Netgear’s A6200 wins the award for most ambitious industrial design. Its USB interface is mounted on a hinged connector, and its antenna is housed inside a thin rectangular bar that you can pivot to fine-tune its reception. If you’re a frequent traveler, Netgear’s antenna design is much less fragile than the Asus USB-AC56’s screw-on antenna (unless you take the time to remove the Asus model’s antenna every time you pack it).
When I tested the Netgear adapter with its USB cradle and its antenna in a vertical orientation, its overall performance fell short of that of the first-place Asus USB-AC56 by just 2 megabits per second. But I saw a big gap between first and second place when the client was in close proximity to the router, separated by 9 feet: The Netgear delivered TCP throughput of 310 mbps whereas the Asus delivered 404 mbps. The A6200 placed second when the client was in the kitchen, too, delivering throughput of 312 mbps versus the 347 mbps that the USB-AC56 achieved.
ROBERT CARDINThe hinged USB interface enables you to fine-tune the adapter to your router. Netgear also provides a USB cradle. (Click to zoom.)
The Netgear adapter proved to be superior at longer ranges, on the other hand, delivering TCP throughput of 233 mbps compared to the Asus’s rate of 163 mbps when the client was in my home theater, 35 feet from the router. And when the client was in my home office, 65 feet from the router, the Netgear delivered throughput of 264 mbps to the Asus’s 213 mbps.
Netgear’s A6200 was no match for the Asus USB-AC56 at close range. But it dusted its competitor at longer range. (Click to zoom.)
The A6200 measures nearly 5 inches long when its antenna is extended (not including its USB interface), and slightly less than 3.5 inches long when the antenna is folded down for travel. The USB interface pivots, but it doesn’t fold away completely as the one on Buffalo’s WI-U2-866D does. The adapter has a WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button that makes it easy to connect to a router that has the same feature.
Netgear’s Genie utility provides useful information such as site polling, physical link rate, and the client’s current IP address.
Lenovo took the wraps off two new gaming PCs at the IFA trade show in Berlin today. The Y70 Touch is the more interesting of the two, as it boasts a 17.3-inch touchscreen display, a fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, and a discrete Nvidia graphics processor in a chassis that’s slightly more than one-inch thick.
A touchscreen is an unusual feature in a gaming laptop, and the Y70 has the largest one that Lenovo offers (the panel’s native resolution is 1920×1080 pixels). As is becoming increasingly common with laptops, the Y70 Touch won’t have an optical drive, but Lenovo has decided to put a free external drive in the box.
Lenovo’s Y70 Touch gaming laptop boasts a 17.3-inch touchscreen.
In a briefing last week, Lenovo product manager Andrew Barrow said Lenovo had “geared the Y70 for the premium end of the [PC gaming] market,” which the company expects to grow to $2.3 billion in value over the next three years. Component choices will include up to quad-core Intel Core i7 processors, up to 16GB of DDR3L memory, and SSDs ranging from 256GB to 1TB.
=The Erazer X15 has LED lighting in front and a one-touch front port cover.
Lenovo is expanding its Erazer line of desktop gaming PCs with the Erazer X315, which will be marketed only in North America.
Several configurations will be available, powered by up to an AMD Karveri A10 APU and an AMD-based video card (up to a Radeon R9 255). Barrow said the case “is designed to look like a knight’s armor.” Systems will be populated with up to 12GB of memory and the buyer’s choice of a mechanical hard drive (up to 4TB), a hybrid hard drive (up to 2TB), or a 256GB SSD.
Prices for the Erazer X315 will start at $599 when it goes on sale in November. The Y70 Touch is expected to go on sale in October at a starting price of $1299.
Hot on the heels of Logitech’s G910 Orion Spark keyboard announcement last week, Corsair’s rebranding its entire peripheral depart to “Corsair Gaming” and releasing its own RGB-enabled keyboard: the K70 RGB. The difference? Corsair gets to keep those sweet, sweet Cherry MX switches. It’s a backlit mechanical keyboard arms race, and I’m all too happy to watch it play out.
