Our Favourite Laptops, Cloud Storage, Gadgets And More

It sort of all seems for naught, with the earth in obvious upheaval, spawning one natural disaster after another and careening toward a horrible and fiery end next year. But until that happens, there are some pretty cool gadget to play with! Here’s the best of the bunch from August.

Note: This is not our complete list, just the change log.
Our full list of The Best Tech Gear is right here.

In

Best Windows Ultraportable
The Vaio Z is proof that Sony can still do some things very right. The screen is beautiful. Borderline jaw-dropping, and makes watching HD content a joy. It’s light, nicely designed and blazing fast — pretty much everything you’d want in an ultraportable. Its one downside is a seriously tiny and lacking trackpad. But still, it’s an astonishingly fast and fluid machine otherwise.[imgclear]

Best Cloud Storage Service
It’s SugarSync — with a few caveats. SugarSync was the best confluence of price, ease of use and features, but if you’re looking for pure, sheer simplicity for sharing your sharables with the loveable luddites in your life, Dropbox might still be the better option. And if you’re a total cheapass, maybe take a look at Google, or Microsoft’s SkyDrive.[imgclear]

Best iPod Dock
So yeah, $US600 is a lot to spend on an iPod dock. But the Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin positively drips with engineering. It has five brand new drivers — two mids, two tweeters, a sub — each powered by its own class-d amp, and 150 total watts of oomph.[imgclear]

Best Mobile Bluetooth Keyboard
The Targus Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard for Tablets came out on top of our mobile bluetooth keyboard deathmatch. It doesn’t fold or roll up like some of the other ones, but after using the it for a few minutes you forget it’s undersized. The individual keys have some separation between them, making keyboard errors less frequent, and it’s attractively priced.[imgclear]

Best Affordable Amplifier
The Topping TP-30 is the best audiophile-worthy amplifier to be had for under $US500.[imgclear]

Out

Best Windows Ultraportable: Like last month, this is more a passing of the torch, with the old Vaio Z giving way to the new model.

Note: This is not our complete list, just the change log.
Our full list of The Best Tech Gear is right here.


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