Live la vida wireless with these slick Windows 8-optimized keyboards and mice

You don’t need to be a neat freak to hate having wires snaking all over your desk, especially if you’re a laptop user who wants to get up and go without first untangling a rat’s nest of cables. It’s bad enough that you have to unplug your monitor and power supply. These days, there’s no good reason to mess around with a wired mouse and keyboard (unless, of course, you’re a gamer worried about lag).

I’ve spent the past several weeks auditioning a brand-new mouse and three all-new keyboards that let you cut the cord so that you can be more comfortable and productive in front of your PC.

Stop digging batteries out of random remotes just to get your wireless keyboard back to working order, and go green in the process. Batteries, even the rechargeable ones, are a pain because they fail at the most inopportune moments. Logitech’s K750 Solar Wireless Keyboard depends solely on light—any light—for power.

Dominating the top of this plank are two wide photo-voltaic panels that convert any type of light to electricity. Whether you’re positioned next to a window or tucked away in the bowels of your building’s basement, all this keyboard needs is a little ambient light from your desk lamp or ceiling lamp (or the sun, of course) to power itself and charge its internal battery. It will stay charged in complete darkness for up to three months, according to Logitech. We’ll have to take the company’s word for it—I love my job, but I wasn’t about to test that claim.

You'll never need to replace the Logitech K750's battery: It charges with any light source.

Pushing a small button above the numeric keypad lights an LED next to a happy-face icon if the keyboard has enough power, or a sad-face icon if it doesn’t. You can also install an app on your PC that displays the keyboard’s battery status and indicates just how much light energy it’s collecting at any point in time.

If you're curious, this app will inform you of the K750's battery status.

Although Logitech chose to accommodate the solar panel by slightly reducing the size of the keys rather than increasing the overall size of the keyboard, the keys don’t feel cramped. My fingers had enough space to stretch out and type accurately at a decent speed. The K750 relies on Logitech’s tiny wireless (2.4GHz) Unifying receiver, which can also pair with up to six other Logitech devices at the same time.

The top-row F-keys have alternate functions, such as opening your Web browser’s home page, calling up your email application, launching your PC’s calculator, controlling your media-player software, and putting your computer to sleep.

The keyboard is only a third of an inch thick and lies very flat even when you use the included tabs to angle it upward. It doesn’t offer much of a well for the keys to travel into, so keystrokes are short, but they deliver a satisfyingly solid feel when they bottom out, providing surprisingly good tactile feedback. If you have sensitive ears, you might find the K750’s plastic-on-plastic clicking to be annoying after a while.

The K750 Wireless Solar Keyboard is available now for $60.

If you’re a fan of Windows 8 gestures, but not prepared to upgrade to a pricey touchscreen display to make use of them, give Logitech’s TK820 all-in-one wireless keyboard a look. It has a large embedded touchpad right where the numeric keypad would be on a conventional keyboard. Of course, if you’re fond of numeric keypads, you won’t be thrilled with this design.

Logitech bumps off the numeric keypad to make room for a slick touchpad on its TK820 Wireless All-in-One Keyboard.

The TK820 is thin, light, very attractive, and easy to fit into a backpack should you decide to take it with you. But unlike most keyboards, it lies perfectly flat on your desktop, with no flip-out feet to adjust its typing angle. The omission is sure to make this keyboard a nonstarter for a whole group of folks—and that’s unfortunate, because the TK820 is a very good keyboard otherwise. Its keys are quiet, firm, and responsive, and it has a nifty collection of buttons dedicated to various Windows 8 functions.

The large, smooth touchpad recognizes Windows 8 multitouch gestures, but its high sensitivity and close proximity to my right hand had me unintentionally clicking and repeatedly sending my cursor flying across the screen.

The TK820 Wireless All-in-One Keyboard relies on the same Unify wireless receiver that Logitech’s other peripherals use. Logitech says you can expect its battery to last around six months. The keyboard will be available sometime this month, but you can preorder one now for $100.

