Stream music files from your A2DP-supported phone over Bluetooth, and the receiver will pick it up, and play through the speakers you've connected via the supplied RCA or 3.5mm cables. It'll detect a Bluetooth-enabled phone from 33-feet away, and as it's only $50 it could solve some of your audio problems fairly quickly. No, sadly it won't label your iTunes collection properly. [iPodnn]

Part of ELAC's Art Edition range, these $1,500 left and right loudspeakers measure 1,021mm high × 220mm wide × 320mm deep, and use 30-250 watts per channel. But anyone buying these De Stijl speakers probably doesn't care two hoots for specs, right? [ELAC via Chip Chick]

This is the 60th anniversary edition of McIntosh's first-ever standalone integrated audio system and it's supposed to have all the quality of larger systems in a compact package. Whether it does that well or not, I don't know. I'm not a big enough audiophile to even consider shelling out this much for a system. [Crunch Gear]

Then I looked a third time, and discovered that the animated electro-luminiscent graphic EQ included in its label didn't actually respond to the DJ's antics. It is all automated, a gimmick designed to make it look like the real thing. Lame, Ballantine's. On the other side, I know that—given the quality of music in most clubs and the state of most of their patrons—this won't matter one bit to most of the people immersed in their booze stupor. So. Hookai. Whatever.

I still need that drink, though. But make that a glass of really good whiskey, neat, thank you very much. [Marketing Magazine via Luxist]

Last updated December 8th, 2009 but we'll update this list as the new stuff replaces the old and crusty. We read and write reviews so you don't have to!

Smartphones

• The Best Smartphones: We like the iPhone, the Motorola Droid because it runs Android 2.0 operating system, and the Palm Pre for people who have stuck with Sprint. We do not like anything Symbian or Windows Mobile 6.5, for the time being. (But are excited for Windows Mobile 7.)

• Cheapest Android Phones: Droid Eris and HTC Hero.

• The Best Smartphones, By Carrier: We sorted out theses answers on Nov 24th, but this category moves quickly so stay sharp when researching.

• Best Windows Mobile Phone We Wish Didn't Run Windows Mobile 6.5: The HTC HD2

• Best BlackBerry: If you're into phones with exceedingly reliable push email, the Bold 9700 is your phone. (We don't like Blackberry's touchscreen interfaces, so the Storms are no good.)

• Non-Smartphones: You mean dumbphones? No thank you.

Computers

• Netbook: If you must get one of these small, cheap and utterly slow machines, the HP Mini 311 with ion graphics is a good one. The Samsung N140 along with the Toshiba mini NB205 are also excellent picks.

• Netbook for Hackintoshing: Dell Mini 10v (and it must be the v) is the top choice. Here's our guide to making it run OS X.

• Laptop: Our bias for OS X and Windows 7 becomes apparent in our choice of hardware that can run both without hacking. Macbook Pros. (Plus, we like unibody construction.)

• Best Non-Apple Laptops: Dell's Adamo XPS may not be fast but it is "insane," raising the bar on design and quality outside of Cupertino. We also like Thinkpads in general, like the X series and the new multitouch t400s. (It's probably also worth noting that Asus and Toshiba recently came out on top in reliability.) And here are our faves at every pricepoint.

• Gaming Laptops and Desktops: Our friend Will Smith at Maximum PC likes these two laptops and two desktops. I personally like Xbox.

• All in One: We like the iMac, the HP Touchsmart and although we haven't used it yet, the Sony Vaio L because it can double as a TV even when the PC is off. The PCs here have infrared touchscreens, so they do multitouch, but in a really shoddy way.

• MIDs: We hate MIDs. Always have, always will. Intel said they had the tech to make them; but the world never had the need. It either fits in a backpack and lets you do real work on a real screen and keyboard, or it fits in your pocket. There's no real need for anything inbetween.

