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Always On Torture Test Giveaway Extravaganza! iPod Touch, ThinkPad Carbon X1, and Kindle Fire HD

It's been a while since we had a good gadget giveaway here at Always On, so in honor of the holiday season, we're having a giveaway extravaganza! Enter in the comments for a chance to win one of three devices we've recently put through the wringer.

First up, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop. This one boasted rugged construction, but had trouble with our torture gantlet: mainly the heat test and the part where I spilled a cup of hot coffee on its otherwise outstanding keyboard. It comes on, but the keyboard and touch pad are unresponsive. … Read more

See where your disk space went

Disk Inventory X is a free disk utility for Mac OS X that gives you a summary of your disk usage, both in text and visually. Need to know how much space is being taken up on your drives by photos or audio files? Disk Inventory X will give you the answer quickly.

The program is easy to install, and its interface is clean. When you run it there's a simple disk selector dialog, which expands to a larger window. A standard hierarchical view of your drive in the left pane shows you the total size of each folder … Read more

Episode 18: The Galaxy Note 2 and a ThinkPad torture test

When Samsung debuted the Galaxy Note last year at CES, the phone met with, well, a mountain of mockery.

It was inexplicably huge, it came with a stylus, hallmark of the hopelessly unhip, and worse, pundits took to calling it a "phablet" -- half phone, half tablet. It appeared to be a product in search of a market it could never, ever hope to find.

We were wrong. The Note found a following, and Samsung reportedly sold 20 million of the funny little things. That's pretty good for a tweener device with no known purpose.

And here … Read more

NASA exoskeleton suit is half way to Iron Man

The X1 Robotic Exoskeleton looks like a cross between the legs of a Stormtrooper and a Transformer. The suit is a spinoff from NASA's Robonaut 2 humanoid robot project.

The X1 is focused on either helping or hindering a person's legs, depending on its job description. When it's set to inhibit, the X1 resists movement and could be used to help astronauts exercise in space. When it's set to help, it could be used to assist paraplegics and others with lower body injuries with walking.

Four motorized joints and six passive joints give the 57-pound suit a good range of motion. It also gives it some nice Iron Man flavor, minus the propulsion feet.… Read more

Ultrabooks: The top technical problems

Owners of ultrabooks face a variety of technical woes, from limited battery life to poor screen quality, according to a new study from FixYa.

Tracking questions and complaints from its site users, FixYa narrowed its scope to seven different ultrabooks, shining a light on the key problems found in each one.

Low memory was the top complaint among users of Apple's popular MacBook Air, followed by thermal shutdown, which automatically turns off the computer if it gets too hot. Some owners also said the Air was difficult to repair and that the speaker quality was poor.

To deal with … Read more

Episode 13: the Nexus 7 tablet is a delicate flower

In the Season 2 premiere of Always On, the Google Nexus 7 takes a beating. Well, it wouldn't be fair to say it takes a beating. It receives a beating, and frankly, doesn't handle it very well. It's one of our more dramatic Torture Tests, and I think it points out that sometimes, you do get what you pay for when it comes to quality and durability. The Nexus 7 is a great tablet in many respects but, well. It's not the toughest little thing. You'll see what I mean.

We'll find out in … Read more

Lenovo intros new Ivy Bridge ThinkPads, including X1 Carbon ultrabook

If you're looking for "new and exciting" regarding Lenovo's newest ThinkPad laptops, you'll have to hone in on the small details. For instance, Lenovo's latest lineup of third-generation Intel Core i-series processor ThinkPads have adopted the more modern raised keyboards that have been seen on models such as the ThinkPad Edge and X1.

Beyond that and some additional port additions -- the inclusion of built-in 4G wireless on certain models -- the biggest news is the tease of the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon, a 14-inch ultrabook that's a sleeker update to last year's somewhat clunky X1 laptop. These new ThinkPads are also compatible with Lenovo's new third-generation docks, which include USB 3.0 ports. … Read more

iPad's display is cutting edge--and a challenge for manufacturers

The new iPad's display is so avant-garde that Apple could have trouble keeping up with demand if it exceeds recent iPad 2 levels, according to a display analyst.

Cutting-edge tech: It's gratuitous at this point to say that the new iPad's 2,048x1,536 display is by any measure amazing--boasting a resolution typically found on large 24-inch class desktop displays.

Exactly how this is achieved is explained in a NPD DisplaySearch discussion about how Super High Aperture technology--by increasing aperture ratio--allows Apple to squeeze four times the number of pixels into the new display compared to the … Read more

The laptop with two brains: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Hybrid doubles down on CPUs

Remember the Lenovo ThinkPad X1? Last year's uber-high-end semithin and semirugged business laptop has gotten a 2012 refresh with the ThinkPad X1 Hybrid, adding an idea that we definitely haven't seen before: this Intel Core i-series-powered computer has its own separate Qualcomm dual-core processor for viewing media in a battery life-saving mode called IMM, or Instant Media Mode.

The idea's not unlike a hybrid, so to speak, of ideas such as automatically switching discrete graphics and quick-launch OS environments that have gone out of fashion as of late in laptops. Lenovo's IMM claims to bump battery life to 10 hours when in that Qualcomm processor-powered Linux-based OS. A dedicated, separate 16GB SSD acts as storage in this mode.… Read more