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100

BEST PRODUCTS
OF THE YEAR

DIGITAL EDITION
DECEMBER 2013
CONTENTS
DECEMBER 2013

COVER STORY
BEST OF THE YEAR
From PCs and tablets to phones,
HDTVs, and apps, the top tech
products of 2013 represent more
power and value than ever before.

Desktops
Laptops
Peripherals & Components
Storage

Software & Internet

Mobile Apps
Security

Printers
Scanners
Projectors
Networking

Tablets
Ebook Readers
Mobile Devices

Cameras
Audio
HDTVs & Home Theater

Gaming &Toys
Digital Fitness
REVIEWS

CONSUMER
ELECTRONICS
Apple iPad Air

Sonos Play:1
Apple iPad Air

Google Nexus 5
(Unlocked)

Samsung Galaxy NX

HARDWARE
Microsoft Surface 2

Asus Transformer
Book T100TA (64GB) Sonos Play: 1

Apple MacBook Pro

(15-inch)

Samsung Ativ Book 9

Plus

SOFTWARE
McAfee LiveSafe

Samsung Galaxy NX
WHAT’S NEW NOW
THE TECH BEHIND
100TB HARD DRIVES
3D thinking could lead to the
biggest hard drives we’ve seen.

STAY SAFE FROM

SCAMMERS
You can use the Internet to foil
phone scammers out of the gate.

CHAT: CINDY GALLOP

The acclaimed entrepreneur offers
ten tips to advance your business
in a social media world.

HOLIDAY GIFTS FOR

LESS THAN $100
You don’t have to spend a lot to
find cool gadgets this season.

LUXURY GIFTS WE LOVE

Five tech-focused gifts that are
worth a holiday splurge.

Anything you say

in 140 characters is
never going to capture
the nuances of any
situation.

—Cindy Gallop,
Social Media Expert
OPINIONS

DAN COSTA
First Word
Are we
dealing with
SEBASTIAN ANTHONY
The Military’s Child-Soldier
a generation
Future of self-
MITCHELL HALL absorbed
The Great American Phone narcissists?
Insurance Rip-Off

IBRAHIM ABDUL-MATIN
How the Tech Sector Can JOHN C. DVORAK
Help the Civic Sector Last Word

DIGITAL LIFE

GET ORGANIZED
Download and Organize
Your Facebook Photos

SHOPPING
The Best Websites for
Buying Gadget Gifts

GAMING
Spend a very Gotham
Christmas with
Batman: Arkham Origins

APPSCOUT
Our Favorite Apps
for December

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

FIRST WORD
DAN COSTA

I
n PC Labs, every day is Christmas. Every day
the UPS and FedEx guys show up with boxes
containing the latest laptops, cameras,
phones, and other gadgets. We get to open them
up, try out the products, and see how they
compare to the laptops, cameras, phones, and
other gadgets we received last week. As of this
writing, we are closing in on 2,000 lab-tested
reviews in 2013, more than any other technology
Every Day Is publication out there.
Christmas In this issue, after weeks of staff-wide debates,
we have culled that list down to the 100 best
products of the year. In this space I want to
explain a few notable omissions and call out a few
of my personal favorites.
Perhaps most notable by their absence are the
Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The mid-November
release dates for both of these consoles made it
impossible to adequately test them. And even after
we’ve had time to test them, it’s going to be very
hard to pick one console over the other. As we
explained in our last issue, Sony and Microsoft are
taking different paths. Sony wants to be the
ultimate gaming machine, whereas Microsoft is
hoping people will spend an additional $100 for a
more complete living room entertainment
solution. At the moment, there’s no way to tell
which strategy will win out.
As for my picks, I’ve purchased a number of the
products on this list over the last few months. And
I do mean purchased—all those toys that come in
for review get sent back to the vendors. (So, it isn’t
exactly like Christmas, but still...) My favorite
pick-up this year was the Sony HT-CT260 Home
Theater Soundbar; it completely transformed the
audio profile of my apartment. Not only do my
All those toys movies and television programs sound better, but
that come in with a simple Bluetooth connection the HT-CT260
for review get also functions as the primary speaker for my well-
sent back to curated collection of Slacker radio stations.
the vendors. I also picked up both BioShock Infinite and The
(So it isn't Last of Us for the PlayStation 3. I didn’t finish
exactly like either game, but my son did, so I feel some sense
of satisfaction anyway. I also want to give a shout
Christmas, but
out to LastPass, which got beat out by Dashlane
still...)
for a Best of the Year award, but is still an excellent
product. Don’t worry guys, I’m not switching.
Of course, there is more to this issue than just a
long list of great products. In her “Get Organized”
column this month, Jill Duffy explains how to find
and download all those photos you have posted to
Facebook over the years. Plus, the indomitable
Cindy Gallop shares her insights on social media
and technology-fueled entrepreneurship.
I hope this issue makes your holiday shopping a
little bit easier.

[email protected]

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

What’s
New Now
THE TECH BEHIND 100TB
HARD DRIVES
STAY SAFE FROM SCAMMERS
CHAT: CINDY GALLOP
10 HOLIDAY TECH GIFTS
FOR LESS THAN $100
LUXURY GIFTS WE LOVE
WHAT’S NEW NOW
DECEMBER 2013

The Tech Behind 100TB

Hard Drives BY SEBASTIAN ANTHONY

R
unning out of storage space? Thanks to engineers at Florida
International University (FIU), hard drives with 100TB or more of
storage space could be on the horizon.
Most magnetic storage breakthroughs have been fundamentally 2D in their
implementation, and thus are ultimately restricted by superparamagnetic
limits: Magnetic bits can only be so small before neighboring bits or changes in
temperature can randomly alter the magnetism. Therefore, the only solution is
to move beyond simple improvements—and into the third dimension.
The FIU researchers have created a new hard drive platter that allows for the
writing and reading of 3D magnetic data. In essence, instead of having just one
magnetic layer, the new platter has three, with isolation POLE POSITION
(insulation) layers sandwiched in between. On a A schematic of the
structure and desired
conventional hard drive platter, a magnetic site stores magnetic properties of
just a single bit of data; here, each magnetic site can store FIU’s new platter
up to eight (north/north/north, south/south/south, technology. The black and
red arrows denote two
N/N/S, N/S/S, and so on). possible magnetic states
To read data, a weakly magnetic head measures the in each stack. ne ni
vector sum of the three magnetic fields. To write data,
each layer of the recording medium has slightly different properties, so that
they can only be written by a specific type and strength of magnetic field, which
is output by a special recording head.
For now, FIU’s new magnetic recording medium is an in-the-lab tech demo.
Whereas conventional hard drive platters are mass-produced using a simple
process called magnetron sputtering, FIU’s platter is more like a small disc of
silicon that goes through dozens of painstaking processes, including e-beam
lithographic patterning. This isn’t to say that multilayer 3D (ML-3D) recording
won’t become a reality, but alternatives such as heat-assisted magnetic
recording are much closer to commercial adoption.
That ML-3D might be used to create 100TB or larger hard drives in the
future, though, is still exciting news—and, interestingly, perhaps the technology
that will finally kill off the magnetic tape, which is still hanging in there as the
preferred bulk offline storage medium.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

BEST
Your computer, phone, or tablet is only as good as the
software you run and the websites you use. Utilities,
operating systems, Web apps, and more offer more
PRODUCTS OF

2013
powerful ways than ever to keep you organized,
informed, and secure across all your devices.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

SOFTWARE
MOBILE APPS

& INTERNET
SECURITY
SOFTWARE & INTERNET
PHOTOGRAPHY/
DESIGN
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP CC
Not only is Photoshop CC the first version
to be offered in a reasonably priced,
subscription-only format, it offers exciting
new imaging possibilities, with the
impressive Camera Shake Reduction
feature, Smart Sharpen, Intelligent Up
Sampling, and Camera Raw as a filter. A lot
of what's new targets professionals, with
more CSS support, automated asset
slicing, and conditional actions. No longer
are high-end functions restricted to the
Extended editon—you get every
Photoshop tool with the subscription—
including 3D, video, and image analysis.
—MICHAEL MUCHMORE
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLL
$19.99/month

VIDEO EDITING
EDITORS’
CHOICE CYBERLINK POWERDIRECTOR 12
CyberLink PowerDirector is a longtime favorite
lLLLh
among prosumer video editors. It offers speedy
$49.99 performance, an intuitive interface, and lots of
editing goodies. The latest version now has
multicam viewing (up to four angles), 3D and 4K

UTILITY editing and output, direct uploading to sharing sites,

and can even author Blu-ray discs. —MM
VMWARE FUSION 6
There comes a time when every
Mac user just has to access
something on Windows. The
smooth-running and least
obtrusive method on the
market is VMWare Fusion 6. It's EDITORS’
compatible with hundreds of CHOICE
operating system “guests,” so lLLLh
try them all. —ERIC GRIFFITH
$99.99
SOFTWARE EDITORS’

& INTERNET
CHOICE

lLLLh
FREE

OPERATING SYSTEM
APPLE OS X 10.9 MAVERICKS
Microsoft made some impressive strides this year
with Windows 8.1, but OS X remains the
smoothest, most reliable, most convenient, and
most manageable consumer-level desktop
operating system on the planet. Top-notch, CLOUD
unobtrusive security is a major plus; so are its tight STORAGE
integration with social media and the ability to run & SYNC
Windows applications through third-party apps. GOOGLE DRIVE
It’s also loaded with useful features and, best of all, Part office suite and part file-
it’s completely free. —MM syncing service, Google Drive
retains all the best features and
core functionality of its
predecessor, Google Docs, while
also upping the ante on how much
it enables collaboration. It is one
sweet package. —JILL DUFFY
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
FREE
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
FREE

WEB APP WEB BROWSER

IFTTT GOOGLE CHROME
“If This, Then That,” or ifttt, Our speedy Editors' Choice browser made
is all you need to remember impressive strides in 2013, offering new
because this amazingly support for WebRTC, which lets the
simple yet powerful service browser act like Skype, using your PC's
can automate just about camera and microphone for real-time
anything else, from backing communication. The search ad giant also
up your Facebook photos to added a new set of “app” capabilities,
sending you text message with new desktop widgets that actually
reminders of upcoming EDITORS’
CHOICE run outside of the browser window. All
appointments. —JD this is added to the ever increasing lead in
lLLLl HTML5 support, speed, and simplicity
FREE that distinguish Chrome. —MM
MOBILE APPS EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLL

IPAD APP FLIPBOARD FREE

It's been years since Flipboard came out

on the iPad, and it's still the best
aggregator of news, social networking,
links, video, and images on the platform.
Even the page swiping is impressively fast.
In version 2, users can create and share
personalized magazines—and recipients
don't even need to have Flipboard
installed to read them. —EG

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
FREE

IPHONE APP EVERNOTE

When it comes to staying organized and
keeping track of ideas and other information,
Evernote does the heavy lifting for you.
Integrate it with one or two other apps, and you

ANDROID APP SWYPE

can't do better. Its online synchronization is
effortless, and the search is outstanding—it'll
The walled garden of iOS has grown some even use OCR to search terms inside images. (A
amazing apps, but the open field of Android has premium account with lots of extras costs $5
invited incredible innovation at even the most per month or $45 per year). —JD
basic level, such as Swype. This application lets
you drag your finger between letters to create
words and even predicts your next word before
you type or swype. Swype also supports
gestures for actions like cut and paste, and EDITORS’
CHOICE
features several other input methods. It sounds
simple, but it’s revolutionary and quickly makes lLLLh
thumb-typing feel antiquated —MAX EDDY FREE
SECURITY
SECURITY SUITE
NORTON INTERNET SECURITY
Norton still has it all: excellent blocking of
EDITORS’
malicious and fraudulent websites; and CHOICE
intelligent firewall that sets permissions for
lLLLh
known good programs and monitors unknowns
$39.95
for risky behaviors, without ever popping up a
confusing query; multilayered antivirus
protection for fending off new threats and
rooting out those already present; and antispam
tools that keep your inbox clean and protect
valid mail. Plus, Norton won’t trample your
STANDALONE
system’s performance. —NEIL J. RUBENKING ANTIVIRUS
BITDEFENDER
ANTIVIRUS PLUS
EDITORS’ Bitdefender's antivirus technology
CHOICE routinely takes top scores in tests by
independent antivirus labs and also
lLLLh
scored well in our hands-on testing.
$79.99
Antivirus Plus is one of a very few
products that detects phishing sites
better than Norton, and it can
optionally prevent transmission of
private data out of your computer.
The new Wallet stores passwords and
personal data, the SafePay secure
browser protects financial
transactions, and SafeGo flags
dangerous links in your Facebook
profile. It even finds unpatched
security vulnerabilities. —NJR

PASSWORDS
DASHLANE 2.0
Dashlane generates,
manages, and protects all of
your passwords, and version
2.0 is better than ever, with
automatic form field
capture, security breach EDITORS’
alerts, secure sharing of login CHOICE
credentials, and a new lLLLh
browser extension for Firefox
FREE
and Chrome. —NJR
SECURITY EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$9.95

PARENTAL
CONTROL
OME-KIDS
Setting up OME-Kids email accounts
for your children gives them access to
spam-free email while letting you keep
an eye on their correspondence. Each
OME-Kids account gets the same
extremely accurate spam filtering as
OnlyMyEmail Personal. You can
control the child's email activity at
different levels: Hold all incoming mail
pending parental approval, review
received mail, or just get a BCC of all
messages the child sends. As the child
gets older, you can step down the
monitoring level and allow more
privacy. —NJR

MOBILE SECURITY
BITDEFENDER MOBILE
SECURITY AND ANTIVIRUS
1.2.3 (ANDROID)
To fully protect your phone, a security
app needs to bring together protection
from malicious software as well as tools
EDITOR
S
CHOICE ’ to keep your phone safe from loss and
theft. Bitdefender for Android does both
lLLL
m gracefully, and for a reasonable $9.99 per
FREE AP
P year—far less than many other big-name
$9.99/y
ea r
competitors. With it, you can also use
SMS commands to take control of your
phone when it's missing, and evaluate
how much of your private information
each app accesses. It's lightweight and
laser-focused on security. —ME

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

BEST
Need to communicate, whether by Wi-Fi, digital file, or
even paper? These products give you lots of ways to do
just that, and provide unprecedented feature sets at
PRODUCTS OF

2013
prices that (for the most part) won't put a permanent
debt in your or your business’ bank account.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

NETWORKING
PRINTERS
SCANNERS
PROJECTORS
NETWORKING
ROUTER
BUFFALO AIRSTATION
EXTREME AC 1750
GIGABIT DUAL BAND
WIRELESS ROUTER
Buffalo’s AirStation Extreme EDITORS’
CHOICE
AC1750 Gigabit Dual Band
Wireless Router offers good lLLLm

performance and the latest $189.99

wireless networking standard,

802.11ac. An extremely well-
designed and powerful user
interface caps off this premium,
feature-rich, dual-band router,
which can also operate as an
access point or wireless bridge.
—SAMARA LYNN

NAS (SOHO/
PROSUMER)
SEAGATE CENTRAL EDITORS’
The Seagate Central is simply the best CHOICE
fixed, single-drive NAS device we’ve lLLLL
tested, and is ideal for sharing and $1,000
streaming files throughout your home
network. Seagate also provides a
complimentary remote access service,
so you can access your data anywhere,
any time. —SL
NAS (SMB)
SYNOLOGY DISKSTATION
DS1812+
With capacity of up to 32TB—that can
be expanded to 72TB!—and top-notch
performance, this box can handle
anything an SMB could think to throw
at a NAS. The often-dreary task of
storage management is brightened by
Synology’s Hybrid RAID technology
EDITORS’
CHOICE and the ease of configuring the unit’s
fault tolerance. —SL
2 7 lLLLm
$159.99 & up
NETWORKING NETWORK
NETWORK UTILITIES APPLIANCES
KERIO OPERATOR 1210
WD MY CLOUD (ANDROID)
The Kerio Operator Box 1210 is a full-featured
The WD My Cloud app is a companion to Western
small-business VoIP in a compact box. Good
Digital’s My Cloud NAS device, delivering a
security tools, detailed reporting, and
surprisingly robust level of data management as extensive administrative functions sweeten
well as excellent remote access. A well-designed the deal. —SL
interface makes it a snap to manage the My Cloud
from any smartphone. —SL
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$900

NETWORK
EDITORS’
CHOICE MANAGEMENT
lLLLh TOOLS
FREE NETWORK TOOLBOX (IOS)
The intuitive Network Toolbox turns
your iOS device into a networking
toolkit. It’s a one-stop, central
console chock full of networking
utilities such as SHODAN, FTP, Telnet,
Ping, and more. —SL

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$5.99
PRINTERS
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$599

SMALL-OFFICE
INKJET
HP OFFICEJET PRO
X551DW PRINTER
A winning balance of speed,
output quality, paper handling,
low cost per page, and additional
features such as mobile printing
makes the HP Officejet Pro
X551dw Printer a smart pick over
its direct competition. Its print
quality could be a little better,
but for most workplaces the
X551dw hits all the right marks.
—TONY HOFFMAN

SMALL OFFICE
MONO LASER MFP
SAMSUNG MULTIFUNCTION
EDITORS’ XPRESS M2875FW
CHOICE
The Samsung Multifunction Xpress
lLLLm M2875FW has lots of strong points and no
$120 notable weaknesses. Its speed, output
quality, paper handing, multifunction printer
basics, and small conveniences—Wi-Fi
Direct, the ability to copy single-sided
originals to double-sided copies—all add up
to the proverbial “more than the sum of its
PERSONAL MONO LASER parts.” That’s enough to make it an excellent
fit for a micro or small office. —TH
SAMSUNG XPRESS M2625D
The Samsung Xpress M2625D printer offers
unusually capable paper handling for personal use.
In addition to an automatic duplexer, it includes a
250-sheet paper tray and a one-page manual feed
slot, so you don’t have to swap out paper every
time you want to print on a different paper stock. EDITORS’
Its paper handling, solid speed and output quality, CHOICE
and small size make this a highly attractive printer
lLLLm
for the price. —TH
$280
4 7
WHAT’S NEW NOW
SECURITYWATCH

Stay Safe From Scammers

BY FAHMIDA Y. RASHID

W
hat’s the scariest thing that happened to me on Halloween this
year? It was a phone call.
According to the caller ID, it came from a local number. When we
answered, a male voice identified himself as calling from the “Kings County
Sheriff’s Office” and asked for a member of my family. When we explained that
she wasn’t available, we were told that there was an outstanding warrant out for
her. We were also told she was going to be arrested in the next 45 minutes,
because of outstanding federal taxes from 2010.
We are always willing to cooperate, within reason, so we asked for more
information. After giving us a phone number and the name of the person we
PRINTERS
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$499.99

SMALL OFFICE
COLOR INKJET MFP
HP OFFICEJET PRO X576DW
Outside, the HP Officejet Pro X576dw
Multifunction Printer’s fast speed, high-
quality output, excellent paper handling,
and the conveniences a 4.3-inch touch
screen allows, combined with a long list of
MFP features, put it way out in front of the
pack, even before considering its low cost
per page. This laser-class inkjet looks like a
laser, feeds paper like a laser, and performs SMALL OFFICE COLOR
like a laser. —TH TABLOID SIZE MFP
BROTHER MFC-J6920DW
EDITORS’
CHOICE GTX 780 SLI
If you need a tabloid-size (11-by-17-inch) MFP
lLLLh
that’s both inexpensive and loaded with
$799
features, the Brother MFC-J6920DW may be
what you’re looking for. It’s perfect for a micro
or small office needing to print and scan at
tabloid size. Its combination of duplex
scanning, NFC, and large touch screen make it
appealing for users who need any or all of
these features. —TH

