budgeting

Want a seriously cheap Android Gingerbread phone that doesn't suck? You got it! Meet T-Mobile's Samsung Exhibit II 4G.

It has T-Mobile's HSPA+ speeds (hence the "4G"), a front-facing camera, a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a 1GHz processor. Plus, it's filled with a bunch of useful apps, like T-Mobile TV HD. Overall, it's a nice chunk of plastic smartphone power for just $30 with a contract and $200 without one.

Read all the pros and cons, take the video tour, and peruse the photos (including comparative camera shots) in the full Samsung Exhibit II 4G review.… Read more

A wise person once said that using a budget doesn't keep you from having what you want, it helps you get what you want. Sticking to a budget can help you reach your financial goals, whether they include a vacation next summer or retirement 20 years from now. Weekly Budget is a set of simple Excel spreadsheets that can help you manage your money on a week-to-week basis. It's a surprisingly thorough budgeting solution, and we liked it a lot.

Weekly Budget provides two different worksheets: a weekly budget and a biweekly budget. Depending on how often you … Read more

There are all kinds of tools out there for budgeting, from Web sites that connect to your bank account to the old-fashioned envelope method. Household Budget Worksheet falls somewhere in the middle, bringing some useful features to the familiar format of a spreadsheet. We think this is a great choice for anyone who needs a simple way to keep track of their spending.

Household Budget Worksheet is simply an Excel spreadsheet, and it opened in Excel with no problems. The spreadsheet had a professional-looking format with helpful built-in instructions. We really liked it that the spreadsheet lets users enter both … Read more

MonoPrice's speakers and subwoofers may be priced at the extreme low end, but they offer respectable performance for very little money. I wrote about the company's subs a few days ago, today we'll look at two MonoPrice "bookshelf" speakers: the 8250 ($28 per pair) and the 8251 ($54 a pair). When the speakers and subs are used together they can serve as a viable alternative to a sound bar home theater system, for buyers who already have a receiver.

The 8250 is a small two-way bookshelf speaker with a 6.5-inch polypropylene woofer and a .… Read more

I've heard some surprisingly decent-sounding, dirt-cheap speakers over the years, but quality subwoofer prices bottom out around $250. Sure, you can find deals on closeout models for less, but $250 or so has defined the lower limit of what you'd have to pay for a nice subwoofer.

That's what I thought, until I heard MonoPrice's 8-inch, 60-watt powered sub (model 8248). It sells for $57. Granted, for that kind of money my expectations were low, but the sub's fit and finish are respectable. The black wood cabinet measures 13.75 inches by 11.75 inches … Read more

Update, Oct. 10, 2011: Velocity Micro has dropped the MSRP of the Cruz T408 to $199.

There are a ton of low-cost tablets out there, many produced by fly-by-night brands, never to be seen from again. We've covered a few of them here at CNET and in most cases it's immediately apparent that you get what you pay for.

Velocity Micro is one of the few bright spots in the budget tablet world. Over the years, its tablets and e-readers have popped up everywhere from Best Buy to Sears and RadioShack. Their designs are never the prettiest and … Read more

Underneath the seemingly predictable veneer of the 14-inch Toshiba Satellite P745D-S4240 are two new stories, albeit ones that might not interest the average person much. The Satellite P series is a new laptop line for Toshiba, although you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between it and the M, A, and L series of Satellite laptops (the P replaces the M and A). Under the hood is a quad-core AMD A6 processor, part of a new line of budget-targeted AMD Vision A-series APUs that include better-than-Intel-integrated graphics to accompany mainstream processing power.… Read more

When it comes to laptops in 2011, "thinner is better" seems to be a consistent trend. The MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 head the pack in that regard, but laptops such as the Sony Vaio SE and Dell XPS 15z have followed suit. It's no surprise, then, that the mainstream Dell Inspiron line has gotten its own thinned-out model in the Inspiron 14z. If the name rings a bell, that's because there was a previous Inspiron 14z released in 2009, with a Core 2 Duo processor, but that "thin" laptop was inferior to … Read more

Gateway laptops are funny products. Of the two mainstream lines available, the "budget" NV series and the "higher-end" ID series, neither one currently has a single model that tops $699. So, in that sense, both are budget lines. The Gateway ID is the slicker, more polished-looking product and a significantly thinner laptop with a 14-inch display, more closely matching what most people consider to be easily portable.

The $699 Gateway ID47H02u has a good set of specs for its price. An Intel Core i5-2410M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive are considered mainstream specs nowadays, but no corners are cut on the processor, which matches equivalent $1,000-range laptops such as the Toshiba Satellite E305 and the Toshiba Portege R835. A sleek--for Gateway--design, a comfortable keyboard and touch pad, and a long-lasting battery complete the package. It's definitely a more attractive and slimmer notebook overall than you see in the Gateway NV line, which we recently reviewed in the form of the Gateway NV55S05u.… Read more