High Technology Product Reviews | Trends and News

The Dell Inspiron One 2305 (IO2305-3114MSL) ($849.99 list), available at Best Buy, is an all-in-one touchscreen desktop PC with a large 23-inch widescreen display. It has a 1080p HD display, wireless everything, decent design, and an attractive sub $900 price. However, it's a little sluggish on most functions, particularly the multimedia tasks like photo and video work that would look great on such a large screen. Maybe with a little more power and a more features, the Inspiron One could be a contender, but not this configuration. Specifications Type Multimedia, All-in-one, Touchscreen All-In-One Processor Family AMD Athlon II X2 RAM 4 GB Storage Capacity (as Tested) 750 GB Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 4270 Primary Optical Drive Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Design and Features The Inspiron One 2305 looks like most other all-in-one PCs—basically it looks like a widescreen monitor. It takes after the HP TouchSmart 600 series an...

Has someone already won the $2,000 bounty for delivering open-source drivers that work with Microsoft's recently released Kinect motion-tracking system? Odds are looking good! Here's the background. Adafruit Industries announced a $2,000 prize last week for anyone who managed to hack into the Kienct in an effort to unlock the device for use with hardware other than the Xbox 360. In short, here's the official challenge: "Upload your code, examples and documentation to GitHub. First person / group to get RGB out with distance values being used wins, you're smart – you know what would be useful for the community out there. All the code needs to be open source and/or public domain." Well, user AlexP over at the NUI Group Community Forums has posted a video that appears to show a Kinect being controlled via a standard PC interface. That's the only background we have so far, so it remains to be seen whether the potential submission will actually fulfill all ...

Affordable, feature-rich, and easy to use small and mid-sized business network management applications are hard to find, but they do exist. Case in point: The free Spiceworks, which has enjoyed popularity in the SMB network management crowd thanks to its vendor independence and ease of use. Cisco's Network Magic does a lot of what Spiceworks does, but we found it worked a bit buggy with non-Cisco networking products. More than a tool, Spiceworks is a portal comprised of network management, help desk, purchasing features, and a community of over 1,000,000 helpful users—mostly IT professionals—deemed "Spiceheads." The software is as useful as ever, but it's hampered a bit by new features that could've used more time in the oven. Specifications Type Business, Enterprise, Professional Free Yes OS Compatibility Windows Vista, Windows XP, Linux, Windows 7 Interface and Setup Spiceworks' interface has been updated since we last took a look at it. The Device ...

The Sony PSP has been a premier mobile gaming platform for the past five years, but it was always a bit large for a portable system. Sony's answer: The PSP go ($249.99 direct), a shrunken-down version of the PSP that eschews the UMD optical drive and game cartridges for 16GB of internal storage, download-only titles, and a new slider design. The screen is bright, the controls are responsive, the storage is sufficient, and Sony's online download store is reliable and robust. The problem is that the PSP go is really only for gamers who are new to the PSP platform, not the faithful who have stuck with Sony for a half-decade. If you fit into the latter group, you're better off sticking with your original, albeit chunkier, PSP-1000, or buying the slightly smaller PSP-3000 ($169.99 direct) if you want to get in on multiplayer games. With the PSP go, Sony is poised to compete with other portable gaming platforms, including the Nintendo DS Lite and Apple's iPod touch—at least...

Think all those new touch screen smartphones look too much alike? Motorola has finally hit on a fun new formula with the Flipout, a nifty pivoting square with a highly usable keyboard and (given the phone's small size) a large LCD. You'll pay for the Flipout's originality, as it has one near-fatal flaw and several smaller ones. But it's much more compelling than the bizarre Motorola Backflip ($49.99, 2 stars). Specifications Service Provider AT&T Screen Size 2.8 inches Screen Details 320-by-240-pixel, 65K-color TFT LCD capactive touch screen Camera Yes Network GSM, UMTS Bands 850, 900, 1800, 1900 High-Speed Data GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA Processor Speed 720 MHz Design, Call Quality, and Hardware The Motorola Flipout is surprisingly small, if a bit thick. It measures 2.6 by 2.6 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.2 ounces. It's made of silver and black high-impact plastic. A thin metal plate sits behind the slide-up front panel. Holding the Flipout ...

The 12-megapixel, Nikon Coolpix S4000 is among the least-expensive cameras on the market to offer a touch screen interface. The touch experience on this camera isn't particularly glitzy, but it's perfectly functional and is complemented by a few, smartly selected physical buttons. Also, the 3-inch display is much sharper than most other under-$200 point-and-shoot cameras. The S4000 also performs somewhat better in low light than other shooters in this price range, but in all lighting conditions, this camera produces softer images than much of the competition. Another problem: there's no optical or mechanical stabilization—most budget cameras offer some kind of image stabilizer on the lens or image sensor to avoid blurry images. With the Nikon S4000, you need to decide whether a touch screen interface is worth sacrificing image stabilization for—and we don't think it is. Specifications Type Compact Megapixels 12 MP Media Format Secure Digital High Capacity 35-mm...

Scanner technology tends to improve over time, benefiting consumers mostly through lowering the cost for a given level of capability. The Epson Perfection V300 Photo scanner ($99.99 direct, which includes a one-year parts-and-labor warranty) is a case in point. Coming a year after the now discontinued V350 Photo scanner, it is $50 cheaper and can run rings around the V350 in performance, particularly for scanning transparencies—both slides and strips of film. It's also comparable with, yet cheaper than, the Canon CanoScan 5600F, which is enough to warrant having the V300 replace the 5600F as Editors' Choice. Specifications Maximum Optical Resolution 4800 pixels Mechanical Resolution 9600 pixels Maximum Scan Area Letter Scanning Options Reflective, Transparency Flatbed Yes You won't find many differences in basics between the V300 and 5600F, but the few that exist are in the V300's favor. Both offer 4,800-pixel-per-inch (ppi) optical resolution; both have tra...