web, the V750's brisk interface and capabilities match pace with most midlevel multimedia phones. Its 67 MB of memory and crippled Bluetooth keep it from groundbreaking status, but paired with its price, these features make the V750 a solid investment for the weekend adventure-seeker. WIRED: Sensible balance of utility and entertainment. Fantastic data speeds via EV-DO Rev A. 1,000-entry phone book stores multiple numbers per entry and postal addresses. 1.6-inch external LCD makes on-the-go media playback a breeze. Looks and handles like a sleek, non-rugged phone. TIRED: Modestly rugged at best. Push-To-Talk setup is convoluted and clunky. Muddy speakerphone audio at high volumes. Flimsy battery door flies off during impacts. Verizon OS cripples Bluetooth, video message length and file sharing. Flashless cameras are the stuff of the Dark Ages. $260, Motorola Read our full Motorola V750 Adventure review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Dell Studio Hybrid doesn?t run on ethanol and D-cells, but it does consume about 70 percent less electricity than those hulking desktop towers. This über-cute little media-cruncher comes in your choice of rich automotive colors (or bamboo, for Pier 1-themed abodes), and you can swap colors on demand with interchangeable sleeves. The Hybrid starts at $500, but by the time you trick it out with goodies like a slot-loading Blu-ray drive, Wireless-N adapter, Logitech?s diNovo Mini Keyboard (a must if you?re planning couch time), a digital TV tuner, and the bamboo sleeve (a $130 upgrade -- WTF?), the price rockets north of $1,300. Hybrids can serve desk duty or accent your living room: Even the base model comes stocked with HDMI port (DVI, too), so it?s a cinch to pair with HDTV. Blu-ray movies at 1920 x 1080 did just fine aside from a video stutter every time we adjusted the volume. Dell scores big points for style, power conservation and customization. WIRED: Sips power, unlike those heinous watt-guzzling towers. Swappable color sleeves let you change the paint job to match your mood -- or paint job. Reports for media-center duty with HDMI port and slot-loading Blu-ray drive. Metal stand cleverly morphs between vertical and horizontal positions. TIRED: Wussy integrated graphics choke on 3-D games. Looks rigged for silent running, but actually runs a little noisy. $130 bamboo sleeve will only appeal to aristocratic pandas. $1,365 (as tested), Dell Read our full Dell Studio Hybrid review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : To instantly win the mine's-better-than-yours camera contest, show friends the Z150's gorgeous 3-inch LCD. It's mammoth for a camera with a sub-$200 price tag, and bright enough to see in direct sunlight. You can also fire off a group shot without having to take the customary 20 steps back to fit everybody in: The Z150's wide-angle lens (28mm) offers a dramatically broader field of view than most pocket cams. Meanwhile, the lens zooms to 4x before the digital faux-zoom kicks in -- that?s a whole "x" better than other models in this price range. Idjit-proof controls and logical onscreen menus make the Z150 a camera anyone can pick up and use sans manual. A dedicated video-record button captures YouTube-friendly movies at 30 fps. The Z150 tops out at 8.1 megapixels -- more than adequate for the party scene. But as you might expect, the camera produces considerable image noise when the lights are low and the ISO high. Only the color reproduction disappoints: It's good, but lacking that zing we see in competing models from, say, Canon. Of course, some of Canon's pocket shooters tend toward the bulky as well, so we can forgive the EX-Z150 its slightly excessive carriage. And we're mad for its big-screen, sweet wide-angle lens, and affordable price. WIRED: Wide-angle lens just plain kicks ass, and 4x optical zoom gets you close. One-touch video recording and YouTube-upload software make this the perfect camera for Paris-Lindsay-Bigfoot sightings. TIRED: Too thick and heavy to leave in your pocket all day. Small, stiff control pad. Snapshot colors lack pop. Battery must be removed for charging. $200, Casio Read our full Casio EX Z150 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Everything?s getting tiny. The once-sexy V-8 engine is now an automotive pariah while the Smart Car gets all the chicks; HD video cameras are now damn near Twinkie-size, and we?ll probably be implanting the next-generation iPod in our molars. But at least