Intel 730 Series SSD (480GB) review: Good performance and a strong warranty

Intel 730 Series SSD (480GB) $490.00 Intel's 730 Series SSD should last a good long while, but don't buy one thinking the skull logo will endow your PC with killer performance.

Intel’s performance guys have a thing for skulls. They delivered a high-performance, dual-CPU motherboard setup named Skulltrail a few years back. Now they’ve announced the new 730 Series of enthusiast-class SSDs emblazoned with fleshless noggins. Do these drives live up to their “killer” image? 

The company shipped us a pair of 480GB drives so that we could benchmark them striped as a single volume in RAID 0, which is how a PC enthusiast might deploy them. Theoretically, you should get near twice the performance this way; but since we haven’t tested any other SSDs in tandem, we stuck with one drive for our full benchmarking regimen, ran CrystalDiskMark for the RAID 0 setup, and I got to kick them about at home. Sweet. This job does have its perqs.

Alas, the killer image doesn’t quite hold up.

The 730 Series SSDs utilize 20nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND, and their 7mm height means they'll fit in most any notebook or even an all-in-one (provided it can be upgraded), as well as a conventional desktop rig. It uses the Intel PC29AS21CA0 controller, which also powers the Intel 3500- and 3700 Series SSDs that Intel markets to data-center operators. According to Intel, the controller is overclocked by 50 percent, and the NAND bus by 20 percent to substantially increase overall performance. Intel made some noise at its 2013 developers’ conference that it would allow end users to overclock the controller, but decided against it in the end.

Alas, the killer image doesn’t quite hold up. The drives are available in 240- and 480GB flavors, priced at $250 and $490 respectively. We tested the 480GB model and it proved to be a good, but not a great performer, ranking 10th out of the 19 drives we’ve tested to date. That said, it does smoke the Intel 335 Series, and the difference between the 1st and 10th-place drives is statistically insignificant once you throw out Plextor’s new PCIe drive and Samsung’s EVO using its Rapid caching software.

In this test, we measure the drive's performance reading and writing a 10GB collection of small files and folders. The Intel 730 Series finished in the middle of the pack.

By the numbers, the 480GB Series 730 wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 469.1MBps and a single 10GB file at 461.9MBps. It read the files and folders at 384.4MBps and the single large file at 454.2MBps.

I saw a significant performance jump with two of these drives striped in RAID 0, using Intel Rapid Storage Technology. (Note: PCWorld's benchmarking environment is described at the bottom of this story.) That’s very close to the 100-percent improvement that Intel claims.

CrystalDiskMark’s sequential write number jumped from about 460MBps to 800MBps, and the read number went from 470MBps to just over 900MBps. But the performance gains will vary depending on which RAID technology is in use. When I repeated these tests on my own system—a motherboard with an Intel Z77 chipset, an Intel Core i7-3770 CPU, and 8GB DDR3/1600 memory—I saw a performance increase of only about 50MBps.

In our second real-world benchmark, we measure how fast the drive can read and write a single 10GB file. Here again, Intel's drive delivered a good performance.

But performance is only part of the 730 Series story: Intel talks a great deal about longevity, and the company backs that up with healthy 5-year warranty. You can tell from the capacities—240- and 480GB, versus 256- and 512GB—that a great deal of NAND is devoted to housekeeping and over-provisioning (memory cells set aside to replace bad blocks, or to be swapped with deleted-but-not-erased memory in certain situations).

Intel rates both drives at 1.2 million hours mean time between failure, or about 13 years. Looked at another way, the claimed 50GB (240GB model) and 70GB (480GB model) of writes per day works out to roughly 90 to 125 terabytes written under warranty. Those are decent numbers.

Based on the 480GB model we tested, Intel’s 730 Series SSDs aren’t the absolute fastest solid-state drives you can buy, but they are very solid. The enterprise-class heritage and 5-year warranty are reassuring; and in pairs—coupled with Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology—they make for a very fast storage subsystem.

