Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review forget the bookstore head to the app store instead before you head back to school plus Spotify tricks for some slick playlists HP's envy 14 may make you rethink your macbook purchase and a solar-powered keyboard that makes fluorescent lighting a little more tolerable it's all coming up right now hi everyone I'm Molly wood and welcome to the cnet tech review where we collect our hottest videos of the week and tell you what's good and what's bad in the world of tech plus offer our own unique tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start with the good first off to all you kids out there enjoying your summer break I've got three words for you back to school wah wah I know we're barely into August but some of you are only weeks away from heading back to campus and we want to make sure that you are fully prepared when you get there that's why Brian Cooley is here with his top 5 download recommendations for your smartphones tablets and PCs whether you're going back to school this year with cool new tech or the same crap you had last year you can tune it up nicely by downloading this year's hottest programs and apps I'm Brian Cooley with the top five you really need to get on your gear sorted by the five major categories of gear you're likely going to be packing number 5 iPad downloads skype is on our list now sure skype works on just about everything but on the ipad you sort of sit there with your mouth open because it really rocks video calls on that full touchscreen and of course make sure you're running it on an ipad 2 with the cameras or you're going to be sitting there making a voice call on a big screen device and that's kind of lame also look at netflix netflix i'm convinced has kept scores of ipad buyers from taking the damn thing back with buyer's remorse because it reminds you why you just spent five to eight hundred bucks on a mobile device that doesn't even make phone calls it's what portable TV always wanted to be number four is our mac software category starting off with tweetdeck now we always like TweetDeck which is now owned by twitter by the way we especially like the mac version which isn't what you always hear it looks sharp and it's a great way to merge and manage twitter and facebook posts from you your friends your followers and that weird stalker guy we also are big on spotify when you're cranking away on your mac doing homework you know you're gonna be playing music nobody studies in silence anymore nothing is hotter in online music right now then spotify it just launched in the u.s. right in time for the school year their track library is huge and you pick exactly what you want to hear not a sounds like thing the way you do on pandora number three are android apps starting off with the kindle app the free kindle app for android is a simple clean way to get a kindle without buying a kindle that's more money for beer that way and you know all about kindle books and periodicals web feeds PDF support but the new thing just announced is the kindle textbook store you can save huge money by renting digital versions of your textbooks and you still get to save your notes and highlights from them after your book rental ends cuz those are just fun to look at years from now also those Evernote what is school if not one big organizational pain Evernote for Android really fills a need for one app that swallows up text notes voice clips pictures files links even GPS locations you'll kind of be like Einstein when he said he never memorized his phone number because he always knew where to look it up unless you drop your phone in the toilet Einstein number two we get to our red hot iphone category starting off with the whatsapp messenger now put this on your iPhone and you can save tons on texting because you'll be able to skirt that texting plan that you pay your carrier for the catch is your friends and family who you want to text this way also have to install whatsapp messenger then they and you are texting and even sharing your locations for free yeah that's going to be a tough sale also we're big on Yelp think about it now if you're heading off to college especially a new college you're not leaving without two things one a lot of weirdness from your parents and two they yelp app on your iPhone now everyone thinks restaurants when they think Yelp but it's a great pocket guide to finding anything like a guitar shop then a piercing place then a skateboard store and a Career Counseling Center now our number one category for back-to-school downloads it's pc and windows stuff chrome browser at the top of the list chrome is really cool partly because it's really fast and it makes the google stuff work very well it's also nicely standards compliant and it seems to run best in its pc or windows version plus you can turn on sinking so your bookmarks prefs and settings will follow you to any other machine that is running chrome just by you using your Google login great for all that itinerant computer used to do in school finally there's paint.net now come on you're not gonna pay for photoshop and you probably don't need that horsepower anyway so paint.net sour go to pick it's open source so no cash required it does all the essential stuff and a few advanced tricks as well and it seems to get an update like every two days now for more on all our back-to-school pics software and gear go to back to school cnet com and for more top 5s like this its top 5 cnet com I'm Brian Cooley thanks for watching that's a good list especially since it had 10 items on it instead of five consider it a bonus I would like to add one more item to your download queue though especially if you're a Windows user BitDefender total security 2012 you're as seth rosenblatt to tell you why hi i'm seth rosenblatt foreseen it and in this first look we'll be peering behind the walls of BitDefender total security 2012 which you can get from cnet download.com for the second year in a row bitdefender's got a new look the suite now has a dark theme not unlike norton it also retains the modularity of last year's basic interface but the rest is entirely new the beginner intermediate advanced interface options are gone replaced with a single approach this status ring here shows a your security status green for secure yellow for problems that require attention and red for immediate issues this ought to be narrowed to green and red the yellow is potentially confusing either give got problems or you don't the new UI it