This week there's an air of secrecy around the PC Magazine labs, as many of the analysts are reviewing gear that they can't quite talk about yet. While that might not make for the most exciting of Lab Reports, it's certainly a good reason to keep checking PCMag.com over the next week or so. As our resident Phone Analyst Sascha Segan mentioned last week, everyone's trying to jump on the iPhone hype. So expect plenty of juicy gear to drop between now and -as Sascha so colorfully put it-- "the iPhone hysterical extravaganza that will occur at the end of next week."

In the meantime, Gearlog readers, we'll have to deal with the gadgets we can talk about. And in the PC Mag labs, there's always something worth checking out.

Labs Analyst Brian Neal is in the process of checking out a couple of Aleratec optical disc duplicators. The 1:3 DVD/CD Auto Publisher LS will burn your discs (200 at a time) at 20x, and even label them with LightScribe. Brian says once you spend about an hour and a half getting the robotic arm calibrated, it's a great "set it and forget it" burner. At $3199 though, you better have a lot of large (and paying) disc duplicating jobs. If your burn-load and budget are a bit smaller, Aleratec makes cheaper standalone burners starting at just over $300. But they don't come with that handy robotic arm, so you'll have to keep popping in blanks yourself.

Lead Desktop Analyst Joel Santo Domingo is already hard at work on a massive desktop computer roundup scheduled to hit PC Magazine at the end of the summer, just in time for back-to-school buying. So if your PC is getting a bit long in the tooth (or slow with your apps), you might want to wait a couple months and see just what Joel and his team turn up.

Audio and Video Analyst Tim Gideon is playing with the Sansa Shaker today, a cute 512MB MP3 player for kids that's shaped like an hour glass drum. It's got some interesting features, like dual headphone jacks and the ability to change tracks by giving the player a shake. And with a built in speaker, Tim says "it'll definitely annoy parents." At $39.99, it might make a good gift for a kid whose parents annoy you.

And if you read Tim's recent review of the second-gen iRiver Clix, keep an eye out for an immanent update for subscribers of "a certain [online music] service."

That's it for this week. But remember to keep checking PCMag over the next several days for revelations about all the secret gear, gadgets and gizmos that are as of this moment still very hush hush. And while next Friday is iPhone day, we promise to have other cool stuff to write about too, to counteract the inevitable Apple fatigue.

Post by Matt Safford