Perfect for students and mobile professionals, the ThinkPad Edge E420S boasts a 2.3-GHz Intel Core i3-2350M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. The notebook also features a fingerprint reader for an added layer of security. Its island-style keyboard and curved “smile-shaped” keys are best-in-class, and its solid performance and long battery life solidify the ThinkPad Edge E420S’s position as the go-to laptop for business users. At 61% off the list price, this is a bargain that can’t be missed.

Base specs: 2.3-GHz Intel Core i3-2350M processor, 4GB of RAM, 320GB 7200-rpm HDD, Intel HD 3000 graphics, 14-inch HD LCD Display, DVD Burner, Fingerprint reader

Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E420S Laptop with a 2.3-GHz Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 320GB HDD for $566 through LogicBUY.

The HP g6t sports a sturdy frame and well-designed keyboard and has average performance. But this laptop was clearly crafted for consumers on a budget, and it shows. Th HP g6t could work on its battery life and multitouch gestures. Coming equipped with a Intel B950 Pentium 2.1GHz dual-core processor, the laptop is upgradable to Core i3 and Core i5 for $469 and $519, respectively.

Base specs: Intel B950 Pentium 2.1GHz Dual-core, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Windows 7 Premium/Professional (64-bit), 6-cell battery, HD webcam, 802.11n Wi-Fi, DVD+/-RW

HP g6t 15.6-inch 2.1GHz Dual-core Laptop for $375 through LogicBUY

The HD smartphone revolution is here. With the recent release of the LG Spectrum, Android users now have four HD (1280 x 720) smartphones from which to choose: the Spectrum, Samsung Galaxy Nexus,  HTC Rezound and LG Nitro HD. Not all HD smartphone displays are created equal, however, so we decided to evaluate each phone’s panel for brightness, viewing angles, color accuracy, sharpness and outdoor visibility. Which HD smartphone display came out on top? Read on to find out.

The Technology Behind the Displays

The LG Spectrum and LG Nitro HD both use True HD AH-IPS technology. IPS, or in-plane switching, is a technology that improves upon the limitations of LCD displays — namely limited viewing angles and a poor color reproduction —  by placing all of the liquid crystals in the same plane (hence the name, “in-plane switching”). An electric current runs through the liquid crystals horizontally (rather than vertically, as in other LCD displays), giving the display a faster response time and accurate color reproduction from all viewing angles.

The advanced high performance IPS (AH-IPS) used by the Spectrum and Nitro HD improves upon regular IPS technology by offering better color accuracy, allowing for easier transmission of light (which lowers power consumption), and increases the number of pixels. The result is a more vivid and sharp display. The True HD, in this case, refers to the fact that the screens offer a 1280 x 720 resolution.

The HTC Rezound, on the other hand, uses Super LCD (SLCD) technology to give it an edge in the number of pixels it can display per inch. In addition, SLCD is said to offer truer blacks than other LCD displays and warmer colors than AMOLED displays.

Last — but certainly not least — is the Super AMOLED technology used in the Galaxy Nexus. Samsung’s proprietary Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (AMOLED) technology uses luminescent organic materials, which emit light when stimulated by an electric current. Because AMOLED displays use light-emitting diodes to create light rather than backlighting (as in LCD displays), they supposedly offer a number of advantages over LCD, including lower power consumption, a higher contrast ratio, wider viewing angles, and faster response times.

Round 1: Brightness

When we compared each of the phones for brightness using a light meter, the difference between LCD and AMOLED displays became quickly apparent. Although LCD supposedly offers brighter colors than AMOLED, the Galaxy Nexus’s 340-lux Super AMOLED display outshines its competitors’ LCD displays. The LG Spectrum matches the the Galaxy Nexus at 340 lux, while the LG Nitro HD’s 324-lux display comes close. The HTC Rezound offers the dimmest display, registering only 278 lux.

At 340 lux apiece, the LG Spectrum and Samsung Galaxy Nexus are tied for display brightness. 

Winner: LG Spectrum/Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Round 2: Viewing Angles

When testing the phones’ viewing angles, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus’s Super AMOLED display came out on top. Among the HD smartphones, only the Galaxy Nexus retained the vividness and brightness of its colors when viewed from the side. The True HD LCD displays of the LG Spectrum and LG Nitro HD fared almost as well, while the HTC Rezound’s Super LCD display offered poor viewing angles. 

When viewed at a 45-degree angle to the right, the colors on Galaxy Nexus remained vivid and true. By contrast, the LG Spectrum’s normally vivid True HD IPS display became slightly washed out, as did the LG Nitro HD to a lesser extent. The HTC Rezound fared the worst when viewed at a 45-degree angle, its colors becoming muted and the screen becoming noticeably darker.