does retain some of the defenders modularity though this is the default look but you can swap these security modules around each one has an icon at the top for easy recognition and toggles at the bottom to manage the feature the settings window is well designed with tabs that precisely reflect the options presented in the main window this year's interface is definitely easier to use than last year's enough about looks let's talk features there's not a huge amount that's new in bitdefender 2012 but there are some important improvements there's a new autopilot that's on by default it's a smart system that sets most notifications to silent automatically deals with most threats encountered and basically ensures that your security is running but not bothering you the browser add-on previously limited to Firefox and Internet Explorer has been replaced by a browser agnostic tool this means that you'll be protected no matter which browser you use rescue mode has been beefed up and bitdefender's free facebook scanning tool Safco has been baked in it ought to support Twitter soon if it doesn't by the time you watch this the online storage component safe box now gets file syncing across multiple computers bitdefender's efficacy scores have been strong in the past six months on infection prevention generally in the top five across multiple independent testers it scans are fast but not the fastest and be warned you're definitely going to notice its impact on startup and shutdown times also it's got a very aggressive install and it won't play well even with security programs that are designed to be complementary to the major sweets such as malware bytes oh and that corporate philosophy thing the software maker says it's the computer security equivalent of the mythical Romanian half wolf half dragon which let's be honest it's kind of awesome I think more computer security companies should take on animal avatars kung fu style and that's your first look at bitdefender 2012 i'm seth rosenblatt I don't care how boring internet security seems I want that did you hear that hackers I've got a wolf dragon watching my back but if you're looking for something a little more social Spotify also made Brian's list now I know many of you are still waiting for your invites but if you happen to be among the chosen few already using the service sharon has a few tips to make the most out of your playlists hey everyone I'm Sharon Vaknin for cnet.com and today I'm going to make you a Spotify playlist master first let's talk about the best ways to discover new music for your playlist starting with Spotify built-in tools because the search bar is actually a lot smarter than you think instead of just entering the name of an artist or song title use search operators for example you can search year colon 1972 1980 and get a list of popular songs from that decade or if you want a flashback from the new millennium search year colon 2000 or you can search for something like genre colon rap space year 1994 and find rap music from that year this is a full list of search operators so you can mix and match to find new or old songs for your playlists another built-in feature is related artists anytime you see a song click the artist name and you'll get an overview of their top songs albums a bio and related artists which is also a good feature for discovering new music it's not as cool as Pandora but it'll do now that you're a music discovery Pro you can drag and drop music into new playlists just remember that all playlists are automatically public so make sure to make them private if you don't want people discovering your love for Justin Bieber just right-click a playlist and uncheck publish in this menu you'll also see the collaborative playlist option this makes it so that anyone you share the playlist width can add songs to it and add it to their sidebar to the only catch is that it makes the playlist private to you and those people now if you don't want to do all the work searching for songs and creating playlists there are a few services that will do it for you and one of them is spotted bot go to spot a bot calm and hit more options under the search bar enter the name of an artist or multiple artists by clicking add another select the number of tracks and hit generate playlist you'll get an automated playlist of songs similar to the artist or song you entered which you can then drag and drop right into Spotify another way to find playlist is to use a sharing site like share my playlist com which lets people upload their playlists for everyone to download you can browse through the collection search by keyword or look at the charts to see which playlists are most popular once you find one just click play and it will launch and Spotify and don't forget to subscribe at the top to add it to your sidebar now here's a tool I love what if you already made play this on youtube soundcloud grooveshark and other music services well-placed if I org will take those playlists and help you transfer them to Spotify just go to place to fight org and click bake your own playlist then select which service you want to grab your playlist from and follow the instructions you'll end up with a link that you can then open and Spotify without going through all the trouble of rebuilding it by hand so now you have a huge list of Awesome playlists but maybe you have too many in your sidebar and it's getting a little crowded now this is where playlist folders comes in to create one just go to file new playlist folder give it a name and drag and drop playlists into that folder to keep your sidebar tidy once you've got your place built organized and perfected it's time to share them go back to share my playlist com and upload your clothes so that anyone can get them or just right-click a playlist and select copy HTTP link and paste it into Twitter and email instant message or facebook when someone clicks it it'll launch Spotify okay now it's time to go and make your epic playlist and be sure to send me a link on my facebook page and visit how to cnet com for more tips tricks and guides for your gadgets Brucie net I'm Sharon Vaknin and i'll see you on the interwebs just remember as more people start joining Spotify you'll have more and more friends to share music and build playlists with and maybe paying the monthly fee for offline listening might seem a little more reasonable me personally I like that now if you like to keep a tidy desktop a wireless keyboard can be the key to a Spartan workspace if you're into that