How to Disable Annoying Touch Sounds on the Galaxy Note 4

Like Chinese water torture, the “bloop / blop” sounds that occur when you tap on the screen on Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 can drive you crazy. Fortunately, it’s easy to silence the phone’s annoying noises with a simple settings change. Here’s how to disable the touch sounds on the Galaxy Note 4.

1. Navigate to settings. You can get there by pulling down the notification drawer and tapping the gear icon.

2. Select the Device tab. 

3. Tap Sound.

4. Uncheck Touch Sounds. You’ll find it under the Feedback subhead.

The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a master’s degree in English from NYU.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Apple Patent Could Change Way We Touch iPhone, iPad

While some companies like LG are experimenting with rear-mounted touch controls, Apple wants to add more sensors to the front of your iPhone or iPad. A new Apple patent details technology that would implement force sensors into the corners of a mobile device, adding a new input method for users.

Apple says the technology would be part of an effort to more accurately interpret gestures from mobile users. So, for example, the integrated force sensors could make it easier for the phone to pick up swipes from the left or right. Theoretically, these sensors could be embedded in an area such as the bezels on your iPhone, which means you could interact with the phone without touching its display.

MORE: iPhone 6 Rumors: Inside Apple’s Next Big Thing

These pressure-sensitive sensors would also be used to tell your device how you’re holding it. For instance, if you’re holding an iPhone or iPad with your left hand and your thumb accidentally touches part of the screen, you could still operate the device with your right hand as you normally would.

The force sensors would detect that you’re holding the phone or tablet with your left hand, preventing the display from mistaking this as a multitouch gesture. Apple’s patented force sensor tech would essentially serve the same purpose as palm rejection.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Apple patents experiment with different uses for the touch screen displays on its products. Back in November, the United States Patent and Trademark office published a patent for tech that turns your iPhone’s touchscreen into a fingerprint scanner.

Lisa has been reporting on all things mobile for Laptopmag.com since early 2013. When she’s not reviewing gadgets, she’s usually browsing patent databases or interviewing experts to track down the hottest tech trends before they even happen. Lisa holds a B.A. in Journalism from SUNY Purchase and has contributed to The International Business Times, The New York Daily News and Guitar World Magazine.

From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

Acer’s White C720p Chromebook Touch Hands-on: Worth $299?

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First Transparent Tablet Lets You Touch From Both Sides

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Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch review: A daily driver with all-day battery life

Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch $700.00 This is one of the most affordable Ultrabooks we’ve seen, and the compromises Lenovo made to get there are not showstoppers by any stretch.

If you think an Ultrabook is out of your price range, you haven’t seen Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch. Ostensibly designed for the consumer market, the U430 carries over many of the features that render Lenovo’s corporate laptops so appealing, including a rigid but elegant all-aluminum enclosure and an exceptionally good, island-style, backlit keyboard.

The dual-core Intel Core i5-4200U processor inside the IdeaPad U430 Touch is one of the least powerful members of the Haswell Core i5 family, but that didn’t stop this computer from delivering a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 199. That marks it as nearly twice as fast as our reference notebook, an Asus VivoBook S550CA powered by a third-generation Intel Core i5-3317u. Lenovo outfits the U430 with a typical 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch is nearly twice as powerful as our reference notebook.

Lenovo clearly had to hold back on some features to hit the $700 price, and the 14-inch display is one of them. The touchscreen panel is plenty bright, and it delivers very good image quality, but its resolution is limited to 1600 by 900 pixels. Still, that’s better than the 1366-by-768-pixel resolution that many of its competitors offer. Another drawback is that this computer relies on the GPU integrated into its Core i5 CPU, so you can’t expect to do much hard-core gaming: Among the five laptops in our testing group, the U430 posted the slowest performance on BioShock Infinite, even with the resolution reduced to 1024 by 768 pixels and the visual quality set to low.

Intel's integrated graphics processors are much better than the GPUs in its third-generation Core processors, but you'll still need more power than that if you want to play games.

The U430 is equipped with a 500GB mechanical hard drive that spins its platters at a leisurely 5400 rpm. A solid-state drive—or at least an SSD cache—would have produced much better performance, but Lenovo would have had a hard time reaching such a low price with either of those features. You’ll find two USB 2.0 ports on the right side of the computer, along with an SD Card reader and the power connector.

