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LG 42 LCD HDTV 1080p Reviews

2009-10-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

42 inch LG 1080p HDTV : LG 42LH55 LCD TV

Editor's Choice for Value & Picture Quality

Now we are going to introduce a very cool 42 inch LG 1080p HDTV, LG 42LH55, which has been a bestselling HDTV on Amazon, more and more people are falling in love with it, seems it would be super popular quite soon, so I think I should share it with you guys today. Well, let’s go to find out why so many people are choosing it.

LG LH55 series overview

LG LH55 series power indicator

The LG LH55 looks slick enough but lacks any overt, eye-catching styling cues. Its most remarkable external feature is the thin, transparent strip along the left and right edges of the frame. That frame rounds slightly along the top edge and is thicker below than above, and its gloss-black coloration is interrupted only by the LG logo. A bump on the bottom left edge houses the blue-lit power indicator. The stand swivels and matches the panel with its glossy black.

LG LH55 series side view

Seen from the side the LH55 looks like most other flat-panel TVs.

LG LH55 series remote control

LG's remote is relatively disappointing. We found the cluster of similar buttons around the cursor control difficult to differentiate without constantly having to look down at them. A little illumination would have gone a long way. There's a prominent button labeled "Energy Saving" key that directly accesses said control and a little energy saving graphic to provide enviro-geeks a warm fuzzy. The remote can't control other brands of gear directly with infrared commands.

LG LH55 series back panel inputs

The LG's back panel offers three HDMI inputs, a PC input and a pair of component-video jacks.

LG LH55 series side panel inputs

On the side is a fourth HDMI port, a USB jack and an AV input with composite video. No S-Video is available.

LG LH55 series quick menu

The menu system is quite extensive, so the easy-access quick menu for aspect ratio, picture and sound modes, the timer and other oft-used functions, is welcome.

LG LH55 series dejudder control

LG's implementation of dejudder, called TruMotion 240Hz, is similar to past 120Hz and 240Hz displays, which force you to engage the smoothing effect of dejudder if you want to enjoy the benefits of reduced blurring. 2009 models from Samsung and Toshiba, on the other hand, allow you to separate the two functions, an option we really prefer to have. The LH55 series offers two strengths of dejudder, Low and High, and also offers a separate "Real Cinema" function designed to work with 1080p/24 sources.

LG LH55 series Expert menu

Like other LG displays, the picture controls on the LH55 series surpass most of the competition. Its Expert modes, which bear the logo and the input of the Imaging Science Foundation, offer a passel of additional controls.

LG LH55 series white balance menu

Our favorite controls, first introduced by LG last year and still exclusive to the company, are the 2- and a 10-point white balance system that can really help get a more accurate grayscale.

LG LH55 series color filter

The company upped the ante for 2009, adding the capability to target a 2.2 gamma, internal test patterns, and even color filters for blue-only, green-only, and red-only to help set color balance

LG LH55 series picture quality

The LH55 series can deliver excellent color accuracy, a positive trait balanced by less impressive black-level performance. Its 240Hz processing reduces blur better than 120Hz displays but not as well as some other 240Hz models, for what it's worth, and off-angle performance was another issue.

Review

At CES this year, LG made a big deal out of its 240Hz technology, claiming it bested similar blur-busting tech from other LCD TV makers. The LH55 series represents the company's least expensive HDTV equipped with a 240Hz refresh rate, and when it comes to that feature, as usual, we weren't particularly impressed. The results were similar to those seen on other 240Hz displays--reduced blur that was difficult for us to really discern, although test patterns prove it's there--but we were a bit annoyed that you have to engage the smoothing effect of dejudder if you want to reduce blur. In its favor, the LH55 brings a boatload of other picture quality adjustments to bear, most of them leading to excellent color accuracy, but its overall picture is hampered by lighter black levels, among other minor problems. If you can handle those issues, are sensitive to blur and enjoy picture tweaks, the LH55 is one of the more tempting LCDs out there.

Series note:
We performed a hands-on evaluation of the 42-inch LG 42LH55 is one series of 42 inch LG 1080p HDTV , but this review also applies to the other sizes in the series, namely the 37-inch 37LH55, the 47-inch 47LH55, and the 55-inch 55LH55. All sizes share identical specs and features and should provide very similar picture quality.

Design

Editors' note: Many of the design and features elements are identical between the LG LH55 series and the LG LH30 series we reviewed previously, so readers of the earlier review may experience some déjà vu when reading the same sections below.

The LG LH55 looks slick enough but lacks any overt, eye-catching styling cues. Its most remarkable external feature is the thin, transparent strip along the left and right edges of the frame. That frame rounds slightly along the top edge and is thicker below than above, and its gloss-black coloration is interrupted by the LG logo only. A bump on the bottom left edge houses the blue-lit power indicator. The stand swivels and matches the panel with its glossy black.

LG's remote is relatively disappointing. We found the cluster of similar buttons around the cursor control difficult to differentiate without constantly having to look down at them. A little illumination would have gone a long way. There's a prominent button labeled "Energy Saving" that directly accesses said control and a little energy saving graphic to provide enviro-geeks a warm and fuzzy feeling. The remote can't control other brands of gear directly with infrared commands.

The menu system is quite extensive, so the easy-access quick menu for aspect ratio, picture and sound modes, the timer, and other oft-used functions is welcome. The main menu is laid out the same as last year's model, with the addition of a new onscreen "simple manual" that provides basic setup and function information. One miscue: we'd really like to see explanations of menu items appear onscreen, too, especially since many of them are so advanced.

Features

As we mentioned above, the LH55's main step-up feature is a 240Hz refresh rate, which is designed to combat blurring in motion. There are two species of 240Hz and LG employs the "scanning backlight" variety, which augments the usual 120Hz technique of doubling the standard 60-frame signal with a backlight that flashes very rapidly on and off (much faster than humans can perceive) to help reduce motion blur. In our tests the other 240Hz technique, which actually quadruples the standard signal and is used by Sony and Samsung, produced slightly better results than LG's method, which is also employed by Toshiba and Vizio. Unlike Toshiba, which carefully calls the scanning backlight a "240Hz effect," LG's marketing department has no qualms about touting its method as unqualified 240Hz.

LG's implementation of dejudder is similar to past 120Hz and 240Hz displays, which force you to engage the smoothing effect of dejudder if you want to enjoy the benefits of reduced blurring. 2009 models from Samsung and Toshiba, on the other hand, allow you to separate the two functions, an option we really prefer to have. The LH55 series offers two strengths of dejudder, Low and High, and also offers a separate "Real Cinema" function designed to work with 1080p/24 sources. Check out the performance section for more details.

Like other LG displays, the picture controls on the LH55 series surpass most of the competition. The company included even more adjustments than last year, starting with a well-thought-out Picture Wizard that uses internal test patterns to help you perform your own basic calibrations of the controls for brightness, contrast, color, tint, horizontal and vertical sharpness, and backlight. Once you've finished, your settings are saved to the Expert1 picture memory slot for your choice of inputs.

Each of the eight adjustable picture memory slots is independent per input, and we appreciated that all of them, aside from the two Expert slots, indicate whether they're in the default settings. A ninth mode, called Intelligent Sensor, reacts to ambient lighting conditions and automatically sets picture parameters accordingly. Advanced controls abound in even the nonexpert modes, with three color temperature presets, settings for dynamic contrast and color, noise reduction, three levels of gamma, a black level control, wide and standard color spaces, edge enhancement, a room-lighting sensor, and even an "eye care" setting designed to prevent the screen from being too bright (it's disabled in Vivid and Cinema modes).

Those Expert modes, which bear the logo and the input of the Imaging Science Foundation, offer a passel of additional controls. Our favorite, first introduced by LG last year and still exclusive to the company, is a 10-point white balance system that can really help get a more accurate grayscale. The company upped the ante for 2009, adding the capability to target a 2.2 gamma, internal test patterns, and even color filters for blue-only, green-only, and red-only to help set color balance. A full color management system is also on tap, and we love the capability to apply Expert settings to all inputs or just one at a time. Of course, most of these settings will appeal only to pro calibrators and HDTV geeks, but either way, LG's 2009 models offer the most complete suite of user-menu picture adjustments we've seen on any HDTV to date.

LG touts the efficiency of this set, and rightly so, according to our tests (see below). In addition to the "home use" and "store demo" initial settings common to the Energy Star 3.0-qualified televisions, there's a quartet of progressively more aggressive Energy Saving settings that reduce the backlight--and thus light output along with wattage consumed. Engaging the settings disables the standard backlight control.

The LH55 series is missing picture-in-picture, but does provide plenty of aspect ratio control, including five modes or use with HD sources and four with standard-def. Two modes are adjustable zooms, and there's a "set by program" mode designed to automatically choose the correct aspect ratio setting based on the signal. We recommend using the Just Scan mode with 1080i and 1080p material, which assures zero overscan and proper 1:1 pixel matching for this 1080p display.

Connectivity is fairly extensive on the LH55, beginning with four total HDMI ports--three on the back and one on the side. The back panel also offers two component-video inputs, an AV input with composite video, a RF input for antenna or cable, an RGB-style analog PC input, an optical-digital-audio output, and an RS-232 port for custom installations. In addition to the fourth HDMI port, the side panel has a second AV input with composite video and a USB port for display of digital photos and playback of MP3 music files. Our one connectivity complaint is the lack of any S-Video inputs.

Performance

Deep Black levels provide for excellent contrast in this scene from The Road Warrior.

This shot of Tom Cruise in Risky Business shows a good contrast presentation from this rough 480i DVD

The LH55 series can deliver excellent color accuracy, a positive trait balanced by less impressive black-level performance. Its 240Hz processing reduces blur better than 120Hz displays, but not as well as some other 240Hz models, for what it's worth, and off-angle performance was below average.

All of those picture settings really helped nail the LG's calibration. Prior to our adjustments, the display's Movie mode came closest to our ideal settings, although it was a bit too dim (33 ftl) and too blue up and down the grayscale. After making all those adjustments, the grayscale was superb in all but the darkest areas, gamma came close to the 2.2 ideal at an average of 2.16, and light output hit our nominal 40ftl level. We didn't need to tweak primary colors or color decoding much, although we couldn't resist making those already-close parameters even closer.

Our comparison involved a few other 240Hz LCDs, including the Toshiba 47ZV650U, the Samsung LN52B750 and the Sony KDL-52XBR9, as well as a couple of plasmas, the Panasonic TC-P46G10 and our reference Pioneer PRO-111FD. This round of image quality tests was conducted with the help of scenes from "Step Brothers" on Blu-ray.

Black level:
The LH55 produced a lighter shade of black that, as usual, robbed the image of some of the punch and impact seen on most of the other displays. The difference was most visible in darker scenes, such as the nighttime car ride home from Derek's birthday party, where the guys' dark suits, the shadows inside the car and the letterbox bars all appeared a noticeably lighter shade than on the other plasmas and LCDs, with the exception of the Toshiba, which was slightly lighter than the LG. Shadow detail, such as the outline of the car in the dark driveway or the bark of the tree in the yard, also suffered a bit--although, to be fair, the LG's shadow detail looked as good as can be expected given the lighter black levels.

Color accuracy:
In most scenes, especially brighter ones, the LG's color looked superb. When Alice accosts Dale in the men's room, for example, her skin tone looked flush enough but certainly not ruddy, and thankfully without the greener tinge seen on the Panasonic. The green of the grass under the For Sale sign and the plants downtown appeared true compared with our reference, as did the other primary and secondary colors. The LG's imperfect blacks did contribute to a less saturated look than we saw on the other displays, but our biggest complaint on the color accuracy front was the LG's blue tinge to blacks and very dark shadows. The issue was most obvious in very dark scenes, such as when Brennan buries Dale in the back yard, and the blue was more pronounced than on any of the other displays, including the Toshiba.

Video processing:
With the LG's "TruMotion 240Hz" processing set to either Low or High mode, the LH55 resolved between 700 and 800 lines of motion resolution according to our test. The test pattern didn't show the same sort of interference and breakup we saw on the Toshiba. If you're keeping track, we saw between 900 and 1000 lines from the Sony and Samsung 240Hz displays we tested, and even more from the Panasonic plasma. Disabling the LG's processing caused the test to register between 300 to 400 lines, which is typical of a 60Hz LCD. Of course, in our experience, the blurring seen in test patterns, despite the large differences in the motion resolution, is quite difficult to perceive in real-world program material. As we noted above, it's impossible to get the improved motion resolution of the antiblur effect without also engaging dejudder processing.

We've never been fans of the overt smoothing effect of dejudder, and while we understand some viewers might like it, we feel it makes film-based sources look too much like video. The LG is no exception. During the car ride home, for example, the motion seemed too video-like even in the Low setting, which was about the equivalent of Standard on the Sony and Samsung. Artifacts in Low mode weren't very common, which is a good thing, but in High they appeared more frequently. One example came during the first awkward dinner, when Brennan got up from the table and his fast-moving arm created a sort of halo or trail in the background. This issue was slightly less obvious than a similar artifact we saw on the Sony and Samsungs in High and Smooth modes, but in any case, we recommend leaving the TruMotion 240Hz setting turned off for films.

We did appreciate the LG's Real Cinema setting, however, which functioned as advertised to preserve the true frame rate of film. We set our Blu-ray player to 1080p/24 output mode, turned the Real Cinema setting on and fed the LG our favorite test clip for evaluating film cadence, the helicopter flyover of the Intrepid from "I Am Legend." The LH55 showed the proper amount of judder without the slight hitching motion characteristic of 2:3 pulldown, which returned when we set Real Cinema to Off.

Finally, the LH55 series delivered every line of static resolution and properly de-interlaced video-based sources, but, like other LG sets we've reviewed (and unlike most other current 1080p HDTVs), it failed to properly de-interlace film-based sources.

Uniformity:
The LH55 sample we reviewed exhibited average uniformity across its screen, with slightly darker areas around the edges and corners compared with the middle, but no overly bright spots or visible backlight structure.

When seen from off-angle, the LH55 performed worse than either the Sony or the Samsung, becoming washed out quite a bit more quickly--at about the same rate as the Toshiba, in fact. The screen didn't discolor too badly when seen from either side of the sweet spot directly in front of the screen, however.

Bright lighting:
As a matte-screen display, the LH55 handled ambient lighting better than the shiny-screen Toshiba, Samsung LCDs, and both plasmas. Bright lights in the room weren't reflected as brightly in its screen, and the screen did an adequate job of preserving black levels in the bright room--if not as good as the Samsung.

Standard definition: With standard-def sources, the LG turned in a fine performance. It resolved every line of the DVD format and detail in the grass and the stone bridge was solid. Jaggies were kept to a minimum and the waving American flag looked smooth. Noise reduction worked well to remove moving motes from the skies and sunsets, and we appreciated that 2:3 pulldown detection kicked in quickly and effectively to remove moire from the grandstands behind the racecar.

PC:
The LH55 series delivered every line of resolution from a 1920x1080 PC input with no overscan or edge enhancement via both HDMI and VGA. The latter input showed some interference in the highest-frequency test patterns, and text appeared a bit softer than via HDMI, but it was still better than many VGA sources we've seen.

Power consumption:
Like most late-model LCDs we've tested, the LG 42LH55 was extremely efficient, using just 10 watts more power in default mode than the company's entry-level 42LH30 model. After calibration, the two were nearly identical, and the LH55 used less energy (93.3 watts) than just about any other 42-inch flat-panel we've tested, including models like the Philips Eco TV (193), the Toshiba 42RV530U (114.6), and easily beat 42-inch plasmas like the Panasonic TC-P42S1 (235.3), the Vizio VP422 (146.4), and the Panasonic TH-42PX80U (190.5).

Product Summary

The good: Accurate color; extensive picture controls, including unique Picture Wizard; solid connectivity with four HDMI and one PC input; energy efficient.

The bad: Reproduces relatively light black levels; does not separate antiblur and antijudder processing; benefits of 240Hz difficult to discern; below-average off-angle viewing; no S-Video input.

The bottom line: Although its overall picture quality falls short of the best 240Hz LCDs, the LG LH55 series offers plenty of picture tweaks and accurate color.

Compare ALL LCD TV Reviews

About Our Rating System

The following product reviews are based on a rating scale from 70 (denoting poorest quality) to 100 (signifying the very best quality). A rating in the 60s for any particular category of a product review indicates a serious defect which causes the product not to operate properly. Picture quality is double-weighted in the Overall Score calculation.

Price range: $889.00 - $1,299.95 check prices

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Coolest New Inventions From Japan

2009-10-23T11:10:00.001-07:00

Recession Can't Stop Japan's Online Shoppers

A rise in the number of stay-at-home shoppers in Japan means the online shopping industry outstrips sales at department stores and convenience stores

It never rains but it pours for Japan's department store operators, once the driving force behind Japan's bubble-era consumerism. This summer already-flagging sales plunged further as recession-hit consumers cut back on spending. Nature didn't help out, either, as poor weather hurt sales.

Yet, even when the recession eases and the weather improves, don't expect a big bounce in sales. These days, Japan's recession-hit shoppers increasingly prefer to shop without ever leaving home.

The numbers are startling. Using data from the Japan Direct Marketing Assn. and Nomura Research Institute (NRI), the Nikkei daily estimates online shopping sales in Japan rose 22% to $67.2 billion. That's despite Japan's deepest recession in the postwar era savaging consumer confidence following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall.

If catalog shopping is also included, the figure rises to over $86 billion—or more than is spent in Japan's department stores or ubiquitous convenience stores. Noritaka Kobayashi, senior consultant at Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo, says that while the growth will likely slow due to the recession, the consumer e-commerce market will continue to outstrip other forms of shopping. Excluding eating out and other forms of consumption that can't be easily conducted online, Kobayashi reckons $2.2 trillion of consumption could be made from computers and cell phones. "A growing number of people are simply avoiding the trouble of visiting stores," he says. "This market has a big growth potential."

Sugomori: "Chicks in the Nest"

What explains Japanese consumers' shift to shopping online? In the last year, as the global recession pounded the Japanese economy, pundits began using the term sugomori ("chicks in the nest") to describe people who stay home to keep outside expenses to a minimum. Shopping online is not only often cheaper, especially when compared with expensive department stores, but it also saves on transportation and eating out while shopping.