• Operating Systems: Windows 7 or Snow Leopard

• Network attached storage: We like the HP Mediasmart series with upnp, iTunes and Time Machine servers among other things. But the Iomega NAS is only a little less fancy and costs half the price.

Audio

• The Best receiver under $1000: We haven't tested one in awhile, but we're going to go out on a limb and say we like Onkyo, Denon, Yamaha and Pioneer gear. While some of our own testing is in progress, we'll go with what our friends at Sound and Vision like: The Onkyo TX-SR706 7.1 receiver with 4HDMI ports and THX certification for $900.

• The Best High-End Portable Media Players: Zune HD and the iPod Touch. We Like the Zune pass system a lot, which allows you to keep 10 songs a month out of your unlimited downloads, even after you stop subscribing. But the iPod Touch's large app library makes it a powerful little computer.

• Best high-capacity media player: iPod classic is pretty much the only one left, since Zune has been discontinued and Archos is a mess.

• Flash Media Drives: We've always loved the screenless shuffle's utility, but there are other drives to be had with more functionality for cheaper. Especially now that the buttonless iPod shuffle is sort of annoying to use. We like the Sandisk Sansa Clip+.

• Surround Soundbar: There's only one series of soundbars that uses cold war submarine tech to bounce soundwaves off your walls for surround, and they're made by Yamaha. I tested the YSP-4000.

• iPod Speaker Dock: JBL OnStage 400p (A winner from last year — I'm almost certain we should be retesting this category)

Video

• Best HDTV under $1000: Panasonic's X1 series plasmas, and four more here.

• Best HDTVs, period: Here.

• 1080p Projectors Under $1000: The Vivitek H1080FD is one we like, although we have not tested many.

• Best Monitors: If your'e a Mac user, the 24-inch Cinema Display has a built in magsafe adapter. The Asus 23-inch VH236H is good deal at about $230, but Samsung and Dell are our solid choices for monitor brands, as well.

• The Best Pocket Projectors: There is no such thing, friend. Wait a generation or 3.

• Blu-ray player: The LG BD390 with WiFi with Netflix and DivX playback is awesome, but we'll never leave out the PS3!

• Media Streamers for People Who Hate iTunes or Love Piracy: The WDTV Live is a good one for people who like it easy, but hackers will probably choose Popcorn Hour, both which did well in our battlemodo. However, the current king is the Asus O!Play, which also wins an award for worst use of an exclamation point in a name.

Cameras

• Best Entry-Level Video-Capable DSLR: Canon T1i

• Best Midrange DSLR: The Nikon D90 has the same sensor as the D300 at a better price.

• Best Prosumer DSLRs: The Canon 7D is great at shooting video and has great low light performance for an 18MP camera.

• Best Flash Camcorder: The Flip Ultra HD.

• Best Quality Point and Shoot: We like the Canon G11 (which is pretty big, but pretty wonderful.)

• A Camcorder We Like: We haven't tested any in awhile, but we tend to like DSLRs that shoot video or cheap flash camcorders. If you must have a camcorder, our friends at CamcorderInfo drafted this list with the best at every price.

• Best Point and Shoot: We like the Canon S90, even though we're sure there are slimmer cameras. This uses the same sensor as the G11 and a faster lens, so it takes great shots for a slim.

• Best Rugged Cameras: The Pentax W80 is the best all around camera because of it's depth and temperature ratings and size. The Lumix has the best picture quality but is a bit of a wimp with low thresholds for dives and temperatures. Canon's the best for water only because of its huge nose. And the outstandingly rugged Olympus has a fatal flaw, which is its terrible video.

• Best Helmet Camera: We love the GoPro Hero HD Wide because it mounts anywhere, is really waterproof and lives in a protected case. Plus, 1080p for $250 bucks.

• Best Slow Motion Pocket Camera: Casio EX FC100

Random Stuff

• The Best iPhone Apps: Here's our monthly list of iPhone Apps, as well as our weekly roundups of the best new releases.