one company isn?t succumbing to all this smaller-is-better madness: TiVo just announced the TiVo HD XL. Stuffed like a Cornish hen with a terabyte hard drive, it?s the highest-capacity DVR available, with room for 150 hours of HD content. That?s, like, every Olympic event you actually care about plus all 60 episodes of The Wire. It?s an entire season of Sunday Night Football with more than enough space for your Food Network-obsessed roommate to go balls-out on Batali. -- Joe Brown WIRED: Western Digital hard drive is nearly silent. THX-certified audio and video (finally). Say goodbye to the ugly stick -- the XL gets the same slick programmable remote as the Series 3. TiVo-easy, as expected, with the company?s ever-expanding catalog of downloadable videos (YouTube!). TIRED: Remote collects more greasy fingerprints than a secondhand sexbot. Annoying info screen hovers over the picture a few seconds too long with each channel change. Cutesy TiVo noises are a little grating, and your only other option is to turn all the sound effects off. We noticed an increase in video artifacts when recording off both tuners simultaneously. In San Francisco, at least, you have to deal with Satan Comcast to get service. $600 plus the $20 $12.95 monthly fee is a lot of cheddar. $600, TiVo Read our full TiVo HD XL review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Need to juice up your desktop music scene? Nuforce has just the thing. Its new Icon is a miniature, multithreat amplifier that can be used to pump music from a computer or audio player to your speakers and headphones. Although it's only 12 watts per channel, the Icon is powerful enough to act as a pre-amp to full-fledged stereos and on its own can drive most bookshelf speakers, producing a wide, spacious sound stage. The sound quality from the headphone jack on my laptop is thin and distorted, but when I hooked up the Icon via the USB port and patched in my Grado SR80 cans, it was a revelation. The Icon uses a high-quality digital-to-analog converter to convert the computer's digital signal to sweet-sounding analog, and all of a sudden the music was crystal clear, the bass cleaner and deeper, and the overall sound infinitely better. The only downside here may be that you'll realize how crummy some of those downloaded MP3s actually sound. In the end, the beauty of the Icon is that it can be used in so many different ways. I've got it powering some outdoor speakers on my patio -- and it excels wherever you rig it. WIRED: Sturdy silicon-like stand holds it vertically. Rad design and color choices: red, black, blue, silver. Small enough to take on vacation. TIRED: Ethernet speaker cables are cutting-edge, but standard banana plugs would be better. Bass can be a touch thin in heavier (rock, hip-hop) music. Price/maker: $250, Nuforce Photo: Christopher Jones/Wired.com Read our full Nuforce Icon Desktop Amplifier review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Treo Pro sports a shiny, rounded, tuxedo-black exterior and a handful of practical OS "shortcuts." Aside from the industrial iPhone-like design lines, those shortcuts are enough to make even the most die-hard Machead grin and bear Windows Mobile (almost). At the top of our shortcut list are the dedicated WiFi button on the right side and customizable button on the left (ours was set for camera). Circumventing the main menu and tiresome nav made the phone a joy to use. The touchscreen, on the other hand, was far from blissful. Laggy and unresponsive, we found ourselves double- and sometimes triple-tapping -? even with the stylus. Palm is definitely flexing its once-mighty muscle and trying to say it can build a stylish multimedia device with a touchscreen. But for $550, a touch interface should have more precision than this. We can only hope Palm continues to fine-tune the screen and ditch that archaic stylus permanently. WIRED: Trim, light and pocketable. Shortcuts prove beyond useful. Decent 2-megapixel pics. MicroUSB Battery lasts almost two full days. 3.5mm headphone jack. PPT/Excel/Word and PDF-reading, of course. Google Maps and TeleNav GPS, which offers turn-by-turn directions plus target searches; e.g., gas stations by price. Ships unlocked. TIRED: Menu scrolling is about as fluid as a piece of dolomite. Slippery "obsidian" plastic casing retains more fingerprints than the NSA. Noticeable screen glare. Curved design comprised by bottom-side USB/headphone jack that should be recessed more. Bluetooth not included in image send options. Only way to access microSD? Remove battery cover. Price/maker: $550, Palm Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Palm Treo Pro review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Look! Hardware that breaks ?