Are you reading?

If you’re in the market for a new laptop / netbook, you might want to add Acer’s just-released Aspire 3935-6504 to the list of potentials. The early reviews are in, and it looks like Acer’s got an aggressively-priced winner on its hands. Laptop Magazine calls it “one heck of a bargain,” noting particularly its sleek and sturdy design, backup and power saver buttons, full-sized keyboard, and the appealing $900 price tag. PC Magazine went so far as to give it the Editor’s Choice award for budget laptops, lauding also its eco-friendly credentials and impressive battery life (4 hours and 50 minutes, by its metric). Both sites bemoaned, however, the lack of HDMI and eSATA ports and its inability to run games as well as competitors like the Dell Studio XPS 13 or HP Pavilion dv3z. Providing a less enthusiastic tone is Computer Shopper, who seems to take more of an issue with its gaming deficiencies than the other two reviewers. Still, the site recommends it for those consider style, portability, and price tag the main selling points. Check out the read links below for more thorough dissection.

Read – Laptop Magazine
Read – PC Magazine
Read – Computer Shopper

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We’re beginning to think there really is no number too high for the megazoom focal length. Back in the day, just boasting a 10x zoomer was enough to fall into said category; today, you best top 20x if you even want into the discussion. Olympus’ 26x SP-590UZ is definitely amongst the craziest out there, sporting a 12 megapixel sensor, 2.7-inch LCD and a launch price of just under $450. Reviewers over at PhotographyBLOG were duly impressed across the board, with a certain critic noting that “the ability to go from capturing wide-angle landscapes to distant details in a four second zoom of the lens cannot be underestimated, especially as there’s little distortion to worry about at either end and excellent sharpness across its entire range.” Not surprisingly, the cam notched a “Highly Recommended” badge along with 4.5 out of 5 overall stars — that said, are you really willing to buy in knowing a 58.983x successor is just around the bend?
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NVIDIA’s $2,000 Quadro CX Pro GPU actually does more than just improve one’s Creative Suite 4 experience, but for whatever reason, the aforementioned firm has decided to market the card’s mastery of Adobe over all else. The hardcore benchmarkers over at HotHardware decided to pop this in and give it a critical look, and while they definitely appreciated the speed gains in Premiere Pro and its performance overall, they never could quite swallow that admittedly huge MSRP. In fact, they reckoned that NVIDIA would’ve been better off offering this up with a slower clock speed and a smaller sticker, particularly when you consider that CS4 isn’t really engineered to fully take advantage of all this horsepower. Reviewers did note that something like this may be entirely more beneficial once CS5 or CS6 emerges, but for now, the card’s just a bit ahead of its time (and priced accordingly). Hit the read link for the full spill — trust us, it’s worth the read if you’re teetering on dropping two large.
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Yeah, we already heard that Dell’s Phenom II-equipped XPS 625 was a solid value, but what does that really mean? The testing fiends over at HotHardware sought to find out, and after putting this gaming beast through more tests than it ever wanted to endure, they mirrored most of the earlier (positive) sentiments. In fact, it was found to boast one of the best price-to-performance ratios out there, and the “minimalist” software installation definitely earned brownie points in our book. One thing that bothered critics, however, was the excessive amount of noise. We too have noticed that Dell’s ginormous XPS towers — which, by the way, reviewers also found to be unnecessarily heavy and unwieldy — can emit some serious decibels under heavy loads, but you’d think the engineers in Round Rock would’ve figured out a solution by now. Still, those quirks are probably small hassles to deal with given the savings compared to similar rigs, but we’d highly recommend digging into the read link just to be sure.
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By Andrew Liszewski

Ugh, I guess this is another sign of the times. Instead of kids blowing up test tubes with strips of magnesium, they have to settle for making square shaped or smoke filled bubbles with this Bubble Experiment Lab from ‘Mad Science’. I’ll give them credit though, when fully assembled the lab does look like a crazy contraption cooked up by a Disney Imagineer, but I’m afraid the accolades end there. While it comes with bubble solution and a smoke elixir (sounds delicious) according to one of the reviewers on Amazon “the smoke was less visible than the steam coming off a cup of warm coffee.”

So if you live for the look of disappointment on your kid’s faces, you can order the Bubble Experiment Lab from Amazon for $42.99. Otherwise, just spend like 50 cents and buy them a bottle of bubble solution. It’s a far cheaper way to confirm the scientific hypothesis that bubbles are lame.

[ Mad Science Bubble Experiment Lab ] VIA [ Gadget Grid ]

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ASUS’ Eee PC 1000HE, which managed to garner some pretty high praise amongst reviewers, is now shipping out to eager buyers. For those that missed it, this here netbook sports a 1.66GHz Atom N280 and a high-capacity battery that could last up to 9.5 hours under perfectly ideal conditions. And for under $400, how in the world can you complain with that? If you too have received your tracking number, feel free to gloat about it in comments below. Might want to hold the actual digits close to your chest, though — we hear netbook interceptions are on the rise.

[Thanks, Mitchell]
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We can’t say for certain what’s gotten into Gateway this year, but it’s on a roll. The company’s MD and UC families, which were introduced at CES, earned high praise from reviewers and came in at very respectable price points. Now, the outfit is expanding things further with the 14-inch TC line, which is currently comprised of the TC7306u and TC7307u. Designed to hit that sweet spot between a full blown 15-incher and an ultraportable, these media-centric lappies get going at $649.99 and tip the scales at 5.3 pounds. Each one sports a 1.3 megapixel webcam, WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, a 1,366 x 768 resolution panel, a built-in multicard reader and three USB 2.0 ports. You’ll also find a variety of colors, Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPUs, a dual-layer DVD writer and a 6-cell Li-ion battery. Nah, you haven’t missed anything out of the ordinary, but these two don’t seem half bad for handling basic tasks without spending a bundle. Full release is after the break.
Gallery: Gateway unveils 14-inch TC7306u and TC7307u laptops

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Did you catch the news yesterday about those chronic performance problems that cropped up in a trio of Intel X25-M SSDs under review by PC Perspective? Intel apparently did, promptly responding and identifying what it believes to be the issue: the testers. The review alleged that the drives’ write algorithms, intended to evenly spread wear and extend their lives, result in extreme fragmentation and major decreases in performance. Intel is saying it wasn’t able to replicate the results, that “the synthetic workloads they use to stress the drive are not reflective of real world use,” and that “the benchmarks they used to evaluate performance do not represent what a PC user experiences.” The reviewers were largely just copying files around and installing/uninstalling applications, which sounds fairly realistic to us. We’re thinking these two aren’t going to agree to disagree on this one, and that there will be more updates to come.