If you haven’t already heard, Google is hosting an event later today that is said to see the official unveiling of Google’s next-generation Nexus 7. However, Best Buy seems to have jumped the gun a bit and have put the tablet up for pre-order on their website, with both the 16GB and 32GB models available.
UPDATE: Looks like Best Buy caught the oopsie and have changed the status to “coming soon”
We already saw a circular ad leak just recently at Best Buy that showed the new Nexus 7 tablet advertised and ready to sell, with a suspected release date of July 30. The ad only showed us a small amount of specs to look forward to, including Android 4.3, but the pre-order page shows that Google is sticking with the Jelly Bean name for this latest update.
The Best Buy listing shows the new Nexus 7 running a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 8064 processor clocked at 1.5GHz with 2GB of RAM and Adreno 320 graphics. The tablet also sports 802.11a/b/g/n wireless and Bluetooth 4.0. The screen is staying at 7 inches, but will have a smooth 1920×1200 resolution.
There will also be a 5MP rear camera paired up with a 1.2MP front-facing snapper. You’ll also be treated with SlimPort, which will let you output 1080p video directly from the tablet. The Best Buy listing pretty much gives away everything on the new Nexus 7 just a few hours before the official unveiling is planned to take place.
Perhaps the only thing we didn’t really know before was whether or not Android 4.3 would be Jelly Bean or Key Lime Pie. Rumors in the past have all hinted to the update sticking with the Jelly Bean moniker, but it looks like it’s confirmed now, thanks to this Best Buy listing. Prices for the new tablet start at $229, with the 32GB version priced at $269.
We’re less than a week away from Motorola’s official announcement of the Moto X smartphone, scheduled for August 1st. Invites have already been sent out, all we now have to do is sit and wait. There have already been a […]
The Ubuntu Edge is the amazing future space phone of your dreams, which is why UK-based Canonical feels it needs $32 million to make the thing. The Ubuntu creator made some good progress in the initial hours of its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, and is now sitting at just over $4 million pledged, but to stoke the fire it took back its initial promise to up the entry-level pre-order price of the Edge from $600 to $830.
The plan at first was to up the price of the Ubuntu-powered superphone, which is somewhere between a grand tech experiment and a reference device, and it aims to be powerful enough to achieve true computing convergence and replace both smartphone and desktop. But the speed of pledges dipping seems to have encouraged Canonical to change its strategy, so it opened up a number of devices at the $625 dollar level, and also added $675 and $725 tiers. Each has 1250 devices total, with the $625 units selling out at a pretty fast rate already.
Once those are all gone, of course, it reverts back to the $830 level (unless Canonical once again decides to open up more less expensive options). The worry here is that after the initial bump, the Edge will hit a wall and won’t manage the rate of pledges it needs to reach its incredibly ambitious goal in the 29 days remaining in its funding campaign.
Canonical’s goal isn’t completely beyond reach – campaigns on crowdfunding sites including Kickstarter have raised ludicrous amounts of money in less time, like the Pebble, but that only raised $10 million in just over a month, and it was actually seeking about a tenth of that. The Edge sounds like it’ll be the best thing you can get in a mobile device when it finally does become a real, actual thing, but that’s not slated to happen until at least May 2014 per Canonical’s shipping schedule.
Crazy high concept device with huge price tag and relatively unknown mobile OS isn’t exactly a recipe for pre-order success, but the Edge is a mobile geek’s dream. The question is, will enough of those dreamers believe hard enough to raise $32 million in just under a month? Canonical’s clearly willing to give some ground to make that happen, but just how much it will take isn’t quite clear yet.
Google is all set to announce the new Nexus 7 2 tablet later today, they already have an event scheduled. However there’s not much that is left to know about this device, considering the fact that there have already been […]
This week NVIDIA is once again blurring the lines between desktop and mobile graphics with a note on the introduction of Kepler technology into their next-generation mobile processor. NVIDIA suggests that, “from a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago.” This is the first set of details we’re getting on Project Logan, the next processor architecture in the Tegra chipset family.
You’ll remember the comic book character collection of code-names for the processors that’ve become the Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 – and what we must assume will be the Tegra 5 as well. Here with what’s still called Project Logan, NVIDIA makes clear their intent to bring graphics processing abilities until now reserved for desktop machines to the mobile realm; for tablets, smartphones, and everything in between.
In addition to deploying Kepler’s efficient processing powers to the Logan mobile SoC, NVIDIA intents on bringing the excellence in a form that the company will be able to license to others. This licensing was outlined earlier this year amid the latest Kepler integrations into GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.
NVIDIA suggests that the technology deployed with mobile Kepler is able to use one-third the power of “GPUs in leading tablets, such as the retinal iPad”, while it performs identical renderings. They also note that this efficiency is achieved with mobile Kepler without compromising graphics capabilities, working with OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, and everything else in the OpenGL universe.
Though we’re expecting this architecture to hit Google’s Android – as NVIDIA has been hitting for the past several years – they do mention that the technology also supports DirectX, the latest graphics API from Microsoft. Think Windows RT and Windows 8 – NVIDIA’s been there before.
Working with these current and next-generation APIs allow NVIDIA to bring on graphics unlike any seen in the mobile universe, developers taking hold of these environments with a variety of high-end rendering and simulation techniques. NVIDIA runs down three of the most powerful:
Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.
Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in the scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.
Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.
