Apple iPod Touch Our Rating:
The iPod Touch is Apple’s offering for those who want all the features of the iPhone sans phone. The Touch is by far the most feature-packed iPod Apple has to offer, offering all the functionality of a PDA or Blackberry in a sleek design and full touch screen. The current generation Touch has four external buttons: The Home button below the touch screen, the hold button at the top, and volume control on the left side. Next/previous track buttons may have been more useful but it is still better than the original touch which did not feature the volume control buttons. On the bottom is the jack for connecting the Touch to a PC or Mac via USB, and the audio input.

By default the touch comes with a standard set of apps, similar to that of the iPhone: Calendar, Photos, Videos, YouTube, Stocks, Maps, Weather, Clock, Calculator, Notes, Mail, Safari, and of course Music, iTunes, and the App Store. Within the App Store one will find hundreds of additional free and premium apps to install, from Google Earth to Quake. The presence of a built-in YouTube player and the largest screen out of any iPod make it the best choice for watching video. The Touch comes in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes, so there is bound to be one for everyone.

The Touch does have its downsides. The lack of more external buttons could make it a hassle to have to skip through songs. A much-needed App is a built-in instant messenger. There are several choices from third parties in the App store, but this is such a popular feature that it should definitely be added. However these are small problems when compared to how much the Touch has to offer.

Apple’s iPod Touch is definitely one of the best portable media devices available today, and short of owning an iPhone it’d be hard to find a device to beat it.

Apple Remote Our Rating:

The Apple remote is a necessity for your Macbook or Macbook Pro, iMac,or Apple TV. With this tiny remote, you can have the ability to control your computer and applications on your Apple computer.

The Apple remote features only 6 buttons: volume control up and down, skip left and right, play/pause, and menu. In a media application, this remote controls all of the normal functions in that application, making it simple to control your music or movies from right in front of your computer to all the way across the room.

The menu button pulls up the Front Row application on Apple computers. This gives you access to movies, music, videos, podcasts, and photos in an appealing interface, all navigated with the remote. In the Front Row, you can also access features such as the top 10 music videos or top 10 songs in the iTunes store, movie previews, and more.

Not only is it a media controller, but a presentation controller. It can also be used in other applications. Additionally, it can play media applications in a Windows Boot Camp partition.

The remote has a long range, and has a long battery life. It also is very light and small, yet large enough to not lose it easily. It works great, and is essential to get the most out of your Apple computer experience.

Intec Audio/Video Selector Our Rating:

If you’re like me, you have tons of things hooked up to your TV. You have your DVD player, video games, and anything else around. This means that whenever you want to switch over to another system, you have to hassle with all of the cables to get it working. This nifty audio/video selector takes away the hassle.

This product allows you to plug in up to 3 devices into it. Then, you use the provided cords to hook the product up to your equipment. It accepts the regular audio and video, along with S-video. Then, all you have to do it hit the switch for whatever device you want to use, and play away! It’s that simple, and this product does the job flawlessly.

Toshiba SD-V291 DVD/VHS Player Our Rating:

Here is another wonderful product. This player from Toshiba is a DVD/VCR combo. It plays all your old VHS tapes from back in the day, and all of your newer DVDs, all in one unit.

The DVD player plays tons of formats: CD, VCD, CD-R/RW, mp3, WMA, and DVD-R, and can view JPEG pictures as well. It has component video output, and is Dolby Digital/DTS Compatible. The VHS player works great and includes multiple features, such as high speed fast forward/rewind, commercial skipping for recording, automatic clock set, and an automatic head cleaner.

We loved being able to use both common types of video media in this unit with the same remote. However, we found that the DVD player in our machine was touchy at times. Rarely, it would take several tries for it to play a DVD. However, this did not occur often. We found that cleaning it with a DVD drive cleaner helped it significantly. If you want to get a new DVD player, but still have a massive collection of VHS tapes, consider this player.

Philips DVD621 DVD Player Our Rating:

This DVD player from Philips is basically just that. It also has the capability of playing CDs, but that is it. It is simple, but it works poorly.

We picked up this DVD player and tested it’s capabilities. It only plays regular DVDs and CDs, meaning anything that is burned will not play, unfortunately. This is a major drawback.

It is also very slow to respond to functions, and it also loads slow. Using it is a hassle. At the end of it all, it does play your DVDs. However, avoid this player.