Battery life of 6 hours, 38 minutes is an impressive stat.

Lenovo placed the sole USB 3.0 port on the left side, along with a headset jack, an HDMI output, and a wired gigabit ethernet port. Wireless networking and Bluetooth come courtesy of Intel’s dual-band Wireless-N 7260 chipset (which also supports Intel’s WiDi wireless video-streaming technology). Stereo speakers on the bottom of the chassis deliver surprisingly clear highs, but they’re almost devoid of bass response.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch is on the heavy side for an Ultrabook, weighing in at 4.2 pounds, but it’s well made and very attractive, and its battery lasted for a full 6 hours, 38 minutes in our tests. It’s a terrific value at $700.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

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Dell Inspiron One 20 Touch review: An attractive budget all-in-one with unsatisfying peripherals and sound

Dell Inspiron One 20 Touch $699.00 The Dell Inspiron One is a sturdy, non-nonsense all-in-one. But Dell's ho-hum component choices deliver equally ho-hum benchmark performance.

I’m a big fan of Dell’s Inspiron One lineup of all-in-one PCs. These computers manage to be gorgeous, sturdy, and versatile while remaining relatively budget friendly. The Inspiron One 20 reviewed here has a smaller display than the Toshiba, but it costs more than $300 cheaper ($699 as of 8/29/13). It’s equipped with an Intel Core i3-3240T processor; 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory; and a 1TB, 7200rpm hard drive. It also has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi adapters, and a 20-inch capacitive touchscreen.

Design-wise, the Inspiron One 20 Touch is tough to beat, though the Toshiba PX35t-A2210 has a slightly more premium look. This all-black AIO features an edge-to-edge glass screen, which gives it a bezel-less appearance and also makes for easy swiping when performing common Windows 8 gestures (such as swiping from the side to pull up the charms bar). The minimalist bezel sports a small, mirrored Dell logo at the bottom and a built-in webcam at the top. The system’s speakers are just below the screen. There are no buttons or ports on the front of the One 20 Touch, these are all relegated to the system’s sides and back.

Dell's Inspiron One 20 Touch boasts a great design, but its performance leaves a bit to be desired.

The One 20 Touch’s great-looking design is slightly marred by its below-average peripherals. The system comes with a wired mouse and keyboard, both of which are utterly basic (though mostly comfortable to use). The keyboard offers very light tactile feedback, which can make accurate typing difficult. The mouse is large but comfortable, and offers an average input experience.

As for performance, the Inspiron One 20 Touch is good, but not great. It will get you through schoolwork and basic entertainment, such as streaming HD movies and playing music, but it won’t handle PC games or media-editing software very well. This Inspiron scores a very average 109 on WorldBench 8.1, which means it’s just nine percent faster than our Acer baseline model . Compared with the other AIOs in this roundup, the One 20 Touch is solidly in the middle – it comes in fourth, but it’s just one point below our third-ranked HP Pavilion TouchSmart 23 (110).

PCWorld's Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite measures performance with a number of productivity, creation, and entertainment programs.

In our graphics tests, the One 20 Touch performed as expected: It managed a playable, if far from excellent, 30.7 frames per second on our Dirt Showdown test, and but only 14.8 fps with the more demanding BioShock Infinite (with both games, resolution was set to 1024 by 768 pixels, and image quality was set to Low). In other words, it can handle low-end PC games at an acceptable frame rate, but it’s about as far from a gaming powerhouse as a Commodore 64. HD video looks just okay—there’s quite a bit of artifacting and foreign objects in scenes with a medium amount of motion—and skin tones have a tendency to look burnt and oversaturated. Audio is also somewhat disappointing: The speakers aren’t very loud, and music lacks depth, even when all the software enhancements are turned on.

This chart indicates how well each all-in-one PC performed with a variety of media editing and encoding tasks. If this is an important consideration for your,the PCs with the shorter bars are your best choices. 

The Dell Inspiron One 20 Touch is a nice starter machine for those who like the Inspiron One look and feel. The touchscreen remains one of the better touchscreens that I’ve used, with smooth, accurate touch and a nice glidey feel to the glossy display. I especially like the adjustable stand, the minimalist design, and the overall sturdiness of the chassis. But it has its issues, including cheap, basic peripherals; mediocre performance; and weak speakers.

