Reviewing a dozen of anything at the same time is generally a nightmare.

Tech journos might get to play with cool toys, but mostly the life of a product reviewer is far less glamorous than it might seem. Testing one product can be tricky enough, but testing a bunch of them can drive you mad - especially when you're dealing with bleeding edge technology.

In ten years of tech reviewing, the last five as a freelancer, I've learned a few things about group product tests (also known as a "Round-Up"). As I settled in this week to run a group test of Android smartphones, I started to post a few words of warning on Twitter, using the hashtag #ShitIveLearnedTheHardWay. Colleagues soon jumped in with their pearls of wisdom. Our musings quickly grew into quite a long list of advice which I thought people might find of interest. I know it would have helped me along my way when I was first starting out.

Round-Up Rule 1: Group tests are more trouble than they're worth, that's why editors outsource them

Round-Up Rule 2: Know when to say no to a group test commission, and which editors are good to work with

Round-Up Rule 3: @David_Neiger Don't test heavy or bulky products (eg. printers, large screen TVs) unless you love your physio

Round-Up Rule 4: Read the brief carefully & plan ahead. Reread brief as you go - aloud if necessary

Round-Up Rule 5: Allow at least week for all gear to arrive, despite promises from vendors/PR/couriers

Round-Up Rule 6: Pay mbe.com.au to deal with couriers, to avoid #PunchCourierInTheFace (the @alexkidman clause)

Round-Up Rule 6a: @alexkidman At least 1 product will be sent to the publication rather than you. The heaviest one (Freelancer sub-clause)

Round-Up Rule 6b: @David_Neiger Products sent to the publication will disappear from the planet only to re-emerge after deadline

Round-Up Rule 6c: Stuff sent to mag will disappear forever, or be stolen in transit (with @coaten)

Round-Up Rule 7: If one in a million are DOA, you'll get that one

Round-Up Rule 8: @alexkidman Expect cables and other important stuff to be missing

Round-Up Rule 9: Expect gear to turn up with only US power plugs

Round-Up Rule 10: Clear a dedicated work space ie. not the kitchen table

Round-Up Rule 11: Allow extra time, clear yr schedule & don't leave complicated stuff til last

Round-Up Rule 12: Photograph the contents of every box before you start

Round-Up Rule 13: Get right tools for job - don't be afraid to spend $$ on gear that makes life easier

Round-Up Rule 14: Cheap powerboards r like dodgy mates - keep plenty around but don't rely on them

Round-Up Rule 15: Take lots of notes, including logins & passwords - and keep notes forever

Round-Up Rule 15a: @alexkidman If someone else set the password, try "Password" and "VendorName" first.

Round-Up Rule 16: NEVER assume you know everything, plus don't take the vendor/PR's word on anything

Round-Up Rule 17: Network-locked gear is a pain in the arse

Round-Up Rule 17a: @neerav Demand SIMs for every phone

Round-Up Rule 18: Battery tests are a pain - be methodical and double-check b4 walking away for 24 hrs

Round-Up Rule 19: Don't get cocky - if it all seems too easy, you've probably missed something important

Round-Up Rule 20: If y'r gettin friend to help, hope they don't have bad reaction to meds & need hospital- slows u down #TrueStory

Round-Up Rule 21: Feature tables are a pain in the arse and take longer than you think

Round-Up Rule 22: @alexkidman High Res product photos will take 4x longer to source than most product tests actually take

Round-Up Rule 22b: Good product photography is harder than it looks, don't do it unless you know your shit

Round-Up Rule 23: When u start seeing compression artifacts & 3D crosstalk whilst driving to shops, y'r in "the zone"

Round-Up Rule 24: You always go through that moment of panic when all seems lost - learn to deal with it

Round-Up Rule 25: @David_Neiger No matter what you do, one or more vendors will end up screaming to the editor

Round-Up Rule 26: @David_Neiger Vendors have no clue where products are - you'll be asked to return gear already sent or never received

Round-Up Rule 27: @David_Neiger The return satchel supplied by a PR will never be big enough to fit the product #itstrue

Round-Up Rule 28: @alexkidman At least 3 new replacement products will come out the day your story goes live. Learn to love it.