Other reasons for the rapid expansion of online shopping in Japan are perhaps more compelling—and Japan-specific. One factor is undoubtedly the widespread use of high-speed Internet. Fast broadband connections are the norm in Japan, while high-speed Internet-enabled mobile phones are long established. NTT DoCoMo's (DCM) 3G service is now in its 10th year of operation. The upshot: Japanese young and old are comfortable and experienced online.

According to the Internal Affairs & Communications Ministry, the mobile-commerce market in 2007 was worth $7.8 billion, a 29% increase from the previous year. The NRI, meanwhile, estimates mobile phones account for about 20% of online shopping and that share will increase to 24.5% by 2013. "Sooner or later it will be half," says Kobayashi. He adds that many teenagers buy games, books, or accessories via mobile phone but never use a PC for e-commerce.
Superior Delivery Service

It helps that workers in Japan typically take long commutes, often in crowded trains. That leaves plenty of time to text, read the news, play games, or shop using a mobile phone.

Marketers are also getting savvier at appealing to mobile shoppers. While eBay (EBAY) isn't a big player in Japan, Rakuten, Amazon Japan, and Yahoo Japan are among Japan's most visited Web sites and are huge conduits for online shopping. Small players, meanwhile, are finding creative ways to woo Net-based shoppers. One example: In March, dozens of young women swarmed to the Tokyo Girls Collection fashion show. At the show, held in Tokyo's youthful Shibuya district, audience members could order what they saw on the runway using their mobile phones, via a dedicated retail site. In a single night, the show sold $615,000 worth of clothes.

Meticulous home-delivery service is another factor boosting online shopping. Delivery companies such as Yamato Transport, Sagawa Express, and JP Express are famously reliable. The companies usually offer to deliver within a two-hour time slot selected by the customer and are rarely late. They are also remarkably fast. Yamato, for instance, has a tieup with Amazon (AMZN) and other mail-order companies by which it offers next-morning delivery for orders made by midnight the previous day. And if the customer prefers, deliveries can be made to one of Japan's 50,000 convenience stores. For only a small extra fee, delivery firms will deliver frozen or chilled products, leading to the rapid expansion of online purchasing of fresh produce, such as freshly caught crab from Hokkaido or pineapple from subtropical Okinawa.

Payment options have evolved to meet customer needs and soothe fraud concerns. For consumers who don't want to input credit-card numbers over the Internet, Yamato and others offer a pay-on-delivery service. "These finely tuned delivery services are boosting the mail-order business," says Masao Ueda, chief researcher at the Distribution Economics Institute of Japan.

By Hiroko Tashiro

Japan's 'Idea Products'

In Japan they are called aidea shohin ("idea products" ), unusual gadgets that would be convenient to own but not practical enough for most retailers to sell in Japanese stores. Although some people might call them pointless, these idea products are popular among Japanese consumers shopping online or via catalogs and TV. And that's a big business: According to the daily Nikkei, home shopping grew 10% last year, to $86 billion. That's bigger than the sales at either convenience stores or department stores. Here are some examples of the latest idea products.

Mattress with a Built-In Fan

Manufacturer: Kuchofuku
Price: $300
http://www.9229.co.jp or http://www.rakuten.co.jp/pc2b

A good night's sleep during the Japanese summer often means using the air conditioner. The Fumin is a low-cost, more environmentally sound alternative. Produced by a clothing maker Kuchofuku, the $300 Fumin ("wind-sleep") includes a built-in fan at the foot of the mattress. Running it eight hours every day costs less only 30¢ a month.

Computer-Heated Lunch Box

Manufacturer: Thanko
Price: $20
http://www.thanko.jp

Many Japanese workers take a prepared bento ("lunchbox") with them to the office. Typically steamed rice and side dishes, bento can be economical and appetizing. One challenge, though, is keeping the food, warm. Thanko, an innovative gadget shop in Akihabara, Tokyo's premier electronics district, may have the answer: A heated lunchbox that plugs into a PC's USB port.

Security-Enhanced Personalized Stamp

Manufacturer: Mitsubishi Pencil
Price: $220
http://www.mpuni.co.jp/product/category/stamps/dialbank/index.html

Westerners usually sign contracts or other important documents in ink, but Japanese traditionally prefer an engraved stamp called a hanko. One concern, though, is that the stamped signature, usually the owner's name, can be easily forged. Mitsubishi Pencil's Dial Bank Seal alleviates the risk of fraud by adding a two-digit dial that creates a series of marks around the printed name, making it difficult for an unauthorized person to copy someone's stamp. It also wards against theft by requiring a code to be entered before use.

Safety Socks

Manufacturer: Pearl Star
Price: $17
http://corporation-pearlstar.com/

Developed by Pearl Star, an original socks maker, and Hiroshima University, Tento Boshi ("Fall Prevention") socks help keep you on your feet by encouraging the toes to point upwards. The socks won an outstanding performance award in a 2007 competition sponsored by the Japan Rehabilitation Engineering Assn.

Tap-Controlled Touch Screen Camera

Manufacturer: Olympus
Price: $461
http://www.olympusamerica.com/cpg_section/product.asp?product=1448

Camera maker Olympus markets its tap-controlled Stylus Tough-8000 camera as a tool for extreme conditions. Shockproof, waterproof, and freezeproof, it is "virtually indestructible," the maker claims. In Japan, though, where it is sold as the mju-TOUGH 8000, its tap-control system (the camera's functions are controlled by tapping or tipping the camera body) is winning plaudits for enabling people with long nails to use the camera easily.

Rain Poncho for Bicycles

Manufacturer: Asahi
Price: $20
http://www.rakuten.co.jp/cyclemall/

A recent change in the law means that Japanese police are taking sterner action against cyclists who use umbrellas while cycling. Asahi's Rain Poncho, which is designed to cover the bike's front basket as well as the rider, may be the answer.

Curved Chopsticks

Manufacturer: H Partners
Price: $9
http://www.h-partners.jp

At a properly set Japanese table, a chopstick rest is used to keep your chopsticks clean. Ukihashi chopsticks, with their distinctive curvature, stay clean while resting directly on the table.

Talking Piggy Bank

Manufacturer: ToyBox
Price: $36
http://www.toybox-jp.com/commodity/img/img08a9b0452_1.jpg

Toymaker ToyBox's speaking piggy bank tells you what coin you have put in and how much you've saved. The box is 15 cm wide and 20 cm high. There are three colors: white, black, and red.

Water-Proof Cloths

Manufacturer: Takashimaya
Price: $30

Furoshiki, square pieces of cloth used for wrapping everyday items, aren't exactly cutting-edge. They date from the 17th century, when Japanese bathers would use them to carry their change of clothes. Still, after renewed interest from younger people in recent years, department store operator Takashimaya has developed a modern, water-repellent version.

Pedometer with a Safety Alarm

Manufacturer: Tanita
Price: $49
http://www.tanita.co.jp/products/models/fb728.html

This is for someone who wants to exercise but is worried about unwanted advances from strangers. Tanita's Stylish Walker pedometer includes a built-in siren. If you want to frighten someone away, just pull the cord, and the alarm goes off.

Earphone Alarm

Manufacturer: Honda Tsushin Kogyo
Price:$11
http://www.konna.jp/shop/goods/A012.htm

The Anshinkun-2 is a light, small timer that you wear like an earphone. With this gadget, you won't miss your stop on the train even if you're napping. Simply set the alarm for the time you want to get off, and the Anshinkun-2 will wake you up before the train leaves the station.

Long-Distance Pet Feeder

Operator: NTT DoCoMo
Price: $215
http://www.konna.jp/shop/goods/A122.htm

Forgotten to feed Fido? By using NTT Docomo's third-generation FOMA mobile phone and its Pet Phone feature, you can provide nourishment for your dog even when you're on the road. First call home on your mobile phone. Ten seconds later you receive live footage of your pet at home. Then push one button to release food from the Pet Phone food unit into the dog's bowl.

Earless Eyeglasses

Manufacturer: Uemura
Price: $20
http://www2.wbs.ne.jp/~uemura/page151.html

The frames of these Coloring Sonotokini eyeglasses rest on your temples, not your ears. According to Uemura, that makes them ideal to wear while coloring your hair.

Vibrating Alarm Pillow

Manufacturer: Funabashi Bussan
Price: $85
http://www.konna.jp/shop/goods/A168.htm

An ordinary alarm clock rouses the whole room. Funabashi Bussan, a maker of auto accessories and health products, has an answer for those who don't want to wake their loved one on the other side of the bed. The company's Mezamashi Bururun is a vibrating pillow only wakes the person sleeping on it.

Hands-Free Umbrella

Manufacturer: Dplus
Price: $32
http://store.shopping.yahoo.co.jp/d-plus/dokodemo-sasube-gr.html

This simple device is especially popular with Japanese women who like to protect their skins from the summer sun, while cycling or pushing a baby stroller.

No-Frills Shampoo Dispenser

Manufacturer: Sanki
Price:$19
http://www.sanki-web.net/index.html/tsumekae.html

This lets you use refills for shampoo, conditioner or body soap rather than buying new bottles. Sanki is originally a backstreet factory in Tokyo making metal parts. At home, the 57-year-old factory owner, Masayuki Abe, grew tired of refilling shampoo bottles for his family and so spent three years to come up with his product as an alternative. Since its release last December, it has sold more than 30,000 sets in eight months. "While our main business has been slow due to the economic climate, this side business is unexpectedly covering the losses," he says.

Google's 20 Hottest Tools

2009-10-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?

As Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and less well-known upstarts nip at its heels, Google has hundreds of wizards racing to come up with smarter answers

High on a wall of the lobby at Google's (GOOG) sprawling headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., a projector displays a live sampling of the 2.5 billion searches made on Google every day. One after another, every second, they appear and just as quickly scroll out of sight: "Route 81 closed," "cushing's disease and canine diabetes," "weather." It's a graphic reminder of how many people, some 720 million a month worldwide, rely on the search giant for links to information, entertainment, products, and just about everything else on their minds.

Yet upstairs from the lobby on this bright September morning, two dozen Google search engineers and executives are gathered around a long conference table, not to celebrate their success but to wrestle with their failures. Headed by Udi Manber, one of nine Google vice-presidents for engineering, these are the leaders of a cadre of engineers and scientists known as the search quality group. They are the masters of the mysterious mathematical wizardry that has made Google one of the most powerful companies in the world. And every week, in a quixotic quest to provide the perfect answers, they meet to grill each other on how to improve Google's search results.

Better than anyone, these folks know that while Google may outperform other search engines, it still spits out plenty of clunkers—irrelevant sites or even occasionally no sites at all for a particular query. They also know that every disappointing result means someone is less likely to click on ads—the source of nearly all of Google's $22 billion in revenues last year—and more likely to try another search engine. "If it turns out that somebody offers a better service than we do," Manber, a former academic and executive at Yahoo! (YHOO) and Amazon.com (AMZN), says with characteristic understatement, "that's a concern."

Today more than ever, Manber and the brainiacs in the search quality group can't afford to falter. Google's competition has recently gone from pitiful to plentiful: Microsoft's (MSFT) new Bing search engine picked up 1.5 percentage points of market share in August to hit 9.5%, according to market researcher Hitwise, while Google's share fell from 71.4% to 70.2%. Bing's gain is partly thanks to a $100 million marketing blitz complete with television ads knocking Google every which way but in name. Microsoft's pending deal for Bing to become Yahoo's underlying search engine, creating a combined entity with 27% market share, could produce Google's first sizable competitor in years.

In addition, there are new upstarts, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Wolfram Alpha, a "knowledge engine" that attempts to answer factual queries in a more organized, comprehensive way. These and other companies are offering search services in such specialized areas as breaking news, updates from friends, and scientific research. Twitter, for instance, has become some news junkies' go-to site for finding out about plane crashes and other news that Google's computers haven't yet provided links to. "Google's very good at searching content as if it's out of a library," says Kimbal Musk, chief executive of OneRiot, a search startup for real-time posts and news from Twitter, Digg, and other social sites. "Twitter let people know another kind of search is possible."

ALTERNATIVES TO SEARCH?

Of course, countless would-be Google killers have fallen on their faces over the years. But longer term, Twitter, Facebook, and related services may pose a more fundamental threat to Google: a new center of the Internet universe outside of search. Twitter, now with 55 million monthly visitors, and Facebook, with 300 million, hint at an emerging Web in which people don't merely read or watch material but communicate, collaborate with colleagues, and otherwise get things done using online services. "Today the Web is not just a collection of pages, it's a collection of applications," says Anand Rajaraman, CEO of Kosmix, a guide to specific Web topics such as health.

As the Web evolves, there's no guarantee that search, or Google, will remain at its center. Not so long ago, portals such as AOL and Yahoo dominated the Internet as most people's first stop online. They lost ground as search improved and helped guide people quickly to sites they were looking for. Now Twitter and others are becoming significant drivers of people's attention to Web sites—Google's raison d'être. The New York Times (NYT) recently said that some 10% of NYTimes.com's traffic was sent by Twitter. Some marketers sense in the rapid rise of Twitter and Facebook a new way other than search for people to find information, connect with friends, and get recommendations and ads for products to buy. Twitter's ability to raise a round of venture money that gives the startup, which has no meaningful revenue yet, a valuation of $1 billion reflects the potential some people see.

Google clearly understands this emerging new Web, given its investments in such services as the video sharing site YouTube, online applications, and even an operating system. But the company hasn't been able to generate significant revenue from anything besides search-related ads, raising doubts about how long it can remain the key leader of the Internet economy.

Meanwhile, Google's very success and size are starting to work against it. In the past year the company has been the target of three U.S. antitrust inquiries and one in Italy. Most recently the Justice Dept. on Sept. 18 said Google's controversial settlement with authors and publishers, which would have allowed it to scan and sell certain books, must be changed to avoid breaking antitrust laws. Even Google's own paying customers—advertisers and ad agencies—say they're eager for alternatives to blunt Google's power. Says Roger Barnette, president of search marketing firm SearchIgnite: "People want a No. 2 that has heft and scale."

The challenges come at a pivotal time for Google. The company, whose founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have thumbed their noses at conventional corporate thinking since Google's founding in 1998, is going through a trying transition to maturity. Its year-over-year revenue growth skidded to 3% in the second quarter from 31% in 2008, prompting several small rounds of layoffs. Analysts chiefly blame the economy and expect search-ad growth to return quickly as the recession eases—one reason Google's stock has more than doubled from its 52-week low last November to nearly 500 today. Yet some current and former Googlers say the company's size has made it slower to act and thus less attractive to the entrepreneurial folk who flocked there in its early days. Google has seen a number of high-profile departures in the past two years.

Relatively few have left the search operation, however. And Google continues to hire engineers for it. "We're still investing a lot in search," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt in an interview. "We are first and foremost a search company." To explore Google's prospects for staying ahead, BusinessWeek recently got a close look at the highly secretive search quality group. Its mathematical formulas and methods are closely guarded to stymie competitors and prevent spammers from gaming the system. But Google provided candid insights into how it's trying to make search so good that people won't bother with extended detours to Twitter, Facebook, and beyond.

The group's home is in Building 43 in the center of the sprawling Googleplex in Mountain View. Deliberately casual, the first floor features such Googley touches as a refrigerator case with free Odwalla juices and huge panels of whiteboards scrawled with product ideas and jokes ("Why are they called apartments if they're stuck together?"). The company's trademark primary colors are splashed everywhere, down to the bulletin-board pushpins. A huge pile of Legos is scattered at the top of the stairs for engineers who need a break from coding software. In a hallway, someone snoozes in a MetroNaps EnergyPod, a semiprivate chair module for catnaps. Much of the second floor, which houses many members of the search quality team, resembles a well-used playroom for a large family of overgrown kids, which is more or less what it is.

The team is composed of several hundred engineers, many from outside the U.S. and some with 20 years of experience in search and information retrieval technologies that predate the Web. In Google's version of Silicon Valley egalitarianism, most people, including executives, share cramped glass offices. They're crowded with multiple large computer monitors, along with whiteboards and yellow sticky notes covered with formulas and notes on arcane aspects of search technology. The office of Matt Cutts, head of the anti-spam unit, and four others bears an inscription above the door: "What could possibly go wrong?"

It's a question Manber and his team contemplate every day. Google can claim a number of search breakthroughs in its 11 years, starting with the co-founders' breakthrough PageRank formula, which gives higher ratings to pages many other sites link to, because they're likely more useful than pages with few links. But it's clear these guys—and a few women—view doing search well as something as difficult as curing cancer. "There's just an endless supply of very difficult, challenging, but incredibly interesting problems to work on," says Scott Huffman, who runs the search evaluation unit and mobile search.

Lately Google has released a flurry of features that suggest it's paying close attention to the competition. One, called Search Options, opens up a pane on the left side of the Google page that allows searchers to narrow queries by such categories as videos, books, or time. In what may be a nod to Twitter, users can select the past 24 hours or even more recent results. Another feature, Google Squared, organizes information on topics, such as dog breeds, into a table with descriptions, photos, and more—echoing Wolfram Alpha.

Most of the search quality group's contributions are less visible because its work is focused mostly on the underlying algorithms, the mathematical formulas that determine which results appear in response to a particular query. Google conducts some 5,000 experiments annually on those formulas and makes up to 500 changes a year. Some are as tiny as improving the results returned on queries such as "GM" by inferring whether someone is looking for the car company or sites on genetically modified food. Others—such as Universal Search, which two years ago added images, videos, and maps to search results that once were all just Web pages—are radical changes. "The core relevance of the results underneath is still the most important thing," says search expert Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land Web site.

If Google's corporate mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Manber articulates a similarly expansive vision of search. He notes that while the 20th century was all about conquering nature, the 21st century will be about understanding people—not just what they say they're looking for, but inferring what they mean from the most minute behavioral clues. "Search is a big part of it, possibly leading the way," says Manber, an intense but soft-spoken man who plays 10 different musical instruments strictly for his own enjoyment. "Our job is to do rocket science that will be taken for granted."

The group's work often begins with a complaint. Google users can flag a bum result by clicking a link at the bottom of results. In some cases, data collected from a standard set of sample queries that Google's computers are constantly running may indicate people aren't clicking on some results as much or in the same way as they did historically. Most ideas, though, come from Google engineers with an inspiration. At the Tuesday morning meeting of search leaders, briefings from colleagues all around Google may spark a new idea to improve a set of searches. Not least, engineers just keep their eyes open. While he browses local art shows, Cutts scribbles obscure artists' Web sites in a small notebook so he can check later on how well they show up in a search—or don't.

