Download: Review Roundup: This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar

Saturday, 19 November 2011

Review Roundup: This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar

Review Roundup: This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar:

This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar

This week we've got a great batch of reviews for you as well as hands ons with the new Motorola Xoom 2 tablet and the Motorola Atrix 2 phone.

In full reviews, we take a look at some of the newest ebook readers on the market, including the Sony Reader PRS-T1. We've also review the rather fine new laptop from Samsung, the Series 7 Chronos.

And for camera fans, there's the impressive new Sony NEX-5N. Read on to check out all this week's reviews from TechRadar.

Sony Reader PRS-T1 review

The two stand-out specs on the new Sony Reader are the light weight and the thin design. As a sleek ebook reader, the Reader stands its own against the Kindle 4 just fine.

However, many of the extra features for borrowing books from the library, loading Google Books, and browsing the web are hard to use. They pale in comparison with the quick touch access of any Android tablet. The Amazon Kindle is a better choice - it is just as light, cheaper, and offers a wider selection of books. Also, the Kindle offers more storage space for books - about 2GB compared to the Reader's 1.3GB.

Samsung Series 7 Chronos review

The Samsung Series 7 Chronos may not be quite as thin as some of the emerging ultrabooks, or the glorious Series 9 that hit stores earlier this year, but can it stand out from the crowd with killer performance instead?

The answer is that if you need a portable machine to entertain you on the move, which won't be out of date any time soon, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is well worth considering. The latest Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor crushes anything you throw at it, and will do for some time to come. Just don't expect great beauty.

Samsung series 7 chronos

HTC Radar review

So HTC has pipped Nokia to the post here with not one, but two Windows Phone 7.5 smartphones up for grabs first. And although Android may have been HTC's bread and butter for the last few years, it's clear that it wants to keep its fingers in both pies.

The HTC Radar certainly looks pretty. If it's a straight choice between the HTC Titan and the HTC Radar, we'd recommend the HTC Radar every time, because it's so much better in terms of value for money.

Hands on: Motorola Xoom 2 review

It's not even a year since we saw the first Motorola Xoom, but already we're looking at its next generation - cunningly named the Motorola Xoom 2.

The new Xoom is thinner, lighter and faster than the old iteration, as you might expect. We're talking 253.9mm x 173.6mm x 8.8mm dimensions, 599g weight and a new TI OMAP 1.2GHz dual-core processor. While we're all for tablets getting sleeker and faster, we're not sure that the Motorola Xoom 2 can be a real winner in the tablet market given the amount of competition already around.

Sony NEX-5N review

There's very little to find fault with in the Sony NEX-5N, other than perhaps the niggle that its minimalist design and lack of physical buttons sometimes necessitates a little searching on behalf of the user. Enthusiasts may also find it a pain that the likes of ISO aren't given a dedicated button or placed immediately at their fingertips.

Once familiar with the quirks of its menu system, however, using the Sony NEX-5N became more of a pleasure than we expected.