About our test environment: We benchmark hard drives and SSDs using an Asus Z98 Expert motherboard (Intel Z87 chipset) with an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3/1600 memory, and a 512GB Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD. The operating system is Windows 8.1 Pro. 

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Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch review: A 15.6-inch budget laptop that's strong on performance and can survive some rugged handling

This solidly built notebook features a great touchscreen display, an even better keyboard, and a huge and fast hard drive. But Lenovo’s networking component choices are a bit disappointing.

Lenovo laptops are the models of choice for many corporate IT departments, and the company manufactures some very good consumer-oriented machines, too. The IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a case in point. You wouldn’t mistake it for a sleek Ultrabook—it’s thick and heavy, and its battery life is wretched—but the Z400 did finish second on Notebook WorldBench 8.1 in our five-laptop competition. And despite Lenovo’s copious use of plastic, the Z400 is built like a brick outhouse.

LenovoLenovo's IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a strong contender.

Lenovo stuck with Intel’s third-generation Core processor for this budget-priced machine, pairing a 1.6GHz Core i5-3230M with 6GB of DDR/1600 memory. At 14.0 inches, its 1366-by-768-pixel display is much smaller than the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870’s 15.6-inch display; but the IdeaPad Z400 boasts a ten-point touchscreen, whereas the Acer does not.

The Z400 is an attractive PC, with charcoal-colored soft-touch paint on the outside and a pretty carbon-fiber look on the inside. Lenovo’s computer feels as rugged as Acer’s feels fragile. Though the display exhibits a little flex, the lower chassis is as rigid as some all-metal bodies I’ve tried to bend. The downside to the solid construction is weight gain: Despite its smaller display, the Z400 outweighs the Acer by 0.7 pound. Still, it comes by most of that weight honestly. Lenovo provides 6GB of memory (as against Acer’s 4GB); packs a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive (versus the Aspire’s 500GB drive); and includes a DVD burner (Acer provides no optical drive at all).

The tests in this suite evaluate how well a system handles editing digital media files and encoding them to different formats.

The IdeaPad Z400 comes with the type of top-notch keyboard that Lenovo is famous for building. The island-style keyboard is fully backlit and feels great under the fingers. It lacks a dedicated numeric keypad, and there’s no provision for temporarily assigning letter keys on the right side an alternative function to serve as one, but I was happy to see the full-size arrow keys in the familiar inverted-T formation at the far edge.

Augmenting the touchscreen is a responsive trackpad that supports most Windows 8 gestures, including two-finger scrolling, swipe, zoom, and rotate. The trackpad doesn’t have distinct right and left mouse buttons, but clicking in the lower right and left areas of the pad perform the same function. Unlike Lenovo’s higher-end notebooks, the Z400 does not embed a trackpoint in its keyboard; however, I found that the trackpad and the touchscreen were all I really needed.

Benchmark performance

The IdeaPad Z400 took a solid second place in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark competition (behind the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870), with a score of 132, marking it as 1.3 times faster than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA, which comes outfitted with a 24GB SSD cache for its hard drive.

None of these inexpensive laptops delivered especially good performance on high-level games such as BioShock Infinite.

The Lenovo placed third in the PCMark 7 Productivity, despite having a 7200-rpm hard drive (both the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 and the Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253 were much faster). But the IdeaPad captured first place on our media editing and encoding tests. It finished in the middle of the pack on our gaming tests, delivering a leisurely frame rate on BioShock Infinite of 18.4 frames per second, even with resolution set to just 1024 by 768 and visual quality set to Low.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

Connectivity and conclusion

The IdeaPad Z400’s networking capabilities are a bit disappointing. Though Lenovo selected a high-quality Wi-Fi adapter—Intel’s Centrino Wireless-N 2230—it’s a single-band adapter that doesn’t give you any choice but to connect to crowded 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks. On the bright side, it’s a 2x2 adapter, meaning that it supports a maximum physical link rate of 300 mbps. It also provides Bluetooth 4.0 support, and is compatible with Intel’s WiDi video-streaming technology. The wired ethernet adapter, meanwhile, is limited to 100 mbps—I thought those adapters had gone the way of the PS/2 port.