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

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Lenovo C540 Touch review: An excellent budget all-in-one that delivers on performance

Lenovo’s C540 Touch is one of the two best all-in-ones in this roundup. And while I have no significant complaints about the quality of its multitouch display, the manner in which the glass is recessed behind the bezel is disconcerting when you’re sweeping your finger in from the edge to call up the Windows 8 charms bar. The display measures 23 inches diagonally—just like the Acer, HP, and Toshiba models—but it’s mounted to a stand rather than being incorporated into a monolithic frame.

Lenovo pairs the Intel Core i3-3240 CPU with 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory—more than any of the other machines we looked at—and it packs a 1TB, 7200 rpm hard drive inside its somewhat thick chassis. All-in-ones are notoriously difficult to upgrade, so having lots of memory onboard to start is a major benefit.

PCWorld's Desktop Worldbench 8.1 benchmark suite measures performance with a number of productivity, creation, and entertainment programs.

The C540 Touch’s Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score of 129 identifies it as nearly 30-percent faster than our Core i5-powered reference machine, Acer’s Aspire A5600U-UB13 , and just a whisker behind the Toshiba PX35t-A2210. The Lenovo has a faster CPU, which helped it deliver very good media editing and encoding scores, but its weak Intel HD Graphics 2500 integrated GPU left it running in the back of the pack on our gaming benchmarks, producing just 16.1 frames per second with BioShock Infinite, even with the game running at resolution of just 1024 by 768 pixels and with its visual quality set to Low. The Toshiba, which features an Intel HD Graphics 4000 integrated GPU, produced this game at a much quicker 26.6 frames per second. Neither experience is ideal, but at least the Toshiba won’t leave you looking at a slideshow.

The recessed display on Lenovo's C540 Touch is a little weird for a touchscreen computer.

Although Lenovo doesn’t have any big-name speaker manufacturers to boast of, the C540 Touch produces surprisingly good sound from its down-firing speakers. Lenovo is rather stingy with the USB 3.0 ports, providing just two on the left side of the display (along with mic and headphone jacks). Four USB 2.0 ports, hardwired gigabit ethernet, and an HDMI input are located in the back. You’ll use two of those rear USB ports to plug in Lenovo’s mouse and keyboard. The mouse is a two-button, bargain-basement cheapie; but the keyboard, while also exceedingly basic, delivers excellent tactile feedback.

It’s tough to say which all-in-one is best, the Toshiba TX35t-A2210 or the Lenovo C540 Touch. The Toshiba looks more attractive and performs better with games, but the Lenovo’s more-powerful CPU and additional memory delivers better performances on our audio-encoding, video-encoding, and image-editing benchmarks. Their Worldbench scores, meanwhile, leave them essentially tied.

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

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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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: The Asus ET2702 is a good all-in-one PC (if you can’t afford a Dell XPS 27 Touch)

Full HD displays are so last season. Asus’s new ET2702 is the company’s first 27-inch all-in-one to sport a quad HD display—that is, a display with a resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, instead of the usual 1920 by 1080 pixels. That higher pixel density makes a big difference when you’re sitting merely 20 to 40 inches away from a 27-inch screen.

But there’s more to the Asus ET2702 than just its screen. Our review model, which costs around $1899 as configured (as of August 14, 2013), sports a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770 processor (a member of the new Haswell family), 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory, a discrete graphics card (AMD’s Radeon HD 8890A), a Blu-ray player, and a 2TB, 7200-rpm hard drive. In pricing, the ET2702 is on a par with comparable systems: It’s more expensive than the $1440 Vizio CA27T-B1, which has a slower processor and a lower-resolution display, but it’s about $200 cheaper than the Dell XPS 27 Touch, which has a lower-voltage version of the Core i7 processor (the Core i7-4770S).

ROBERT CARDINWe would have liked the ET2702 a lot more if we hadn't seen the Dell XPS 27 first.

Although the ET2702 boasts some impressive specs, it disappointed somewhat in benchmark performance. For instance, it earned a score of 174 in our Desktop WorldBench 8.1 benchmark tests. That’s good—it means the ET2702 is 75 percent faster than our baseline model, the Acer Aspire U—but it’s not fantastic, especially compared with the scores of other 27-inch all-in-ones we’ve reviewed recently. The Vizio CA27T-B1, which has an older third-generation Intel Core i7 processor, scored 179 on WorldBench 8.1. The Dell XPS 27 Touch, meanwhile, blew both the ET2702 and the CA27T-B1 out of the water with its mark of 262.