Microsoft has been manufacturing ergonomic keyboards for nearly 20 years, having introduced its Natural Keyboard way back in 1994. The company is attempting to make ergonomic computing cool again with the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop set.

This three-piece set includes a modern-looking ergonomic keyboard, an oversize angled mouse, and a detached numeric keypad. The keyboard’s unusual design is intended to keep your wrists in a more natural position, and it includes a cushioned rest. (Fun fact: The cushion is fabricated from the same material that Surface covers are made of.) If you find the wrist rest to be too low, Microsoft provides a magnetic plastic riser that you can attach to the bottom of the keyboard to elevate it slightly.

Microsoft continues its long line of ergnomic keyboards with the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop.

Once I got past the learning curve, I found the Sculpt’s keystrokes to be easy, quick, and almost inaudible. The keyboard sports dedicated keys for Windows 8 tasks, as well as buttons for controlling media-player software (play/pause, mute, and volume). You don't need to worry about holding down some annoying Fn key either, as a simple switch toggles between the F-keys and their alternate functions.

The numeric keypad is a separate unit, so you can move it out of the way when you don't need it.

Microsoft has moved the numeric keypad off the main keyboard and turned it into a separate device that resembles a calculator. It’s there when you need it, and out of your mouse’s way when you don't. I really like the concept, though it does add some desk clutter.

The pièce de résistance of the set is the large, round mouse that fits into your hand like a well-worn baseball—without the stitching. The device’s slant, thumb indentation, and well-placed buttons make for pain-free mousing even after long hours of use. The button inside the thumb indent acts as the Back button, while the Windows button opens the Start menu (or the Start screen, if you’re using Windows 8). The four-way scrollwheel provides good tactile feedback when scrolling—nothing mushy here.

All three devices connect to your PC using the same 2.4GHz USB dongle, which fits snugly in the bottom of the mouse when you want to hit the road with your laptop. Unlike Logitech’s K750 keyboard, Microsoft’s peripherals rely on batteries. But Microsoft claims that the keyboard batteries will last three years, the mouse one year, and the keypad a full six years.

Microsoft’s Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop bundle will be available later this month for $130, or you can buy the keyboard (with number pad) for $81 and the mouse for $60.

Alex covers desktops, everything from fancy to practical. He's also an avid (addicted) gamer and loves following the industry.
More by Alex Cocilova

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Enjoy slick Web apps on your desktop with Cubiez

Web apps are great when you're on your PC, but they require a browser. Mobile apps, on the other hand, require nothing but a smartphone, but are not very convenient to use while working on your computer. So why choose? A new platform called Cubiez (currently in public beta) offers the best of both worlds: Light and responsive apps that feel almost like mobile ones, don't require a browse, and run on your computer. Very similar to the better-known Pokki, Cubiez is an online marketplace for apps through which you install and then run a variety of apps.

Cubiez's app icons sit in your tray—the more apps you install the more icons you have.

Cubiez is fairly new in its field, and therefore doesn't offer many apps yet. While its biggest rival Pokki includes hundreds of different apps, Cubiez has only a few dozen at the moment. There's no way to view Cubiez apps online, but you can check them all out by installing Cubiez and clicking on its taskbar icon. You can look at all available apps, only new apps, or apps you have installed. There is no way to view apps by category, but since not many apps are available, this doesn't make much of a difference.

Cubiez sits on the leftmost side of your taskbar—right next to the Start button (if you still have one)—and each app you install adds an icon on the taskbar as well. This is nice at first, but when you've installed seven apps, it starts to get crowded, and there's no way to put Cubiez to sleep or collapse all the icons into one. Installing apps is a breeze: After choosing an app from the marketplace and clicking the install button, you can't even count to five before the app is installed and available for use. Cubiez and its apps are all highly responsive, and there were no unexplained lags, sluggishness or unresponsiveness in any that I've tried.

Installing apps takes virtually seconds, and only one click.