LenovoAll of the touchscreen notebooks had highly reflective displays.

In addition to WiDi, you have your choice of HDMI or VGA video outputs for connecting to external displays. And like the Acer Aspire, the IdeaPad has three USB ports, but only one of them is the speedy USB 3.0. Lenovo does provide a memory card reader that supports both SD and MMC media, and the company includes Dolby Home Theater technology and a set of decent speakers, so you won’t have to rely on headphones for an enjoyable audio experience.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a heavy computer for its size, its network connectivity is weak, and its battery life is very poor. But this laptop is a very good performer, with a great keyboard, an optical drive, and the largest, fastest hard drive in this group. It’s also the machine I’d recommend if you need a computer in this price range that’s rugged enough to tolerate a little rough handling. Overall it finishes a solid second in our roundup.

Editor's note: This notebook was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five notebooks we compared it to, here.

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Review: KeePass makes strong passwords and keeps them safe

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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If you adopt just one security tool this year, make it KeePass. This free and open-source password manager is available for Windows, with unofficial ports for iOS, Android, Linux, and Mac OS X. A secure, lengthy, completely random password goes a long way towards improving your security–and having a separate password for each and every website and service you use is the single most important thing you can do to keep secure.

For too many of us, the alternative to a password manager is using the same password everywhere. This means that if the user database of any one website you sign up for is compromised, hackers can (and often do) just try your username and password on many other websites and gain access. So, seriously: Use a unique, difficult password for each and every website you sign up for, no matter how little you plan to visit it. KeePass lets you keep all of these username/password pairs in a securely encrypted database, protected behind a single master password, which is the only password you're ever going to have to remember. And unlike commercial competitor LastPass, KeePass doesn't automatically put your password database in the cloud (although you can put it into Dropbox yourself).

KeePass lets you quick-search for passwords and organize them into a complex tree of folders.

KeePass features its own random password generator, so you don't have to come up with random passwords on your own. It includes a quick-search box where you can type just a fragment of a website's name to quickly find it on your list. The list itself is built to contain thousands of records, and you can subdivide it into folders and subfolders to keep things organized. KeePass isn't limited to just usernames and passwords, either: Each entry has several other fields, including a free-form Notes field which you can use for securely storing any sort of text.

One way the baddies circumvent password protection is with a keylogger: an application (or a physical hardware dongle connected to your computer) that sits in the background, quietly logging every single keystroke you type, to later transmit this information to an attacker. With a keylogger installed on your system, an attacker could potentially learn every single word you type throughout the day, including all of your usernames and passwords. This is another thing KeePass protects against: Thanks to its AutoType feature, you never have to manually type individual website passwords. KeePass pastes them into the browser window using a combination of virtual keystrokes and clipboard obfuscation, making it all the more difficult for a keylogger to figure out what the password is. AutoType is sometimes finicky, but when it works, it's very useful. KeePass also lets you enter your master database password in a prompt protected by UAC, which protects it from any software keylogger that isn't running with Administrator rights on your machine.

Get KeePass, and start using it right now. You'll thank yourself next time a major website breach vents thousands of usernames and passwords into cyberspace.

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

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Review: Toshiba's LX835-D3230 is a compact all-in-one with strong media capability

All-in-one computers are popular due to their simplicity, low profile, and media capabilities. They have increasingly become more powerful, too, offering features and performance closer to what a power user desires. The LX835-D3230, Toshiba’s latest all-in-one model, offers good performance for the price, but some users may find the screen size constraining.

Priced competitively at $999, the LX835-D3230 comes with an Intel Core i7-3610QM processor that runs at 2.3GHz, plus 6GB of RAM for speedy multitasking. It managed a score of 103 on our strenuous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite, so it's about 3 percent faster than our baseline system.