The absence of an SSD cache for the ET2702's mechanical hard drive had a significant negative impact on this all-in-one's Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score. Elements of our WorldBench suite that are based on performance in productivity applications, such as PCMark 7, suffered the most from the absence of an SSD cache.

Those results don’t mean that the ET2702 is a lousy computer. It actually delivers superior graphics compared to what Dell and Vizio are providing with their AIOs, and thus it is the best choice of the three if you’re looking to play games. Whereas Dell uses Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M card, and Vizio relies on integrated graphics, Asus splurges on an AMD Radeon HD 8890A. In our Dirt Showdown test (resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, with low visual-quality settings), the ET2702 managed an impressive frame rate of 131.7 frames per second. By comparison, Dell’s XPS 27 Touch delivered 125.7 fps and the Vizio CA27T-B1 chugged along at a rate of just 54.4 fps on the same test.

Gaming performance is a bright spot for the Asus ET2702, thanks to its Asus Radeon HD 8890A discrete video card.

The ET2702 is also one of the few desktop systems we’ve seen to provide an on-board 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter. If you’re running a superfast 802.11ac router, this computer will take full advantage of it.

The Achilles’ heel of the ET2702 is its storage subsystem: Dell and Vizio both include a 32GB solid-state drive as a cache for their machines’ hard drives, whereas Asus does not. That cache makes a tremendous difference in many applications that involve frequent data fetches from storage. As a result, it affects many of the benchmarks that comprise our WorldBench 8.1 suite. Asus does provide up to a 128GB SSD on some other versions of the ET2702, but not on the model the company sent us (specifically, its model ET2702IGTH-B023K).

ROBERT CARDINThe stand on the Asus ET2702 allows only a very limited tilt range.

Even though the ET2702 doesn’t have the best touchscreen display I’ve seen (that honor belongs to Dell’s XPS 27 Touch), it does deliver crisp, clear text and images, as well as bright and accurate colors. Touch is especially nice on the ET2702: Multitouch gestures are smooth and accurate, not at all choppy as I’ve seen on some touchscreens. I also appreciate the bezel-free, edge-to-edge glass design, which makes it much easier to perform Windows 8 gestures such as swiping from the side or the top of the screen to access menus. I also enjoyed watching HD streaming video on the ET2702’s screen, although I did notice visual artifacts and and blurred details.

The rest of the ET2702 needs some work. This AIO looks appealing from far away, thanks to its sleek profile and brushed-metal accents, but Asus needs to make several tweaks for better usability. Four labels in the lower-right corner of the screen, for instance, identify touch-sensitive nubs below the screen for mode, volume up/down, menu, and brightness up/down. The nubs are confusing to use—I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to swipe, tap, or press them. They’re also inconsistently sensitive, and generally they never did what I expected them to do. Tapping the volume nub, for example, changed the brightness.

The wireless peripherals, while attractive, are uncomfortable to use: The mouse is too small and square, and the keyboard sports superslick, soft keys. The adjustable stand barely tilts the screen 15 degrees, and the plastic door covering the side ports feels as if it will break within the first five uses.

The Asus ET2702 isn’t a bad all-in-one PC, especially if you’re a sucker for pretty screens, but it’s not the best. The Dell XPS 27 Touch is faster and more attractive, and it suffers from fewer usability issues. And Dell’s machine costs only $200 more.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Review: SyndiFeed brings a personal touch to RSS reading, but needs more features

SyndiFeed If you like simplicity in your RSS and have the patience to wait for more features, give SyndiFeed a try.

Download Now

Almost everyone was sad to hear of Google Reader's demise. Free, easy to use, and relatively simple, Google Reader brought RSS to the public awareness almost single handedly. Alternatives such as Feedly, Pulse, and various browser add-ons have always existed, but received a significant boost since Google Reader's fate became known. SyndiFeed is a standalone RSS Web app (with mobile apps coming soon) that doesn't really offer anything its competitors don't, but does offer a personal touch for those burned by Google's indifference.

You can view your SyndiFeed feeds in grid or list form, the former providing an image and an excerpt of the article.

