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We are almost to the end of yet another wonderfully innovative year in technology. The non-stop innovation of the tech sector has presented us with products and services that deliver more horsepower, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors that deliver more value and features. The tradition of Black Friday began with retail merchants feverishly working over the year to pull their bottom lines out of the "red", and utilizing the US Thanksgiving long holiday weekend to bolster sales and revenue back into the "black." For 65 years value-seeking consumers in the U.S. have been looking...
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The annual Consumer Electronics Show – CES – is typically chock full of bleeding-edge technology. Numerous companies take advantage of CES as the backdrop to launch or announce new products, and this year's CES 2017 was no exception. But for every killer piece of technology shown off at CES, there are a dozens of chintzy unmentionables that fill the millions of square feet that comprise the show's multiple venues. The Las Vegas Convention center and virtually all of the surrounding upscale hotels and resorts are packed to gills with CES-related tech products every year. It can be tough...
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With the KIRAbook 13 I7, Toshiba is flexing its muscles and taking on the likes of Apple, Asus, and Lenovo in the ultrabook arena. And you know what? Toshiba seems to be on the right track. With clean lines, a 2560 x 1440 resolution display and a slick magnesium alloy body, the KIRAbook is anything but a typical laptop. Hitting a home run in this market isn’t easy, because a true ultrabook should be as much about form as it is function. It should be thinner than a laptop, and lighter too. It needs processing power as well as decent battery life. But small, powerful hardware...
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Toshiba is claiming to have the world's thinnest 10-inch tablet with its Excite 10 LE. This Android 4.0-powered tablet is indeed thin and lightweight, measuring 0.3 inches thick and weighing about 1.18 pounds. In addition to its thin design, the Excite 10 LE also offers a number of ports and expansion slots. With its size, range of IO ports, and good-looking magnesium alloy surface finish, the Excite 10 LE is certainly eye catching. Although thin and light are definitely key features for any tablet, we also demand performance. Toshiba understands this, and has included a 1.2 GHz Dual-Core Texas...
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We're going to let you in on a little secret, and while you're free to pass it on, understand that nobody will ever believe you. In fact, if you do share this secret, you might suffer a barrage of insults, and depending on your stature, could even end up with a wedgie. You've been warned. Are you ready? Here goes: Many Windows users, even die hard ones, have a secret lust for Apple's MacBook Air. Yup, we said it, and now we'll give you a moment to clean the coffee off your monitor and keyboard. Few Windows users will ever admit it, but the MacBook Air is a finely crafted laptop from a physical...
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If 2011 was the year of the tablet, then Q4 2011 had to be the quarter of 7-inch versions. With a late-in-the-year burst of releases from various manufacturers spurring break-out products like the Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, it's as if manufacturers made a concerted effort to target lower price points in an move to capture opportunity upsides during the holiday season. There's little question Amazon's product, with its $199 price tag and an entire platform of media services and brand recognition behind it, made a big splash and now the competitive offerings...
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One of the most dramatic shifts in portable gaming history has been the surge in popularity of smartphones and tablets in the past two years. In 2009, Android and iOS devices accounted for ~19 percent of game revenue. In 2010, their combined share nearly doubled, while Flurry Analytics estimates that the two platforms will account for 58 percent of gaming revenue in 2011. This shift, combined with the rising popularity of "freemium" distribution models in which much or all of a game's content is provided free of charge while a subset of top-tier content is available for a nominal fee, has...
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Android Honeycomb based tablets are beginning to feel like they're a dime a dozen. 10.1-inch slates are coming out of the woodwork from a bunch of major players, and for all intents and purposes, they're built upon very similar base platforms with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processor powering them. Capacitive touch displays, integrated 802.11 WiFi, 8 - 32GB of ROM storage, 1GB of RAM, accelerometers, gyroscopes, front and rear facing cameras and Android 3.1 -- you know the drill. Fortunately, beyond the cookie-cutter reference platform, some manufacturers are building tablets that stand...
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This year's Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada offered some of the most exciting product announcements we've seen in any previous CES show thus far. The past three years' CES shows have been rather snoozy, to be honest, with the economy taking its toll on product design investment and innovation. However, this year's CES showed great promise of not only emerging technologies and product innovations but with the sheer number of announcements and the notable increase in attendance (as well as city traffic, which was a nightmare), it was all a very encouraging sign of...
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The ultraportable notebook marketplace is hotter than ever before. In years past, buying a sub-14" machine generally meant a couple of things: low power and high price. Today, it's still fair to say that ultraportables are generally less powerful and more expensive than the standard-sized 15" machines that sit above them, but the gap is closing fast. Intel's Core i3 and i5 line of processors has ushered in an entirely new segment of thin-and-light machines, and we're getting to the point where 13.3" machines can finally be taken seriously from a performance standpoint. Toshiba's 13.3" Portégé...
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Toshiba's Tecra Series of laptops have traditionally been marketed as high-performance business laptops, designed to be capable of handling demanding tasks. Earlier this year, Toshiba announced the Tecra A11. The new Tecra A11 is thinner and lighter than its predecessor and features a 10-key numeric keypad. Designed as a desktop replacement, the Tecra A11 offers the new 2010 Intel Core processor family and a high-resolution widescreen 15.6-inch display. Some models also offer NVIDIA NVS 2100M graphics. Because the Tecra Series targets business users, Toshiba has included additional...
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Last year, Toshiba announced the Satellite T135 series, a line of thin-and-light ultraportable laptops that offered a good balance of performance and price. Toshiba got our attention with this line so we reviewed the Satellite T135-S1310RD, an Intel Pentium SU4100 powered machine that featured an ultra-low voltage processor. At a time when many thin-and-light notebooks were using Atom processors, the higher-powered dual-core SU4100 in the T135-S1310RD definitely caught our eye. Fast forward to this year and Toshiba is expanding the Satellite T135 lineup with new AMD Turion Neo X2-powered models....
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If you could design your own laptop in an effort to have the perfect balance of performance, price, size, weight, and features, what would you include and what could you live without? As part of its Blue Label program, Best Buy asked that question of its customers--accepting as much feedback as its customers could give and then channeling that information back to the laptop manufacturers it partners with. The ensuing results of this feedback now manifest themselves in the three current Best Buy Blue Label exclusive laptop offerings: the Dell Studio s15Z-2249CPN, Sony Vaio VPCS11FM/S, and Toshiba...
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We're seeing more and more CULV notebooks hit the market these days. The growing sector of Consumer Ultra Low Voltage machines attempts to bridge the gap between lower cost netbooks and full-size notebooks, offering a more powerful chip than the ubiquitous Atom options we see in netbooks, but one that consumes less power than the mainstream Core 2 Duo processors we see in many full-size notebooks. The Toshiba Satellite T100 Series fits in the CULV segment and attempts to offer the comfort and convenience of a standard laptop in an ultra-thin package. As the larger model in the T100 series, the...
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