- on purpose! The Z10's apparent bendy kick-slide design may be flashy, but turning out an innovative design is about the only thing this phone has going for it. Though it's billed as a "pocket-sized mobile studio," this 4-ounce, platinum-trimmed phone is certainly no substitute for even a mediocre minicamcorder (Exhibit A: the Flip Mino). So why drop $500 on the Z10 when you can get a 5-megapixel camphone (Exhibit B: the Nokia N82) that shoots crisper stills and comparable vids? Beats us. Maybe it's the intuitive editing suite: The Z10's storyboard feature let us cut together a montage of clips and pics with cinematic fades, circle dissolves, music and title cards in less than 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the OS wasn't nearly as user-friendly. We literally had to break out the instruction manual just to send a Bluetooth pic (no joke). Had Motorola spent even half as much time making the software as innovative as its breakaway hardware, the Z10 would have wowed us. But with its lacking OS and underwhelming camera, the phone didn't feel ready for prime time. WIRED: 30-fps vid clips don?t look too shabby. Quick, easy uploading to YouTube and Shozu. Storyboarding was a cinch. Camera shortcut button, plus autofocus, great for snapping pics on the fly. Easy-to-access external microSD card slot is ready for 32 GB. TIRED: 2.2-inch screen isn't ideal for peeping videos. Only 3.2-megapixel cam? (Tarantino wouldn?t settle for less than 5 megapixels). Only a measly 1-GB microSD included. Nav and Symbian UIQ more difficult to penetrate than Fort Knox. Curved slider makes lower keypad buttons harder to press. Price/maker: $500 (unlocked), Motorola Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Motorola Z10 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Sylvania G Netbook is a fairly direct response to the Asus Eee PC 900 series, with an 8.9-inch screen, Linux OS and chicklet keys that make touch typing a fever dream fantasy. And while some of Sylvania's choices here are merely dreadful (the arrow keys are a mere 12mm wide ? thinner than my pinky), it's actually the OS that royally blows it for the Netbook. Ubuntu is known for being one of the most stable and simple versions of Linux on the market, but Sylvania somehow turns it into a nightmare on this system. For a computer ostensibly designed for inexperienced users, it's a disaster. I had trouble with the Ubuntu installation on the Netbook from the start: Blank screens on bootup. MPEGs wouldn't play and codec installations repeatedly failed (or even crashed the machine). Help files weren't installed. And most annoying of all, the battery meter couldn't decide whether the computer was plugged in, and pegged battery life remaining at 0 or 2 percent no matter how long we charged it. The Netbook abruptly shut itself off on at least one occasion, possibly convinced that it was out of juice. With stability this dismal, the specs are largely irrelevant. But if you're willing to invest the time to work through the Netbook's quirks and faults, it could make a great replacement for your desk calculator. ?Christopher Null WIRED: Has a real hard drive (80 GB) instead of flash storage. Includes three USB ports and an SD card reader. Comes in colors. Bright screen for this category. TIRED: Slower than a sedated slug at just about every app despite 1.6-GHz Atom chip and 1-GB RAM (standard $399 model includes just 512-MB RAM). Cartoonish styling. Considerably heavier than advertised (and the Eee PC 900) at 2.6 pounds. Far too buggy to be taken seriously. Price/maker: $450 (as tested), Sylvania Photo courtesy Sylvania Read our full Sylvania G Netbook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Think of this 26-inch TV from Samsung as any one of last year's larger models, shrunk down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's only 720p, but its bright, detailed picture is impressive and its vivid color is surprisingly accurate for a set this small. It scores surprisingly well in our video-processing tests, even besting many of this year's small models. Sure, this model is a bit challenged in the areas of de-interlacing 24-fps film-based HD sources and removing jaggies from