Personal Electronics, Tech For Home & Leisure
Lots Of Storage, Decent Power, Low Price
No price has been set for the new Q21 11.6-inch laptop from
Gigabyte, but we anticipate a retail price as low as $200. That would make the
Q21 very affordable indeed, as Gigabyte says it will be. Although the Windows
8.1 laptop was designed for day-to-day tasks and multimedia (as opposed to,
say, high-power graphic design), the Q21 is no slouch. Its Celeron processor is
a high-performance model with four cores, four threads, and 2MB of cache, which
Gigabyte claims adds up to three times the graphics processing power of older
mobile Atom processors. And for storage there is both a 512GB SSD (solid-state
drive) and a 1TB hard drive, so you can back up everything even if you don’t
have an external drive or cloud storage access. The Gigabyte Q21 weighs just a
shade under 3 pounds, includes all the right ports (Ethernet, USB 2.0 and 3.0,
HDMI, etc.), and a choice of operating systems: Win8.1 or Win8.1 with Bing.
That would make
the Q21 very affordable indeed, as Gigabyte says it will be
New Home Router Offers Power & Performance
Announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show to a
great deal of buzz and high expectations, the RT-AC87 Dual-Band Wireless-AC2400
Gigabit router from Asus ($269.99; www.asus.com) is now available. The
high-performance 5GHz router uses the newest Wi-Fi standard (802.11ac) and
employs Quantenna’s MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple Input, Multiple Output)
chipset, which means that it’s fast (up to 1.73Gbps) and easily supports
multiple devices running at full steam on the same wireless network. Need to
stream HD content? Asus claims this router can handle it with ease and promises
“incredible range and reliability.” Plus, setup is simple, designed to take just
30 seconds.
Announced at this
year’s Consumer Electronics Show to a great deal of buzz and high expectations,
the RT-AC87 Dual-Band Wireless-AC2400 Gigabit router from Asus ($269.99)is now
available.
Excellent For Saving Or Streaming
There are really just three things you need to know about a
thumbsized flash drive: (1) Does it have plenty of capacity? (2) Is it fast?
(3) Does the manufacturer have a solid reputation? With the Turbo 3.0 Attache 2
USB Flash Drive from PNY, the answers to these questions are “Yes,” “Yes,” and
“Yes.” The drive uses USB 3.0, which offers speeds 10 times faster than USB 2.0
and makes it ideal for fast data transfers or even streaming of multimedia
files, and it’s backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports. The 128GB model ($59.99)
shown here provides read speeds up to 190MBps and write speeds up to 130MBps.
It also comes in 64GB ($34.99) and 32GB ($17.99).
The drive uses USB
3.0, which offers speeds 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and makes it ideal for
fast data transfers or even streaming of multimedia files, and it’s backwards
compatible with USB 2.0 ports.