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$1,695

3D PRINTER
TYPE A MACHINES SERIES 1
The Type A Machines Series 1 is geared
toward professionals and hobbyists: It’s
relatively easy to set up and operate,
versatile, and can print large, good-quality
objects in a range of resolutions. —TH
PROJECTORS EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm

INTERACTIVE $899

DATA PROJECTOR
EPSON BRIGHTLINK 436WI
The Epson BrightLink 436Wi Interactive WXGA 3LCD
Projector brings Epson’s leading-edge interactive
features (such as automatic calibration) to a more
affordable projector. The 436Wi also offers an
attractive balance of image quality, brightness, and MOBILE
price. Unless you need 3D support, it’s the short- PROJECTOR
throw, interactive projector you want. —TH NEC NP-M311W
This LCD-based projector
delivers a bright image,
WXGA (1,280-by-800)
resolution, 1.7x zoom lens,
long lamp life, near-
EDITORS’ excellent data image
CHOICE quality, and better video
quality than most data
lLLLm
projectors can offer, plus it
$1,490
is reasonably portable. If
you don't require 3D or a
short-throw lens, it’s a
compelling choice. —TH

HOME ENTERTAINMENT
PROJECTOR WITH 3D
EDITORS’ EPSON POWERLITE HOME
CHOICE
CINEMA 3020E
lLLLm
The 3020e offers high-quality 2D and 3D at
$2,899 full 1080p, both as a home theater projector
HOME THEATER and as a home entertainment projector that
stands up to ambient light. It works directly
PROJECTOR WITH 3D with HDMI 1.4a devices such as Blu-ray
EPSON POWERLITE HOME players, and is an excellent low-cost 3D home
CINEMA 5020UBE theater projector. —TH
The Epson PowerLite Home Cinema
5020UBe is impressive for its price. It
delivers high-quality 2D and 3D images, a
wide range of brightness settings, and
advanced features that include an
EDITORS’
unusually large zoom and lens shift, an CHOICE
auto-iris, frame interpolation, super-
resolution, and more. —TH lLLLh
$1,899
6 7
SCANNERS EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$149.99

SMALL OFFICE
DOCUMENT
SCANNER
XEROX DOCUMATE 5445
This highly capable desktop scanner
delivers fast speed with duplex (two-
sided) scanning, an assortment of
world-class software, and features such
as a 75-sheet automatic document
feeder. Its balance of speed, input
capacity, duty cycle, and price, along
with its well-chosen set of application
programs and capable scan utility, make
this an excellent choice for moderately
heavy-duty use in a small office or
workgroup. —TH

PERSONAL PORTABLE
PHOTO SCANNER
FLIP-PAL MOBILE SCANNER
The Flip-Pal mobile scanner offers an
innovative design with PC-free scanning, a
4-by-6 flatbed, and a 2GB SD card. It has a
neat trick for scanning originals that won't fit
under the flatbed lid: Take off the lid, turn
over the scanner, and place the glass on top
of the item to be scanned. The scan quality is
EDITORS’ good and as a flatbed scanner it eliminates
CHOICE
the risk of mangling photos or delicate
lLLLm documents that's possible with a sheet-fed
$1,195 scanner. Its 1.7-inch LCD lets you preview
scans on the spot. —TH

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

BEST
The mobile revolution is here, and 2013 saw some
of the best products yet that let you take your tech
anywhere. Whether you want to make calls, read, find
PRODUCTS OF

2013
your way around unfamiliar geography, or even just
get online, these winners will help you make it happen.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

TABLETS

EBOOK READERS
MOBILE DEVICES
TABLETS
& EBOOK READERS
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$499-$929

SMALL-SCREEN
TABLET LARGE-
GOOGLE NEXUS 7
SCREEN
TABLET
The Nexus 7’s $229 price is an
amazing value, but Google’s flagship
tablet would still be a good buy even if APPLE IPAD AIR
it cost more. Its high-res screen is The Air isn’t a radical
extremely sharp, battery life is long,
break from Apple’s
and the tablet’s body is narrow
previous iPads, but it
enough to hold comfortably in one
hand. This tablet makes a perfect doesn’t need to be. It’s a
ereader or backseat entertainment well-built, slim, and light
gadget. —SASCHA SEGAN platform for a terrific
range of tablet apps,
with an unusually fast
processor and a much
lighter frame than last
year’s model, but with no
loss of battery life. As
EDITORS’ with previous iPads, it’s
CHOICE
close to a no-brainer.
lLLLh —SS
$269.99

IPAD ACCESSORY EBOOK READER

BELKIN ULTIMATE AMAZON KINDLE
KEYBOARD CASE PAPERWHITE
Keyboard cases for the iPad Amazon’s revised Paperwhite is
generally come in either traditional faster and more refined than last
folio or thin-and-light cover styles, year’s model, with brighter edge
but both have their drawbacks. lighting and lots of useful new
This case splits the difference, features. It’s comfortable to hold
combining solid protection, sleek and lasts for weeks on a battery
design, and a comfortable charge. Plus, Amazon’s ebook
keyboard in one terrific store and overall app ecosystem
package. —EUGENE KIM remain the best in the business.
—JAMIE LENDINO

lLLLm
$99.99 EDITORS’
CHOICE
2 4 lLLLh
$119 & up
MOBILE
DEVICES & NETWORKS
BEST MOBILE
NETWORK
VERIZON WIRELESS
Plan prices vary

4G LTE
AT&T’s network is the

BEST PHONE fastest, but Verizon’s is the

best. How’d that happen?
IT'S A TIE! The two big carriers weren't
SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 far apart in our Fastest Mobile
Samsung’s flagship smartphone is the Networks study, but the huge
differential in our Reader’s
Microsoft Office of mobile phones: It has
Choice study landed Verizon
something for everyone. Light and slim, the S4
in a solid first place. As the
is nonetheless laden with an amazing number
only truly national LTE
of features, from a simplified Easy Mode to network, Verizon has you
special camera modes that let insert yourself covered. —SS
into a shot or take photobombers out of one.

APPLE IPHONE 5s
The Apple iPhone 5s may be the same size as
last year’s iPhone, but its more powerful
hardware and software make a major
difference. This first 64-bit phone on
the market is also the first with a usable
fingerprint reader, and it has one of the two
best camera phones out there—and, of
course, it runs Apple’s unparalleled library
EDITORS’
of third-party apps. —SS CHOICE

lLLLh
EDITORS’
CHOICE $79.95

lLLLh
$199 & up
IPHONE
ACCESSORY
UNU DX PROTECTIVE
BATTERY CASE FOR
IPHONE 5
Find yourself scrambling for a
charge by midday? Cast away
your worries with the Unu DX
battery case, which will more
EDITORS’ than double your iPhone’s
CHOICE battery life without adding
lLLLh
much bulk. It outperforms
many more expensive
$199.99
options, making it an
excellent value. —EK
MOBILE
DEVICES & NETWORKS
SMARTWATCH
PEBBLE
Smartwatches are still in their
infancy, but the Pebble is the
closest to realizing their
potential. Its good looks, useful
notification support, and
growing list of features (thanks
to third-party development)
make the Pebble a far better
choice than anything else
currently out there. —EK

GPS NAVIGATION
GARMIN NÜVI 3597LMTHD
Garmin’s long experience in the GPS
navigation game shows with this top-
end model, which includes a 5-inch glass
capacitive display with a sharp 800-by-
480 resolution. In a world of free
smartphone GPS apps, the expensive
EDITORS’ nüvi 3597LMTHD earns its keep thanks EDITORS’
CHOICE to beautiful 3D terrain mapping, CHOICE
photorealistic 3D lane assistance, a lLLLm
lLLLm
brilliant magnetic mount, and better
$379.99 $150
natural-language voice prompts. —JL

BLUETOOTH EDITORS’
CHOICE
HEADSET lLLLh
PLANTRONICS
$49.99
BACKBEAT GO 2
Plantronics stepped up EDITORS’
its well-respected CHOICE
BackBeat stereo
lLLLm
Bluetooth line this year
$79.99
with the BackBeat Go 2,
which delivers solid CELLULAR MODEM
sound quality, a sweat-
proof nano-coating and a
OR HOTSPOT
comfortable fit at an VERIZON JETPACK 4G MHS291L
eminently reasonable A hotspot should always be able to connect.
price. —SS Verizon’s Jetpack 4G MHS291L has the
longest battery life of any hotspot we’ve
tested: more than 14 hours of solid LTE
streaming on one charge. —SS

4 4
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013
BEST
Whether you want to preserve your most important
memories, or even just take in your favorite videos
and songs, these outstanding media products
PRODUCTS OF

2013
released this year will make doing so easier—and
more fun—than it’s ever been before.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

CAMERAS
HDTVS &
HOME THEATER
AUDIO
CAMERAS &
CAMCORDERS
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$329.99

SUPERZOOM
CANON POWERSHOT
SX280 HS
If you want a lot of zoom in a form
factor that can slide into your pocket,
the Canon PowerShot SX280 HS does
the trick. Its 12-megapixel, 1/2.3-inch
image sensor isn’t the largest you’ll find
in a pocket camera, but you can still
shoot at moderate sensitivity settings
without significant detail loss. The
camera is also impressively small,
especially when you consider that it
houses a 20x zoom lens and packs
built-in Wi-Fi and GPS. —JIM FISHER

BUDGET POINT-AND-
SHOOT
CANON POWERSHOT A1400
If you’re looking to spend around $100 for a
digital camera, the AA-powered Canon
PowerShot A1400 is a solid choice. Like
other CCD cameras it’s not the best in low
light, but it does pack a sharp 5x zoom lens,
POINT-AND- EDITORS’
CHOICE and it's one of the few compact cameras of
SHOOT lLLLm
you'll see with an optical viewfinder. —JF
CANON POWERSHOT $229.99
ELPH 330 HS
The Canon PowerShot Elph 330 HS is
the camera to get if you're looking for
something compact without breaking
the bank. It’s the best camera we saw
this year for less than $250, thanks to
sharp optics, impressive performance
in low light, an 8x zoom lens, and EDITORS’
CHOICE
built-in Wi-Fi. —JF
lLLLm
2 8
$109.99
CAMERAS & FULL-FRAME D-SLR
CAMCORDERS CANON EOS 6D
The Canon EOS 6D brings full-frame
to the masses at a price point that,

D-SLR though not cheap, is within the reach of

enthusiastic photographers. The huge
NIKON D7100 image sensor does well in low light, and
Nikon’s D7100 is everything a premium when paired with a wide-aperture lens
APS-C D-SLR should be. It has a bright delivers an impressively shallow depth of
pentaprism viewfinder, a lightning-quick field. The 6D can shoot at 4.5fps and
autofocus system, and loads of physical adds an integrated GPS and Wi-Fi—and
controls. Wildlife and sports shooters will its body is impressively compact. —JF
appreciate the 6fps burst rate, and there’s
a vertical battery grip available for anyone EDITORS’
who prefers a beefier camera. —JF CHOICE

lLLLh
$2,099
Body only

EDITORS’
LENS
CHOICE LEICA APO-
lLLLh
SUMMICRON-M
$1,199.95
50MM F/2 ASPH.
Body only You simply won’t find a
better 50mm lens than the
Leica APO-Summicron-M
50mm f/2 ASPH. It’s
absurdly sharp from edge
to edge, shows no
distortion or chromatic
EDITORS’ aberration, and is
CHOICE impressively compact.
You’ll want to pair it with a
lLLLL
full-frame (or 35mm)
$7,195
rangefinder or to get the
most out of it. —TH
should speak with at the federal government office, the caller transferred us to
that number. The agent who answered the phone claimed that if we wanted to
resolve this right away, we would have to provide a cell phone number. The
person wasn’t very pleased when we refused, and kept repeating that our lack of
cooperation meant that this family member would be arrested in 45 minutes.
Scary? A little bit.

RED FLAGS APLENTY

There were lots of ways to tell right away that this call was a scam.

New York City residents know that we don’t have

a “Kings County Sheriffs Office.” We have the

1
NYPD. We do actually have a Sheriff’s Office,
though, and it does handle tax evasion issues,
but as the friendly spokesperson at the Sheriff’s
Office told me when I asked, the office handles
only cases for local taxes.

The caller kept saying

2
“federal government”—
not the IRS. Not the
Law enforcement doesn’t
Internal Revenue Service.
call and say, “Pay up or we

3
will arrest you.” If there’s a
warrant, the arrest happens
first and there’s an
opportunity to fix it. Usually
The demand that we “act with a judge.
in 45 minutes” was clearly

4
a social-engineering tactic
to create a high-pressure
situation, said White Hat
Security’s Robert Hansen.

5
I didn’t mention this in my initial summary, but we
were told we were going to be transferred to speak
with “Michael Black.” Yet when he answered, he
said, “This is Khan.” If you are going to run a scam
operation, get your names straight.
CAMERAS & EDITORS’
CHOICE

CAMCORDERS
lLLLh
$799.99

PRIME-LENS
COMPACT
RICOH GR
The Ricoh GR puts a D-SLR–sized
APS-C image sensor into the body
of a camera that slides snugly
into your jeans pocket. The prime
lens doesn’t zoom, instead giving you
a fixed 28mm-equivalent field of
view. It’s an f/2.8 design that’s sharp
from edge to edge, with a
16-megapixel sensor that is
impressive through ISO 3200. Couple
that with excellent physical controls
and a sharp, bright rear LCD and you
have a camera that will wow you. —JF EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLL
$1,399.99
Body only
RUGGED POINT-
AND-SHOOT
OLYMPUS TOUGH TG-2 IHS
The TG-2 isn’t that different from Olympus’
first fast-lens rugged camera, the TG-1, but a
few modest improvements and a lower price
point make it a winner. The lens opens to f/2
at its widest angle, and the TG-2 is rated for
use in up to 50 feet of water. It’s also rated to
survive 7-foot drops, operate in HIGH-END
temperatures as low as 14°, and withstand MIRRORLESS
external pressure of up to 220 pounds. —JF OLYMPUS OM-D E-M1
The OM-D E-M1 isn’t perfect, but it’s
close. The top-end Micro Four Thirds
body is an all-weather shooter with an
EDITORS’ outstanding EVF, five-axis image
CHOICE
stabilization, fast autofocus, and
lLLLh impressive burst shooting. It does well in
$379.99 low light, and even packs Wi-Fi for
remote camera control and easy image
transfer to your smartphone. —JF
4 8
CAMERAS &
CAMCORDERS
PREMIUM POINT-
AND-SHOOT EDITORS’
CHOICE
SONY CYBER-SHOT
DSC-RX100 II lLLLh
$199
The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100 II is an
upgraded version of the RX100, which found
itself in this spot last year. It still features a
compact body with a 1-inch image sensor WEBCAM
and 28-100mm f/1.8-4.9 Zeiss lens, but adds DROPCAM PRO
a titling rear display, a hot shoe, and Wi-Fi, Dropcam’s approach to the surveillance
and turns out better low-light photos. It’s the market is software first. Its CVR, or “cloud
best compact digital camera with a zoom video recording,” is proof of that, and the
lens we’ve seen. —JF service will cost you. But the hardware
also shines. The latest Dropcam improves
EDITORS’
CHOICE on the old in every way with better optics,
a wider angle lens, and a slick-looking
lLLLh black paint job. You don’t need to pan or
$749.99 tilt—the sensor is so big that even
zooming digitally looks pretty amazing.
For ease of use, PC-free setup, sharing
video streams, and monitoring from
anywhere, the Dropcam Pro is a winner.
—ERIC GRIFFITH

EDITORS’
CHOICE

CAMCORDER lLLLm
GOPRO HERO3 BLACK EDITION $399.99
Adventurous outdoorsmen know that GoPro
cameras are tough, small enough to mount
on your body, or on a snowboard, surfboard,
or skateboard. Add a waterproof housing
and this camera can capture your extreme,
possibly insane, hobby of choice. The Hero3
Black Edition ups the video quality and adds
Wi-Fi. —JF
HDTV & HOME THEATER EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$2,799.99

HIGH-END HDTV
SAMSUNG PN60F8500
Plasma’s decline isn’t stopping the
technology from producing some
amazing screens. Samsung’s high-end
PN60F8500 is a beautiful 60-inch
plasma HDTV that has one of the best
contrast ratios we’ve seen. It’s loaded
with features and stylish design aspects,
including online media and social
network services, voice commands, a
touchpad remote, and even a built-in
camera for video chat. —WILL GREENWALD

EDITORS’
BLU-RAY PLAYER
CHOICE OPPO BDP-103
Few people pay attention to Blu-ray
lLLLm
players these days, but there are still some
$1,099.99
models targeted at high-end home EDITORS’
theater enthusiasts. The Oppo BDP-103 CHOICE
offers 4K upscaling and 2D-to-3D
lLLLh
conversion, and has both dual HDMI and
$499
7.1-channel analog audio outputs. —WG

BUDGET HDTV MEDIA HUB EDITORS’

VIZIO M551D-A2R ROKU 2 CHOICE
You don’t need to spend a lot of money For less than $100, the Roku 2 offers
lLLLm
for an excellent, 3D-capable HDTV. The more than 1,000 different content
$79.99
Vizio M551D-A2R can be found for just channels including big names
over $1,000, and its 55-inch LED screen (Netflix, Hulu Plus) as well as niche
offers very good contrast and color services (Crunchyroll, Midnight
accuracy for the price. It has a passive Pulp). One excellent feature it shares
3D screen, comes with four pairs of with the higher-end Roku 3: a
glasses, and is loaded with online headphone jack in the remote so you
services and apps. —WG can watch what you want without
disturbing your significant other. —WG
AUDIO
MP3 PLAYER EARPHONES EDITORS’
CHOICE
KLIPSCH IMAGE X7I
APPLE IPOD TOUCH lLLLm
The Klipsch Image X7i delivers
Smartphones are hogging the spotlight $199.99
amazing audio quality for its
now, but there’s still plenty of demand for a price range, with tight bass,
dedicated music player. The Apple iPod crisp highs, and a neutral, well-
touch delivers much more than that. It’s balanced timbre. It’s one of the
basically an iPhone, complete with a strong smallest in-canal earphone
processor and fine display, stripped of its pairs we've tested, and it’s
calling capability and GPS—meaning you extremely lightweight.
Sonically, it’s more of a flat-
can still run almost all of the 900,000-plus
response pair than one that’s
third-party apps and games in Apple’s App
ideal for those who love
Store. Oh, and it’s ideal for playing music boosted bass response; if that
and watching TV shows and movies. sounds good to you, the X7i is
—JAMIE LENDINO the set to get. —JL

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$399.99

HEADPHONES
BOWERS & WILKINS P7
MOBILE HI-FI HEADPHONES
Bowers & Wilkins, long known for its
luxurious high-end audio speakers, takes
its first shot at an over-the-ear headphone
EDITORS’
CHOICE pair—and nails it. The P7 sounds exemplary
with all kinds of music, its design exudes
lLLLh
luxury, and it’s extremely comfortable to
$229-$399 wear for long periods of time. The P7 isn’t
inexpensive by any means, but you get
everything you pay for, and more. —JL
AUDIO
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$299.95

WIRELESS
SPEAKER
BOSE SOUNDLINK
BLUETOOTH MOBILE
SPEAKER II
At just under 3 pounds, the Bose
SoundLink Bluetooth Mobile
Speaker II is compact and easy to
tote. It folds up nicely with the
PORTABLE
attached cover, which doubles as
a power switch, and delivers
WIRELESS
smooth, balanced sound SPEAKER
throughout the frequency BOSE SOUNDLINK MINI
spectrum. It also gets surprisingly Bose’s 7-inch SoundLink Mini is
loud, and can easily fill a sizable the best-sounding portable
room with music. —JL Bluetooth speaker we’ve tested,
with surprisingly full, rich bass and
a smooth midrange. It also has a
sleek, relatively retro design, and
though it fits easily on a desk or
bookshelf, the included charging cradle
makes the SoundLink Mini easy to bring
along for tunes on the go. —JL EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
EDITORS’
CHOICE SOUNDBAR $199.95

lLLLh
SONY HT-CT260 HOME
$799.99
THEATER SOUNDBAR
You get a lot for your money with this
unusually well-rounded soundbar,
including stereo Bluetooth streaming,

PC SPEAKERS three sets of inputs, and a remote control.