Whatever the source, "broken" queries and other proposals for improvements land in the e-mail box of Amit Singhal. The genial, 41-year-old Google Fellow (the company title for its most accomplished engineers) heads the core ranking team. Its job is to provide the most relevant links to pages, videos, and other information for every query and adjust the algorithms when results don't seem to match the queries. Making improvements follows a regular regime. Engineers on the team can essentially try out proposed changes on one of Google's copies of the entire Web, stashed on the company's massive network of computers. Once they think they have a fix, they send the proposal to the evaluation unit, "eval" for short. Those changes can affect many other queries in unexpected ways, so it's up to eval to run more rigorous tests to make sure a change is positive overall and doesn't hurt other results too much.

About three years ago, for instance, engineers proposed a ranking update that would include more results related to synonyms of the words or phrases a searcher typed in—theoretically providing more relevant results in some cases. A broad sample of queries seemed to indicate people on average liked the results. But when eval statisticians dug into results in particular countries, they ran into a big problem. In Chinese, terms such as "big school" and "little school" were coming back as synonyms, producing results that were "really bad, like this would be hugely embarrassing if we launch this," recalls Huffman, head of the evaluation unit. So despite the positive results in other languages, engineers had to try again. Ultimately, they found a bug in the software code that they fixed.

FASTER THAN AN EYEBLINK

That experiment points up another surprising aspect of Google's testing. Google is famous for its algorithms and data-driven approach, but the company depends nearly as much on a global network of human evaluators, or "raters." These part-time contract workers are asked to provide opinions on proposed changes and whether results are more relevant, among other things. Often their opinions carry the day. A couple of years ago, an engineer proposed that Google extract addresses from pages and display them, and perhaps a related map, in appropriate situations, such as when someone does a search for "MOMA New York." The raters liked it, and after a live test on Google confirmed its popularity, the feature was rolled out. About 10 changes are approved to go live at each Thursday morning launch meeting.

To an outsider, many of the changes may look impossibly trivial. Several years ago, for instance, engineers noticed that while Google was returning useful pages when someone typed an acronym such as "CIA"—providing links to the government agency and to the Culinary Institute of America—people were taking a slightly longer time than expected to click on one of them. So on the results pages, Google began highlighting in bold the full names. Immediately, Google saw more clicks through to pages—and faster, too. How much faster? Perhaps 30 or 40 thousandths of a second, on average, Singhal says. That's one tenth the speed of an eyeblink. "This was a small idea," concedes Singhal. "But we have a real responsibility as a company to respect people's time."

More recently, Google has been focusing on providing results more relevant to specific regions around the world. Engineers realized that people in India searching for "bank" didn't much care about Bank of America (BAC), even if it was in the news. So Google has been tweaking algorithms to emphasize the searcher's apparent location. Now, a search on "bank" on the U.S. site, google.com, will bring up links to Bank of America and Wells Fargo (WFC), while the same search on google.co.in, Google's Indian site, will bring up homegrown HDFC Bank (HDB) and ICICI Bank (IBN). It's one small reason Google has even higher market share in many other countries than in the U.S.—such as 88% in India, according to comScore (SCOR).

Making all these search improvement efforts even more difficult is the need to cull Web spam. Marketers of male enhancement drugs or purveyors of damaging software, for instance, are continually trying to fool Google's algorithms into ranking their pages up high. Cutts and his team are constantly on the lookout for ways to recognize them and squelch their appearance in results. In other cases, Webmasters who oversee sites run afoul of such efforts by accident. So Cutts, a voluble 37-year-old who currently sports a shaved head—the result of a lost bet that his team couldn't finish a project on a tight deadline—also educates Webmasters through conference appearances and informational videos on YouTube.

Cutts' unusually public role was on display at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. In this crowd, Cutts is a rock star, his blog posts studied as carefully as Wall Street traders deconstruct comments by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Cutts served on a panel called "Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic," where three dozen Webmasters rushed up to provide business cards. The first site was a sex toys emporium called mypleasure.com. An unruffled Cutts suggested changing its URLs, or Web addresses, to contain more product-related words. Examining a Midwestern department store site, Cutts chided, "Your URL structure is pretty much a search engine obstacle course," advising the Webmaster to excise question marks and other symbols.

The reason Google has become such a powerhouse isn't just because its search technology is exceptional, of course. It's because the company perfected a way to match advertisements to its search results. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers in its AdWords program bid in an online auction to buy "keywords," or terms likely to be in search queries, that they hope will trigger their ads to run on the right side or the top of the search results page. It's a good bet that people searching on, say, "sony cybershot" are in the market to buy a digital camera, and retailers that buy that term are more likely to attract clicks and sales. Spending on search advertising has soared in recent years because advertisers tend to get strong returns for their money.

How well are all the search improvements underlying those lucrative ads working? While no one knows for sure whose search results are best, a number of independent experts continue to give Google the nod over its rivals. And they think the current crop of would-be disrupters isn't going to beat Google at its own game anytime soon. "None of these are big challenges for Google," says search expert Sullivan. "I think Google is still better in quality."

For now, at least. But Google engineers know they need to think outside the search box to stay ahead. A recent contest called CSI, for "Crazy Search Ideas," asked engineers to submit improvements they thought would never be approved because they were weird or seemed too minor. Some 118 entries were culled to four, which are still being explored. Describing such left-field efforts after the recent Tuesday morning meeting, Manber mused about how easy it is to climb a hill and think you're on top of the world. "My worry is we could be stuck on top of a hill," he says, "and it's not the right hill."

What Will Google Devise Next?

Google made its name in Web search, but successes in e-mail, maps, news aggregation, and online video show that the company is no one-trick pony. Where will the search giant go next?

"One of the ways for us to accelerate the potential for one of these products to go from an idea internally to externally launched is to get it in the hands of the user to try," says R.J. Pittman, director of product management at Google

In this BusinessWeek slide show, we look at 20 promising experiments, most of which originated at Google Labs. Some face a clear path to profitability; others are aimed merely at getting consumers to devote more time and attention to the Web—and ads placed by Google. Whatever the case, they're likely to change the way you get around the Web.

1. Sidewiki

http://www.google.com/sidewiki

One of the most recent Google experiments, Sidewiki aims to provide a forum for discussion about virtually every page on the Web. In the margin of any news article or site, Google Toolbar users can leave comments, links, or videos that other Toolbar users in turn can vote up or down. When it was announced, some bloggers welcomed the prospect of a universal commenting system while others pointed out that Sidewiki competes with publishers for reader comments and has great potential for spam. The project has no ads, but indirectly generates revenue by encouraging searches to be launched via the Google Toolbar.

2. Fast Flip

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

The search company collects current news stories and sorts them by topic for Google News, which was launched in 2002. Fast Flip, introduced in September, lets readers quickly page through these articles as if they were reading a magazine. Google displays banner ads alongside each story, generating revenue that it shares with partner publishers, including The New York Times, Salon, and BusinessWeek.

3. Google Listen

http://listen.googlelabs.com/

The search giant took a leap into mobile software when it helped develop the Android operating system, first made available on T-Mobile's G1 phone in 2008. Now Google is busy developing Android-friendly mobile apps, such as the podcast manager Google Listen. The app is free to download and lets users search and subscribe to podcasts and other sources of audio from around the Web. Google Listen doesn't generate revenue directly, but encourages the use of smartphones, which can result in more people seeing Google ads via handheld devices.

4. Chrome OS

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

Google already competes with Microsoft in search, productivity software, and with its Chrome browser, launched in 2008. But in July the company announced a direct assault on Redmond's core product, the Windows operating system. In the second half of 2010, Google intends to release the Chrome OS, which it describes as a lighter, speedier operating system tailored to running Web-based applications. The software will be free to download, but the company may charge PC makers a fee to bundle it with new products.

5. Google Wave

http://wave.google.com/

One of Google's more ambitious projects, Wave combines e-mail, social networking, instant messaging, video, and collaborative document editing. It lets users create a "wave" around a topic or group of friends, and then invite others to contribute messages, multimedia, and content from around the Web in real time. The application, which is open only for limited testing and has no official release date, could help win Google traffic from popular online social hubs such as Facebook and Twitter.

6. Google News Timeline

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

Tinkering with the appearance of its Google News search results, the company in April launched a timeline feature that lets users track the twists and turns of a public figure or other subject over a period of weeks, months, or years. Timeline may eventually place ads next to search results, as it does with most Google News searches.

7. Similar Images

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/

Since introducing Image Search in 2001, Google has indexed hundreds of millions of photos and illustrations on the Web. But it searches for images based on the text around them, often yielding faulty results. So Google is developing a visual search engine that relies on "computer vision" to find shapes and colors similar to each other. The service could some day be incorporated into the general image search, which delivers ads alongside results.

8. Wonder Wheel

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-03-24-n84.html

Web sites like Wolfram Alpha, Aardvark, and Twitter are coming up with new ways of searching the Web, forcing Google to think about different ways it could appeal to searchers. One experiment this year is Wonder Wheel, which presents search results in a spiderweb format, with each search revealing several related terms to help users refine their search. For now, Wonder wheel is available as a free feature under the "Search options" menu on any Google search. It yields no associated ad revenue.

9. Google Voice

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

Using technology acquired in the company's 2007 purchase of GrandCentral, Google Voice lets users receive calls on home, work, and mobile phones from a single number and transcribes voicemail messages into text on the Web, among other nifty features. Apple's reluctance to approve a version of Google Voice for iPhones has raised the hackles of regulators concerned about anticompetitive behavior. The service remains free, but is available only in the U.S. and only to a limited number of invitees.

10. Flu Trends

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/tracking-flu-trends.html

November 2008
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can take up to two weeks to collect and release survey data about where and when the flu is spreading around the country but Google's Flu Trends harnesses real-time data. The service identifies regions around the world experiencing a high number of flu-related Web searches and it produces results shown later to correlate closely with CDC data. The project is part of the nonprofit Google.org, funded with 1% of Google's annual profits.

11. Google Moderator

http://moderator.appspot.com/

Last year, Google engineer Taliver Heath used his "20% time" to create a tool that lets event organizers solicit questions and debate topics from the public. In December, Google Moderator went prime time as then-U.S. President-elect Barack Obama used the site to hold a public forum called "Open for Questions." Google doesn't charge for or run ads on Moderator, but does use the service to get feedback from users in topics such as "Ask a Google engineer" and "Suggest an Android application."

12. Google Audio Indexing

http://labs.google.com/gaudi

To help the public stay up-to-date with last November's U.S. Presidential election, Google used speech-recognition software to create a searchable record of all the words spoken in political videos appearing on YouTube. The company described this as a "showcase for speech technology," suggesting that it may open audio indexing for broader use some time in the future.

13. Knol

http://knol.google.com/k

Seeing that Wikipedia entries for all kinds of people, places, and things were taking the top spots in many of its own search results, Google decided to build its own online encyclopedia. Launched in 2007, Knol is a collection of user-written articles on everything from rheumatoid arthritis to 3D graphics. Unlike Wikipedia, the site displays ads—and once an article goes up, it cannot be edited by the general public.

14. Google Health

https://www.google.com/health

Anticipating the need for a common online database of health records, Google last year launched Google Health, a site where patients can store personal health records and share them easily and securely with physicians. Eventually, Google might collect revenue from partnering with health-care providers. Challenges abound. Critics raise concerns about allowing a large company to control access to such sensitive data. And rivals such as Microsoft and WebMD have released comparable services.

15. GOOG-411

http://www.google.com/goog411/

The ubiquity of Web-equipped smartphones has lessened the need for 411 information services. But for those needing to find business phone numbers without the aid of the Internet, Google provides a free, automated service at the number 1-800-GOOG-411. Google harnessed the service to refine the speech recognition technology used in other tools, including Google Audio Indexing.

16. SketchUp

http://sketchup.google.com/

Startup @Last Software grabbed Google's attention with software that lets people build virtual objects and have them interact with environments in Google Earth. The search giant bought @Last Software and has since released SketchUp—its powerful 3D-creation software—for free. It's since been used by architects, video game developers, do-it-yourselfers, and to improve the 3D maps in Google Earth.

17. Patent Search

http://www.google.com/patents

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office lets anyone search through its archives to dig up original patent filings for all manner of inventions. But Google's own Patent Search, launched in 2006, uses the full-text search capabilities it developed for Google Book Search to deliver more relevant results.

18. Google Code Search

http://www.google.com/codesearch

Google has numerous offerings that cater to Web developers, from nuts-and-bolts tools on Google App Engine to the numerous APIs, or open platforms, it makes available for mixing and mashing. So what could be more fitting than giving them a search engine devoted to finding bits of code hidden all over the Web? The service was created in 2006 and has grown to include domains from Poland, Brazil, China, France, Germany, and elsewhere.

19. Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends compares the popularity of search terms over a period of time and lists what's most popular every day and each year. Last year, Google built Google Insights for Search, a beefier version aimed at helping advertisers use search advertising more effectively. Microblogging site Twitter followed up this year with its own application that reports the hottest topics being discussed by its users at any given moment.

20. Google Mars

http://www.google.com/mars/

Not content merely to map Earth, Google is surveying the heavens. Google Mars offers glimpses into the infrared and relief images collected by two NASA Mars missions, the Mars Global Surveyor and the 2001 Mars Odyssey. In 2008 the company also released Google Sky, which acts as a virtual telescope into the cosmos.

BlackBerry Versus IPhone

2009-07-13T13:06:00.001-07:00

Does the newest iPhone OS eliminate the few advantages the BlackBerry Bold had in our original deathmatch comparison?

The new iPhone 3.0 OS is now old news, but does its enhancements overcome any advantages that the BlackBerry has over the iPhone?

I didn't grow up in my corporate life with either an iPhone or a BlackBerry. For me, a phone is something to make calls with, and a PDA handles my contacts and calendar. But a year ago, I replaced my nearly dead Handspring Palm-based PDA with an iPod Touch and quickly grasped the significance of the "modern" PDA -- the importance, from both a personal and a professional point of view, of having the Web, e-mail, and more at my fingertips. To me the iPod Touch, and by extension the iPhone, was about as productive as a PDA could be, yet I saw BlackBerrys everywhere in conferences and business meetings.

What was it about the BlackBerry that I was missing? Would the iPhone really fall short in a business setting?

To find out, I spent a month with an iPhone 3G and a BlackBerry 9000 Bold (the professional model that RIM recommended as the best to compare to an iPhone) to see how well each would fare in my daily grind. In doing so, I also had the chance to compare the two devices in depth: mail to mail, phone to phone, browser to browser, and thumb stroke to touch-tap. In short, I evaluated them based on everything from classic PDA functionality and usability to location-based services and availability of third-party apps. (This feature revisits those findings in light of the new iPhone 3.0 OS.)

And how do they stack up? Frankly, I've concluded it's time to bury the BlackBerry. A revolution in its time, thanks to its ability to provide instant, secure e-mail anywhere, the BlackBerry has become the Lotus Notes of the mobile world: It's way past its prime.

I was shocked to discover how bad an e-mail client the BlackBerry is compared to the iPhone. And the BlackBerry is terrible at the rest of what the iPhone excels at: being a phone, a Web browser, an applications platform, and a media presenter. With its Windows 3-like UI, tiny screen, patched-together information structure, and two-handed operation, the BlackBerry is a Pinto in an era of Priuses.

Let me show you point by point why most people -- most companies -- should retire their BlackBerrys and adopt iPhones. And why some of you sadly cannot. Note that both devices are available only on AT&T's network, whose coverage and reliability is mediocre on much of the East and West Coasts, a drawback that really hit home when I lost data coverage in lower Manhattan for several hours as AT&T passed me off to roaming partner T-Mobile and its data-less service.

Deathmatch: E-mail, calendars, and contacts

I fully expected the BlackBerry to beat the pants off the iPhone when it came to e-mail. So I was shocked by how awkward e-mail is on the BlackBerry.

In both cases, I used a personal POP account and a work Exchange 2003 account. The iPhone works directly with Exchange, so my e-mail, e-mail folders, calendars, and contacts all flowed effortlessly among the iPhone, laptop, and server. The configuration was trivial. For the BlackBerry, I first used the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which acts like a POP server: You can't access your Exchange folders, contacts, or calendars. And man, is the setup painful, as you step through seemingly countless Web-based configuration screens. After struggling with the limitations of BIS, I asked our IT staff to connect me to our BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) instead, which gave me the connections to folders, contacts, and calendars.

It's key to note that BES supports Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes, while both of those servers support the iPhone only through Web clients, limiting their integration with other iPhone apps such as Contacts and Calendar. (IBM says it will soon add ActiveSync support to Notes, which will then let it have a native iPhone client at some point.) Thus, BlackBerry supports more e-mail systems, even though you have to add a dedicated server to get that support (and upgrade to the latest version to support app management). But an iPhone is much easier to use with Exchange than a BlackBerry is -- at least as a user. Apple uses Exchange Server 2007 for remote iPhone management: remote kill, configuration, and so on. Apple also provides a free app that lets IT admins manage profiles and internally developed iPhone apps on the devices. The hitch is that the management tool can reach the devices only when they are physically tethered to the admins' computers.

My first struggle with the BlackBerry involved its puzzling timestamping of e-mail messages. Oddly, the BlackBerry lists the messages according to when the device receives them, not when they are sent. (If you open the message, you can see the real date and time.) The first time I told the BlackBerry to "reconcile messages" with the server, so I'd have older messages (past my 30-day setting) available to me, in they flooded -- all stamped with the current date and time, burying my new messages. Each time I got off a plane or turned the BlackBerry on after charging it, all the messages received during those disconnected times would be marked as more recent than the messages I got right after I turned the BlackBerry back on. It makes e-mail management a nightmare.

The second frustration was discovering how hard it is to navigate e-mail. I use folders extensively to manage my messages, and the iPhone makes it very easy to navigate among folders. The BlackBerry lets you navigate down but not up, so it's hard to flip from any one folder to another. And on the BlackBerry, the original message stayed in the top-level inbox, so now the message existed in two places: my too-cluttered inbox and in the folder to which I moved the message from my computer. Fortunately, there is a preference to turn that dual message location off; too bad it's not the default.