See, Logitech’s Orion Spark uses exclusive Romer-G switches. You can read a bit more about them here, but basically it’s a mod to the no-longer-under-patent Cherry MX design. Instead of the iconic Cherry MX stem, the center of the key is hollow allowing for smooth and even backlighting. The cost? At least to my fingers, the Romer-G switches feel a bit more rubber dome-esque than I prefer.
But there’s a reason for Logitech’s exodus—up until recently there was no RGB Cherry switch, and not due to lack of demand. According to Corsair, “Due to the current design of the Cherry MX switch, there is only room for a single 3mm LED that could mount directly onto the key switch.” An RGB LED requires five millimeters of space, by contrast.
Corsair really wanted RGB backlighting though, so it worked with Cherry to solve the problem. The pair found that if they mounted the LEDs directly to the circuit board and used a lens to refract light, they could keep the iconic stem design and feel of the Cherry MX switches while still enabling full RGB backlighting.
Hands-on with Corsair’s K70 RGB keyboard
It worked, as far as I can tell. I’ve got a Cherry Red K70 hooked up to my desktop rig right this moment, and I couldn’t tell the difference between it and another Cherry Red board I had lying around. They feel identical, and pulling the keycaps off does indeed reveal that same Red stem.
As for the lighting on the K70, it’s impressive though not without some weird design choices. Instead of recessing the keys into the casing, the K70’s keys all jut out from the base. In other words, you can see underneath all the keys. You know—where all the light comes from in this new switch design. This results in a lot of light bleed from the sides of each key, which can be distracting. Also, due to the nature of RGB LEDs any keys that are set to White will bleed a bit of green out the top edge, which is unpleasant.
And for whatever reason, the K70 doesn’t actually switch off when I put my computer to sleep. I don’t know if that’s intended or not, but I have to manually kill the backlighting in order to stop the thing from shining all night.
On the other hand, Corsair’s built some intuitive software to go along with this device, and it’s easy to set up anything from a solid background color to a WASD/Shooter control scheme that pulses quietly to a setup that sends waves for each key press to…well, complete visual chaos. You can just keep adding layers of lights until your eyes bleed, though you can only have a maximum of sixteen distinct colors on the board at a time.
Too lazy to make your own lighting scheme? Corsair allows you to import/export whatever you’d like, and is partnering with a few e-sports teams to, for example, make a keyboard set-up in that team’s colors.
Similar to Logitech, Corsair is also putting out an SDK for the keyboard so developers can integrate the new lighting features into games—for instance, turning your entire keyboard into a health bar that fades from green to red as you take damage.
Sounds like a fantastic keyboard, right? Just like Logitech’s Orion Spark, however, I expect the price to be the point where you choke: $170 for the K70 and $190 for the K95 (which adds eighteen dedicated macro keys to the left side, though both the K70 and K95 allow you to set a macro on any key, both on press and release). That $170 flies in a bit underneath Logitech’s $180 offering but still, holy mother of expensive peripherals.
We’ll have a more extensive review sometime soon, but at the end of the day Corsair’s K70 is a Cherry MX keyboard with full RGB backlighting, and it’s the only such keyboard on the market. For now, Corsair’s your only option if both those features are important to you.
Toshiba has introduced a new line of computers that, in keeping with Windows 8’s emphasis on touch, offers an array of products with displays that can be poked and pinched.Toshiba began taking pre-orders for the new systems Wednesday, and will be selling them to the public from its online store on Oct. 26, when Windows 8 debuts.While all the new Toshiba laptops don’t have a touch display, they do have large touchpads that support touchscreen gestures, so many of the gesture tasks performed on a touchscreen can be performed on the touchpad.
The Qosmio X875
In addition, Toshiba is addressing the absence of a start menu in Windows 8 with a utility program preinstalled on all models, Toshiba Desktop Assist. The software gives users quick access to their programs, the Windows control panel and their files and folders, much as the start menu does in Windows 7.
Toshiba is also including three Windows 8 “tile” apps. Toshiba Central provides one-click access to a model’s user guide, support information, how-to videos and such. Toshiba Book Place is an e-book reader and marketplace for purchasing titles. Toshiba News Place is a graphical news aggregator.
