Picture of Nokia Lumia 620 in Vietnam

Screen with ClearBlack technology for better viewing angles in the sun.

The back cover of the machine made ​​from polycarbonate and have a variety of colors can be replaced.

Laptops for Back-to-School: How to Make the Right Choice

Students have different budgets and needs. Picking the right laptop will save both money and frustration.

It’s back-to-school time, and retailers are inundating everyone with back-to-school specials, ads, email promos, and even direct-mail offers, all promising the best possible computer deal for your student. The problem is that many of these deals focus on some generic student, failing to address the needs or wants of individual students. Sure, the bargains often look attractive, but before you whip out your credit card, you should spend a little time with your student to figure out what they need.

College students, for example, don't have an easy time buying a computer for school. Budgets can be tight. Space is at a premium—particularly today, when colleges are cramming three bodies into rooms designed for just a pair of students. And computer needs may change due to class requirements.

That’s not to say that high school students don’t have their own needs. Nowadays, high school juniors and seniors face more-demanding curricula, with an increased homework load plus a growing need for collaboration and teamwork. They may have more space than college students, but not necessarily more budget.

Since today’s students are more mobile and more connected than ever, laptops are typically a better choice for students than desktop PCs. Students who require a larger display can always connect to one at their home desk.

My younger daughter, Emily, is heading off to college this year, and we just finished researching and buying a laptop. In addition to talking about technology and products, I’ll share some of our experiences and thought processes.

Before Buying: Research

My college-bound daughter, Emily, liked the usability and design of the Dell XPS 14.First of all, PCWorld is an excellent tool for researching laptops. Our laptop reviews give you an edge, helping you zero in on the models you should consider. You can sort the reviews by price, size, brand, and other features.

Don’t forget to check with the college or university your child will be attending. Schools often have listings of deals from different manufacturers, including discounts that may not be readily visible on the manufacturers' websites.

Also check any specific requirements the university has for hardware, software, or accessories. While most colleges may be brand agnostic, a few support Apple or Windows exclusively. Other colleges restrict certain types of hardware, forbidding items such as routers or network-attached storage. You’ll want to know about such conditions before you buy anything.

Work Versus Play: A Reality Check

Sometimes it seems like the ideal laptop for a student weighs under 4 pounds, sports a 24-inch display, carries 5TB of storage, and has a 175W graphics processor. That’s an impossible mix, of course, so your first task is to talk with your student and do a reality check. Emily is a good example. She’s a pretty serious PC gamer; she likes playing MMOs and PC-based role-playing games that often demand serious graphics horsepower.

You need to impress on your student that a laptop for school should be optimized for the work, not the play. When we bought a school laptop for my older daughter, Elizabeth, we didn’t quite grasp this concept. She ended up with a 15.6-inch laptop that had a decent mobile GPU and a very nice screen—and weighed nearly 7 pounds. She came to dread lugging it around, even when she needed it for class. Next time around, she’ll get something lighter, as she has come to realize that she doesn’t really use her laptop for gaming; her most demanding application is photo editing. Classes change, and so do hobbies.

The HP Envy 4 turned out to be a no-go because the touchpad buttons required a lot of force to press.

I told Emily that if gaming was truly important to her, she should consider making room for a desktop system of some kind. For a school computer, mobility was more important than the ability to run Mass Effect 3 at high detail levels, I said. On the other hand, she wasn’t willing to sacrifice usabilityfor sheer portability. (I’ll get to what that means shortly.)

She’s also a pretty good touch typist, so both keyboard and touchpad feel are important to her. Performance is a high priority, too—but when Emily talks about performance, she really means “responsiveness.” So although raw CPU or graphics horsepower may not be critical, having adequate memory to allow a lot of simultaneously open windows and browser tabs is pretty important.

Ask your student several questions: What types of classes are they taking? Will the emphasis be on math or writing, or will it be a blend of both? Online collaboration is more common now than in past years, so reliable networking capabilities and a good webcam are must-haves, too.

Let’s run down a list of key considerations.

