The alaTest Blog

There is a huge convenience in condensing two devices down into one. Still, you can’t help but wonder whether or not your Smartphone really does make a better MP3 player than a dedicated device. Smartphones offer one significant advantage over MP3 players: a mobile data connection. You can download and stream music, so you’re not limited to the songs you can fit on your device. The iPhone and Android phones also have the advantage of well stocked App stores for all sorts of multimedia, productivity, and gaming applications (something only a few MP3 players offer).

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Portable gaming has been around for decades, starting with Mattel’s light based handhelds back in the Seventies. Things really started to take off in the late Eighties with Nintendo’s original Game Boy, followed a little over a year later by Sega’s more technologically advanced Game Gear, and even though the Game Boy sold significantly better, this marked the slow start of technological progression of handheld consoles.

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Technology never stands still, something twice as true for the mobile world. Smartphones, especially, are expected to see performance increases greater than any previous year as well as new features that rival even science fiction. To put this into perspective, it’s generally accepted that processing power doubles every one and a half to two years. In terms of raw processing power, this year’s smartphones will be more than twice as fast as last’s. But enough techno babble; let’s get straight to the phones.

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The digital age is well upon us, and has been for some time. We’ve seen music digitized by CDs, movies digitized by DVDs, mail digitized by E-Mail, and film digitized by digital cameras, so it should come as no surprise that books have been digitized as well. In e-book form, the average book is only about 20MB in size, meaning a MicroSD card the size of your thumbnail could easily hold millions of novels, and with an E-Book Reader, you can literally carry a library of books right in your pocket. The current e-book readers on the market offer all sorts of different features, so we decided to take a look at some of the most popular.

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The internet has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives, so it’s only fitting that televisions start featuring internet connectivity. Vizio got its start offering the latest HDTV features at a much more appealing price than its competitors, while still delivering a quality product. It’s no surprise that with Samsung introducing the Internet@TV models and Sony now shipping the first Google TV products, Vizio has been quick to create its VIA brand, standing for Vizio Internet Applications. Still, we have to wonder, does the VIA platform hold up against the competition?

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Your monitor is the most important peripheral device you have for your computer (the mouse and keyboard are up there pretty high too though). Without a monitor, your desktop computer is just a whirring box that might beep from time to time, so it makes sense that you’d want to invest in a good one. Here’s a look at some of the highest ranking monitors on alaTest.com. Read the rest of this entry »