Summer is slowly winding down. That’s depressing. But it’s not a serious problem for a few more months, so you may as well sit back and enjoy some awesome gadgets. Here’s the best of the past month (or so):
For the full list of Gizmodo favourites, head over to the complete Best Gadgets
In:
Best Solid State Drive
Better NAND pushes the Pyro SE past its stablemate and into the rarified air at the top of the SandForce-powered heap. With sequential read and write speeds at 482MB/s and 300MB/s, respectively, as measured by CrystalDiskMark, the Pyro SE is quite fast, and its 4KB random write speed, at over 91,000 IOPS is preposterous. [imgclear]
Best Hybrid SSD/Hard Drive
If you want a taste of SSD speeds but can’t afford one, or simply need more storage and don’t feel like Frankenstein-ing your rig with a combo SSD/HDD setup, the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive isn’t a bad deal at all for $US180. An SSD for with a third of the storage costs twice as much. But definitely get the 750GB model-not only do you get more storage, you get double the flash cache and interface speed. [imgclear]
Best Budget Laptop
The Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E420 is a less fancy-looking version of the very nice ThinkPad Edge E420s. It’s got a 2.3GHz Intel Core i3-2350M processor, a 14-inch 1366×768 anti-glare display, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. [imgclear]
Best Voice Command System
In terms of speed and accuracy, Google Voice Actions was ahead of Siri in almost all of our tests. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and both are handy convenience features. Siri has a little more colloquial chops and is more “fun”, but Voice Search is ultimately a faster, more efficient tool. [imgclear]
Out:
Best SSD: It was a good ride, Kingston’s SNV425-S2 64GB drive.
Best Budget Laptop: So long, HP Pavilion G6x.