Reading e-mail was comparable on both devices, though the iPhone's larger screen requires less scrolling. I prefer the iPhone's on-screen controls for replying, forwarding, and so forth over the BlackBerry's use of its button to open a contextual menu, but that's an acceptable UI-based difference. Still, the BlackBerry's menu is too long and requires too much scrolling for common functions. It's easier to delete messages on an iPhone, both in the list and when reading a message, than on the BlackBerry. The culprit is the BlackBerry's reliance on the step-intensive contextual menu for almost everything you do. And while you can press the Backspace button to delete mail, you still have to contend with the menu to confirm the deletion.

The BlackBerry and iPhone are mixed bags when it comes to navigating messages. Both the BlackBerry and iPhone offer a quick way to jump to the top of your message list, but only the BlackBerry has a way to jump to the bottom. The iPhone makes it very easy to select multiple messages to delete or move them, while the BlackBerry can only multiple-select contiguous messages, which in practice means you can't work on many messages at once. There is a workaround for some situations: You can search your messages by name, subject, title, or attachment status, then select those files -- still contiguously -- to work on them.

The iPhone 3.0 OS wipes out a former BlackBerry advantage: the ability to search e-mails, both within the e-mail app (like the BlackBerry) and as part of a device-wide search (something the BlackBerry can't do). But the BlackBerry does let you sort your messages, such as by name or status, which the iPhone can't.

Both the BlackBerry and iPhone let you view common attachment formats such as Word, Excel, and PDF. But the iPhone can't handled zipped attachments, while the BlackBerry nicely shows you a list of the contents so that you can open the ones you want.

With both the iPhone and BlackBerry, you can add people who e-mail you as contacts, but the BlackBerry unnecessarily complicates the process. If it can't figure out the person's name, it forces you to enter that before it will save the contact. The iPhone, on the other hand, lets you fill in that information at another time, so at least the e-mail address is stored for easy access later. The iPhone also notes who you respond to and adds them to the quick-selection list of addressees it displays as you begin tapping a name, even if they're not in the address book. The BlackBerry only displays names in the address book.

Both the BlackBerry and iPhone are annoying when it comes to handling calendar invites, but the iPhone is worse. If you get a calendar invitation as an e-mail attachment on an iPhone, you can't accept it from your e-mail; the iPhone can only sync calendars already handled by Exchange. Plus, you can't move an event from one iPhone calendar to another, such as from your personal calendar to your work one. That's just dumb. iPhone OS 3.0 does now let you send invitations from your mobile calendar, as well as respond to invites (rather than merely accept them), putting it on par with the BlackBerry in that regard.

A BlackBerry doesn't recognize multiple Exchange calendars, so even if you distinguish private from work calendars in Exchange, the BlackBerry does not. The same is true if your desktop calendar app has multiple calendars; the BlackBerry sees them all as one. (The BlackBerry treats events in each e-mail account, plus those in your synced desktop calendar, as a separate calendar.)

Another area where the BlackBerry hung me up: I could accept some invites sent to me, but not others. The BlackBerry would often tell me that I could not accept invites because I was the meeting organizer -- even though I was not. The BlackBerry also overloads you with calendar item details when you open an invite -- it's overwhelming and not necessary.

The iPhone clearly has some issues, but for such a mature platform, the BlackBerry is surprisingly mediocre when it comes to e-mail. The iPhone makes it easier to read, send, and organize e-mails and contacts, but it falls short when it comes to zipped attachments. Both disappoint for calendar management.

Deathmatch: Applications

RIM has made a lot of noise about its BlackBerry App World store, and Apple recently celebrated its 1 billionth App Store download. Make no mistake: The selection of BlackBerry apps is not only limited, but the apps themselves are typically pale, pathetic imitations of iPhone apps. (Compare the New York Times or Salesforce.com on the two devices, for example.) And downloading an app to the BlackBerry usually means wading through several pages and prompts. I much prefer the iPhone's simple, fast approach to downloads. Like much of the iPhone UI, the App Store recognizes that you're using a mobile device and that six-screen legal agreements and endless "Are you sure" confirmations are not mobile-friendly. If you download an iPhone app by accident, deleting it takes a couple seconds -- and the whole download-install-remove process takes less time than just starting a BlackBerry App World download.

To add insult to injury, there's no desktop version of the App World store to peruse available options, as there is for the iPhone, and the BlackBerry's tiny screen makes it hard to do any real perusing or searching. I was also put off by the fact that the BlackBerry App World functionality itself is a BlackBerry app, requiring a download before you can even get started. Not only that, but downloading App World to the BlackBerry from my desktop system via a USB connection required me to use Internet Explorer as my browser. (As a Mac user, I can't.)

The UI for managing apps on the BlackBerry is pathetic. There are at least four places that apps can reside on the device, so finding them is an unwelcome Easter egg hunt. (You can move some of them around to consolidate the mess.) On an iPhone, they're easily and consistently accessible, and infinitely easier to organize than on the BlackBerry. You can download "themes" for the BlackBerry that change how apps are organized, including some that unify them into a common location -- these themes are third-party add-ons, not something the BlackBerry provides itself. But the BlackBerry does let you create your own folders, so you can manage your apps however you want; the iPhone only lets you rearrange your apps, not organized them in folders.

Most BlackBerry "native" apps I tried were just glorified WAP apps, not real apps that take advantage of device-specific capabilities, as native iPhone apps do. (WAP is the DOS-like mobile "Web" technology that the cellular industry tried to palm off on us in the late 1990s.) BlackBerry apps -- at least so far -- are incapable of doing the cool things that iPhone apps can do, whether acting as a level or a credit card terminal, managing your Amazon.com orders, or translating foreign-language terms (even hearing the pronunciation, which was handy on a recent trip to Portugal). Awkward interfaces make many BlackBerry apps painful to use, and they usually cost two or three times as much as their iPhone equivalents.

The iPhone has a real OS, and its SDK lets you create real applications, with menus, buttons, interactivity, video, forms, and so on. Plus, you can use Web apps, getting the iPhone's UI for HTML-based functions such as fields and pop-up menus; you can even save the Web apps alongside your other apps for quick one-click access. By contrast, the BlackBerry apps often consist of browser forms and buttons (often at tiny, unreadable sizes) that fetch and display data from the Web. RIM might like to think of them as native apps, but they're really just stubs to Web apps.

Most apps available for business are either personal aids such as tip calculators and expense logs; front ends to sales tools; or basic editors. The iPhone has better UIs for the first two types of apps. For editing, the BlackBerry has DataViz's $70 Documents to Go (a basic version is included at no charge by many carriers), which is capable and straightforward, letting me do basic text edits in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, and simple formatting such as boldfacing text. You can cut and paste as well. Tracked changes are removed from the document, and though extensive editing is theoretically possible, you're hamstrung by the device's keyboard and trackball.

On the iPhone, I used the $20 Quickoffice for iPhone, a productivity editor that has similar capabilities (including internal cut and paste), plus retains any revisions tracking in the original document. But it can't work with zipped files. Quickoffice is a little easier to use than Documents to Go, but Apple's prohibition against saving files on the iPhone means that Quickoffice can't get to those e-mail attachments. Quickoffice does have a cool tool to transfer files to and from the iPhone over Wi-Fi, but you need your computer up and running to do that -- in which case, why would you edit the documents on the iPhone? Recently released, an iPhone version of Documents to Go can download attached files if they come from an Exchange Server, which only partially gets around the Apple limitation; but it works only on Word files, so it's not terribly useful.

I also tried the devices on Google Docs. It's barely possible to edit a spreadsheet in Google Docs on an iPhone; the most you can do is select and add rows and edit individual cells' contents. You can't edit a text document, and for calendars all you can do is view and delete appointments. The BlackBerry lets you see spreadsheets one column at a time -- which is useless. Bottom line: You won't use Google Docs on either device.

I found several BlackBerry apps to be unreliable and very slow. Salesforce.com, for example, didn't open for weeks due to an undefined error when connecting to its site. When I finally got it installed, it was very hard to read and use. I tried five times to download Gokivo Navigator -- BlackBerry App World's top-rated navigation app -- at half an hour a pop. It worked the sixth time, and 90 minutes later was installed and running. Not only did the installation take nearly 45 minutes, but then it rebooted the BlackBerry, which took another 45 minutes to grapple with whatever changes were made. This simply doesn't happen with iPhone apps.

When all was said and done, Gokivo Navigator turned out to be hard to use compared to the iPhone's Google Maps. It has as many confirmation dialog boxes as Windows Vista -- so getting to a result requires many clicks -- but lacks the real-time scrolling or page-by-page direction features of Google Maps. You'd need to be desperately lost to use it -- and forget about accessing it in a moving vehicle, given how slow it is and how hard it is to mouse through the maps. The alternative is to pay a monthly fee for AT&T's voice-based navigation service, which is available on many phones, not just BlackBerrys.

I also found that several BlackBerry apps often hogged my device's resources, leaving me unable to switch to another application, the Web, e-mail, or the phone. That can happen on an iPhone as well, but the "stuck" times on the BlackBerry were both much more frequent and longer in duration. The BlackBerry's application switching issues meant that its alleged advantage of being able to run multiple apps simultaneously is limited, essentially letting you pick up where you left off rather than really working with multiple apps. Still, that's more than the iPhone can do.

I did find one BlackBerry app advantage: the ability to open files in zipped attachments (a glaring omission from the iPhone).

If you want to use apps on a mobile device, the BlackBerry is not a realistic option. If your work forces you to use a BlackBerry, get an iPod Touch for the apps.

Deathmatch: Web and Internet

Before the iPhone had a wealth of apps, it had a wealth of Web sites, thanks to its Safari browser's support for most modern desktop Web technology, though Flash support is the big omission. That means you can view most Web pages on the iPhone, as long as you are willing to zoom in and scroll. But as noted in the previous section, Web-based tools such as Google Docs are a different story.

The BlackBerry also supports desktop Web technologies, so theoretically you can do the same zoom-and-scroll navigation on it. But in real life, it doesn't work that way. Configuration issues pose the first set of hurdles: BlackBerrys often ship with JavaScript disabled, so you have to know to change that. And though you can emulate different browsers on a BlackBerry, the default settings usually tell Web sites that you are a WAP device (hello, text-only interface), so you have to know to change that too.

Once your BlackBerry is configured to access the Web, you use the built-in Web browser to navigate pages. This is where the BlackBerry's weaknesses become painfully apparent. You can only zoom a little bit using the BlackBerry's navigation button, and zooming back out is a mystery. Consequently, many Web sites remain too hard to browse. Because the BlackBerry comes with none of the standard Web fonts, even zoomed-in Web pages can be hard to read.

The BlackBerry also can't handle basic Web technologies such as overlapping, hidden DIVs, so many DHTML Web sites are unusable. And filling out HTML forms is exceedingly frustrating, especially compared to the iPhone's use of standard, easily accessible mechanisms. Even with my reading glasses on, most were lost causes.

The only practical approach to most Web pages is with the BlackBerry's columns mode, which essentially stacks all the DIVs in a Web page into a single column. This works, making most DIVs accessible, but it's like drinking the Web through a straw. Expect to scroll past multiple Web pages of site navigation before you get to the site's real content. The columns view is a hack, and like all hacks, it's better than nothing but not a substitute for the real deal.

The bottom line is that the BlackBerry makes mobile Web browsing a painful exercise. You'll do it only when you have no other choice. No wonder that the iPhone accounts for the vast majority of mobile Web traffic -- it's one of the very few handsets that can actually use the Web.

Deathmatch: Location support

Both the iPhone and the BlackBerry support GPS location, and the iPhone also can triangulate location based on Wi-Fi signals. The iPhone comes with Google Maps, which can find your current destination, provide directions, and otherwise help you navigate. The BlackBerry requires you to download separate apps to do so. As noted earlier, the BlackBerry App World store's top-rated navigation app is a real pain to use: no turn-by-turn directions, great difficulty in navigating the map, and a UI more interested in issuing confirmation dialogs than providing results. Honestly, I can't see using it. Even though I'm a guy, I think I'd break down and ask someone for directions before trying to work with it again.

Alternatively, I could pony up the $10 monthly fee to use AT&T's Voice Navigator, which talks you through your directions and updates the map as you move along. (There is no iPhone equivalent, for those who travel a lot and need a travel guide, though that may change with the iPhone OS 3.0's new support for voice commands.) Frankly, data services cost too much as it is, so paying even more to get Voice Navigator is not acceptable to me.

The iPhone's integration of location is more pervasive than the BlackBerry's, so you see it in many App Store apps, from a "find my car" app to "tell me the nearest train station." A common "find me" icon works across location-aware apps, and the ability to pan and zoom through maps makes it easy to see where you are, follow the recommended directions, and explore alternatives. There's also decent integration between Google Maps and the iPhone's Contacts app, so you can select a friend's name to have his address entered automatically. (Oddly, you can't edit the contact information in Contacts if you access it via Google Maps.)

The BlackBerry also had trouble finding its bearings via GPS in any location-aware app; often it could not get a location at all. And it sometimes took several minutes (yes, minutes -- try that while driving) to get the positions for those times when it could. I can't blame AT&T for this -- the iPhone uses the same network and could situate itself in mere seconds.

Deathmatch: User interface

BlackBerry users don't seem to like touch keyboards, which the iPhone depends on. I became equally adept at writing e-mails on both devices, though it took me a couple of weeks to get up to speed on the iPhone's screen-based keyboard compared to a few days on the BlackBerry. Colleagues who've migrated from the BlackBerry to the iPhone also say it took them a while, and some are never as fast on the iPhone as on the BlackBerry. Plus, they can do keyboard shortcuts, which is a nonexistent concept on the iPhone.

Both keyboards have their issues. Typing numbers and special symbols on the BlackBerry can result in hand-wrenching positions, and you need to use both thumbs, due to how the Shift key works. Entering numerals with regular text is particularly a pain. I also can't read the symbols on the BlackBerry keyboard without my glasses. The iPhone works best when tapping with one thumb, though I still have trouble with Q, W, O, and P, due to the optical illusion as to their location caused by the glass.

For the rest of the UI -- the screen size, the navigation, and option selection -- the BlackBerry is torture. That little roller ball is hard to control precisely. The menus can be difficult to scroll through. Everything just takes longer to do. Apple's UI is elegant and easy. Its mouse-like touch navigation coupled with the use of gestures makes it easy to delete items, select multiple items, scroll, and enlarge and shrink screens. Its use of a consistent set of input controls for dates, lists, and so on lets the UI become second nature quickly.

On a BlackBerry, the screen is hard to read, hard to navigate, and hard to zoom, and it's often covered by the menus. The UI for input controls is inconsistent at best. Clearly little to no thought has been brought to the BlackBerry UI; it's just a Frankenstein collection of methods developed in isolation from each other. Apple's real UI advantage is not the touch interface (though it works wonderfully in a graphical environment), but something less tangible. It's the well-thought-out, consistently implemented UI that leaves the iPhone unmatched.

In other areas, the iPhone's rotation ability and its use of accelerometer for motion detection allow uses -- some silly, some practical -- the BlackBerry can't even dream of.

As for the devices themselves, I found myself accidentally pushing the BlackBerry's camera button a lot, and the lack of autolock for the keyboard meant that I often had my address book or other function active when I took it out of my pocket. The iPhone's buttons aren't so easily pressed by mistake, and its easily set autolock prevents accidental 911 calls and address book edits.

One big drawback of the iPhone had been its lack of copy and paste, which iPhone OS 3.0 addresses in a very easy-to-use, intuitive approach. It's far superior to the BlackBerry's key-and-menu-based approach; plus, it can handle graphics and regions of Web pages, not just text. That former BlackBerry advantage is no more.

Where the BlackBerry wins

There are three considerations that might legitimately lead a company to choose a BlackBerry as its mobile platform, despite all its inferiorities.

One is security. Although Apple provides more iPhone security capabilities than most people realize, it still doesn't have the depth of messaging and device security that the BlackBerry does. Organizations running BlackBerrys can trust that both the data in transit and the data stored on the devices is secure. If a BlackBerry is lost, IT can wipe all of its data and render it useless over the air. You can remote-wipe and incapacitate an iPhone, but only via Exchange. The BlackBerry can have updates and policies pushed to it wirelessly, as well as confirm and log such updates so that you can demonstrate regulatory compliance; by contrast, although the Apple Configuration Utility provides BlackBerry-like security and policy capabilities, you can't force users to install them or even know whether they have done so. And forget about pushing automatic policy updates.

Of course, most organizations don't actually need that level of security, nor do they apply it to other devices such as laptops and employees' home access. But if you follow defense or health-care industry security practices, the iPhone isn't up to snuff yet, not even with third-party add-ons.

Another is use of an e-mail platform other than Exchange 2007. Apple has tied itself closely to Exchange 2007, for user management, information integration, and even security (Exchange is the only way to blank a lost or stolen iPhone, for example). If you use Notes or GroupWise, your iPhones must be managed as Web clients.

The third is the lack of keyboard. All the BlackBerry users I know love their physical QWERTY keyboard. Yes, the touch keyboard works just fine for non-touch-typists like me, but different people work well with different UI methods. So Apple should allow the development of a plug-in or Bluetooth keyboard to satisfy that need. It could even make a model that has it built in -- as long as the screen is not shortened to make room (call it the iPhone Tall).

Apple could easily close all three gaps if it chooses. RIM will have a much harder time addressing the BlackBerry's fundamental deficits. Its iPhone-copying attempts so far -- the BlackBerry Storm and App World -- reveal that RIM fundamentally doesn't get it and is well on its way to becoming the Lotus Notes of mobile.

The fourth reason to choose a BlackBerry is because you really don't want employees to use the Web or apps from a mobile device. If that's your agenda, the BlackBerry will ensure you succeed.

Where the iPhone wins

For everyone else, the BlackBerry is yesterday's mobile messenger, way past its prime and heading toward retirement. The iPhone is light-years ahead of the BlackBerry on almost every count. RIM should be ashamed.

BlackBerry Tour Product Review

2009-07-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

A fast processor, modern design, good keyboard, and international connectivity make the Tour an excellent smart phone,

Combining some of the best aspects of the BlackBerry Bold Series and the BlackBerry Curve Series, the BlackBerry Tour Series from Verizon Wireless is a sleek, fast smart phone with a comfortable keyboard. This device ($199 after $70 mail-in rebate) doesn't offer Wi-Fi, and it's Web browser isn't as good as the competition, but the Tour's speedy processor, sharp display, and global connectivity make it well worth the investment.