Unfortunately, the LX835-D3230 has only Intel's integrated HD 4000 graphics technology. In our graphics tests, it barely ran Dirt 3 and Crysis 2 on high settings at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, achieving an average of just 15.0 frames per second and 9.2 fps respectively. When we lowered the graphics settings and dropped the resolution to 1024 by 768 pixels, the system ran Dirt 3 at 52.0 fps and Crysis 2 at 31.4 fps. In any case, you won't want to try playing any graphically intensive games on the LX835-D3230, though it should manage casual, low-end games fairly well.

Despite the LX835-D3230's inability to play games, you shouldn't count it out as a media maven. The 23-inch high-definition screen sports a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and is great for watching movies and television. It may be a little tough to watch from the couch, but it's ideal for a small room or dorm. It also comes with a remote that allows you to sit back and enjoy media from a comfortable distance. Unfortunately, since the system lacks a touchscreen, it can't take full advantage of the impending Windows 8 features. Most people won’t mind, though, and the absence of touch support will help you keep the screen clean.

The LX835-D3230 boasts a plethora of ports for the media aficionado, including a TV tuner and an HDMI-in port for connecting video game consoles or Blu-ray players. If you have a superb DVD collection, you’re in luck with the included DVD drive. You'll also find four USB 2.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet port on the back, plus two USB 3.0 ports, a memory card reader, a headphone jack, and a microphone jack on the left side.

As far as connectivity is concerned, the LX835-D3230 covers all the bases with 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. With both kinds of wireless tech available for staying connected or syncing devices, you'll get to keep the area around the system free of cable clutter.

A standard wireless mouse and keyboard accompany the system. Both are a comfortable size, and easy to use. The keyboard isn’t particularly useful for media capabilities, but it does offer the standard pause/play, skip, and back controls when you use the function key.

The screen leans on a small stand that allows a little room for adjustment. It isn’t the most elegant setup that we have seen on an all-in-one, but it works. The speakers are located on the front, and the sound quality is reasonably good with the installed SRS Premium Sound 3D software.

The LX835-D3230 has your storage needs covered for the foreseeable future, as it comes with 1TB of 7200-rpm storage for all of your programs, files, and media. A terabyte should last most people (even media collectors) a long while before they start looking to expand. Of course, this all-in-one's lack of easy internal accessibility means that any expansion will have to take the form of an external drive.

If you’re looking for an AIO, and you want to get a bit more power without killing your wallet, the Vizio CA27-A1—that company's first all-in-one—may be an alternative to keep an eye on. The $1250 (as of September 5, 2012) CA27-A1 managed a score of 122 on our WorldBench 7 benchmark, and has a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 640M graphics card. It still isn’t a gaming machine by any means, but you will certainly get your money’s worth from it. The Vizio is also larger, with a 27-inch display and 1920-by-1080-pixel high-definition resolution. Its startup times are faster since it uses a small solid-state drive to cache the larger, slower 5400-rpm hard drive.

Overall, though, the Toshiba LX835-D3230 is a great all-in-one system for a great price. It is encouraging to see how affordable AIO systems have become without sacrificing a lot of power and usability. In an age where media consumption is a centerpiece for most people, options such as the LX835-D3230 are key to staying on a budget and still enjoying everything that modern entertainment has to offer.

WorldBench 7 results Gaming test results

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Vizio's 27-inch CA27-A1 all-in-one: First desktop is a strong start

Vizio is no stranger to our lab, but its first desktop PC entry—the Vizio CA27-A1 all-in-one—shines bright.

Priced at $1250 (as of August 24, 2012), the Vizio CA27-A1 comes stocked with an Intel Core i5-3210M processor that runs at a standard 2.5GHz but ramps up to 3.1GHz when using Intel’s Turbo Frequency technology. This is coupled with 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM to support a speedy, responsive machine.

The screen is a beautiful 27-inch display with a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. It has a slight tilt to get a better viewing angle and to alleviate any glare that might catch the reflective screen. But it's not a touchscreen, which feels like a bit of an oversight with Windows 8 so close to release. While a touchscreen isn’t necessary, it could be useful with Microsoft's forthcoming operating system.