With powerful bass response and a warm
KEF X300A overall sound signature, the HT-CT260 is
The KEF X300A is as close to an excellent buy and an easy upgrade for EDITORS’
CHOICE
perfect as we’ve heard in its price anyone looking to augment their HDTV in
tier. It’s an ideal pair of speakers a small living room or den. —JL lLLLm
for an apartment, office, or study, $299.99
and its digital USB connection
and 96kHz/24-bit digital-to-
analog (D/A) converters ensure
pristine sound when connected
to a PC or Mac. —JL

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

BEST
We didn’t get the newest PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
consoles in time to include them in this list, but lots
of other new releases in 2013 help you make the most
PRODUCTS OF

2013
of your downtime, whether you want to kick back
with a game or get exercising outside.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

GAMING
DIGITAL HEALTH
& FITNESS TOYS
GAMES
& TOYS
PLAYSTATION GAME
THE LAST OF US
Naughty Dog, the development house behind the
Uncharted and Jax and Daxter series, has created
what many have hailed as “the last great
PlayStation 3 game.” Fusing action and survival
game play to tell a character-driven tale about a
world destroyed by the Cordyceps fungus, a growth
that transforms humanity into zombie-like
monsters (the fungus, in fact, is one that appears
in the real world and has unusual effects on its
hosts), The Last of Us is moving, action-packed,
and deserving of a spot in every PlayStation 3
gamer’s library. —JEFFREY L. WILSON

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
EDITORS’
CHOICE $59.99

lLLLL
$59.99

PC GAME
BIOSHOCK INFINITE
The third installment in
Irrational Games’ impressive
XBOX GAME saga exploring the
GRAND THEFT AUTO V devastating effects of
isolation (and isolationism)
Grand Theft Auto V represents the
on the human psyche,
pinnacle of Rockstar Games’ design
BioShock Infinite combines
talent. Neighborhoods, minigames,
familiar gameplay elements
animations, voice-overs, radio
with exciting new mechanics,
stations—anything you can think of—
an engrossing story, and
are wonderfully realized in the fictional
stunning graphics that make
city of Los Santos. Factor in a gang-
it surprisingly complex and
centric online mode and GTA V
EDITORS’ powerful even by the high
becomes the ultimate crime caper of CHOICE standards of the BioShock
this console generation. —JLW
lLLLm series. — MATTHEW MURRAY
2 5
$39.99
GAMES TOY
LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3

& TOYS
The newest version of Lego’s
Mindstorms robotics kit is also
EDITORS’
the best, with a more powerful CHOICE
brain you can program to do
anything. The sample robots lLLLl
start deceptively simple and $349.99
become increasingly complex,
PORTABLE and soon you’ll find yourself (or

GAMING DEVICE
your kids) building unique
creations and programming
NINTENDO 2DS them from the ground up. It’s
Nintendo’s newest handheld is a scaled- an excellent tech toy for adults
and a fantastic science and
back, child-friendly version of the
learning toy for children. —WG
excellent 3DS and 3DS XL systems. It
can’t display 3D pictures, but it can play
every game and run every app the 3DS
can, and its lower price and hinge-free
design make it very tempting for gamers
on a budget or parents who don’t want to
spend $170-200 on a device their kids will
throw around. — WILL GREENWALD

3DS/VITA GAME
FIRE EMBLEM: AWAKENING
Awakening, like other Fire Emblem games
before it, focuses on tactics more than the
grind-heavy gameplay of Final Fantasy Tactics
and Disgaea series. Combat units have their
own unique classes, and almost every fighter
in your squad has a name, unique art style,
personality, and story. A big part of the Fire
Emblem experience is perma-death; when
your units die, they die for good, so don’t get
too attached to any one character. —JLW

EDITORS’
CHOICE EDITORS’
CHOICE
lLLLm
$129.99 lLLLh
$39.99
GAMES EDITORS’
CHOICE

& TOYS
lLLLh
$19.99

IPAD GAME
XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN
XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the hit console
game about a paramilitary organization
tasked with defending Earth from an alien
invasion, made its mobile debut this year,
and it's as good as its bigger brother (minus
the detailed graphics, of course). You
recruit new troops, discover new high-tech
weaponry for vanquishing the enemy, and
battle it out in randomly generated levels.
A recent update added an asynchronous
multiplayer mode for mixing it up with
friends on the digital battlefield. —JLW

ANDROID
EDITORS’
GAME CHOICE
SPACETEAM
lLLLh
Originally an iPhone-only $3.99
title, Spaceteam debuted
this year on Android and
simply blew away the IPHONE/IPOD
competition with its sheer
oddity. You play over Wi-Fi TOUCH GAME
or Bluetooth with people in YEAR WALK
the same room, and the Year Walk is not like most other
game centers around mobile games. Instead of brief,
shouting things—“Jiggle almost disposable interactions, this
emergency whittler!”, “Set Swedish horror game pulls you in and
Shiftsanitizer to one!”— challenges you with devilish puzzles
aloud to your teammates. that require you to use your phone in
It’s a very silly game, and unusual ways. With starkly beautiful
the lively nature of it makes cut-out graphics, the game does a
it a joy to play. Bust it out great job establishing a moody
any time you're around atmosphere. It has a few cheap
others with cell phones (though effective!) scares, but they
(which is all the time). feel like a self-conscious effort to
EDITORS’
—MAX EDDY
CHOICE make the game scarier. — ME

4 5 lLLLl
FREE
HEALTH EDITORS’
CHOICE

& FITNESS
lLLLh
$4.99

HEALTH GADGET
WITHINGS PULSE
The Withings Pulse takes everything you
love about existing top-notch activity
trackers and adds a nifty built-in heart rate
sensor, giving you a more comprehensive
picture of your overall health. Its elegant
design, informative display, and wealth of
features (including sleep tracking and
displaying a full two weeks of history) make
it our new favorite activity tracker.
— EUGENE KIM

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$99.95

HEALTH APP
RUNTASTIC PRO (ANDROID)
The Runtastic PRO app tracks running,
cycling, hiking, and walking, but does
even more. It also spits out incredible
maps and graphs about your activities
and routes, accurately and consistently.
The PRO version ensures you get auto-
pause, extra modes, and the ability to
search out new routes uploaded by
other users. —JILL DUFFY

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

When I mentioned to the Sheriff’s Office
spokesperson the caller claimed the amount due was
$1,798, he laughed and said, “There are people who owe
The
tons more than that and don’t get arrested.”
scammers
Remember, if there really is an issue of overdue taxes, wanted us to
the IRS—or any government entity for any kind of act quickly,
problem, really—will first send a letter by postal mail. and were mad
And follow up by mail. The initial call won’t come from we didn’t.
law enforcement.
“You don’t get an arrest warrant. You just get a lot of
mail,” Chester Wisniewski of Sophos told me.
The scammers wanted us to act quickly, and were
mad we didn’t. They kept mentioning how it would be
our fault if the arrest happened.

DON’T PANIC—THINK
It helped that we didn’t panic and fall into the trap of thinking we had to do
something right away.
We demanded information. If this kind of request comes from a legitimate
employee of a company, or a member of law enforcement, they will immediately
provide the necessary information, such as the name, extension, and badge
number, so you can verify who they are. If this happens over email, don’t click
on a link, but instead go directly to the organization site and see if you can get
more details.
We immediately called the IRS—not with the number the caller gave us, but
by looking it up on IRS.gov—and also the Sheriff’s Office. In fact, when we
called the Sheriff’s Office, the spokesperson immediately said that we weren’t
the first ones reporting this scam.
You should also try to gather as much information as possible on the person
calling so that you can report it to the real law enforcement. We didn’t get
much, but we got the person’s “name” and phone number.
“Trust your gut. If the call doesn’t seem right, trust that feeling,” Wisniewski
said. He also noted that in these situations, hearing an Indian accent generally
puts him on guard because of past scams originating from Indian call centers. I
am not saying all Indian accents are suspect (my entire family has an accent), or
that non-accented callers are always legitimate. But consider that there have
been a lot of suspicious calls recently and it is one thing to consider if you are
feeling suspicious.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

GET
ORGANIZED
Download and
Organize Your
Facebook Photos

SHOPPING
The Best Websites for
Buying Gadget Gifts

GAMING
A Very Gotham
Christmas

APPSCOUT
Our Favorite Apps
for December

Digital

e
DIGITAL LIFE
GET ORGANIZED

Download and Organize

Your Facebook Photos
If you’re like most people, many of the pictures
you snap live only on Facebook—maybe even
most of them. Here’s how to get them to your
computer and get them under control. BY JILL DUFFY

A
re your photos scattered across a few laptops, your smartphone, and
maybe even the Internet? Are there some on Facebook and Flickr that
you’d really like to consolidate to one location?
Cleaning up all your photos is a crazy-huge project, and you should take it one
step at a time. One of the biggest steps on most people’s lists is downloading
Facebook photos. Facebook is, after all, one of the biggest repositories of photos
on the Web. If that’s the stage you’re at, here’s how to do it.
1 4
HOW TO DOWNLOAD
FACEBOOK PHOTOS
1
Before you start, know that
downloading all your photos from
Facebook takes a little longer than
you might expect, although the time
is mostly spent waiting.
I include that warning because if
you have a project in mind for which
you want to use the photos, this lag

2
could set back your entire progress.
Be sure to initiate a download of your
Facebook photos at least one day
before you actually need to work with
the images.

1. Go to your Account Settings in

Facebook (click the gear icon on the
top right).

2. On the left panel, select General.

3
You’ll see a list of choices, and below
them, in a totally different font, you’ll
see a link reading “Download a copy
of your Facebook data.” Click it.

3. The next few prompts ask you to

verify your email address and start
your archive. Click through them, and
Facebook will send you an email
confirmation message.

4. Now, you’ll likely have to wait a

little while—perhaps half an hour, or
as long as a day or two—until you get
4
another email informing you that the
archive has been created and is ready
for you to download.
5

5. When you receive that email, follow the link to

download the file. Inside, you’ll find a folder called
Not Junk
When you download the
Photos—and a whole lot more. There’s no way to pictures you've uploaded
download only photos and not your other data, but to Facebook, they arrive
at least the pictures are collected into one place. on your computer in
unhelpfully named folders.
Inside the Photos folder, you’ll find more But you can decode the
subfolders, all poorly named with gibberish. But if gobbledygook: Each folder
you look back at your Facebook account, you’ll corresponds to one of your
Facebook photo albums,
notice that each subfolder corresponds to one of with the first in the list
your photo albums. My advice is to rename each usually your collection of
folder to match the name of the album it came profile pictures. Renaming
the folders will help you
from, or a new name if you have a better idea now. find the images you want
The first of your downloaded folders is likely to be more quickly and easily in
your profile pictures (preview a few images to be the future.

sure). Once you know the album, you can rename

this folder—and the others—accordingly. (I would
not bother renaming all the individual image files.)
From there, you can integrate these folders with
your other locally stored images and continue
consolidating all your other scattered images in the
same way.
NOW WHAT? ORGANIZATION
AND STORAGE
I recommend moving your Facebook
photos (and all your other photos,
really) to one location that’s regularly
backed up. If you don’t already have
a location in mind, I’d suggest using
a file-syncing account, such as
Dropbox, SugarSync, Box, Bitcasa, or
Google Drive—there are dozens of
excellent cloud storage solutions.
Some file-syncing and storage
solutions come with a pre-made
“Photos” folder, which you can use as
a dumping ground for your Facebook
pictures and more, or you can create
your own folder.
If you use a file-syncing program to
centralize your photos, definitely
look into the affiliated mobile app.
Several file-syncing providers,
including SugarSync, Dropbox, and
Bitcasa, have an “instant upload”
feature that automatically sends all
the photos you take on a mobile
device to your account. This same
feature works for all photos you take
going forward as well as all the KITSCH AND SYNC?
Once you've taken control of
existing photos on your phone. It’s your photos, saving them to
supremely convenient. a location that's regularly
If you think you’ll remember your backed up with an
automated service such as
photos best by whether you posted SugarSync will help you
them on Facebook, then I would protect your images for
recommend keeping all the Facebook years to come.

pictures grouped together, or at the

very least use the word “Facebook” in
the subfolder names.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

DIGITAL LIFE
HOLIDAY SHOPPING

The Best Websites for

Buying Gadget Gifts
With new shopping sites crafted especially for
unusual gifts and gadgets, now you can give a
present as tech savvy as you are. BY KARA KAMENEC

I
t’s an age-old problem: You want to buy a cool gadget as a holiday gift but
have no idea where to start your search. Luckily, the Internet is making
this easier than ever. You can easily create your entire shopping list and
send gifts with the click of a button, buy products from anywhere in the world
and find smaller retailers you may have missed otherwise, and even access
marketplaces featuring new crowdfunded products from Kickstarter,
Indiegogo, and Rockethub. Here are our favorite sites for helping you find
exactly what you want, even when you don’t know what you want.
1. Firebox
Firebox is an online electronics retailer selling tech toys and gadgets. The site inventory
fits the site’s slogan: “We don’t stop playing because we get old; we get old because we
stop playing.” The homepage has a familiar Pinterest-style layout with product boxes
containing the product name and price, and for newer products a label signifying when
it was added. Product boxes are also marked “New” or with a number indicating its
popularity. The “#1” marker indicates the most popular products ranked using an
algorithm of sales data, social feedback, and user votes. Organize the “pins” or boxes you
see using the site categories of Homepage, New Stuff, Top 50, Gift Finder, Live Feed or
by product. In addition to Home & Lifestyle, Food & Drink, and Gifts, product categories
can also be more offbeat: Gadgets, Toys & Games, Personalized, WTF?, Last Chance,
and Random. In the Gift Finder section you can sort products by price (ranging from $0
to $2 million) or personality type, including Animal Lover, Bookworm, Dirtbag, Enjoys A
Brew, and Pop-Culture Junkie.
2. Quirky
To find something no one else has, check out crowdfunding aftermarket Quirky.
Founded in 2009, Quirky is a community site focused on invention with a connected
online store. Members navigate between three main areas: Invent, Influence, and Shop.
In the Invent section, you vote on submitted ideas at various stages of development.
Every Thursday, the New York City–based company hosts a live broadcast where
experts, friends, and community members drink beer and debate the best ideas
submitted; at the end of each broadcast, a winning idea is selected to be created and
sold in the Shop section. Royalties are allotted to influencers of any suggested ideas as
they are developed. Each product page resembles a Kickstarter project, complete with
investor and invention stats, as well as an added Buy button. You can view detailed
product development and the funding history of any item in the store, plus videos.
3. ThinkGeek
ThinkGeek, the online retailer loaded with “stuff for smart masses,” sells cyberculture
toys and gadgets. The site has gamified shopping with a rewards program to earn Geek
Points, and organizes products by highly specific interests such as Star Wars, Office &
Dorm Pranks, and Zombies & Bacon. With an account you can also create your own
product wish list or search lists of friends and family using their email addresses. To find
gadget gifts you can shop the Gadgets or the Gifts & Interest sections, with have
subcategories organized by price, brand (such as Lego or World of Warcraft), interest
(such as Gamer or Coder Goodies), or audience (such as Gifts for Students). ThinkGeek
features a unique gift discovery aid called Timmy’s Tactical Gift Finder. Simply answer
three questions about gift type, price range, and interests and it generates a custom
selection of gift suggestions.
4. The Gadget Flow
The Gadget Flow is a curated one-stop shop for gadgets featuring products from a
variety of sites, including those mentioned above. Users submit gadgets and feature
products with listings ranging in price from $50 for a 24-hour on-site product post to
$1,299 for a blog post or email blast. The site is organized by Staff Picks, Gift Ideas, Hot
Collections (such as For Pet Lovers and For Photographers), and Categories (such as
Fancy and Useful). Gadget product pages display picture, price, description, the option
to save the product to your Gadget Flow wish list, and a “Buy Now” option that directs
you to a third-party site.
WHAT’S NEW NOW
CHAT

How Social Media Can

Lead to Business Success
Innovator and entrepreneur Cindy Gallop thinks
success in business depends on being yourself—
and making sure others know it. BY JILL DUFFY

Identify
exactly who
you are and
what you
stand for.

W
eb entrepreneur, business consultant, and former advertising
executive Cindy Gallop is more forward on social media than many
business leaders. Gallop, who in addition to her consulting and
advertising work also started IfWeRanTheWorld.com and MakeLoveNotPorn.
com, believes success relies on expressing your true self in all areas of life, from
the boardroom to the bedroom, and on social media. I interviewed Gallop
recently in her lavishly decorated home about how to thrive in the digital age by
having a rich social media and Internet presence. Here’s her advice for how
business leaders—or anyone—can effectively leverage social media.
5. DudeIWantThat
Don’t let the indiscreet name fool you: This site has one-of-a-kind products. Unlike most
shopping sites nowadays, DudeIWantThat has individually curated products hand-
picked by actual people. The company posts three new products every day from various
gadget sites across the Web and strives to be “a geek’s gift guide of gadgets, gear,
novelties and zombies.” Site categories include Home, Gear, Style, Autos, Entertainment,
Food, Fitness, Household, Outdoors, and OMG!!! The homepage promotes the latest
products in a Pinterest-style layout and each box is labeled with subcategories such as
Weapons or Gadgets. The easiest way to find all gadgets on the site is to click on one of
the red gadget labels in a product box, which produces a custom result of all gadget-
labeled products. The gift guide has a search engine-like option for finding the perfect
gift. You can click on product categories organized by recipient, occasion, location, or
popular tags, or you can search the gift guide section with any keyword related to the
gift, person, or occasion.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

DIGITAL LIFE
HOLIDAY GAMING

A Very Gotham Christmas

Seven cool things to see and do in the new
Batman: Arkham Origins. BY MATTHEW MURRAY

DIGITAL LIFE
APPSCOUT

Our Favorite Apps

Android Android Android, iOS iPad

LastPass Password Mgr Premium $1/Mo

l l l l h
With its third version on Android, LastPass introduces a powerful new design that
finally matches the capability of this password manager. With a Chrome-esque
interface and emphasis on search, the app gives you fast access to all the entries
in your Vault. The app’s browser is at the forefront and quickly logs you into
EDITORS’
websites. One of our favorite new features is the improved flow for saving
CHOICE generated passwords, which is far more flexible than before.
1. EMBRACE YOUR PHILOSOPHIES
“If you identify exactly who you are and what you stand
for...then you never have to worry about being caught
doing anything you are ashamed of.”