Design & Specifications

Size and Weight

* Height: 4.4 inches (112 mm)
* Width: 2.4 inches (62 mm)
* Depth: 0.6 inches (14.2 mm)
* Weight: 4.58 ounces (130 grams)

Display

* Clear, high-resolution display
* Half VGA+
* 480x360 pixel screen
* Displays over 65,000 colors

Available Features

* World Phone Capabilities
* 3G Network
* Camera (3.2 MP)
* 256 MB Built-in Memory
* Enhanced Media Player
* Supports BlackBerry App World™
* BlackBerry® Maps
* Wireless Email
* Organizer
* Browser
* Phone
* Corporate Data Access
* SMS/MMS

The Tour has a beautiful design that puts the old, boring Curve 8330 and the 8830 World Edition to shame. It has a chic black face, keyboard, and recessed trackball. The Tour also has a dark metal border running around its edge, and a subtle yet unique dark-blue carbon fiber-like design on the back cover. Plus, the 2.4-inch, 480 x 360-pixel display is bright and vivid, even if the high resolution often caused us to squint when viewing Web pages.

Measuring 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and weighing 4.6 ounces, the Tour is nearly half an ounce heavier than the original Curve, but it’s still pocket-friendly. On the left side is a voice control toggle button, and on the right you’ll find a full 3.5mm headphone jack, volume controls, a camera quick-launch button, and the phone’s microUSB charging port. The top of the phone has two soft keys for locking and muting the phone, design touches pulled from the Curve 8900 and the Storm.

User Interface

The BlackBerry 4.7 OS interface is plain but intuitive, with six icons on the desktop and more inside the main menu. While phones such as the Palm Pre have introduced new operating systems with enticing card–based user interfaces that make it easy to switch between open apps, RIM hasn’t made any noticeable changes to the Tour’s operating system. It works, but it’s far from fun or exciting. On the other hand, you can multitask on the Tour, something you can’t do on the iPhone. For example, we enjoyed surfing the Web and checking e-mail while streaming music from Slacker in the background.

Battery & Battery Life

* Battery: 1400 mAHr removable/rechargeable cryptographic lithium cell
* Talk Time: 5 hours
* Standby Time: 14 days

Keyboard & Security

Data Input & Navigation

* 35 key backlit QWERTY keyboard
* Trackball located on front face of device, ESC key to the right, Menu to the left
* Dedicated Keys: Send, End, Menu, Escape, Left/Right Convenience keys (default VAD and Camera) ,2 x Volume/Zoom, Sleep, Mute (Play/Pause)
* Intuitive icons and menus

The backlit QWERTY keyboard features beveled keys separated by frets (like the BlackBerry Bold), but, because the Tour is narrower than the Bold, the layout is somewhat cramped. Despite that small caveat, the Tour still has a better keyboard than most smart phones on the market today.

We typed a 45-word block of text on both the Bold and the Tour to get an idea of how fast we could type on each device. On the Bold, we completed this test in 55 seconds with 3 errors; on the Tour we typed the same snippet in 1:04 seconds with 6 errors.

Security

* Password protection
* Screen lock
* Sleep mode

Global Connectivity

Wireless Networks

* Fully-functional World Phone that supports global roaming on 3G networks
* Quad-Band: 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900MHz GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks
* Single-Band: 2100 MHz UMTS/HSPA networks
* Dual-Band: 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EVDO Rev A networks

Bluetooth

* Bluetooth® v2.0; Mono/Stereo Headset, Handsfree, Phone Book Access
* Profile (PBAP) and Serial Port Profile Supported. Bluetooth Stereo Audio (A2DP/AVCRP), DUN
* 3.5mm stereo headset capable

Like the BlackBerry Storm, the Tour is a world phone, which means it supports international roaming for voice and data networks. You can make phone calls on the Tour in 220 countries, or voice and data connections in 175 countries. When you travel abroad, in countries that typically use GSM networks instead of CDMA–based ones, you’ll be ready to roam with the included Vodafone SIM card. Verizon Wireless charges by the minute for roaming, and costs range from $0.69 per minute in Canada and Puerto Rico to $2.89 per minute in Indonesia for phone calls. GlobalEmail Monthly plans start at $64.99 for per month.

E-mail and Messaging

With the first-class push e-mail experience we’ve come to expect from RIM, e-mail setup is—no surprise—simple on the Tour: Enter your e-mail address and password, and the phone does the rest. Your messages arrive in your inbox very close to real-time on the Tour, and it’s easy to search through e-mails. Plus, unlike the iPhone 3GS, which is limited to 300 messages, you can store well over a thousand messages in your inbox should you so choose. The phone also comes loaded with DataViz’s Documents To Go software, for light editing of Microsoft Office attachments.

You can install AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger all from the phone’s Application Center menu, or you can download them from BlackBerry App World. Like the original Curve, you’re limited to just 160-word SMS messages before you have to start a new text. The Bold, iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, and most other phones these days, immediately start a new text and thread them together.

Web Browsing

The browser on the Tour is very similar to what you'll find on the Bold and Storm, but in this case the high-resolution display makes text a little too small to read without zooming in. Plus, panning around pages is slower on this device than on smart phones equipped with WebKit browsers, like the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, and T-Mobile G1. You have to wait a bit longer for the screen to redraw.

The good news is that the Tour offers speedy data performance. Over Verizon Wireless’ EV-DO Rev. A network, the Tour loaded m.CNN.com in 3 seconds and the full HTML New York Times home page in 25 seconds, which is a little slower than the iPhone 3GS (17 seconds), but faster than the Palm Pre (27 seconds). Too bad the Tour doesn’t support Wi-Fi like the BlackBerry Bold, iPhone 3GS, or Palm Pre. We saw good data coverage on our tests in New York City and New Jersey, but there are plenty of areas where you won’t have full 3G coverage and will want the faster browsing speeds Wi-Fi offers.

GPS & BlackBerry Maps

* Assisted, Autonomous and Simultaneous GPS enabled with preloaded BlackBerry Maps application and for e911 capabilities. Both User Plane & Control Plane GPS is supported.
* Includes BlackBerry Maps
* Picture geo-tagging functionality

VZ Navigator comes preloaded for voice-guided turn-by-turn directions and live traffic alerts. The app found us in 15 seconds, and accurately calculated a route from Midtown to the Upper East Side in about 6 seconds. That’s impressive given that some phones have trouble finding us in Manhattan, where it can be hard to grab a GPS signal because of the tall buildings.

Multimedia & Application

Media Player

* 256 MB Built-in memory
* Expandable memory capability
* Synchronize iTunes® music and playlists to and from the device
* Enhanced multimedia support
* Music and video playback and video recording
* Video streaming and full track downloading
* Video format support: MPEG4 H.263, MPEG4 Part 2 Simple Profile, H.264 (encoding and decoding 30fps), WMV
* Audio format support: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA, WMA ProPlus

Ringtones & Notifications

* Tone, vibrate, on-screen or LED indicator
* User configurable notification options
* 32 Polyphonic Ringtones – MIDI, MP3

Voice Input & Output

* Integrated speaker and microphone
* Hands-free headset capable
* Bluetooth headset capable
* Integrated Hands-Free Speakerphone

The Tour has a 3.5mm headphone jack and comes with a set of plastic headphones. You can download tracks from the V Cast Music Store for $1.99 each, or load music using a $14.99 per month Rhapsody subscription. We downloaded 311’s “Jackpot” in a speedy 45 seconds, and there’s plenty of room for music on the included 4GB memory card. The speaker was sufficiently loud, but the sound distorted at full volume during the opening guitar segment of the song. Using Slacker, and compared to the Curve, we thought a Weezer track sounded fuller and a hair louder on the Tour.

Using the aforementioned App World, you can also download and install applications to beef up your multimedia experience. Slacker, for example, takes advantage of your memory card for caching music, which will allow you to listen to songs even where you don’t have data service. The Tour’s speaker sounded much fuller when we played the same station side by side with a Curve 8330.

App Store

You can use RIM’s App World storefront to find new applications for the BlackBerry Tour. And although there were 1,336 applications available for the original Curve on Verizon Wireless as of this review, there were only 584 available on the BlackBerry Tour. For example, there were 105 entertainment apps available for the Curve, but just 47 on the Tour. RIM is constantly adding applications, so we imagine that number will increase quickly.

We downloaded the Ticketmaster application to a Curve—which already had a lot of e-mail and applications installed on it—and on the Tour, to compare the speed at which each was able to download and install the application. The Tour completed the task in 35 seconds, while the Curve was still chugging along after 2 minutes.

Just keep in mind that you can’t install applications to a microSD Card. The Tour has a skimpy 256MB of memory on which you can install apps, which is at least better than the 96MB available on the Curve, but nowhere near the storage you have with the iPhone 3GS or the Palm Pre.

Worse, App World doesn’t yet offer everything that’s available for BlackBerry devices. Pandora, for example, supports BlackBerry phones, but isn’t in the App World store. And premium apps still require a PayPal account, which is annoying. We also encountered a small bug where multiple icons for apps appeared Downloads.

Camera & Video Recording

* Camera: 3.2 MP camera
* Auto focus, image stabilization, and video capture
* 2X digital zoom
* Geo-tagging functionality
* Video recording capabilities

The 3.2-MP autofocus camera on the Tour took sharp shots with decent color saturation, but it was slow to capture stills (about 2 seconds). When the camera did kick in, we were impressed that our pics didn’t come out blurry, even when subjects were moving. (The iPhone 3GS has an especially difficult time with moving subjects.) We also appreciated having an LED flash on board for shooting in low light, something the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre lack.

The video clips we captured with the Tour had a lot of artifacts and exhibited some blurring during playback. We couldn’t read the text on the side of a truck across the street. The frame rate(15 frames per second) was good, though, and audio came through clear.

BlackBerry VS Apple iPhone Comparison Review

Graphic Card End User Level Buyer's Guide 2009

2009-06-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

End User Level PCI Express Card $200 - 400

At the $180 - $280 range, we are going to ask our readers to wait until the end of this week to make a decision. If you want a little more power than the 4870 1GB / GTX 260, but you don't want to spend the money required to push up to the next price point, we might have something (or two somethings) for you.

$180 - $280 Recommendation: Almost There ... Stay on Target (Wait a few more days)

I wish we could talk about this a little more now, but all will be clear by the end of the week.

The only real options between $280 and $400 are the 4850 X2 2GB and GTX 285 (we could only find the GTX 280 for a couple bucks less negating the value). Making this choice isn't for the feint of heart though. Yes, the GTX 285 does offer the highest performance of a single GPU solution in many cases. But the fact that the 4870 costs just a little more than half as much, and in some cases performs higher, leaves a sour taste in our mouths.

The fact that the 4850 X2 2GB comes in at the low end of this price range and the GTX 285 requires an investment of at least $50 more dollars tilts our recommendation heavily in favor of the 4850 X2 2GB in terms of value. But at the same time, Sapphire is still the only vendor out there building the 4850 X2. And while current drivers are doing pretty well, we are still reeling from the AMD driver issues we had from the end of last year up through the beginning of this year.

So there are caveats for both options. But our recommendation is the 4850 X2 2GB.

$280 - $400 Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB

	ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB
Sapphire	$279.99

At the highest end, there are only two options left. The 4870 X2 and the GTX 295. The GTX 295 is much more expensive, but does outperform th 4870 X2 in most cases. There are some games where the 4870 X2 does top the GTX 295, just like the 4870 1GB sometimes leads the GTX 285. But really it's diminishing returns.

If you want the top of the line, the choice is clear: the option is the GTX 295. If you want top of the line performance without breaking the bank as hard, the 4870 X2 would be the option to go with.

Our recommendation is that there are something like two games where this level of hardware make any difference at all. But if you have the money to spend we're going to go ahead and recommend the part that delivers better price/performance: the Radeon 4870 X2.

$400+ Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

	ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
Sapphire	$429.99
Diamond	$449.99

That does it for our spring GPU buyers guide. We'll fill in one gap shortly, and the highest volume slot at $100 will make more sense (maybe) in about a months time.

Graphic Card Mid Level Buyer's Guide 2009

2009-06-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Mid Level PCI Express Card $100 - 200

For our ~$100 price point (plus or minus a bit) we are going to strongly recommend that people wait for about a month. This price point will be shaken up a bit in about that time and we really aren't comfortable recommending anyone purchase something in this market until sometime in early May. This may or may not further compress the sub $100 market, but there really isn't much more room down there, so we don't expect much change except at right around $100.

~$100 Recommendation: IT'S A TRAP!!! (wait about a month)

It just so happens that this price point is also the highest volume price point. Certainly neither AMD nor NVIDIA will be happy that we recommend waiting, but this is all about the consumer. If you are going to spend about $100 on a video card, just try really hard to wait a little bit longer.

From $130 to $150 we are looking at the a tightly contested price point. At the lower end of the spectrum, the Radeon 4850 gets our nod, while at the higher end the 1GB GTS 250 does perform slightly better in our tests (we do not recommend the 512MB variant though). Whether that slight difference in performance is worth the $20 difference in price really has to be up to the end user, but you get a much bigger bump by jumping up out of the price range to the ATI Radeon 4870 512MB at $165 (which is why we don't recommend the GTS 250 1GB at this point).

$130-$150 Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4850

	ATI Radeon HD 4850
PowerColor	$129.99
Diamond	$159.99
XFX	$169.99

This next bit is a little more tricky. Between $165 and $180 there exist the 4870 512MB and 4870 1GB. These cards perform nearly the same at lower resolutions, so for gamers with 1680x1050 and lower resolution monitors, we would recommend the 512MB variant with the caveat that some games are becoming memory hogs. The 1GB might be slightly more future proof, but it's really hard to say whether or not that will last beyond when you'd want to upgrade both either way when talking about 1680x1050 and lower.

$165 (At 1680x1050 and Below) Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4870

	ATI Radeon HD 4870
ASUS	$164.99
HIS	$169.99

At resolutions above 1680x1050, the 1GB 4870 and the GTX 260 core 216 are both viable options that come in at $180. So save $20 at average to lower resolutions or make a choice based on the games you play (or preference for a hardware designer) at higher resolutions. NVIDIA and AMD really do trade blows depending on the games we choose to test, so if you want the best performance at this price point, you'll have to pick the games in which performance matters most to you.

$180 Recommendation: End User Preference (4870 1GB or GTX 260 core 216)

Graphic Card Entry Level Buyer's Guide 2009

2009-06-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

It's been since the holidays that we've done a GPU buyers guide. It never seems like the right time to do a new GPU buyers guide, as NVIDIA and AMD have been pushing aggressively back and forth for leadership in the market place. When new parts or tweaked cards haven't been coming out, prices have been adjusted quickly to maintain tight competition.

Now is no exception. There are a couple spots in our line up where we will have to make recommendations based on what we know about what's happening in the market place. In competitive reviews, we try very hard to look only at that exact time slice to make our recommendations. In our buyers guides we like to be a little more flexible and take a more retail and market place view rather than the heavily technology and performance based focus of our GPU reviews.

Starting out, we're looking at the roughly $75 market where we split our recommendation between the 4670 and the 9600 GT. Prices have compressed more over the past few months, and the 4670 comes in low enough to cover many needs at very little cost. You can always spend less on graphics and get less, but if you want more than 2D, the 4670 and 9600 GT are where you should start looking.

Entry Level PCI Express Card Between $75-$100

$75 Recommendation: ATI Radeon HD 4670

	ATI Radeon HD 4670
Apollo	$64.99
Gigabyte	$79.99
Sapphire	$69.99

And we've got the GeForce 9600 GT. Just a little more performance in some games, maybe a little less in others, with roughly the same cost. But if you want any more than that, you'll want to wait about a month.

$75 Recommendation: NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT

	NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT
Apollo	$74.99
Gigabyte	$67.99
Sparkle	$89.99
PNY	$97.99

Amazon Coupon Valid Until 2009-03-31, Hurry Up !!!

2009-03-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

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Domain Name - General Info

2009-03-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

What is a Domain Name?
For all intents and purposes, your domain name is your online identity, which allows internet users from around the world to locate and browse your website from their computer. Technically speaking, a domain name is an alias which refers Internet users to your ISP address, a complicated series of numbers that represent your space on the web. Developed to make ISP addresses easier to remember, domain names consist of three parts: the second level domain, the root, and the top level domain. The second level domain is the name of your website.

The History of Domain Names
Quite surprisingly, the history of domain names can be traced clear back to the 1960's, well before the advent of the personal computer. In the 1960's the United States Department of Defense established the Internet, and set up the present domain name system, using generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as a way of describing organizational and political structures. In the past few years, several of these gTLDs have been granted "unrestricted" classification, meaning that anyone can register and use a domain in that particular gTLD. Below is a listing of current gTLDs, their specified use, and their classification.
Top Level Domain Specified Use Classification
.com Commercial Companies Unrestricted
.edu Educational Institutions 4Year Institutions
.gov Government Agencies Restricted to US Government
.mil Military Agencies Restricted to US Military
.net Network Providers Unrestricted
.org Non-Profit Organizations Unrestricted
.arpa Historical Remnant No Longer Available

All unrestricted gTLDs, such as .com, .net, and .org, can be registed by anyone. In addition to these, there are several new gTLDs currently being considered, which will probably be added soon, including: .info, .biz, .name, .aero, .museum, .coop, and .pro.

Applying For a Domain Name
In order to apply for a domain name, you must provide information on at least two servers who will be responsible for handling all DNS inquiries concerning your domain on the Internet. This requirement makes it relatively difficult and extremely expensive for an individual to apply for a domain name, so most people allow Internet service companies to handle domain name registration and account setup for a minimal fee. These days there are literally thousands of Domain registrars on the web, all offering a variety of services, so make sure to shop around for the best deal. In case you are serious about registering your own domain name, here are the official requirements:

At least two independent Servers MUST be provided for translating names to addresses for Hosts in the Domain. A Domain name may be removed from the InterNIC database, after notice, if at least two Name Servers are not reachable and functioning properly. DO NOT list Name Servers if you do not have permission from the owner to do so. Listing Name Servers without the explicit approval of the owners is not only unethical, but can cause operational problems for the Name Servers listed. The Servers should be in physically separate locations and on different networks, if possible. The Servers should be active and respond to Domain Name System (DNS) queries BEFORE this application is submitted. Incomplete information in Sections 7 and 8 will result in a returned template. Most ISPs can provide one or more Name Servers if you do not have your own.

