Kiran Upadhyay

This week we’ve got several great deals on a Surface Pro, a hybrid drive (mostly for laptops), an aluminum laptop and an ultra-budget SSD. These deals won’t last long, so get them while they’re hot! Tablet Users This week we’ve managed to pick up a discounted Microsoft Surface Pro. Microsoft Surface Pro Price : $599 new; compare to $499 (refurbished) via  eBay Retailer : eBay (Best Buy) Best Buy, selling on eBay, recently dropped the price of their 128GB Surface Pro tablet from $899 to the low price of $599. The Surface Pro offers excellent battery life, very good performance, an optional add-on of a keyboard, and light weight. For those of you looking for a tablet device with laptop-like functionality, look no further. The specifications of the Surface Pro quite good, although starting to age. It uses an Ivy Bridge processor, a 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM. Before buying, I suggest reading up on James’s  review of the original Surface RT tablet . It’s a g...

Wearable technology has become a new term in recent months — the Google Glass ( which we reviewed ) is currently the most iconic project of this genre of technology, but it’s still quite a while until it’s ready for consumer hands. However, that doesn’t mean you’re currently out of luck. There are plenty of smartwatches which you can get your hands on right now, so why should you consider the Sony SmartWatch 2? To find out, we purchased a Sony SmartWatch 2 for the purpose of this review. And now that we’re done with it, we’re giving it away! Why A Smartwatch? You might be asking yourself, “What could a smartwatch possibly do for me?” Think of a smartwatch as a helper tool — it can connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth, and show you various functions of your smartphone without actually using your smartphone. You can check for SMS messages, events on your calendar, emails, tweets, the weather, currently playing music, and much more. In the case of music and other applicable ...

Everything important that you need to know about living a successful life, you can get from a computer program. Don’t believe me? Read on. When I first started programming as a young kid, it only amounted to copying foreign-looking words and symbols out of a computer magazine so that my brother and I could get our old Franklin 64 with a dual floppy drive to play a cute little digital tune at us. Back then, there weren’t many life lessons to discern out of that cryptic text. A number of years later, in high school Pascal class, things started to look different. Learning about IF statements and FOR loops started to spark philosophical synapse connections the likes of which Walt Whitman and Robert Frost would have been proud of. Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but still the insights were pretty cool. Yes, I know, it’s quite a nerdy thing to say — but the truth is that there’s a lot of wisdom in code….in while statements, arrays, methods, objects and all that. In fact, a whole lot that I...

The original Cut The Rope was a super-hit, racing to the top of the charts on all app stores. It perfectly melded cute and fun graphics with gameplay that was accessible, yet challenging at the same time. Developer Zepto Labs teased the sequel with Twitter hashtags like #OmNomIsMissing. Om Nom, for the uninitiated, is the lead character of a Cut The Rope — a cute green monster who is always hunting for candy. And in his zeal to protect all his candy, he was trapped by spiders and is now lost in the jungle. Cut The Rope 2  ($0.99) is all about getting Om Nom back to his home. Can Cut The Rope 2 live up to the standards of its predecessor and be one of the best iPhone games? Back To Basics The basic gameplay mechanics of the original Cut The Rope remain intact in the sequel. The physics-based puzzler has pieces of candy in each level, usually tethered by a rope. You have to cut the ropes in the right order to get the candy into Om Nom’s mouth, who is s...

When Sony sells you a smartphone for $600, it’s making a promise. Actually, it makes a whole bunch of them: Power, beauty, waterproof protection, and everyday utility. Can this slab of metal and glass do it all? To find out, we bought a retail unit and used it for several weeks. This is not a review unit sent by Sony, but one that we paid for in full — in other words, we don’t “owe” anyone a positive review, and this is our truly unbiased take on the  Sony Xperia Z1 . Playing The Specs Game Sony isn’t shy about touting the numbers here. With a Snapdragon 800 SoC, 2 gigabytes of RAM, an Adreno 330 GPU, and a 441 ppi 5-inch full-HD screen, the Xperia Z1 is  a lot  of phone. This is as high-end as Android gets circa early 2014, and it handled anything I threw at it with aplomb. Its glass casing packs a 3000 mAh battery that carries it through a full day’s use with ease. Just for the sake of comparison, these are better specifications than what you’d get w...