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The ViewSonic VX1962wm is currently the lowest priced monitor I've reviewed. Currently...

For some, finding the lowest price for a computer monitor trumps all other factors, including features, size, and brand. For those "some" of you, this is the blog you've been waiting for.

Here, I'll outline what I think are the best techniques for finding monitors that are priced the lowest.

Go small
The smaller your monitor's screen size, the less work it takes to illuminate. Thus, the less expensive it is. Simple math, really. Obviously, you'll buy per your needs, but if funds are an issue, go as small as you can stand. I recommend bottoming out at 17 inches, however.

Buy off-brand
Name brands have a premium attached to them, but off brands don't bear the same burden. While a mainstream 21.5-incher like the Dell SX2210 or Lenovo 215p will cost you at least $250, you can find the lesser-known brand HannsG 221HPB from Newegg for $180. Keep in mind though that you get what you pay for and you should not expect the quality level on off-brands to match those of name brands. A brand name may save you on peace of mind, but it usually won't save you cash.

Skimp on features
Like everyone else, if you want two HDMI ports, DVI, component, DisplayPort, built-in speakers, a beer holder, a mini pizza oven, a holographic projector that projects an image of Megan Fox in a bikini that says you're the strangest boy she's ever met attached to your monitor, you're gonna have to pay for it.

Think about exactly what you'll need from your monitor. What exactly you'll be using it for. Then, when it comes time to choose your monitor, stick to your needs and remember that any extra frills will be, well, extra.

Seasonal discounts
After Christmas, late winter/early spring is the best time to take advantage of sales, as stores try to sell off their previous season's stock. Also, most retailers--especially e-tailers--have big promotions on Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Memorial Day weekends. If you're looking to buy and it's approaching one of those weekends, it may pay off to wait a few days to see what deals you can get.

Shop around
If finding the lowest possible price is paramount, then you'll need to put in the time to do so. Check all the majors like Amazon, Newegg, and Best Buy. Then check out some of the price aggregators like Google Product Search and Nextag. Those will point you to lesser-known e-tailers, so use caution when choosing who to buy from.

Buy used
Craigslist and eBay are great resources for finding used monitors in good condition. Just be sure that the eBay users have lots of positive feedback and that you actually try before you buy when using Craigslist.

That about covers all your legal choices. I'll be back next week to focus the best illegal ways to find the cheapest monitor (I won't actually be doing this).

Check out our low-price LCD monitors comparison to get an idea of lowest prices for LCDs that got at least 3.5 stars in our reviews. Then take a look at our comparison of budget LCDs, regardless of rating comparison. There would have been some overlap between the two lists, but the criteria for the two comparisons was that a monitor that appears in one list couldn't appear in the other.

Enjoy, happy hunting, keep your eyes peeled, and stay frosty. And like that, (whoosh!) he's gone.

At its CTIA booth Nokia showed a new camera phone application that will allow users to get information about an object. Point & Find is a downloadable app that uses real-time image processing and recognition technologies to access information related to books, movies, DVDs and similar media content.

Point & Find with the Nokia N95

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

Though Nokia officially unveiled Point & Find back in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 conference, I got see a demonstration in Las Vegas. The Nokia rep pointed an N95 at a poster for the movie Ice Age 3. You don't actually have to take a photo--all you need to do is point the camera at the poster. Within seconds we were able to watch a trailer and get information about the flick. As Ice Age 3 won't be in theaters until this summer we weren't able to get read reviews or get local show times, but Point & Find promises such capability for current films.

Beyond media content, Point & Find also can read bar codes, and it will support GPS data and text-entry search. Though Point & Find is primarily a consumer application, companies will be able to use the technology to market specific products.

Once downloaded, Point & Find and the related content sit directly on the phone so there's no need to connect back to a server to access content for most objects. Nokia says it will offer frequent updates to keep the database current, though we imagine that not everything in the world will be captured.

During our demo, Point & Find appeared to be intuitive and responsive. Since it's not an NFC technology there's no need to capture a specific bar code-like image on the movie poster. As long as you can frame most of the poster, you should be good to go.

