Gadgetory

i'm dan ackerman you ever pick up one of these guys that's right just a retail sales circular from your favorite electronics store it's really one of the main reasons you might want to go pick up a Sunday newspaper these days instead it's just reading it online I would like to get these and see what's new what's on sale at different stores best minds one of the more common ones are going to find it i like that they have a lot of desktops and laptops and not just that but TVs and digital cameras and all kinds of other technology when i'm looking through the flyer I sometimes find it hard to figure out exactly what they're advertising or what the actual product is they're trying to sell because i always like to comparison shop and see where you have the best price on things so let's take a laptop as an example here and i'm going to show you how to read a best buy ad I'll take this one right here it's a dell laptop it's see a nice picture of it that's okay I see the price but I can't really tell what the exact laptop is there's simply not going out of their way to tell me about that I'll give you a little hint here even though they don't list the model number very prominently if you look down here at the very bottom of the fine print there's a string of letters and numbers in parentheses that's actually the model number you see here it says I 15 RN and some numbers now you can either Google that little string there and maybe get a hit and maybe you won't sometimes stores like best buy get their own specific model numbers even though it's basically the same laptop you can get anywhere else or you can know that the i-15 r is actually the down inspiron 15r laptop that we reviewed and you can go look that up and see if you can get similar specs for the same price or less either direct from dell or from somewhere else now it tells me what the processor is intel core i5 but it doesn't tell me the actual four digit extension on that processor so i can't really do an exact comparison shop unless i guess i go into the store and try to find out in person there's some other odd stuff here in the description says for we processing that sounds really fancy that's really just a dual-core hypothetic processor that's nothing special there they must have just needed to fill some space here in the description there's also a bunch of little boxes down here that purport to tell you details about this tells just got a 15.6 inch screen okay I can see that it says up to seven hours and 26 minutes of battery life that definitely sounds impressive of course if you follow the little footnote on here tells you how they tested it the test that we run here is actually quite different and on the left inspiron 15r that we tested the battery life we got was much much shorter so always take these numbers with a grain of salt now it also says right here that it's a little blue boxes WI di and it not really asks any explanation there but that means intel widi or wireless display that means this laptop can hypothetically send its signal to your TV wirelessly which is very cool but they don't mention that you're going to need sold separately a netgear box that's using around ninety nine dollars in order to do that so that's just some of the stuff we found in one of these laptop ads if you go through all of them you'll find similar things like hidden model numbers nonspecific CPUs but if you read carefully and you understand what to look for you can usually figure out enough to at least decide if you want to go to the store and see this laptop in person I'm Danny Eckerman and that's some tips for how to read a best buy ad