2. BE CONCISE
“One of the things I recommend to everybody is that
you should have a very short, memorable sound bite
that describes what it is you do.”

3. TRUST EVERYONE
“Social media, to be effective, requires a high-trust
environment that enables you to do business in a real-
time, responsive way, in the way that today’s business
world demands.”

4. MAKE THINGS HAPPEN

“Whether it’s you or somebody else in your business,
having a presence on social media, being responsive to
customers, using it to make things happen in the world
can be very, very powerful.”

5. HAVE CLEAR GOALS

“Absolutely use social media to highlight what you
want to do to improve things for your constituency and
how you want to do it with them.”

PRACTICE WHAT
YOU PREACH
Cindy Gallop’s Manhattan
apartment breaks all the
design rules—but it’s as
clear an expression as
you’ll find of who she is
and what she believes.
DIGITAL LIFE
APPSCOUT

Our Favorite Apps

Android Android Android, iOS iPad

Mr. Number Free

l l l l h
Just because you have a smartphone doesn’t mean you want people calling you all
the time. Mr. Number makes it easy to block calls and text messages from specific
numbers, area codes, code prefixes, or just everyone. It’s dead simple, but with
reverse number look-up, enhanced caller ID information, and lots more, it’s
EDITORS’
incredibly powerful. Even if you’re not famous enough to need extensive call
CHOICE blocking, it’s terrific for avoiding the world (or only an area code) now and then.
DIGITAL LIFE
APPSCOUT

Our Favorite Apps

Android Android Android, iOS iPad

Strava Cycling Free Free

l l l h m
Strava Cycling puts a new spin on bicycling tracking apps. Flick it on, hop on your bike, and
Strava will record where you go, how fast you travel, your change in elevation, and a few other
metrics, and at the end of your ride it will compare your performance on certain segments
against that of other Strava users who have ridden the same stretches. A lot of your
information is public by default and ride tracking is limited (there’s no auto-pause, for
example, or a delay start countdown), but using Strava is exciting—and fiercely competitive.
DIGITAL LIFE
APPSCOUT

Our Favorite Apps

Android Android Android, iOS iPad

XCOM: Enemy Unknown $19.99

l l l l m
2K Games’ hit PC and console turn-based paramilitary strategy game XCOM:
Enemy Unknown has lost little in its transition to the iPad. In defending the Earth
from alien threats you’ll find lots of ways to engage enemy combatants and tons
of options for customizing your dream squad. The story isn’t particularly
EDITORS’
intriguing and the graphics aren’t always of console quality, but the squad-versus-
CHOICE squad action is enough to keep fans forever coming back for just one more game.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

LAST WORD
JOHN C. DVORAK

I
’m not absolutely sure how this phenomenon
of the “selfie”—the photo you take of yourself
with a digital camera held at arm’s length, or
into a mirror—has eluded scrutiny. You’d think
that the sociologists of the great universities would
be all over this one as a phenomenon out of
control. Is it a fad or a trend?
They are done by women and men, but it seems
mostly by teenage girls. Some of the girls who take
Age of the these pics are so adept that they can gather a

Selfie crowd around them and almost make it look as if

someone else was doing the shooting. Kind of.
The only things worse than selfie snapshots are
the hordes of teens, again usually females, who set
up a webcam and begin to “produce” commentary
to post on YouTube. They are usually alone and
grumbling about one thing or another in a way
that’s coy, cutesy, and often hipsterish.
There are a few guys, including adults, who
partake in this sort of amateurish rant or review or
commentary, so the phenomenon is pretty broad-
based. And many of these would-be personalities
develop huge followings. The other day I watched
one of these teens rant about how men are sooooo
dumb. The video had ten million views. Some
people have even acquired sponsors or enough
Google adviews to make a living out of this.
With these substantial followings all of this is
further encouraged. Nobody is going to rant into
the camera for long if no one else watches. What
we do not fully understand is what percent of the
people are actually enthused and not flabbergasted
or stunned by the audacity of the performer.
The same sort of befuddlement exists with the
selfie snapshot. The girls who do these are often in
various dimensions of undress. Or they are
Nobody is going making duck lip faces as if that was attractive. If
to rant into a you have no idea what I am talking about then go
camera for long to Google Images and search for “duck lips.”
if no one else Sticking out a big tongue is also a popular pose.
watches. These pictures are freely traded and posted
mostly on Facebook as a tribute to stupidity along
with pics of hammered college kids. None of this is
a good idea. This selfie phenomenon is generally in
the age bracket of about 13-20 with a few
immature older people constantly shooting selfies.
It fits in with the outrageous popularity and the
show-off nature of Facebook.
It’s services like these where boasting about your
great life is promoted like crazy. And where you
will find plenty of selfies to balance the great text
with great pictures of you and your incredibly
awesome friends.
Will this creepy and distressing phenomenon go
on forever as a mainstay of society? I see nothing
to stop it except possible tendonitis. But tendonitis
on this scale is just wishful thinking.
At some point, you have to ask yourself, “Are we
dealing with a generation of self-absorbed
narcissists?” So far it seems the answer is yes, and
unless we teach these kids differently everything—
not just photos—will only get worse.

[email protected]

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

MASTHEAD
EDITORIAL

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, PC MAGAZINE NETWORK Dan Costa

CREATIVE DIRECTOR, ZIFF DAVIS Cynthia Passanante
MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL EDITIONS Matthew Murray
SENIOR DESIGNER Jackie Smith
SENIOR PRODUCER Mark Lamorgese

FEATURES
MANAGING EDITOR Mitchell Hall
FEATURES EDITOR Eric Griffith
SENIOR FEATURES WRITER Chandra Steele
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Meredith Popolo

NEWS
MANAGING EDITOR Chloe Albanesius
REPORTERS Stephanie Mlot, Angela Moscaritolo, Damon Poeter

PC LABS
MANAGING EDITORS Sean Carroll (software, security, Internet, business, networking),
Wendy Sheehan Donnell (consumer electronics, mobile), Laarni Almendrala Ragaza (hardware)
LEAD ANALYSTS Jamie Lendino (consumer electronics), Samara Lynn (networking),
Michael Muchmore (software), Neil J. Rubenking (security), Joel Santo Domingo (desktops, laptops),
Sascha Segan (mobile), M. David Stone (printers, scanners)
SENIOR ANALYST, DIGITAL CAMERAS Jim Fisher
ANALYSTS Jill Duffy (software, Internet, networking), Will Greenwald (consumer electronics),
Tony Hoffman (printers, scanners), Eugene Kim (mobile), Brian Westover (hardware),
Jeff Wilson (software, Internet, networking)
JUNIOR ANALYSTS Patrick Austin (consumer electronics), Max Eddy (software, Internet, networking)
INVENTORY CONTROL COORDINATOR Nicole Graham
INTERN Jordan Minor

ART, MEDIA & PRODUCTION

SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER Yun-San Tsai
PRODUCERS Gina Latessa, Whitney Reynolds
COMMERCE PRODUCER Arielle Rochette
DESIGNER James Jacobsen
ASSISTANT DESIGNER Teppei Masuda
STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Eddie Schneckloth
VIDEO PRODUCER Chris Snyder

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Tim Bajarin, John R. Delaney, John C. Dvorak, Tim Gideon, Bill Howard, Edward Mendelson, Fahmida Y. Rashid

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

MASTHEAD
CORPORATE

ZIFF DAVIS INC.

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Vivek Shah
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Steven Horowitz
CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Andy Johns
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER Joey Fortuna
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, SALES AND MARKETING Eric Koepele
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Anurag Harsh
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER, DATA SOLUTIONS Bennett Zucker
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT Dan Costa
GENERAL COUNSEL Stephen Hicks
VICE PRESIDENTS Frank Bilich (Sales, PCMag Digital Group), Jason Haddad (sales
development), Diane Malanowski (human resources), Archie Rosenblum (technology),
Jason Steele (commerce)

7 8
the most convenient places. Some hover
just above the ground and others are
confusingly high on the wall. If you need to
charge your iPhone but there’s no surface
nearby on which to rest it, pop it into this
wall mount, which has a cable slot and
connector recess, and can be affixed to

9 10 any flat surface using glue-free tape.

WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GIFTS

10 Holiday Tech Gifts

For Less Than $100
BY MEREDITH POPOLO

1 2

3 4

5 6 Curb
$16.99
thinkbym.com
If you’ve ever lost a paper or presentation

7 8
due to an overheating laptop, you’ll find
comfort in Curb. The silicone triangular bar
props up your laptop enough to increase
airflow under the machine, cooling it and
also preserving battery life. The sleek
solution works with laptops of all sizes and
is available in an assortment of colors

9 10 including white, blue, pink, lime green, dark

gray, light gray, black, and “believer green.”
WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GIFTS

10 Holiday Tech Gifts

For Less Than $100
BY MEREDITH POPOLO

1 2

3 4

5 6 Elroy Bluetooth Earbuds with

Magnetic Docking System
$79.95
meetelroy.com

7 8
Tired of tangled wires? Elroy cuts out the
lower two-thirds of the problem with a
wearable Bluetooth device. The
Kickstarter-backed gadget uses an
activated magnetic attachment system so
your earbuds affix to the docking plates on
the side of Elroy; you can answer phone

9 10 calls, hang up, and pause music by simply

docking or undocking the earbuds. It works
with all Bluetooth-enabled devices and
charges via USB.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GADGETS

Luxury Gifts We Love BY CHANDRA STEELE

RICOH THETA
Want to capture the
whole world in the
camera in your hands—
or at least your view of
it? With the Ricoh
Theta, one touch is all it
takes to get your
surroundings in a
360-degree single shot
with a super-fast
shutter speed. Two
hemisphere-shaped
lenses do the work for
you, and associated iOS
and PC or Mac software
makes it easy to view
and share your photos.
The Theta’s 4GB of
storage will hold about
1,200 images.
$399.95
theta360.com
WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GADGETS

Luxury Gifts We Love BY CHANDRA STEELE

LIBRATONE LOOP
The Libratone Loop gets around: It’s wireless, with AirPlay, DLNA, and proprietary PlayDirect
software that’s Wi-Fi-independent—and it surrounds a room in sound with tweeters and
midrange drivers that direct music throughout the space. The stylish shape of the Loop gets
covered in interchangeable Italian wool pullovers available in a variety of dynamic colors. You
can hang the Loop on the wall or place it on any flat surface by using the included stand.
$499.95 shop.libratone.com
WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GADGETS

Luxury Gifts We Love BY CHANDRA STEELE

RECON JET
If Google Glass is too fragile for your athletic lifestyle, the sports-oriented Recon Jet heads-
up display is made for adventure. It captures the action with an HD camera and microphone,
wirelessly connects to your wearable fitness tech, and has its own built-in GPS and sensors.
The interchangeable battery means you don’t have to slow down to power up, and its
polarized lenses let the Recon Jet double as sunglasses.
$599 jet.reconinstruments.com
WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GADGETS

Luxury Gifts We Love BY CHANDRA STEELE

CLOUD LAMP
Designer Richard Clarkson has brought the outdoors in with some cotton, a cloth cord, and
an Arduino board that controls the weather. The Cloud Lamp, which made its fluffy debut at
the Maker Faire this fall, is a motion-controlled nightlight and speaker, and an atmospheric
way to light things up and set a mood. Want to create an entire sky? Get a set of six
networked clouds for $4,100.
$960 shop.richardclarkson.com
WHAT’S NEW NOW
HOLIDAY GADGETS

Luxury Gifts We Love BY CHANDRA STEELE

FARADAY PORTEUR
This bike may look like a vintage Euro dream but it has a modern secret: It’s electric. The
company says it likes to keep people guessing about where it’s hidden the batteries in the
charming frame but happily touts that charging time is under an hour. One thing you won’t
be in the dark about is how to light your way at night—the bike has high-powered integrated
LED front and rear lights.
$3,500 faradaybikes.com

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

Opinions SEBASTIAN ANTHONY
MITCHELL HALL
IBRAHIM ABDUL-MATIN

Technology’s
blindness is a
double-edged
sword.
SEBASTIAN ANTHONY
THE MILITARY’S CHILD-SOLDIER
FUTURE
Sebastian Anthon OPINIONS

The Military’s
Child-Soldier Future

I
n his book Ender’s Game, which was recently
made into a movie, Orson Scott Card
envisioned a not-so-distant future where
intergalactic war is waged and won by child
soldiers. But unlike today’s idea of child soldiers,
where military regimes equip children with rifles
and send them off to war to kill and be killed, in
Ender’s Game the battles occur inside a
Sebastian
simulator, where no physical harm can befall the Anthony is the
kid. It doesn’t take a genius to see the parallels senior editor of
ExtremeTech.com,
between this and the U.S. military’s move toward
where he regularly
unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and combat writes stories
robots that are controlled by soldiers hundreds about computing,
space, and
or thousands of miles away from the battlefield.
emerging
But wouldn’t it be even more efficient for the technologies.
military to instead use children to control its
killer arsenal of unmanned drones and robots?

TECHNOLOGY IS BLIND
One of the defining—and most powerful—aspects
of technology is that it’s completely impartial. An
iPad, for example, doesn’t care if you’re three or
60 years old, male or female, white or black—as
long as you have the manual dexterity to use the
touch screen, every single one of the iPad’s
capabilities are compelled to do your bidding.
But technology’s blindness is a double-edged
sword. The Internet lets anyone seek information
and resources that can dramatically improve their
quality of life—but it also grants access to bomb-
Sebastian Anthon making guides and other subversive materials
that might have a detrimental effect on children
or other easily influenced groups of people.
Sometimes, because technology is so terrifyingly The military
unprejudiced, we build safeguards to prevent acts first and
such situations—but in most cases, technology, does whatever
like information, strives to be free. When it takes to keep
safeguards are implemented, you can almost its country
guarantee that someone somewhere has created a safe.
tool that will remove those safeguards cheaply
and easily.

MECHANIZED CHILDREN
The military, of course, isn’t so fussed with
safeguards. Society generally tries to impose
some kind of ethical framework upon the military
so we can sleep soundly at night, but at the very
best the military only conforms to these pesky
requirements when it absolutely has to. For the
most part, the military acts first and does
whatever it takes to keep its country safe, and
asks or answers to questions later.
Which leads us neatly onto UAVs and other
remotely or autonomously controlled weapons,
such as robot soldiers. In recent years there has
been a massive push by military and law
enforcement toward unmanned weapons of war
and surveillance. At their most simple, these
UAVs are just surveillance drones that can
provide valuable intelligence that might be
difficult (read: dangerous) to obtain with a
human-piloted vehicle. UAVs can also be
outfitted with weaponry, if blowing up enemy
combatants is more your kind of thing.
UAVs can be autonomous, or they can be
controlled by soldiers on the ground. In the case
of the military, these soldiers are usually situated
at some kind of forward base, where they use a
Sebastian Anthon ground control station (GCS) and the Common
Data Link wireless protocol to remotely control
the UAV. The GCS is essentially the aircraft’s
cockpit, but with fewer knobs and more screens. There is no
Ultimately, control of the UAV comes down to the technical
soldier’s joystick and keyboard inputs. reason that a
As we all know, children are more than capable child couldn’t
of watching a video feed, assimilating the use the GCS to
displayed information, and reacting by blow up
controlling a joystick or hitting some buttons. I America’s
have just described a video game—and, in
enemies.
essence, that’s exactly what the UAV’s GCS, like
Ender’s simulator, is. There is no technical reason
that a child couldn’t use the GCS to blow up
America’s enemies.
There’s also no reason that the GCS should be
limited to just UAVs. Over the last few years,
DARPA and contractors like Boston Dynamics
have clearly been working toward a robot army.
There’s the BigDog mule, the WildCat fast attack
squad, and of course the real-world Terminator,
Atlas. For now, only BigDog is close to military
deployment (carrying supplies for human
soldiers), but it’s only a matter of time until the
U.S. military fields an all-robot army.
Unless it’s autonomous (which is unlikely), this
army will be controlled by hundreds of soldiers
sitting in front of computers. For the soldiers, war
will be a lot like a video game—and kids are really
good at video games.
Worryingly, it makes a lot of sense to have
children control the army of the future. They have
faster reaction times than adults, and they’re
generally capable of learning new skills and tasks
more quickly. Most importantly, children aren’t
fully psychologically developed, and so they
generally lack some of the more complex mental
processes, such as ethics and critical thought.
Sebastian Anthon Whereas Private Smith might question whether
it’s really the right thing to put a bullet between
the eyes of an unidentified target, it is relatively
easy to get a child to wield a robotic weapon of It is relatively
death without flinching. easy to get a
Even more terrifyingly, the military of the child to wield a
future might, as in Ender’s Game, not even tell robotic
child soldiers that they’re remotely controlling weapon of
robots on a battlefield. Instead, the military could death without
create a glorified Call of Duty clone where— flinching.
unbeknownst to the child—the first-person view
is actually being transmitted in real time from a
battlefield robot, and the on-screen enemies are
avatars of real-world terrorists. As we know all
too well, children wouldn’t think twice about
mowing down hundreds of enemy soldiers in
such a setup.
As I wrote this story, I experienced an odd
sensation: growing dread. I’ve written a lot about
the future of technology, but this one had a much
stronger effect on me than usual. I think it’s
because, for once, I’m writing about a not-so-
distant future that can, and probably will,
happen. We’re not talking about realistic android
prostitutes or space elevators that rely on
technology that hasn’t been invented yet. The
military could field a battalion of child-controlled
killer robots today.

