The Logitech Harmony 900 is the updated Logitech Harmony One, which marries a traditional button remote with a capacitive touchscreen for expanded functionality. What makes this better are the charging dock and the RF to IR control adapters.

The Price: $400

The Verdict: This form factor, plus the included charging dock and the RF to IR blasters make this the best remote package Logitech has right now. We’ve been fans of their standard remotes for a while, but combining the keep-your-eyes-on-your-tv ability of those with the extendability of their full touchscreen units makes for a winner.

If you've played with the Harmony One you should know what this remote feels like. The number keys are on the bottom, the navigation keys are in the middle and the activity keys are near the top. The touchscreen is responsive enough, and can scroll through pages of various commands for different media console items—just like their previous remotes.

The charging dock is contoured exactly like the back of the remote, taking it in lovingly into its electric arms. Imagine getting into bathtub shaped exactly like your body—this is that, except without the water or the urge to pee.

Syncing with your computer works the same way as before, but Logitech STILL hasn’t managed to enable consolidating profiles so that you can have more than one remote on an account, and hasn’t come up with a way to export remote profiles to other accounts. That’s a huge pain in the ass if you have multiple Logitechs, and is probably our biggest gripe with their setup.

There is one included central RF to IR blaster, with two other IR blasters that can hook up to it for a total of three IR blasters. They're meant to be used in cabinets where the door is closed, or somehow out of IR line of sight, so you can literally point your remote at nothing (it's using RF) and it'll still propagate the command through to the IR blaster. This is pretty easy to set up—there's a wizard right on the remote—and you should be up and running in a few minutes. And there's very little RF delay, so you won't have to worry about that.

The upside is that this is probably our favorite universal remote package that Logitech has made, figuring in the charging dock and the RF to IR blasters. The downside is that the whole setup costs $400. If you’re shopping for your first universal remote, this will probably be your last. if you already own a cheaper Logitech in the sub $100 range, find a way to sell it and pick this up. [Logitech]

Best universal remote by Logitech yet

Allows extendability with touchscreen without sacrificing the usability of buttons

Price is a little high, but less than full touchscreen remotes

The Gadget: Ideative’s Socket Sense surge protector that expands in order to fit more bulky AC adapters all on one strip.

The Price: $29.99

The Verdict: One of the best expandable surge protectors we’ve used yet. It’s incredibly useful on road trips (CES) as well as at home, and beats even the Power Squid in our eyes in a general comparison.

The special thing about Socket Sense is that it can be expanded from 13 to 18 inches and has 6 angled outlets, allowing you to fit more adapters on one strip. Because of this, the Socket Sense is significantly bigger than a lot of other power protectors—fully extended, it is the length of a 5'4'' female's arm—and weighs a lot more too.

However, compared to squid outlets, the design and size of the Socket Sense gives it a heavy, flat bottom, which makes it easier to use without having to deal with bundled up cords and cables all over the place. Moreover, surge protector allows you to individually extend each outlet when needed, allowing you to adjust how much space it takes up to some extent. Also, there is enough tension on extender so that the strip doesn’t flimsily slide open or close, but it doesn’t give off so much resistance that a relatively weak girl can’t extend it easily.

Overall, Socket Sense is a reliable piece of hardware for those who need a power strip that offers more space between each adapter. It has 2160 joules of surge protection, compared to the 540 joules of the $30 power squid (the $50 squid offers 1080 joules and the $70 squid offers 3240 joules). For $30, it’s hard to find a better overall surge protector with this amount of space per socket, although the EZSpace UFO is pretty good as well. [Ideative]

Large enough to allow you to plug in six of just about anything in the strip

Slightly larger than a normal power strip

Slightly pricier than a normal strip at $30

When we first heard about EFiX—a simple USB dongle that'll let you magically install Leopard on your PC—it sounded too fantastic to be true. Well, I used it to turn my gaming PC into a Mac Pro over the weekend, and I’m somewhat amazed to say this, but it works perfectly.

I grabbed all the updates straight from Apple—including 10.5.5 last night, so you don't have to wait for a hacked patch like you would running a typical Hackintosh—installed a whole bunch of software and have been using it for several days. It runs beautifully, just like a real Mac Pro.

The Process
There are, of course, rules you have to adhere to, as there tends to be when using black magic. The major one with EFiX, and its only real “catch,” is that you have to use the supported hardware, not a very long list indeed. But outside of the Gigabyte motherboard requirement (reportedly some Asus boards using a P45 chipset also work), it’s actually fairly generic. I just happened to have everything on the list.