Toshiba’s Windows 8 lineup includes:
Satellite S800 series. These all-purpose laptops are designed for both work and play. They can be configured with either a third-generation Intel Core processor or AMD A-Series Accelerated Processing Unit. Options include AMD Radeon HD 7570M graphics in Blu-ray disc player. Units are offered with a 15.6-inch display ($699.99) and a 17.3-inch model ($749.99).
Satellite S955. This model contains the power and options of units in the 800 series but is less than an inch thick. With a 15.6-inch display, the laptop sells for $649.99.
Samsung’s recent Galaxy Note 4 apparently edged out the recent Apple iPhone 6 Plus in terms of display quality, even though the analyst reviewing it basically called Apple’s displays the best he’s seen to date.In a report released Monday, DisplayMate’s Raymond Soneira—who does nothing more than test smartphone displays, by the way—called the iPhone 6 Plus display the “best performing smartphone LCD display that we have ever tested,” Soneira wrote. “The iPhone 6 Plus has raised the bar for top LCD display performance up by a notch,” he added.
High praise indeed for the iPhone 6 Plus. But that doesn’t make the iPhone 6’s display the best, period—an odd little caveat that may inspire a new round of back-and-forth between Samsung and Apple fanboys. “We recently gave the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 our overall Best Smartphone Display award, and for the time being that continues for all of the reasons originally mentioned there,” Soneira wrote in his report.
Apple’s iPhone 6 uses a 1334×750, 326-ppi pixel display, while the iPhone 6 Plus has a 1920×1080 pixel display with 401 ppi. Apple calls both displays ‘Retina HD,” and executives made a big deal at the iPhone 6 launch describing how good they look.
Still, Soneira wasn’t nearly as effusive about the display quality of the smaller iPhone 6. “The display on the iPhone 6 is none-the-less still a Very Good display, and most buyers will be happy with its performance, but it’s somewhat disappointing that Apple went for satisfactory as opposed to the best,” Soneira wrote. “Maybe that was done for intentional product differentiation with the iPhone 6 Plus, or perhaps to improve their margins… With a 1920×1080 display the iPhone 6 would have taken the crown.”
According to DisplayMate’s tests, the iPhone 6 Plus breaks all sorts of records, including the highest peak brightness, lowest screen reflectance, highest (true) contrast ratio, highest contrast in ambient light, and more. But it doesn’t exceed competitors in terms of resolution, pixels per inch, and absolute color accuracy.
Still, both displays should satisfy casual users and creative types alike. With a nearly perfect 99-percent sRGB color gamut for the iPhone 6 and 101-percent for the iPhone 6 Plus, the displays will be almost be perfectly color-accurate. And in a nod to anyone who uses their phone outside in the bright summer sun (which is, naturally, everyone), both phones combine high screen brightness and low screen reflectance, critical to outdoor performance. Specifically, they both provide 550 cd/m2 luminance, DisplayMate found.
In general, the two iPhone 6 displays are also both more power-efficient than other full-HD LCD smartphones. But the Note 4 outclassed the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus when used to view a mixture of different images, consuming 21 percent less power. If the display were simply powered on to a white screen, however (such with a flash light app), the two iPhone displays would consume 45 percent less power than the Note 4.
“The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are the current Best Mobile LCD Displays and the Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Note 4 are the current Best Mobile OLED Displays,” DisplayMate concluded. So as we concluded in our review of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus: Yes, bigger is indeed better.
Built for speed, the Nexxt 150 delivers high performance for smooth streaming of video, high frame-rate gaming, fast data transfers, and heavy Internet use from multiple users, all with great range. It also connects to your existing Wireless-G devices.
The Samsung New Series 9….Impossibly Thin. Impeccably Crafted.
Add more excitement into your life with the Samsung Series 9, featuring the new 3rd generation Intel Core processor. Enjoy speedy and dramatic performance gains, including more efficient CPU processing, plus 2x faster media processing and 3D rendering. So everything you love to do, like watching HD movies, editing contents or creating powerful presentation, is quicker, crisper and more life-like.
Apple i-Pad 4th Gen. Tablet..Just as STUNNING…Twice as FAST!
Pick up the iPad with Retina display and suddenly, it’s clear. You’re actually touching your photos, reading a book, playing the piano. Nothing comes between you and what you love.
ROBERT CARDIN
Royale Computers & Accessories 