• Budget: Before you begin shopping, set your budget. That will narrow the choices substantially. Try not to set the budget too low. Newspaper ads are often full of $499 laptops, but those models tend to be bulky, with less-than-robust plastic shells. The sweet spot for performance and durability seems to be between $800 and $1200 these days. Spending more than that will get you nice luxuries, such as a large solid-state drive or a beefier CPU, but typically those aren't necessities.
• Mobility: This term means different things to different students. Some people are willing to lug around 7 pounds of laptop all day long, but most aren’t. Remember to factor in the weight of the charger.
• Battery life: A high-performance laptop will do little good if the battery dies after a couple of hours. You can’t always find wall power on the go.
• Usability: A good keyboard and a usable touchpad are both important, but the feel is a personal choice. Some folks are willing to give up a little tactile feedback in the keyboard if it saves them a pound of weight.
• Display: The most common LCD-panel resolution today is 1366 by 768. But if you can find a laptop with a good 1600-by-900-pixel screen or even a 1080p display, that machine becomes even more usable, particularly for Windows 7 and the upcoming Windows 8.
• Mac versus PC: This is another personal choice. My older daughter might have been perfectly happy with Mac OS X, but Emily was adamant about getting a Windows-based system.
• Storage: Since laptops are often a student’s only PC, adequate storage is essential. A 128GB SSD might be ideal for a business road warrior connected to corporate servers, but students will want their music, their photos, and even their games on the one system. Typically that means picking a laptop with a large hard drive over one with a smaller SSD.
• Secondary storage: In addition to primary storage, your student will need backup storage. Although backing up to cloud services is an interesting option, having a portable, bus-powered hard drive is crucial.
• Connectivity: If the laptop lacks an ethernet jack, as some ultraportable systems do these days, you’ll want a USB-to-ethernet adapter. While most universities now have Wi-Fi in most places, not all of them do. For example, Emily’s dorm rooms require a wired ethernet connection, even though Wi-Fi is available on the main campus.
• Support: Springing for an extra warranty is worthwhile. First-year students in particular tend to bang up their laptops, spill coffee on them, lose them. Extra support services, such as an extended warranty that also covers accidental damage, can be indispensable. Many companies now also offer location tracking, such as Intel Anti-Theft technology, Lojack for Laptops, or Apple’s Find My Mac. A tracking feature could be a lifesaver if your student leaves the laptop in a coffee shop or if someone steals it.

Don't Sweat the Jargon

You'll find laptop ads full of terms like "turbo-boost," "3rd-generation Core processor," "400-nit brightness," and other jargon. Most PCWorld readers already understand a fair amount of this stuff, but you don't need to obsess over the raw spec details. In a mobile PC, usability, battery life, and ease of transport are much more important.

Apple announces iPhone 5

As was widely expected, Apple on Wednesday unveiled the iPhone 5, the newest entrant into its smartphone lineup. The iPhone 5 sports a taller screen, a new dock connector port, LTE support, and other refinements.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, took the wraps off the new iPhone for press gathered at the company’s San Francisco event, calling the device “the most beautiful product we’ve ever made, bar none.”

The iPhone 5 is made entirely of glass and aluminum, Schiller said, adding that the “exacting level of standards” exhibited by the phone is Apple’s best hardware engineering to date.

It’s the thinnest and lightest iPhone, at 7.6mm thin, and 112 grams. Schiller said those measurements make it the world’s thinnest smartphone. The iPhone 5 is also volumetrically smaller than the iPhone 4S.

The screen

The iPhone 5 keeps the Retina display moniker, but it’s taller than the screens on iPhones that preceded it. The display offers 326 pixels per inch, with a 4-inch screen and 1136 x 640 resolution.

There’s now a fifth row of icons on the taller home screen, and all of Apple’s native apps, along with the iWork and iLife suites, have been updated on the iPhone 5 to take advantage of the larger display.

The Calendar app in landscape shows five days instead of three on the iPhone 5, for example.

Apps that aren’t updated don’t stretch or scale, Schiller said. Rather, such apps will display letterboxed on the iPhone, with black borders surrounding the centered app.

Schiller showed off apps from CNN and OpenTable, each of which had been updated for the taller iPhone display, adding in new content. In OpenTable’s case, Schiller said, the developers added some of the iPad app’s interface element, since the iPhone 5’s 4-inch screen afforded more space for such niceties.

The iPhone 5 offers 44 percent more color saturation than the iPhone 4S, Schiller said, and because the touch sensors are integrated right into the display, it’s 30 percent thinner, with sharper imagery, and less glare in sunlight.

Ultrafast wireless

New to the iPhone 5 is LTE, HSPA+, and DC-HSDPA support. That’s on top of the GPRS, EDGE, EV-DO, and HSPA that the iPhone 4S offered. Schiller said that with LTE, the iPhone 5 can achieve a “theoretical maximum downlink of up to 100Mbps.”