[email protected]

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

Mitchell Hal OPINIONS

The Great American

Phone Insurance Rip-Off

R
ecently I woke up from a solid night’s
sleep and stretched for my Samsung
Galaxy Nexus, only to find a black screen
blankly staring back at me.
I repeatedly pressed the power button—
nothing. I removed and replaced the battery—
nothing. I inserted a different battery—nothing. I
removed and replaced the SIM card—nothing. Mitchell Hall is
Starting it while connected to the power cable? the managing
Once again, nothing. editor of features
at PC Magazine.
So I made my way to Verizon for help. “It’ll be He has previously
fine,” I assured myself. “If they can’t fix it and it’s worked at
no longer under warranty, this is exactly why I Minyanville.com,
EmergingMoney.
pay my $5.18 a month for phone insurance.” com, and other
Not so much, as it turns out. Unbeknownst to publications.
me, phone insurance in America is a large, fast-
growing, and lucrative market. If you want to
know what makes it so lucrative, do as I did and
start by reading the fine print of your policy.
Verizon claims to offer to “replace your device as
soon as the next day, [and] avoid paying up to the
full replacement cost when your device is lost,
stolen, damaged, or experiences a post-warranty
defect.” Guaranteed replacement with a new
device sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Read
on to the slightly smaller text, though, and you
see, “It is our goal to provide you with a
replacement device that is the same color and has
the same features, but this cannot be guaranteed.
If the same make and model you claim is not
Mitchell Hal available, a similar make and model will be
substituted. Your replacement device could be
new or remanufactured.”
It goes on. “The most we will spend, for any one During 2010
occurrence to repair or replace Covered Property Asurion was
due to a covered claim is either four hundred raking in
dollars ($400) if your device is found in Schedule monthly
A or one thousand five hundred dollars ($1,500) revenues of
if your device is found in Schedule B, C, D, or E.” around $500
You could be forgiven for thinking $400 sounds million just in
pretty good for your $200 smartphone, until you
America.
remember the unsubsidized replacement cost of
any high-end smartphone usually runs between
$600 and $1,000.
As it turns out, Verizon isn’t even providing the
coverage; it is marketing and reselling insurance
from a low-profile Nashville, Tennessee–based
company called Asurion. Asurion says if a
customer’s phone is lost, stolen, or rendered
incapacitated it will try to send a replacement
within 24 hours. The big four U.S. wireless
carriers offer its insurance exclusively, and
another 14 carriers around the world also relabel
and market Asurion’s “white label” insurance.
According to a November 2010 BusinessWeek
article, Asurion claims that “more than 20
percent of the 293 million mobile customers in
the U.S. pay Asurion to protect their handsets.”
Of course many more Americans have bought
mobile phones in the last three years, and given
that more of them are smartphones (and thus
more likely to need insurance), we can assume
that millions more Americans now pay between
$5 and $12 per month to Asurion, depending on
their model and coverage plan.
If you do some back-of-the-envelope math,
during 2010 Asurion was raking in monthly
revenues of around $500 million just in America.
Mitchell Hal BusinessWeek estimated its profit as between $98
million and half a billion per annum. Again, those
figures must be higher now.
After doing some digging, the insurance I The insurance I
thought would cover the full replacement cost of a thought would
new Galaxy Nexus was sounding less and less like cover the full
the no-hassle experience Verizon’s selling pitch replacement
had suggested. cost of a new
I figured I should go into a store to see if my Galaxy Nexus
lifeless phone was fixable. It wasn’t. “Looks like was sounding
your charging pin is corroded,” the dour Verizon
less and less
rep offered after a cursory two-minute inspection.
like the
Is there anything you can do for me? “Afraid not.”
no-hassle
What’s to stop me just going to T-Mobile and
experience
getting a new phone from them? “Nothing really.”
After bathing in the warm glow of this above-and-
Verizon’s
beyond customer service, I decided it was time to
selling pitch
go home and file my insurance claim. had suggested.
And then the real fun started. It turned out that
Samsung Galaxy Nexus phones had only just
recently ceased production, so I would have to
settle for a replacement. I figured I could handle
LG’s Google Nexus 4—surely the obvious
replacement as it was the successor to the Galaxy
Nexus—for six months until my contract was up
and I could upgrade to a new phone of my
choosing. Like most Nexus owners, I specifically
selected a Nexus because I don’t want vendor or
carrier bloatware; I like having Google’s showcase
model that best integrates its software with the
latest hardware, and prize receiving Android
updates promptly.
Instead, I was offered the choice of an LG
Spectrum or an LG Spectrum 2. Though you
could argue the specs are broadly comparable to a
Nexus’, you couldn’t argue the LG was the top-of-
the-line Android device of its time, unlike the
Galaxy Nexus. It gets better: My replacement
Mitchell Hal would be a refurbished Spectrum or Spectrum 2.
The pièce de résistance? I would have to front a
$99 deductible for a second-hand phone that
goes for $100 on eBay—and I’d already paid I probably
Verizon/Asurion $98.42 in monthly premiums. won’t buy
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the secret to phone
Asurion’s lucrative business model. insurance
My experience is far from unusual. There are again, at least
endless pages of complaints from Verizon, Sprint, not from
AT&T, and T-Mobile customers who have all Asurion.
discovered that the peace of mind they thought
they had wasn’t so peaceful. Consumer Affairs
rates Asurion satisfaction at one star out of five.
My takeaways from this experience: I probably
won’t buy phone insurance again, at least not
from Asurion. I look after my stuff, and out of six
phones I haven’t ever lost or significantly
damaged one (er, apart from that time at the
beach I dove into the ocean complete with the
Nokia N95 I had forgotten was still in my pocket).
If you have a habit of dropping or losing your
phone, then Asurion insurance may be worth it.
But you can also try insuring your phone under a
“personal articles policy” from a regular
insurance company, which could cost half of what
Asurion charges. You often won’t even have to
pay a deductible, and after filing a claim you’ll
simply receive a check to use when purchasing a
replacement. This usually means you get to
choose which phone you replace your old one
with; at the very worst you’ll get the same model
back—unlike with Asurion. As always though,
make sure you understand how the policy works
before you sign, and make sure to check whether
there’s a deductible, what losses are covered, and
how your phone will be replaced.

[email protected]

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

Ibrahim Abdul-Mati OPINIONS

How the Tech Sector Can

Help the Civic Sector

C
alling all analysts, code developers,
software testers, and project managers:
Society desperately needs your
collaborative skills to help our communities. Most
community and civic groups don’t understand
how government works, lack funding, and must
create programming with limited resources. They
also have difficulties holding onto talent and
Ibrahim Abdul-
meeting the needs of the communities they serve. Matin is a
They could use an infusion of people used to consultant with
The Frontier
operating on tight deadlines and dealing with
Project and the
limited budgets and dwindling human resources. author of Green
This idea goes back to 2001 when, in the wake Deen: What Islam
Teaches About
of 9/11, I was working on a project to map
Protecting the
community organizing and activism in the United Planet.
States. I remember walking into the ground-floor
apartment of a coder named David Jacobs. It was
my first time interacting with a coder. His place
was piled high with records and CDs and he
worked like—and was in fact—an artist.
Over the years I came to consider developers
and artists one and the same; they could be a bit
moody at times, but they created brilliant work.
You had to coddle them but also treat them with
deep respect because your idea rested on the
relationship in that moment.
Coders work differently now because
everything requires their attention. There is a
digital strategy, a mobile strategy, internal
operations, HR, and everything in between. A
Ibrahim Abdul-Mati strong technology team is arguably as central to
an organization as its brand and identity. It used
to be that the “webmaster” worked in binges of
creative bursts and output fueled by Diet Coke Now that
and pizza. Or if they were like Jacobs, they ate coders are vital
salads, drank water, and dabbled in yoga. Either to every
way, you gave them requirements and wireframes enterprise,
or just a problem to solve, and they would work they have
their magic. become
Now that coders are vital to every enterprise, incredibly
they have become incredibly diverse and, in some diverse.
cases, high-functioning in the work sector. The
fact that their work touches almost every aspect
of an organization is critical; they do not think of
parts anymore, but in terms of a whole company.
We talk a lot about what the Internet can do
and about the brainiacs who created it, but we
rarely talk about the changes that have taken
place in the way we work in the process. Yes, we
have teams whose members are dispersed all over
the world, but how do these teams collaborate
despite language and cultural barriers and the
lack of face-to-face cues?
The change is profound. You can call it a
transformation from a waterfall model, which is
rooted in industrialization and churning out
products in a traditional factory, to a nimble and
distributed approach where multifunctional
teams play multiple roles and adapt to changes in
real time.
So what can we do? If you are an analyst, code
developer, software tester, or project manager
who has been using agile and scrum
methodology, you actually have muscle memory
the world needs to help manage more than just
products, software, or the latest app.
I love Winston Churchill’s cynical quote that
says, “Democracy is the worst form of
Ibrahim Abdul-Mati government, except for all the others.” It
highlights the messiness of what happens when
people get together to accomplish something. All of our
Interestingly, in countries like America, India, organizations
and the United Kingdom, there are many of these need an
messy, unorganized, and critically needed infusion of this
organizations working hard to make our “new way to
democracies effective. These “frontlines” of our work.”
democracy I define as our co-op and condo
boards, neighborhood associations, religious
groups, youth groups, sports leagues, and even
hunger and anti-poverty programs. All of these
organizations could use seasoned technologists as
part of their team to share what they know of
working in diverse teams and pushing through
challenges to get something done.
The bottom line is that all of our organizations
need an infusion of this “new way to work” and
the skilled professionals immersed in it need to
help share it beyond the tech world.

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

Reviews CONSUMER
ELECTRONICS
Apple iPad Air
Sonos Play:1
Google Nexus 5 (Unlocked)
Samsung Galaxy NX

HARDWARE
Microsoft Surface 2 (32GB)
Asus Transformer Book
T100TA (64GB)
Apple MacBook Pro (15-inch)
Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus

SOFTWARE
McAfee LiveSafe
REVIEWS
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

Apple’s Thinner, Lighter

iPad Is Heavy on Features
Slimmer, lighter, and faster than last year’s Apple iPad Air
model, Apple’s iPad Air is a full-fledged $499-$799 (Wi-Fi);
$629-$929 (Wi-Fi +
computer that’s now so thin and light that you Cellular)
won’t even notice it’s in your bag. Like every L L L L H
EDITORS’
CHOICE
iPad before it, it’s striving to become the
magic book with eternally rewriting pages that seers
and science fiction writers have predicted for millennia.
The iPad Air isn’t a radical break from the iPads before
it. It doesn’t watch your gestures or read your
fingerprint. But its build gets it that much closer to the
dream of the sheet-of-paper-thin form factor where the
hardware disappears, and all that’s left is magic.
PHYSICAL DESIGN AND WI-FI Apple iPad Air
Considerably smaller and lighter than any previous PROS Impressively
non-mini iPad, the Air measures 9.4 by 6.6 by a razor- slim, light. Fast. Very
thin 0.29 inches (HWD), with a much slimmer bezel on good camera. Top-
notch app selection.
the sides of the screen. This iPad also has a flat back, LTE version works
not a convex one like on previous models. It comes in with every U.S. carrier.
Silver (with a white front) or Space Gray (with a black CONS Expensive.
front). At almost exactly a pound for the Wi-Fi model
and a hair heavier (1.05 pounds) for the LTE version,
the Air isn’t feather-light. But it’s airy enough that
throwing it into your bag and carrying it all day doesn’t
faze you, when it might have with older iPads.
Otherwise, this tablet looks and works a lot like an iPad.
The 9.7-inch 2,048-by-1,536 IPS LCD touch screen is
bright, but rather reflective. At 264ppi, it’s at the limit
of my eyes’ ability to distinguish the pixels. It doesn’t
quite match 2,560-by-1,600 super-sharp tablets such as
the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, but I don’t think anyone
will be dissatisfied with the sharpness here.
The new MIMO antenna improves Wi-Fi reception
with the right router. (Yes, Apple’s AirPort Extreme fills
the bill.) Against an 802.11n Meraki MR16 router
connected to our corporate line, I was able to get 30-
33Mbps down on the Air versus only 17-18Mbps down
on last year’s iPad. That will make a big difference when
downloading movies or large files; many high-end
games are now over a gigabyte.
Both the Wi-Fi and cellular iPads pack Bluetooth 4.0;
only the cellular model, which works on every U.S.
carrier interchangeably depending on your SIM card,
includes a GPS radio.
Apple says the Air should last up to 10 hours on Wi-
Fi. That’s on a 32.4Wh battery as compared with the
previous iPad’s 42Wh cell. In our battery test, which
plays a stored video with the screen turned to max
brightness, the Air lasted 6 hours 14 minutes. (The
difference between our result and Apple’s estimate is
the screen brightness setting; halve the brightness, and
you’ll easily hit that 10 hour mark.) That’s 37 minutes longer than the third- and
fourth-generation iPads, which had a larger battery, but not as long as the
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which scored 7 hours 37 minutes on the same test.

THE A7 PROCESSOR AND PERFORMANCE

Apple’s A7 processor, running at 1.4GHz here, is the most efficient on the
market, if not quite the fastest. But its performance is excellent. On the iPad 2
and 3, iMovie in iOS 7 feels genuinely gummy; on the Air, it’s effortless. High-
end games such as Asphalt 8 and Infinity Blade III render beautifully.
Augmented-reality apps update their screens in real time. Yes, the Air has only
1GB of RAM on board, but iOS doesn’t tend to need a lot of RAM because it
doesn’t do much multitasking.
We ran a range of cross-platform benchmarks and some iOS apps to illustrate
how the Air compares with other top tablets. For Web browsing, the
combination of the A7 and Apple’s Safari browser is killer: The iPad outmatched
every other tablet we’ve tested on the Browsermark Web browsing benchmark.
On the GFXMark benchmark, which gauges gaming performance, the A7 pulled
49 frames per second (fps) on screen, which competes well with, but doesn’t top
what you see from Nvidia Tegra 4 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 tablets. On
the Geekbench processor benchmark, quad-core processors like Qualcomm’s
Snapdragon 800 expectedly beat the dual-core A7—Geekbench scales more
smoothly with more cores.
If you’re just comparing the Air with other iPads, of course, there’s no contest.
I got 13 percent higher Browsermark results than the fourth-generation iPad,
and 35 percent better than both the iPad 2 and 3. FAST
FACT
Graphics frame rates were more than double those on
the iPad 2 and 3. A short 720p movie exported from
iMovie in 41 seconds, which is 50 percent faster than on
the fourth-gen iPad and three times as fast as on the
The iPad Air
earlier models.
comes with
CAMERA AND MULTIMEDIA Apple’s iWork
The iPad’s 1.2-megapixel, 720p front camera works well suite, which
for video calls, and the 5MP, 1080p rear camera plays a includes the
role in scanning, shopping, and augmented-reality apps. Pages word
The Camera app is notoriously simple, with your processor,
options limited to HDR, Panorama, Square, or Numbers
Standard. Samsung’s Galaxy-device kitchen sink spreadsheet,
camera this ain’t. and Keynote for
The main camera is quite sharp, with a super-quick presentations.
shutter and good low light performance. It blows out
bright skies, which the HDR mode didn’t fix, and
shutter speeds flirted with blurring moving objects on a
cloudy day in my tests. But take it out of the realm of
snapshots and into computer vision, and it’ll be able to
recognize things well, especially with an excellent, fast-
focusing macro mode that excels at reading text. Video
shot in 1080p ratcheted its frame rates down a bit in
lower light, from 30fps outdoors to 27fps inside.
The front camera takes 1.2MP still shots and records
720p video at 30fps in good light and a very grainy
24fps in low light. Most notably, like all iPad cameras
(but unlike, say, the Kindle Fire’s) it’s designed to work
with the iPad in portrait mode, and the angle and focal
length are perfect for video calling in that orientation. If
you hold your iPad in landscape mode, you have to
angle it oddly to get your face in the picture.
The iPad Air comes in 16, 32, 64, and 128GB models,
starting at $499 and adding $100 each time you double
your capacity. The 128GB tablet has 115GB free for your
files. Multimedia playback is the same here as with
other Apple mobile devices. Natively, the tablet plays
ONE SIZE FITS
(ALMOST) ALL
With good
performance,
strong media
functionality, and of
course its incredible
selection of
available apps,
Apple’s super-thin
iPad Air offers the
best combination of
price and features
for most people.

anything you sync over from iTunes, whether via USB cable or Wi-Fi; there are
(paid) third-party apps to handle music and video formats that the integrated
players don’t support. You can throw your video over to a TV using a Lightning
to HDMI adapter cable ($49) or wirelessly with Apple TV.

CONCLUSION
Because of Apple’s simple interface and its devotion to its developer
community, the iPad is America’s default tablet. If you have an iPad 1 or 2, you
should definitely upgrade—the Retina display makes their screens look leaden,
heavy-handed, and grainy, and there’s impressive power under the hood.
Windows Bay Trail tablets such as Asus’ Transformer Book T100TA will serve
you better for getting work done; Amazon’s simple Kindle Fire offers better
support; the Galaxy Note 10.1 appeals because of its pressure-sensitive pen; the
Sony Xperia Tablet Z can function as a universal remote for your HDTV and
Blu-ray player; and the Barnes & Noble Nook HD+ can get you online, reading
books, and playing games for only $149.
Whereas every other tablet has a specific place, the iPad is everywhere else.
The iPad Air won’t please everyone, but it will please most people. As with the
iPhone 5S, Apple is trying to make both the hardware and the OS step into the
background here, so you can better enjoy the apps. The best iPad, Apple
implies, is one that disappears.

SASCHA SEGAN

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

Sonos Play:1
$199
L L L L m

This Small Wi-Fi Speaker

Puts Out Big Sound
Sonos has been a big name for wireless, multi-room audio for nearly a
decade. It’s typically made expensive hi-fi products, with self-
contained bundles that feature multiple components for equipping an
entire house with audio. Sonos is now stepping into the affordable
EDITORS’
CHOICE
$200 range of wireless speakers, where usually only Bluetooth
speakers like the Bose SoundLink Mini tend to dwell. The Sonos Play:1 is small
enough to fit on a shelf or table but hefty enough to put out plenty of sound, and
although it’s neither portable nor Bluetooth it’s a surprisingly good-sounding,
accessible way to start an expandable, multi-room music system. This speaker is
two-thirds the price of the Sonos Play:3 but offers all the flexibility and a good
amount of performance.
DESIGN Sonos Play:1
The Play:1 is a chunky, slightly cylindrical block 4.7 PROS Incredibly easy
inches wide and deep and 6.4 inches tall. With its two to set up. Affordable.
class D amps, 3.5-inch mid-woofer, and separate Solid low-mids to
highs.
tweeter, the speaker is a hefty 4.1 pounds and definitely
not intended to be portable. It’s available in both black CONS Bass distorts
at maximum volume.
and white versions, but those colors only apply to the Not portable.
top of the speaker and a ring around the base. The Requires a Wi-Fi
majority of the speaker is taken up by a gray metal grille network and a device
with a wired
that wraps around the body. A recessed two-prong connection to the
notebook power port sits on the underside with an router. No wired audio
indentation to run the included 90-degree power cable connections.

out the back. The back of the speaker holds a screw

mount for wall or stand mounting and an Ethernet port
for connecting directly to your router. There aren’t any
3.5mm or RCA inputs to be found; if you want to play
music through the speaker, you need to have it set up as
part of a Sonos network. The top surface of the speaker
is smooth and concave, with an indicator light, and
Play/Pause and Volume Up/Down buttons sitting on a
raised area above the Sonos logo on the front.
To set up a Sonos system, you need to have at least
one device physically connected to your router through
Ethernet. You can plug the Play:1 directly into your

EASY CONTROLS
The few buttons on
the top of the Play:1
make it simple to
start and pause
playback, and adjust
the volume.
WIRELESS BUT
NOT PORTABLE
The Play:1 can be
placed anywhere,
but because of its
significant weight
(more than 4
pounds) it’s not
especially easy to
take with you when
you go on trips.

router, but unless your router is placed somewhere you’ll be listening this isn’t a
very good option. Fortunately, Sonos includes a free Sonos Bridge with the
Play:1. The Bridge plugs into your router to set up the Sonos network, letting
you place the speaker (and any other Sonos speakers you want to use) anywhere
within range, as long as it can be plugged into a power outlet. Each Sonos device
forms and extends the network, so as long as the Bridge is within Wi-Fi range
(approximately 100 feet) of a speaker it should work. Additional Bridges can be
purchased for $49 each to further expand the network.

