PCWorld Feb-12

ALL WE WANTED was to answer a simple question: Which U.S. airports are best at meeting travelers’ tech needs? The question was simple, but finding the answer was anything but. In fact, it ended up being the most complex project in PCWorld’s 30-year history, requiring two editors, one in-house researcher, 31 field researchers, four months of labor, hundreds of phone calls, the support of dozens of airline and airport personnel, and even the cooperation of the TSA. “Today’s air passengers routinely carry laptops, smartphones, and all manner of connected mobile devices,” explains Senior Editor Mark Sullivan, who oversaw the project and wrote “The 20 Best Airports for Tech Travelers” (page 66). “To learn how well airports support these travelers, we had to outfit researchers with similar gadgetry and send them to the…

Tech Revolutions I’d just like to note that optical drives, FireWire, brick-and-mortar music stores, phones with buttons, and netbooks all still exist. I’d also like to note that there will not be a post-PC era anytime soon. “PC” stands for “personal computer,” and people will probably have a PC (even in tablet form) for many, many generations to come. Yes, I know what Steve Jobs meant, but his choice of words was probably also deliberate, since most Windows machines are referred to as “PCs.” And how did the iPhone “[change] the nature of phones”? The original iPhone really wasn’t all that different from what already existed on the market. KLanD, PCWorld.com forums “Keyboard-and-mouse input may be on the way out”? Get real! While for select usages they do just fine, none of the current alternative input…

TABLETS AND smartphones are in, but don’t count laptops out. Impressive models planned for 2012 promise to be thinner, lighter, and faster, with longer-lasting batteries. Ubiquitous Ultrabooks Thin and lightweight Ultrabooks are the watchword, thanks to Intel, which has trademarked the name for a new category of ultraportable laptops. As many as 30 to 50 Ultrabook models may be announced at the CES trade show. To qualify for the label, a laptop must be less than 21mm (0.83 inch) thick, resume from hibernate to keyboard input in less than 7 seconds, get at least 5 hours of battery life, and support certain specific Intel security features in its BIOS. See page 77 for reviews of four early models: Acer’s Aspire S3-951, Asus’s Zenbook UX31E, Lenovo’s IdeaPad U300s, and Toshiba’s Portege Z835. A fifth,…

FLIPIT This charger from Ideative Product Ventures turns one wall socket into two. A small plastic power tab slips over another device’s plug. The tab then sits between the wall outlet and the plug. The $16 Flipit can grab up to 1 amp of power from the outlet. INNERGIE The Innergie Magic Cable Trio has a standard USB connector on one end and an interlocking triple connection on the other (Micro-USB, Mini-USB, and a 30-pin Apple connector). It costs $20 and must be paired with an Innergie plug, such as the $25, 15W Dual USB Adapter. POWER2U Simply plug a USB cord directly into the $40 Power2U AC/USB wall outlet from Newer Technology. The product features two standard electrical wall sockets and two dual USB 2.0/3.0 ports; the ports deliver enough power…

MICROSOFT WANTS to make upgrading to Windows 8 from older Windows versions easier and faster via online delivery, with no product key entry for at least one installation method, and a process that involves 82 percent fewer screen clicks. “Our aim in improving setup is to reduce the time from start to finish,” Microsoft’s Windows chief, Steven Sinofsky, said in a recent post published on the company’s Building Windows 8 blog. Installing a new version of Windows has always been a pain; and even when the steps involved are easy to perform, the process can still take as long as 4 hours, as PCWorld colleague Jeff Bertolucci pointed out during the Windows 7 launch. Microsoft hopes to improve its upgrade process so as to persuade the more than 450 million users of…

Facebook: Degrees of Separation? 4.74 Facebook has updated the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory, announcing that a study shows that any individual person on earth is a mere 4.74 steps away from being introduced to any other person, instead of the presumed 6. Facebook paired with the University of Milan to approximate the “number of hops,” or degrees of separation, between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. The study found that while 99.6 percent of all pairs of people on Facebook are a maximum of five degrees of separation (six hops) apart, 92 percent are a maximum of only four degrees (five hops) apart. AOL Revamps AIM With Facebook, Google Chat AIM, AOL’s seminal instant messenger app, just received a preview update to pull it out of obscurity and enable it to compete…