If you've got the hardware, the whole process is simple, so that even if you've never cracked your desktop before, you could still get this done with a quick search online for the requisite know-how. I plugged the EFiX dongle into a USB header on my motherboard—not, as you might have assumed, to a USB port on the outside. That's really it for getting your hands dirty, though. I restarted my computer, selected EFiX as the boot device—it was listed under hard drives, actually—and was greeted with a drive selector. After selecting the Leopard disc, it started installing without a hitch.

Okay, there was a slight hitch. My video card, an Nvidia 8800GT, isn’t supported by the firmware EFiX ships with. EFiX already has the update on the site, but its updater is only coded for 32-bit Windows. If, like me, you run Vista 64-bit, you will have to install Vista 32-bit on the drive you intend to put Leopard on, just to update the stupid firmware.

After I did that, everything was peachy. The only slight inconsistency is that my 8800GT shows up as a 256MB card, when it’s actually a 512MB card, and my 1066MHz RAM is only running at 800MHz apparently. But that’s sorta trivial.

The Numbers
Here are some benchmarks compared to some numbers Adam over at Lifehacker ran for his Hacktinosh vs. a MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. Obviously, my hardware is newer—a 3GHz E8400 Wolfdale Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM (running at the slower 800MHz, rather than 1066MHz) and an Nvidia 8800 GT (with the OS only recognizing half of the memory). The total guts of my computer cost just under $800 when I put it together in May, hard drive included. (Mac Pros start at $2,300.)

Day to Day
One thing to keep in mind is that EFiX has to interlope every time you want to boot to Leopard, so a cold boot takes at least two minutes, between booting to EFiX, picking Leopard, then loading it up. And when you go into Windows, EFiX will show up as an attached USB drive. These aren’t dealbreakers—once you’re up, performance is great. Overall, the experience is really incredible for how smooth and seamless it is. Updates, installing software, everything is just like a real Mac. The best way to put it is this: I’ve got a Mac Pro now.

I occasionally feel like Windows is running just a smidge more slowly, but benchmarks compared to before I installed EFiX don’t support that creeping feeling, so I chalk it up to paranoia.

Is the dongle worth $170? That's a personal question. Do you wanna go through the usually more complicated—but free—Hackintosh process? Perhaps the best way to look at it is this: If you've already got the supported hardware, it's like buying a Mac for $170, since you can still have your trusty PC just a restart away on the same machine. Also, even as simplified as it is, you still need to know what you're doing. There's no official tech support, though there is a very active forum that provides helpful answers to queries.

Updated: EFiX USA is handing all of the distribution in the US for E-FiX.com, who actually doesn’t do any of that. They were selling units on eBay but their main site looks like it’s up now. So far in our dealings with the company (who sent us EFiX to review) we haven’t had any reason to think they’re scamming anyone, but it’s understandable if you wanna approach this with caution. [EFiX, EFiX USA]

The Gadget: Brando’s Power Station, a portable battery pack for your iPhone that slides easily into your dock connection for charging away from a socket or a USB connection. The Power Station, in turn, is charged from ITS dock connection, so you can use the same charger for both devices. Comes in white and black.

The Price: $25

The Verdict: Works as advertised. In our tests, it charged our iPhone 3G from 10% to 60% in about an hour, after which charging stopped altogether because the pack was out of juice. We then used another pack to take our iPhone from 60% to 100% in about another hour. Great for emergency days when you’re low on power from a frantic 3G browsing session earlier that morning.

The only complaint we’d have is that unlike other chargers that wrap around the iPhone to secure itself in place, the Power Station only connects via the dock. This results in a flimsy connection that might snap off if you’re not careful. So be careful and don’t stick the phone in your pocket when this is docked.

At a price of $25, it’s the cheapest iPhone battery pack that we’ve seen. Despite its drawbacks (only charges about half the phone’s battery and is sort of flimsy when connected), we’d still recommend it as a backup battery for emergencies. [Brando]

Side note: The original unit Brando sent us was defective and would alternate between charging state and plugged-in state, eventually going to DRAINING state. If you get one of these, call them up and get a replacement as it’s obviously not supposed to drain your phone.

The Gadget: The ViDock Gfx, a box with an ATI 2600XT inside that allows you to add two DVI displays to your ExpressCard Laptop (e.g. MacBook Pro). It doesn’t affect your current display setup, which might already have an external monitor being driven by the on-board DVI port, which means you can have a total of three external displays plus your MacBook Pro’s going at the same time. Mac and Windows versions are available in both 128MB and 256MB flavors, running at up to 2560×1600 resolution.