Of all the apps Cubiez offers, about half are games. Among these, you'll find some big names such as Kingdom Rush, Little Alchemy, and Plants vs. Zombies, some classics such as Pacman, and some super-addictive ones such as Unicorn Robot Attack. Aside from games, you'll find useful apps such as Calculator, Facebook, Google Maps, Google Search, NewsHub (an RSS reader), and Weather. If you're looking for a specific app, you can use the search box to find it quickly, but note that search strings are case sensitive, so searching for "facebook" will yield no results. The apps all run in a small window that can be moved around the screen, but cannot be resized.

Looking closely at some of the apps, I found that while they're all generally good, some are still somewhat lacking in features. The Facebook app, for example, is a great take on a Facebook client, with a News Feed, birthdays and events calendar, a photos tab, an inbox, and a notification area. Some actions, such as comments and likes, can be done straight from the app, while others, such as writing a message or viewing a friend's profile, send you to your browser. The app even includes badge and pop-up notifications, but it doesn't manage to refresh properly, and keeps showing old updates when there are in fact newer ones to be seen. The Weather app can only show one location at a time and doesn't let you save locations, and the RSS reader includes a tiny number of publications, which, combined with an inaccurate search feature, forces you to enter the exact feed URL for almost any website you want to add.

The Facebook app for Cubiez is convenient and useful, when it updates properly.

These problems are in the minority, though, and most of the Cubiez apps are a joy to use. The games, especially, are a very nice combination between Web-based games, mobile games, and PC games, and literally give you the best of all worlds: instant, browser-less gaming. But don't let the browser-less apps fool you: All Cubiez apps, even games, require an Internet connection in order to work, and when one isn't available, most will not return any error, but will simply fail to load.

Considering its beta status, Cubiez is a very impressive take on the fairly new world of HTML5 desktop apps, and is open to developers who want to add apps of their own. It's still missing too many big names to be really useful, but more apps, new features, and some polishing, will surely turn it into something we would all want to have on our computer—even quicker access to productivity tools, information, social networks, and entertainment.

Note: By default, Cubiez's installer also includes a browser add-on called Cubiez Shopping Buddy. Despite the unfortunate name, this is a legitimate shopping add-on, and is one of the company's revenue streams. You can easily opt out of installing it. If you choose to install it and then change your mind, uninstall it through the control panel. The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
More by Yaara Lancet

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Postbox is a slick, affordable desktop email client that plays nice with Gmail

If you're after a desktop email client that isn't Outlook, you may discover you don't have very many options. Mozilla Thunderbird is no longer actively developed; Eudora is a distant memory; The Bat! is still around, but costs $35 (or $45 for the Professional edition). One of the more appealing options available is Postbox, a slick, modern-looking desktop email client that plays nice with Gmail and will set you back just $10 after the 30-day free trial.

With all panes shown, the Postbox interface feels powerful almost to the point of being overwhelming.

Postbox v3.0.7 is actually based on Thunderbird: If you go to Tools > Options, you'll find a very familiar looking Options dialog. The rest of the interface, however, looks different. Gone is the traditional horizontally-split layout, replaced by a vertical split that puts your message headers on the left, with the message body on the right, much like the Gmail Offline Chrome extension. You can still bring the Classic View back, though.

By default, the leftmost part of the window is populated by a nested list of folders based on your Gmail labels. Almost all of my labels synced correctly, except for one: the Bulk label, which I automatically filter incoming "gray mail" into. That label never made it all the way to Postbox due to a configuration error on my Gmail account: I had to make it available via IMAP (as all other labels were set), after which it synced to Postbox without a hitch.

In the past, each email was its own little island of text. Modern clients such as Gmail changed this by showing threaded conversations, which cleverly group related emails into one cohesive view. Postbox uses the same concept, and adds a few desktop interface niceties such as being able to pop open the conversation and access a specific email directly from the list of message headers.

Postbox makes it easy to individually collapse every pane, so that you can end up with a minimalistic list of conversations if you prefer.