sort of thing but if you're not into dumping a bunch of batteries into your local landfill check out this new solar keyboard from logitech if you're tired of replacing batteries on your computer keyboard logitech has a new solar powered solution that earns our Editor's Choice Award I'm Justin you peripherals editor for cnet com this is your first look at the logitech wireless solar keyboard k750 the k 750 s killer app is the dual solar panels that power the integrated lithium rechargeable battery inside they also draw a perpetual power from artificial light sources which means you don't have to be sitting by a window or even outside for the recharge the lights in your apartment or above your desk at work are fine and the keyboard automatically senses and stores those charges in ambient light to keep the unit charged best of all Logitech tells us a single to our charge will retain power for the keyboard for up to three months or more if you use the on/off switch in the corner the k750 may take a little getting used to though in terms of typing if you're normally used to the generic keyboard that came with your computer that's because the keys use scissors style switches underneath that you have a much shorter vertical clicking distance which means two things first the low-profile switches make for a typing experience that's a lot more like a laptop and a desktop keyboard that means low noise and light touch for actuation second the key switches also make the keyboard super thin that's just one third of an inch thick other notable features include Logitech's perfect stroke uniform key structure and unifying receiver technology so a unifying receiver is this USB port here that links to your computer to the keyboard and it sticks out just about half an inch off your computer and you can power up to six other Logitech devices at a time saving your precious USB ports for other peripherals finally we're really impressed with logitech's thorough eco conscious design principles from the pvc-free chassis to the one hundred percent recyclable packaging and even a download link instead of a physical driver disk in the box shows the company's push to reduce the users footprint for its affordability eco-consciousness and thoughtful feature set we're proud to award Logitech the Editors Choice Award and you can read all the details in our full review on cnet com but that's going to do it for me I'm Justin you you just took a first look at the logitech wireless solar keyboard k750 thanks for watching as justin mentioned the solar keyboard can hold a charge for up to three months so for those of you who prefer to do your computing in a darkened cave you could just switch on a light once a quarter charge that baby and take the opportunity to throw out some of those pizza boxes too all right the time has come to take a break but stick around we still have a lot more tech review right after this welcome back to the cnet tech review our weekly video digest of all things good and bad we've seen here at cnet TV continuing on in the good if you're one of those early adopter types and you want something to tinker around with while you're riding in someone's passenger seat the pioneer AppRadio might be right up your alley though it aims for seamless iPhone integration with your car you might end up being a little disappointed these days smartphones pretty much do everything so why do you need a fancy car stereo that's the question that pioneer aim to answer with its new app radio the first car stereo to be almost completely powered by your iPhone I'm antuan goodwin let's take a first look at this one of a kind of ice the Pioneers appradio is aimed squarely at those of you who are absolutely addicted to your iPhone's now by itself it's a little more than an am/fm radio tuner a Bluetooth hands-free system and a kind of fancy kind of sexy 7-inch capacitive touchscreen now if you don't actually have an iPhone that's about all that you can expect from this app radio pretty disappointing huh however connect an iphone to the included 30-pin dock connector and the rest of app radio functionality spring to life thanks to a set of apps that are installed on this connected i device users are able to browse google maps search for points of interest and get directions however like the Maps app on the iPhone itself these directions aren't live updating so you want to get a passenger to advance those instructions and probably read the directions allowed for you users who want the real deal for turn-by-turn directions will want to install the motionx gps Drive app on your iPhone which does exactly that it gives you those turn-by-turn directions motionx is a free app for the first 30 days after downloading though it's going to cost you about three dollars per month thereafter users can also add traffic data at an additional cost or you can just install the inrix traffic app on your iPhone to gain access to free traffic reports incidents and flow data while you're on the road you can access your locally stored ipod media or stream audio from the internet with the pandora internet radio or Rdio apps on the iphone all of which are very cool ways to keep your head on your next long drive there's also calendar integration and a contact manager which lets you initiate hands-free calls or even email your current GPS location to anyone in your context list even better pioneers actively working with even more app developers to add more choices to the list of supported apps however at radio is about as first generation as Hardware comes so there are some odd interface quirks that you'll need to be aware of before you pull the trigger on this guy first you'll notice that every app looks a little bit different which is buying on a handset but it can be difficult when you're just trying to skip tracks while you're driving next none of the apps are connected to one another and they run a separate processes on your phone so that inrix traffic data i talked about isn't actually going to factor into your Google Maps or motionx gps Drive directions more importantly none of these apps have a back button built into them so if you actually want to switch between the apps for example you're tired of our do and you want to listen to pandora you'll have to physically touch your phone to switch between the apps using the touchscreen which means you can't really just hide the phone away in a glove compartment and control it with the app radio which sort of defeats the purpose of actually using the app radio again