The most insidious Internet security problems today rely on human gullibility, not tricky software. These types of attacks are called “social engineering” and can be used to steal your money and identity. Here are tips to help you avoid becoming a victim.
Adobe’s Photoshop Express offers the nicest set of Web-based photo editing tools I have seen. They are sophisticated for a consumer application, yet easy to use. However, it’s rough around the edges.
Apple’s new Time Capsule packs both a giant hard disk and a speedy Wi-Fi wireless router into one slender case, allowing computers to easily back up their hard drives wirelessly.
Lenovo’s thin and light ThinkPad X300 is an innovative laptop that will be perfect for many mobile PC users. But its file-storage capacity is low and its price tag is high.
The hard drive is being challenged by the solid-state drive for its role as the principal storage device in computers, but current SSDs offer much lower capacity and have much higher prices.
Apple’s MacBook Air is a beautiful, amazingly thin computer, but one whose unusual trade-offs may turn off some frequent travelers. It’s impossible to convey in words just how pleasing and surprising this computer feels in the hand. But there’s a price for this laptop’s daring design: Apple had to give up some features road warriors consider standard in a subnotebook, and certain of these omissions are radical.
A tiny new computer called the Eee PC is better than competing products in certain respects, such as text entry and price. But it still has too many compromises to pry most travelers away from their larger laptops.
Verizon’s new Voyager looks remarkably like the iPhone and even beats Apple’s product in certain respects. But Walt Mossberg says the Voyager suffers badly in the area where Apple’s phone shines: software.
Dell’s new all-in-one PC, the XPS One, is a stylish Windows Vista machine that runs well and won’t cost a fortune. If it didn’t have the Dell logo on it, the XPS One might be mistaken for a product of the PC industry’s design leaders, Apple or Sony.
Two new business-card scanners make it easier than ever to organize those cards piled high on our desks, but their software isn’t as easy to work with when manipulating the scanned images.
A new digital music player called the Slacker plays music that is absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. But the device has some glitches.
Edited by Walt and written by Katie Boehret, this is a guide to gadgets, web services and other consumer technologies.
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