The Price: Still TBD

The Verdict: Multitasking bliss. We were able to add two 19-inch, 1280×1024 monitors to our 15-inch MacBook Pro without breaking a sweat. The two extra monitors (we were already running a 30-inch Dell off the internal DVI port) had very little slowdown while being powered through our ExpressCard port, and handled HD video like the Watchmen trailer without any signs of tears or imminent exploding.

What we did notice was that the unit was LOUD. In our pre-production unit, the fan ran started quietly on boot, but ramped up to 100% after a minute or two. It was loud enough to give us AND our unborn children a migraine. The people at Villagetronic said their release units would be softer, but note that the ATI 2600XT throws out a lot of heat. To us this means that you probably shouldn’t expect this to be too much softer. Just something to watch out for if you need to use this in a quiet production environment. The other annoyance we’ve found is that the ExpressCard connection can’t be hot-plugged on OS X, so you have to shut down your machine every time you want to swap in or out of the multi-monitor setup or else you’ll get that curtain of death. Villagetronic tells us that it’s a bug that Apple will fix in the future.

Is this great for multitasking? Oh sweet jeebus yes. You can have all your applications open at the same time, spread eagled across your four displays like Stalin planning to push the Nazis back into Germany (apologies for that undoubtedly historically inaccurate statement). Is it worth the as-of-yet-undetermined cost? Hard to say. Something like this won’t be cheap, but if you’re like us and value every pixel of your screen as if it’s the last chopper out of Saigon (sorry again!), you’ll look long and hard at the ViDock Gfx. [Villagetronic]

The gadget: The Eye-Fi. It’s an SD memory card that adds Wi-Fi to any camera. Plus the free Eye-Fi service supports automatic uploads to 20 different web photo sites (like Flickr) as well as a computer on your home network.

The verdict: It works flawlessly.

The performance: Like we said, the Eye-Fi works flawlessly. Setup takes roughly five minutes (you program the card through your computer and bundled card reader.) From there, you simply snap pics in the range of your router, and chances are, by the time you go back to your computer, the pictures will be viewable. If your router dies, you turn off your camera, or even if you take out the card and put it back in, the photos will upload when you get things sorted out again. It’s actually a normal 2GB memory card underneath all of the other functionality and can work as such.

The catch: We figured iIt must drain more battery —but apparently in-camera SD power standards dictate that this extra consumed power needs to be minimal, to the level of not noticeable to the end user. Unfortunately, the product doesn't support hotspots.

The price: $100

The verdict Part II: Sure, the Eye-Fi is basically a cradle replacement. But snapping photos and automatically uploading them in real time to share is truly fantastic, especially when the images can be better than one’s camera phone. And the entire product experience is built with Apple-like simplicity. If you can get over the price and are sick of cords, we strongly recommend the purchase. Available now. [eye-fi]

The Gadget: Although the Elgato Turbo.264 hardware encoder has been around for a while, products have been released that make h.264 one of the most, if not the most important video codecs out there. Not only is it supported by the iPod classic, there’s the iPod nano, iPod touch, Xbox 360, PS3, Apple TV, many, many phones (including the iPhone), and even the Zune. It’s the perfect time to get into h.264.

The Price: $99

The Verdict: Testing on a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM, exporting a movie to iPhone using the Turbo.264 on default settings with Quicktime Pro used less than 50% CPU and took about 11 minutes, whereas exporting the same movie with the same settings without the device used 100% CPU and took 15 minutes.

To make sure it wasn’t just Quicktime’s export functionality determining the encode speed, we tested exporting for iPod using Elgato’s default encoding app versus iSquint, which does something very similar. iSquint used a little over 50% CPU and took 8 minutes to encode a 22-minute episode of Venture Bros. into an iPod format, and Elgato’s encoder (using the Turbo.264) also used a little over 50% CPU and took 5 minutes.

Elgato claims performance gains will be much more dramatic on machines with lesser processing power, so keep that in mind as you decide whether this is right for you. Even on a pretty new machine, we saw speedups of around 50%, which is pretty substantial. For us, it’s definitely a good buy if you encode video for your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV frequently and want to save time (and CPU cycles) in the process. [Elgato]

Sling Media rolled out Slingbox Solo, a set-top box that lets you watch a home-bound HD source from anywhere in the world on a PC, Mac, Palm OS or Symbian mobile device. It’s called “Solo” because it controls just one set-top box, instead of the four of its more-expensive Slingbox Pro brandmate.