Performance

The system scored 122 on our strenuous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite, making it 22 percent faster than our baseline system, a fully equipped tower. The CA27-A1 manages to be faster, sleeker, and more functional than that baseline, a difficult combination of goals to achieve in any PC.

One goal for most all-in-one desktop PCs is to be as thin as possible. This often means sacrifing some of the bulkier, more powerful components. Vizio managed to squeeze in a discrete GPU, albeit a mobile one: Nvidia’s GeForce GT 640M LE graphics card with 1GB of memory. While the CA27-A1’s specs will let it run some less strenuous games well, it struggled a bit on our graphics/games test.

We ran DiRT 3 and Crysis 2 at the highest graphics setting at a maximum resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. The system managed 35.7 frames per second on DiRT 3 and 16 fps on Crysis 2. Unfortunately this won’t make for an enjoyable gaming experience. The CA27 does manage to cross the coveted 60-fps mark when DiRT 3 is changed to low graphics settings (63.7 fps) or the resolution is lowered to 1024 by 768 pixels (66.2 fps). Crysis 2 doesn’t quite cross that threshold: When the graphics are set to low and the resolution to 1024 by 768 pixels, it reaches 55.9 fps. Of course, you can make it a little prettier, but acceptable performance is not guaranteed.

Ports and accessories

The ports are all located along the base of the unit, mostly in the rear, which can be a pain to get to regularly. Also, a lip on the base extends about an inch, which unfortunately hides the ports. While it gives the system a clean, sleek look, it makes the ports impossible to find without some serious maneuvering. The ports include one for eSATA, two for HDMI for multiple devices (such as a video-game console and a cable box), and four for USB 3.0. I was pleased that Vizio went straight to full-on USB 3.0, leaving out the older, slower USB 2.0 standard entirely.

The CA27-A1 offers all the connectivity an all-in-one needs, including 802.11n wireless, a gigabit ethernet port, and Bluetooth for other wireless accessories.

And that brings us to the accessories, where the company's decisions are a bit of a mixed bag. Its wireless keyboard, to begin with, doesn't really impress. It's thin and light, but the keys lack texture and are flat. And instead of a mouse, Vizio offers a large wireless touchpad. It works well if you are computing from the couch where you'd have no flat surfaces for that accessory, but some users may miss the mouse. However, the touchpad will make the system more Windows 8-friendly. Vizio also includes a 2.1 surround-sound subwoofer to provide some strong audio out of small speakers. A front-facing, 1.3-megapixel, 720p webcam and an integrated microphone are also present for those who rely on video conferencing. Finally, you get a small remote to control media functionality. It’s easy to see that this system's main goal is to be a digital media machine.

However, the CA27-A1 doesn’t come with an optical drive. While playing games and installing software via CDs is rapidly becoming obsolete, when a computer strives to be the final answer as a media device, the lack of a DVD or Blu-ray drive seems limiting. It feels a little counterproductive to buy an external optical drive when one of the CA27-A1’s goals is to relieve desk clutter.

Vizio did make some smart choices when pricing this system. At $1250, the CA27-A1 stays just below similar products from major competitors without giving up performance. The Asus ET2701 INKI, for example, costs about $50 more ($1299 as of 7/9/2012) and didn’t perform as well on WorldBench 7, scoring a 111. The two models have nearly identical specs, though the Asus does sport a speedier Core i7-3770S. Where the Vizio manages to beat the Asus is in boot-up time: The Asus took over 20 seconds longer to become fully functional after booting. You can thank the 32GB solid-state drive in the CA27-A1 that is used for hard-drive caching. Though the SSD doesn’t make for any extra storage space, it turns the slower 1TB, 5400-rpm drive into a simulated SSD with Intel’s Rapid Storage technology—a perfect mixture of price efficiency and performance.

Overall, the CA27-A1 is a great entry to the affordable all-in-one market. You get plenty of performance bang for your buck, though it isn’t without shortcomings. Vizio put a lot of thought into the system's performance, but perhaps less in its media functionality. I would have liked to see Vizio forego a feature or two to make room for a Blu-ray drive and still keep the price competitive. The system is great for students on a budget or the family that needs a digital media player in an extra room, and since it is one of the lowest-priced such systems, the investment will be a reasonable one.

