Gadgetory

this week on the cnet tech review using prismo to scan text into your iphone see what you've been missing on your iPad we count down the top-5 back-to-school downloads and not one but two editors choice award worthy products it's all coming up right now hi everyone in Hollywood 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 and of course offer some life-changing tech wisdom in the form of the bottom line let's start with the good it's the middle of August and some of you kids are already headed back to school but before you start clogging your campuses network sharing torrents check out our top 5 downloads for students they'll come in handy when you actually get around to doing some work yeah you still see piles of pencils erasers and paper and stores back to school aisles but I don't know why I'm Brian Cooley here with another cnet top five top five things you really need to go back to school software downloads number five wordweb it's a great tool if when you're cranking on a paper and need to come off smarter than you are highlight a word hit a hotkey and presto there's a definition synonyms and other info about the word that you really don't know but want a copy and paste so it looks like you do windows only but that's okay since mac users probably think only windows users are stupid enough to need this number for microsoft office yeah downloads are usually cheap or free an office isn't really either of those but you can download an academic version costing as little as a hundred bucks and sorry google and openoffice you're great but Redmond's productivity suite is still the gold standard of getting stuff done number three google earth seldom is anything so cool so free but that's Google doesn't matter what your major having what used to be government level access to geography satellite imagery and street level views of locations you're studying or just dreaming of a spring break too is incredibly powerful number two avast antivirus free windows only but then again who needs it more it galls most of us to pay for antivirus software especially since so often the anti virus warnings out there are coming from an antivirus company so a freebie like avast is a good feeling no brainer and is highly rated so you get way more than you pay for before we get to our number one top back-to-school download maybe you're wondering if you're being cheap with your kid on the shopping budget this year well a fresh survey indicates the average back to school budget for a seven to twelve year old is gonna be about four hundred and forty bucks this year down ten percent from last year and if you've got a teen in the family look to spend about 480 to be average that's down about twelve percent clearly we're not buying our kids upon ipads or if we are we're sending into school and rags okay now it's time to reveal our number one back to school download its review okay you're gonna think I'm nuts or moronic or both but this is a flash card program which doesn't mean it's limited just to grade school stuff last cards were one of my secret weapons all the way through college sure I got my degree in multiplication but review is a great tool to make flashcards to hammer home into your mind anything and it can test you with the cards you've created oh by the way if you need something to download these great software pics on to go over to cnet TV calm and look for our recent top five desktop computers and for details on all these software titles just head over to back to school cnet com I'm Brian Cooley thanks for joining us for this top by oh you don't have your back to school computer yet well as Brian mentioned you can find all of our computer reviews at cnet com but let me save you a little trouble here are a new laptop and an editor's choice award winning desktop for your consideration hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor at cnet com and this is the alienware m11x laptop the Nvidia Optimus version I say that because we reviewed the alienware m11x previously in the spring we talked to battered at CES 2010 as well it's an 11.6 inch small ultraportable laptop with pretty powerful built-in high-end graphics but an ultra-low voltage processor inside previously a core two duo ulv processor which combined provide an interesting balance between decent battery life switching over to some pretty good graphics in a compact little shell back then the starting price for this little 11.6 inch laptop was 799 but since then dell has released a new version with upgraded processors and Nvidia Optimus automatically switching graphics at a starting price of 949 now what do you get for this you get a core i5 ulv processor or you can upgrade to a core i7 ulv processor you also get up to four or eight gigs of ram a 500 gig 7200 RPM hard drive when you add all that up in hours it came to about twelve ninety nine so it's really not that cheap and another thing that's a little disappointing is that while the Nvidia Optimus graphics do provide an automatically switching experience meaning you can go from your game playing mowed down to a non dedicated graphics mode using integrated graphics to extend your battery life the actual gains in our tests were not that spectacular in fact the battery life was a little bit less than we had on the previous version a little over three hours which is great for a gaming laptop but it's not so great for most laptops that you'd expect would have a slightly better battery life nowadays the macbooks being a great example there's also no optical drive on this which is surprising because it's a pretty thick base on the other hand you're getting nvidia geforce GT 3 35 n graphics in here which are really good they're a step below really high-end graph you're going to get some really nice frame rates we played a lot of mainstream games look fantastic and there's a great built-in audio system here too with 5.1 simulated surround you can also export this with HDMI or using DisplayPort there's no vga on this which is dropped from the previous model a little strange and you can play it on an HD TV or monitor 1080p display looked a little