Price: Free
Editors’ choice: 4.5/5
The newcomer among Web browser holds onto
its lead this year, with the most in HTML5 support and speed. Chrome’s Instant
features mean that sites can load before you even finish typing their
addresses, and built-in Adobe Flash and PDF support mean you don’t need to look
around for plug-ins to make the Web work. A tight security strategy with
sandboxing protects your computer, though some will have second thoughts about
its lack of a built-in Do Not Track feature.
Duolingo
Price: Free
Editors’ choice: 4/5
The free website Duolingo provides a
fascinating new way to learn Spanish, German, or French (for English speakers),
or English for speakers of Spanish and Portuguese. Duolingo first teaches words
and phrases through basic language-learning exercises, and then lets you try
translating real Web pages, based on your skill level. Other users vote on the
quality of the translations, and the results are used as part of a
crowd-sourced project to make Web content publicly available in more languages.
Western Digital My Net 900
Price: $179.99
Editors’ choice: 4/5
Western Digital’s dual-band 802.11n MyNet
n900 wireless routers is a delightful surprise from a cendor not known for
making wireless routers. It sports a nice, simple, easy-to-remember product
name along with excellent performance in the 2.4GHz band, and very good
throughput in 5GHz, and best for all, seven Gigabit Ethernet ports and a
couples of USB 2.0 ports for network peripherals.
Sinology DiskStation DS1812+
Price: $1,000
Editors’ choice: 5/5
Sinology
DiskStation DS1812+
With support for up to 32TB of storage (and
beyond with an expansion unit), terrific performance, a winning UI, an
excellent data protection, the Synology DiskStation DS1812+ is a near-perfect
NAS though it may be pricey for some..
HP Officejet 6100 ePrinter
Price: $99.99
Editors’ choice: 4/5
The HP Officejet 6100 is fast for both
business applications and photos, it delivers reasonably good quality across
the board, and it offers a higher paper capacity than most printers at this
price. It also can be shared over a network, prints from iOS devices with
Air-Print, and prints from any device that can send documents as email
attachments.
Kodak ESP 3.2 All-in-One Printer
Price: $99.99
Editors’ choice: 4/5
Aimed primarily at home use, the Kodak ESP
3.2 can also serve light-duty use in a home office, or in the dual role of home
and home-office printer. It offers better than par print speed and output
quality for photos, reasonable speed and quality for text, and a lower running
cost than most printers in its price range..
Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 710HD
Price: $649
Editors’ choice: 4/5
Epson
PowerLite Home Cinema 710HD
If you can make do with 720p resolution in
a family-room projector, the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 710HD provides a
winning combination of low price, high brightness, solid image quality,
connectivity choices, and built-in sound system. Its 2,800 lumens will let you
project a large image in a fairly bright room, and its image quality is better
than many HDTVs can manage.
3M Mobile Projector MP410
Price: $599
Editors’ choice: 4/5
The 3M Mobile Projector MP410 offers a more
than attractive balance of brightness, size, and features, including the
ability to read files from various memory sources. It earns a lot of points for
having less of a rainbow effect than most of its 300 and 500 lumen competition,
and if offers somewhat better data image quality, with more readable text.
Canon imageFormula DR-C125
Price: $495
Editors’ choice: 4/5
The Canon imageFormula DR-C125’s
combination of speed, OCR accuracy, and business card handling is impressive
for its price. Even more impressive is its ability to recognize test and save
to searchable PDF format without slowing down. This makes it potentially a
better choice than faster, more expensive scanners that slow down when
recognizing text.
VuPoint Solutions Magic Wand W/ WiFi PDSWF-ST44-VP
Price: $130
Editors’ choice: 4/5
VuPoint
Solutions Magic Wand W/ WiFi PDSWF-ST44-VP
The VuPoint Solutions PDSWF-ST44-VP is best
appreciated as a highly portable document scanner. Not only is it far better at
OCR and document management than most of its ilk, its Wi-Fi support lets you
find out if you have a poor-quality scan while you are still able to do
something about it.
