Stories by: Yardena Arar

The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) delivers a good, classic netbook for a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life: nearly 7 hours in our tests using the provided 6-cell battery.

TaxActDeluxe has been the budget tax-software option for some time now, but can it handle business taxes? The answer is yes -- but only if you don't need a heap of guidance and you can make do with limited data-import features.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.

Travel used to be about getting away from it all, but these days even leisure travelers don't want to leave the Web and their smartphones, tablets, or laptops behind.

High-definition TVs have come a long way in the past two years. In 2008, a 1080p HDTV set was still a high-end item; today, it's pretty much the norm (as it should be for optimal Blu-ray Disc playback). LED-backlit sets were just starting to appear then, and their price tags were astronomical — Sony charged US$5000 for its first 46in LED-based Bravia. These days, such models are widely available, and prices have dropped dramatically.

From Jules Verne to Stanley Kubrick and beyond, writers and artists have imagined what the future would be like. Their visions range from the comically bizarre to the uncannily accurate to the wildly optimistic (where are those jet packs they promised us?!). Here's a quick collection of our favorite examples.

Even if your work is humdrum, your documents shouldn't be. The latest version of Microsoft Office makes it easier than ever to create handsome documents, thanks to some cool new tools for dressing up text, displaying images, and embedding video.

The Jabra Cruiser is the latest car-friendly Bluetooth gizmo to promise hands-free use of your cell phone while driving, but the device's talents don't stop there.

Squeezed by desktop competitors (Microsoft's powerhouse Office suite and the free, open-source OpenOffice) and Web alternatives (apps from Google, Zoho, and others), can Corel WordPerfect Office X5 bring something to the productivity software table? The suite does deliver some unique features--most notably in PDF support and--with the addition of Nuance PaperPort to the suite--in document management. But WordPerfect Office X5 remains a tough sell for general business users who are reasonably satisfied with Microsoft's core Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps, or their free Web counterparts.

“A great read is a few seconds away,” proclaims the Sony Reader Daily Edition screen as it tries to connect to the Sony store--or to do anything else involving the unit’s wireless Internet access. Unfortunately, in my tests, I had to wait a lot longer than a few seconds.