diagonal lines, but then so are many of the 32-inch and smaller TVs we've tested this year. And who really worries about 24 FPS film sources on a 26-incher besides geeks like us? Unlike many small sets, though, the Samsung's noise reduction performs beautifully. We saw good results leaving it in "auto" for all but the crappiest video, and only had to really adjust for our truly hideous NR test clip. Hardcore testing aside, the Samsung's good NR combined with its great picture and color delivered where it matters the most: Our HD and SD test movies looked awesome, as did satellite HDTV and output from our 360. ?Chuck Cage WIRED: Attractive, simple remote-control. Side ports (HDMI, S-Video and composite) make hooking up a 360 or camcorder a breeze. Optical digital audio out -- perfect for tying into that massive dorm-theater sound system. TIRED: Some video-processing issues. 1366 x 728 native resolution makes it a not-so-great computer monitor unless you're over 40 and want to read without your glasses. Price/maker: $550, Samsung Read our full Samsung LN26A450C1 LCD TV review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The HP TouchSmart IQ506 is an update to last year's all-in-one touchscreen, the TouchSmart IQ770. This year, HP went for a countertop-friendly design by packing all the components into the IQ506's brilliant 22-inch, touch-sensitive display. As a whole, this makes for a much more streamlined and clutter-free presentation compared to its predecessor. In terms of general ease and responsiveness, the IQ506's touchscreen does a marginally good job. Common maneuvers like double taps and click-and-drag highlighting can be pulled off with minimal hassle. Even problem areas like corners were accessible with relatively effortless finger pokes. Save for a pinch/zoom gesture, however, all the image-rotating fun we were expecting was largely nonexistent. In its defense, leaving notes, creating calendar reminders and a host of other "bulletin board" tasks were a cinch using the TouchSmart dashboard. But even though you can incorporate non-dashboard programs like Firefox into the interface, opening these applications kicks you back out to the Vista desktop. On one hand, the system is a great value when one compares the sticker price to the components, but it's disconcerting that a $1,500 computer lacks the flair and usability of a relatively inexpensive device like the iPhone. We've got our fingers crossed for next year's model. WIRED: Elegant space-saving design. Speaker bar produces booming lows and clear highs. Bright 22-inch screen hides smudges and fingerprints. Integrated TV tuner adds living room chops. Blazing connectivity via gigabit Ethernet and integrated 802.11b/g/n. 500-GB hard drive offers plenty of room for media storage. Whisper-quiet operation. TIRED: Not the smoothest touch-based interface. Handoffs between TouchSmart/Vista programs are slow and awkward. Very limited upgrade options. Midrange GPU puts a damper on hardcore gaming. Retractable bezel feels cheap and rickety. Sluggish processor given its all-in-one class. What? No Blu-ray? Price/maker: $1,500 (as tested), hp.com Read our full HP TouchSmart IQ506 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dubbed the "Boulder," this angular, candy-colored handset is the offspring of the Gadget Lab's crumpled Type-V, Type-S and Type-SL review units. The Boulder isn't another rugged rehash, though. In fact, Casio finally threw a curve by including some fairly useful multimedia features. Welcome additions like music playback, a more powerful (but still lacking) camera, and zippy EV-DO connectivity fatten up this phone's already rock-solid resume. But let's face it -- Casio is extremely late to the party with these commonplace features. Previous pratfalls like the laughably low-res external LCD, and an annoying light show for incoming calls have returned too. Foibles aside, a lot of the "new" features were actually well integrated into this otherwise hard-knock handset. Tasks like downloading and playing music, mobile messaging and accessing webmail were brisk and painless due to a sensible layout and speedy EV-DO network. Little usability improvements (and smart additions like a waterproof cover for the microSD port) reinforced Casio's obvious commitment to achieving a rugged/user-friendly balance. Casio definitely gets kudos for bringing a tank like the G'zOne into the multimedia era. However, the Boulder is more a patchwork of desirable