Hasta La Gadget!

iFixit tears apart the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch. Image: iFixit

It’s always a pleasure to find out what makes our favorite gadgets tick. And how difficult, and costly, it’ll be to repair them should they have an unfortunate run-in with a concrete driveway or a rambunctious, unintentionally destructive child*.

That’s why we love iFixit: They tear apart every new gadget they encounter.

iFixit’s latest teardown is of the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Sprint’s CDMA/WiMAX sequel to the Samsung Galaxy S. So what sort of goodies are inside?

First and foremost, the Samsung-made glass display and AMOLED panel are fused together. So if you end up cracking your screen, a repair is going to cost you. However, the 1800 mAh Li-ion battery — which should provide 8.7 hours of talk time or over 10 days in standby mode — is easy to replace. All you have to do is pop off the back plate. Once you’ve done that, you’ll also find a microSD card slot which you can use to bump up the device’s internal memory specs if 16 GB isn’t enough for you.

The Epic 4G Touch is .04 inches thicker and .49 ounces heavier than its European counterpart, bringing it to a practically obese .38 inches and 4.52 ounces (blame the french fries). It also doesn’t support NFC like its fancy skinny Euro cousin (C’est la vie, Google Wallet).

The front-facing camera shares a ribbon cable with the LED and ambient light sensor, so if one of those craps out on you, repair will be a bit more expensive.

iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric said the Epic 4G “was not too challenging” to take apart — you can use pretty basic tools to disassemble the smartphone, like a Phillips #00 screwdriver. The iFixit team gave it a 7 out of 10 for repairability.

*Full disclosure: I once destroyed my dad’s watch by slamming it repeatedly on our driveway. You probably shouldn’t give electronics to babies.

Samsung Epic 4G Touch Teardown [iFixit]

Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips include the world’s first mass-produced 22-nanometer transistors. Image: Intel

If you dream of having brilliant, iPhone 4-like displays on your notebooks and tablets, you may see it become a reality sooner than you think.

Intel’s latest chips will provide support for an ultra-high resolution display, according to information seen in a slide presentation about the company’s upcoming “Ivy Bridge” processors during the company’s developer forum last week.

According to the slide, the Ivy Bridge chip will support super-high resolution displays of 4096 x 4096 pixels on a single monitor, as well as processing for 4K QuadHD video.

How pixel-packed is a 4096 x 4096 display? A 1080p screen is 1920 x 1080, so that’s over four times as large. 4K QuadHD — a technology largely ignored while the world has primarily focused on 3-D TVs — packs video into a resolution of 3840 × 2160, slightly below the 4K cinema standard.

First revealed in May, Intel’s Ivy Bridge chip features a unique 3-D transistor which uses a thin silicon ridge in place of the power-conducting strip normally used in 2-D transistors. The change makes the 3-D transistor 30 percent more efficient than planar transistors, with only a 2 to 3 percent price bump. The development is a big step for Intel in its rivalry with chips usingARM architecture, and could allow for portable notebooks to feature a screen similar to Apple’s Retina Display on a larger scale.

Slim, portable devices like the MacBook Air or Asus UX21 Ultrabook often use an integrated graphics chip in order to save on space. Notebooks and high end computers tend to use a separate, more powerful GPU for their processing needs (for example, the 2010 MacBook Pro featured an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GPU).

Intel’s Ivy Bridge technology will be in full production later this year, so we should start seeing it incorporated in products in 2012.

VR-Zone via Macrumors

It appears that Verizon’s showing no signs of slowing its LTE expansion efforts, as 26 markets lit up last week and at least another 21 are ready to debut on October 20th. The most recent switching of the flip, which took place on September 15th, rose the grand total of cities blanketed by LTE to 143, covering more than 160 million people; the upcoming effort to expand will increase it to 164 cities. The carrier’s goal by the end of the year is 175, which means it’ll be just 11 cities away from achieving its 2011 objective with two months to spare. Notable highlights include: Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico; Buffalo and Niagara, New York; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Stockton and Modesto, California. Los Angeles and San Diego will also be getting more coverage. Check the list after the break to see if your city will be the fortunate recipient of some 4G love, as well as the press release to take a look at the entire list of available cities.

Continue reading Verizon continues nationwide LTE expansion tour, edges closer to year-end goal

Verizon continues nationwide LTE expansion tour, edges closer to year-end goal originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photo: Keith Axline/Wired.com

Popular television show streaming service Hulu Plus is now available on a host of new Android devices, according to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday.

The service will now be available on eight more devices than before, including three Motorola phones, three HTC devices and two LG phones. Hulu Plus — the paid version of Hulu’s media streaming service — allows users to view content on their smartphones and tablets.

Customers of streaming media service companies like Hulu and Netflix have faced serious issues with Android device compatibility since the companies’ respective mobile apps were released. Unlike Apple — which manufactures only a handful of devices — the Android platform is hosted on hardware across multiple manufacturers, all of which produce numerous, very different devices. As a result, Hulu and Netflix have struggled to bring their apps to all Android phones and tablets.

There could also be holdups for Android devices that are “rooted,” which essentially means those able to be hacked by the user to gain full control over the phone. Movie studios may be concerned that users with rooted phones will install programs that make it possible to make copies of streaming content from the phone, bypassing the DRM security measures in place.

The company will continue to work on bringing its app functionality to all smart devices, according to Hulu senior product manager Lonn Lee.

Netflix’s surprise split took the top spot this week, so we dug into what this means for the company and its subscribers, especially those who prefer Blu-ray quality over streaming convenience. Closing things out is our quick preview of this week’s fall TV premieres, with a few media streamers, CEDIA notes, satellite outages and Windows 8 discussion squeezed in between. We’re now living in the era of Qwikster — press play and we’ll talk you through it.

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Engadget HD Podcast 266 – 09.20.2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 17:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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