The LG LX5500 is free with service.
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)
Everyone loves to hate cell phone contracts, but if given a choice, I’d bet that many people would gladly sign one in exchange for a cheap cell phone.
If that logic applies to you, there are quite …
Filed under: Peripherals
The portable, rollable X-mini II speaker gets a refresh originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Now that the Windows 7 beta is out, the benchmarks are coming fast and furious, and while 7’s been previously found to best XP and Vista during “real-world” tasks, it looks like XP is still the outright speed champ on current hardware. That’s at least the word according to InfoWorld, which pitted all three systems against each other in a suite of tests designed to suss out how each performed on modern multicore systems, and while we won’t pretend to grok all the data, there’s nothing complicated about the final results, which showed that “any illusions about Windows 7 somehow being leaner or more efficient than Vista can now be thrown out the window.” Sure, there was some speedup — 7 was 60 percent faster than Vista during the dual-core workflow tests — but overall, 7’s just slower on dual- and quad-core hardware than XP. However, there’s a silver lining here: InfoWorld says the slowdown is in large part due to the extra code Vista and 7 use to manage multicore processors, and as the number of cores increase, the corresponding performance gains are much bigger than with XP since they can be used more efficiently. Of course, by the time we’re all sitting pretty with 48-core Larrabee machines this all might be just a distant memory, so for right now we’re just going to get back to installing the Windows 7 beta on anything we can find and reveling in the glory of perceived speedups.
Read – Analysis I (against Vista alone)
Read – Analysis II (against Vista and XP)
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
Windows 7 put up against Vista and XP in hardcore multicore benchmarks, XP wins originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sprint Nextel’s Direct Connect service may not be sexy, but the push-to-talk network has a staunchly loyal following. And if Sprint knows what it’s doing, it will leave the basics of Direct Connect alone.
Yet, the carrier did announce Thursday that it was tweaking the Direct Connect plans …
The Paniq controller lets you play, pause, and adjust the volume on your iPod–via the "smart fabric" on your garment.
(Credit: QIO Systems)
Sometimes–like when it’s freezing out or you’re speeding along on your bike–it’s not very convenient to take out your gadget and fumble …
(Credit: Hawking Tech)Most new laptops have built-in wireless, but if you still have an old laptop or desktop that you want to connect wirelessly, Hawking Tech has something for you.
On Thursday, the company introduced its first Hi-Gain compact Wireless-N USB adapter, the HWUN3. This little device comes with …
[Via Be Sportier]
Filed under: Gaming
2eleven introduces souped-up foosball table originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The ANSI checkerboard seems simple enough, so why is contrast ratio so complicated?
(Credit: Ovation Multimedia)
Contrast ratio should be black and white. Taken at face value, it’s the ratio of the light level (luminance) the display produces when fed a white signal to the luminance when it’s fed a black signal. Unfortunately, it’s probably the most misused, inflated, and ultimately misleading specification used to describe HDTVs today.
At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, manufacturers quoted contrast ratio specs of 1,000,000:1 or 2,000,000:1 for upcoming LED-based LCD displays (Vizio and LG, respectively), which are similar to the specs quoted by Samsung and Sony for their current LED models. Those numbers sure do sound impressive, but what do they mean in the real world?
Very little. It’s true that in general, a higher contrast ratio can indicate that the display produces a deeper level of black, with all of the picture-quality benefits that brings–but then again it might not. Despite the million-to-one contrast ratios of the Samsung and Sony LED sets we reviewed, we observed better black-level performance in the Pioneer PRO-111FD. Pioneer doesn’t publish a contrast ratio spec for that television, but has claimed that its black levels are so deep as to be “immeasurable.”
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Forget the iTunes Remote. The newly released Air Mouse 1.5 ($5.99) makes a mean universal remote out of the iPhone and iPod Touch. With it, you’ll be able to control almost any program on your Mac or Windows computer.
I was always a big fan of this app, which works with the help of a Windows and Mac servers to establish a local network between the computer and the iPhone. It then gives you two modes for controlling the keyboard and mouse: a touch pad, and a slightly less effective (read: higher learning curve) and more traditional air mouse that you activate by pressing a button and arcing your arm. Version 1.5 completely blows away every competitor we’ve seen by adding an incredible array of new features without bumping up the price.
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Originally posted at The Download Blog
Core i7 oomph
makes for speedy performance;
but the price is high.
—Nicole Price Fasig
For the full-length, free-verse Velocity Micro Edge Z55 review check out PCMag.com.
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