features, rather than a cohesive marriage of entertainment and durability. WIRED: Armored cross section where mud meets multimedia. External LCD doubles as wanderlust-friendly e-compass. Awesome camera flash/flashlight combo. Expanded memory via microSD card slot. Solid call quality -- even after 12 rounds of tough love. Included cradle doubles as a travel charger. Also comes in "less-flamboyant" black. TIRED: Terrible speakerphone quality for both voice and music. Far too expensive. Annoying multicolored lights show signals incoming calls. No file sharing via Bluetooth. Lackluster 1.3-MP camera sucks for both stills and video. Sweet angles still can't hide a brick-ish profile. Price/maker: $130 (after $50 rebate), Verizon Read our full Casio G'zOne Boulder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Out of the box and straight up to the eye you'll immediately enjoy the D3's spacious and bright viewfinder. The noticeably improved 51-point auto focus system is whip-fast and works in concert with an outstanding 1005-pixel metering sensor that gets it right in the most challenging lighting. Images are beautifully consistent with a wide dynamic range and improved noise-reduction settings that give the pictures a more natural look. To achieve that end, Nikon pulled back on the sharpening levels, leaving the choice of added "crunchiness" to a photographer's post-production predilections. Nikon's new three-inch high-res LCD is a revelation. If you do take the plunge, be ready to spend a good chunk of time learning the feature set to exploit the D3's capabilities. From resolution to speed, color control, bit-depth and so much more, the D3 is incredibly customizable. Dial it in for lightning-quick 11-fps sports action, superlow-light shooting (ISO up to 25600), handheld or tripod-mounted live view -- you name it, whatever and however you want to shoot, the D3 does it exceptionally well. WIRED: High ISO shooting is fantastic with relatively low noise at settings up to ISO 3200 and beyond. Live view function the best of the top-end DSLRs. Dual CF card capability. TIRED: So many functions it could take a lifetime to learn them all. No in-camera dust-reduction system. Price/maker: $5,000 (body only), Nikon Read our full Nikon D3 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The U110 ultralight we received looks striking, with a scarlet paisley-etched aluminum lid paired with a shiny jet-black keyboard area. As soon as you open it up and power it on, you come face to face with one of the U110's most interesting yet unsettling features: VeriFace recognition. After booting up, the webcam embedded in the bezel starts scanning the room. When it finds you, it superimposes disturbing cross hairs on your eyes in an attempt to recognize you and unlock the PC. If you haven't registered your peepers, the system will hang, so you have to shut it down, turn the notebook away and open it up again to get it to boot. The 11.1-inch display is bright and sharp, though it can look a bit iridescent at close range. The glossy black keys are big and square but the thin membrane beneath the keys is flimsy and deforms as you type. There is a decent set of ports, but the designers couldn't find room for an optical drive. Seriously, we're pretty disappointed. The included external DVD drive looks cool, but you know what would be even cooler? Not needing an external drive at all. For work purposes, the Lenovo is a capable little machine. The U110 excelled in our PCMark tests, far outdistancing most other ultralights. Overall this is a good PC; it just has a few annoyances. WIRED: Charming good looks will attract the Lenovo faithful who are sick of looking funerary. Excellent business performance will silence office critics of your "red PC (Harumph!)." Delightfully light and slim. TIRED: The keyboard, though pretty, is pretty flimsy. Terminator-style face recognition will give you the heebie-jeebies and make you torch all your Schwarzenegger flicks (Especially Batman and Robin). External DVD means one more gadget to tote. Price/maker: $1,800 (as tested), Lenovo Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad U110 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Dishing out a hefty helping of HD, the SR12 is a lot of camera, both in your hand and under the hood with its 120-GB hard drive. The upgraded CMOS sensor and Bionz image processor have significantly improved image quality and stomped out even more noise. Sony?s