NVIDIA makes clear that a lovely collection of processing-heavy tasks will be able to be carried out with this next-generation solution including computer vision, augmented reality, computational imaging, and speech recognition. Showed off this week at Siggraph was a return of the digital head now known as “Ira”, aka Faceworks.
Stick around as we continue to jump deeper into the next big superhero-themed processor, one that’ll break barriers beyond what we’re only just seeing now with the NVIDIA Tegra 4 – living inside NVIDIA SHIELD and getting pumped up for benchmarks sooner than later!
When it rains, it pours. As anyone who takes Big Apple public transit can tell you, the days of the brief underground reprieve from wireless are mostly behind us — in many parts of Manhattan, at least. But if you doubted that the rest of the 100-year-old transit system would be getting some love, let Sprint lay those concerns to rest. The carrier announced this morning plans to bring service to the whole map — that’s 277 underground stations in all, bringing coverage to Sprint, Boost and Virgin Mobile subscribers. Folks on those networks will be getting service in 36 Manhattan stations early next year, followed by 40 more in that borough and Queens.
Project Logan is NVIDIA’s next-gen mobile processor. Inside of it is the Kepler GPU, which NVIDIA claims the fastest, most advanced scalable GPU in the world. Last year, Kepler hit desktops and laptops, and next year your phone and tablet are about to get supercharged.
At the SIGGRAPH conference going on this week, Nvidia has made a potentially huge announcement regarding the future of mobile gaming: the company is bringing its Kepler graphics architecture to mobile devices via its Project Logan next-gen mobile processor. Nvidia compares this development to the rollout of the first GPU, the GeForce 256, 14 years ago. Logan as a platform, with its Kepler GPU, jumps mobile computing ahead by the equivalent of seven years’ worth of advancement, says Nvidia.
Mobile devices haven’t had GPUs available with true, full desktop feature set support before now, Nvidia says. That includes things like better rendering and simulation techniques, like tessellation, advanced physics and anti-aliasing and the ability to calculate lighting effect rendering in a single pass. All of which is pretty technical, but ultimately means that a lot of the tricks and capabilities available to console gaming will now be brought to mobile devices.
Kepler is already in use in desktop GPUs, and in Nvidia’s desktop designs it can take on general purpose computing as well to help with the processing workload even when you’re not playing Call of Duty. Kepler on mobile can also offer this, which means that mobile apps featuring things like computational imaging, computer vision, AR or speech recognition would be able to benefit from the Kepler GPU and take advantage not only of its processing power, but also its power efficiency.
To demonstrate Kepler’s power, Nvidia released a video which showed a realistic human head model being generated in real-time. The demo itself isn’t new – it was shown off earlier this year on a desktop PC using Kepler. But this time around, the mobile Logan processor with Kepler is powering the rendering, which makes this a pretty stark proof of the kind of effect that Kepler could have on the state of mobile gaming, and mobile computing overall.
Many believe that mobile and desktop gaming are not on a collision course – each will have its place, and serve different functions owing to different graphics capabilities, control schemes and more. But with Kepler, Nvidia is showing that it’s delivering the technology to enable a further blurring of the line between desktop and mobile, and delivering it well ahead of when some people thought that might happen.
I am quite sure that many of you out there have heard of the name AOC before – they have been rolling out pretty affordable displays without compromising on quality in the past, and look set to continue even now. In fact, AOC has just announced a spanking new 16” monitor that they call the AOC E1659FWU, where all it takes is a solitary USB 3.0 cable that handles both power and signal needs. You can hook up the AOC E1659FWU monitor in a jiffy, regardless of whether it is connected to a notebook or desktop, it still offers a quick, simple solution for dual monitor setups, and is said to be able to increase one’s productivity by up to 50%. Hmmm, I am quite sure that such a productivity increase would have caused your superior to sit up and take notice?
Thanks to DisplayLink technology, the AOC E1659FWU monitor offers the convenience of portability, where one is able to benefit from additional viewing real estate thanks to a second display, be it at home or at the office, at meetings or in hotel rooms. The monitor itself can be used just about anywhere, ranging from coffee shops to trains, with the added advantage of not having to tote around a large and heavy AC adapters with its corresponding power plugs.
Expect the AOC E1659FWU to play nice with both Mac and PC platforms, where your eyes will be treated to a 15.6” viewing window which supports resolutions of up to 1366 × 768 pixels at 60Hz a pop. This slim piano black, highly portable monitor will measure nearly 13mm thinner compared to its predecessor, where you are able to convert from landscape to portrait view in a jiffy, thanks to its secure, foldable metallic stand. The AOC E1659FWU itself will arrive with its very own monitor carry case, and it is set to ship next month although you can place a pre-order for it at $139 a pop.
The Oculus Rift will most likely lead to a new genre of first-person games, but it could also make drones a lot more fun to use. For his master’s thesis, Jonathan of Intuitive Aerial is working on Oculus FPV, a drone camera system that streams 3D video that can be viewed with the Rift.
The system uses a Black Armored Drone carrying a laptop and two cameras. The laptop compresses the feed from the two cameras and sends them to a second computer on the ground via Wi-Fi. It’s a crude setup, but it works. According to Intuitive Aerial the current rig has a range of about 160′ to 320′ when using Wi-Fi cards. The video latency is 120ms, good enough for the viewer to pilot the drone at the same time.
That shot of the pilot wearing the Rift reminds me of Ghost in the Shell. Intuitive Aerial said it will improve Oculus FPV if it receives enough interest from potential clients. They should incorporate the MYO armband to Oculus FPV make it more fun to use.
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