Apple iPod Touch
(Credit: CNET)In news that shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's perused our Holiday Gift guide, sampled our list of top MP3 players, or remembers what happened to last year's iPod Touch, the third-generation iPod Touch now proudly bears the CNET Editors' Choice badge.
As I mentioned back in September, I deliberately held off on awarding the Touch an Editors' Choice early on, waiting to see what Archos and Zune had up their sleeves before handing down final judgment. Well, all the reviews are in now and the iPod Touch remains king of the hill. Whether you're buying one for yourself or giving it as a gift, the third-generation iPod Touch does not disappoint.
To all you Zune HD fans out there who feel betrayed by our choice, feel free to pour your anger into the comments section below.
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Check out our full review of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid.
(Credit: Josh P. Miller/CNET)
Spoiler alert: We gave the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid our Editors' Choice award. Although to be fair, after seeing its doppelganger, the 2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid, win the award previously, you had to have known the less expensive Fusion was something of a shoo-in.
However, our experience with the Fusion Hybrid wasn't an exact repeat of our time with the Milan. For starters, our tester was not equipped with the hard drive-based navigation system, which let us get a taste of the Sync flavor without the cheat sheet touch screen.
How did the screenless Sync experience stack up? Check the full review of the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid to find out.
You might balk at the $130 price tag, but this time more actually means better. The Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro combo puts two of our favorite products together in one package: the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Keyboard and the Logitech MX 1100 Cordless laser mouse.
Both products received very high marks from their respective editors, and the MX1100 mouse even managed to win an Editors' Choice award. This time around, we're sticking to our guns and rewarding this winning combo as well.
One of the most significant hardware changes in the bundle that we don't speak much of in the review is the mouse's rechargeable battery. In our separate review of the MX1100, we weren't very happy to see that it used alkaline batteries for juice. We cut it some slack since it meant one less power adapter to throw into our mountain of cords, but Logitech really came through this time and includes a rechargeable battery with the system.
Logitech advertises two months of power per charge, and although we don't have the time or the resources to perform a drain test, we used the device for a full week and kept it on 24 hours a day and barely saw the drain indicator move. In our opinion, that's worth the bimonthly mouse charging.
Read the full review of the Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro.
We've been hard on standalone Blu-ray players from the start. At first, they were astronomically priced, while HD DVD was able to deliver much of the same performance for less. Then HD DVD dropped out, but the PlayStation 3 was able to offer great Blu-ray playback, plus media streaming and high-def gaming for the same price or less than standalones. And lately we've seen some standalone Blu-ray players priced significantly less than the PS3, like the Insignia NS-BRDVD and Philips BD7200, but their image quality performance isn't quite as good as we'd like.
The Panasonic DMP-BD35 finally escapes the conventional wisdom against standalones. We put it head-to-head with the PS3 in image-quality tests, and it performed nearly identically, which is to say Blu-ray, movies looked fantastic. The DMP-BD35 also has all the key features we look for, including Profile 2.0 support and onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. To wrap it all up, it carries a list price of $300, which is $100 less than the PS3. All this adds up to the best value in standalone Blu-ray players today, and that's why the DMP-BD35 receives our Editors' Choice award--the first we've given to a Blu-ray player.
Panasonic's TH-58PZ800U, a 58-inch THX-certified plasma, earned our Editors' Choice award.
(Credit: CNET)Earlier this year we awarded the 50-inch Panasonic TH-50PZ800U our Editors' Choice among 50-inch plasma TVs, and now that we've reviewed the newly released 58-inch version, it predictably gets a similar review, with an identical score and Editors' Choice award. Part of the reason has to do with its color accuracy, for which the TV's THX Display Certification deserves credit.
The bigger Panasonic still didn't perform as well as our new reference standard, the Pioneer Elite Kuro PRO-111FD--which we assume will perform as well, in turn, as the 60-inch Elite PRO-151FD--but those Elite models are just too expensive to earn our Editors' Choice. The 50-inch Elite, for example, costs more than the 58-inch Panasonic, and the 60-inch Elite is off the charts.
If you're shopping for a massive-screen plasma, the other high-end option is the 60-inch non-Elite Pioneer, model PDP-6020FD. Too bad it's significantly more expensive than the 58-inch Panasonic itself, and judging from our review of the 50-inch version, its color accuracy is a big issue. Couple that with the fact that, according to our observations, the 58-inch Panasonic delivered even deeper black levels than the 50-inch model, we feel the EC and higher rating compared with the non-Elite Pioneer is justified, again.
For folks just looking for a massive screen, regardless of form factor, it's still difficult to justify the higher cost of plasma over rear-projection. Our current rear-projection EC is the 61-inch Samsung HL61A750, a superb-performing LED-based DLP model that can't quite match the overall picture quality of any of those plasmas, but costs a dark sight less.
What's your take? Let us know in the comments section.
read the full review of the Panasonic Viera TH-58PZ800U.
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The FreeAgent Go external hard drive by Seagate wins our coveted Editor's Choice award for three reasons: Design, cost per gigabyte, and speed. There are a ton of external drives out there to choose from, but we can definitely say that the FreeAgent Go takes the cake. Seagate offers the drive in multiple colors and capacities and the inexpensive price makes it perfect for users that need to access data on the run.
The FreeAgent Go is available in four colors (red, white, blue, and black) and with capacities up to 320 gigabytes. For our purposes, Seagate sent us a 320GB model to test that will run you $150, or $0.48 per gigabyte. In relation to their competitors' prices, the FreeAgent Go is dirt cheap- up until now, the typical price per GB ran around $0.56, so you're getting a great deal with the FreeAgent.
Read the full review of the Editor's Choice winning Seagate FreeAgent Go.
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(Credit: CNET Networks/Corinne Schulze)Sony has come a long way since the release of the NW-MS11 Network Walkman. One of the company's first flash-based MP3 players, the NW-MS11 didn't even play MP3s and was crippled by copy-protection woes and painfully slow transcoding, but even back then, Walkmans were a model of sleek design and excellent sound quality. The S-Series Walkman is a prime example of the reason Sony was the original king of portable music devices. The flash player, which comes in 4GB ($149.99) and 8GB ($179.99) models, is sleek, compact, easy to use, and packed with features. Plus, it sounds great and has an impressive battery life--we just wish we could get more than the 8GB of memory. Read the full S-Series Walkman review.
The iAudio 7 is the Swiss Army Knife of MP3 players.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze / CNET Networks)Our review is up, and the results are in--Cowon's latest player, the iAudio 7, snagged a CNET Editors' Choice award. This little guy has just about every feature you'd want in an ultracompact MP3 player, plus a rechargeable battery life rated at an incredible 60 hours. You'll have to read the CNET review to get all the details.
Or, if you don't care about details and just want some eye candy, then take a gander at our official Cowon iAudio 7 slide show. If you want a slightly less polished tour, then here's a slide show of when we first saw the unofficial version of the iAudio 7 (includes comparison shots of the iAudio 6).
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