As much as Postbox strives to play nice with Gmail, some of the visual differences are disorienting: For example, the message list shows senders' names in bold, even for messages you've already read. The "unread" marker is a small blue dot, quite elegant, but not as obvious as bold/non-bold text. There is a way to change this, but only by manually editing the configuration (or switching to the Classic, horizontally-split, view). Another point that kept me from seriously using Postbox is the lack of support for RTL languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic. If you write even the occasional email in such a language, Postbox is out of the question.

One of the challenges of managing email is quickly getting to the messages you care about within a cluttered folder. Gmail lets you do this with blazing-fast searches and clever operators like "is:unread." Postbox offers a more visual way, in the form of the Focus Pane. This collapsible pane lets you quickly slice and dice the current folder: Show only unread messages, show only messages that have attachments, only messages from today, yesterday, the past week, or the past month, and more. Postbox even lets you assign "topics" to your emails, which are another layer of classification, distinct from labels. You can assign any email to a topic such as Work, Home, or Personal. The Focus Bar lets you quickly filter these, as well.

With the folder pane, the focus pane, the vertical conversations list, and the email preview pane, the Postbox interface feels busy. Fortunately, Postbox allows you to eliminate the folder pane by setting up a handful of favorite folders, which you can then access via a toolbar at the top of the window. You can also collapse and expand the focus pane with a single click, and even hide the email preview pane, so that you're left with just a minimalistic list of message headers.

Threaded conversations, familiar to every Gmail user, are fully supported in Postbox.

Postbox isn't perfect, but then again, the same can be said about email itself as a communication medium. Still, if you're not happy with Gmail's browser interface and yearn for the comfort of the desktop clients of yore, you would do well to try it out. Be sure to allow for an adjustment period. Slick as it may be, it's still an acquired taste.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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.
More by Erez Zukerman

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G: Slick, Speedy Phone Suffers From Bloatware

In a world where smartphone displays are getting more and more gargantuan, the 3.97-inch display on the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G is refreshingly compact. Not everybody needs a 5.3-inch display on their phone (Galaxy Note, I'm looking at you!), and it's nice to see a more pocketable phone for those consumers. In addition, the Galaxy S Blaze 4G ($150 with a two-year contract on T-Mobile; price as of March 20, 2012) has fast data speeds (thanks to T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 network) and smooth performance powered by a dual-core processor. But regrettably, the phone is riddled with carrier and manufacturer bloatware that you can't easily remove.

Design and Display

The Blaze has a fairly basic, Samsung-esque design with a glossy black face and rounded corners. The soft-touch, textured back gets fingerprint-greasy fast and seems to be a magnet for dust, crumbs, lint, and whatever else is in your pocket or bag. It's easy enough to clean, though. The Blaze looks a bit chunky, measuring 4.8 by 2.48 by 0.46 inches thick. It weighs a satisfactory 4.51 ounces.

The Blaze's 3.97-inch 480-by-800-pixel display is roomy enough for watching videos and playing games. Viewing angles are excellent on the Blaze's display, which uses Super AMOLED technology. Unfortunately, like other Super AMOLED displays we've encountered on Samsung phones, the Blaze's looked oversaturated in our color-bar and grayscale tests. In our color-bar test, the colors bled into each other; in the grayscale test, we had trouble differentiating the light-to-dark shades from one another. Still, oversaturation isn't always a bad thing: Colors looked rich and bright, and blacks were deep.

Software and Extras

Instead of the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, the Blaze runs Android 2.3.6, (Gingerbread). Like other Samsung Galaxy phones (but not the Galaxy Nexus), it runs Samsung's TouchWiz user interface over Android.

Consumers (and reviewers) have a love/hate relationship with TouchWiz. On the one hand, it's relatively light and fast, and it adds some needed color to Android Gingerbread. On the other hand, the borderline cheesy, cartoony look of the user interface is a bit of a turn-off.