If the last passage made little or no sense to you, you probably do not qualify to register your own domain name, and would be better off using a domain registrar. The process of registering for a domain name requires advanced computer skills, and is much more than filling out an application and mailing it in.

iPhone 3.0 OS Guide: Everything You Need to Know

2009-03-23T05:57:00.000-07:00

iPhone 3.0 OS, the next generation operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch, and whatever Apple device comes next. New features, new apps, here you will find all the information you need.

NEW IPHONE OS 3.0 FEATURES

The new iPhone OS 3.0 adds over 100 new features including—at friggin' last—cut and paste.

• Copy & Paste text. When you double-tap over text, you will get a "cut, copy, and paste" bubble dialog. Double-tap again and a "paste" bubble will appear if there's anything stored in your clipboard.

This works across applications. You can expand your selection points using your thumbs and, if you accidentally paste something you didn't want to paste, just shake your iPhone to undo it.

• Copy & Paste photos. You can also copy and paste photos. Now you will be able to select multiple photos by tapping the action button, copy some of them, and paste them in an email, ready to send.

• New Spotlight. iPhone OS 3.0 will allow you to search across the entire information contained in your device, no matter where, as soon as the information is supported it. If an application is written to support the new Spotlight, its data will also be available in the search.

In this screenshot you can see Spotlight bringing results from your address book, maps, your iPod, and apps in your springboard.

• Search in Mail, Calendar, and iPod. These Apple applications have specific search interfaces. The search in Mail doesn't support the message content yet, but it supports searching in IMAP servers—that will save a lot of time logging into Gmail.

• 3G Tethering. This feature will allow you to connect your iPhone 3G to a laptop, to use it as a modem to access the internet. Carriers still have to sign-off on it, and probably charge more for it. None have announced it yet.

• Landscape keyboard. Apple has added the landscape keyboard mode to other applications, like Mail, SMS, and Notes.

• Multimedia messaging. A big one to send rich content to people without mail-enabled telephones: The new MMS function will allow you to include everything, from images to sound to vcards (no word on video, however.) Personally, I find these usesless having email, but some people seem to want it.

• Support for new calendar types. In iPhone OS 3.0 you will be able to subscribe to calendars on the web using two protocols: CalDAV—supported by Google and Yahoo—and subscriptions via the .ics format—which is what Apple uses in iCal.

• Improved stocks application. The stocks application now allows you to read related news, so you can enjoy yourself learning about the latest market scandals, stock crashes, and executives getting bonus packages from government aid while their companies sink into hell. Thank you, Apple.

• Stereo Bluetooth A2DP audio. You will be able to pair your iPhone 3.0 with a stereo Bluetooth A2DP device, like headphones or speakers.

• Note syncing with iTunes.

• Automatic login in Safari. The new version of Safari will remember login credentials, so you won't need to introduce your username and password again while accessing Scoreland your work intranet.

• Shake to shuffle music. If you are in your iPod application, you just need to shake it to start the shuffling mode. Hopefully this will be optional for sports people out there.

• Wi-Fi auto-login. In case you have a subscription to a paid hotspot, your iPhone or iPod touch will autolog into it.

• Anti-phishing. Mobile Safari now can warn you against malicious sites trying to scam you.

• Extended parental controls. Adult content filters can now be applied to movies, TV shows, and applications, in addition to web sites and music (porn apps, here we come).

NEW APPLE APPLICATIONS

Apple will include new widgets in the new version of the iPhone operating system:

• Voice memo application. Obviously, allows you to record voice or any other sound, so you don't forget any idea or want to play FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.

• Send and receive files. A dedicated application to exchange files between iPhones or iPods touch.

NEW THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS FEATURES IN IPHONE OS 3.0

The new iPhone OS 3.0 adds 1,000 new APIs to extend the capabilities of new applications.

• Peer-to-peer ~~Wi-Fi~~ Bluetooth connectivity. A new API will allow for two iPhones to connect directly—peer-to-peer—via Bluetooth ~~Wi-Fi, without needing any Wi-Fi network~~.

They will be able to discover each other using Bluetooth, and then start a ~~Wi-Fi~~ connection transparently.

This opens a lot of possibilities. I doubt they will allow you to pass music, but you would probably be able to pass any other information, as well as directly communicating between applications in the two devices. One example: A pets game that allows two dogs to play with each other.

This feature could be combined with push notification, so your iPhone may receive a note from another iPhone, inviting you to play a game one-on-one.

• Browse remote content. While the built-in iPod application doesn't allow you to browse songs in other people's iPhones or iPod touch, third-party applications will allow you to do that, according to Apple's Forstall.

• Use your iPhone/touch to control peripherals. A new API will let you use your iPhone or iPod touch as a control to your accessories. In this example, the iPhone is being used to equalize the sound in a loudspeaker.

However, the applications are endless. Johnson and Johnson is releasing LifeScan, an app that connects to a glucose monitoring device. The application can even alert other people automatically, in case something is wrong.

There other less serious apps, like creating the most perfect sex device ever (NSFW).

• Maps inside other applications. New applications will be able to use Maps directly, which is now an API.

• Turn-by-turn directions. Developers will also be able to create turn-by-turn applications using the GPS information from the iPhone and combining it with their own maps, without depending on 3G connectivity or Google.

• Push notification finally coming. Hopefully this time it will be true. Push notification means that your iPhone OS 3.0 applications will finally be able to receive messages from the intarwebs automagically, so you can have an Instant Message application and have your iPhone vibrate or make a sound when a new message comes in, even if the application is not running.

• Voice communication in applications. iPhone 3.0 applications will also be able to access a Voice over IP service. This means that you will be able to chat with other users while playing against them in a game, for example. This won't use the telephone, but the internet over a Wi-Fi connection.

• Rumbling. Games—or any other application—will also be able to rumble, like your console joystick.

• Audio recording. Audio recording will also be possible from third-party applications using a standardized API, instead of custom workarounds.

• Access your music from applications. Future applications will also be able to access the iPhone/iPod music library. This means that applications will be able to play your own music while they run.

NEW FEATURES IN THE APP STORE

The new OS will also offer an enhanced App Store, opening new possibilities for developers and consumers.

• Subcriptions to apps.
• Purchase additional content for apps, like new cities for a city guide application.
• Purchase additional levels for games.

Basically, this will allow developers to sell more things on top of their apps, and to consumers to expand their experience with those apps.

• This will work straight from the applications, so you can purchase new things through the software itself, even while it still goes through the App Store internally.

PRICE

iPhone OS 3.0 will be a free upgrade to all iPhone users, including the first generation (not all features will be supported in the first generation, like Stereo Bluetooth support). iPod touch users will be able to but it for $US9.95.

11 Things You Should Know Before Buying a High Definition DVR

2009-03-23T05:37:00.000-07:00

With the recent launch of CableCARD Vista Media Centers, many people are reconsidering buying (or upgrading to) a high definition DVR. But with all the different choices and various benefits and drawbacks of each, it's hard to choose the one that's right for you.
Do you go with a cheap $9 a month rental from Comcast and put up with all its flaws to save money? Do you plunk down a couple hundred bucks and a monthly fee for a TiVo Series 3 because it just works the way you want it? Do you go all out and spend a couple grand for a Vista Media Center that has every single extra feature you could possibly want in a PC? Or do you go to the other extreme and build your own MythTV/SageTV/XP Media Center machine out of spare parts?

Here are the eleven things you should know before you decide.

1.Do you have HDTV cable and an HDTV set? The pre-requisite to even getting an HD DVR is actually having high def cable and an HDTV. Make sure you're signed up for high definition cable from your cable provider (it's usually $5-$15 more a month) and have an HDTV to watch it on. The super-cheap EDTV sets you find at Costco won't support up to the 1080i resolution that HD cable brings, which means all those extra pixels are going to waste. Make sure you have the necessary equipment before you go and spend the money on an HD recorder.

2.Are you cheap? This is the biggest and most important question. Admit it, you're cheap. Hell, I'm pretty cheap too. Do you really need to spend $500 or $2000 for a system only to have to keep on paying rental or subscription fees of nearly $100 a month? Do you really want to watch that much TV? If not, then renting a HD DVR from your cable company or building your own Myth TV or XP Media Center Edition box with an over the air (OTA) HD recorder could be for you.

3.Are you familiar with Linux/PCs? If you are cheap (see #1), then you're probably contemplating salvaging an old PC and building a media center out of that. The only problem is that MythTV requires anywhere from slight Linux knowledge (installing some packages) to uber haxor Linux knowledge (recompiling kernels, fiddling with code and compiling), depending on what PC components you already have and which ones you can get your hands on. Even if you're going for a Windows XP MCE-based box, you might still have to go out and look for drivers and download updates to your current software. It's not nearly as easy as buying a TiVo or a pre-built Vista Media Center box.

4.Does someone nontechnical need to use it? If you or your wife/husband/roommates don't know the first thing about computers, you're going to want to go with TiVo. Although Vista's CableCARD HTPC is pretty easy to use (as we saw in our TiVo head-to-head), it's still a PC and still suffers from the same old PC problems like freezing or crashing. If you want the absolute simplest interface while still keeping features intact, you'll want a TiVo Series 3. Also, if you've already owned a TiVo before, you're going to want to stick with TiVo. Learning another system, even if it is easy like Vista's Media Center, is unnecessary if you're already an expert at one.

5.Do you need DivX/XviD playback? If you're often downloading TV shows and movies off of BitTorrent, you're going to want a way to watch them on your TV. And if you don't have an upscaling DVD player that supports DivX, a Vista CableCARD HTPC or a do-it-yourself Myth/XP machine can do the trick. However, most of the time HDTV encodes you find on BitTorrent are of poorer quality than the feeds you get from your cable provider—because they've been re-encoded, naturally. You'll want to watch most of your TV programming from your DVR instead of from BitTorrent if you can help it.

6.Do you have Satellite TV? If you have Dish or DirecTV, your own provider has a box made just to cram down your throat, so you're usually stuck with those. The DIY solutions like MythTV or XP MCE won't work with satellite, but Microsoft and DirecTV said they're going to integrate an app/plug-in into Vista Media Centers that allow reception of DirecTV. In this case, the receiver is your Vista HTPC, which brings with it all the benefits that HTPC systems have.

7.Do you need photos and music? Gaming? Internet browsing? Vista Media Centers trounce TiVo when it comes to viewing photos and playing back your music. To a slightly lesser extent, so do MythTV and XP MCE boxes. If you're going to want to play games or browse the Internet from your couch like some kind of non-shitty WebTV, a PC is the way to go.

8.Do you need On Demand? HD cable in general? This one's a little tricky. For On Demand, the only HD DVR that supports this is the one from your cable company. Both TiVos and Vista machines don't. Also, if you want HD cable, that totally rules out home-made machines like MythTV, which don't have CableCARD support and can only get cable over the air using an ATSC card. Depending on where you live, how big an antenna you use (yeah, you'll have to use an antenna), and what channels your local stations broadcast in HD, you may or may not have the same experience as HD cable.

9.Do you watch a lot of TV? If you record a lot of TV, you're going to need a lot of space. The DVRs from your cable company only have 120GB of space (the Comcast Motorola box), TiVo only has 250GB unless you upgrade it with an external hard drive, but Vista Media Centers and do-it-yourself solutions are almost infinitely expandable thanks to the fact that they're PCs. In fact, you could even store the recordings on another server over the network, or burn them to DVDs if you want to archive them.

10.Can you stand a PC in the living room? We're fine with it, but many people hate the sight of a PC in their home entertainment setups. This is a huge win for TiVo, since it looks like it belongs in your media center. However, you can technically get an extender like an Xbox 360 and get the exact same experience as if you had the Vista Media Center in your living room. This way, you can house your machine in another room and have a (relatively) quiet front-end. The same is true for MythTV systems, which can also be extended with smaller front ends and have larger servers in the back room.

11.Do you love Macs? Although we prefer to go with a TiVo 3 or Vista Media Center, we know of a couple people that are so tied into the Apple ecosystem of iTunes music and movies that they really want that experience in the living room as well. Using something like a Miglia TVMini HD+, you can turn your Mac Mini into a DVR that even records in DivX. Add to that the fact that you have a Mac with Front Row attached to your TV—so you can easily watch iTunes movies or listen to iTunes music—and you have the perfect setup for a Mac head who wants DVR features. The only caveat, like the issues MythTV systems run into on #7, is that you can only record over the air HD and not stuff from cable. (Of course, TiVo's desktop app is well supported on the Mac, so you can stream music and photos from your Apple, and a MCE PC can still run iTunes.)

With all these options, it's probably tough to decide which one is right for you. There's no perfect solution right now (neither TiVo nor Vista HTPCs are great for everyone), so you should pick the features you really, really need to have and choose the DVR that meets most of them. – Jason Chen

Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone

2009-03-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

Although Apple's iPhone may be feature-packed and great to use, it, like every other product, has limitations. And that's why we're putting it through our Ten Things You Should Know buyer's guide series so new buyers and people who don't live and breathe the iPhone (your parents, your co-workers, or your wife) can be just as well informed as you. Here are the Ten Things You Should Know Before You Buy an iPhone.

1) Not all iPod Accessories and headphones will work with the iPhone: Unless your accessory specifically claims that it works with the iPhone, you're going to have mixed results when you plug in. Some work (but prompt you to turn on Airplane mode), some don't. So far our test show good results.

As for headphones, if you've got an L-shaped plug or a fat plug, you're out of luck. Thanks to the recessed headphone jack, you're going to actually have to buy an adapter to get some of your regular headphones to work with the iPhone.

2) AT&T is Evil: You know this. Being stuck on AT&T for two years is going to be horrible. This is the company that had managers forcing customers to buy accessories with the iPhone just so they could meet their sales quotas. Plus, their reception and customer service leave a lot to be desired.

3) No video recording or MMS: The iPhone's 2-megapixel camera is great if there's enough light, but there's no video recording at all. None. This is odd, since the iPhone has so much video playback capabilities in its iPod "app," but don't expect to make movies with this thing. And since you can't record video, you can't send any video messages (MMS) either.

4) No Instant Messaging: The SMS app may look great with its iChat-esque bubbles, but there's no IM app to be found anywhere. With the Helio Ocean and the Sidekick both featuring on-board multi-client IM apps, and Windows Mobile and Palm smartphones able to add them on later, there's no excuse for not having an IM client.

5) Not for business use: BlackBerry enthusiasts need not apply. In addition to the keyboard being totally different (we're already typing fast with two thumbs, but less "adaptable" people may not pick up on this as fast), there's no push email except for Yahoo Mail. There is Exchange support, but it's just using IMAP access. Good luck getting your IT department to hook this up.

6) It's not a full iPod Replacement, and it has no games: With 4GB or 8GB of storage, this is essentially an iPod nano. It's definitely not an iPod Video, both in terms of storage and functionality. You can watch videos, sure, but there's no TV out, and not nearly enough room to keep all the TV shows and podcasts you keep downloading. Plus, all those 5G iPod games that you thought were going to make it onto the iPhone? Nope. No games at all.

7) It's not a smartphone: As much as Apple wants you to think their "open application development" using webapps is actual apps, it's not. You can get some stuff done using webapps and Safari, but as of right now, support sucks. Until people start developing apps specifically customized for the iPhone's quirks, you won't be doing anything super fancy. And of course there's no way for you to get "real" Cocoa-based apps onto the iPhone.

8) The data connection is slow: Although the iPhone has both EDGE and Wi-Fi, you're probably going to be using EDGE most of the time. Why? Because if you're in Wi-Fi range, you're usually at home or at work, when you've got an actual computer in front of you. When you're outside driving or walking, you'll be on EDGE. If you're on EDGE, expect emails with large attachments and Web pages to download slowly. Unlike other gripes, this is something they can't fix with a software update. Real time traffic is nice though.

9) There's no GPS: The iPhone may have a Google Maps application with turn by turn driving directions, but there's no actual GPS in there. You're going to have find your current location yourself, plus tell the phone exactly when you're turning. Like the data connection, a software update can't fix this.

10) There are no custom ringtones: You can't use your own ringtones (whether they're MP3s, downloaded music, or iTunes tracks) as ringtones for your phone. Luckily for us, since the default ringtones are pretty lousy, custom ringtones may be coming soon.

As you can see, the iPhone has caveats galore. Even though we're still enjoying the iPhone, any prospective buyers should be aware of these limitations before throwing down $500 or $600. Many of these problems (video recording, MMS, Instant Messaging, custom ringtones) can be fixed with a software update, but if any of the other features are important to you, you may have to wait until iPhone 2.0.

Which Is The Best PC Desktop System For Your Need

2009-03-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

Final Words

The problem with "entry-level" systems is that they aren't normally sexy or groundbreaking. PCs under $800 are therefore devoid of any of the glitz and excitement associated with the midrange to high-end market. Many consider low-end PCs to be just the Dell or HP special of the week - hardly worthy of consideration as a "real" PC. That perception is really a shame, because the sub-$800 market is where many computer buyers choose to buy - or they may be forced to buy in this price range with the strains of today's worldwide economic woes. Today, more than ever, you will get a lot for your money in this market segment. With entry choices like Core 2 Duo and Phenom II CPUs, 4GB of DDR2-800 or faster memory, and a starter $59 500GB 7200RPM hard drive there truly is value to be had at these price points.

Our base entry systems with decent integrated graphics are just $300-$320 for either Intel or AMD. Add a 1440x900 LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse, and the Vista OEM OS and the complete system build is still around $500, and decent integrated graphics were just $538 for either Intel or AMD. Even compared to just three months ago these entry PCs are faster and just as cheap. There has never been a time when you received better value for your $500. Indeed, the Intel/AMD wars in the CPU space and the NVIDIA/ATI wars in GPUs have created some truly excellent values. This value has been further enhanced by the AMD introduction of Phenom II and the worldwide recession. It is ironic that the best prices coincide with the scariest economic times, but that is how economics often works. If you are in the market for a PC, you will be very pleased with the values you can find.

If your budget interests extend to gaming, you can start with the AMD or Intel Budget PCs. Both feature a Viewsonic 21.5" 1920x1080 LCD, and you can add the well-regarded ATI HD 4870 512MB video card to bring your new system up to current gaming PC standards for only $155. That means you can build a 4870 gaming rig with a 1080P 1920x1080 HDMI LCD for around $940. That kind of value did not exist until recently, and that is why it is such a good time to buy and build a new PC.