face-detection system, which works snappily for video and the 10.2-megapixel stills, is very effective both up close and at long range. OK, so it makes great video, but what about the controls? For those who fly on manual, the Cam Control Dial is like piloting an F22. Neatly nestled next to the lens, the silver nubbin is a twisty-twirly festival of videographic functionality, providing quick access to manual adjustments of exposure, focus, white balance and aperture. There?s also an ?easy? button on board. A quick tap on the little blue button and all you?ve got to do is point the camera in the right direction to get the good stuff. In spite of all this Sony video goodness, the SR12 has one glaring flaw ? terribly difficult Mac integration. To get it working you?ve got to have iMovie '08. Previous versions of iMovie don?t have the capability to natively read the AVCHD codec meaning that you had to convert the video to other formats in order to do any post-production. WIRED: Excellent AVCHD video quality got better this time around. Extra-wide 3.2-inch touchscreen LCD is a big bonus. Outstanding sound quality. TIRED: Massive internal hard drive makes it somewhat chunky and a bit of a load to carry. The ?easy? button should be bigger and easier to find. And it should be red. Yeah red and all glowy. $1,400, Sony (Photo by Jackson Lynch for Wired.com) Read our full Sony HDR-SR12 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : With Kensington's Wireless USB Docking Station, the moment you open your Wireless USB (WUSB)-enabled notebook, all your desktop devices are ready to go. We were amazed at how seamless the process is: The station recognized our 20-inch monitor, wireless USB mouse, keyboard and printer. It was as if they were always connected to the notebook. Of course, there are a few gotchas. WUSB is a new standard and some notebooks can't hook up with this docking station. Dell and Lenovo offer a few models, and other companies should be out the gate by this fall. With its plain, geeky looks, the 11.4-ounce antenna-topped station could get lost in a field of wireless routers. But that's not quite enough to put our Battlestar boxers in a knot: The Kensington Wireless Docking Station is a snap to set up and makes mobile computing, well, mobile and hassle-free. You know, the way it's supposed to be. ?Michael S. Lasky WIRED: Drop-dead, simple setup and instant wireless connection of all desktop peripherals makes moving a notebook to and from the desk a hassle-free, nothing-to-plug-in experience. Small footprint means no great loss of desktop real estate. TIRED: Still few WUSB-enabled notebooks on the market. Audio handling could be smoother; default requires USB-powered speakers. First generation device is still pricey. $230, Kensington Read our full Kensington Wireless USB Docking Station review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : This standard-definition lightweight shoots better video and has a much smarter feature set than most of its competitors. In fact, JVC knows that YouTubers can't bear missing the latest police beating or Matthew McConaughey shirtless in the grocery store, so the MS100 is lightning-quick on start up. The 35x optical zoom allows you to capture the crushing blows and bothersome blemishes while keeping a safe distance. Plus, the nifty laser-touch LCD makes you feel like a real cinematographer with speedy access to manual features. While it's nicely appointed, you've got to bridle at a couple things. First, there's no optical image stabilization. But shaky image stabilization aside, the very nature of this camcorder calls into question its usefulness. While neither big nor expensive, there are other, better, ultrasimple run-and-gun camcorders out there. Most are smaller and cheaper, too. With this form factor at this price, the MS100 is kind of stuck in the middle between the svelte flash-based AVCHD camcorders and the shirt-pocket shooters from Flip, Kodak and Creative. WIRED: 35x optical zoom brings the action right to your doorstep. Superb video quality. Formula 1 start-up speed. Easy to use laser-touch LCD. TIRED: No optical image stabilization. Lack of Mac compatibility is inexcusable and utterly perplexing. Three hundred and fifty bones for a camera that's made to record for YouTube? The Flip Mino does the same thing for about half the cost. $350, JVC (Photo: Jackson Lynch/Wired.com) Read our full JVC Everio GZ-MS100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Through