This phone comes with a ridiculous amount of carrier- and manufacturer-added software. From T-Mobile, you get 411, Game Base, More for Me, Netflix, Lookout T-Mobile TV, T-Mobile Name ID, T-Mobile Video Chat...and the list goes on. Sure, you might want some of these apps, like Netflix and Lookout, but the collection as a whole is unreasonably large. Some of the "apps" aren't even real; they're just links to app stores or trial versions of services. Samsung adds a few apps of its own; and again some--like Kies Air and AllShare--are useful, but others are merely pseudo-apps that require a separate download to get up and running. When you open the Samsung MediaHub, for example, a message informs you that you must install a separate app and create an account before you can run the app. Really?

One lovely thing about Android is the customization features and the bevy of apps available to you in Google Play. When carriers and manufacturers add all this junk to phones, they take some ownership away from the consumer. The phone you just bought with your hard-earned money doesn't feel like your phone--and that's unfair. Even worse, you can't remove many of these extra apps. On some Android phones, you can go into your settings and manually remove unwanted apps. But on the Galaxy S Blaze 4G, as far as I could tell, there is no such option for any of the added apps. Unless you root your phone, you're stuck with the bloatware.

Performance

The Galaxy S Blaze 4G is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 1GB of RAM. We ran both Qualcomm's Vellamo benchmarking app as well as a third-party app, Quadrant. On Vellamo, the Galaxy S Blaze achieved an admirable score of 1071, putting it just below the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. We take these scores with a grain of salt, as the Blaze has a Qualcomm processor and Vellamo is developed by Qualcomm. Oddly, on Quadrant, the Blaze scored better than the Galaxy Nexus.

The true test of a phone's performance, in my opinion, is how well it handles the most heavy-duty apps and high-resolution video. I tested a handful of graphics-heavy games on the Blaze including Anomaly HD and Osmos HD. Both games ran flawlessly with the Super AMOLED display beautifully showcasing the 3D graphics.

The Galaxy S Blaze supports T-Mobile's faster HSPA+ network, which has theoretical speeds of up to 42 mbps. I tested the Galaxy S Blaze in various parts of San Francisco, using the FCC-approved Ookla Speedtest.net app, and achieved average download speeds of 6.77 mbps and upload speeds of 1.45 mbps. Signal strength varied around the city: Some areas produced speeds on par with Verizon's 4G LTE while other areas had more 3G-like speeds.

Call quality over T-Mobile was good, with ample volume and praiseworthy clarity on both my end and my contacts'. We haven't yet run battery testing for this model, but Samsung claims that the battery delivers 7 hours of talk time and 9 hours of standby. The Blaze 4G lasted for a full day (about 8 hours) of regular use before I needed to plug in again.

Camera

The Blaze's 5-megapixel camera took good pictures indoors and out. My outdoor pictures had bright, natural colors, though details were slightly fuzzy and I detected a bit of graininess (see the blue sky in the photo of the San Francisco Bay Bridge). My indoor photos had a little more graininess, but good colors. Details, such as the Furbies' fur, were lost, however. Still, for a 5-megapixel camera, it produced very satisfactory pictures. The TouchWiz camera interface is clean and easy to use, and it offers a few advanced controls such as white balance and exposure value, as well as some shooting effects (sepia, black-and-white, and others).

Bottom Line

The Galaxy S Blaze 4G has the performance and the specs of its Galaxy S II siblings but at a smaller size and a more affordable price. The bloatware is the phone's only real weakness, but the fact that users can't easily remove these carrier/manufacturer-added apps makes me hesitant to recommend the Blaze 4G enthusiastically.

If you're a fan of Samsung's Galaxy series and want the latest and greatest smartphone, you might want to hold out for a few months as the Samsung Galaxy S III is rumored to be launching soon. Another phone that might be worth waiting for is the HTC One S, which is headed to T-Mobile in the next month or two and has a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, and 16GB of internal memory. It's unclear whether it will be plagued with the same bloatware issue, however.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here