Spelunky is the latest in a long line of interesting, downloadable Xbox 360 platformers, with roots in Super Mario Bros. It’s also, by far, the most unforgiving, despite a cartoon facade of stumpy characters, colorful environs …
Reviews
foxLv2 Bluetooth Portable Speaker Review: Sweet, Bass-Thumping Sound
I’m usually not susceptible to stunt-pitching, but when the speaker wonks at Soundmatters lobbed an email for the company’s $200 foxLv2 portable Bluetooth speaker at the universe with a blurb from The Great Kat, well…
I …
Seagate’s New External Hard Drives: Back to Basics
For years, hard-disk kingpin Seagate has tried to jazz up the image of the humble hard drive. For a while, it used the slogan “Your on,” which led insufficiently hip people to wonder if it had made an embarrassing typo. It also …
Pogoplug Review: The Ups and Downs of DIY Cloud Storage
Between Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive and SugarSync, there are plenty of options for backing up your files online. But to store an entire hard drive’s worth of data with any of these services, you’ll have to pay hefty, …
Origin EON11-S Review: 11-inch Ultraportable Gaming, Alive and Well
A couple years ago, 11-inch laptop gaming was all the rage. Dell led the charge with the Alienware M11x, a netbook-style 11.6-inch laptop that weighed just 4.5 pounds, featured surprisingly high-end gaming specs, and was updated …
Samsung Series 5 550 Review: The Case for Google’s New Chromebook
Why buy a laptop that runs nothing but a web browser, when you could buy a laptop that runs everything? That’s the question that comes up in pretty much every debate about Chromebooks — a series of stripped-down laptops that …
Unroll.me Removes You from Pesky E-mail Lists, Summarizes the Ones You Still Want
If you’re an active participant on the Internet, chances are you’ve been added to all sorts of e-mail lists and newsletters over the years–either unwillingly or on purpose. Maybe you’ve tried to unsubscribe from the worst …
HMDX Jam Wireless Speaker Review: Modest Things from Modest Packages
Finding a decent-sounding wireless speaker in a sea of cheap, tiny wireless speakers is now officially a trick. Everyone seems to have one, be it something from a brand name you recognize like Sony, Bose or Logitech, or others …
Review: SteelSeries’ Simple, Durable, Dependable Diablo III Mouse
As expected, games peripheral-maker SteelSeries has released Diablo III-themed accessories for Blizzard’s uber-popular hack-and-slash. In one corner, the tamely named “Diablo III Mouse” (henceforth, D3M) — in the other, the …
Newton, Reconsidered
A hands-on assessment of Apple’s pioneering, ill-fated Personal Digital Assistant, twenty years after its original unveiling.
Get Text Messaging on Your PC with These 3 Handy Android Apps
Whenever someone asks me why an Android phone is worth considering instead of an iPhone, one of the first things I bring up is the ability to send and receive text messages from my PC’s web browser. Apple does not allow other …
Windows 8 Release Preview: Not Ready for Prime Time, but Closer
For all the ways in which Windows 8 is a bold departure from its predecessors, it’s following a road map to release that’s very much like the one Microsoft has used for years. Last September, the company showed the new version …