Finally, you can build a powerful AMD or Intel HTPC 4GB of memory, processors and graphics fast enough to provide stutter-free and tear-free Blu-ray playback, 1TB of quiet hard drive storage, a combo 6X Blu-ray player/DVD burner, and HDMI capable onboard graphics in a quality home theater component or mini cube case with a PC Power and Cooling 500W Silencer power supply for a base system price of just over $600. Add a wireless keyboard/ mouse and Vista and you are still around $740. The end result again is tremendous value for the money spent.

As has been pointed out many times since the introduction of Phenom II, AMD and Intel performance is all but equal from low-end to upper midrange systems. That is to say a $120 AMD CPU is today pretty comparable in performance to a $120 Intel CPU. Intel still owns the very top of the CPU curve with Core i7, but those processors and systems are much more expensive in today's market. This CPU price/performance parity is part of the reason so much value is available at such relatively low prices, but it isn't the whole story. You can buy what we consider a top value GPU for around $150, and it will perform as well as or better than yesterday's $500 video card. 500GB is now an "entry" hard drive and 1TB drives offer storage at $0.105 per gigabyte, making 1TB at around $100 a reality. Memory has also reached commodity pricing levels when we can recommend 4GB of high-speed DDR2 for a cost of less than $40.

Put it all together and you can buy an excellent entry, budget, or HTPC computer for well under $800. You can even deck it out with a 1080P monitor and a good video card and still barely top $940. It is a good time to be shopping for a new PC. Value is the rule of the day as competition, a mature market, and a lackluster world economy has created great options in every computer component category - except perhaps the computer operating system, assuming you still plan on running Windows. Fortunately, you do have options available even in the operating system cost. Microsoft has kept the Vista OS "system" or OEM price for Vista Home Premium at $100, and it is even more expensive if you buy a full retail Vista. However, if you are good with computers you can install Linux for little or no cost at all. Even if you're not a computer whiz the Ubuntu flavor of Linux/Unix is still free and relatively painless to install. Drivers for new hardware remain the biggest Linux/Ubuntu issues, but even that has been improving.

When you build a new system for your mother, brother, nephew going to college, or even yourself, you no longer have to feel like the person on the other end got a crippled system with little upgrade potential. The systems in this sub-$800 guide are powerful, upgradeable, and capable of even more powerful performance with a careful selection of upgrades. Your friends and relatives will consider you a hero when you build one of these systems - so much so that it is a shame to consider them entry-level.

Intel HTPC Budget

2009-03-23T05:26:00.001-07:00

Intel HTPC

To be honest, if there's one system in this roundup that is likely to get a lot of comments and criticisms, it's going to be the HTPC configuration. That's not to say that our particular configuration is unreasonable, but in the HTPC market we will invariably encounter a lot of differing opinions about what is necessary and what is not. We detailed our assumptions about the HTPC configurations tin the introduction to the AMD HTPC system. You may want to look back at the considerations. We assume the end user has already selected an HDTV or monitor and a sound system. Very few end users need a TV tuner any more so we are not making that recommendation. We also assume the primary use of the HTPC computer is to play, store, and stream Blu-ray movies and other video entertainment.

Intel HTPC System
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Wolfdale (2.5GHz x2 65W 2MB L2 800 FSB)	$73
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H NVIDIA GeForce 9400	$120
Memory	4GB DDR2-800 - GSkill F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ	$37
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM	$105
Optical Drive	LG BD/HD DVD / 16x DVD+/- RW GGC-H20LK	$110
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	Lian LI PC-V350A	$110
Power Supply	PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS500 500W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Retail	$50
Base System Total		$605
Keyboard and Mouse	Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 Black USB RF Wireless Keyboard & Optical Mouse	$30
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$734

As discussed in the Intel entry PC, the E5200 is an excellent value point in the Intel CPU line. Anything lower priced is generally a lot worse in performance, but higher priced CPUs do not gain that much in performance. At the new lower price of $73, the dual-core E5200 is also an excellent match to an NVIDIA 9400 chipset motherboard. It doesn't hurt, either, that the E5200 is rated at 65W, which will help in keeping the HTPC as quiet as possible.

The motherboard for the Intel HTPC is the $135 Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H featuring the NVIDIA GF9400 chipset. Our motherboard reviews found this chipset and the GF9300 a better choice than G45 in HTPC systems due to superior video playback and overall system performance. Some users have reported that the stock Intel CPU heatsink touches the chipset heatsink on this motherboard and they found the heatsink fit best and worked best by rotating the heatsink 90 degrees. For best results check the fit and best positioning before completing the mount of the heatsink/fan.

The HTPC case is one of those very personal options in building an HTPC computer. Some like the small cube form factor that can easily hide next to books on a shelf, while others prefer the audio component look. While it is fairly expensive for the actual size, we find the cube-like Lian Li PC-V350B a great small aluminum cube. The PC-V350A is the silver version and the PC-V350B is the black version. Both colors sell for the same $110. There is enough space for all the typical HTPC requirements, with good cooling and above all the important blessedly quiet operation. Only a Micro ATX motherboard will fit and there are two 5.25" external drive bays that can open right or left and two internal 3.5" bays for hard drives. Front ports for USB, audio, and FireWire (IEEE 1394) are featured behind a door to keep the appearance sleek and uncluttered. At just 10.3" tall by 11" wide, the V-350A fits in most bookcases just fine, but the depth of 14.7" makes the Lian Li most comfortable on deeper 16" shelves (279mm W x 262mm H x 373mm D).

The little Lian Li is coupled with a robust PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W power supply that you can currently buy for a bargain $50. You can spend more on a PSU but you will be hard pressed to find a unit as quiet and reliable as the Silencer. It also has enough power for whatever video card you might throw in your HTPC in the future - though high-end GPUs are at odds with the silence most desire from HTPCs.

If you prefer the "audio component" look in your HTPC an excellent alternative is the Silverstone LC13B-E Media Center case selected for the AMD HTPC system. It is worth mentioning that if you choose a full size ATX motherboard for your HTPC, it will fit in the Silverstone but not in the Lian Li cube. The Silverstone is presently on rebate, so the normal $115 price is reduced to $100 after the $10 rebate.

The rest of the components are the same as those found in the AMD HTPC system. For detailed information on the rest of the components chosen for the Intel HTPC please refer to the detailed discussion on the AMD HTPC page.

AMD systems have held the lead for some time in HD video and HTPC boxes. The AMD advantage was large enough that AnandTech hadn't recommended an Intel HTPC build until last December. The NVIDIA GeForce 9300/9400 chipsets have done a lot to level the HD and HTPC playing field - but at a premium price. The Intel HTPC problem was never the CPU, but rather the motherboard chipset. That is the reason we can combine a cheaper Intel CPU with an NVIDIA GF9400 chipset motherboard to create a competent HTPC box.

While we can't tell you HD playback capabilities are completely equal between AMD and Intel today, we can tell you that both HTPC builds provided smooth, stutter-free Blu-ray playback. Certainly that is the primary concern of most HTPC system builders. If you're interested in doing video encoding/transcoding on your HTPC, however, the triple-core Phenom II setup is definitely faster than the E5200; such users would likely want to take a long look at quad-core offerings in all honesty, as encoding is one of the tasks that truly leverage the power of multi-core processors.

Intel HTPC Budget

2009-03-23T05:26:00.000-07:00

Intel HTPC

Intel HTPC System
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Wolfdale (2.5GHz x2 65W 2MB L2 800 FSB)	$73
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H NVIDIA GeForce 9400	$120
Memory	4GB DDR2-800 - GSkill F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ	$37
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM	$105
Optical Drive	LG BD/HD DVD / 16x DVD+/- RW GGC-H20LK	$110
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	Lian LI PC-V350A	$110
Power Supply	PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS500 500W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Retail	$50
Base System Total		$605
Keyboard and Mouse	Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 Black USB RF Wireless Keyboard & Optical Mouse	$30
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$734

AMD HTPC Budget

2009-03-23T05:22:00.000-07:00

AMD HTPC

Everyone asks for HTPC component recommendations, and then when we publish them readers can't wait to throw rocks at our recommendations. Perhaps this is because the HTPC, more than any other computer class, is a very personal machine. It needs to meet the specific needs and demands of the end users, who vary widely in what they plan to do with their new HTPC. So let's first talk about our concept in these two HTPC configurations.

We are assuming the user already has the HDTV (likely) or display he plans to feed, along with a sound system for that HDTV. The motherboards we recommend can reasonably feed audio signals for your Blu-ray movies, but they are not integrated audio amplifiers. Since most end-users are on cable or satellite for TV, we will make no recommendations at all for a TV tuner. Of the many possible uses of an HTPC the great majority of end-users store, play, and stream movies with their HTPC computers. That is mostly what their HTPC systems are used for and that is where we have concentrated our recommendations. In general the processing power in both systems has increased since our December 2009 guide, but costs have gone down a bit.

AMD HTPC System
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	MD Phenom II X3 710 (2.6GHzx3, 3x512KB L2, 6MB L3 Cache)	$119
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	ASUS M3N78-EM	$90
Memory	4GB DDR2-800 - GSkill F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ	$37
Hard Drive	Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM	$105
Optical Drive	LG BD/HD DVD / 16x DVD+/- RW GGC-H20L - Retail	$110
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	SILVERSTONE Black Aluminum/Steel LC13B-E ATX HTPC Case (After $15 Rebate)	$100
Power Supply	PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS500 500W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Retail (after $25 Rebate)	$50
Base System Total		$611
Keyboard and Mouse	Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 Black USB RF Wireless Keyboard & Optical Mouse	$30
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$740

The CPU chosen for the AMD HTPC computer is the new triple core Phenom II X3 710 with 6MB of L3 cache. You get the expanded processing power of the Phenom II, which is always useful in an HTPC, at the same price as the older Phenom CPU chosen in the December guide. The three CPU cores each run at 2.6GHz, each with a 512KB cache, and a shared 6MB L3 cache - the same L3 cache sized shared on Phenom II quad-core processors. We hesitate to call a Phenom II X3 CPU a low-end chip, but this is certainly the most reasonable Phenom II you can buy. It has plenty of power, however, to drive your AMD HTPC to most anywhere you choose to go.

With DDR2-800 so reasonable these days we equipped the HTPC with 4GB of G.Skill memory. We aren't really interested in overclocking this HTPC (though it's technically still possible), and spending additional money on even higher performance RAM just doesn't make sense. 4GB of memory, however, does make perfect sense in an HTPC box.

The $90 ASUS M3N78-EM is based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8300 chipset. The board features one PCI-E x16 slot, one PCI-E x1 slot, two PCI slots, 8GB memory support, NVIDIA Gigabit LAN, 7.1 HD audio, 12 USB ports, five 3Gb/s SATA ports with RAID support, IEEE 1394a, one eSATA port, HDMI/DVI/VGA output, and full support for the Phenom 140W processors. This board offers overclocking capabilities along with being a top notch HTPC capable board. We highly recommend the GF8200/8300 series for the HTPC market due to hardware accelerated Blu-ray/H.264 playback, multi-channel LPCM output, and very good application performance.

As we discussed in the HTPC introduction, we did not include a TV tuner in the configuration since most end-users are now using their cable and satellite feeds. Few users, therefore, have any real need for a TV tuner card. There's something else to consider in this, and that is the US government mandated deadline to end analog broadcasts (which is now in June), so older/cheaper analog tuner cards are now useless unless you have an analog Cable/Satellite signal. If you truly need a Digital TV tuner, one option that is pretty unique on the TV tuner side is the HD HomeRun from Silicondust USA. This is a dual HDTV tuner/recorder that functions over a network and provides ATSC/QAM support. The price of $169 is more than many other options, but this is arguably a more flexible overall solution - particularly with the mandated move to digital and away from analog.

What's the point of having an HTPC if you don't have a lot of storage space? To that end, we selected a newly affordable 1TB (1000GB) Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS SATA hard drive at just $105. The WD Green is a variable speed energy saving design that we found to be among the quietest drives we have ever evaluated. For an HTPC, quiet operation is paramount and this WD Green will not disappoint. The WD Green is a bit slower than true 7200RPM 1TB drives, but the real performance difference is very minor. Another excellent HD option is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000333AS 7200RPM 1TB at $110. Performance of this 1TB drive has been exemplary in early testing at AnandTech, and the drive has proved to be reasonably quiet. Seagate also makes a super-reliable 1TB drive optimized for video storage and retrieval called the Seagate SV35.3 ST31000340SV 1TB at $150. This "video" Seagate features 24x7 reliability with > 1 million hours MTBF and improved read/write reliability. For those willing to pay the small premium the "video" Seagate would be a good alternate choice.

The optical drive is certainly an upgrade to the entry and budget systems since a reasonable HTPC requires Blu-ray playback capabilities. The LG Black 6X Blu-ray SATA fits the bill without breaking the bank. It provides 6X Blu-ray playback and the fastest recording and playback of DVD and CD media. The current price is around $110, but this drive sometimes goes on sale for $100 so look out for specials. There are also Blu-ray options under $100 from Lite-On and a 6X Blu-ray player at $105. We do not have much experience with this Lite-On drive, but Lite-On drives in the past have proved reliable. That would make the Lite-On Black 6X Blu-ray SATA a more reasonably priced alternative where every penny counts.

Our choice for an HTPC case is the audio component look in the Silverstone LC13B-E, which is an extremely flexible design with two silent fans and silent power when combined with the PC Power and Cooling 500W Silencer power supply. This solid Silverstone case can handle either ATX or Micro ATX motherboards, with space for four internal hard drives in addition to two 5.25" External bays and two 3.5" external bays. If your plans for your HTPC include lots of comportments and storage the Silverstone is an excellent choice. If you prefer a small cube case the Lian Li PC-V350B is a gem of a small black aluminum case. The Lian Li is our choice for the Intel HTPC system on the next page, and you can find more information on that case there.

Since most will place their HTPC near their HDTV or big screen monitor, a wired keyboard and mouse are not really very useful in most setups. Control is more often from across the room, so a wireless RF Logitech keyboard and mouse were selected. At just $25 for the pair, the Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 wireless keyboard and mouse is a great value. This is also the HTPC preferred RF wireless set, which does not require "line of sight" that is needed for IR wireless.

The final price of the AMD HTPC comes to just $740. That has to be considered a bargain considering the triple core Phenom II CPU, 4GB of memory, and 1TB hard drive all housed in a quiet Silverstone HTPC case with a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 500W PSU. You can certainly spend even less on a basic HTPC box, but we doubt you can build a more powerful or quiet system for the same money.

Intel Mid-level PC Gaming Buyers Guide

2009-03-23T05:09:00.000-07:00

Intel Budget

While Intel offerings have tended to be more expensive than configurations from AMD, our Intel budget and AMD budget PCs are all but the same price. With prices all but the same you can choose your budget system based on other features that are important to you.

Intel Budget PC
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 Wolfdale (2.93GHzx2 3MB Cache 1066 FSB)	$145
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H nVidia GeForce 9400	$120
Memory	OCZ Fatal1ty Edition 4GB DDR2-1066 OCZ2F10664GK ($28 after rebate)	$43
Hard Drive	WD Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB	$59
Optical Drive	Samsung 22X DVDRW/DL SH-S202G	$25
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	Cooler Master Elite 330 RC-330-KKN1-GP Mid Tower	$40
Power Supply	BFG Tech LS Series LS-550 550W SLI Certified, CrossFire Ready, 80 PLUS Certified ($20 Rebate)	$60
Base System Total		$492
Display	ViewSonic VX2233wm Black 21.5" 5ms Widescreen 16:9 LCD (1920x1080)	$170
Speakers	Logitech R-20 12 Watts RMS 2.1 Multimedia Speaker	$18
Input	Microsoft CA9-00001 Black PS/2 Standard Keyboard and Optical USB/PS2 Mouse - OEM	$16
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$795

The E7500 ups the bus to 1066 from the 800FSB of our entry-level Intel system. A dual-core 2.93GHz with 3MB of cache won't be a slouch in any department in your budget system. Yes the new i7 is faster, but it is also much more expensive. The question for a budget system is how good the performance is for the money spent. The E7500 SYSmark 2007 score is about 72% of the very top Core i7 965 Extreme. That is fantastic performance for a CPU that costs just $145. The E7500 is also a candidate for overclocking if you are inclined to move the performance a bit closer toward the 3.33GHz Core 2 Duo E8600, which reaches 88% of the i7 965 SYSmark performance.

The Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H is one of the most reasonable nVidia 9300/9400 chipset boards and features the GF9400 chipset at a price that matches most of the GF9300 equipped boards. With the 9400 integrated graphics performance is good enough to play most games at 1280x1024 on medium quality settings. This is leaps and bounds ahead of Intel's G45 series in this department. However, the HTPC feature set impresses us most. The only thing we are lacking is the ability to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA (both of which no chipset currently supports). This chipset offers flawless HDMI/HDCP repeater compatibility, fully functional hardware acceleration, 8-channel LPCM output, and of course, stutter-free 24p playback.

Gigabyte loaded the GA-E7AUM-DS2H with four DDR2 DIMM slots featuring 16GB memory support, Realtek ALC889A HD audio with Dolby Home Theater, Realtek 8211CL Gigabit LAN, and five SATA 3Gb/s ports with RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 capabilities. Also included is eSATA 3Gb/s support, two IEEE 1394a ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports, one PCIe x16 slot, one PCIe x1 slot, two PCI slots, IDE connector, and video output including D-Sub, DVI-D, and HDMI ports. The BIOS is user friendly and features numerous overclock options for those wanting to get more out the E7500 processor along with decent temperature and fan speed monitoring options.

By this time, you may be wondering why we chose not to include an aftermarket CPU heatsink to go along with our CPU choices. For this budget, a $50 solution from Thermalright or Scythe was simply not an option, but with the stock AMD and Intel heatsinks incorporating heatpipe technology, we figured we'd still be good for a decent if not spectacular overclock.

The rest of the components are the same as those found in the AMD budget system. Again, for gaming purposes you can look to an upgraded GPU like the Radeon HD 4850 or 4870. Sound cards at this budget are simply an unnecessary luxury, and the onboard offerings continue to improve with each new motherboard generation. You can be reasonably happy with the onboard sound until you figure out if you want to go further with sound.

AMD Mid-level PC Gaming Buyer Guide,

2009-03-23T05:04:00.000-07:00

AMD Budget

Leaving the entry-level sector behind and with a budget of under $800, our options increase significantly. Our aim here is to provide a configuration that allows for a nice balance of performance at stock speeds. This doesn't mean you have to spend over $800 though, as prices have dropped in the past year and performance for the dollar has definitely increased. Both budget systems are under $800 complete, with the basic box under $500 in both cases. This gives you the option to increase graphics power or go for a larger monitor (or both) and still be less than $1000. The assembled system is balanced for a wide variety of computing tasks, but final tweaks can tilt it toward gaming and graphics for example, if that is what you aim for.

