reviews

Mouse technology has come a long way since the rollerball mice of the 1980s. Logitech’s Performance Mouse MX drives that point home--it can be used on practically any surface, and it offers features that our first Mac mouse could never have dreamed of.

Rome: Total War

Posted 03/03/2010 at 3:35pm | by jamor

A well-made strategy game reminds us of a season of Survivor, requiring a player to struggle, conquer, bargain, backstab, and dominate until all resistance has been removed. Rome: Total War, published for the Mac by Feral Interactive, certainly fits that bill--only instead of eating bugs for a million dollars, all you have to do is conquer the world.

Roxio Popcorn 4

Posted 03/03/2010 at 11:28am | by Zack Stern

For something that looks roughly the same wherever it’s played, video sure comes in a lot of formats. Online videos, including YouTube’s, are often Flash (FLV or F4V) files, while DVDs contain the Video_TS structure, TiVo shows get wrapped in their own proprietary MPEG-2 format, your camcorder captures clips in AVCHD--and the list keeps going. You shouldn’t need to know any of this to play and watch video, which is where Popcorn steps in. Roxio’s software imports these and other formats and compresses them for use on an AppleTV, iPhone, PS3, YouTube, DVD, and more. While it occasionally stumbles, the app comes in handy more often than it disappoints.

Dew Motion Quiver

Posted 03/03/2010 at 11:18am | by Ray Aguilera

2

I love my iPod, and I use it every day. But between earbud cables, straps for my laptop bag, and a jacket (even in summer… it’s San Francisco), things can get pretty cumbersome. Dew Motion’s Quiver iPod sash (for lack of a better term) aims to keep you from getting tangled in your own wires and makes it easier to control your iPod.

GagaFactory Radio Gaga

Posted 03/02/2010 at 10:34am | by Adam Berenstain

Internet radio offers options well beyond the powers of old-fashioned broadcasting, but something’s still missing--that’s because many music apps don’t go the extra mile themselves to let you record internet-radio streams. Radio Gaga plays and records thousands of stations, but the more you try to do with it, the more you’ll only hear static.

Pentax K-7

Posted 03/01/2010 at 10:55am | by jamor

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can keep the new 14.6MP Pentax K-7 down--tight weather seals and low noise at high ISOs ensure that if you have the chops, this camera will deliver no matter what the conditions. The K-7 retains much of the great feature set of its predecessor, the K-20 (5 out of 5 stars, Dec/08), with a few additions. It now sports a brilliant 3-inch LCD viewscreen, 5.2-frames-per-second continuous shooting, 1/8000-second shutter speed, and a whisper-quiet shutter. Its innards are protected by a weather-resistant body, and HD video capture has been added. All fine improvements.

Sanho HyperMac External Battery

Posted 03/01/2010 at 10:49am | by Paul Curthoys

1

Comment

Sure, the unibody MacBooks have longer-lasting batteries. But for many, those improvements came at too high a cost--no swapping of spare batteries can be a lethal limitation. But for the folks at Sanho, it presented a dreamy business opportunity, and their line of batteries delivers the plug-and-go power that many of you crave, though you’ll pay a premium for it.

Logitech Harmony 900

Posted 02/26/2010 at 2:00pm | by Zack Stern

1

Comment

Our entertainment-center remotes are like tribbles; they look warm and welcoming at first, but we swear they keep multiplying to the point of overrunning the living room. We spend more time swapping between clickers than actually pressing buttons… so we’ve replaced them all with a single, universal device: Logitech’s Harmony 900. And it does more than just duplicate the original remotes’ controls--it adds new features. We had one significant setup problem, but after we corrected the issue, the Harmony 900 excelled.

Google Nexus One

Posted 02/25/2010 at 5:19am | by Roberto Baldwin

Hot on the heels of the Motorola Droid release, Google entered the mobile-phone market full-bore with its HTC-built Nexus One. Sporting the Android 2.1 OS, the first official Google phone has been deemed magical enough to be sold exclusively by the search giant and can only be purchased directly from the big G’s online store--with or without a calling plan.

G-Technology G Drive

Posted 02/24/2010 at 10:36am | by Ray Aguilera

Despite our constant exposure to tech gear, we’re always amazed at the advances in storage. We still fondly remember floppy disks of the 3.5- and 5.25-inch varieties--yes, the ones that held a single megabyte or so at best. These days, we all expect to have hundreds of gigabytes of storage in our machines, but that doesn’t mean external drives aren’t a must-have. G-Technology’s G Drive brings high-speed, high-capacity storage to your desktop, and it’s clad in a slick design that will look right at home with the rest of your equipment.