portable

U.S. Army, welcome to the future.

If you happen to be in Farnborough, London, this week, you'll be able to see a demo of an Army pilot geared in the latest in wearable military technology -- a portable computing device that fits in a pocket and a display panel that can be strapped to a soldier's wrist.

The entire Aviation Warrior (yes, that's what it is called) system -- which includes a helmet equipped with a flip-down viewing monocle and taps into the cockpit's digital display -- may seem like something that belongs in Battlestar … Read more

If all the stored PDFs were printed out, we'd be tripping over the piles of documents. While you won't find as many PDF tools as PDFs, it sometimes seems like it, especially lightweight freeware designed to make quick work of handling PDFs. PDF-XChange Viewer Portable from Tracker Software is a fine example of the breed. It can view Adobe-compatible PDFs, perform a variety of functions on them, and export PDF data in several file formats. With editing, annotating, searching, and printing capabilities, it's neither too sparse nor too big and unwieldy to be useful. It's totally … Read more

What's bigger and more capable than Notepad but not a match for Word? It's WordPad, the basic word processor included with Windows 95 and every Windows release since. Carolina Road's Jarte is a free word processor built upon WordPad. It moves the bar much closer to the capabilities offered by full-featured word processors such as Word, though Jarte is no Word clone. Word can open documents created by Jarte, and Jarte can open many (but not all) Word documents. We tried Jarte Portable, a fully portable version of this free word processor. Like the installed version of … Read more

Nintendo is more than satisfied with the 3DS, and now its handheld sights are set on the company's next-generation portable, according to gaming icon Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto, who created some of Nintendo's most popular franchises, including Mario, Zelda, and others, told IGN in an interview published yesterday that he believes the 3DS is "the best for this generation" of handhelds. And because of that, Nintendo is now thinking about "a future generation of handheld."

Miyamoto's comments come just after Japan's Nikkei reported that Nintendo was planning to launch a 3DS XL, featuring … Read more

GIMP is a well-known open-source image editor that is renown for its powerful features. GIMP Portable is a version of this program that can be taken on the go via installation on removable devices. Although for serious users GIMP likely will not knock Photoshop off the throne, but it's still a great option for anyone who's looking for a freeware alternative that offers a full complement of photo-editing tools.

GIMP Portable's interface will be familiar to anyone who's used Photoshop or similar image-editing programs; the image is placed in the center, with a toolbar down the … Read more

I've reviewed my share of portable headphone amplifiers, but ALO's new Rx-MK3B just might be the best on a number of counts. First, the amp is compact, just about the same size as an iPhone, but twice as thick. ALO invested two years of engineering and development time in the Rx-3B, and makes it in the U.S.

The Cypher Labs AlgoRhythm Solo is a portable digital-to-analog converter designed only for use with iPhones, iPads, and iPods, but it won't work with computers (it's not a USB DAC). There are precious few portable DACs that can … Read more

Freeciv Portable is Freeciv, the open-source civilization-building game, rendered totally portable by PortableApps. As with the installed version, players attempt to build empires over a timescale spanning the Stone Age to the Space Age. Freeciv Portable lets you play new games, save and return to games, and connect to network games, just like the regular freeware. Freeciv's been around a long time, and the original version from the mid-1990s was based on an even older game from the Days of DOS, Sid Meier's Civilization. It's gotten much more sophisticated since then, in both look and gameplay.

We … Read more

Metalogic's Finance Explorer is a simple, free, open-source tool for managing your personal finances. It's compatible with Quicken, Microsoft Money, and other financial programs. It supports OFX, OFC, and QIF formats, so it can import and manage transaction data from most banks, a huge time-saver over entering everything manually. It can manage your checking, saving, credit, investment, loan, and cash accounts, in any number. It can download stock quotes from online sources, display monthly transactions or net worth, and help you set up a personal budget using an intuitive process. We sampled a fully portable version of Finance … Read more

Plenty of people don't want or need a big PDF app just to do something fairly simple, such as split or merge a handful of PDFs. Those people have many choices. For example, there's 7-PDF Split and Merge, a freeware version of the German software developer's premium tool. It has all the features of the Pro tool, but it will split only the first 50 pages and merge only five PDFs. We tried a fully portable version of the software, 7-PDF Split and Merge Portable.

As with similar tools, Split and Merge has a compact, all-in-one style … Read more