Schiller explained that the iPhone 5 uses one baseband chip for voice and data and a single radio chip. The new phone also improves upon the iPhone 4S’s dynamic antenna, Schiller said, improving its ability to automatically switch to different networks as appropriate.

LTE partners for the iPhone 5 include Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon in the U.S, and Rogers, Fido, Bell, Telus, and more in Canada. Schiller said there are “plenty” of LTE partners in Asia, Australia, the UK, and Germany, with lots of DC-HSDPA support in Europe as well.

The iPhone 5 also gains better Wi-Fi, with support for 802.11 a/b/g/n. The 802.11n standard is 2.4GHz and dual channel 5GHz, up to 150 Mbps, Schiller said.

A6 processor

The processor in the iPhone 5 is the brand new Apple A6, which is twice as fast at CPU and graphics processing compared to the A5 that drove the iPhone 4S, Schiller said. It’s also 22 percent smaller than its predecessor, freeing up more space inside the iPhone, and making it more energy efficient to boot. Schiller said that everything—launching apps, viewing attachments, loading music—would be twice as fast as before.

Schiller invited EA to show off what the A6 chip meant for them; EA debuted Real Racing 3, which included real-time reflections, functional rear view mirrors, and “console quality” graphics, according to EA Studios’s Rob Murray. (The game will hit the App Store later this year.)

The battery

Schiller explained that Apple wanted “to match the battery life of the 4S in a thinner and lighter design” for the iPhone 5. The company ended up exceeding that battery life; the iPhone 5 will offer eight hours of 3G talk time and browsing and LTE browsing, ten hours of Wi-Fi browsing, ten hours of video, 40 hours of music, and 225 hours of standby time.

The camera

The iPhone 5’s camera sports an eight megapixel sensor, 3264 by 2448 pixel images. It’s backside illuminated, with a hybrid IR filter, five-element lens, and a fast f/2.4 aperture. And the camera is 25 percent smaller than the iPhone 4S’s camera. The camera also includes a dynamic low-light mode, which can sense low light and combine elements for two f-stops greater.

The camera also includes, for the first time on an iPhone, a sapphire lens cover, which Schiller said would protect the lens and make images cleaner and sharper.

The A6 chip includes a new image signal processor, with spatial noise reduction and filtering to improve photographs. And the camera’s now 40 percent faster, too.

Also new in the iPhone 5’s camera arsenal is Panorama. You hold the iPhone vertically and sweep your scene; the app tells you at what speed to move. “Even if you’re not perfectly stable,” or if movement artifacts are introduced, Schiller said, the software can compensate in the final image.

Video performance is improved, too. The iPhone 5 offers 1080p HD video, improved video stabilization, face detection for up to ten faces, and can take photos while you’re recording video. The front-facing camera is now a FaceTime HD 720p HD camera with backside illumination, a significant improvement over the iPhone 4S’s VGA-quality front-facing camera.

Audio

The iPhone 5 includes three separate microphones, Schiller said: One on the front, one on the back, and one on the bottom. They improve noise cancellation and voice recognition.

The speaker gets improved, too. It now includes five magnets in its transducer, with better frequency response and better sound—while being 20 percent smaller than the speaker in the iPhone 4S. The earpiece is now noise-canceling, too, Schiller said.

With some carriers, the iPhone 5 will support wideband audio. In a typical cell phone call, the frequency of data in your voice is compressed around the midrange, Schiler said. But that doesn’t sounded entirely natural. Wideband audio fills up more of the frequency spectrum to make your voice sound more normal. Schiller said 20 carriers will support the technology at launch, and didn’t mention any U.S. carriers that would.

Lightning: The new dock connector port

Throw away your old dock connector cables. Or, at least, go pick up some adapters. The iPhone 5 abandons the familiar 30-pin dock connector port, which first appeared with the original iPod in 2003. In its place is a smaller port, which Apple calls Lightning.

The 8-signal Lightning connector is all-digital, with an adaptive interface and improved durability. It’s reversible (meaning you can orient it either way, like a MagSafe adapter), and it’s 80 percent smaller than the connector it replaces.

Schiller announced that Apple would offer a 30-pin-to-Lightning connector, but didn’t mention pricing.

The iPhone 5 will come in an all black model, and a white model with a bright silver aluminum finish.

We’ll have more on the iPhone 5, including pricing and availability, later on Wednesday as that information becomes available.

Source : pcworl.com