some loophole, wormhole or deal with the devil, Gateway has produced a massive desktop replacement that's fast, good and cheap. How fast, you ask? Fast enough to go toe-to-toe with -- and school -- a $4,800 Alienware Area 51 m15x: In our Quake 4 test, the Gateway posted a score of 167.8 fps to the m15x's 167.2. This is partially because the Gateway's 512-MB Nvidia Geforce 9800M is running the show. The FX also has Olympic endurance for larger-class notebooks, going 2 hours, 23 minutes to play a DVD. And that brings us to the cheap part. The Gateway is just $1,400 -- more than three times less than the Alienware and hundreds (and more hundreds) less than most other desktop replacement machines. Sure, it lacks the latest processor (it's got a 2.27-GHz Core Duo), but it has a whopping 4 GB of RAM to help it attack processing tasks and a spacious 200 GB of drive space for your stuff. The big bummer here is the missing Blu-ray drive, which is what is likely keeping this thing so affordable. WIRED: Some of the best gaming performance ever recorded on a PC. Long battery life for a desktop replacement. Comfy and solid keyboard withstands heavy hands. Multimedia controls and slide volume look cool without glowing too brightly. TIRED: No Blu-ray is a letdown for HD-heads, and you can't configure your PC to include the drive. The battery sticks out a bit in the back, and the power brick is monstrous. Power lights on the front, unlike the multimedia controls, are too bright. Price/maker: $1,400 (as tested), Gateway Read our full Gateway P-7811FX Notebook review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Alienware prides itself on its tower rigs and desktop replacements, but several of its earlier forays in to the mid-size laptops were disastrous; the branding was intact but the performance wasn't. Not so with the m15x. This 15.4-incher is plenty portable, yet it has all the gaming trappings and the performance to back it up. From the unboxing onward, you can tell that you are paying for the experience as well as the hardware. A baseball cap with an alien head on it, an extra battery, VGA-to-DVI adapter, FireWire adapter and entertainment remote show that Alienware will risk no dissatisfied customers due to lackluster goodies. With specs that include a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 512-MB nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX, the m15x performs impressively, but not out of this world. It all comes down to the loot; this is a luxury item and there are far more affordable PCs with comparable performance. WIRED: Tip-top business and gaming performance. Lots of included extras for gaming elitists. The solid and handsome design will please gamers, and cool lighting effects will titillate geeks. TIRED: Exorbitant price that only a space tourist could pay without wincing. For all the expense, it's not the very best gaming PC. Dual batteries take a long time to charge up. The Blu-ray drive must be removed to accommodate the secondary battery. Price/maker: $4,880 (as tested), Alienware Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Alienware Area-51 m15x review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : The Archos 605 WiFi is a damn fine portable media player. Now it?s slightly mo' better due to this new GPS accessory, which for $130 adds full-bore street navigation that's on par with a Garmin or TomTom system. Well, a low-end Garmin or TomTom from a few years ago, anyway: This lackluster accessory does not have many of the bells and whistles of modern nav systems, and the one it does have -- real-time traffic updates -- works only in Europe. On the plus side, the software locks in satellite signals faster than NORAD. However, it navigates like a base commander heading home from the officer's club. On several occasions the GPS tried to route us totally out of the way instead of continuing on the road right in front of us. To make matters worse, the software doesn't announce street names, only directions. The GPS Car Holder would look pretty good if this were, say, 2003. And it does get you where you're going, if not always by the fastest or most logical route. At $130, it's a decent deal for current owners, but definitely behind the GPS times. WIRED: Cheaper than a standalone GPS, at least if you already own an Archos 605. High-resolution screen makes maps look mighty purty. Lightning-fast satellite lock. TIRED: The 605 can?t navigate without the car