bit choppy but it looked pretty good in other resolutions and it's cool that you can do that all in all for the price there are a lot of other laptops you can get that can provide you a better overall experience but if you're looking for a really portable gaming experience for a price that won't destroy you it could be an interesting one to look into particularly with the added improvements I'm Scott Stein and this is the new alienware m11x the Nvidia Optimus edition hi I'm Justin you associate editor for cnet.com with a first look at the sx 2801 01 e it's gateways latest budget slim tower system that we're proud to award our editors choice this 500 $19 desktop is it best buy exclusive and it isn't too far off from last year's model which also received an editor's choice the system features a 2.8 gigahertz intel dual core processor that can easily keep up with most consumer level tasks a one terabyte hard drive and six gigs of storage so as you can see the narrow case is suitable for any environment and it has an hdmi port on the back that makes it a suitable partner for your HDTV if you want to use it in a home theater you also get a flexible set of connectivity options including nine total USB ports e-sata optical audio and VGA out in addition to hdmi a big part of the criteria for judging budget desktops are its performance scores and as expected this computer keeps up in our head-to-head performance tests with four competing systems so it certainly can handle all your day-to-day tasks but if you're a video editor that uses graphics heavy programs like Photoshop or premier the Gateway SX 28 4000 1e that's last year's model and it's faster core i3 processor is a better fit you can get all the details on both of those systems on cnet com but that's my time I'm Justin you and you just took a look at the gateway sx 28 01 01 e that's an Editors Choice winner for it stop to your performance upgrade ability and affordable price tag thanks for watching up next on the good list is this week's edition of tap that app now for those of you who came for Brian tongs dancing you may be disappointed but Josh Lowensohn is here with an iphone app that can really come in handy welcome to tap that app I'm Josh Lowensohn and this is a show where we cover the hottest apps in the mobile space this week's appt is prismo for the iPhone by belgium-based developer crea seed the app is scheduled to be released mid August 2010 prismo uses the iphone's camera to scan and process text so you can get rid of that sack of business cards or pile of notes and store everything on your phone instead to start out you just tell prisma what you want to scan it does business cards plain text whiteboards and bills for this demo we're going to use a business card the app includes a handy on-screen grid to help you straighten out your shot once you've taken a picture you can rotate it left or right by 90 degrees crop it and correct the white balance this makes it easier for the program to do its next step which is to pull out all that information prismo uses optical character recognition or OCR to grab letters and numbers from your shot we found it to do a pretty great job at this though if your picture is blurry on a multicolored background or you're working with a handwritten note it can bungle it up luckily it lets you go and correct any mistakes it might have made just by tapping on a text field once you've captured any text you want to save you can store it on your iPhone's camera roll as a personal contact or a spreadsheet file the app can also be tied into Amazon simple storage service or Dropbox so you can store your files in the cloud beyond business cards and whiteboards prismo even works on receipts so if you get a big dinner bill or you're trying to manage your finances you can use this app to record that data to do this you just snap a picture like you would with the business card but this time you'll notice there's this big sideways bar use this to split up the description from the price and prismo puts it into an order bill you can then send or save this as a spreadsheet or use the built-in bill splitting tool to figure out who needs to pay how much prismo has a few advanced features that make it really unique one is that it can actually read back text you've scanned with one of 36 international voices these costs two dollars and ninety-nine cents a pop but are very well done sabe me llamo Vittorio a solo la voce mescal italiana we don't really know why you want to use this feature but it's nice that it's there the app is also able to translate whatever text you've captured using google trends late this is useful if you're trying to translate a dinner menu or any signage the most impressive feature is that you can actually use this app to correct photos you've taken it with a bad perspective so save taking something off angle you can make it look like you took it straight on this works especially well on magazines prismo is just submitted to apple for approval and will be on the app store in early August for around ten dollars since it puts so many features in one little package we think it's a really killer deal for the money don't forget that if you got an app you want to tap send us an email at tap that app at cnet com I'm Josh Lowensohn and thanks for watching that is one pretty tap where the app but I can just imagine the look on the waitresses face if you pull your phone out and try to use prismo to split up the bill put it on the company card that's what I do all right while you're figuring out that eighteen percent tip I'm gonna take a break actually bump it up to 20 the math is easier and we'll be right back with more cnet 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 let's continue on with the good and our editors have been busy choosing things lately here's Donald Bell with an iPod speaker system that gives his boat hey I'm Donal Bell and today we're taking a first look at the s7 15 I from Logitech this is a portable speaker designed for the iphone and ipod and price at 149 dollars it's such an outstanding price for the sound quality that you're getting that I've