Hasta La Gadget!

All signs are pointing to a Sprint blowout at CTIA next week — and we’ll be there, of course! But ahead of that, BGR’s claiming a few additional details on the headline devices we scooped not long ago that Sprint should be showing for the first time at the show — namely, the EVO 3D and EVO View 4G tablet. On the EVO 3D side, this bad boy is shaping up to be a proper EVO 4G successor with a newer 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8660 processor, 4.3-inch glasses-free 3D 960 x 540 display (which, like the rumored Pyramid, suggests HTC is following the qHD trend set by Motorola), a whopping 1GB of RAM, 1080p video out, 1.3 megapixel camera up front, and — of course — dual 5 megapixel cameras around back for stereoscopic capture. The rumor also pegs Gingerbread at launch along with 3D versions of the Blockbuster and YouTube apps to make sure users have plenty of 3D content out of the gate; that tidbit seems particularly believable considering that YouTube introduced high-quality mobile playback on the EVO 4G last year.

As for the EVO View 4G, it’s shaping up to be a CDMA / WiMAX remix of the Flyer — as expected — complete with pen input. They’re also expected to confirm that the Xoom will be coming in a Sprint flavor (with WiMAX in place of Verizon’s LTE, of course) and will be launching “in the coming weeks or months.” Looking like it’s going to be tough for any other carrier to go this deep at the show — but hey, we invite ’em to give it a shot.

HTC EVO 3D, EVO View 4G specs revealed ahead of Sprint’s CTIA announce? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Mar 2011 01:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung, which is currently the market leader in 3D TVs that require viewers to wear glasses, has just proved it can make a big-screen TV that displays 3D images without the need for glasses.

The display uses a technology known as autostereoscopic 3D, which relies on thousands of mirror embedded into the display itself and makes it look like the thin display has depth.

Other companies have forayed into this technology, the most notable of which is Nintendo, which is using autostereoscopic 3D for its 3DS system. Other uses include preview displays on 3D cameras, 3D photo frames, and small TVs in Japan.

Samsung’s 55-inch display, which is not a fully functional TV but could easily be made into one, is the biggest mass-market product yet.

Via Tech On

At CES, LucidLogix’s Virtu software solution promised to get discrete and Sandy Bridge GPUs together in graphical harmony — giving you both Sandy Bridge’s greased-lightning video transcoding and the horsepower of an NVIDIA or ATI rig. The code also lets you watch content from Intel’s forthcoming Insider movie service while running a discrete GPU. Now that Chipzilla’s 2nd-gen Core i5 and i7 CPUs are getting to market en masse, the gang at Hot Hardware put an RC of Virtu through its paces to see what it can do. As expected, the software waxes chumps and smokes fools when encoding HD video, but gaming performance suffered slightly (in FPS and 3DMark 11 tests) with the technology enabled. The other nit to pick was that Virtu renders the control panel of your discrete card unavailable, so any graphics adjustments must be made in-game whenever the software is running. Time will tell if the final release has similar shortcomings. Hit up the source link for the full rundown.

LucidLogix Virtu in action, discrete graphics and Sandy Bridge together at last originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 21:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The controversial step to approve .xxx domain names has today been taken by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, paving the way for a whole slew of new addresses suffixed by the famous triplicate x. Funnily enough, before the decision was made today, opposition to it was proffered by both conservative groups opposed to pornography and adult entertainment companies fearing they’d be more easily compartmentalized and potentially blocked by overzealous governments. Moreover, every popular adult website at present will pretty much be forced to buy its .xxx version, which, for an industry famous for its frugality, will be an understandably tough pill to swallow. We are surprised not to see the people of Amsterdam consulted, however — their city’s emblem features three Xs too, shouldn’t they have a say in this?

A further meeting is scheduled by ICANN for June 20th to discuss opening up all possible domain name suffixes to registration, pending the validation of a set of guidelines for approval. That’s looking quite likely to be passed too, as the AFP sagely notes that there’s a celebratory party scheduled for two days after the event. URLs are about to get a lot more varied, it seems; they’re certainly going to feature a lot more of the (English) alphabet’s 24th letter, whatever the case.

ICANN has .xxx domain names? Yes! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen a flood of Android phones so far in 2011. We got our first whiff of the coming deluge in January when we went to CES and saw around a dozen really impressive models on the show floor, all with big displays, 4G radios, beefy processors, and promises of epic battery life. Some had interesting add-ons, like big physical keyboards for thumb commandos, or the Motorola Atrix’s whacky full-sized laptop dock.

Some of these Android handsets have since arrived, and there are plenty more to come.

Over on the Product Reviews site, we collected the best Android phones we’ve gotten to test here at Wired over the past few months. So, if you’re in the market for an Android phone, start with our recommended picks.

Check out the full list.