Gear Patrol | Spirit of Adventure, Passion for Gear

Nimble Networker

D-Link’s All-In-One Mobile Companion is a new travel accessory designed to take the headaches out of setting up a wireless network on the road. Packed inside the mouse-sized cube is a Wireless-N router, USB recharger, and an ethernet port for those in search of faster wired speeds. The small cube can just as easily be [...]

Thin It to Win It

Acer has kicked off what’s sure to be an avalanche of Ultrabook announcements at this year’s CES with the Aspire S5. As of the time of writing this article, the 13.3-inch S5 holds the title for “thinnest Ultrabook”, measuring 15mm at its thickest point and weighing just under 3 pounds. That svelte physique, encased in [...]

And nary a single apple-shaped logo around

When you sweat the details, and we mean truly sweat, people notice. When you do it with a seemingly impossible low price, people take even more notice. With Vizio’s foray into desktops and laptops it’s evident the engineers and designers have colluded to do just that. A culmination of two years worth of design, the [...]

Closet Speed Freak

In the gadget food chain, routers rank right next to bottom feeders like printers in terms of consumer buzz. It’s just hard to get jittery over a small block of plastic and metal that passively blinks its way through life. Technophiles who really understand the router’s role as the pit boss of the digital home [...]

Photo Express

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST In our third and final segment on the HP TouchSmart, we decided to see how the innovative desktop handled a usual day at the home office editing photos and scouring the web. How much of a difference did ditching the keyboard and mouse make? Hit the jump to read about our [...]

The virtual DJ your party's been waiting for

Services like Pandora and Apple’s Genius technology changed the way many of us consumed music, by intelligently mixing and matching songs to fit a particular theme or mood. These jukeboxes of the digital age, however, still fall well short of what professional DJs do best — the continuous mix. Pioneer’s newly launched Mixtrax music software [...]

What's Cookin'

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST After covering the HP Touch Smart’s talents as a bedroom media center, we next put the capable machine to the test in the center of our home, a.k.a. the kitchen. We know –- having a computer there sounds strange, but as we discovered, having a touch-enabled digital communication center that the [...]

All-in-fun

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST If the explosion of smartphones and tablets has revealed any universal truth about technology, it’s that touch screens are far more pleasant to work with for most activities compared to mashing buttons. So, how can a touchscreen change the role of the desktop in your home? That’s a question we set [...]

iCray

The Mac’s infamous spinning beach ball of death has a special place on our hearts… right alongside Beelzebub. And if you relish squeezing out every last ounce of performance from your Mac as much as we do then you probably empathize with our plight. Adding further insult to injury, things only get worse when you [...]

Goodbye Cubicle

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST A good laptop needs to handle creativity and entertainment to stand out from the pack, but if it’s not up to snuff on the business side, it’ll never win us over. Business clearly means different things to different people, think Kayne West v. Warren Buffet. For the GP crew, though, it [...]

Drive-in? Try Fly-in.

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST As much as we love our home theaters, they don’t exactly pack well. So, in this second part of the My Life on the Go series we decided to test the ASUS U46E’s prowess at handling one of our favorite off-hour diversions — movies.

Spreadsheets no more

GEAR PATROL SPONSORED POST It’s no secret computers are just as much a tool for serving personal expression as they are tools for business — sometimes the two being one in the same. Recently, we’ve been spending time with the ultra-portable ASUS U46E ($850) laptop to evaluate just how the next generation of Intel-powered laptops [...]

Pop n' Lock

As life becomes increasingly more digital, securing your files is a must. You’re ahead of the game with password protection on your phone, tablet and computer. But what about that backup USB hard drive? Couldn’t someone just plug it into another computer, and copy every last bachelor party photo of you, “relaxing”, with just a [...]

Swipe On. Swipe Off.

Mac users shouldn’t get all the multi-touch fun (patents aside). Seems someone out there agrees. The Logitech Wireless Touchpad ($50) will bring multi-finger control with one, two, three, four, and ten figure scrolling for Minority Report like controlling (almost) of your PC. Sorry, no Macs. Spend more time plowing through Gmail, hauling through Facebook, and [...]

0.7734 Lives On

Who needs a touch-surface Magic Mouse when you can pack it full of glorious calculator buttons? We’re betting our spreadsheet ninjas can think of a few — and until Apple finally makes a Bluetooth extended keyboard, options are pretty limited. With a built-in ten-digit calculator, the Canon X Mark I Mouse ($60) gives users not [...]