holder, so you can?t go on walkabout. Doesn?t say street names. Requires you to move to Europe if you want traffic features. You have to manually restart the GPS app every time you power on the 605. Price/maker: $130, Archos Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com Read our full Archos 605 WiFi GPS Car Holder review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : As one of six new Fujitsu offerings equipped with Intel's Centrino 2, the Lifebook A6120 more than makes up for its dull exterior with features that will have prettier laptops quaking in their neoprene sleeves. Opposite its no frills glossy shell resides a gorgeous 15.4-inch LCD capable of brightening even the darkest depths of Mordor. Battery life and performance are equally impressive. The new 2.26-GHz CPU more than did the job when it came to photo editing, gaming and pretty much every other benchmark we threw at it. What's more, we squeezed a respectable four and a half hours of battery life under normal usage out of A6120. In fact, after playing with the Lifebook for a week, we were hard pressed to find anything significant to complain about. Would Fujitsu be well served by spending a little more time and effort on design and shrinking down that plump chassis? Sure. But this reviewer is more than happy to overlook a 1.7-inch waistline as long as it hides enough goodies. WIRED: Great bang/buck ratio. The A6120 starts at only $1,150 and jumps but $200 for a Radeon HD 3470 card and Blu-ray drive. Sharp, beautiful screen is one of the brightest we've seen on a laptop. Screw the chicklet-style keys found on other notebooks: Fujitsu's old school keyboard provides near perfect "clickiness" (to borrow a term from designer Amar Sagoo). TIRED: Small trackpad makes for a less than thrilling multitouch experience. Runs consistently hot -- don't rest it on your lap for long or risk a scorched crotch. While certainly not ugly, design is blander than a plate of lima beans. Price/maker: $1,350 (as tested), Fujitsu Read our full Fujitsu Lifebook A6120 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : GeTac clearly had utilitarian users in mind with the E-100, which makes for a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to function. On the bright side, this surprisingly light ultramobile PC is military certified to withstand splashes of water, dust, humidity, shock and even freezing temperatures. Even common vulnerabilities like exposed ethernet and USB ports have been sidestepped with a bevy of watertight rubber stoppers. In fact, my review unit was able to smoothly stream South Park episodes while taking repeated tumbles down a flight of stairs. But it was when I looked under the hood that I found kinks in the armor. Mission-critical applications like Office ran at a reasonable clip in a number of bumpy environments, but for the E-100's price I was expecting a little more "oomph." The 100-GB shock-resistant ATA hard drive and 1 GB of RAM tilt the balance a little bit, but honestly, even the unassuming Eee PC comes stock with Intel's newer Atom chips. Mediocre specs aside, this rough and tumble UMPC performs solidly in a number of harsh environments and boasts a host of connectivity options. WIRED: Rock-solid construction, ergonomics and field performance. Responsive 8.4-inch touchscreen looks phenomenal in direct sunlight. Web ready with 802.11b/g, gigabit ethernet and SIM card slot. Waterproof combination SmartCard/PCMCIA slot. Decent battery life at 3.5 hours (WiFi on). 100-GB hard drive has its own heater for cycling up in freezing conditions. TIRED: Too little processing given the amount of buck. Near three grand price tag? Seriously? No option for a solid state drive?! Recessed USB and headphone jacks are a hassle to plug into. Tinny speaker is more of an afterthought. Lose the stylus and you're S.O.L. Looks that only a FedEx driver could love. Price/maker: $2,880 as tested, GeTac Read our full GeTac E-100 review. Check Wired.com's latest Gadget Lab reviews, updated daily. : Most of the new mini-laptops look like toys, educational tools or lab experiments in miniaturization, but the MSI Wind is an actual PC. Packing the latest 1.6-GHz Atom processor and a roomy 80-GB drive, the Wind boasts some legit PC cred. Yes, your iPod probably has more drive space, but 80 gigs was plenty not so long ago, and it's not like you're going to be producing HD video on this thing; it's more of an internet lapdog than a laptop. The 10-inch widescr