Hasta La Gadget!

Quim Gil of Nokia’s Maemo team has dropped some knowledge on the folks chatting up the upcoming MeeGo release in the official Maemo forums, and it sounds like there are at least a couple critical points to be aware of for N900 owners and would-be ROM flashers when the first developer preview drops next week. To quote Gil, “nothing beautiful, stable or fully featured” will be a part of that initial release — and to be more blunt about it, “99% of you don’t want to install that release in your N900.” The good news, though, is that Nokia seems to be aware of the importance of a dual-boot solution to MeeGo devs working with N900s in the long term, and Gil reports that a proper setup for that “will come at some point” — it’s just not on their short-term radar. We can totally understand that; we’ve no doubt there’s still tons of reconciliation to manage between the legacy Maemo and Moblin ecosystems, and that’s presumably priority one as they march toward a May release of what’s being billed as a MeeGo 1.0 release.

Speculation had been building that the next cut of Maemo 5 — PR1.2 — might have MeeGo dual boot capability, but it’s not to be. That said, PR1.2’s still got plenty of tweaks that should be of interest to N900 owners, including a totally revamped landscape on-screen keyboard, onboard memory wipe capability (thank goodness), and an option to enable auto-rotation in the device’s settings. The forums are all abuzz over both topics, naturally — and since a proper PR1.2 release for N900 is still just a twinkle in Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo’s eye, you may as well have a peek, right?

[Thanks, Akinwale]

Nokia N900 Maemo / MeeGo dual boot ‘will come at some point,’ but not next firmware originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know, you’re packing furiously for your next shoot tomorrow, but look — you need to sit back for 12 seconds, give this article a once-over, chime in below and take one of the biggest sighs of your life. As unprepared as you feel, everything’s going to be alright. We promise. Now that we’ve got you in a proper state of mind, we’re curious to know how you’d change Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. The outfit’s latest and greatest professional DSLR has come out shining in nearly every review we’ve seen, and while it’s rather massive in stature, it’s loaded with features. For nearly five grand, we suspect that you’ll be pretty critical on it, and that’s exactly how it should be. Is the low-light performance satisfactory? How’s the speed and handling? Has it revolutionized your business? Are you a Canon fanboy (or girl) for life now? Spill all down below, cool?

How would you change Canon’s EOS-1D Mark IV DSLR? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you were watching last night’s episode of The Vampire Diaries (believe us, we were not), you probably saw something a little… strange. Yes, with the opening credits still running, two women (sorry, we have never seen a frame of this show so we don’t know who these broads are) sitting in front of a laptop converse about a runaway teen named Isabelle Peterson or something like that. Unsure of whether or not this suspicious Peterson character was using a fake name or not, the ladies needed… well, they needed a tool that would allow them to search the vast and beautiful world wide web of information. “But where’d she get Peterson? Classmate? Best friend?” the blond sitting at the terminal wonders. “So…” she says, turning to the computer, “… I Binged it.” Wait, what? You Binged it? Hmm… we’ve never heard that one before, though we have to say in this case, it seems like Bing really came through for the ladies, nailing down the information they were looking for with ease. It’s quite an extended piece of advertising, really. But seriously… Binged? Guess it’ll have to do. Video is after the break.

[Thanks, Eva]

Continue reading ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and Microsoft team up, try to add ‘Binged’ to the lexicon

‘The Vampire Diaries’ and Microsoft team up, try to add ‘Binged’ to the lexicon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft is bringing USB mass storage capabilities to the Xbox 360 in an update coming in a week and a half. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20001307-248.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Web Crawler/a/p

Let’s get the hard data out of the way first: 480 CUDA cores, 700 MHz graphics and 1,401MHz processor clock speeds, plus 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 memory running at 1,848MHz (for a 3.7GHz effective data rate). Those are the specs upon which Fermi is built, and those are the numbers that will seek to justify a $499 price tag and a spectacular 250W TDP. We attended a presentation by NVIDIA this afternoon, where the above GTX 480 and its lite version, the GTX 470, were detailed. The latter card will come with a humbler 1.2GB of memory plus 607MHz, 1,215MHz and 1,674MHz clocks, while dinging your wallet for $349 and straining your case’s cooling with 215W of hotness.

NVIDIA’s first DirectX 11 parts are betting big on tessellation becoming the way games are rendered in the future, with the entire architecture being geared toward taking duties off the CPU and freeing up its cycles to deliver performance improvements elsewhere. This is perhaps no better evidenced than by the fact that both GTX models scored fewer 3DMarks than the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 that they’re competing against, but managed to deliver higher frame rates than their respective competitors in in-game benchmarks from NVIDIA. The final bit of major news here relates to SLI scaling, which is frankly remarkable. NVIDIA claims a consistent 90 percent performance improvement (over a single card) when running GTX 480s in tandem, which is as efficient as any multi-GPU setup we’ve yet seen. After the break you’ll find a pair of tech demos and a roundup of the most cogent reviews.

Continue reading NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 ‘tessellation monsters’

NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 ‘tessellation monsters’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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