The Galaxy Nexus looks just as good when viewed from a 45-degree angle to the left. The Spectrum looks much better than it does on those on the right, with true colors that are just as vivid as when viewed head on. The Rezound, on the other hand, looks even worse that it did from the right. The already dim display became even darker, and the normally vivid reds of its home screen appeared washed out. The LG Nitro HD, like the Galaxy Nexus, looks just as good from the left side as it does from the front.

Winner: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Round 3: Color Accuracy

We first compared the color accuracy of the HD phones using a tiger wallpaper. At first blush, the colors on the HD smartphones look identical. Upon closer inspection, however, subtle but important differences became noticeable.

The colors on the LG Spectrum’s True HD IPS display were dark and rich. The difference between the Spectrum and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was most immediately apparent when looking at the tiger’s orange fur and the blue sky framing its head. On the Spectrum, the orange of the tiger’s fur appears deeper in color, closer to red than yellow. Similarly, the sky on the Spectrum is a darker shade of blue than on the Galaxy Nexus.

Looking at the close-up of the tiger on the Rezound, the colors were far less lustrous and vivid than on either the Spectrum or the Galaxy Nexus. The grey-blue sky looks similar to that on the Galaxy Nexus, and the tiger’s normally eye-popping orange fur appears muted. The stripes in the shadow on the left side of the tiger — which are visible on the Spectrum and Galaxy Nexus — can barely be seen on the Rezound.

The colors on the LG Nitro HD’s True HD IPS LCD display are lighter than on any of the other phones, giving the tiger a somewhat washed out appearance.

Winner: LG Spectrum

Round 4: Sharpness

For level of detail, the LG Nitro HD was the worst performer. Its text is grainy, and no matter how many close-up photos we took of its screen, a green distortion always appeared. The LG Spectrum, Galaxy Nexus and HTC Rezound, on the other hand, looked similarly crisp and clear — until we zoomed in even further.

The LG Spectrum’s 4.5-inch True HD IPS display offers a whopping 329 pixels per inch — and it shows. Even when viewed at extreme-close-up, text on the Spectrum looked crisp.

Because it uses the largest panel, the 4.7-inch Super AMOLED display on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus only sports 316 ppi — less than any of the other HD displays. At an extreme close-up the text still looks sharp, although there was more graininess than the Spectrum and Rezound.

The HTC Rezound’s 4.3-inch True HD IPS display boasts a staggering 342 ppi, the most pixels per inch of any of the HD displays. Unsurprisingly, text on the Rezound looked crisper than on the Spectrum, Galaxy Nexus and Nitro HD, with pleasantly bold letters and clean lines.

Although the LG Nitro HD’s 4.5-inch, 329-ppi AH-IPS display offers 329 pixels per inch — the same as the Spectrum — text on the Nitro HD appeared far more grainy than it did on any of the other displays. 

Winner: HTC Rezound. The LG Spectrum was a very close second.

Round 5: Outdoor Visibility

The visibility of the phones’ displays varied widely when viewed outdoors. The Galaxy Nexus suffered from the least amount of glare: even in sunlight, the tiger’s lustrous coat lost almost none of its luster. By comparison, the colors on the LG Spectrum and LG Nitro HD look washed out: the sky is closer to grey than blue, and the fine details of the tiger are lost. Visibility on the HTC Rezound was particularly poor outdoors — the tiger, sky and snow blend together in a grey haze.

Winner: Samsung Galaxy Nexus

Verdict

Though it didn’t win every round, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and its Super AMOLED display outperformed the competition overall. While the Galaxy Nexus’s 4.7-inch display isn’t as sharp as its smaller-screened competitors and the LG Spectrum’s True HD IPS display boasts slightly more vivid colors, the Nexus’s brightness, wider viewing angles, and suprerior outdoor visibility combine to give it the best HD screen on the market today. 

• Top 10 Smartphones
• LG Spectrum Review
• Samsung Galaxy Nexus Review

Cellphone shoppers generally judge wireless carriers based on their networks’ speed, size and—above all—reliability. But reliability extends to customer service. Will your carrier be able to help when something goes wrong? And can you get your questions answered in a timely fashion?

With that in mind, we performed a survey of the country’s four largest service providers—AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless—to determine which offers the best service and which could use some lessons in customer appreciation.