pioneer promises that it is making strides towards continuously updating the app radio and the apps that it supports but for now it feels like it should probably be called F radio beta for you iphone addicts and early adopters that may not be such a bad thing but I think I'd wait for app radio to bake for a bit longer before taking the plunge well there you have it for more of my thoughts on this one-of-a-kind car audio receiver and I've got plenty of them look for the full review on cnet com which is also where you can find more cool first look videos I'm answer one good one giving you a first look at the pioneer AppRadio the a Brady oh really could have gone in the bad section of the show this week but I like the idea and the direction pioneers headed so I'm giving it a pass although I'm afraid I can't say the same for the next item which is truly deserving of the title hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet.com today we're going to take a look at the acer aspire x 1920 you are 20 p so this is actually a pretty terrible budget desktop sad to say the case is pretty decent it's the nice simple design relatively clean here got the DVD burner by the front door there few ports media card reader down here but the problem is that the system really is sort of under featured even for its low price you can find it for about four to five hundred dollars depending on where you look comes with a reasonably fast intel pentium dual-core chip they're still making pan geum's it has four gigs of ram a terabyte hard drive and that's about it the system is really pretty spare and you can get better equip pcs for the same price so we really can't recommend you buy this system now the back of the case we think you'll see what we mean when we say how under feature it is you've got 5.1 audio support only two USB ports a single egg internet jack old-school ps2 mouse and keyboard inputs as well as a me GA video out there's no digital audio no digital video no firewire e-sata a little own USB 3 you can find those features at least in some combination on other desktops in this price range particularly gateway which is actually ironic since ASR owns gateway so inside the case the layout is pretty straightforward for a slim tower there's the intel cpu here you can see here's the DVD drive underneath that is the hard drive there's room for only one hard drive inside and down here you kind of can't see it but there's two memory sticks not for memory sticks lots like you get on some other pcs for card expansion the system has no cards but there is a 1 x pci express slot those a 16 x pci express slots you can put say a half height graphics card in this pc but we wouldn't even recommend this upgrade platform just because it's really pretty underpowered and under featured as we've mentioned now we don't always expect slim towers to deliver it say the fastest performance are the most features for the dollar but the fact that they're such tiny cases really makes them well-suited both to desktop environments and the living room you can imagine putting a system like this next so TV is a pretty decent home media server but with no Wi-Fi adapter or no digital video out that really makes the system tough to recommend for the living room environment you can also get better bang for your buck in terms of performance in this price range so for both those reasons we can't recommend you buy the system Farmer Brown this is the acer aspire x 1920 you are 20 p let's take a look at some of riches takeaways from this review under featured can't recommend underpowered and how could we forget pretty terrible i don't think i have anything to add so let's finish things up here with this week's bottom line this summer apple has introduced updates to both the macbook pro and the macbook air laptop lines which is great news to apple fans with money to burn luckily for the other ninety percent of the world HP's updated envy 14 continues to be a word the alternative I'm dan Aykroyd and we are here taking a look at the latest version of HP's envy 14 now if you look at this envy 14 you may say it looks a heck of a lot like the last entry 14 or pretty much all the envy laptops that we've reviewed and from the outside it actually is pretty much exactly the same that said that's not necessarily a bad thing on the windows side this is about as close as you're going to get the kind of that hefty metallic macbook pro look and feel and it's really one of our favorite high-end pcs right now on the inside the differences are this latest version of the envy 14 has one of Intel second generation core i series processor of this one has a core i5 in this case it also had USB 3 and it adds a its new touchpad gestures they've taken this large image pad style touchpad at the very front here and even though it looks the same they've tried to upgrade the two three and four finger gestures to work a little bit more like dare I say at a macbook they're differently are some improvements here however it's not quite the same as you do get with a macbook the two-finger scrolling not quite as smooth there's a new handy for finger gesture for bringing up and hiding all your different windows that you're working with that's kind of very similar to what a four finger gesture pre line used to do on a macbook it's still not quite as smooth and seamless as that still you get most of the things that you're looking for in a higher-end midsize laptop you've got both hdmi and displayport outputs of course that USB three pointer and some basic AMD graphics so you could do some you know mid-level gaming on here even better the envy 14 starts at nine ninety nine which is the same as the 13-inch macbook used to start at now you'd have to either get a 999 macbook air 11 inch model or trade up to about 1,200 bucks for a 13-inch macbook pro or even more for a 13-inch macbook air so if you're looking for something that's built like a tank solid metal and really emulates kind of that macbook pro look and feel on the window side you're not going to do better than the HP envy line and this envy 14 definitely hits the sweet spot coming in at 990 i'm dan ackerman and that is the HP envy 14 bottom line this week what's apples return policy again and also is it just me or does the phrase for finger gesture sound a little bit dirty don't think about it too hard okay folks that's our show go back next week for an all-new cnet tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at Cena TV com I'll see you next time and thank you for watching