• The best GPS: It's really hard to justify these when smartphones are doing so well with their turn by turn apps. But they still need car docks and some of their UIs are not great, so if you want a dedicated unit, bide your time with the cheapest Garmin Nuvi you can find. Usually about $125 at Amazon.

• The Best iPhone GPS Apps: Motion X GPS is our favorite value GPS app, but ALK's CoPilot is another cheap champ. Navigon is still the classiest, but it costs a lot. (We're hoping for free Google Maps with Navigation to come to iPhone.)

• The Best Android Apps: There aren't as many Android apps out, but here are the ones we think are worth checking out.

• Ebook reader: Now that we've reviewed the Barnes & Noble Nook, we can safely say there are finally two great contenders. But until Nook gets some firmware updates making it smoother and quicker, Amazon's latest Kindle will remain king.

• USB drive: The Patriot Xporter is fast, but if you have cash to spare, the Corsair Voyager GT is slightly faster and has 128GB of space.

• The Best Video Game Console: Xbox 360

• The Best Video Service: Anything, really, combined with Hulu and Netflix (for free old stuff).

• Best mid-tier office chairs: Herrman Miller Setu and Steelcase Cobi.

• Vacuums: We will always be loyal to Sir James Dyson because he tried to sell bagless vacuum tech to big vacuum corporations and they shut him down motivated by the profitability of bag sales. Then he started his own company. His machines are loud, but you can't argue with their industrial design. Here's his latest handheld and ball vacuum.

• Routers: D-Link Dir685. I know it has a digital picture frame built into it, but it also has a HDD and a bittorrent client. And Jason says it's been more reliable than the top line Linksys he tested it against. I also like the Time Capsule, but haven't yet tested the one with 2x the wireless performance.

• The Best Headphones: For in ear buds, we like the Shure SE110/SE115, Ultimate Ears Metro.fi and Etymotics hf5 won our tests. (The Last updated August 2008, so look for updates to winners.) We like the Klipsch Image S4i earbuds for people who want to use the iPhone's voice control or iPod shuffle's Voiceover function. For Bluetooth stereo headsets, we like the Motorola s305.

• Rechargeable Batteries: Duracell destroyed Energizer, and kept up with the legendary Sanyo Enerloops.

• Mice: For gaming, the Microsoft Sidewinder X8. The Logictech MX1100 for regular mousing. And the Magic Mouse is not amazing, but it's pretty good if you have a Mac—the best mouse Apple has ever made.

• Keyboard: We like the Logitech DiNovo.

Suggestions? Requests for review? Leave em in the comments or email us!

A floating speaker that would play theme music when you entered a room, WWE-style. Movie protagonist style.

Imagine, you walk into the office, Every Rose Has Its Thorn deafens a whole room of cubicles. Pumped (and possibly greased), you march through the office in slow motion (or just very slowly, no one can quite tell). And it's all thanks to your little Melody Balloon, a concept that is now 1% less plausible but 10000000% more incredible. I mean, as long as we're making stuff up, it might as well include at least one 80s meme. [Yanko via UberGizmo]

The Q2U supports both XLR and USB cables, letting you plug it into basically any machine you have in your house. Now you can break glass, stomp on light bulbs and do whatever it is those crazy sound recording artists do to get effects to seem more exciting than they actually are in real life. It also has a 3.5mm headphone port so you can listen to what you're recording while you're recording it. [Samson via Engadget]

The YSP series made our Bestmodo list of top gadgets, because its the only soundbar to create surround using sonar-ish tech, bouncing sound off walls using an array of small drivers.