How We Tested

To get a complete view of each carrier’s customer support options, we visited two of their brick-and-mortar stores, placed two phone calls to their tech-support hotlines and tried to connect with them via their Web services. For our tests, we used purchased phones (instead of review units) to help ensure we received genuine user experiences.

Our test beds included an AT&T Motorola Atrix 4G, a Sprint EVO 4G, a T-Mobile G2x and a Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid X. To ensure our testing was fair, we posed the same three questions to each carrier’s service representatives: “How can I tether my phone to my notebook,” “How can I upload photos from my phone to Facebook?” and “How do I improve my phone’s battery life?”

Best and Worst Carrier Customer Service

• Introduction and How We Tested
• AT&T
• Sprint
• T-Mobile
• Verizon
• Final Verdict

How does it work?

You start by creating a specific “handle,” or nickname, and then look up friends. From there, you can challenge them in a number of ways.

Sometimes you simply compare stats and scores through leaderboards, such as how many pieces of fruit you’re able to slice in Halfbrick’s “Fruit Ninja.” Other times, you can challenge players directly in online play, such as a round of “Real Racing 2.”

Whatever happens in your games is automatically tracked through the program. You can see how many friends are on your list (and which ones are currently playing), how many games you’ve played and how many Achievements you have unlocked.

What are Achievements?

Certain accomplishments in a game earn points called achievements. You may win achievements for beating a “boss,” a tough guy, at the end of a particular stage, for instance, or for finishing a game in its entirety. Game Center automatically tracks achievements. You can visit a menu for each game to see what your score is and what achievements you may be missing.

Game Center can compare your achievements with those of your friends and automatically rank everyone, adding a competitive edge to each game.

How do I find friends?

Finding your friends is as easy as entering their handle, if you have it, or doing a search on their real name. Then you can invite them to be a friend. Of course, they can do the same for you.

Some games can pair you up with random players. Afterward, you can track whom you’ve played and ask any of them to be friends, should you feel like playing them again. The “Infinity Blade II” game, for example, has an extensive list of players. So it shouldn’t be a problem to make new friends.

What can I play?

Most newer games work with Game Center. What’s more, it doesn’t matter what kind of player you are: whether a fierce warrior in “Infinity Blade II” or a casual gamer who prefers “Angry Birds.”

Oh, and if you see someone named TheDCD tearing up the charts, don’t be afraid. It’s just me.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

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“This is a lot heavier than I’d thought,” said Sarah Ryan, 23, an organizer with Change.org, as she lifted a cardboard box with printouts of 250,000 names to deliver to the Apple Store in Grand Central Station in New York City. All the people had signed an online petition hosted by Change.org and another organization, SumOfUs, asking Apple to reform its labor practices in China.

 This wasn’t the first time Change.org has visited the store. They showed up at the grand opening Dec. 9 to protest Apple’s use of “conflict minerals” – which are mined by warring factions and under conditions constituting abuse of human rights, primarily in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They joined with The Enough Project and Delly Mawazo Sesete, a Congolese activist who created a Change.org petition that has gathered over 60,000 signatures urging Apple to stop using conflict minerals.

Protest theater is a regular activity for Change.org. On Wednesday in California, activists dressed as trees protested plans by the California Codorniu’s Artesa Napa Winery to expand by clearing a stand of coastal redwood trees. And recently the group delivered to the State Capitol in Texas a petition to protest state policy of eradicating wild burros. They were accompanied by several of the animals.

The best-known recent Change.org campaign is likely the one that stopped Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 monthly fee for customers using its debit cards. Amanda Kloer, the director of Change.org, believes that influenced the whole banking industry. “When they saw the incredible pushback against Bank of America, there haven’t been any other companies considering such fees,” she said.

In another recent campaign, Change.org won a small victory with Hershey, which agreed to use Rainforest Alliance certified cocoa for all of its Bliss Chocolate products. Among other things, the certification is to ensure that products are harvested humanely. “In the cocoa industry, there’s definitely child labor, there’s child slavery,” said Kloer.

Like Apple, Hershey became a target because of its size. “They have an opportunity to lift up the chocolate industry and make sure that it’s responding to workers’ rights and human rights around the world,” said Kloer.

But other electronics companies may not be safe from citizen ire. At the action, Ryan was joined by 25-year-old Shelby Knox, the director of organizing for women’s rights at Change.org, who was wearing a costume that made her look like a curly haired iPhone.

Knox proudly brandished a Google Nexus Android phone. “Apple has a terrible record on worker rights,” she said. Though she added later, “I think that they all have shoddy practices, and they all could be a target [of protests].”