given it a cnet editors choice award I send a lot of rinky-dink portable ipod speakers come through here but this one really raises the bar the design measure is around 15 inches across and two inches thick it's on the larger end of portable speakers but it has no problem fitting in a backpack or a messenger bag on the front you have buttons for power and volume and a covered ipod dock that flips back into a kickstand on the back there's a little gasket here that covers an aux input and a sock for the included power adapter you also notice too passive radiator woofers on the back which we have to assume is how this thing gets his deep full sound there's also a pair of powered three inch speakers on the front another pair of passive radiators and dedicated tweeters that are spaced at the edges to offer a better stereo sound stage then you'll typically find that this price range to really sweeten the deal Logitech also throws in and ir remote control with basic play pause skip shuffle and repeat controls and you also get a carrying case and the included power adapter the internal rechargeable battery is rated around eight hours of use at a moderate volume we notice a definite improvement in volume and sound quality when the speakers plugged in but even off the battery the s7 15 I sounds better than any similar product at this price you won't get features such as an integrated radio eq Bluetooth or alarm clock but if you're using an iPhone or an iPod Touch you've already got most of these features so that's the Logitech s 715 I an editor's choice portable speaker for the iphone and ipod or Cena calm I'm Donald bell of course they cannot all be winners David karna has another ipod speaker system should show us and this one's even solar-powered but that is not enough to save it from being this week's representative of the bat I'm David cardo and I'm here with the actin solar ipod iphone portable audio system this is actually an audio system that is designed to go outside it is both a little bit ruggedized and has a splash proof design as you can see you can hide your iPod or iPhone behind the plastic shield here in the front that is removable you can also put down this little lid here a but what the key thing is is this is a solar charger right here in the lid the idea is that you would charge this unit up with the AC adapter it has a built-in lithium ion rechargeable battery that you take it outside and you would flip this lit up and it would allow you to trickle charge so you get more battery life without any son you only get about four hours of battery life but with the Sun you can probably get in the range of around six hours so this can go for a full day outside it also charges your iPod or iPhone now from a feature standpoint aside from that solar charging there isn't a whole lot here this is really a very basic audio system there is no FM radio there's no bluetooth or anything like that this is designed to be set outside and it has a little handle on top so you can carry around it isn't all that heavy but does have enough heft to it that does feel like there's something to it and it is compact as you can see like a lot of these little systems this one does come with a remote it matches the design of the product that's kind of an industrial look we did like the design of the product and the remote is simple and durable as for the sound it's okay but not great we found the base to be a little bit thin there is a bass boost on it but doesn't offer tremendous clarity and it distorts a little bit at higher volumes um so you want to play this in sort of a middle volume level but for casual listening outdoors it certainly does the job i'm david carr nguoi and that is the akon soul rub okay so you plug it in you charge it up for however long and then maybe you get two extra hours with the solar charger two extra hours of cruddy audio quality Wow where do I sign up and now it's time for this week's bottom line it's true the ipad is pretty and it runs all kind of apps that's fine for reading and angry birds is kind of a troublesome addiction but damn it sometimes I just want to click on a video link and watch a flash video luckily some clever hackers have removed the last barrier to web surfing nirvana flash on your iPhone or iPad is here kind of apples refused to allow flash to run on your iPhone iPad or iPod touch but now you can do it if you're willing to jailbreak your device i'm brian Tong and i'll show you how to install an app called frash that will allow you to view flash content on your idevices now you'll first need a jailbreak your device which is legal but Voyager apple warranty with apple so to find out how to do that you can find the video at cnet TV com now let's get to it you have a jailbroken device and first will launch this city app select the manage tab and then select sources you'll see a list of sources hit the edit button and then add enter in this URL and then once you're done with that add source it will update and when it's done hit return to cydia when the installation finishes go to the search tab and then find fresh and install that application reboot your iDevice but once it's up and running you'll have the ability to view some but not all flash content on your idevice so far we've seen it run best on car websites and restaurant websites and yes those advertisements you love to hate they display most of the time but it's a basic flash you're getting here and all the websites with a flash-based video player did not display content or would crash including our own gamespot com but there you have it i'm brian Tong with your how-to for installing and viewing flash content on your idevices use it wisely the bottom line this week come on Steve just let us have flash already sure I can live without some of those annoying flash ads but how do you expect me to shop for my new Porsche without jailbreaking my iPad well that's our show for this week everyone join us next time when we'll be back with a brand new tech review until then there are tons of great videos available every day at cnet TV com see you next time and thank you for watching