Reviews
If three's company, we'd say Motorola has gone and made a full-on family out of its Moto 360 smartwatch. Hot on the heels of its second-generation Moto 360 comes the Moto 360 Sport, an Android Wear timepiece designed to compete not with TAG or Sony or Samsung, but with FitBit, Polar, Garmin, and TomTom. The ruggedized or sports smartwatch...
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To look at the Dell Precision 15 5510, you wouldn’t know that it sits in the middle of Dell’s workstation lineup. The laptop is thinner and sleeker than you might expect a workstation-class laptop to be and the premium carbon fiber palm rest gives the system a decidedly high-end vibe. But the Precision 15 5510 is...
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To expand on our coverage of Intel’s Z170-chipset, we now turn our focus to another Gigabyte motherboard for Intel Skylake CPUs. The Gigabyte Z170X-UD5 Ultra Durable motherboard is up at the plate and has the budget-builder firmly in its sights. Conversely, the company’s pricey Z170X-Gaming G1 motherboard, which we...
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When ASUS released the ZenFone 2 Laser, the company’s goal was to offer a premium smartphone experience with strong camera performance at an affordable price. On the surface the ZenFone 2 Laser has many of the key features of a premium phone, including an octa-core SoC with Adreno graphics, dual active SIM...
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If you like the idea of using a stylus with your mobile device, then you probably prefer the precision and additional functionality over the convenience of a fingertip. That, or you've picked up a brand-new HP Pro Slate 8, a tablet targeted at working professionals that includes a rather useful and unique accessory dubbed the "Duet Pen" that...
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We had good things to say about Asus’ super-slim ZenBook UX305 when we evaluated it early last year. Attractive, sturdy, and downright tiny, the UX305 was a good value for the price, and it had good looks too. A year later, the ZenBook is back with the updated UX305CA, so we got one in to see if the newer version is...
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In a broad sense, there are two types of keyboards in this world—those that use mechanical key switches and those that don't. If that sounds like something a keyboard snob would say, so be it, this editor stands guilty as charged, and happily so. We can accept that not everyone will find just cause to spend a premium...
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Netgear has released a new line of high-end-yet-consumer-friendly NAS drives dubbed the RN210 family. They are available in both two-and-four bay models, and this time around we’ll be examining its two-bay model, the RN212, and everything we cover here applies to the four-bay model as well, which goes by the moniker RN214. The big deal with...
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We dug the original Intel Compute Stick that launched last year. If you recall, the original Compute Stick was a tiny, Atom-powered device that could turn any HDMI-equipped display into a basic PC. The low-power nature of the Compute Stick meant it was ideally suited for every-day, less-demanding computing tasks, and...
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Though it still hasn't grabbed consumers like some manufacturers had hoped, the smartwatch market is growing rather quickly, and a number of good options are currently available. For some users, price may be one of the key factors holding them back from buying a smartwatch. While many watches cost at least $250, and...
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Dell has some enticing new hardware on tap for its newest Inspiron 7000 series laptops, including the latest and most powerful Intel Skylake processors and NVIDIA GPUs, but the computer maker sent us a decidedly modest version for this evaluation. PC makers usually load their review systems to the hilt, in an effort to make them perform well...
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The router game is heating up once again, after being dormant for what seemed like an eternity, thanks to new iterations of the Broadcom XStream platform. We first examined this platform for 802.11 AC routers back in October when we rounded up four AC3200 routers from Netgear, D-Link, TrendNet, and Asus. We then added...
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We covered a lot of miles at CES 2016 this year, our fitness trackers often chirping "success" rather early in the day, but we saw a lot of people and a lot of tech gear in our travels. Some of it was hot - damn hot - some of it, not so much. There were some recurring themes this year, as with every year at CES it seems. The hot topics and...
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You could hear the collective groan from the enthusiast community when Dell announced it had purchased Alienware, in what now feels like 100 years ago. It's actually been just shy of a decade since Dell took ownership, and rather than let the Alienware brand wither into irrelevance like some other boutique vendors that were later absorbed...
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Although updated sales figures haven’t yet been released, and some initial reviews were less than stellar, if the movie is any indicator, EA’s Star Wars Battlefront is poised to be a resounding success. And with an expansion pack inbound, that will likely feature content that ties in with the Force Awakens, it’ll...
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A few weeks back, we attended a summit hosted by AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group. A number of new initiatives and technologies were disclosed at the event, including AMD’s plans to support FreeSync over HDMI along with other new display technologies. Also discussed was the company’s GPUOpen...
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EVGA decided to branch out this year. No, not with AMD graphics; the company's GPU offerings are still very much based on reference cards from Team Green. Yet, in an effort to expand their product lines, the largest North American vendor of NVIDIA graphics cards now offers their own branded memory modules in both DDR3...
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Dell's Alienware Steam Machine is under the microscope today. In partnership with several leading PC makers, Valve has finally taken their often-talked about Steam Machine with custom SteamOS to market, promising the depth and precision of PC gaming driven by a purpose-built operating system, that offers a...
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When Microsoft first launched its Surface line of products, it caused quite a stir in the mobile PC market. It may have taken a couple of iterations to get things dialed in to the point they are today, but simply entering the market with its own branded hardware put Microsoft in the position of essentially competing with its partners. Microsoft...
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Periodically, Amazon updates and revamps its lineup of tablets with upgraded models and new names. While the company's tablets have kept the Fire branding over the years, the combination of letters and numbers that follow have changed. This year, for example, Amazon removed the HDX tag and now offers tablets with simply “Fire” or “Fire HD”...
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Shortly after we published our AC3200 router roundup, Linksys contacted us and wanted to throw one of its routers into the ring. We agreed, and the company sent us its Linksys EA9200 Tri-band Smart Wi-Fi router, which like the others in the roundup is a tri-band router that uses the Broadcom XStream 5GHz platform, throwing out dual 5GHz networks...
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The original Google Nexus 5 shipped right around this time two full years ago. Much has evolved in the smartphone space in the 24 months since then, but little has changed in terms of branding with this latest LG-built Nexus device. The 5.2-inch Nexus 5X we will be showing you here is positioned as the mainstream Nexus phone in the Android...
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