Spanning four feet wide but under four inches deep—the perfect complement to a 50-inch TV—Yamaha's 25lb, 120W system simulates 7.1 surround while supporting five HDMI devices, an iPod and subwoofer, if you'd like. I'm not sure whether it qualifies as Big and Tall, husky or even "big boned" (which I know may be made up, but the phrase got me through at least 10 years of my life so I'm rolling with it). Just know the YSP-5100 will be out in Japan later this month for the equivalent of $2,280. [Yamaha JP via CrunchGear]

I'm not sure whether or not the sound quality of the Opere Sonore speakers justify such a price tag, but it does bring back priceless memories of reading comic books in the early '90s for some reason. [W3sh via BornRich]

The Blackbody is a high-tech audio accessory which greatly enhances your audio playback experience by addressing the interaction of your audio gear's circuitry with ambient electromagnetic phenomena and modifying this interplay. The Blackbody takes advantage of the quantum nature of particle interaction, and is therefore able to permeate metal, plastic, wood, and other barriers to affect the circuitry inside your components. This altered electromagnetic influence results in profoundly improved sound quality.

Basically, it cleans up audio imperfections that may or may not arise from your gear's interaction with ambient electromagnetic phenomena. Supposedly, this creates a super-clean sound that even "non-audiophiles" can appreciate. Oh, and did I mention that it costs $959? Sounds like a scam to me, but then again, I'm not the person to ask about the validity of this technology. If you are, take a look at the product page and let us all know if it's actually real science. [LessLoss via Engadget]

The design is basically one sealed sound chamber filled with enough speakers for an authentic surround sound experience: four, 2.6-inch flat speakers and two, 4.5-inch passive radiator speakers. You'll find a 2x10W Class D amplifier squeezed in that shell as well.

Plugging in or operating off a built-in lithium polymer battery, the i24R3 has no inputs, instead receiving signals over 2.4GHz wireless USB or A2DP Bluetooth—yes, from software like iTunes and devices like iPhones.

And while we have no idea how it actually sounds or how much it actually costs, we have too many regularly-intoxicated friends with too good of access to aerodynamic implements to ever invest in one of our own. [Michael Young via The Design Blog]

It's all bullshit, of course. Like Monster Cable and that $500 Denon Ethernet cable, there's more snake oil flowing through this "premium" socket than anything else.

And as with that Denon Ethernet cable, the comments from "satisfied users" are what really make this product worth "investigating." Buyer beware. [Parts Express via Boing Boing]

Lame jokes aside, TerraCycle actually has a decent little business plan going on. Put simply, they recycle the world's garbage into electronics, bags and other knick knacks, and sell them on the cheap.

These Frito-Lay Cheeto speakers, for example, sell at Radio Shack for $20. They won't melt your face, but I can see them finding a comfortable home on the desk of some college undergrad. [TerraCycle via CNET]

This isn't to say the so-called Polk HitMaster doesn't have a bunch of extra features, which it does. There's 60 watts packed in the unit's 13-lb. frame; a pair of 2.2x5.5-inch horns; and two 1-in. tweeters. Top it all off with a 6.5-in. sub and you have yourself an impressive faux stage monitor. Oh, and there's also iPod support should you want to listen to some real musicians.

Arrives in early 2010 for $100. [Polk Hot Hardware via Engadget]

Whether you're taken with the S5 largely depends on how you feel about Sonos in the first place. If you've been itching for an elegant way to play music and internet radio over your home network, and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you'll probably love the S5. It's not very different from Sonos's other products, really: Instead of plugging in your own stereo, the S5 simply supplies its own. Navigation, playback and music discovery are unchanged from previous Sonos products, so I'm going to focus on the hardware, mostly sound quality.

The receiver/speaker all-in-one is smaller than you'd expect, no bigger than a mid-sized iPod dock, and conservatively styled in white metal with a grey grille. I tested it alongside the winner of our iPod dock Battlemodo, the JBL OnStage 400p, for purely sound-specific purposes, since the actual products have a different feature set. Hardware-wise, the Sonos S5 lacks the JBL's iPod dock (as it doesn't really have a need for one) but does have Wi-Fi, ethernet and audio-in and -out.