Generally we consider PC Gaming rigs to begin at the next price category (i.e. the low end of midrange), but adding a decent graphics card and a larger monitor will definitely make one of these budget systems a good choice for entry gaming at around $1000. If that is your goal take a look at the Phenom II Guide for help in selecting a graphics card and display for your price point.

AMD Budget PC
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE (2.8GHzx3, 3x512KB L2, 6MB L3 Cache)	$145
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	Biostar TForce TA790GX3 A2+	$110
Memory	OCZ Fatal1ty Edition 4GB DDR2-1066 OCZ2F10664GK ($28 after rebate)	$43
Hard Drive	WD Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB	$59
Optical Drive	Samsung 22X DVDRW/DL SH-S202G	$25
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	Cooler Master Elite 330 RC-330-KKN1-GP Mid Tower	$40
Power Supply	BFG Tech LS Series LS-550 550W SLI Certified, CrossFire Ready, 80 PLUS Certified ($20 Rebate)	$60
Base System Total		$482
Display	ViewSonic VX2233wm Black 21.5" 5ms Widescreen 16:9 LCD (1920x1080)	$170
Speakers	Logitech R-20 12 Watts RMS 2.1 Multimedia Speaker	$18
Input	Microsoft CA9-00001 Black PS/2 Standard Keyboard and Optical USB/PS2 Mouse - OEM	$16
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$785

While the GPU is the most important factor in game performance, the CPU is also a factor. To make sure the CPU is not a bottleneck now or in the near future should you upgrade your budget PC, a Black Edition Phenom II X3 is the CPU choice. The Phenom II 720 Black Edition has an unlocked multiplier should you choose to overclock, which makes overclocking as simple as it gets. It is rated at 2.8GHz with 3x512KB L2 cache, and 6MB of L3 cache. As a 45nm Phenom II it is also a dynamite overclocker - in fact it is the same CPU we recommended in our Phenom II OC system just a few weeks ago.

We've paired the Phenom II 720 BE with the Biostar TForce TA790GX3 A2+, a perfect match for those looking to squeeze as much performance out of their money as possible. The Biostar is loaded with overclocking features and features integrated AMD HD 3300 graphics with an HDMI/DVI interface and 1080P support. This means very decent performance using the onboard graphics. Biostar offers both AM2+ and AM3 CPU support for processors like the Phenom II 720BE when used with cheaper DDR2 memory. Biostar includes 128MB DDR2 sideport memory for improved GPU performance, Realtek ALC 888 HD Audio codec, Gigabit LAN, 16GB memory support, six 3Gb/s ports capable of RAID 0/1/10/5, 10 USB ports, two PCI-E x16 slots (dual x8 CF), two PCI-E x1 slots, and two PCI slots. The BIOS caters to the casual overclocker and this board performs very well in a variety of tests.

We've chosen OCZ Fatal1ty Edition 4GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) in a 4GB kit for $43. This is a great value in DDR2-1000 memory from a top memory supplier. Right now it's an even better deal with a $15 rebate that lowers your net price to $28. The extra 1066 speed lets you run your memory at a faster speed or provide reserves for overclocking the CPU. OCZ is a great memory choice, but there are many memory options at great prices today. Quality DDR2-800 and DDR2-1000 RAM from Corsair, OCZ, G.Skill, Mushkin, and Geil are available at any of the major online retailers. Just be sure to look for RAM with better timings if you can afford it.

The remaining components are the same as our entry systems. The hard drive remains a 500GB Western Digital. If you'd prefer a longer warranty, look at Seagate, which includes a 5-year warranty on some of their drives for a few dollars more. The DVD burner remains the same Samsung 22X.

The case receives an upgrade with the selection of the Cooler Master Elite 330 and our Gold Editors Choice BFG Tech LS Series LS-550 550W power supply. The BFG currently has a $20 rebate which reduces the final cost to $60. The BFG 550W is a great power supply, but you could save a few dollars here with an OCZ, Corsair, or PC Power and Cooling PSU, which are often on rebate in recent months. It all depends on the timing of your system purchase.

The LCD display was an easy choice with the full HD high resolution Viewsonic 22" 16:9 widescreen for just $170. A 21.5" monitor with 1920x1080 resolution with a 3-year warranty from a major monitor maker is certainly a good value. If you prefer a larger screen you can find a 24" widescreen starting at $250, though most are $300 or more. If you need to save a few dollars a lower resolution 19" or 20" would do.

If you want more video power for gaming you can add an ATI HD 4830 for just $75-$90. This will get you into gaming and it is a terrific value at this price according to our Graphics Editor. He recommends the Radeon HD 4850 as the start of true HD gaming starting at just $120 or a Radeon HD 4870 512MB which you can find for as little as $155. Any of the three cards would still keep your total well below $1000. The 4870 addition totals just $940 for an extremely capable 1920x1080 system complete with a Viewsonic 1080P monitor.

Intel Entry-level PC Buyers Guide

2009-03-23T04:52:00.000-07:00

While Intel still owns the top in the CPU performance, the area from entry to upper midrange is very competitive between Intel and AMD. As pointed out in our Phenom II Guide, the only area still dominated by Intel is the very top, with CPUs at $300 and more. The one advantage that remains for Intel is that their processors generally overclock much better than current AMD CPUs, but that has changed with Phenom II in the midrange. This is not normally a consideration in entry computers, but it could be for some buyers, and at the lowest rungs of the CPU ladder Intel processors remain the best overclockers for now.

Intel Entry-level PC
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 Wolfdale (2.5GHzx2 65W 2MB L2 800 FSB)	$73
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	ECS GF7100PVT-MT NVIDIA GeForce 7100 HMDI	$60
Memory	G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800	$37
Hard Drive	WD Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB	$59
Optical Drive	Samsung 22X DVDRW/DL SH-S223Q	$25
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	HEC 6K28BSOH48D Micro ATX Mini Tower 485W Power Supply	$50
Power Supply	Included with Case	$-
Base System Total		$304
Display	Hanns-G HB-175APB Black 17" 8ms Widescreen LCD Monitor Built in Speakers - Retail (1440x900)	$99
Speakers	Built-in Monitor	$-
Input	Microsoft CA9-00001 Black PS/2 Standard Keyboard and Optical USB/PS2 Mouse - OEM	$16
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$518

Our choice for the Intel entry CPU remains the excellent 2.5GHz dual-core E5200 Wolfdale. This 65W rated CPU is built on Intel's 45nm manufacturing that begs you to overclock. The E5200 is rated 800FSB, so right out of the box the first option for overclock, if you are inclined, is to bump it up to a 1066 bus. Even if you never overclock you will be very pleased with the performance of the E5200. The E5200 is an easier choice now that the price is $10 lower at $73 than it was just three months ago. We do not recommend going lower than an E5200 in an Intel system because the trade-offs in performance for the few dollars saved are too great. The E1200 at $50, for example, is dismal compared to the E5200, and certainly not a good choice in performance for the $23 saved.

Unfortunately our favorite Zotac N73PV-Supreme board has been discontinued by Zotac. This was a real surprise considering how well the $60 board sold. The NVIDIA 7100 used in the Zotac is a good chipset choice for an entry Intel 775, so we have chosen the ECS GF7100PVT-MT at the same $60 for the entry Intel system. There is currently a $10 rebate that lowers the price to $50. The ECS provides HDMI output with a DVI to HDMI adapter. If you prefer a real HDMI output on the rear panel you can choose the Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H LGA at $69.

The case for the Intel entry system is the solid HEC 6K28BSOH48D Micro ATX mini-tower. HEC is best known as a manufacturer of power supplies. Some are sold under their name, but most are manufactured for other well known power supply brands. HEC includes a 485W PSU with this attractive mini-tower, which should provide plenty of power for your entry Intel build. If you prefer a mid-tower case HEC uses the same PSU in the $50 HEC 6C60BSOH48. You could also choose the Sigma La Vie Aluminum mid-tower featured in the AMD build on the previous page. The rest of the components are virtually identical to the AMD entry-level system.

If we compare the two entry-level systems, the winner depends on what is of value to you. The Intel system is a bit more powerful, but you can move up to a high-end Athlon 64 X2 or a low-end AMD Phenom X3 for comparable performance at less than $100. The full-size AMD ASRock board offers more flexibility for future graphics expansion, with two x16 PCI-E slots and CrossFire X support. If you are a gamer on a strict budget the AMD entry system offers you more for future graphics expansion. For the typical entry-level PC right now and for what the system is typically used for - internet, office, low-end gaming, and low to mid graphics - you can go either route and be very happy.

AMD Entry-level PC Buyer Guide

2009-03-23T04:45:00.000-07:00

A year ago our entry AMD was single-core, last December 40% less money bought a 2.6GHz dual-core system, and today's AMD entry system uses a Black Edition unlocked 2.7GHz dual-core that costs a few dollars less than our choice just three months ago. That is certainly increased value in an economy that forces most buyers to look closely at price. With memory so cheap we have continued our recommendation of 4GB at a kit price of just $37. You can go with 2GB and save $18, but that money is well spent in doubling memory. The hard drive remains at 500GB.

AMD Entry-level PC
Hardware	Component	Price
Processor	Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma 2.7GHz Black Edition (2.7GHzx2 95W 2x512KB L2)	$60
Cooling	CPU Retail HSF	$-
Video	On-Board	$-
Motherboard	ASRock A780GXE/128M 780G	$80
Memory	G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800	$37
Hard Drive	WD Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB	$60
Optical Drive	Samsung 22X DVDRW/DL SH-S223Q	$25
Audio	On-Board	$-
Case	SIGMA La Vie ABWBP Black Aluminum/ SECC ATX Mid Tower with 500W Power Supply	$60
Power Supply	Included with Case	$-
Base System Total		$322
Display	Hanns-G HB-175APB Black 17" 8ms Widescreen LCD Monitor Built in Speakers - Retail (1440x900)	$99
Speakers	Built into Monitor	$-
Input	Microsoft CA9-00001 Black PS/2 Standard Keyboard and Optical USB/PS2 Mouse - OEM	$16
Operating System	Microsoft Vista Home Premium OEM	$99
Complete System Bottom Line		$536

Prices on all processors are continuing to drop in the face of the aggressive pricing strategy adopted by Intel in entry to upper midrange processors. The $60 AMD 2.7GHz dual-core is a faster CPU at a slightly lower price than our December guide. Not only is it faster but it's also a Black Edition (unlocked) CPU. Most have been easily running at 3.0GHz just by increasing the multiplier. If you want even more power the Phenom 8750 triple-core Black Edition is a good value for just $44 more ($104). However, for most users the Athlon 64 X2 7750 provides plenty of power for an entry system. If you're counting pennies you could drop down to a single-core 2.6GHz Orleans 45W processor for $42 and save $18.

The 780G chipset is one of the best budget IGP designs we have worked with over the years. This is the chipset that made integrated graphics relevant again. One of the best boards in this price category is the ASRock A780GXE. The A780GXE features AMD/ATI Radeon 3200 integrated graphics. ASRock loads the board with six 3Gb/s SATA ports featuring RAID 0/1/10, 5.1 HD Audio, Gigabit LAN, two PCI-E x16 slots, one PCI-E x1 slot, three PCI slots, and support for 16GB of memory. Durability is addressed with solid capacitors for CPU power and duracap long-life capacitors for the rest. This board has been rock solid for us and supports AM2/AM2+ and the newest AM3 CPUs. The A780GXE has 128MB of sideport memory for additional performance. It fully supports the 140W Phenoms, and it can do dual x8 CrossFire. The A780GXE used to be a $100 board, so it is a good value at the current $80 price. It is ATX format, and ASRock also manufactures the A780FullHD motherboard, which at $57 may be a better choice for those pinching pennies. However, the extra performance of sideport memory and the better chipset for the $23 price difference is worth it in our opinion.

The case and power supply are the Sigma 500W La Vie mid-tower. This case and power supply are currently on sale after a $25 rebate for $40. Sigma makes both decent cases and decent power supplies that are sold separately. While no one will mistake this case/PSU combo for one of the premium Sigma offerings, it is still good quality and good value for a very reasonable price. Even if you pay the regular price of $60 to $65 you will get good value in this combo. We have built several entry systems with the Sigma case and PSU and had good results and stable performance. The only caveat is to check out the case when it arrives as shipping can take its toll on the case front door.

If you prefer a smaller case to mate with your Micro ATX motherboard the HEC 6K28BSOH48D Micro ATX mini-tower used in the Intel entry system is a good choice. It is a solid small case with a power supply from HEC, which is one of the world's best PSU makers. You should generally go for the best case and power supply you can reasonably afford, so you should also look at the cases and power supplies recommended for more expensive systems if you plan to keep your case/PSU and merely upgrade other components in the future.

With DDR2 prices so very low, we went for 4GB of DDR2-800 this time. This is double last year's entry recommendation for less than half the price. This 50% to 75% drop in DDR2-800 memory prices in the past year is why you're not seeing much memory advertising these days. RAM prices as a whole are certainly in the commodity category as of late. We recommended the G.Skill 4GB DDR2-800 CAS 5 kit, but you could just as easily choose OCZ, Kingston, Corsair, Crucial, Geil, Patriot, A-Data or any other quality DDR2-800 name and shop for the memory based on a combination of price and the company's support reputation. Again, if you are truly pinching pennies you can save about $18 by going with a 2GB DDR2-800 kit instead at $19 to $20.

Hard drive capacity continues to grow, as you can see in our selection of the Western Digital Caviar 500GB for our entry system. It seems a waste to choose a lower HD capacity when 500GB is now available for around $60 - even from www.amazon.com. While there are differences between hard drives, outside of running benchmarks most people aren't likely to notice the difference in performance between Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi and other major brands. All are worthy of consideration if the price per gigabyte (or terabyte) is right.

For the optical drive we went for value with the dependable Samsung 22X DVD. With the rise of the 25GB/50GB Blu-ray burners, DVD writers have continued to drop in price. A DVD writer that supports double-layer and 22X DVD writes for $25 is a bargain indeed.

The last major component to discuss is the display, and here the tilt was toward price. $99 is a really low price for an LCD monitor, and the Hanns-G is a 17" widescreen that supports a native resolution of 1440x900. This is the resolution supported by most 19" and 20" widescreen monitors. You will not give up resolution with this monitor, but things will be a bit smaller.

If your budget allows, you can choose the 19" Acer X193Wb with the same 1440x900 resolution at $120, or a 21.5" Viewsonic VX2233wm with true HD 1920x1080 resolution at $170. 21.5"/22" True HD is today's sweet spot, since the next step up to 23.6"/24" starts around $250. If your budget can stretch to $170, that is money well spent on a 21.5" 16:9 HD widescreen display.

System Buyers Guide: PCs under $800

2009-03-23T04:35:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Since last November we has looked at most of the components in the various system configurations you might want to purchase. This included specialty guides for Core i7 Systems at the high-end and our most recent guide for the newest CPUs in the Phenom II System Guide. The one constant in the computer market is change, and generally new product introductions bring greater value to market segments affected by the new CPU - and those downstream from the announcement.

That is certainly the case with the new AMD Phenom II, which started a midrange price war. After the Phenom II launch Intel responded quickly with Core 2 price cuts, and AMD countered with price adjustments that placed the Phenom II processors at price points where they compete very well with similarly priced Intel Core 2 processors. AMD then filled out their 45nm Phenom II line with models that extended to the upper end of the entry market, which squeezed other models in both lineups and created further price adjustments.

Now that the dust has settled for a while it is time to take another look at the entry-level computer systems. Low-end PCs have a reputation for being sub-standard, underpowered, and barely better than off-the-shelf PCs. That certainly was true in the past, but with the continuing drop in component prices, you can get a lot of PC today for your $300 to $800. About a year ago it would cost you about $700 to $750 to put together an entry system. Today you can build a similar but more powerful system for about $200 to $400 less.

We last looked at entry systems in late December with our buyers' guide for PCs under $1000. At that point prices had dropped to the point that $1000 was starting to look more midrange than entry, which is why that guide focused on cost rather than "classification". Prices have continued their slide, particularly in processors, to the point that our guide now focuses on complete PC systems for under $800.

Component classes and individual items were covered in detail in the various component guides in December. You will find those a useful reference for many of the components chosen in these system guides. This guide will take a closer look at the complete systems you can build for less than $800 these days. We have also revised the component tables with a subtotal for the basic system without speakers, I/O, display, or OS as several readers have requested. With a quick glance you can now see the cost to build a basic box which many would consider in a system upgrade. You can also see the total to build a complete system with all the peripherals needed for a balanced brand new setup.

In this guide we will be taking a look three common categories of systems you can now buy for under $800. This includes the entry-Level PCs that represent the best value for a basic box costing around $300 or a complete system for around $500. The bar is then raised with budget PCs that feature the most bang for the buck closer to $500 for the basic box and the $800 price point for a complete system.

It was a bit of surprise to find you could build very capable AMD and Intel machines, complete with keyboard, mouse, operating system, and a Full HD widescreen monitor for less than $800. These all rely on integrated graphics, but it is very easy to add a capable discrete graphics card if you require more graphics power and still end up well below $1000. In reality, dedicated gaming rigs normally begin in the midrange spectrum and entry PCs are normally the realm of integrated graphics. However, CPU prices are so low today with so much power that it would be very easy to add a $100 to $150 video card and end up with powerful graphics that can easily tackle gaming.

All of our recommendations are upgradable - even the cheapest entry boxes. You never know where your computer interest might lead, so options for future upgrades are always a good idea. The storage recommendations may seem overkill to some, but there is little reason to choose a smaller hard drive when you can buy 500GB of hard drive storage for $59 and a 1000GB (1TB) drive for just $100. Since most will have trouble filling 500GB on an entry PC we didn't choose anything larger, but you can easily double your storage to 1TB for just $40 to $50 more.

Finally, we put together basic HTPC computers to deliver video content to your home theater. HTPC builders have normally already selected a display/TV and the sound system. For that reason we did not include either the display or speakers in the basic HTPC component selections. With the current CPU and chipset power available in the entry to lower mid-range it is amazing how much video-crunching power you can put into an HTPC at such a low price.