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Intuit QuickBooks Pro 2012 Review: The Perennial Leader Stays Strong

QuickBooks maintains its grip on the small-business accounting leadership year after year because it's relentless in its pursuit of small-business owners and managers who need help with the books but aren't versed in accounting. QuickBooks Pro 2012 is built on the same standard accounting structure as its competitors, but it does a pretty good job of minimizing the professional jargon--and adding features that help with chores that all businesses must tackle--from taxes and billing to rudimentary customer relationship management.

Like its higher-end sibling, QuickBooks Premier 2012, QuickBooks Pro 2012 lets you get started within a couple of minutes with an Express Setup routine involving just two screens. You need to provide a business name, basic contact info, a tax ID number, and industry type (from a preset list).

Intuit makes getting started with QuickBooks Pro very easy. After that, Intuit lets you enter information--say, a customer record or merchandise item--on the fly. You can, however, opt for a more systemic approach if you prefer. For example, you can download a free app that syncs Outlook contacts with customer, vendor, or employee lists, or you can import an inventory list from Excel. Like other accounting software packages, QuickBooks lets you edit the default accounts that it creates based on your industry type.

QuickBooks' home screen shows a flow chart of business processes that the software manages. Clicking one of the chart's component icons takes you to the appropriate ledger or form. On a narrow pane to the right, a small window shows key account balances, a list of to-do reminders, and links to add-on products and services such as payroll and checks. And regardless of what's on the center screen, a row of icons above it and the Windows menu bar offer you quick transportation to other areas both within and outside the software.

QuickBooks' flow chart feature can provide an at-a-glance depiction of your business's typical activities.For example, an App Center icon summons links to dozens of third-party add-ons, which can greatly enhance QuickBooks' usefulness. Indeed, the breadth of third-party support is one of QuickBooks' geatest strengths.

By the same token, however, the explosion in third-party support suggests that, on its own, QuickBooks has weaknesses. It still lacks the rock-solid inventory management features found in Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013, and even Acclivity AccountEdge Pro 2012 does a better job.

QuickBooks Pro's 2012 goodies include a calendar view to give you a handle on upcoming events (for example, quarterly tax-filing deadlines or payment due dates); regrettably, it doesn't sync with any other calendar that you might be using. The software integrates well with Microsoft Office for everything from data exports to spreadsheets to canned letters for sending to customers with overdue bills.

QuickBooks has always been strong in customizable report creation, but this year it takes that feature to new heights by allowing its huge user base to share their customized report templates.

Perhaps the most annoying thing about QuickBooks is its ongoing policy of sunsetting online feature support for older versions, which means, among other things, that you can't automatically download transaction information from your bank. It's a way of strong-arming users who are perfectly happy with an older version (right now Intuit supports only the 2010 editions and later) into upgrading to a newer version.

And though a single copy of QuickBooks Pro 2012 is competitively priced (normally it's $230; but at this early August 2012 writing, with the annual upgrade approaching, you can find it for less), costs mount quickly if you want to add simultaneous users, because you don't get a price break for the additional licenses. QuickBooks' payroll service, while comprehensive, is also pretty pricey.

Intuit offers several Premier versions of QuickBooks that have everything the Pro edition contains and add industry-specific features. The Premier options are considerably more expensive than Pro--$400 for a new copy--and additional licenses cost only $50 less than the first one. Also, QuickBooks Pro and Premier support a maximum of five simultaneous users; Intuit does sell enterprise products, but they are considerably more complex and expensive. If you think you'll want to support more than five simultaneous users, you might want to look at a competitor such as Acclivity AccuEdge Pro.

Still, for small-businesses managers who prize ease of use and a focus on automating as many business chores as possible without getting into the minutiae of standard accounting practices, QuickBooks remains the product to beat.

This review is part of a roundup of accounting software. You can read the introduction to the story and find links to the other products we reviewed here.

