Hasta La Gadget!

When Microsoft unveiled its Surface tablets with a flashy, top secret Los Angeles event, it didn’t just mark the beginning of a new (and utterly critical) phase for the history of the company. It marked the repurposing of a name that was already quite familiar to us — though in the guise of a big table. That device lives on as PixelSense, thus putting a period at the end of one definition of the word, a definition Microsoft kindly requests we put behind us as we move on to something that is wholly different.

This new Surface device could be said to relate more closely to the active form of the word in question. That is, the verb: to rise up — for something to appear that was not there before. It’s a very apt definition for what Microsoft is doing, attempting to go from zero to hero on the tablet hardware front in just one shot. Is this, the Surface for Windows RT, good enough to erase decades of mediocre touchscreen Windows devices? Will it help Microsoft and its latest operating systems float up to the top of the tablet hierarchy? Your answers lie just below the break.

Continue reading Microsoft Surface with Windows RT review

Filed under: Tablets, Microsoft

Microsoft Surface with Windows RT review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Samsung’s ARM-running Chromebook is barely out of the starting gate, and it’s already being tweaked to run without as much of an online dependency. By a Google employee, no less. Not content to rely solely on Chrome OS, Olof Johansson has loaded Ubuntu on the Chromebook by partitioning an SD card, mixing OS components and booting from USB. The technique unsurprisingly requires being more than a little comfortable with a Linux command line as well as playing fast and loose with the warranty. It also won’t be cheap or quick — commenters note that you’ll ideally have a partitioning-friendly SD card, and running a desktop OS from a slower kind of flash storage creates an inherent bottleneck. Anyone who likes the Chromebook’s $249 price, but isn’t as enraptured with the cloud as most of the team in Mountain View, might still want to try Johansson’s step-by-step process for themselves.

Filed under: Laptops, Software, Samsung, Google

Googler loads Ubuntu on an ARM-based Samsung Chromebook, gives solace to the offline among us originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TG Daily  |  Olof Johansson (Google+)  | Email this | Comments

As much as we love the Arduino Uno, it’s not the most powerful of hobbyist microcontrollers. Fortunately, the folks in Turin have just put the finishing touches on a 32-bit upgrade with buckets of potential. At the heart of the Arduino Due is an 84MHz Atmel CPU, based on ARM’s Cortex M3 Architecture, which is capable of being the brains inside your own flying drone or homemade 3D printer. It should start trickling out onto shelves from today, setting you back $49, but hey, that’s a small price to pay to automate your drinking adventures.

Continue reading Meet the Arduino Due, the 32-bit board that’ll let your projects fly (really)

Filed under: Misc

Meet the Arduino Due, the 32-bit board that’ll let your projects fly (really) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Don’t think that Lenovo is keeping the IdeaPad Yoga’s bendy secrets all to itself: its Japanese partner NEC is bringing a variant of the ARM-based Yoga 11 to the land of the rising sun as the LaVie Y. The 11.6-inch blend of laptop and tablet keeps the signature 360-degree display, 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage as its more internationally-minded counterpart, and confirms that there’s a quad-core Tegra 3 powering either of the Windows RT systems. What differences exist will stem from the software: there’s hints of a custom NEC app on an otherwise vanilla interpretation of Microsoft’s platform. The LaVie Y should precede its IdeaPad sibling by days, arriving in stores around November 22nd, although any local buyers will pay dearly for the privilege with an estimated $1,136 price. We’d suggest that patience ought to be a virtue for everyone else.

[Thanks, Gerald]

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Lenovo

NEC LaVie Y brings Lenovo’s 360-degree IdeaPad Yoga hybrid tablet to Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Oct 2012 11:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NEC  | Email this | Comments

Google really impressed us in San Francisco here today with its 11.6-inch ARM-based Samsung Chromebook. The $249 laptop is 0.8-inches (20mm) thin and weight only 2.43 pounds (1.1kg). It features a 11.6-inch 1366 x 768-pixel matte display, a full-size keyboard, a button-less trackpad and a 30Wh battery for 6.5+ hours of operation. Specs include a fanless dual-core A15-based Samsung Exynos 5 Dual (5250) SoC, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in flash storage, WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth. There’s a full-size SD card reader and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack (with mic support) on the left, plus the power input, HDMI output, USB 2.0 port, USB 3.0 connector and SIM slot (currently unused) in back.

First impressions? This is a solid machine — build quality and materials are fantastic for the price. It’s also pleasantly thin and light, a boon for people who are used to carrying a laptop around every day. We’re happy with the display which is bright and crisp. Viewing angles could use some improvement, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a better laptop screen at this price. The keyboard and trackpad feel great (we’re coming from an 11-inch Core i7 MacBook Air), and two-finger scrolling works like a charm. Performance is somewhere between the original Atom-based Chromebooks and the current Celeron-equipped Series-5 model. The system didn’t have any issues playing back 1080p content in YouTube, but we didn’t get a chance try Hulu or NetFlix.

Ultimately, this is a phenomenal device for the price. If you’re used to working in the cloud, you’re basically getting 80 percent of the entry-level MacBook Air experience for a quarter of the price. Factor in the Google Now integration and 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years and this latest Chromebook is a winner. Check out the gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on video.

Continue reading Hands-on with Google’s $249, ARM-based Chromebook (update: video)

Filed under: Laptops, Samsung, Google

Hands-on with Google’s $249, ARM-based Chromebook (update: video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments