Trendnet TEW-812DRU V2 router review: Barely the basics

TRENDnet TEW-812DRU AC1750 Wireless Router $210.00 There's very little reason to consider the Trendnet's TEW-812DRU Wi-Fi router. It's nearly devoid of advanced features, it's performance is below par on most counts, and it's not the least-expensive model

Street-priced at $135, Trendnet’s TEW-812DRU V2 is one of the least expensive 802.11ac routers on the market. But its performance leaves much to be desired, and it's virtually bereft of advanced features beyond its support for 802.11ac.

Well, that might be a little harsh. You can establish up to three guest networks with two options: Allowing guests full network access or restricting them to the Internet, and allowing them to interact on the network or isolating them from each other. Like D-Link’s DIR-868L, Trendnet’s TEW-812DRU V2 has a single USB 3.0 port that can be used to share storage or a printer.

ROBERT CARDIN

The Trendnet TEW-DRU812 V2 is one of the least-expensive 802.11ac routers on the market—with good reason.

And unlike Buffalo’s WZR-1750DHP, the Trendnet’s router recognizes drives formatted NTFS. Or at least some drives. For whatever reason, it wouldn’t recognize the WD My Passport drive I use for measuring NAS file-transfer performance. It did recognize a different WD My Passport, but since the TEW-812DRU happened to be the last drive I tested, I wasn’t about to go back and retest the rest of the field with that other drive, so I skipped that benchmark with this router.

Aside from those features, the TEW-812DRU V2 is as bare-bones a router as I’ve seen. Parental controls? Basic. VPN server? No. BitTorrent client? No. Cloud services? No. iTunes server? Heck, this router doesn’t have a DLNA server! It does have UPnP, FTP, and Samba servers—but once again, those are basic features that any router should have.

The TEW-812DRU V2’s routers are hidden inside its vertically oriented enclosure, and that design decision likely contributed to this router’s poor performance compared to the other five routers I tested.

ROBERT CARDIN

The TEW-812DRU V2 seems to be finicky about which USB hard drives it will recognize. 

The Trendnet TEW-812DRU V2 is a router and nothing more. It can’t be converted to operate as a Wi-Fi access point, and you can’t turn it into an 802.11ac wireless bridge. Like most of its competitors, it doesn’t offer TurboQAM on its 802.11n network, either, but that’s not a significant shortcoming. It finished in the back of the pack in most of my TCP throughput tests.

As I’ve already mentioned, you can’t convert the TEW-812DRU V2 into an 802.11ac wireless bridge, so I couldn’t test it in that scenario.

Trendet’s router finished dead last when paired with a Linksys WUMC710 802.11ac Wi-Fi bridge. It was the only router that couldn’t break 200 mbps when the client was in my home theater, or 300 mbps when the client was in my home office.

The TEW-812DRU V2 delivered an outstanding performance when linked to a client outfitted with a Linksys WUSB6300 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter, but only at very close range when the two devices were in the same room.

The Trendnet’s 5GHz 802.11n network performed much better. While it finished in fifth place in the field of six, it wasn’t that far behind the D-Link DIR-868L, which finished first.

This router turned in average performances on its 2.4GHz 802.11n network when the client was at close range, but its performance went off a cliff when I moved the client to my home theater and then my home office.

The TEW-812DRU V2 wouldn’t recognize the WD My Passport USB 3.0 hard drive that I use for benchmarking network-attached storage performance. Oddly enough, it did recognize an older WD My Passport drive. To be fair to the other manufacturers, I would have had to retest all the other routers with this model, so I decided not to spend the time to benchmark Trendnet’s.

There’s little to recommend the TEW-812DRU V2 beyond its low price tag. Buffalo’s WZR-1750DHP was $5 cheaper, and it has more features and delivered higher performance on most of my benchmarks. Trendnet is the better choice over Buffalo if  you want a cheap router that can share a USB storage device. Then again, if you can squeeze another $15 out of your budget, D-Link’s DIR-868L delivers a full set of features and performance that’s leagues beyond both the Buffalo and Trendnet routers.

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HP Spectre 13 review: an exceedingly well-executed return to the basics

HP Spectre 13 $1,000.00 The HP Spectre 13 nails the fundamentals, and its innovative trackpad works great with Windows 8.

HP’s Spectre 13 runs Windows 8, but it doesn’t contort, flip, swivel, or do any of the other impractical tricks that look so fun in advertisements. It’s not a tablet strapped to a dock, or a tablet with a keyboard cover, either. It’s just a regular ol’ Ultrabook. A very, very good Ultrabook.

Windows 8 has Microsoft and PC manufacturers like HP trapped between a rock and a hard place. The new operating system was supposed to keep the PC relevant in a world increasingly dominated by sleek, shiny touchscreen devices. That gambit has largely failed, leaving hardware manufacturers little recourse but to throw devices at the wall to see what might stick. So we get 2-in-1s, convertibles, detachables, and all manner of confusing hybrids, when what we really want is a thin-and-light notebook with a great keyboard, a high-res display, and the power to tackle nearly any workload.

So how near does the Spectre 13 come to delivering that ideal design? Pretty darn close. It also leverages one of Windows 8’s key features—touch—to deliver a significant innovation in usability: An almost comically wide touchpad dubbed the Control Zone. More on that shortly.

HP's Spectre 13 boasts a very attractive industrial design. 

The Spectre 13 looks a lot like Apple’s MacBook Air. That’s probably not the praise HP is looking for, but put the two side by side and you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart. No shame there: Both machines are exceedingly attractive pieces of hardware. The Spectre 13’s aluminum unibody chassis feels sturdy without being especially heavy (it weighs in at 3.3-pounds). I’d argue that its “truffle brown” lid is closer to "purple onion," but I’ve never had much of an eye for fashion. The shade is distinctive though, and shiny in a way that doesn’t feel too ostentatious.

Under the hood, you’ll find a fourth-generation Intel Core i5-4200U CPU paired with 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory. The 128GB SSD feels a bit cramped, but you can double the storage for an additional $150. The PC packs Intel’s integrated graphics, so you won't get much in the way of gaming performance, but turning down settings will do in a pinch. Those components are good enough to earn a respectable WorldBench 8.1 score of 270. One shortcoming you won’t be able to fix: the Spectre 13’s cooling fan. It kicks in when the processor starts doing any heavy lifting, and the noise can be annoying.

You can order the Spectre 13 with a higher-resolution 2560-by-1440-pixel display for just $70 more.

HP’s claim of 9 hours of battery life is a little overblown, but we managed to squeeze 7.5 hours out of it in our battery-rundown test. That’s an hour-plus more than what Sony’s VAIO Pro 13 delivered, and nearly 2 hours more than Lenovo’s ThinkPad Yoga.

The keyboard feels great. The wide, spacious, backlit keys are easy to reach, and while I’m always a trifle annoyed when the arrow keys are squished into narrow little spaces, it’s a worthy sacrifice to ensure everything else has a bit of breathing room. The primary role for the row of function keys up top is media-player control. If you want to use them as traditional F keys, you’ll need to hold down the FN key—and I imagine that’ll be perfectly fine with most people. Few apps rely on the function keys anymore, but everyone uses their laptop as a media player.

(Note: Click on the charts below to enlarge them.)

And then there’s the Control Zone, which is designed to ease your transition to Windows 8 by translating the new OS’s touch gestures into actions you can perform right on the touchpad.

Slide your finger along the touchpad, and you’ll notice it’s flanked by matte, almost chalky borders. These distinct zones behave like the edges of a touchscreen in Windows 8: Swipe in from the left, and you’ll quickly cycle between apps; press the zone on the left for a quick list of your open apps. Swipe and hold, and you’ll be able to pin apps onto your screen. The same goes for the zone on the right, which can call up Windows 8’s charms. If you’re at all familiar with Windows 8’s gestures, you’ll be right at home here.

The Control Zone doesn’t alleviate any of Windows 8’s irritations, but it does make the Windows 8 experience feel a bit more—traditional; natural, even.

Keyboards—especially the ones on laptops—have conditioned us to navigating apps using easy, fluid motions, with our hands never straying too far from the same general area. Jabbing at our laptop’s screen just to slide between apps feels silly—at least, at first. The Control Zone rather successfully eases that transition by reinforcing Windows 8’s gesture lessons in a format we’re familiar with. It probably helps that it’s nice and responsive—the only thing worse than trying to learn new gestures is trying to learn new gestures with sluggish hardware.

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the gestures (there aren’t many), you start to realize how awesome Windows 8 can be. The Spectre 13 couldn’t be marketed as an Ultrabook if it didn’t have a touchscreen, even though that feature doesn’t feel entirely necessary once you’ve spent some time with the spruced-up touchpad. And this 13.3-inch, 1920-by-1080-pixel display is nice and bright, with excellent viewing angles. You might have trouble in direct sunlight, but things are fine otherwise. Photos and videos look great, but if you’d like higher resolution, you can upgrade to a 2560-by-1440-pixel display for another $70.

Whatever your opinion of Beats Audio—I think their headphones are overpriced and gaudy—I’ve yet to find fault with their many audio collaborations with HP, and the Spectre 13’s speakers are very good. You’ll want headphones or proper speakers for extended listening sessions, as the two tiny speakers sitting on either side of the laptop’s underside can’t work miracles, but they pump out rich, well-rounded audio with Beats’ signature appreciation for a bit of bass.

I was also pleased to see relatively little in the way of bloatware. McAfee Antivirus is preinstalled, but you get a one-year subscription if you opt in. And HP Connected Music a makes half-hearted attempt to sell you music. Finally, you’ll find the full, retail version of Adobe Lightroom 5, which leads me to wonder: Is preinstalled software bloatware if it’s welcome and useful?

HP’s Spectre 13 won’t convert the Windows 8-wary—that uphill chore is Microsoft’s burden. But laptops like this that nail the fundamentals and don’t trip over themselves trying to reinvent the wheel in an effort to make touch relevant to PCs will certainly aid in that effort.

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Review: SpeedyPainter boils painting down to its very basics

I came to free, tiny, SpeedyPainter not long after reviewing Corel Painter Lite. In my mind, a painting application had to have a wide selection of brushes and effects, multiple paper types, and pressure calibration options. At a mere 1.8MB, SpeedyPainter doesn't have any of these; you just get a blank canvas, and one brush. But you know what? It works, it's fun, and it's easy to learn.

SpeedyPainter makes it easy to draw tapered brush strokes and work with layers.

SpeedyPainter offers the bare essentials of what makes a painting application possible. It's meant to work with pen tablets, so it plays well with stroke pressure. You can use pressure to control stroke size and opacity, and strokes taper off at the edge in a way that is both pretty and natural.

Just like recent versions of Corel Painter, SpeedyPainter features a HUD view that brings the color picker right to your pen, making it easy to change colors while working. Unlike Painter, though, you don't get to limit your possible choices with a palette of color swatches or a fancy natural color mixer: The radial selector has an endless variety of shades, and it's up to you to pick what works. To limit yourself to shades you've already used, you can use the eyedropper tool to sample off the canvas.

Rotating the canvas while working is easy, and so is flipping it. The two-faced icon for flipping the canvas made me think of Corel Painter's kaleidoscope feature that lets you paint with multiple planes of symmetry, but SpeedyPainter doesn't have this concept – but even mirroring the canvas is more than you can do with a real canvas. The interface is built mainly for working with pen-and-tablet input, and you can also quickly toggle it off so you're left with just the canvas. To separate background and subject, you can create multiple layers and quickly switch between them, or control their opacity and stacking to get just the look you want.

SpeedyPainter lets artists share their painting process as an interactive file you can play in the application, or as a video for YouTube.

One feature that captured my imagination was the instant playback: Like deviantArt Muro, SpeedyPainter automatically captures your brush strokes while you work, making it easy to create a fast-painting film showing how exactly you created a given piece. YouTube is teeming with video demonstrations showing SpeedyPainter in use to create beautiful works of art, like this Iron Man video, compressing almost two hours of work down to two-and-a-half minutes. This is both educational and brilliant, because it means viral sharing is built right into the app.

SpeedyPainter feels lean, but not crippled in any way. If you have a pen tablet and just want to paint without getting bogged down in details or spending a dime, get it and start creating.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Canon Pixma MG4120 Review: All the Basics, Expensive Black Ink

The $130 (as of March 19, 2012) Canon Pixma MG4120 color inkjet multifunction (print/copy/scan) is one of the cheaper MFPs on the market to feature paper-saving automatic duplexing. It also produces nice-looking output at a reasonable pace. Color-ink costs are lower than average for a low-price MFP, too, so photos and Web pages are relatively cheap to print. The black ink is pricey, however, so printing out everyday letters and term papers costs more than the norm.

You can attach the Pixma MG4120 directly to your PC via USB, or network it using the integrated Wi-Fi. The unit's flip-up 2.4-inch LCD screen is easy to read, and makes using the printer a breeze for the most part. Canon needs to ditch the three "function" buttons for making selections, though. Having to move your fingers to those buttons is a waste of time and effort; the OK button and four-way cursor control would suffice. The Pixma MG4120 also features SD Card and Memory Stick slots for printing photos or offloading scans.

Paper-handling features on the Pixma MG4120 are modest, though adequate for home use. You get a single 100-sheet letter/legal input tray at the front of the unit, and a 50-sheet output tray directly above it. The unit doesn't have an automatic document feeder for the A4/letter-size scanner, but it does offer an automatic duplexer for hassle-free two-sided printing. The lid for the scanner telescopes to accommodate thicker material.

The Pixma MG4120's output is about the same quality as what you see from other Canon Pixma MG-series printers--that is, quite good. Text is sharp, if not laserlike. Color graphics have an orange skew that can make faces look spray-tanned, but the tint also makes for warm-feeling landscapes and still-lifes. Photo details are nicely rendered.

Speed is good for everyday tasks and the odd photo. In our tests the Pixma MG4120 printed text pages at 6.5 pages per minute on the PC and 7.1 ppm on the Mac. Snapshot-size photos printed at 2.6 ppm on plain paper, and at 1.2 ppm on photo paper. Color PDF pages and full-page photos printed on the Mac took twice as long as the average. Scans and copies at normal and higher resolutions were decently fast. And, in case you were wondering, the Pixma MG4120's performance falls right in line with the numbering convention of the MG series--it's faster than the MG2120 and MG3120, and slower than the MG6120 and the newer MG5220.

Similar to its brethren, the Pixma MG4120 has higher-than-average black-ink costs. The PG-240XL Extra Large black cartridge costs $21 and lasts for 300 pages, or 7 cents per page. The $38, 600-page PG-240XXL black cartridge reduces costs only slightly to 6.3 cents per page. Color, on the other hand, is relatively cheap. The unified-color CL-241XL costs $30 and lasts for 400 pages, or 7.5 cents per page. A four-color page using the PG-240XXL and the CL-241XL would be 13.8 cents, about average in cost for an inkjet MFP. Note that with a tricolor cartridge (containing cyan, magenta, and yellow), when one color runs out, you have to replace the entire cartridge even if ink remains for the other colors.

If you're looking for alternatives with lower black-ink costs, both the HP Photosmart 6510 e-All-in-One ($150) and the Brother MFC-J625DW ($130) are worth considering. However, the Pixma MG4120 is otherwise every bit as competent, and it's decently inexpensive for mixed-color pages and photos.

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