Melissa

Are Android tablets poised to fall in price, again? That’s what it sounds like based on comments by Nvidia vice president Rob Csonger. In a call with investors, Csonger discussed the existence of a reference design for a $199 Android tablet running the company’s Tegra 3 processor. What’s noteworthy here is that, in the five months since Nvidia took the stage at its CES 2012 press conference, the company has lowered the target price of its inexpensive tablet platform from $249 to $199.

That 20 percent price decrease reflects the ongoing price pressures in the non-Apple tablet market, where the Amazon Kindle Fire dominates among 7-inch models, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 dropped in price by 38 percent compared with last fall’s model. However, neither of those models are performance barn burners, and neither features a quad-core processor with the potential power of Nvidia’s Tegra 3 platform.

The $400 (as of May 22, 2012) Brother MFC-9125CN stands out among other low-cost color laser multifunction printers for having decent speed and toner costs. Though this MFP is unremarkable otherwise, it's a legitimate option for a small office seeking an inexpensive print/copy/scan/fax machine.

The MFC-9125CN's engine uses an LED array instead of the more traditional laser, and the MFP comes with 64MB of RAM, expandable to 576MB total. While its monthly duty cycle is a midrange 25,000 pages, the more realistic print volume (per Brother) is 300 to1500 pages per month--a low to moderate figure for a small office.

If you get the feeling that the cost of replacing the ink cartridges on your inkjet printer is getting out of hand, your impression may be more accurate than you realize. Between 2009 and today, the rate of inflation has increased by 7 percent. During that same period, the cost per page of some vendors' inks has risen by anywhere from 4 percent to 30 percent. Yes, 30 percent.

We review 50 or more printers per year, and we price the cartridges for every one of them. About 8 months ago, I began noticing that ink cartridge prices for some models were going up--sometimes sharply. When I dug deeper, I also saw that the price increases seemed to be selective: Some inks went up; others stayed the same; and one even dipped slightly. The biggest hikes I observed came from Lexmark and Kodak, but Epson's color ink costs have been rising as well. Meanwhile, HP seems to be nudging ink costs upward in its newer models.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 is now shipping, and PCWorld is running it through our gauntlet of tests to see how it compares with its predecessor. Our full review is forthcoming, but in the meantime, here's a quick look at the Tab 2's performance as compared with the original, nearly year-old Galaxy Tab 10.1.

In short, last year's tablet actually outperformed the new model on some of our tests. Some metrics, such as our Sunspider tests, were effectively identical. Others showed a distinct trend toward sluggish performance by Tab 2 10.1. For example, the Tab 2's cold start-up time was 22 percent longer than the original Tab, 44 seconds to the original's 36 seconds. And its results on our GLBenchmark were mixed -- the Tab 2 slightly outpaced the the original Tab on the Egypt Offscreen and Pro Offscreen tests, but it lagged slightly on Egypt Standard and Egypt Pro Standard.

Huawei's MediaPad 10 tabletHuawei brought its MediaPad 10 tablet to CTIA 2012. The tablet was first introduced at Mobile World Congress in February, as was the Ascend line of smartphones.

Neither has changed much since then, and both remain in limbo in terms of U.S. availability, but we did catch a few new changes in the tablet's software and hardware.

AT&T is making an ambitious jump into home security and automation with AT&T Digital Life, a service that will run on its wireless infrastructure. The company announced the venture here at the CTIA trade show at an offsite event in the New Orleans' Garden District. Trials of the new offering begin this summer in Atlanta and Dallas.

Home automation is a departure from AT&T's core products and services, but the Digital Life service, says Ainsley M. Sadio, assistant vice president for AT&T Digital Life, is a complement to the company's existing service offerings.

If you're looking for a low-priced color laser printer for your small office, look again: For a mere $150 (as of May 1, 2012), you can obtain high-speed, good-quality color printing with HP's Officejet Pro 8100 ePrinter. This classily-styled color inkjet printer has Wi-Fi, USB, and ethernet, and it can handle up to 1250 pages of printing per month. Most important, its inks are cheaper per page than the toner supplies from any comparably priced color laser.

Setting up the Officejet Pro 8100 on a PC is simple: Insert the CD and follow the prompts. If you're using a Mac that runs Lion (OS X 10.7), however, you'll probably have to surf to HP's website for the latest drivers; the ones on our installation CD didn't support Apple's latest and greatest. You can use OS X's own Add Printer function to find the driver, but HP should bring its installation software up-to-date.

CTIA 2012 in New Orleans starts May 8.CTIA 2012 kicks off next week in the Big Easy, and PCWorld will be at the show to bring you all the latest mobile news from New Orleans.

Unlike Mobile World Congress (MWC) or even the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), CTIA is more of a U.S.-focused gathering for the wireless industry. Here's what we know so far.

I lot of headlines this week proclaimed that Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors actually run a lot hotter than the Sandy Bridge processors they're set to replace. The truth is not that simple. We'll break it down for you in the podcast.

We also discuss the merits of Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, which is essentially two GeForce GTX 680 cards for the price of...well...two.

Canon’s Pixma MX892 Wireless Inkjet Office All-In-One color inkjet multifunction printer (for printing, copying, faxing, and scanning) is suitable for a home or very small office. It delivered good output quality in our tests, and supports both automatic duplex printing and scanning, for a reasonable $200 (as of April 27, 2012). It's also handsome, solidly built, and moderately fast. Among its shortcomings are an awkward control panel and an absence of high-yield replacement ink cartridges, which other office-minded models in the same price range make available.

Setting up the PixmaMX892 is easy; and the MFP supports USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi connectivity. You can set up Wi-Fi via WPS, though the 3-inch LCD gives you the option of selecting a network and entering a password to accomplish the same setup. Canon bundles its Solution Menu EX software, a capable package that handles everything from photo albums to scanning. You may push-scan to your computer from the PixmaMX892's control panel or offload scans via USB/PictBridge, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, or Compact Flash media. You may also print directly from media inserted into these ports.

It appears that $400 or less marks the new sweet spot for 10-inch-class tablets. First Apple reduced its iPad 2 to that price, and now we have a pair of Android tablets, the Acer Iconia Tab A200 and the Asus Transformer Pad TF300, coming in at $350 and $380, respectively. If you have four C-bills and want a 10-inch tablet, which of these represents the best deal? The answer may surprise you.

Or maybe not. We’ve already established that, for some, an Apple iPad 2 may be enough tablet and represent the better buy over the newer third-generation iPad. But now we have two new Android models, each from large PC manufacturers, and each competing for the same market that Apple’s targeting with its iPad 2.

Buying the inkjet printer or inkjet MFP (multifunction printer) that is best suited to your budget should be simple. It's not--and the complication is the ink. Replenishing this vital fluid costs much more over time than the printer itself costs initially, yet unwary buyers often overlook that expense. To find the most economical printer over the long haul, you need to pay attention to ink-onomics--how much your printer's inks cost and how much ink you'll use.

The first law of ink-onomics: The cheaper the printer, the more expensive its inks. We've tracked the prices of 56 inkjet MFPs over the past two years, and the average cost per page for inks destined for a cheap printer (which we define as one costing less than $200) has consistently been higher than that for an expensive printer (one costing $200 or more).