Hasta La Gadget!

Small size, big sound: Bose's $599 SoundDock 10.

(Credit: Bose)

Bose has been busy the last few weeks. First, it announced its new QuietComfort 15 noise-canceling headphones. And now it’s introduced another high-profile product with a double-digit model number, the SoundDock 10.

Bose says it’s been working for several years on this new speaker system for the iPod and iPhone (yes, it has GSM shielding), and its goal was to build a product that delivered “audio performance previously attainable from a one-piece speaker system for iPod.”

The SoundDock is bigger and more expensive ($599) than previous SoundDock models, but it’s still relatively compact, measuring 17 inches wide, 9 inches high, and 10 inches deep. The centerpiece of the unit is a hefty, custom subwoofer, and two Bose Twiddler transducers (no, that’s not a new social-networking site, it’s a combination of a high-frequency transducer and midrange driver).

The subwoofer alone adds a lot of weight to the unit, and while the speaker can be moved around the house easily enough, Bose reps told me the SoundDock 10 weighs three times as much as the SoundDock Series II ($299) and SoundDock Portable ($399). In case you’re wondering, those models will stay in the line.

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We’ve played around with various pre-release versions of Windows 7 for a long time now, but the prize for being the first PC maker to actually ship us a street-ready system with Windows 7 …

Asus is the latest PC maker to hit the market with its own line of thin, light laptops.

The Taiwanese company revealed its new family of notebooks at a news conference in Taipei on Monday. The ASUS UnLimited, or UL, laptops measure less than 24.5 millimeters (one inch) thick …

Sound ID 400

(Credit: Sound ID)

We’ve been fans of Sound ID headsets in the past, and so have many of you, so we’re pleased to see the company come out with its latest and greatest headset, the Sound ID 400.

Taking the form factor of the Sound ID 300 …

(Credit: Sony)

With its new $300 price tag, the PS3 Slim has been selling like crazy, and the fact that it’s an excellent Blu-ray player is at least part of the reason.

Since Blu-ray’s inception, the PS3 has been our reference Blu-ray player, only recently getting edged out of the top spot by theOppo BDP-83. Now that the new 3.00 firmware has been released, we’ve had some time to put the PS3 Slim through our Blu-ray testing suite.

The good

Blu-ray performance

Testing the image quality of the PlayStation 3 has always been a challenge, mainly because it does not deinterlace native 1080i content to 1080p at 60 frames per second. That means test discs specifically designed to assess Blu-ray image quality–like HQV, Spears and Munsil, and Qdeo–aren’t helpful; they all feature 1080i content and the PS3 just passes it along without processing. The PS3 Slim is no different in this regard. Not much Blu-ray content is available in 1080i, however, so this quirk of the PS3 isn’t a huge problem in real-world scenarios.

Without the comfort of our reliable test discs, we switched to our favorite challenging passages from actual program content. The kitchen scenes during chapter 2 of “Sunshine” are often difficult for lesser players, but the PS3 Slim had no problem rendering the ridged cups or striped shirts. It also handled the end of chapter 6 on “Ghost Rider,” where we sometimes see moire in the grille of the RV on players with faulty 1080i deinterlacing. A couple of select scenes from “Spider-Man 3” looked flawless as well.

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