It's Friday afternoon, time once again for your intrepid Gearlog intern to shuffle off into the PC Mag labs to give you a taste of what our analysts are working on. The iPhone hysteria has at least died down, if not blown over completely. So we finally have other things to talk about, like other music phones and the endless supply of iPod docks. PC Mag Lead Operating System and Security Analyst Neil Rubenking also chimes in this week, with some details about how he tests and what he's working on now.

Lead Mobile Phone Analyst Sascha Segan is waiting on some iPhone apps, but in the meantime is looking at a couple music phones that are a whole lot cheaper. His reviews of the Verizon LG Chocolate 2 and the Sprint Musiq should be up on PCMag.com soon.

"These are the best music phones so far on Verizon and Sprint," says Sascha. "Neither is an iPhone, but if you're on Verizon or Sprint, you can't get the iPhone. And also, they're a hundred bucks, so you can buy six Musiqs for the price of an iPhone."

The Chocolate 2 even has an iPod-like scroll wheel.

Lead Audio and Video Analyst Tim Gideon, aside from doing battery testing on the iPhone (audio playback with Wi-Fi off is about 22 hours), is just starting to look at the iLuv Bluetooth-enabled "high fidelity multimedia system." Basically, it's a shiny black iPod speaker dock which will also let you play CDs and stream music both ways via Bluetooth. It's also big. But Tim hasn't really had time to test it yet. So keep an eye on PCMag.com for his thoughts. Tim also hinted that a lot of new MP3 players are coming in that he can't quite talk about yet, but he says, "It's going to get pretty interesting soon."

Labs Analyst Brian Neal is still hard at work on that yield test story I told you about last week. There's a bunch of printers chunking away in the labs, and Brian makes sure they print as many pages as their respective manufacturers claim they print.

Finally, from his home base in Davis California, PC Magazine's Lead Operating System and Security Analyst Neil Rubenking chimed in to talk about how he tests security software and what his workspace setup is like.

"My desk has four monitors, keyboards, and mice jostling for space," wrote Neil in an e-mail, "and four or five PCs underneath." Aside from a clean work machine for writing, he maintains another specifically to test firewall software.

"The busiest computer has an installation of VMware Workstation 6 and dozens of virtual machines. Between eight and ten of them are devoted to malware testing, each infested with 3-4 nasty samples. To test an antispyware product I restore a VM snapshot that's fully infested, then install the antispyware software and let it do its best to cleanup."

Sounds complicated, even to a geek like me. Neil's going to soon be working with the new versions of STOPzilla and Spyware Terminator, to see how much malicious code they can clean up. You know where to check to see what Neil finds out. And don't forget to read "Ask Neil" every month in PC Mag, to see just how much Neil knows about you PC woes.

That's all for this week. Check back next Friday for more digital dish. And if you haven't read it yet, check PCMag.com for my review of Logitech's excellent new MX Air. Believe it or not, it's so good it may make you seriously consider spending $149.99 on a mouse.

Post by Matt Safford