Round-Up Rule 29: Don't get sucked into Twitter when you should be working

Forget movies and sport, it's gaming that will drive 3DTV sales.

Right now I've got Panasonic's flagship 3DTV in my lounge room - the 50-inch Viera TH-P50VT20A. This plasma giant is hooked up to a Panasonic Blu-ray player, TiVo and PlayStation 3. A few days of testing have confirmed my initial impressions of 3D - it's only worth donning those sexy glasses in order to play games.

When it comes to the World Cup in 3D on the TiVo, or watching 3D movies on the Blu-ray player, the 3D effects are at best a novelty and at worst a distraction. The hassle of wearing the glasses only adds to the feeling that 3D is more trouble than it's worth. It's not until you fire up a few 3D games on the PlayStation 3 that you start to see the real value of 3D.

My theory is that you need something engaging and interactive to distract you from the glasses. Turn on Spain vs Netherlands and the 3D effects only seem to get in the way and distract you from the action. They don't actually add anything to the experience. The same goes for most movies I've seen in 3D, perhaps with the exception of Avatar. Now switch from the football over to WipEout HD or MotorStorm: Pacific Rift on the PS3 and the 3D effects actually enhance the gaming experience. Soon you forget about the uncomfortable glasses, while any imperfections in the 3D effects don't bother you because the game is a virtual environment anyway - it's not supposed to look "real".

When it comes to movies and sport, I still think 3D is an expensive novelty. If I owned this television, the only time I'd bother breaking out the glasses is to play 3D games.

Why do most PVRs, such as Telstra's T-Box, offer half-arsed Season Pass features?

A Season Pass lets you program your Personal Video Recorder to automatically record your favourite shows each week. The best PVRs check the schedule for changes, rather than blindly recording the same time slot. I'd say the Season Pass is probably the most critical feature of any PVR.

When it comes to off-the-shelf PVRs, TiVo sets the bar pretty high with regard to Season Passes. The reason why is that a TiVo lets you specify how many episodes to keep, so the hard drive doesn't fill up. If it's a show you want to hang on to, you can tell the TiVo to keep every episode until you manually delete them.

Most other PVRs lack an auto-delete option, so your hard drive fills up unless you remember to do a manual cull every week or so. You generally don't realise the hard drive is full until it's too late and you've missed your favourite show or, worse yet, missed your better-half's favourite show.

Telstra's new T-Box PVR goes to the other extreme, with a hard-wired auto-delete feature that you can't edit. The T-Box only holds about 100 hours of SD or 30 hours of HD recordings. When it's full, it just starts deleting old recordings. There's no way to nominate which shows to keep. There's no way to tell it that you want to keep as many episodes of Glee as possible, while deleting Letterman each night to make way for another episode. There's no way to tell it you want to keep the World Cup final for a few weeks, but not keep every stage of the Tour de France.

UPDATE: After testing the T-Box for a few days, I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Telstra's T-Box expert yesterday to ensure I understood its advanced features. What I wrote above (now struck out) is EXACTLY what I was told over the phone. After reading this post, Telstra's PR team rang to say I'm wrong - the auto-delete options are related to rented movies. That's NOT what I was told on the phone. Obviously such a feature is difficult to test in day or two, so I was stupid enough to think that Telstra might fking understand its own product.

Now I'm told the T-Box's PVR function does NOT include an auto-delete feature. It just keeps filling up, like most other half-arsed PVRs. It warns you when you hit 90 percent capacity, which means you've got room for roughly another three hours of HD content. If it hits 100 percent, it just stops recording shows until you manually delete something. So the T-Box is still a piece of crap, it's just crap in the same way as most other so-called PVRs. Save your money and get a TiVo or Foxtel iQ2.

