Gear Patrol

RED is credited with making some of the most innovative and lust worthy video shooters on the market today. Considering their gear can devour upwards of 50 megabytes of data per second and render eye popping 5k resolution video, almost anything is possible; at least until it comes time to chop, cut and rebuild that…

The closure of El Bulli + the rise of 3D digital printing = Opportunity! Bereft foodies now have common cause with CAD manufacturers — to rejoice in the dementedly creative mind of one NYU grad student who has prototyped the Burritob0t, a 3D printer for making, yep, burritos. Inspired by a frustration over the paucity…

Asymmetrical fan blades? Yup. And there you have it. Details like this sum up the all-new next generation MacBook Pro with Retina Display ($2,199). Just announced, the MacBook Pro with Retina offers — bone stock — a 2.3GHz quad-core i7 processor (configurable up to 2.7 with 3.7Ghz Turbo Boost on demand), 256GB-768GB of solid state…

If your penchant for gaming, music and web surfing through your smartphone is a 10/10, then you might want to put a tickler in your calendar for this holiday season in anticipation of the Clamcase Clambook. With nary a hint of Macbook Air (ahem), the Clambook is as thin as the day is long and…

Traveling and giving presentations for work is stressful enough, which is why perennial mouse-maker Logitech has created the Cube. The palm-sized businessman’s friend is a combination mouse/presenter that lightens the load of even the most burdened road warrior. Thanks to touch surface scrolling, the Cube acts as a traditional mouse when placed on a flat…

For years Apple marketing mavens have asked us to “think different”. With so many of us sipping on a stylish cup-ertino, it now seems that “different” has now become the norm. Be the one to buck that trend at your local hot-spot with the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (TBA). Staying true to the ThinkPad’s…

We’re not ones to embrace hyperbole, but the new HP Envy Spectre XT ($1,000+) may actually live up to its category — and humility-bending title of Ultrabook. Weighing a fairly svelte 3.07 pounds with 14.5mm-thick profile, HP’s newest offering features an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU, a four-speaker Beats Audio sound system, a 13” high-definition LED…

After a long absence, the once popular Amiga brand is back, courtesy of its parent company Commodore. The revival, dubbed the Amiga Mini, like a Leprachaun in a boxing ring, is short in stature, but big at heart. With obvious nods to its similarly named Apple counterpart, the Amiga Mini is made out of a…

If you’re getting rid of an old computer, be very careful about the data that you leave behind on the hard drive. Having someone steal your social security and credit card numbers would be bad enough, but think of what would happen if someone got a look at something much worse — like a glance…

Computer workstations are typically regarded as PC powerhouses for the professional. Boasting top tier internals and reliability, they’re only limiting factors tend to be size or an inability to upgrade components. That’s now a problem of the past. Designed and fast tracked in secret, literally in a lab within a lab, the HP Z1 Workstation…

Addressing every last shred of your right brain, the new Adobe Creative Suite 6 is the definitive collection of creative apps applications. Whether you design, code for the Web, cut video, sketch, or crop-stitch-and-sharpen photos for your blog, the 14 applications that make up CS6 leave nary a creative stone unturned. The flagship, of course,…

From outcries that they’re paying too much for current technology to being badged as label-driven sheep, Apple fan boys take a lot of flack for their devotion. But regardless of whether or not you agree with any of the admonitions, one thing has never been in doubt –Apple products are gorgeous. For those of you…

Technology moves fast, but for those of us that dream about time-traveling DeLoreans and holographic computer screens, it can’t move fast enough. That’s why our inner-LeVar Burton became giddy with excitement when Google shared some details of their long-rumored experiment, Project Glass. Whisperings among the Technorati have guessed at specs that seemed straight out of…

You’re thinking, “What the hell is Gear Patrol doing writing about a scanner?” Next thing you know, they’ll be covering external CD burners and zip drives. Normally, we’d share those sentiments with you, but Doxie’s Go portable scanner ($199+) provides a wallop of convenience in a very portable, 10.5″ x 1.7″ x 2.2″, 14oz package….

The history of modern computing began in the 1950s with the development of reliable, discrete transistors, which were smaller, consumed less power, ran much cooler, and remained operational longer compared to the vacuum tube designs used in the first generation of computing. A true “explosion” in computing, however, came later in the 1960s during the…

You can ask your smartphone to help you hide dead bodies, or swing an invisible lightsaber like a giddy 12 year-old on a Lucky Charms sugar high, but setting up a wireless router still requires logging on to a website and fiddling with complex settings. Securifi is a new startup that wants to bring critical…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…