It's super easy to set up; the iPhone app discovers any Sonos hardware, which you name and then have access to from the main menu. You choose music, either from a location on the network (like a computer, or in my case an Apple Time Capsule) or from streaming services like Pandora, Napster and Last.FM. Streaming was very quick, with only a split-second lag before the song started, and streaming music (both from a saved location and from the internet) played back so smoothly you can't tell that it's streaming. The Sonos iPhone app is excellent, as always—check out our review for more on that. Suffice to say that it's extremely fast and easy to use, whether you're searching through Last.FM for an artist or just streaming your own tunes from a computer.

Sound quality was actually very slightly disappointing, in that it didn't totally blow me away. It sounds quite good, don't get me wrong, and played far louder (without audible distortion even at its highest setting) than the JBL OnStage 400p, but on the whole I preferred the JBL. Though the Sonos is packing two tweeters, two mids and a subwoofer, bass wasn't nearly as full and rich as on the JBL. EQ can be tweaked via the remote (iPhone/iPod Touch or Sonos controller), but its stock setting was a little jarring on the highs and slightly thin-sounding compared to the JBL. At low volumes, the difference wouldn't be noticeable, but blasting Discovery's "Orange Crush" showed a distinct difference between the two.

I don't want to imply that the S5's sound quality is lousy in any way: It's definitely above-average for an all-in-one system, and I was impressed with the lack of distortion and clarity. But I kind of expected to be wowed, and I wasn't. That doesn't mean it's not an interesting and worthwhile product, but it could be better.

The S5 worked flawlessly with other S5s, able to play different songs simultaneously—but if you want one to stop playing its song and join in with another S5 to play in tandem, it can do that too, and sync perfectly. It's pretty cool and worked well, but I'm not sure why you'd need two all-in-one units to play the same song at the same time in different rooms.

I really like the Sonos S5 as a speaker for a room where you don't want a full stereo—like the kitchen, say, or the back porch. It's great to be free from wires yet still have access to all of your music, and services like Pandora. If you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch, it's actually a solid deal, provided you're sold on Sonos: The ZonePlayer 80 costs $300, but for $100 more you can get a portable (and pretty decent) speaker with the S5.

But the question I was left with: Is it worth the $160 premium over the JBL OnStage 400p? I'm not sure, really. The S5 is a more elegant solution, certainly, but a lot of users just want a quick-and-dirty playback device, and the S5 is too refined for that. If you're already a Sonos devotee, the S5 is an interesting and affordable addition to the lineup, but if you aren't sold on the whole concept, I don't think the S5 will change your mind. [Sonos]

Created by Juan Cabral, the Sony Soundville campaign played music from the likes of Death in Vegas, Bob Dylan, and the Guillemots for a week. Cool stuff, Sony, but where's the Abba, the Chic, and the rest of the disco love? [Likecool]

Their new SP-FT1/FT2 speakers are just 1.2 inches thick, and can be mounted on a wall or set on a table with a built-in stand. The accompanying 20W×4ch amp is nearly just as unobtrusive (.2mm thicker) and supports Dolby Digital/DTS/AAC/Linear PCM formats.

Of course, you'll still need to run wires.

Sadly, these products are exclusively available in Japan for now. The speaker set runs $220 with the amp coming in at $260. [JVC via CrunchGear]

The two cylinders on top contain midrange drivers at each end, which reflect on the aluminum surface. There's a third cylinder on the bottom of the lamp stand, which is the woofer. Intrigued? You can wait a few months and give the Serbian manufacturer $4000 to get yours, bundled as a complete tri-amped system. [Dvice]

The amplifier is made by a Japanese audio equipment manufacturer that usually sells do-it-yourself kits. The EK Amp, however, comes as this from the factory. It has a low 10 x 10 watt output, tone control stage, and the usual input and output jacks. But most importantly, it looks so pretty I would like to take it out for dinner. [Case Real via Dezeen]