You can manually copy recordings you want to keep across to a USB device. Recordings archived to USB can only be viewed on the T-Box, not other devices.

The T-Box looks impressive at first glance but, if you've got a house full of TV watchers, Telstra's new PVR looks like it could put a serious dint in your WAF.

The iPad makes a handy couch-side companion for the three grueling weeks of le Tour de France.

If you're a sleep-deprived cycling fan with an iPad at hand, it's easy to keep track of the action. SBS Tour de France website renders nicely in Mobile Safari, such as last night when I was watching Stage 5. The Fantasy Tour site also works nicely for Dreamteam fans who fancy themselves as a team manager.

Unfortunately the Flash-based TDF multimedia site isn't as iPad friendly. Obviously the live Flash-based TV simulcast doesn't work, although if you've got a notebook at hand it's a great way to watch the tour in bed. Even the non-Flash-based sections of the site aren't that user-friendly on the iPad.

SBS has released a free iPhone app, although it's copped a lot of flak in the user reviews on the iTunes store. You'll need to cough up $3.99 to activate advanced features such as real-time tracking and real-time alerts. Before you do, check out the free Rabo Bank Cycling for iPad app (plus there's also a free iPhone app).

The Rabo Bank app shows you a live map of the stage, marking the climbs and sprints as well as the distance to the finish line. It also reveals the riders in the peloton and those in the break away, as well as their lead on the pack. The app seems to be around 7 to 10 km behind the live broadcast, or a bit over 10 minutes (once SBS skips through the early parts of the race and catches up to live with around 100km to go). So it's handy during the race but obviously not much use during the final sprint. It's times like this the iPad's lack of Flash is really annoying, as the official Tour website offers an amazing live view of the race which is only about 1 km off the action.

As we push towards the mountains, keep your lead-out man close and your tech even closer.

Will Australia's TV networks go back to the courts to stop others using their new Electronic Program Guide?

After years of fighting against such technologies, Australia's free-to-air broadcasters have finally produced a combined EPG under the Freeview banner. The EPG is built on a multimedia platform called MHEG-5, plus it will also monitor new Content Reference Indicator (CRID) data embedded in the broadcast signal. The CRID data allocates a unique identifier to each show, allowing PVRs to detect when a show is running late and adjust the EPG on the fly, so you don't miss recording the end.

Accessing the Freeview EPG requires an MHEG-5-compatible device but, to my understanding, the CRID data is just sitting in the Event Information Table embedded in the broadcast signal. Technically there's nothing stopping non-Freeview PVRs accessing this data. TiVo's Australian backer, Hybrid TV, told me it intends to extract the CRID data to use with TiVo's own EPG (it won't use the Freeview EPG). Hybrid TV intends to get the blessing of the networks, but it remains to be seen if that blessing is actually required.

Such a legal situation is obviously reminiscent of the case between IceTV and the Nine Network. The judge found that Nine does hold copyright over its EPG, but that IceTV is not infringing that copyright.

Reading through the IceTV judgement, there would seem to be encouraging signs for third-party EPG providers wanting to access the CRID data without the blessing of the networks;

"... generally speaking, no copyright could be claimed in a programme title alone and the time at which a programme will be broadcast is a single item of quotidian information... In terms of the distinction between information and creative material, the time and title information is information about Nine's intended future conduct... In this case, a chronological arrangement of times at which programmes will be broadcast is obvious and prosaic, and plainly lacks the requisite originality."

There's obviously a lot more to it, but the basic conclusion was;

"Any reproduction of the time and title information in the IceGuide was not a reproduction of a substantial part of any of the Weekly Schedules (or the Nine Database)."

This certainly sounds promising for those who want to access the CRID data - it's basically just a URL conforming to what appears to be an open standard. Providing you've already got legit access to an Electronic Program Guide, accessing the CRID data may not actually be a breach of copyright - but you'll need a good lawyer to find out for sure.