HotHardware's 2014 Back To School Shopping Guide

LG G Watch (On sale now at Amazon starting at $229): With the wearables craze just getting started, you’ll surely spark up a few conversations if you show up to class with this on. Google obviously has a vested interest in seeing Android wearables succeed, so rather than watch its hardware partners flounder around in a sea of custom platforms, the sultan of search introduced the world to Android Wear, a special version of Android specifically built for the wearable market. It's drawing interest from hardware players and developers, including LG, which just announced its working together with Google on a "G Watch" powered by Android Wear.


Notifications from your own apps as well as Google Now will be filtered through to the watch, and also, it tells time. In other words, no excuses for being late to class.

Corsair Vengeance K70 Mechanical Keyboard (Currently $112.99): Yep, we’re still swearing by ‘em. If you’re looking for the most responsive keyboard for gaming and you know, typing term papers, you have to go mechanical. This one utilizes Cherry MX Red mechanical switches under every key, a 100% anti-ghosted matrix, 20-key rollover and 1000Hz reporting rate. In other words, it's exactly the kind of keyboard the hardcore gamers would want.


The Vengeance K70 gaming keyboards are available in two color schemes: silver aluminum with blue backlighting, and anodized black with deep red backlighting. Overall backlighting can be adjusted to four levels of intensity and each key is individually backlit, enabling the lighting for each key to be independently enabled or disabled. The key-by-key lighting customization allows users to highlight just the keys they need to emphasize and then save the setting directly to the K70's onboard memory. In addition, the Vengeance K70 comes with alternate colored, contoured keycaps for the WASD and 1-6 keycaps to allow additional customization. It also features dedicated multimedia controls to allow users to play, stop, pause, skip tracks and adjust volume. An extra USB connector is provided for attaching to USB devices such as a Vengeance gaming mouse or headset. A removable soft-touch wrist rest provides comfort for long gaming or typing sessions.

Logitech Proteus G502 Programmable Mouse Currently $79.99: Nothing to fear here — it’s just a mouse that looks like it showed up from a foreign planet. What makes this critter unique is just how customizable it is. It’s perfect for gamers, but it’s also useful for programming for popular productivity applications. You can tweak weight, balance, tracking speed, and more — as well as tune it for a given gaming surface's unique physical and reflective characteristics.
There are a series of 3.6g weights, 11 programmable buttons, a quick scroll wheel, 3 onboard profiles, mechanical microswitches, and a 1-millisecond report rate. It sports a Delta Zero sensor with a DPI range of 200 - 12,000, which is a nifty factoid to keep around in case you need a geeky pick-up line.