Pros: good weight, slim design, reasonable speeds in vista. right now, i have open 11 many-tabbed firefox windows + 4 ppts + mcafee and >20 new firefox windows can be loaded instantly. aero works fine with the X3100, if for some reason you use this silly vista feature. battery life could be better, but it's still acceptable on the X3100 after fiddling with the power schemes. i can squeeze out almost 4.5 hours on the standard battery before it's totally dead. the fan is reasonably quiet, and it hasn't yet burned a hole in my pants.

Cons: i formatted and installed a clean 32bit vista ultimate on arrival. sony bloatware requires that you either spend three hours finding and destroying it, or just spend that time on a clean reinstall. the necessary vista drivers are all on the website. unsurprisingly, switching between the two graphics chipsets (stamina vs. speed switch above the keyboard) requires a reboot. running on battery with the geforce on substantially reduces battery life, so if you're planning to game on a plane, bring a power inverter or something.

Overall Review: like many of these lightweight laptops, the weight is understandably imbalanced toward the battery. no biggie. door on the ethernet port is connected by a silly rubber dongle. kinda cheapo. i have mixed feelings about the keyboard. there's an extra millimeter of depth on keypresses, and the overall keyboard size is comfortable not cramped. it feels a bit more like a desktop keyboard than most laptops. accordingly, no wrist pain yet. the downside is that the keyboard is *very* clicky and loud in meetings. even zen-like soft keypresses are audible three states away. the keys also have a small amount of lateral flexibility that's a bit unusual. that said, it's certainly livable.

Pros: Works generally as advertised. Comcast had some trouble with the pairing and had to come back twice. That's just par for the course with Comcast and Cablecards. (Why is sending a tech out to your house even necessary?? Everything important to getting it working is done remotely on their end.)

Cons: Cannot act as a network tuner. That's disappointing.

Overall Review: Like others, I bought it because of the Black Friday rebate. I didn't get the rebate check. The manufacturer's email address for inquiries is dead and just bouncing emails. That seems an awful lot like a big bag of mail fraud.

Pros: Hand tracking is excellent and generally responsive... maybe too responsive.

Cons: Hardware: It's very sensitive to illumination conditions, falling back into a "Robust" mode that has slower responses under relatively normal office illumination conditions. Software: The input method is too finicky and frustrating to be used for more than a few minutes at a time. As such, it has essentially no useful software. If you expect to purchase this to use it for something on day one, forget about it. The company failed to implement a development strategy that would allow the device to be useful to non-developers. There are apps available on the somewhat anemic app store that one can purchase (for extra money) that aim to fill the software gap. But they don't. It is likely that a small cache of games is the ultimate target for this hardware. I can't say I came across any good ones, honestly, since after a few buyers-remorse experiences in purchasing disappointing apps for the device, I decided to stop wasting any more money on the platform. Even for gaming, no developer (that I've seen) has demonstrated any unique advantage to the Leap controller over a Kinect or a regular touchscreen, which many already have.

Overall Review: The whole notion of fine hand/finger-based gesture input hasn't been thought through (by the company or anyone else) to the point that it could be useful for interacting with software productively. Again, this leaves only trivial applications, such as one-off games or artistic interaction with screen-saver-like "experiences," which I imagine are more engaging for those who aren't entirely sober. As a gullible early adopter, I am self-interested in the growth and maturity of the platform. However, there is little evidence that this will ever happen. Unless third-party developers or the company tackle the serious development shortcomings, I would not recommend purchasing a Leap Controller to anyone.

Pros: Fits in an SD card slot. Appears generally to be an "SD card" in most philosophical senses.

Cons: Unreliable. After sitting in my camera for a few weeks after taking some shots, the camera would then only show the card as "write protected" regardless of lock position. I thankfully could read off the card, and after reformatting, it seems to be writeable again. I won't be trusting this card for anything important.

Overall Review: Tested in h2testw: 15.6 MB/s write. 19.3 MB/s read.

Pros: No fan.

Cons: Huge heatsink.

Overall Review: I suppose I should have seen this coming, but it's impossible to install this on my MSI 785GTM-E45 mATX mobo with both PCI slots in use. It just about fits alongside one PCI card, but there's no way to install it next to two. Whoops... My bad, I guess.