Reviews

The HTC Rezound ($300 with a new two-year contract as of 1/3/12) is one of the more capable devices released this year. With beefy specs, including a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and Verizon LTE 4G connectivity, the Rezound stands its own against other Verizon smartphones.

Design

With a 4.3-inch 1280 by 720 resolution super LCD display, the Rezound is definitely on the larger side. While it may not fit in everyone’s pocket, that large display is great for watching movies and playing games. At 6 ounces the Rezound can feel a bit hefty but that extra weight also makes the phone feel rock solid.

High dynamic range imaging is a photography technique that involves taking multiple images at different levels of exposure, and then combining them into a single image containing a greater amount of detail. Photoshop is the usual program for turning photos into HDR images, but it's not the only option. EasyHDR Pro (35 Euros, 46 USD on the date this review posted) is a standalone application that retails for a fraction of the price and lets you create HDR images using a number of sophisticated options. Despite packing plenty of features, it is easier to use than Photoshop because it is purpose-built for HDR.

EasyHDR aligns and combines multiple photos into a single HDR image, and then lets you change the color-balance curve and other parameters to get the exact look you're after.To begin using EasyHDR Pro, you're going to need at least three photographs of the same exact scene, taken at different exposure values. I've tried the application both with JPEG and RAW images, and RAW images produced significantly better output: JPEG compression produces noticeable artifacts and noise when images are overlaid on top of each other.

For a system priced at a cool $1000 (technically, $999 as of 1/3/2012; the price may drop), you’d expect a desktop PC--and a compact PC, no less--to come with some bells and whistles. But the only sound we hear coming from Polywell’s ITX-Z6800 is one of raw performance. Don’t get us wrong: We love a speedy system. However, the market is cluttered with Compact and Budget PC contenders that offer a lot more than what the ITX-Z6800 delivers in total.

Polywell stashes the lower-power variant of Intel’s Core i7-2600 CPU into this 8-by-8-by-3.5-inch system. This gives the ITX-Z6800 a bit of an advantage on cooling due to the lower power draw, as the i7-2600S CPU runs at 2.8GHz versus the i7-2600’s full 3.4GHz, helping this compact PC run a little quieter during normal operation. But, as hinted above, the ITX-Z6800 is no slouch in the performance department: Intel’s Turbo Boost feature allows the i7-2600S to jump up to a clock speed of 3.8GHz when necessary. And this flexibility really comes across on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests, where the ITX-Z68’s speeds deliver a superhigh score of 147.

For a printer that retails for only $100 (as of January 3, 2012) and is heavily discounted online, the Brother MFC-J430w color inkjet multifunction (copy/fax/print/scan) gets things done in a hurry: Text pages print at a brisk 7.6 pages per minute or faster. Other strengths include sharp text output and below-average ink costs, if you stick with the high-capacity supplies. You get some nice features for the price, but note that color graphics quality is merely adequate, paper capacity is minimal, and automatic two-sided printing or scanning is nonexistent.

The MFC-J430w's appearance is best described as conventional. The all-black MFP has a small, 1.9-inch LCD that tells you what's going on, plus the usual array of navigation, job, and fax buttons. The buttons are logically placed, and navigating the menus is very easy. You can even scan to a PC directly from the control panel.

Keeping your kids safe online while allowing them to maintain their privacy can be tricky. But SafetyWeb.com makes it a whole lot easier: This service alerts you to many questionable or potentially dangerous activities that your kids may be partaking in online, without requiring that you watch their every little step. This service costs $10 per month or $100 per year for one child; covering additional children costs $5 per month.

SafetyWeb delivers information about your child's online and mobile activities in a neatly organized dashboard.To use the service, you enter your child's email address (or addresses) and SafetyWeb scours the Web, looking for social networking accounts and more associated with those addresses. The service can alert you to public and private accounts on more than 60 social sites, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

High-end video cards are hungry, demanding beasts. They eat money, suck down power, run hot, and occasionally require complex driver configuration or other special care in return for the visual thrills they provide. Moreover, the benefits of such a setup can be hard to appreciate over a well-chosen mid-range alternative, especially at the time of purchase. Unless multiple monitors or very high resolutions come into play, the extra FPS and features you pay for won’t matter until later, when you're able to skip next year's upgrade cycle or play games which implement those new technologies. That's pretty thin soup for most gamers, who want to see the prowess they paid for onscreen now, not next winter. Unigine's Heaven is a synthetic gaming benchmark that provides next-generation graphics today, delivering the visual goods while doing its best to entertain you in the process.