Unlike Google Reader, SyndiFeed is a one-man development project, and is also fairly new. Accordingly, it's still pretty basic when it comes to the features it offers. This is refreshing at times—basic is not always bad, after all—but makes the app almost inconvenient to use at others.

Like any RSS reader, SyndiFeed revolves around feeds, which you can either add manually by entering the feed's URL, or by importing them from Google Reader. Feed groups also exist, but there is no way to add existing feeds to them, meaning, when importing your Google Reader feeds, they're going to be jumbled around groupless, and short of adding them all again manually to groups, there's nothing you can do about this. There's also no way to edit feeds once added.

Individual articles are very readable, with large inline images but no navigation options to other articles.

When it comes to reading, SyndiFeed doesn't get much better, unfortunately. While the interface is far better-looking than Google Reader's, usability is SyndiFeed's current downfall. Each of your feeds is arranged in a magazine-like grid or a list, but there's no easy way to move between articles or feeds.

After reading an article, which opens in a separate lightbox, you need to click "Close" and click on the next article in order to move on. The reading experience is nonetheless good, making articles from any source readable with images and links that stand out, and no unnecessary page elements. While reading an article, it's also easy to share it through Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

SyndiFeed is not only about reading right now, however, making it super-easy to save articles for later reading. To do this, you can either connect SyndiFeed with your Instapaper account, or use the built-in Read Later feature to add articles to your Saved tab. There's also a SyndiFeed bookmarklet for saving items from any website to your SyndiFeed Saved tab. The Saved tab is not completely thought-out yet, but you can add several folders to it, arranging your saved items as you please.

While the option to edit feeds and groups does exist, it only lets you add and delete feeds.

I love that SyndiFeed is made by one person, and I adore its interface and simplicity. As it stands, however, it will not become my go-to RSS reader; there are just too many important features missing. The developer assures me that all these features are in the works, so if you like the look of it, it's well worth it to keep an eye on SyndiFeed and see how it develops. Every app has to start somewhere, and although it's not done yet, SyndiFeed is off to a promising start.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use this Web-based software.

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Microsoft Patents Phone Case That Responds to Your Touch

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Dell XPS 27 Touch review: Looks are everything

When it comes to its high-end all-in-one PC lineup, Dell seems to be operating on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle. The XPS 27 Touch packs a speedy new Haswell CPU under its hood, but that’s the only significant departure from earlier models.

Our review unit, which costs $2100 as of July 17, 2013, sports a quad-core Intel Core i7-4770S processor; 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a discrete video card (Nvidia’s GeForce GT 750M); and a roomy 2TB, 7200 rpm hard drive augmented by a 32GB mSATA SSD cache. That’s impressive for any all-in-one, and it helped the XPS 27 Touch deliver a Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score of 262, which means it’s more than two and a half times faster than our reference PC, Acer’s Aspire U. It’s also significantly faster than Vizio’s CA27T-B1. The displays on both of those models are limited to 1920 by 1080 pixels, but they’re also considerably less expensive (selling for $1000 and $1550 respectively).

The Dell XPS 27 Touch produced a high Desktop Worldbench 8.1 score (for an all-in-one, that is).

Nevertheless, the Dell’s score places the XPS 27 Touch solidly in the upper half of all the desktop systems we’ve tested so far, although it’s nowhere near the custom-built gaming rigs we’ve evaluated (Primordial Computer’s over-the-top, quad-Titan Medusa hit 385, while Micro Express’s single-GPU MicroFlex 47B scored 421). Unlike most all-in-ones, however, the XPS 27 will satisfy the gamers in your family—as long as their expectations aren’t too hardcore. In our Dirt Showdown, with the game’s resolution at 1024 by 768 pixels and image quality set to low, the XPS 27 delivered a strong 125.7 frames per second. Compare that to our reference PC, which relies on the integrated GPU in its Intel Core i5 3230M processor: It delivered Dirt Showdown at just 47.5 fps.

The XPS 27 Touch is a very reasonable gaming PC, provided you’re willing to compromise on resolution and image quality.