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ZTE Era Tegra 3 Smartphone Hands-On: Weak Screen, Strong Performance

Joining the ranks of HTC, LG and Fujitsu, ZTE introduced its own quad-core Tegra 3 smartphone at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Dubbed the ZTE Era, this handset stands out for having significantly lower-end screen than its competitors.

Unlike the HTC One Z, LG Optimus 4X HD and Fujitsu’s unnamed Tegra 3 phone, all of which have large 1280 x 720 displays, the Era sports a relatively-pedestrian 4.3-inch, 960 x 540 scren. In our brief hands-on, we were unimpressed not only with the Era screen’s sharpness, but also with its dull color and comparatively dim backlight. Colors simply did not pop at all when we were playing games or navigating around the desktop.

On the bright side, the Era has an 8MP camera, 1GB of RAM, and Dolby Sound. It’s also fairly thin at just 7.8mm. Though it won’t beat the HTC One X or LG Optimus 4X HD in a fashion contest, the dark gray metallic back with its navy blue accents reminded us a bit of the Google Nexus One.

Though the ZTE Era runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, it has a dedicated row of capacitive buttons below the screen. Apparently, ZTE agrees with most of its  competitors that dedicated buttons are better than the virtual buttons that appear in stock Android 4.0. The company even went so far as to include the search button along with the home, menu and back buttons.

The demo version of the Era that was on display at ZTE’s booth did not have any special skins or UI customizations so all we saw was just another installation of stock Android 4.0. That said, we hear that ZTE has a UI called Miflavor that it could implement on this phone. 

In our brief time with the Era, we were able to fire up two demanding games, Riptide GP and Shadowgun, and both performed flawlessly. We also tried out the camera application and noted that it took a good couple of seconds to snap a shot. There’s no high-speed camera feature like you’ll find on HTC’s new One phones.  

The ZTE Era’s dim, sub-HD screen is truly a disappointment, considering its high-end processor. Considering that ZTE also showed a phone calle dthe PF112, which has a 720p screen with a dual-core processor, it’s possible that ZTE doesn’t even consider the ERA to be its flagship phone. Still, the device has plenty of pep and may find a market with screen-conscious users in China and the other non-U.S. markets where ZTE does most of its business.

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Google Chrome: Still a Strong All-Around Browser

Chrome's minimalist design isn't eye-catching, but its lean toolbar leaves more room for viewing Web pages. And what Chrome lacks in flashiness, it more than makes up for in performance. Google's browser really shone in our JavaScript test, leaving its competitors in the dust. JavaScript is used in many popular websites--Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc.--because it makes those sites more immediately responsive and those JavaScript heavy pages will perform better in Chrome. The browser also performed admirably in our speed test, fully loading an image-heavy page in just over five seconds.

Along with impressive performance, Google's browser has some other useful tricks up its sleeve. For starters, tabs are run as separate processes so that if one crashes, it doesn't take the entire browser down with it. If your wanderings take you to a foreign language Web site, Chrome will recognize the language and offer to translate it for you in a matter of seconds. The translations, which are powered by Google Translate, are not always completely accurate--but they can be helpful in giving you a basic idea on what the page is about. Chrome is one of the most secure browsers on this list because it is sandboxed: The plug-ins Chrome uses are limited to accessing information only within the browser itself and cannot read information from other areas on your computer. Sandboxing allows Chrome to prevent malware that uses plug-in exploits from spreading through your PC.

Mobile users will be glad to know that if you own an Android phone or tablet running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), you can sync your Chrome bookmarks and web history to your mobile devices.

You can customize Chrome with web apps, themes, and extensions to fit your preferences. Chrome has a built-in web store that makes it easy to search for and install add-ons to the browser. Add-ons range from simple things, like an Evernote plug-in, all the way up to full games like Angry Birds or Bastion. And, unlike in Firefox, you don’t need to restart your browser every time you install a new extension or app.

Still, Chrome lacks an integrated RSS reader, so you'll need to come up with your own solution if you subscribe to multiple RSS feeds.

Note: The Downloads button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

--Megan Geuss

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here