For now Point & Find is available on the Nokia N95 and Nokia N95 8GB phones, though Nokia says more supported handsets are on the way. On the upside, the initial download and updates are free to consumers.

(Credit: FindWhere)

The other day my esteemed colleague Leslie Katz mentioned a lightweight gadget you can slip into a car's glove compartment or onto a pet's collar to locate the things you care about wherever they are. If the device doesn't provide enough stats for your detail-hungry brain or seem adequate to cover human cargo, FindWhere offers a similar tracking service using a gadget that your teen/workforce/elderly parent most likely already has--a mobile phone.

Like the Zoombak Universal GPS Locator, FindWhere offer worriers no-go zones whose border crossing sends text message or e-mail alerts to whoever's at the helm of Mission Control. The service keeps going with detailed location reporting, a panic alert for emergencies, and a number of battery-checking and motion detection routines for each cell phone under surveillance.

Of course, it's not as good at geolocating your pooch, and subscription prices can skyrocket the more advanced a micromanager you are. The GPS device works out to be cheaper in the long run, but FindWhere is another service we thought you should know about that goes beyond the basics.

The new location-based service FindMe is a straightforward app that uses cell phone towers to broadcast your general whereabouts to Facebook friends, saving you from updating Facebook manually with places you frequently travel. In beta, FindMe installs on your cell phone and updates your Facebook status when it senses you've changed locations. For each new cell area FindMe detects, you'll be able to tag it "Work," "Home," and so on, and you'll only share addresses you manually enter yourself. As you change zones, FindMe updates your bearings, going "dark" when you switch to offline mode.

Like Google Maps for Mobile, FindMe relies on cell phone towers to generalize your geography, so the service works for all cell phones regardless of GPS support.

FindMe's reporting style prompted a friend to IM me, "What the heck is with your Facebook status?"

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's a somewhat good, somewhat limited idea that suffers from half-formed presentation issues. For instance, FindMe doesn't believe in grammatical standards when updating Facebook, nor in identifying FindMe-produced status messages with a proprietary icon. Not only does this miss the promotion boat, it confuses friends who wonder why I keep changing my status to "Jessica is at an unknown location," or to this caveman grunt: "Jessica Work."

FindMe also has the annoying "useful" habit of updating every 15 minutes even when the phone is stationary. Assuming I never leave the office and don't go dark, my Facebook status would show 32 "Work" messages during any given eight-hour weekday.

I welcome the team's plan to add Wi-Fi or Bluetooth sensing, or both, in addition to GPS support. The integration would add finer resolution for distinguishing between your desk and the deli next door. Future development will see FindMe as a standalone app that can feed Web site widgets, Skype status, and possibly Google docs. I hope it offers more granular status options, as well, like only broadcasting starred tags or turning off updates for unknown locations.

FindMe is currently available for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones. To try it, add the FindMe app to your Facebook profile.

'Find the Lost Ring,' a brand-new alternate-reality game, is a promotional vehicle for McDonald's and the Beijing Olympics. The game, which went live on Monday, is centered on a woman named Ariadne, who claims to have woken up with amnesia in a South African corn maze on February 12.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee and that McGonigal's partners in the creation of the game were McDonald's and global interactive experience design shop, AKQA.

"This ARG extends McDonald's historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games in a brand-new direction," said McGonigal, who is a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. "Its goal is to create global collaboration and bring the spirit of the Games to people around the world. It will invite players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games."

McGonigal, an alumna of leading ARG design firm 42 Entertainment, has either been lead designer on or helped create a wide variety of multimedia games such as A World without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Last Call Poker, and I Love Bees.

Since The Lost Ring went live on Monday, its Web site has offered up a number of clues for players to follow, while ARG-related sites like ARGNet and Unfiction have been actively discussing the game. It will play out over many months, likely not finishing at least until the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on August 24, 2008.

'Find the Lost Ring,' a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the Olympics in Beijing, went live Monday morning.

(Credit: findthelostring.com)

As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.

