Sexy Gadgets, Cool Gadgets and Concept Gadgets

Slip your iPad inside and it’s held firmly in place by the brackets, while the solid material protects your precious gadget if it gets battered. The edges are left open to provide access to essential ports and switches, so bear in mind that these are potential vulnerabilities too.

Magnets and a flap hold the case closed when your iPad’s not in use. Open it up and you can prop the tablet up at an angle perfect for typing, or also at a near-vertical angle for watching movies or TV shows.

The HP Envy 14 is a laptop that struggles to match its colossal price tag with the performance it should offer. It’s a well-built machine which is great to use, but falls down with a series of weak points that confused and dismayed in equal measure.

Inside this machine is a Core i7 processor but, unfortunately, it’s part of the older family of Intel chips, which means that performance is significantly hampered in comparison to the Acer 5750 which sports the new Sandy Bridge model. The older design, coupled with the slower clock speed, means that the HP lags behind the competition in terms of performance, making it less attractive as a future-proof buy for a similar price you could get a MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 15Z, which are both fantastic performers.

The MSI FX720 is well-built desktop replacement laptop which packs in plenty of power, it will easily keep tip with your needs for years to come, but does fall short of the performance expected by more demanding users.

This 17-inch laptop isn’t designed to be carted about and its bulky design and whopping 3kg chassis will soon start to weigh you down. Instead, it’s best considered by people who tend to use their laptop in a fixed position, such as at their de.sk, in i he study or bedroom, but who want the option of occasional portability, preferably by car, as a 3kg laptop will be an uncomfortable weight in anyone’s bag. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest laptop in Lenovo’s ThinkPad series of business laptops, the Lenovo ThinkPad T420s, is as masterfully engineered as it is incredibly lightweight. Its magnesium enclosure protects some of the most advanced parts, and the laptop has arguably the best user experience in the world.

The last time we looked at the ThinkPad T series, its meager battery scores weren’t the kind that can last through a grueling travel schedule. This time around, thanks to an overhaul that included Intel Sandy Bridge technology, the T420s has the battery chops to battle its competitors—and win. Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile phone photography has come of age; consider that the iPhone 4 has become the most popular camera represented on Flickr (based on the number of photos uploaded per day). The VuPoint Photo Cube, a portable thermal-dye printer, capitalizes on this trend by letting you print directly from a docked iPhone or iPod touch, or an iPad or Android device connected to the printer via a USB cable. The Photo Cube, which produces 4-by-6 prints, operates independently of a computer—in fact; you can’t use the Photo Cube to print from any source other than a mobile device. In this day and age, that may be enough for many consumers. Read the rest of this entry »

The most appealing aspect of a small-business laptop is that it includes most of the features of an enterprise system, yet costs much less. The HP Pro-Book 6465b is one such example, where every standard feature is accounted for, and the price is too sweet for IT managers to pass up. As an added bonus, it’s also one of the first laptops to feature AMD’s newest A6 Fusion processors (codenamed “Llano”). Though it didn’t perform as well as an Intel CPU-based SM B laptop like the Dell Vostro 3350, the 6465b has enough in features to get IT managers interested. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the laptops here, only the Asus K52F (£339 inc. VAT) and the MSI feature one of Intel’s speedy budget Core 13 processors. At first we were impressed by the value for money on offer, but it isn’t all good news.

Your laptop’s processor is the tiny chip that runs all of your software, and the more powerful it is, the faster everything runs. Recent processors feature more than one core and, while many of the laptops here have two cores, the KS2Fs Core i3 processor has four. Read the rest of this entry »

Acer is one of the most prolific manufacturers we know, producing everything from huge multimedia powerhouses to stripped-down budget models. The Aspire 5742z (£349 inc. VAT) is one of the latter, and another strong entry-level contender.

The laptops in this group arc aimed at consumers with tight budgets, who need a portable computer for everyday use. At this price range, you won’t be getting the latest technology and performance will be Limited.

However, the 5742z features an Intel Pentium processor backed up by a staggering 6GB of memory, much more than we usually sec at this price. Only the MSI and Asus performed better in our tests. We managed to write this review, stream music over the intern el and back up our files al] at once, with no slowdown at all Applications started up quickly and ran smoothly. Read the rest of this entry »