Bumping up tessellation in Unigine's Heaven DX11 benchmark brings all but the mightiest hardware to its knees.Designed as a showcase for DirectX11, Heaven provides a fully realized, outdoor 3D environment filled with lush vegetation and highly detailed models. The floating islands are dotted with dragons, dirigibles and other surprises lovingly rendered by an engine that supports ambient occlusion, stereo 3D, tessellation and other advanced features that are only just now starting to appear in top-shelf computer games. The built in flyby test provides a score for comparison to other systems, but the real fun here resides in the open nature of Unigine's world; by taking down the fences and allowing users to explore they've made Heaven the Skyrim of benchmarking.

First, let's get the obvious out of the way: In 2012, cameras will become smaller, more powerful, and more specialized. Meanwhile, smartphone cameras will continue to improve at a blistering pace, approaching the imaging capabilities and features found in stand-alone cameras of a few years ago. Over the next 12 months, you can expect another great round of "phones versus cameras."

In some ways, stand-alone cameras and phones will forge a more symbiotic relationship in 2012. In 2011, we saw both storage cards (the Eye-Fi Mobile X2) and point-and-shoot cameras (the Panasonic Lumix FX90) that synced wirelessly to smartphones and tablets, thus enabling iOS and Android devices to store and share images from higher-quality cameras over ad-hoc Wi-Fi connections.

Folder Lock 7 is a jack-of-all-trades for file encryption and data security. Not only does it encrypt and hide volumes and folders with an on-the-fly 256-bit algorithm, it also protects USB drives and creates wallets to list and store important information such as bank accounts, online passwords, and such. The program goes even further with a secure erase (shred) function, data lockers (think Windows Briefcase), and the ability to run stealthily--that is, without any sign that it's operating.

Folder Lock 7's interface is super-easy to use, but a bit over the top in appearance.Version 7 of Folder Lock adds an optional online component to the mix, synching your data lockers to NewSoftwares' own storage service if you desire. The service is $5 per month for every 10GB, not the cheapest but relatively competitive. 10GB should be more than enough for only your secure data. Other neat features are login attempt tracking, and creating both normal and self-extracting password protected zip files. (PCWorld last reviewed Folder Lock at version 6.25).

Humans are list-making animals. At no time is that impulse more prevalent than December, when we set ourselves the task of churning out year-end retrospectives. In the tech universe, those lists generally call out the best products, the splashiest debuts, and the most promising technologies of the year (see, for instance, PCWorld’s own “100 Best Products of 2011"). But there are tech losers each year, too--products, concepts, and services that kick the proverbial bucket. Some, like the vile Rustock botnet (taken down in March), we were glad to see go.

Other tech demises evoke genuine regret: good products lost in the ferocious market of 2011, tech initiatives that grew too expensive to retain their sponsor’s funding, even well-engineered gear that simply never caught on with the public. Herewith, my respects to 10 tech goners that we at PCWorld are truly going to miss.

Apple’s most recent MacBook Air is selling like hotcakes, for good reason. Current Airs are incredibly thin and light, and--unlike the first version--they’re powerful enough for most everyday work. But what if you don’t want an Apple laptop? Finally, thanks to Intel and its partners, you have a Windows alternative: the Ultrabook.

Ultrabooks are thinner, lighter, and in some ways faster than standard ultraportables. Most are barely more than half an inch thick. Priced from around $800 to over $1500, these are premium products, and they feel like it. Some early Ultrabooks eschew cheap plastic in favor of materials such as aluminum and magnesium alloy. You’ll find solid-state drives in most units, making them seem snappier and more responsive. Open the lid, and your Ultrabook will go from hibernate to working in seconds, and it’ll resume from sleep in the blink of an eye.