As befits a new AIO of the Windows 8 era, the XPS 27 is outfitted with a 10-point touchscreen display (this was an optional feature on previous models). Dell boasts that it’s the company’s “brightest and most versatile touch display” to date. I agree, it’s the best touchscreen I’ve seen from Dell. It’s extremely bright, and images and text look fantastically crisp and clear thanks to its 2560-by-1440 resolution. Multitouch gestures are smooth and easy to perform, and the bezel-less design makes using Windows 8 a breeze. But the display is not perfect. I have the same minor complaint about this screen as I had about Dell’s earlier XPS One 2710: Colors, especially skin tones, have a tendency to look oversaturated.

ROBERT CARDINThe dual-articulated hinge enables you to adjust the display’s height as well as its angle.

Dell’s XPS 27 Touch is a nice, attractive system, but I do wish the company had paid a little less attention to looks and a little more to usability. This AIO is super pretty, and the changes I want would probably make it a little less so. While the media card reader and two USB 3.0 ports are conveniently located on the left side of the bezel, the HDMI ports (in and out), Thunderbolt/Mini DisplayPort, gigabit ethernet, and four additional USB 3.0 ports on the back of the display are obscured by the stand and are difficult to reach.

ROBERT CARDINMany of the XPS 27 Touch’s I/O ports are obscured by the double-articulated stand (which enables you to adjust the height as well as the angle of the display).

I’m also not a fan of the four touch-sensitive buttons on the lower left corner on the front of the display. A proximity sensor causes these unlabeled buttons to light up when you hover your finger over them, although the only one you might use on a regular basis is the Eject button for the DVD burner. And speaking of optical drives, if you want a Blu-ray/DVD combo, you’ll need to move up to the $2600 model, which also comes with 16GB of memory and Windows 8 Pro. But if you get your movie fix via Internet streaming, you won’t care.

Aside from those quibbles, the Dell XPS 27 Touch is an exquisite all-in-one.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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iTalk’s iPod Touch Sleeve Converts Your iPod Into a Smartphone

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Review: Skitch Touch makes it easy to annotate images in Windows 8's Modern interface

Evernote-owned free utility Skitch is a great way to annotate images and screenshots. It comes in both Windows and Mac OS X editions, and mobile versions for iOS and Android are available, too. And somewhere between the mobile and desktop versions comes Skitch Touch, the version built for Windows 8's Modern Interface. It has the same simple and pretty annotation tools as the other versions, but being a Modern app, offers less power and features than the traditional Windows version.

Like many other Modern apps, Skitch Touch seems to be designed for screen in the 11- to 13-inch range. On a 24-inch monitor, it ends up displaying vast expanses of white, unused space. As you launch it, Skitch Touch shows a beautiful Create New area on the left side of the screen, letting you create a pull in material to visually annotate from a camera (presumably a tablet's built-in camera, but this feature also works with a regular webcam connected to a computer), a map, a photo or screenshot you've previously taken, an image saved into the clipboard, or a blank canvas.

Skitch Touch makes it easy to start annotating a new image from a variety of sources.

Notably missing is the option to capture a new screenshot. You'll have to use a third-party tool for this, such as Screenshot Captor or ZScreen.

Once you have an image open for editing, annotating it is just as easy as on other Skitch versions. Part of what makes Skitch fun to use is that it doesn't overwhelm the user with numerous tools: There are just seven of them to master. You can draw arrows on your image, enter text, demarcate areas with rectangles, and squiggle with a marker. Other tools let you style your annotations (pick a color and stroke width), pixelate areas of the image, and crop the image. That's basically it—but really, that's all you need to get your point across when annotating an image.

When you're ready to share your work with others, click the Export button, and you can save the image as a JPG or PNG file. This isn't as convenient as being able to drag the image off the window to save it (a feature Skitch for Windows offers), but it works. To save your work as a Skitch document for editing later, click the checkmark on the top-right corner of the screen. Saving files for editing later is another area where Skitch Touch could do better: Unless you log into your Evernote account using Skitch, you only have access your most recently edited file. Once you log into Evernote from Skitch, the main part of the window shows previous files, and you can easily click through to edit them.

Skitch's simple annotation tools go well with the simple Modern visual aesthetic.

Skitch is a fundamentally simple tool, and it already offers mobile versions for iOS and Android, something that helps when designing a Modern app. It's also visual, which is a great quality for a Modern app to have. Thanks to these advantages, Skitch Touch offers a better Modern experience than most apps I've seen so far, and should work especially well on a touch-enabled tablet screen.

Note: The Download button on the Product Specs page takes you to the Windows Store, 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.
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