Reviews
Calling the smartphone market "mature" is likely misguided, even if you consider its increasing saturation levels. In the U.S., however, much has changed over the past half-decade, but more important perhaps is what has become commonplace. While the initial players all jockeyed for their share of the smartphone pie, companies such as Kyocera...
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Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series has been wildly successful for many years now, offering some of the edgiest story lines, game play tactics and objectives the gaming industry has ever seen. With psychopathic main characters, you are left in the depraved communities of Los Santos and Blaine County, to walk a path few would dare choose in...
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In addition to ushering in a tidal wave of new notebooks and mobile devices, Intel’s Broadwell microarchitecture has also found its way into a plethora of recently introduced small form factor systems. We have already taken a look at a couple of them, like the excellent Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK and Gigabyte Brix S...
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As popular as thin and light notebooks have become, there is a place in market for the hulking, desktop replacement machines targeted at power hungry users--like gamers. Sometimes you’re willing to give up a little portability so you can bring a real powerhouse to the next LAN party. The Eurocom P5 Pro, which is the latest desktop replacement...
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The WD My Cloud EX2100 is a new prosumer-oriented NAS drive from WD that continues the company's adventures in the realm of "personal cloud" storage. These drives are aimed directly at people who use Cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.com, and others. The marketing speak from WD is that those services require a monthly payment...
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Asus unveiled its latest addition to the Transformer series at CES in January, the Transformer Book Chi. Available in three sizes, the new Transformer Book Chi Series features a 2-in-1 detachable laptop design. Their flagship Transformer Book T300 Chi offers a 12.5-inch screen, an Intel Core M processor, and a fanless cooling solution. The...
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Intel has refreshed its line-up of processors in a number of categories over the last few months. Late last year, Intel’s current flagship desktop processors based on Haswell-E arrived, followed shortly thereafter by the low-power Core M series for ultra-mobile devices, and then 5th Generation Core processors for...
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Relationships. Some go the distance. Others are of a more mercurial nature, such as the one between me and my iPhone. As much as I loved my iPhone, I've always found iOS to be somewhat immature and not quite serious (a problem that plagues most Apple-produced software), which probably explains why my eye has wandered towards Android phones...
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About a year ago, we were in a similar spot. We had the latest Galaxy smartphone in hand, rand were comparing it to rivals from LG, Motorola, Apple, and Sony (just to name a few). Twelve months have passed, and as fate would have it, we've got yet another pair of Galaxy phones in the labs. This time, however, Samsung's got something that clearly...
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At this point, it is clear that virtually all of the major mobile device manufacturers are laser focused on the wearables market. While one could argue that the war for the wrist began a couple of years ago, most of the smartwatches that have shipped thus far have served only a small niche. Early adopters have peeked at the Moto 360,...
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Ever since Grand Theft Auto V’s initial release back in September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, PC gamers have been eagerly waiting for Rockstar Games to bring title to the PC. 18 months later, and the long-awaited game has finally been released. Unfortunately, while Rockstar Games is known for releasing some top-notch titles, its...
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NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture has already torn up the gaming world, thanks to cards like the GeForce GTX Titan X and the GeForce GTX 980. NVIDIA recently took time to bring that same Maxwell goodness over the workstation market as well and the result is the new Quadro M6000, NVIDIA's new highest-end workstation platform. Like the Titan X,...
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We first got an official look at the Intel Compute Stick earlier this year, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In one of those “But wait! There’s more!” kind of moments common at trade shows, one of the good folks at Intel that was previously showing off a few upcoming NUC systems pulled a tiny device from his...
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Solid State Drives continue to be one of the more sought after (and effective) upgrades for both desktop and mobile systems. But as drives have matured, and newer generations have been released, the bandwidth limitations of the legacy SATA interface have become increasingly more apparent. Even relatively affordable, mainstream solid state...
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As has become the norm in the smartphone era, major manufacturers are seemingly expected to launch a new version of their flagship phone annually. On top of that, the average consumer clearly expects greater improvements and features with each successive release. It’s a tall order to meet such demands on an annual...
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In the past couple of years, the high-end Android smartphone market in the US has largely been dominated by Samsung, LG, and HTC. Although Sony continues to compete in the mobile market, Verizon Wireless customers haven’t seen a Sony-branded phone since the Xperia Play in 2011. As you may recall, the Xperia Play didn’t sell as well as Sony...
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Not long ago, the battle for consumer dollars occurred on a field littered with ultralight notebooks. A few years later, that transitioned to smartphones and tablets. Today, the next major tussle is occurring on one’s wrist, in the red-hot "wearables" market in general. Motorola’s Moto 360 made waves by being the first major smartwatch to...
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Had things gone to plan, Steam Machines would be a shipping product by now. However, Valve threw a wrench into the works when it decided that more time was needed to tweak its custom Linux-based Steam OS and fine tune the platform's accompanying Steam Controller. That decision left several partnering OEMs and boutique system builders in limbo,...
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Samsung is introducing a number of new members to the SSD 850 EVO line-up of solid state drives, based on different form factors than the standard 2.5” drives we showed you here. The brand new mSATA and M.2 Samsung SSD 850 EVO drives we’ll be showing you here, however, leverage all of the same technology. The last few generations of Samsung’s...
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Gigabyte's Brix line-up of small form factor systems is the company’s answer to the teeny, tiny NUC from Intel. These ridiculously small PCs pack all the power of a laptop, or a budget desktop, into a box small enough to fit in your palm. These wee PCs are marketed to non-gamers and people who need a basic, no-nonsense PC with a tiny footprint....
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OCZ Technology is at the ready with yet another new Solid State Drive, built around the company’s tried-and-true Barefoot 3 controller. The Vector 180 series drive we’ll be showing you here today is packing some of Toshiba’s latest A19nm MLC NAND flash memory and has some welcomed features and additions normally...
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Soon after NVIDIA unveiled its G-SYNC technology, AMD announced that it would pursue an open standard, dubbed FreeSync, leveraging technologies already available in the DisplayPort specification to offer adaptive refresh rates to users of some discrete Radeon GPUs and AMD APUs. AMD’s goal with FreeSync was to introduce a technology that offered...
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