The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.

The game's conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world clues and puzzles. Somehow, it will all be tied in to the Olympics. One clue on the game's site says she offers up the "fact" that, after waking up, she spent a week in the hospital being treated for her very rare form of amnesia and that doctors there "say I'm an Olympic-caliber athlete."

To me, it's all very Bourne Identity-ish, except probably without a lot of gun play and CIA involvement.

For the full list of clues that launched the game, see my blog entry from Sunday night, which includes photos and the text of the initial clues.

Erica Sadun over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has come up with a useful mobile application/hack for the iPhone. It's called FindMe, and just like the name suggests, it's a location-based service that helps you find your stolen or misplaced handset, and potentially whomever is in possession of it.

It works by auto transmitting your phone's location in the same way the iPhone currently does for the Maps application--by using the location of local cell phone tower or Wi-Fi signal. In this case, the catch is that the service employs Twitter to send the status updates, meaning you and a few other folks can monitor the signal privately, and check the location right on Google Maps.

When it comes time to actually find your stolen phone, things might get a little difficult. While the system gives you a general location that's accurate up to a quarter mile, you're not going to get the exact positioning you'd get with something like GPS. An application called BlackBerry Tracker has been offering such a service for the past year, and even lets you set up geofences that trigger tracking automatically when a phone breaches the invisible borders. With FindMe you might just have to call your phone and hope you're close enough to hear the ringtone (Note: we don't recommend you going vigilante against thieves of any sort).

Another thing to note is that the installation is not for the faint of heart. You'll need a jailbroken iPhone, minor knowledge of shell scripting, and some comfort with editing a few lines of code. You can find full instructions over at TUAW.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

When I was a kid I was always going to my friends' houses to check out the latest additions to their record collections. We'd sit around playing new records, getting high, eating crappy food, and generally having a great time. As we got older that happened less and less, but we started to trade mix cassettes, and more recently mix CDs. Mixes are hit or miss in terms of finding good new music, but now that everybody has an iPod, it may be the best ever way to tap into my friends' music collections. I figured that if I spent a couple of hours listening to a friend's iPod over a weekend I'd find some gems.

That was my theory at least, so I called up my pal, Wes, to see if he was up for it. He seemed a little, well, shy, about letting me peruse his musical taste, but happily lent me his 80GB 'Pod. It did feel a little weird at first, as if I was exposing his personal tastes as I sampled a bunch of great stuff. Soup Dragon's "Mindless" and "I'm Free" got me going; I loved the acoustic folk stylings of Robinella and the CC String Band; and Rufus McKenzie's spine tingling a cappella blues stopped me in my tracks. Rosanne Cash's Rules of Travel turned me onto a new side of her music, and Steve Winwood's killer Hammond B-3 organ on his About Time record had a harder, meaner groove than I've ever heard from him.

And I don't know how I missed it, but I finally got to hear Thom Yorke's Eraser, wow, it sounded amazing! I liked it even better than Radiohead's In Rainbows, gotta get Eraser ASAP. Thanks Wes!

Point is, there's so much great music out there and a little iPod swapping among friends can be a lot of fun. Let me know how it works out for you.

Google and Microsoft haven't quite cornered the market on mobile search and directions apps, at least not yet. Infospace Find It!, built with the BlackBerry in mind, gives users multiple entry points to search businesses, people, and directions while squeezing in features not yet stocked by competitors.

To satisfy variant search methods, Find It! sorts searches by name, by category, and by maps and directions. When choosing to search by name, you can look up a business or person in or near a location. This wasn't always successful during my tests, nor was the reverse phone number lookup, a feature unique to Find It! among its better-known and more prosperous rivals. However, when Find It! did strike gold, it didn't skimp in doling it out. Upon locating an individual or business, users can click-to-call, view a map, get directions, save the entry to the address book, and see what else is nearby.

I should mention that both Microsoft's Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile and Google Maps for Mobile had their fair share of data holes--one didn't even register CNET after a search, the brute--so Find It!'s defaults are common to still-youthful mobile search.... Read more