SETUP
Considering Sonos sets up its own wireless music network with multiple
speaker configurations expanding the network, setup is incredibly easy
(especially compared with other non-AirPlay, non-Bluetooth speakers). Install
the Sonos app on your smartphone, tablet, or computer, then click on “Add
Component.” The prompts will tell you to press a button on the Bridge or two
on the Play:1, and the app does the rest. Once the speakers are registered, you
can set them for different rooms in your home through the app, and even set up
two speakers as a stereo pair for a room. If you have a Sonos Playbar, you can
also set up two Play:1 speakers to serve as rear channels and turn the soundbar
into a surround-sound system.
Because Sonos uses non-AirPlay Wi-Fi, you need to use the Sonos Controller
app to play music instead of your music player or service of choice. You can use
Spotify, TuneIn, SiriusXM, Pandora, Rhapsody, Songza, and several others
through Sonos Controller, and though you need to register your system with
Sonos and get used to the app’s layout, you can easily jump into your favorite
playlists. Apple’s iTunes library is obviously not
available through Sonos, and Google Play Music is
similarly absent, but if you’re a regular SiriusXM or
It lacks in
Spotify listener you’re covered. You can also play any bass, but
music stored on your device, and mix and match tracks the Play:1
into custom queues for your speakers. otherwise
sounds
PERFORMANCE terrific.
It lacks in bass, but the Play:1 otherwise sounds terrific.
Because it’s large enough to have a 3.5-inch woofer and
two amps fed by a wall outlet instead of a battery, it can
get impressively loud and easily fill up a room. This
mostly applies to low-mids and higher frequencies,
though; our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,”
lacked much sub-bass punch and distorted slightly at
maximum volume when the kick drum began. It didn’t
sound garbled, but the mid-woofer was definitely
struggling with the hard thumps.
This distortion issue only came up with “Silent Shout”
at the highest volume setting, and other bass-heavy
sounds didn’t suffer. The bass and drum intro of Blue
Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” sounded just powerful enough to give the song its
dramatic beat. Although Sepultera’s “Biotech Is Godzilla” doesn’t have nearly as
much deep bass, the frantic drums and growling guitar came through
powerfully without overshadowing Max Cavalera’s vocals.
Jazz sounds good on the Play:1, and both John Coltrane’s “Naima” and Miles
Davis’ “So What” sounded rich and full, with the clarity of the instruments
cutting through the grain of the old recordings. The low end reaches sufficiently
deep to make the saxophone and bass sound warm, and the treble is strong
enough to bring out both trumpet and piano notes without sounding bright.
The Sonos Play:1 is the most affordable Sonos speaker yet, and a strong
performer despite its weak bass. At $200 it’s one of the simplest and most
affordable ways to start a comprehensive multi-room audio system, and it can
be combined with other Sonos speakers for excellent stereo or surround
performance. If you want a portable speaker to take anywhere, a Bluetooth
speaker such as the Bose SoundLink Mini is a better choice. But if you want to
build a home audio system, the Sonos Play:1 is an excellent starting point.

WILL GREENWALD

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

The Best Unlocked Android

Phone You Can Buy
The Nexus 5 is finally here—and it was worth Google Nexus 5
the wait. Thanks to Google’s obvious subsidy, (Unlocked)

it is simply the best value for an unlocked $349

L L L L m
smartphone on the market. Manufactured by
EDITORS’
CHOICE
LG, it features a host of improvements over
last year’s Nexus 4, including a 1080p 5-inch display,
LTE (finally!), and Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest
version of Google’s wildly popular OS. All of that
combines to make the Nexus 5 the best unlocked
smartphone out there—and that’s despite some rather
serious problems we found with the phone’s camera.
DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND CONNECTIVITY Google Nexus 5
The Nexus 5 is incredibly well balanced to hold, and (Unlocked)

feels lighter than the iPhone 5S even though it isn’t. The PROS Killer price for
Nexus 5 measures 5.43 by 2.72 by 0.34 inches (HWD) an unlocked
smartphone. Fast
and weighs 4.59 ounces. It’s encased in a comfortable, next-generation CPU.
rubberized soft touch housing. The left side contains a Beautiful full-HD
volume rocker switch, the top edge holds a 3.5mm display. Android 4.4
KitKat is better than
headphone jack, and the right side has a Power button ever.
at the top and a micro SIM slot below it. The bottom
CONS Camera
edge holds a mono speaker and a microphone. performance trails
The back panel features a large Nexus logo, a small Samsung, HTC.
LG logo, and curiously, a raised half-inch circle for the Camera app is
difficult to use.
camera sensor, with an LED flash below it. The raised
portion just looks strange; it appears durable, with a
thin plastic ring around the edge, so I’m not convinced
it will scratch easily or anything. It’s just not a clean
design. But this is otherwise a beautiful device from a
hardware standpoint.
The IPS display offers full-HD 1,920-by-1,080-pixel
resolution, an extremely tight 445ppi, and Corning
Gorilla Glass 3. The screen looks sharp, colorful, and
detailed, although it’s not quite as bright as the
Samsung Galaxy S4’s. Typing with the on-screen
keyboard is super-easy in portrait or
landscape mode. Google defaults
the haptic feedback to be
extremely subtle, which I
actually liked, and I don’t
normally like haptic
feedback much. The built-
in sensor complement
includes GPS, gyroscope,
accelerometer, compass,
proximity, ambient light,
pressure, and hall effect, the
latter of which detects
magnetic field changes.
For connectivity, the Nexus 5 delivers a ton of bands,
including quad-band EDGE
(850/900/1,800/1,900MHz), North American CANDY IS DANDY
WDCMA bands 1/2/4/5/6/8/19 and LTE bands Android 4.4 KitKat is
1/2/4/5/17/19/25/26/41, and global WDCMA the Nexus 5’s OS of
choice, and it offers
1/2/4/5/6/8 and LTE 1/3/5/7/8/20. There’s also lots of new features
802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi on both the 2.4 and 5GHz that improve both
bands, plus Bluetooth 4.0 LE and NFC. I experienced usability and
performance.
no problems when connecting to our WPA2-encrypted
5GHz test network. Outdoors in
Midtown Manhattan, I saw roughly
3-4Mbps down and 3Mbps up on a
series of Speedtest.net tests, which
reflects the AT&T’s increasingly
crowded LTE network.

CALL QUALITY, OS, AND APPS

This is a good phone for voice calls.
Voice quality through the earpiece was
fantastic, with a clear, warm, loud
tone that didn’t vibrate the handset
and yet delivered crystal-clear caller
voices. Reception was solid. Calls
sounded fine through a Jawbone Era
Bluetooth headset, and I had no
problem triggering voice dialing over
Bluetooth. The mono speakerphone
sounded clear and fairly loud, with
just a touch of distortion at the top
volume setting.
The 2,300mAh battery is non-
removable; on the plus side, however,
the Nexus 5 supports wireless
charging out of the box.
Under the hood is a 2.26GHz quad-
core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800
processor, a 450MHz Adreno 330
GPU, and 2GB RAM. This is one fast
phone, with smooth animations, task switching, and scrolling. It’s faster and
smoother than the iPhone 5; everyone who complains about Android’s
inherently jerkier scrolling will still see some of that when browsing the Web,
but not in the lightning-fast home screen or app drawer animations. This phone
is also ideal for gaming: Asphalt 8 looked incredible, with smooth frame rates
and only an occasional hint of slowdown during the most hectic scenes.
The Nexus 5 sports Android 4.4 KitKat, which uses the enjoyable natural-
language “Okay Google”–style voice activation first seen on the Moto X;
includes an immersive mode that lets an app take up the entire display; and
features smart caller ID that matches unknown callers with Google Maps
listings, priority contacts, and full-screen album and movie art whenever the
device is locked. The Hangouts app aggregates SMS, MMS, video calls, and
other conversations into one view. Android enthusiasts will appreciate the new
faster multitasking, thanks to improved memory management with greater
protection from apps consuming large amounts of RAM.

MULTIMEDIA AND CAMERA

Our 32GB loaner model had 26.42GB of free internal storage. Music tracks
sounded clear through Plantronics BackBeat Go Bluetooth earphones and
Klipsch X7i wired earphones. Videos up to 1080p played smoothly and looked
sharp and vibrant in full-screen mode. My Xvid files wouldn’t play, but I had no
problem with other formats. Google’s Play Store gives you access to millions of
downloadable songs, plus thousands of movies and TV shows, all of which
follow you from device to device as they’re stored in the cloud.
The 8-megapixel rear-facing camera offers optical image stabilization and
autofocus, plus a new HDR+ mode that combines a series of burst photos into a

MISSED SHOT
The Nexus 5’s rear-
facing camera takes
okay photos, but
the camera and its
controls aren’t as
polished as you’ll
find on other top
smartphones.
single improved photo. Camera performance is good,
but not outstanding; several photos outdoors had lower The Nexus 5 is
contrast than are customary on today’s top phones, and a beautiful
the Nexus 5 struggled with exposure, blowing out smartphone
highlights from the sky. Indoor photos had some noise with a
and lacked detail. Test photos and 720p videos from the subsidized
1.3MP front-facing camera looked somewhat fuzzy, price that’s
about halfway between VGA and a top-of-the-pack impossible to
front-facing camera like the Nokia Lumia 1020’s. beat.
Worse, the camera and video controls themselves are
essentially broken. To modify various settings, you
swipe up from the bottom of the display, which presents
a half-circle with icons depending on the mode you’re
in. You’re supposed to swipe your finger across each
one until you get to the one you want, and then swipe
up to see a second half circle with the options on each
submenu. But I could never get this to work reliably;
testing each camera’s photo and video recording was a
royal pain, as I continuously stumbled around in white
balance and exposure settings that I never meant to
adjust. I’d hate to put up with this on a daily basis.

A STELLAR PHONE WITH SOME CAVEATS

The Nexus 5’s only sticking point right now is the
camera issue: Will Google fix it promptly in a firmware
or software update? I can’t imagine they won’t, which is
why I’m somewhat hesitantly awarding this phone an
Editors’ Choice. It’s tough to come up with any real
reason to buy the Play Editions of two top existing
smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC
One, because they cost $250 to $300 more. In the end,
the Nexus 5 is a beautiful smartphone with a subsidized
price that’s impossible to beat. That leaves me with one
final voice command: Okay Google, when are you going
to fix Android 4.4’s camera app?

JAMIE LENDINO

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

This Mirrorless Camera Is

Better as a Tablet
In a year in which we’ve seen everything from Samsung
affordable full-frame mirrorless cameras to the Galaxy NX
pocketable APS-C Ricoh GR, the Samsung Galaxy NX $1,599.99 (body only)
L L L m m
still takes the cake as 2013’s most ambitious digital
imaging product. The mirrorless shooter features the
same 20-megapixel image sensor and processing engine
as our Editors’ Choice NX300, and the same 4.8-inch
touch screen and Android functionality as the Galaxy
Camera. But the Galaxy NX lacks the physical controls
serious photographers expect, and is priced high
enough to deter more casual shooters. Early adopters
and Android aficionados might swoon over this one, but
it’s no threat to any good, high-end mirrorless camera.
DESIGN, FEATURES, AND CAMERA APPS Samsung
The Galaxy NX is based on the NX20 in terms of Galaxy NX
design. It has the same grip and EVF (decently sharp at PROS Impressive
1,440k dots, if less than ideal in low light), but instead image quality. Cellular
connectivity. Big
of loading the rear with control buttons, there’s that big, touch screen. Minimal
sharp touch screen (921k dots). The NX measures 4 by shutter lag. Quick
5.4 by 1 inches (HWD) and weighs in at 1.1 pounds continuous shooting.
16GB internal storage.
without a lens—just a bit bigger and heavier than the Integrated EVF. Fast
NX20. The Galaxy NX features a deeper handgrip; its Android performance.
body is a bit slimmer behind, and it extends out further. Includes Lightroom
software, 50GB
The camera is comfortable to hold, though I did find Dropbox storage.
myself accidentally activating touch-screen controls
CONS Expensive.
when I brought the camera to my eye for a shot. Minimal physical
There aren’t many physical controls. There’s a power controls. Some
button on the top plate, along with the shutter release compatibility issues
with popular apps.
and record button. And one dial on the rear of the top
plate can scroll left or right (it doubles as the volume
control for Android apps), or you can push it in to
select functions. By default the dial toggles between
shooting modes, but may be reconfigured to also
adjust shooting settings or control the highlighted
function at the top of the screen and toggle
between active settings. The dial’s
functionality, however, makes
it easy adjust the wrong
setting, and to change
exposure compensation,
aperture, or ISO you need
to move the dial in the
opposite direction than
you may expect. All other
settings are controlled via
the touch screen.

ANDROID AND NETWORK

PERFORMANCE
One of the selling points of using
Android as the operating system for this
camera is the ability to use popular photography apps
with a large sensor and interchangeable lenses.
Facebook and Twitter had no issues; Instagram didn’t
focus properly or load images stored on the memory Like the Galaxy
card; and Vine wouldn’t autofocus at all and failed to Camera before
post videos more often than not (though direct it, the Galaxy
uploading to Facebook worked). If you use the included NX has a tablet
Lightroom application to manage your photo library, feel, but is
you’ll notice the NX’s puzzling and unnecessarily nonetheless a
complicated file-naming structure: based on date and two-handed
time, with different filenames for Raw and JPEG
device.
images. Also included is 50GB of free DropBox storage.
Like the Galaxy Camera before it, the Galaxy NX has a
tablet feel, but is nonetheless a two-handed device. The
NX is powered by a quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos 4412
processor with 1GB RAM; it’s not the fastest setup, but
it pays off with reliably brisk and responsive
performance comparable to what you get from the
Nexus 7 on productivity and gaming apps alike. The NX
runs Android 4.2.2 and has Samsung’s familiar
TouchWiz styling throughout; you have unbridled
access to the Google Play store, and the camera ran
every app we tested (though you’ll need a headphone to LEND A LENS
The Samsung Galaxy
hear music or sound effects). There are no dialer or NX does not come
SMS apps, but the NX does have a SIM card slot and with a lens, and can
cellular connectivity. use any of a wide
variety of models
from Samsung’s
catalog.
LET’S (NOT) GET
PHYSICAL
The Galaxy NX lacks
most physical
controls; you have to
do almost everything
with the touch
screen.

Unsurprisingly, the NX features robust media support for an array of audio

and video formats. Video looked sharp on the 4.8-inch display, and the NX
supports H.264, MP4, DivX, Xvid, and AVI video at resolutions up to 1080p.

NETWORK CONNECTIVITY
The Galaxy NX supports LTE on the AWS, 700, 850, 1,900, 2,100, and
2,600MHz bands, and HSPA+ on the 850, 1,700, 1,900, and 2,100MHz bands.
That means it’ll work with T-Mobile and AT&T’s LTE and 3G networks in the
U.S., with support for 3G roaming internationally. The NX qualifies as a tablet,
so it’s eligible for T-Mobile’s free 200MB monthly data plan.
We tested with a T-Mobile SIM card in New York City, where the NX pulled in
2-3Mbps down and around 1Mbps up on the carrier’s HSPA+ 21 network. Wi-Fi
speeds were faster. The NX supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz on 802.11b/g/n
networks, and we managed 10-15Mbps downsteam and 5.79Mbps upstream on
our 5GHz corporate network.

CAMERA PERFORMANCE AND IMAGE QUALITY

Focus speed and burst rate are both impressive. The shutter lag is only 0.15
second in good light, and the Galaxy NX locks focus with the 18-55mm lens in
about 1.3 seconds in dim light. In terms of burst shooting, the NX fared the
same regardless of whether you opt for the 16GB internal memory or a
removable memory card. It shoots at up to 7.4 frames per second for up to five
Raw or Raw+JPEG images, or up to 25 JPEGs. It does
take a little time to write all of these images to a
memory card—about 11.5 seconds for Raw+JPEG or
JPEG, and 8.4 seconds for Raw. The time to
That said, the time to first shot is just too slow for a first shot is
camera of this class. The Android boot process makes just too slow
the duration excessively long (26 seconds); and it takes for a camera of
3.6 seconds just to bring the NX out of standby to fire this class.
your first shot, or 2.2 seconds if you’re at the Android
home screen. (The processes are a shade quicker when
recording to internal storage rather than a memory
card.) The NX300, which uses the same image sensor
and processor as the Galaxy NX, is much quicker to
start and capture an in-focus shot (1.1 seconds).
We evaluated the Galaxy NX as a body only, but in
testing with the standard $100 18-55mm kit lens we
used with the NX300, we discovered that the NX
doesn’t do automatic in-camera correction of lens
distortion as the NX300 does.
Imatest also revealed that the Galaxy NX keeps
noise under 1.5 percent through ISO
6400, slightly better than we saw
with the NX300. The corresponding
Raw file does a better job with color
and detail, and although it’s a bit
grainy, the grain is in a tight pattern
that doesn’t distract from the
content of the image. An ISO 12800
Raw image is a bit noisier, but still
impressive in quality, but the JPEG
engine wipes away a bit too much
detail at that ISO for my tastes.
JPEGs tend to be a little bit muted in
terms of color when compared with
their Raw counterparts, but you can
tune the color output in-camera if
you prefer a more vivid image; and if
you prefer less noise reduction in the
JPEG output, that can be adjusted to Off, High, Low, or
Normal (the default).
It’s not tough
The Galaxy NX records HD video at 1080p30,
to find a
1080p24, 720p60, or 720p30 in MP4 format, and low-
camera with
resolution recording at 480p360, 480p30, or 240p30.
The footage looks sharp, smooth, and colorful at
similar image
1080p30, and the internal mic picked up voice sound
quality and
clearly. There was some noise audible on the soundtrack snappier start-
when adjusting the focal length of the 18-55mm lens, up time for
but there was no added audio as the camera refocused less money.
as the scene in front of it changed; the video autofocus
is impressively speedy. There’s a combo mic/headphone
jack, a micro USB port, and a micro HDMI port, all
located on the left side of the camera. The battery
compartment features one slot for a micro SIM card
and another for a microSD memory card. Samsung
doesn’t include an external battery charger with the
Galaxy NX; you’ll have to plug it into the wall to charge,
or spend $70 on a bundled charger and extra battery.

CONCLUSION
Despite the superb imaging library, some excellent
available lenses, and good performance as an Android
device, the design compromises (including lack of
physical controls) made in order to accommodate that
huge touch screen and the presence of Android hinder
the Galaxy NX’s usability as a camera. It’s not tough to
find a camera with similar image quality and snappier
start-up time for less money—the NX300, for example,
or the higher-end Olympus OM-D E-M1. The Galaxy
NX is impressive for a first attempt, but most shooters
looking for top-notch image quality and connectivity
will be better served with a mirrorless camera or D-SLR
with Wi-Fi or an Eye-Fi memory card.

