It's Labor Day. Maybe you're kicking back with a refreshing drink and trying to avoid Immobilizing Heat Wave 2011 by staying inside and doing some online shopping.Here are a few tech items — an ultra-thin laptop from Apple, an Android smartphone and wireless broadband stick from T-Mobile, and Time Warner's highest-speed Internet tier — that have caught our eye this summer and are worth a look.
Apple MacBook Air 13-inch
(mid-2011 model)
Last month, Apple unveiled new models of the MacBook Air, its very thin, very light, 11-inch and 13-inch laptops. The Air is wedge-shaped and even thinner and more impressively slight than it appears in photos.
The recent refresh adds better performance with significantly more powerful Intel processors, Thunderbolt technology — which promises faster transfer speeds and more versatile ways to connect devices — and a backlighted keyboard.
But the biggest advantage the MacBook Air has is that it comes standard with a solid-state drive (SSD) instead of a hard drive. Imagine my surprise when, in everyday tasks like opening Web pages or editing photos, the Air seemed speedier than my new hard-drive-based MacBook Pro, which costs about $1,000.
The 13-inch Air provided to us for testing by Apple was fast and capable. The most impressive thing I discovered: You can reboot a MacBook Air and have it ready for action in 16 seconds on Mac OS X Lion.
What doesn't it have that its more expensive Pro counterparts do? No optical/DVD drive, no HD-quality webcam (the Facetime camera is standard-def), and smaller drive capacities, the trade-off for faster SSD technology. The 11-inch model, which starts at $999, replacing the old white plastic MacBook, has a 64-gigabyte drive and comes with 2 gigabytes of RAM. The 13-inch model, which starts at $1,299, has a 128-gigabyte drive, an SD-memory slot and 4 gigabytes of memory standard.
The MacBook Air doesn't have the graphical horsepower to run the latest video games, but for even video editing and major multitasking, the Airs no longer seem stymied in their ability to keep up with most laptop users.
T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide and Rocket 3.0 Laptop Stick
T-Mobile's MyTouch 4G Slide has a modest-sized touch screen (3.7 inches), an illuminated slide-out physical keyboard with nicely spaced-out keys and a dedicated camera button on the side, all without too much bulk.
The camera button is a key feature on the Slide because the phone's biggest selling point is its 8-megapixel, dual LED-flash camera, which can record 1080p video and has a variety of shooting modes (close-up, action and night, for instance). Outdoor photos and pictures taken in decent conditions do look quite good, especially compared with most smartphone cameras.
Battery life on it is better than it is on larger Android phones but still is not quite as good as the latest iPhone. It costs $199 with a two-year contract. If you're in the market for a 4G phone on T-Mobile's network, you take a lot of photos and you need a physical keyboard, this one's a good match for you.
Another product running on T-Mobile's 4G wireless network is the Rocket 3.0, a laptop stick that can deliver Internet to Macs or PCs via USB. Unlike WiFi hotspot devices like Verizon's MiFi or T-Mobile's own Mobile Hotspot, the Rocket can only deliver service to one computer at a time.
In Austin and New Braunfels (where I work and live), the 4G service was reliable and I got 15 Mbps download speeds and 1.5 Mbps upload speeds. That seemed great to me until I saw that T-Mobile is advertising the stick as being capable of 42 Mbps download speeds, which I never came close to achieving. Speeds in Austin were less consistent; even in the middle of downtown Austin, it was sometimes as low as 8 or 9 Mbps, with upload speeds dropping to about 0.5 Mbps.
The device costs $80 with a two-year contract; mobile broadband plans start at about $40 monthly for 2 gigabytes of data.
Time Warner Cable's
Road Runner Wideband Internet service
I've been a customer of Time Warner Cable's Road Runner Internet service since the late '90s and, even on the mid-tier Standard service I've been on, one complaint I've rarely had is speed. Even HD video streaming has worked fine for me, and the price has stayed consistent (about $50 a month without any other TWC services bundled in).
In July, Time Warner introduced "Wideband" Internet in the Austin area, which promises speeds of up to 50 Mbps, more than twice as fast as the service I was getting. Time Warner installed the service in my New Braunfels home for a trial, and while the installation was quick and professional, the first week with Wideband was rocky. Until I figured out what was going on, I spent a week wondering why the network would suddenly slow to a crawl or become unavailable when I tried to multitask on the Web; it turned out to be a modem setting the installers hadn't warned me about to prevent hacking.
Once that option was disabled, download speeds were consistently in the 35-50 Mbps range, according to Time Warner's speed test website and other independent speed test sites I used. But I only noticed the speed difference when downloading large files or with multiple streams of music or video. Slow websites still are slow if the logjam is on the other end, and your computer's processing power, memory and Wi-Fi bottlenecks still are going to be big factors in the speeds you get, no matter the service. We also had a few network interruptions in our area and had to reboot our modem at least six times during a month and a half to restore Internet service.
Where I did notice a huge improvement, though, was in upload speeds. With Wideband, a set of three 50-megabyte files that used to take about 25 minutes to upload to Dropbox.com now took less than five minutes.
Wideband costs $99 a month (or $4 more if you don't have other Time Warner Cable services). For home users with typical Internet needs, it might be overkill. In fact, Time Warner just announced that it's upgrading its Standard and Road Runner Extreme tier speeds for existing customers at no additional cost. Upgrading your Wi-Fi network, making sure your computers aren't too slow to take advantage of Internet speeds and looking into a less pricey tier of service (somewhere in the $40-$60 range) might better fit your needs.
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