It's Friday afternoon again, and if it's as hot where you are as it is here in New York City, you might want to think twice about rushing out that door and into the wall of humidity. Relax, lean back and enjoy some more of that sweet office-supplied air conditioning and take gander at what's going on in our testing labs.

Lead Laptop Analyst Cisco Cheng is testing out a couple of entertainment-centric laptops, the Sony VAIO VGN-AR570 and the HP Pavilion DV9500T. Both come with Vista Home Premium, WXGA+ widescreen displays, and weigh in at about eight pounds. The HP sports an HD-DVD drive for viewing pleasure, and the Sony of course brings its BluRay drive to the party. Both look good, though I'm partial to Sony's shiny black over the generic gray of the HP. But as usual, the Sony laptop is the more expensive of the bunch. Get the VGN-AR570 with the BluRay drive and it'll run about $2700. A similarly outfitted HP Pavilion DV9500T clocks in at about $2100. Both laptops are customizable though, so your credit crunch may vary. Be sure to check PCMag.com over the next week or so to see Cisco's reviews, and find out which of these two laptops comes out on top.

Labs Analyst Brian Neal is glad to be spending a lot less time with printers this week, as the yield test we've been telling you about is winding down. There's still one HP printer that's chugging away though. Whenever it finally stops printing, you can find which printers and cartridges give the most bang for your buck at PCMag.com. Meanwhile, Brian's helping Lead Desktop Analyst Joel Santo Domingo look at a whole host of desktops for an upcoming roundup. Expect to see everything from $500 value PCs, to what Joel calls "$8000 gaming behemoths." Hopefully there's some good stuff in the middle of that range as well.

Lead Mobile Phone Analyst Sascha Segan is enjoying some well-deserved rest and relaxation in the Canadian wilderness this week. But of course, that doesn't mean he doesn't have anything to say.

"One very interesting fact is that while people typically think of GSM as the big international roaming tech, there is only CDMA here," says Sascha. "My brother-in-law brought an iPhone, and its an iPod up here, proving that generalizations often have holes in them!"

Well Sascha, at least your brother-in-law won't have the misfortune of running up a $3,000 phone bill up there then, eh?

Lead Audio and Video Analyst Tim Gideon's getting in a bunch of new MP3 players in which, unfortunately, he can't talk about. But hopefully that means he'll have some good reviews going up soon, because my Sansa e280 is getting a little long in the tooth. He also just finished a review of the odd-looking LTB Q-Bean wireless headphone and microphone link. I know I'll be checking to see what he thinks about that at PCMag.com next week.

Also in the pipeline in the coming weeks is a look at a few fancy new wireless USB hubs. Yours truly has his hands on Belkin F5U302 at the moment. And all I can say so farit that it works, because I just plugged it in. Once we get competing products from IOGEAR and D-Link, we'll put them all to the test to find out which is the best.

Okay, that's it this time around. Feel free to abscond from your office now and out into the summer heat, secure in the knowledge that once you get back to work next week, while the heat will likely still be oppressive, there'll be plenty more details about all this cutting edge tech (and more), for your perusing pleasure, at PCMag.com.

Post by Matt Safford