Despite her current campaign, Ryan makes no secret of her love for Apple products. “As I work on my Apple phone,” she said, smiling, while checking messages before the action.

Ryan seemed comfortable reconciling her tech and human rights desires. “Apple is the cooler product. But if they are also the ethical product, that will be another reason to buy an Apple.”

• Labor Activist: Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough
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Today, you’re free to hack around those restrictions. And you don’t always need to be a tech whiz. With some iPhones, for example, you have been able to visit the website jailbreakme.com with your phone’s browser and just press a button. After that, it’s “jailbroken,” and you can install apps from anywhere, not just Apple’s App Store.

These changes aren’t always purely for fun. Some deaf people have hacked Android phones, for example, to allow them to make video calls using a sign-language interpreting service called SVRS.

But soon, all that could be illegal if jailbreaking is ruled to be copyright violation. Today is the last day that the U.S. Copyright Office is accepting input on whether it should continue allowing you to jailbreak your phone. Technically, doing so could violate the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, a strict law against “circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works.”

Software is considered to be copyrighted work, so jailbreaking your phone by changing its software could be considered “circumvention.” The penalties, at least on paper, can be severe — up to $25,000 – though it’s unlikely to go that far. “I’d say people will be more at risk of getting threatening letters from lawyers,” said Mitch Stoltz, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF.

Cellphone tinkerers got a reprieve in July 2010 when the U.S. Copyright Office agreed – based on input from EFF — to exempt mobile devices from the DMCA. But the exemption is temporary, and will expire later this year if the government decides not to renew it.

Even now, it applies to only “wireless telephone handsets.” It doesn’t mention iPads and other tablets, though they often run the same software as the phones. It certainly doesn’t cover other gadgets such as game consoles. In fact, Sony sued a man named George Hotz in 2011 for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 to run additional software and for offering downloads on his website that would enable other people to do the same.

(We asked Sony on Wednesday and Thursday to comment, but they were unable to reply in time for publication. The same happened with Apple and Google.)

For that reason, EFF is asking not only for extension of the phone exemption, but also for protection for hacking tablets and game consoles. Stoltz is upbeat. “We’re pretty confident that we’ve shown that there are a lot of legal and valid reasons for jailbreaking devices,” he said.

Other groups are going further. The Free Software Foundation will ask the copyright office to exempt essentially every electronic device. Brett Smith, their license compliance engineer, was finishing the organization’s comments to the Copyright Office as we spoke to him on Thursday night. “We’ll support an exemption for as much jailbreaking as we can get,” he said. Smith declined to provide a list that would limit what they wanted covered, but he said “yes” to every item we asked about, including game consoles, tablets, PCs, PC software, home automation devices, robotic toys and TVs. Then he added home network routers and modems.

Aaron Williamson, a staff attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center, said his organization is also pushing for broad exemptions. “If you buy anything — whether that’s a phone or a computer or a tablet or a toaster — you have the right to control the software running on that device and have it do what you want it to do,” he said.

Article provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to Laptopmag.com.

• Labor Activists Deliver Demands to Apple Store in New York City
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• How SOPA and PIPA Went Down, and Why They’ll Be Back Up

 In our review of the Inspiron 14z, we praised its sleek and stylish design, backlit keyboard, snappy performance, and long battery life. Although the touchpad had a few issues with multitouch gestures, the Inspiron 14z’s light weight, strong performance, nearly all-day battery life and sleek Fire Red chassis make the notebook an excellent choice for on-the-go users. 

Base specs: 2.3-GHz Intel 2nd Gen Core i3-2350M Dual-core processor, 6GB of RAM, 750GB 7200-rpm HDD, 14-inch Intel Wireless Display, Wireless-N, DVD Burner, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Dell Inspiron 14z Laptop with a 2.3-GHz Core i3 CPU, 6GB of RAM, and 750GB HDD for $649 through LogicBUY.

If you’re going to make an all-electric car, why not give it a wicked-modern design to go with that forward-thinking fuel approach? That at least seems to be Tesla Motors’ modus operandi with its just-unveiled Model X crossover. In addition to its eco-friendly pedigree, the X rocks wing-style doors, which Tesla calls Falcon Wings.

Back to the Future-style doors aren’t the only high-tech features this car has in its favor. The center console has a huge display for the car’s infotainment system and climate controls.

Tesla says the Model X will start around $50k, though TechCrunch estimates that the fully configured model (largest battery pack and all) will top off at about $90k. Production is set to start in 2013, with models hitting the market the following year, but you can reserve an X of your own now.

via TechCrunch

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