JIM FISHER

EUGENE KIM

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
HARDWARE

A Better Windows RT Tablet

When the original Microsoft Surface RT came Microsoft
out a year ago, it was a very good product with Surface 2
(32GB)
a well-executed design and powerful
$449
productivity tools, but it was difficult to
EDITORS’ L L L L m
CHOICE
recommend to all but the most ardent of early
adopters. The new Microsoft Surface 2 offers even
better productivity tools, improved keyboard
accessories, a smoother Windows RT experience, and a
wide selection of familiar software, including Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, and now Outlook. Throw in a more
elegant design, dramatically better performance, and
longer battery life, and the Surface 2 reigns supreme
over a minor kingdom.
DESIGN Microsoft
Microsoft has made several changes to the first Surface Surface 2
(32GB)
RT’s design, but the company has wisely decided to not
change what works. The tablet still has the slim slab PROS Faster
hardware. Improved
design, complete with the lightweight VaporMag display, kickstand.
magnesium-alloy construction and angular beveled All-day battery life.
edges. This time around, however, the Surface 2 is a Includes full Office RT
2013 suite, Best of
little bit thinner (0.35 inch) and a little bit lighter (1.42 Skype package,
pounds sans keyboard), and the stealthy black color is 200GB SkyDrive
now a light silvery gray that appears nearly white in storage.

certain light. CONS Keyboard

The display has also gotten an upgrade. Color quality covers sold
separately. App
is better, and the resolution has been upped from 1,366 selection still
by 768 to the full-HD 1,920 by 1,080. It pales in (relatively) small.
comparison to the Apple iPad’s 2,048-by-1,536 Retina Windows RT 8.1 is still
limited, confusing.
display, but stacked against what you’ll find on other
Windows RT tablets, it’s a giant step up. The capacitive
touch display also tracks five points simultaneously,
which is enough for one- or two-handed use.
Along the back of the Surface 2 tablet is a built-in
kickstand, which, unlike the one on the Surface RT,
allows for two positions instead of one. The first
TAKE A STAND
The stand on the
Surface 2 extends
outward at a wider
angle, so you can
easily view the
screen from more
positions.
position props the kickstand at the same 22-degree position seen on the
previous iteration, which is perfect for use on a desk or table by a person of
average height; the second position opens to 55 degrees, which is better if you’re
taller or want to use the tablet balanced on your lap.
Microsoft has also updated the accompanying keyboard covers, with the
TypeCover ($129.99) sporting a quieter key mechanism and the TouchCover
($119.99) an improved array of sensors for more accurate typing. Both
keyboards still conveniently connect to the excellent magnetic docking system,
neither contains a battery to extend your tablet’s uptime, and both are still sold
as separate accessories (which mostly seems like a sneaky way for Microsoft to
squeeze an extra hundred bucks out of customers).

FEATURES
On the right-hand edge of the tablet you’ll find two ports: USB 3.0 and micro
HDMI, and a microSD card slot. On the left are the headset jack and physical
volume controls. All other connections are wireless, with dual-band 802.11n
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. The Surface 2 also includes the usual tablet sensors:
accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and ambient light detection through
the onboard cameras.
The Surface 2 features a front-facing 3.5-megapixel webcam; it’s ideal for
Skype, producing clear images and good 720p video capture. The rear-facing
camera increases the resolution to 5MP, and is set at a slight angle so as to
offset the tilt of the tablet when using the kickstand; you’ll need to hold the
Surface 2 at an angle when holding it in your hand. And though this angle works
well for the first kickstand position, it doesn’t correct for the angle of the
second. It’s just another feature that manages to be both thoughtfully designed
and frustrating at the same time.
The Surface 2 is available with either 32GB of internal storage ($449), as seen
in our review unit, or 64GB ($549). Microsoft covers
the Surface 2 with a one-year limited warranty.

SOFTWARE AND APPS

With the Windows RT 8.1 update, many of the same
changes seen on Windows 8.1 come to the Surface 2’s
tablet OS as well. The Start button is back when in
Desktop mode, and the Start screen’s tiles can be
resized and repositioned with greater flexibility. The
biggest change in the OS is that the Desktop tile has
been removed, so you have no direct path there from
the Start screen. And Office RT 2013 has been expanded
to now include an RT-friendly version of Outlook in
addition to the variants we already had of Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and OneNote included with the original
Surface RT.
Other extras include 200GB of cloud storage via
Microsoft SkyDrive, which both bolsters the 32GB of
onboard storage and makes it easier to share and sync
files with non-RT PCs. If you want to really integrate the
Surface 2 into your circle of personal computing
devices, SkyDrive is essential. Microsoft’s offer only
lasts for two years, however, after which you’ll need to
pay for the same amount of storage.
Though Microsoft also bundles in the Best of Skype
package, which adds one month of free international
calling and free Wi-Fi through Skype hotspots along
with the normal Skype app, the overall selection of apps
still feels paltry. There are over 100,000 Windows RT
apps available now, which is better than when the
Surface RT launched, but that’s still a lot less than you’ll
find on Apple or Android tablets—and there are lots of
apps that simply don’t have RT versions.

PERFORMANCE
The Surface 2’s 1.7GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 quad-core
processor and 2GB of RAM are a step up from what we
saw in the Surface RT. On our BrowserMark 2.0 test,
the Surface 2 left the previous Surface RT in the dust, offering a much faster
browsing experience. But this ARM processor means that the Surface 2 doesn’t
support any traditional Windows software—including our normal batch of
Windows benchmark tests.
Although it has the same-size 31.5Wh battery as the Surface RT, the Surface 2
stretches the available charge for several hours more, lasting 14 hours 51
minutes in our battery rundown test. By comparison, the leading Dell XPS 10
lasted 11:34, well ahead of the Asus Vivo Tab RT (9:37) and the fourth-
generation Apple iPad (5:36). The previous Surface RT lasted only 7:45. But
both the Dell XPS 10 and the Asus Vivo Tab RT also offered a docking keyboard
with a secondary battery, extending the life of the tablet to 20:36 and 15:00,
respectively. Though the Surface 2—thanks to more efficient hardware—offers
nearly as long battery life on its own, the addition of a secondary battery would
extend it even further.

CONCLUSION
Thanks to its processor, battery life, lower price, and expanded productivity, the
Surface 2 is the clear leader among Windows RT tablets, and thus our new
Editors’ Choice for that category. But dozens of other tablets have come on the
market recently—such as the Asus Transformer Book T100TA—that boast full
versions of Windows 8.1 and better overall value. If you want Office and Skype
on an affordable tablet with a high-resolution screen—and you don’t require the
full Windows experience—the Surface 2 is the best there is.

BRIAN WESTOVER

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
HARDWARE

The Next-Generation
Netbook Is a Tablet
The netbook scene used to be filled with sub- Asus
$500 low-powered laptops that were just Transformer
Book T100TA
powerful enough for general use and small (64GB)
enough to take anywhere. Then tablets such as $399
EDITORS’
CHOICE
the iPad and Galaxy Note 10.1 wiggled their L L L L H
way into that spot, but required giving up the full-
featured desktop browsers, legacy Windows programs,
and browser plug-ins that only work on full PCs. Enter
the Asus Transformer Book T100TA, a fully functional
Windows 8.1 PC that acts equally well as either a tablet
or a clamshell netbook. It’s the first hybrid tablet we’ve
seen that can ignore the limitations of mobile OS– Asus
powered tablets, for the same or better price. If you Transformer
Book T100TA
need to replace your pre-2011 netbook with something (64GB)
faster, longer lasting, and more modern, then the Asus
PROS Can run all
Transformer Book T100TA is what you want. Windows software.
Lightweight.
DESIGN AND FEATURES Incredibly affordable.
Excellent battery life.
The Transformer Book T100TA is the spiritual Easy to charge.
successor to Asus’ previous attempt at a hybrid laptop, Supports dual-band
the Vivo Tab RT, which came in a similar-looking Wi-Fi. Includes
keyboard, 1TB of free
configuration. The Transformer Book measures about cloud storage for one
0.41/0.93 by 10.5 by 6.75 inches (HWD), 0.41 inch thick year, full Microsoft
alone as a tablet and 0.93 inch thick with the included Office Home &
Student 2013.
keyboard dock. This compares well with Microsoft’s
slightly larger Surface 2, though that one doesn’t CONS Limited system
memory. Finicky
include a keyboard in the base price. The Transformer touchpad. Little free
Book T100TA’s polycarbonate body isn’t quite as nice as storage space.
the Surface 2’s (it uses VaporMG instead), but its Smallish keyboard.

rounded edges are comfortable to hold alone or docked

to the keyboard.
The tablet portion of the system weighs only 1.23
pounds, making it only slightly heavier than Apple’s
new iPad Air; adding the keyboard ups the weight to 2.4
pounds. The 10.1-inch IPS screen only has a 1,366-by-
768 resolution, compared with the 1,920-by-1,080
resolution you see on the
Surface 2—a forgivable disadvantage given the KEYED IN
Transformer Book’s price and other features, and unless Unlike some
competing tablets,
you have an eagle’s eyes you probably won’t miss the the Transformer Book
extra pixels at this screen size. The stereo speakers are T100TA comes with a
loud enough to fill a small room, and they surprisingly full detachable
keyboard.
don’t clip out all the bass notes. Sound effects on movies
such as The Avengers came in much clearer than
expected for a tablet. Streaming video from several
online services played smoothly and largely stutter-free.
This all helps the Transformer Book look and sound like
it costs much more than it does.
On the tablet you’ll find a micro USB port that can be
used for both charging and as a regular USB port (with
an adapter). The tablet also has a micro HDMI port,
microSD card reader, volume control, power button,
headset jack, and a physical Windows/Start button on
its edge. Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) 802.11a/b/g/n
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 are the built-in wireless
protocols. The keyboard dock doesn’t sport its
own battery pack and isn’t backlit, but it has a
full-size USB 3.0 port and is comfortable to
type on. Unfortunately, its multitouch
touchpad had intermittent trouble registering
swipes as calls to the Charms menu and
sometimes had a delay in tracking initial
touches, though this shortcoming is
negligible if you hook up an external mouse
or just use the five-point touch screen most
of the time. Because the system only has
about 31GB free after you activate the
included Microsoft Office Home and
Student 2013 suite, we recommend
supplementing the storage with up to
64GB more with the microSD card
reader or using the included
“unlimited” Asus WebStorage
(nominally 1TB, free for one year).
In addition to Office, the
Transformer Book T100TA has
Amazon’s Kindle app, Netflix, Skype,
and a few Asus apps preinstalled. On the whole,
it’s a good mix, and welcome. The Transformer Book
T100TA automatically changes the screen color balance
toward a more yellow/sepia tone while you’re using the
Windows 8.1 Mail, Reader, and News apps. This is Asus’
Reading Mode setting, to which you can add other apps
or turn off entirely for a consistent color palette.
Reading Mode may make it easier to read text-based
communication by toning down the blue/white cast of
the screen. The T100TA comes with a standard one-year
warranty and a 30-day Zero Bright Dot display
guarantee so you can exchange your unit if you detect
a bright, stuck pixel anywhere on your display.
PERFORMANCE
The Atom Z3740 processor in the Transformer Book is one of the new 2-watt
CPUs based on Intel’s Bay Trail architecture, which finally makes Atom usable
for general Windows purposes. (The system also has 2GB of system memory.)
With its built in 31Wh battery, the Transformer Book managed an excellent 11
hours 20 minutes on our battery test—better than we saw with either the
Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 10 (7:20) or the Dell Latitude 10 (9:20), and considerably
more than the 4:10 we got from our budget laptop Editors’ Choice, the Dell
Inspiron 15 (I15RV-6190 BLK).
The Transformer Book held up well against that full-size Inspiron 15, scoring
a remarkable 2,485 on PCMark 7 (compared with the Dell’s 2,117), though both
destroy the results we saw from all systems we’ve tested using the previous-
generation (Clover Trail) Atom processors.
The Transformer Book T100TA had no problem with basic Photoshop CS6
operations, but struggled with the strenuous rendering filters we use in our
official benchmark test. The T100TA also made short work of our Handbrake
video encoding test, finishing in 2 minutes 41 seconds—a quarter of the time
older Atom systems have needed. (The Pentium-powered Dell Inspiron 15 just
edged its way past the T100TA at 2:23.) Basically, Asus’ new system has the
wherewithal to perform day-to-day tasks and light to moderate multimedia
creation.
The T100TA
trounces
many other
similarly
priced
systems to
give you the
most bang for
your buck.

CONCLUSION
The Asus Transformer Book T100TA is the first Atom-powered consumer PC
that we feel comfortable wholeheartedly endorsing following the virtual death
of the netbook after 2011. Because it runs the full Windows 8.1, lasts all day on
battery, and works well in both the traditional laptop form factor and as the
touch-enabled tablet people have come to expect in recent years, the T100TA
trounces many other similarly priced systems to give you the most bang for your
buck. We’re awarding it our Editors’ Choice award for entry-level hybrid
tablets—it’s the first system of its kind we’ve seen that can replace both a mobile
tablet and a laptop to become your primary PC on a budget.

JOEL SANTO DOMINGO

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
HARDWARE

Apple’s High-End Laptop Is

Thinner, Better Than Ever
Take last year’s excellent MacBook Pro with Apple MacBook
Retina display, make the chassis thinner, then Pro 15-inch
(Retina display)
add a powerful Intel Core i7 processor with
$1,999
integrated graphics that performs like discrete
EDITORS’ L L L L L
CHOICE
graphics, and what do you get? This year’s
MacBook Pro is the pinnacle of laptops designed for
über-picky power users who need to take their time-
sensitive projects with them.
DESIGN AND FEATURES Apple MacBook
The new MacBook Pro looks identical to last year’s, Pro 15-inch
(Retina display)
with the same aluminum-and-glass construction, the
same 15.4-inch, 2,880-by-1,800-resolution IPS display, PROS Brilliant screen.
Long battery life.
and the same chiclet-style backlit keyboard that’s Includes iLife, iWork
flanked by speaker grilles. Aesthetically, the MacBook's software suites.
design is a balanced one, though number crunchers Equipped with two
Thunderbolt 2, HDMI
may miss not having a keypad for spreadsheet data ports. Integrated
entry. The sides of the chassis are vented to let air flow graphics performs like
through the base of the laptop, cooling the processor discrete.

and batteries. The large multitouch trackpad is centrally CONS Glossy screen.
located and responds instantly to commands. The Ethernet requires
adapter.
keyboard is as comfortable to type on as previous
models’, is solid, and is evenly backlit.
The excellent Retina display still isn’t touch enabled,
but as OS X isn’t yet optimized for touch you’ll hardly
miss it. Many more apps take advantage of the Retina
display now than did last year, so you’ll only run into
blocky-looking UI elements if you use a really
old version of a program. Though some
laptops’ screens have higher pixel counts,
including that on the Samsung Ativ Book 9
Plus (see our review in this issue), we
probably won’t hear too many high-end
Mac users complain. The MacBook Pro
supports up to 4,096-by-2,160
resolution on an external display via
HDMI. About the only nit we have
with the Retina display is that it
doesn’t have a matte finish option,
something that went away when
Apple recently discontinued the
previous generation of 15-inch MacBook
Pro models.
The Intel Core i7-4750HQ processor with Iris
Pro 5200 graphics is likewise an improvement
over last year’s CPU. The system’s 256GB of flash
storage is now PCI Express–based instead of SATA-
based, which helps speed file transfer and app loading
ON THE EDGE
operations. On the exterior, the system has HDMI, USB Ports on the latest
3.0, and the SD card reader on the right, with another MacBook Pro include
USB 3.0 port, MagSafe 2 connector, headset jack, and two Thunderbolt 2,
which support
two Thunderbolt 2 ports on the left. Thunderbolt 2 20Gbps of
supports a higher 20Gbps of bandwidth than the bandwidth—twice
10Gbps Thunderbolt ports that have appeared on Macs that of the first-
generation
since early 2011. Thunderbolt devices are fully Thunderbolt
compatible with Thunderbolt 2, but it remains to be protocol.
seen how quickly users and manufacturers adopt
Thunderbolt 2 when the selection of regular
Thunderbolt products is still somewhat limited. As in
the past, the Thunderbolt 2 ports can be used for either
Thunderbolt or Mini DisplayPort monitors. The system
comes with 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking, but you’ll have
to use a USB-to-Ethernet adapter or Thunderbolt-based
docking station to get wired Ethernet connectivity.
One of the big news stories from October’s Apple
event was the inclusion of the updated Apple iLife and
Apple iWork software suites along with Apple OS X 10.9
Mavericks, Apple’s updated operating system for Macs.
This means that you can use the MacBook Pro right off
the bat with fully functional business, content creation,
and entertainment software suites. This flies in the face
of Microsoft systems, most of which don’t include Office
(unless you count the time-limited trial you get with
every new PC). The other additions to Mavericks work
well, as does the built-in 720p FaceTime HD camera.
Like the latest crop of Apple MacBook Air models, the
MacBook Pro has a new dual microphone array to help
with FaceTime conversations.
The MacBook Pro comes with a standard one-year warranty with 90 days of
24/7 technical support.

PERFORMANCE
The MacBook Pro’s quad-core processor is speedy and energy efficient, shown
by the system’s class-leading results on our Photoshop CS6 (3 minutes 14
seconds) and battery-rundown (8 hours 52 minutes) tests. Other systems in this
price category, such as the Toshiba Kirabook, are hours short on battery life and
are left behind on the multimedia benchmark tests.
What’s notable about the Iris Pro graphics is that this new MacBook Pro is
able to almost match last year’s on the Heaven 3D gaming test (42fps versus
45fps, at medium quality settings), even though last year’s model used discrete
Nvidia graphics. This means that for light to moderate gaming, the Iris Pro
5200 is more than adequate. The new PCIe-based flash storage was quick on
booting up, installs, file operations, and launching apps.
Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro earns its title as one of the best high-end
desktop replacement laptops you can buy. It has the power of a desktop Mac,
and the battery life to carry you through a full workday and beyond. The screen
resolution is higher than you'll see on most all-in-one desktop PCs and desktop
replacement laptops. The MacBook Pro compares well against laptops ranging
in price from $1,400 to high-powered systems that run more than $2,700.
Systems such as the Toshiba Kirabook and the Razer Blade come in at about the
same $2,000 price point, but don’t offer the same outstanding blend of
amenities and performance; even the otherwise excellent Asus ZenBook
UX51Vz-DH71, which puts up a good fight, can't compare in terms of screen
resolution (it's limited to 1080p HD) or battery life (it lasts less than half as long
as the MacBook Pro). Upcoming professional-grade Windows mobile
workstations have the potential to challenge the MacBook Pro in thinness,
resolution, and performance, but right now Apple takes the crown and our
Editors’ Choice award.

JOEL SANTO DOMINGO

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
HARDWARE

This Laptop Puts the ‘Ultra’

in Ultrabook
With few exceptions, the current crop of Samsung Ativ
premium ultrabooks are all about the three Book 9 Plus
Ps: portability, performance, and pixels. $1,399
L L L L H
Boasting the latest in processing and display
EDITORS’
CHOICE
technology, plus a terrific design, the Samsung
Ativ Book 9 Plus delivers on all three.