The idea of a cheaper, single-source HD-compatible Slingbox is a great one. Before we got this Slingbox Solo, we’d been using a Slingbox Pro for a year, and its variety of inputs has proven to be way more than we’ve ever needed. (Really, why would we want to watch a DVD via the Slingbox? TiVo is all we want to watch remotely.) But this Slingbox Solo ($179.99), positioned in the Sling product line between the Slingbox Pro ($229.99) and the Slingbox AV ($129.99), hit that Goldilocks sweet spot: It’s just right.

The Slingbox Solo carries on that Aztec temple-like design of the Pro, but it’s about two thirds the width. If you care about such things, its shiny piano-black surface is definitely a fingerprint magnet, but after wiping it off with a microfiber cloth, it still looks sparkly, low-slung and sophisticated as it takes its place on our component rack.

Looking out back at the business end of the Solo, you’ll see that even though it only handles one input at a time, there’s no shortage of places to plug in. Whether you choose component, composite or SVideo, any source can be passed through so you can also plug it into your TV after that Sling magic has been performed on your video.

We plugged in our TiVo Series3 HD PVR, and the Sling Solo’s setup, functions and quality appeared to be identical to the Slingbox Pro. Just like the Slingbox Pro, even though HD sources go into the Solo at 720p, as long as you’re watching the signal over a high-speed home network they come out at 640×480 and then are stretched out to 16:9. That’s definitely better than standard definition but certainly not HD.

Using the system over the internet, its quality ratchets down to 320×240 but is stretched out to widescreen. Away from the home network, its video looks a bit blocky and suffers dropouts here and there, but picture quality is mostly dependent on the speed of the internet connection. In both instances, the Solo’s video looks just the same to us as the Pro model.

Solo is a worthy addition to the Slingbox line, and unlike the Slingbox Pro, requires no optional adapter to get it working with HD sources. Sure, we would've liked an HDMI port on the back of this baby (also lacking on the Pro), but component video will just have to do. And forget sending HDTV all over the world with the Slingbox—until bandwidth in the United States reaches that of Japan or Scandinavia, the Solo's kind of sub-HD resolution for watching TV all over your house or on the road will be just good enough for now.

Incidentally, Sling is also announcing that Solo also works in Canada ($199.99 looneys), and the UK (£129.99), calling it the company’s “first worldwide model.” The company’s also launching the Slingbox Pro in the UK for £199.99, and that’s packing a DVB-T tuner and includes an HD connect cable.

The Gadget: A Bluetooth noise canceling headset from nXZEN, a company whose strange fascination with the letters N and X belie the quality, size and performance of their headsets.

The Verdict: The nX6000 is a small, comfortable, and best of all, great sounding headset that blocks outgoing noise well but also gives you a really loud and clear incoming sound, which works great in noisy places.

The Catch:

It actually fared better than the Aliph Jawbone, our previous choice for best-sounding headset for the price right now (left side on the photo below). Not only did the nX give a better and louder incoming sound for you to hear, the outgoing sound was pretty much on par between the two. And the nX6000 is smaller!

The Price: $129

The Performance: As we said before, the noise cancellation is as good as the Jawbone’s, allowing the person you’re calling to only hear faint music when it’s being played, loudly, in the background. It’s also comfortable and secure, with both an ear loop and an in-ear bud to fasten it in place on your head.

The Recommendation: If we had to choose between the nXZEN nX6000 and the Jawbone, we’d choose the nX6000. One of the main complaints we have with the Jawbone is its slightly soft incoming sound, which the nX addresses strongly. Very strongly.

The gadget: Speedfreek, an add-on from Kontrolfreek for the Xbox 360’s left analog stick to make racing games easier to play by making the cars more precise to control.

The verdict: Pretty comfortable for racing games, because it allows you to use just the sides of your thumb to gently nudge the car left or right.

The catch:

It’s not great for anything but racing games, because the plastic attachment on the bottom makes pressing down hard on the stick slightly more uncomfortable. Kontrolfreek is working on an adapter for other genres.

The performance: Good. I don’t know if it made me any better at PGR, but it did make turns more comfortable since the grooved sides fit my thumb quite nicely.

The price: Pack of 2 for $9.95, or pack of 4 for $17.50.

The recommendation: If you’re a racing fan who doesn’t want to pony up for a racing wheel, this is a very cheap alternative.

[kontrolfreek]