CNET UK Editors' Choice winners June 2009
Here's the best products we reviewed in June, earning our monthly awards. Kit from Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Acer feature, along with a certain Apple product. Can you guess which?
Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlepeople for our monthly unveiling of the best products we've reviewed over the past four weeks. Our Editors' Choice awards go to the very finest bits of kit that pass over our detritus-choked desks. Let's find out what's won, shall we?
iPhone 3GS
Right now, the iPhone 3GS is our king of touchscreen smart phones. It isn't a massive update of the previous iPhone, the 3G, but it takes a good thing and makes it even better.
The unsung heroes of the 3GS are the speed and battery life, although the battery still suffers under the onslaught of GPS and surfing over Wi-Fi and 3G. It also adds the ability to shoot video, an improved 3-megapixel camera, voice control and a compass, as well as the umpteen software updates that came with the release of the iPhone OS 3.0, which you'll also get on the older iPhone 3G.
iPhone favourites such as the App Store are in the house, with its zillions of add-ons from the useful to the frankly frivolous, and the iTunes store has added TV and movies to its music-downloading talents. Some of the new features, such as MMS, are long overdue, but it's not the features that make this phone the current champ -- it's fun and easy to use, and that's a lesson every phone should learn.
Sony Ericsson W995
The Sony Ericsson W995 Walkman is Son Eric doing what it does best, even better than the best it could do before. It's taken our beloved Walkman line and crowned it with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as vastly improving its software for transferring songs and videos. And it's even thrown in a 8.1-megapixel camera, just in case we were still on the fence.
Sure, it's a little bulky, and some of the lesser applications that we tested, such as YouTube, didn't work very well. But with excellent music quality, an above-average camera, and good old-fashioned easy-to-use buttons, you can't argue with the W995.
Samsung UE46B8000
It's hard not to like this Samsung TV from the first minute you take it out of the box. It's the thinnest TV we've seen in a long time and it looks like it's a big deal. And it is, because the LED edgelighting means you get an impressive contrast ratio and black levels that can almost match a plasma.
Not only is the picture quality excellent, but the TV is jam-packed full of features such as Yahoo Widgets and media playback that make it even more exciting. You can connect to the Internet wirelessly with an optional dongle, and you can even browse DLNA servers and watch video, look at photos and listen to music.
This TV has it all. Superb image quality, amazing features and it looks like a million dollars in your lounge too. We don't know what to say -- apart from we really want one.
Acer Timeline Aspire 4810T
Acer's sure to have rival 14-inch laptop manufacturers rattled with the Timeline Aspire 4810T. Not only does this machine sport a gesture-sensitive, multi-touch mouse trackpad, a comfortable keyboard and a true 16:9 widescreen display, it also sports a new-fangled ultra-low-voltage CPU.
These fancy chips give the Timeline Aspire 4810T solid performance, but more significantly, excellent battery life. The 4810T is one of relatively few laptops in its size and price range that delivers three and a half hours of power at an absolute minimum -- or around double that amount if you're performing simple office tasks.