DESIGN
The obvious place to start discussing the Book 9 Plus is
its 13.3-inch display. It boasts a whopping 3,200-by-
1,800 Quad HD+ touch screen that’s better than what
you’ll find on almost any other laptop on the market— Samsung Ativ
including Apple’s Retina display–equipped MacBook Book 9 Plus
Pros. Unlike the Retina display, the Ativ Book 9 Plus’s PROS Incredible high-
screen also has ten-point touch, an essential feature for resolution display
with ten-point touch.
Windows 8. Delivers solid
Apple comparisons don’t stop there. The Book 9 performance. Slim,
shares with the MacBook Air a similar sliver-thin lightweight design.
Premium materials
design, a minimalist aesthetic, and an aluminum all- used in construction.
metal chassis, though Samsung subdues it quite a bit by Long battery life.
adding a dark coat of paint and leaving only a glint of Dual-band Wi-Fi.
Sturdy 180-degree
metal along the edges of the chassis. The slim hinge.
ultraportable measures 0.54 by 12.58 by 8.78 inches
CONS Limited storage
(HWD), about the same size as the MacBook Air, capacity. Marquee
though the Samsung system is just a bit heavier (3.06 software options have
pounds versus 2.91 pounds). limited appeal.
Dongles for VGA,
The Ativ Book 9 Plus has a full-size chiclet-style HDMI not included.
keyboard, complete with backlight, which is joined by a
fairly large touchpad measuring 2.7 inches high and 4
inches wide. The buttons are incorporated into the
touch surface, and the touchpad also supports Windows
8 gestures.
To provide a firm backing for the touch screen, the
laptop hinge opens smoothly to just past 90 degrees,
and then requires more force to open further, similar to
the dual-friction hinge used on the Editors’ Choice Acer
Aspire S7-392-6411. The result is a touch screen that
holds firm against all of your poking and prodding
while still opening and closing without issue. The one
oddity of the Ativ Book 9 Plus is the decision to use a
180-degree hinge—I can’t for the life of me think of any
circumstances in which you’d want to open up the
ultraportable to lay it completely flat.

FEATURES
The narrow edges of the Book 9 Plus don’t
leave a lot of room for ports,
but there’s still a
pretty good
selection. On either side of the laptop is a full-size USB
ANY PORT
3.0 port for use with external drives and peripherals. On A USB 3.0 port may
the right you’ll find a combination headphone and be found on both
microphone jack, and a tiny connector that converts to edges of the
Samsung Ativ Book 9
full-size VGA with an accessory dongle ($39.99, not Plus; micro HDMI and
included). On the left, a micro HDMI port lets you LAN ports are
connect to a second monitor or HDTV, and a minuscule available, too.

LAN port offers Gigabit Ethernet when using a different

adapter dongle (also $39.99, but included with the
laptop). Also on the left is an SD card slot, which is
concealed by a spring-loaded cover that swings in rather
than pushes out, automatically protecting the card slot
when it’s not in use.
There are also a number of wireless options, with
dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi providing 2.4GHz and 5GHz
Internet connectivity that does better in crowded areas
than 2.4GHz alone, and Bluetooth 4.0 + HS for use with
smartphones and wireless peripherals. Finally, when
you want to skip the dongles and cables, WiDi 4.1 lets
you stream HD content wirelessly to a WiDi-equipped
TV or WiDi adapter.
Preinstalled on the hard drive are several programs
and applications to accompany Windows 8, including
Skype, Netflix, iHeart Radio, Plants vs. Zombies,
Bitcasa, a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security, and
a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements, but two unique Samsung offerings
stand out. The first is SideSync, which lets you automatically sync files between
the Book 9 Plus and several current Samsung Android smartphones, such as the
Galaxy S4, and access the phone’s functions from the computer. The second is
HomeSync Lite, which lets you use the PC as the central hub of a personal
cloud, syncing files between multiple devices, though its capabilities are limited
by the fact that it’s tied to the laptop’s fairly small local storage (128GB, though
on a speedy SSD). Samsung covers the Book 9 Plus with a one-year warranty.

PERFORMANCE
The Book 9 Plus is outfitted with a 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-4200U processor that
helped the laptop deliver strong performance in tests such as PCMark 7 (4,907)
and CineBench (2.50), where it fell right in line with the similarly equipped
Acer Aspire S7 and the Sony VAIO Pro 13. In multimedia tests, the Book 9 Plus
finished Handbrake in 1 minute 23 seconds, and cranked through Photoshop in
5:51, edging ahead of the Acer in Photoshop (6:01) and topping the 13-inch
MacBook Air (3:15 Handbrake, 7:07 Photoshop).
The Book 9 Plus makes the most of the integrated
Intel HD Graphics 4400, squeezing out 3DMark 11
scores of 1,655 (Entry) and 271 (Extreme), just behind
the Acer Aspire S7 and just ahead of the Sony VAIO Pro In terms of
13. We couldn’t attain playable results in our gaming performance
tests at any setting so we can’t recommend the Book 9 and battery life,
Plus for that use, but these results are better than we’ve the Samsung
seen with previous-generation Intel graphics. Ativ Book 9
With a 55Wh battery sealed in the chassis, the Book 9 Plus holds its
Plus lasted 8 hours 15 minutes in our battery rundown own against
test. This puts it right alongside the Acer Aspire S7,
other premium
which lasted only 7 minutes longer (8:22), and well
ultrabooks.
ahead of the Sony VAIO Pro 13 (6:23), but none of these
hold a candle to the 13-inch MacBook Air’s 15:33.

CONCLUSION
In terms of performance and battery life, the Samsung
Ativ Book 9 Plus holds its own against other premium
ultrabooks, in terms of both performance and pricing.
What the Book 9 Plus has that others do not is a higher-
than-HD screen that rivals Apple’s Retina display.
Though other versions of this laptop offer less
impressive features or cost more than they should,
about the only thing I can knock this configuration of
the Book 9 Plus for is its use of ports that require
dongles, but that’s not so uncommon on thinner
ultrabooks. For the price, it matches the portability and
performance of the Editors’ Choice Acer Aspire S7 and
offers the sort of resolution you’ll prize when working
with photos or enjoying movies. Add it all up, and the
Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus is the new Editors’ Choice for
premium ultrabooks.

BRIAN WESTOVER

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

REVIEWS
SOFTWARE

Protect Every PC, Mac, and

Mobile Device You Own
One big reason to choose a security suite McAfee LiveSafe
rather than a collection of separate security $79.99 per year
products is consistency. You don’t have to L L L L H
learn the logic of a different security company
EDITORS’
CHOICE
for each component; you can concentrate on
mastering that one all-encompassing suite. McAfee
LiveSafe extends this concept across multiple platforms
and devices. One $79.99-per-year subscription lets you
apply consistent protection to all of your PCs, Macs, and
mobile devices. You don’t get the parental controls or
online backup features you used to with McAfee All McAfee LiveSafe
Access, but antitheft functionality, SafeKey password PROS Works on all
management, and Personal Locker file protection with computers, mobile
voice and facial recognition help pick up the slack. devices in your
household. Includes
password manager,
TOP-NOTCH PROTECTION digital locker for
After you’ve activated your subscription on McAfee’s storing sensitive data.
Online dashboard
website, you can begin installing the software on all of manages all devices.
your devices. For basic security protection, PC users will Antitheft features for
install McAfee LiveSafe–Internet Security. Mac users Android, some
laptops.
will install McAfee LiveSafe–Internet Security for Mac;
both these are almost identical to the standard McAfee CONS No backup,
parental control
Internet Security products. McAfee LiveSafe–Mobile functions. Not all
Security is the Android version; iOS devices are limited mobile devices get all
to just SafeKey and Personal Locker, Kindle Fire devices features.

get Mobile Security and SafeKey, and BlackBerry users

get only Mobile Security. There’s no limit to the number
of devices you can protect, and you can track them all
using McAfee’s online dashboard.
If you’re familiar with LastPass you know how to use
SafeKey, because SafeKey is a licensed version of it that
omits some of the high-end features most likely to be
used only by experts. SafeKey captures your credentials
when you log in to secure sites and offers to replay them
when you revisit the site—from any device. You can
create one or more form-fill profiles, complete with
contact information, a credit card, a bank account, and
custom fields. SafeKey can optionally offer to capture
this information after you’ve filled in a Web form. Once
your profile is complete, SafeKey will fill in all the fields
it can match in any Web form.
Personal Locker lets you store up to 1GB of anything
you want and protect it with both face and voice
recognition as well as a PIN. (Obviously, the device on MOBILE SECURITY
which you use it needs a camera and microphone.) The LiveSafe protects
technology is cool, though not perfect—sometimes the phones and tablets,
but different devices
app needed to snap more than one photo of me to get different sets of
recognize my face—though it can be cumbersome features.
REMOTE LOGOUT
With McAfee
LiveSafe you can
track lost or stolen
devices, and lock or
wipe them
altogether to keep
your personal data
out of thieves’
hands.

unless you have extremely sensitive data you want to guard, and are willing to
go through a lot of trouble to protect it.

ANTITHEFT, TWO WAYS

Android malware definitely exists, but loss or theft may be an even bigger
danger to your Android device. McAfee’s mobile protection includes all of the
expected antitheft actions (lock, wipe, locate, scream, and so on) and also backs
up your data. You can define one or more “buddies” who will receive a
notification if a thief replaces the device’s SIM card. LiveSafe lets you send
commands via either a Web portal or text message—it’s rare that mobile
antitheft products let you do both.
New in LiveSafe is an option to extend antitheft protection to your PCs and
laptops, as long as they’re modern enough to have Intel Anti-Theft technology
inside. To start, go to the McAfee online console and install the Anti-Theft
component on the device; all you need to do is configure an eight-digit unlock
passcode and enter your email address. If your laptop is lost or stolen, you can
log in to the McAfee console and check its location history. Doing so might
reveal that you left it at a friend’s house, or it might show where a laptop thief is
hanging out. You can choose to stay stealthy and track the laptop’s movements
or lock it down right away (and thereby lose the ability to continue tracking it).
The locked PC displays a message at attempted boot-up, so you can add your
contact info there in case a Good Samaritan finds it. There’s also a nifty option
to automatically lock down the computer if it doesn’t connect with the Internet
for a certain number of days, to foil a thief who disables connectivity so the PC
can’t receive antitheft messages.
CROSS-PLATFORM AND MORE
The value proposition is really, really simple. Buy McAfee LiveSafe and you can
fully protect every PC, Mac, and Android device in your household, plus receive
partial protection for iOS, BlackBerry, and Kindle Fire devices.
But wait—there’s more! With LiveSafe you can manage all of your devices
through a single Web-based console that includes antitheft access for Android
devices and certain PCs. McAfee SafeKey lets you securely share your Web
passwords across all your devices. And using Personal Locker you can store
sensitive items in secured cloud storage that can only be opened if the app
recognizes your face and your voice.
There are other cross-platform multi-device security suites, but none of them
offer McAfee’s combination of unlimited devices and highly useful additional
components. McAfee LiveSafe is our Editors’ Choice in this hot category.

NEIL J. RUBENKING

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

Best of
the Year
DESKTOPS TABLETS
LAPTOPS EBOOK READERS
PERIPHERALS MOBILE DEVICES
COMPONENTS
STORAGE CAMERAS
HDTV &
SOFTWARE & HOME THEATER
INTERNET AUDIO
MOBILE APPS
SECURITY GAMING & TOYS
FITNESS
PRINTERS
SCANNERS
PROJECTORS
NETWORKING
BEST
Although the trend in computer hardware this year
was toward the sleeker and svelter, much of it also
got a lot faster. From systems to components to
PRODUCTS OF

2013
storage and beyond, 2013 was an incredible year for
balancing value with sheer performance.
BY PC MAGAZINE STAFF

DESKTOPS
PC PERIPHERALS

LAPTOPS
& COMPONENTS
STORAGE
DESKTOPS
BUDGET
GATEWAY DX4870-UB2B
A basic tower desktop that checks all
the boxes you need, particularly if you
already have an LCD display you’re
carrying over, the Gateway DX4870- EDITORS’
CHOICE
UB2B is speedy for its segment. It has
spacious storage, will let you keep lLLLm
many documents open $499.99
simultaneously, and it’s relatively
inexpensive. It’s also expandable, so it
can grow with your family. It’s a solid
choice with lots of bang for the buck.
—JOEL SANTO DOMINGO

ALL-IN-ONE/
TOUCH-SCREEN
EDITORS’ VIZIO 27-INCH ALL-IN-
CHOICE
ONE TOUCH PC (CA27T-B1)
lLLLm With strong features and performance,
$999.99 Vizio’s All-in-One Touch PC delivers on
the promises made by its futuristic

MAINSTREAM design. A touch screen, hybrid drive setup,

quad-core processor, and improved
CONSUMER touchpad help elevate the system. —JSD
VELOCITY MICRO VECTOR Z25
The Vector Z25 is an old-school midtower
desktop with multimedia and 3D gaming
chops, all for a sub-$1,000 price. It’s the kind EDITORS’
CHOICE
of PC you would have paid $2,500 for back in
the day, and for multimedia users it comes lLLLh
highly recommended; this PC has the power $1,549
to quickly complete tasks with photos and
video, while keeping a little in reserve for
moderate to hard-core gaming. —JSD
DESKTOPS GAMING
FALCON NORTHWEST
FRAGBOX (GEFORCE
BUSINESS/ GTX 780 SLI)

WORKSTATION
High-end gaming rigs like this
one are made to play AAA titles
HP Z230 SFF WORKSTATION at the highest possible
resolution and quality settings—
When you buy a workstation PC, you’re
and the Fragbox is semi-
buying more than just a desktop equipped
portable to boot. This latest
with powerful components. You’re also model gives users a high-
getting better reliability, tested and powered fourth-generation
certified compatibility with professional Intel Core i7 CPU plus a pair of
software, and a design that lets you fix Nvidia’s powerful GTX 780
things quickly and minimize downtime. video cards. —JSD
The full-featured HP Z230 SFF
Workstation does all of that in a notably
compact package you can actually fit on
your desk with room to spare. —JSD

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh
$4,499

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLh COMPACT/SLIM
$2,045 POLYWELL B8500
This small-form-factor desktop
provides time-critical control or
business info, and with its size can
go where plain business desktops
would fear to tread. It’s a good
EDITORS’ choice for the factory control desk,
CHOICE
prepress proof desk, or the broker’s
lLLLm workspace. —JSD
$499.99
LAPTOPS
BUSINESS
DELL LATITUDE
6430U
Road warriors who prefer
travelling with a light
footprint will dig the Dell
Latitude 6430u. This EDITORS’
Windows 8–equipped CHOICE
business ultrabook deftly lLLLm
blends style and $1,328
performance with a slick
design, excellent keyboard,
and superb battery life. It’s
an easy choice for those
who want productivity for
work without having to
settle for a drab, utilitarian
system. —BRIAN WESTOVER

DESKTOP
EDITORS’
CHOICE
REPLACEMENT
APPLE MACBOOK PRO (15-INCH)
lLLLm
Apple’s latest 15-inch MacBook Pro takes
$279.99 last year’s excellent Retina display upgrade
and thinner chassis, and adds a powerful
Intel Core i7 processor with integrated
graphics that performs like discrete. And at
about 9 hours, the battery life is more than
adequate for a day's work. It’s currently the
foremost example of a laptop designed for
power users who need to take their time-

BUDGET sensitive projects with them. —BW

ACER C7 CHROMEBOOK (C710-2055)

Google’s Chromebooks have long promised
affordability and simplicity, qualities this Acer
version delivers in spades. It’s faster, better, and
lasts longer on battery than other Chromebooks EDITORS’
on the market, plus it offers a host of online and CHOICE
offline tools and a healthy mix of local and cloud
lLLLL
storage. —BW
$1,999
LAPTOPS ULTRAPORTABLE
APPLE MACBOOK AIR
(13-INCH)
ULTRABOOK Its fourth-generation Intel Core i5
ACER ASPIRE S7-392-6411 processor helps the latest 13-inch
If you’re looking for a svelte laptop to MacBook Air show decent
show off, yet still be able to do real work performance gains, but its
outstanding battery life (more than
the Acer Aspire S7-392-6411 is what you
15 hours) is what really blows away
want. It’s the current pinnacle of the
the competition. —BW
ultrabook trend and shows the brilliance
PC makers can return under Intel’s
increasingly stringent standards for
EDITORS’
the category. —BW CHOICE

—BW lLLLh
$1,099

GAMING
RAZER BLADE
The oh-so-portable 14-inch
Razer Blade has you covered
when you want to take your
gaming on the road, with an
Intel Haswell processor and the
latest Nvidia graphics. —BW

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$1,449.99
EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
$1,999.99
PERIPHERALS
& COMPONENTS
MONITOR
ACER B296CL
If you’re tired of dealing
with the clutter of multiple
monitors and their
associated cables and
power bricks, the time is
right to trade up to an ultra-
wide monitor such as the
Acer B296CL. It’s
reasonably priced, and
offers a generous selection
of ports, solid IPS color
performance, and an EDITORS’
ergonomic stand. CHOICE
—LAARNI ALMENDRALA RAGAZA
lLLLh
$599

EDITORS’
CHOICE

lLLLm
KEYBOARD
$69.99
MICROSOFT SCULPT
ERGONOMIC DESKTOP
The Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic
Desktop is one of the best
ergonomic devices we’ve seen,
delivering solid Windows 8
features along with the simplicity
of wireless and a distinctive,
stylish design. —BW
MOUSE
EDITORS’
CORSAIR VENGEANCE M65 CHOICE
The Corsair Vengeance M65 may be
lLLLm
made for gaming, but with its
contoured aluminum construction, $129.95
adjustable 8,200dpi tracking, and
rock-solid design, it’s also one of the
best mice we’ve seen, period. —BW
PERIPHERALS
& COMPONENTS VIDEO CARD
NVIDIA GEFORCE
GTX TITAN
Nvidia’s supercomputer-inspired
GK110 GPU comes to consumers in
the form of this terrific $1,000
single-GPU card. It packs seven
billion transistors, 6GB of RAM, and
2,688 shader cores, and supports
supercomputer technologies such
as Hyper-Q, Dynamic Parallelism,
and GPU virtualization, making it
ideal for gaming and compute
functions alike. —LAR

EDITORS’
CHOICE
lLLhm
$339 lLLLh
$999

PROCESSOR
INTEL CORE I7-4770K
The overclockable Core i7-4770K is
Intel’s new top-end quad-core CPU
based on its Haswell
microarchitecture and its second
built on the 22nm process node. It’s
a 3.5GHz chip with a 3.9GHz Turbo
speed and formal support for up to
DDR3-1600. The CPU includes a
number of new capabilities and
enhancements, and is a notable
step forward in CPU efficiency.
Other Intel CPUs offer more cores
or faster speeds, but you won’t find
a better overall balance than you
will with the Core i7-4770K. —LAR
STORAGE
HARD DRIVE
LACIE 5BIG
This desktop-class external
drive gives you an enormous
20TB of storage, available
instantly. It’s the drive to use
EDITORS’
when you need constant CHOICE
access to all your work or
lLLLm
project data, or if you need the
$2,199
gargantuan capacities of a
server without the potential
speed hang-ups. —JSD

PORTABLE DRIVE
SEAGATE WIRELESS PLUS
Carrying your entire media library just
became a bit easier with the Seagate
EDITORS’ Wireless Plus. It’s a 1TB hard drive with
CHOICE
a built-in battery, media server, and
lLLLm Wi-Fi router, so you can easily share
$199.99 videos, photos, and music on the road.
—JSD

SOLID-STATE DRIVE USB FLASH

SANDISK EXTREME II 480GB SSD DRIVE
The SanDisk Extreme II internal solid-state drive LACIE XTREMKEY
is a fine opening volley into the high-end
USB 3.0 (32GB)
consumer market. It offers enthusiast-level
performance—not what you’d expect from the The LaCie XtremKey USB
historically OEM-focused company. —JSD 3.0 might be the roughest,
toughest USB flash drive
we've ever encountered. It
will survive insane amounts
of abuse, it looks good, and
it’s a fine flash drive as
EDITORS’ well. — JSD
CHOICE
EDITORS’
lLLLm CHOICE
$449
lLLLh
$84.99

PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION I SUBSCRIBE I DECEMBER 2013

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