PC Mag Lab Report: All Quiet on the iPhone Front
It’s so quiet in the PC Mag labs today that you could hear a pin jumper drop. And if I could think of a tech analogy for sagebrush, that’d be rolling through the labs too. Yes, we’re all waiting for the iPhone to arrive, just like the rest of you, though we’re not quite as desperate as Stephen Colbert.
You might think that Apple would be so kind as to get us their gadget a little early, since testing these things is kind of what we do. But no such luck, despite the fact that Meredith Viera got her hands on one for “Today.” In the meantime, our resident audio and phone analysts (respectively) Tim Gideon and Sascha Segan are preparing to pull an iPhone all-nighter, or maybe even two. They want to get their full reviews to you as quickly as possible. How’s that for dedication? Check here tomorrow; we’ll link to them.
As always, there are some less-buzzy but still very interesting things going on in the lab. Notably, laptop analyst Cisco Cheng is just about to wrap up his testing of the Alienware Area-51 m9750 gaming laptop. And what a beast of a laptop it is, with SLI graphics (dual nVidia GeForce Go 7950GTX), an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, two 160GB hard drives arranged in RAID 0, and a 17-inch widescreen, all in a sleek–if hefty–8.5-pound package.
Cisco says the laptop has scored quite well on all benchmarks so far, not just on the gaming side. “Photoshop scores beat out every other laptop I’ve ever tested,” says Cisco. But don’t expect all that portable computing muscle to come cheap. “Keep in mind this is a really powerful $5,000 machine.”
On the desktop front, Joel Santo Domingo has something interesting (though less sexy), for business types. HP’s low-powered HP rp5700 Desktop PC might not look like much in terms of hardware, though it is pretty small. But the value comes in the PC’s long lifecycle. “[HP] will be supporting it for five years,” says Joel, “which is notable because most business desktops are only supported for about a year.” So not only is it energy-efficient, but it’ll stay with your business for a long time. Sounds like a win-win to me. Look for more deets on PCMag.com soon.
That’s it for this week, but when you lay your gadget-weary head down tonight to sleep, remember that Tim Gideon and Sascha Segan will still be here in the labs answering all your iPhone questions and getting their full reviews up on PCMag.com. Thanks guys, for taking one for the geek team.
Post by Matt Safford
Original post by Gearlog