10 Of The Best Deals In Technology

High performance at mainstream pricing: We tested the Core i5-750 in the CRN Test Center. It performed adequately, attaining a Geekbench 2 score of 5734, which is respectable when you take into account its selling price of $200. Intel has jumped into the "Best Deals" list with this CPU offering, with price performance that could spur new interest in the desktop space.

When Apple dropped the price on the iPod Touch earlier this month, to as little as $199 for the 8-GB version, it was also sending a statement: It could beat netbooks on either price or size, without having to dumb-down a MacBook. As a media player and Internet access device, the iPod Touch is likely to gain traction in the market at the new price point.

This server can be found with a street price in the $2,300 ballpark, and it's more than worth it. We've looked at the offering built with dual-Xeon 5570s at 2.93GHz, with 20 GB of memory at 1.333GHz. This server was powerful enough to enable us to load Windows Server 2008 and launch as many as 20 Windows Server 2008 virtual machines in about an hour. (Intel's own claims for performance in this scenario aren't as lofty, but we were happy with what we found.) For the money, being able to put the equivalent of a 2006 data center into a form factor little bigger than a pizza box is fantastic.

With a list price now of $499, the ThinkPad SL series is Exhibit A in any argument against netbooks. Competitive on price with netbooks, we've reviewed and recommended the ThinkPad SL 400 because of its features, fit, finish and engineering. It weighs less than 3 pounds, which is also competitive with netbooks, and is built with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 2.53GHz -- which is significantly better-performing than any netbook.

With an AT&T service contract, this thing will run about $99. After seeing one in use for more than six months, the Curve 8310 reminds us of former New York Yankee Tommy Henrich: "Old Reliable." Ease of use is formidable, and, like most BlackBerry devices, it fits in nicely with enterprises that have standardized on the platform for corporate use.

List-priced at $399, this is one of those must-have devices for both business travel and personal use. Highly accurate, user-friendly and reliable, it's also designed with a more-than-nice side benefit: It's safe and nondistracting to the driver when mounted on the windshield. You'll make the investment back in good time in both saved fuel consumption and saved time.

AT&T and Verizon are two of the bigger service providers to offer some form of unlimited texting -- a pricing option that's still relatively new to the market. While adoption for personal and "family" use has been steady, there is still decent room for adoption for business use. Cost-efficient, discreet and easier to use with newer generations of touch-screen smart phones, it's almost a no-brainer for many business scenarios.

The i1220 Plus is a 600-dpi duplex scanner that can reach speeds of up to 45 pages per minute (ppm) when scanning to grayscale and 30 ppm in color. It starts quickly, scans efficiently, is easy to manage and supports the top document and imaging formats: TIFF, JPEG, RTF, BMP, PDF and searchable PDF. It's listed at $1,199 but can be found for what we think is a steal in the mid-$800 range. Regardless, it's a top tech deal for offices in an enterprise.

The Netgear ProSafe GS748TPS is a feature-rich switch, offers enterprise-level scalability and comes in at a street price of about $1,300 -- compared to $2,000 for some competing offerings.

This device is only about $25, can be easily found and is probably the best deal of the lot. Why? Because this device, manufactured by P3 International, could help solution providers and their customers find thousands of dollars in energy savings by pinpointing juice hogs that can easily be replaced with energy-efficient technology.