Hasta La Gadget!

Ready for it? We’ve got more (and possibly less) on the color ASUS DR-570 e-book reader that stormed through our site over the weekend riding a wave of OLED anticipation. We now know that in addition to WiFi, 3G, and 122-hour real world battery life, we can expect lightning quick 0.03 second page turns (that’s about 23 times faster than the Kindle and its peers as you’d expect from a non E Ink display), 124 x 170 x 8.8-mm / 200-g footprint, 4GB of onboard storage with SDHC expansion, 512MB of SDRAM, and 1,530mAh battery. It also brings a built-in RSS reader, audio/video/Flash player, text to speech engine (presumably the Svox like the DR-950), and built-in web browser when it hits before the end of the year. There’s also a hint of online video streaming support via Amazon video on demand, 3D gaming and navigation (picture Blio page turning emulation), “One stop shopping for books, video, music,” and explicit support for ePub, PDF, txt, MP3, MP4, and AVI content formats.

The one thing we can’t confirm is the 6-inch OLED display originally reported; our data simply calls it the “world’s first 5.7-inch colorful eBook Reader” and we’ve heard rumors that Sipix (the panel of choice for the DR-950) is expected to ship a color electronic ink display in 2010. Doubt they’ll achieve 0.03 second refreshes with that though. Stay tuned as we dig deeper.

ASUS DR-570 color e-book reader gets detailed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 08:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS is suddenly all chatty with its plans to enter the e-reader market in 2010. Just yesterday we got word of a 6-inch color (claimed to be OLED by InGear) e-reader from ASUS by the name of DR-570 headed to retail before the year is through. Now we’ve got details of a second ASUS e-reader, dubbed the DR-950 that should arrive sooner. This time we’re looking at a 9-inch Sipix panel with 1,024 x 768 pixel resolution pushing 16-levels of gray just like the Jinke reader unveiled at CES. The touchscreen DR-950 features text-to-speech (based on Svox engine supporting 26 languages), a web browser that works in portrait or landscape modes, a virtual keyboard and handwriting input, a RSS reader, and dictionary (with expandable database) with real-time translation. Spec-wise, the 222 x 161 x 9-mm / 370-gram reader packs WiFi and HSPA (WiMax is optional) data radios, 3.5-mm headphone jack and stereo speakers, with 4GB of internal memory and SD Card expansion. Supported formats include PDF, TXT, Audible, MP3, and unprotected ePub. Not bad ASUS, not bad. Now let’s see some content partners, eh? See it pictured browsing the web after the break.

Continue reading ASUS DR-950 9-inch touchscreen e-reader brings text-to-speech and internet browser

ASUS DR-950 9-inch touchscreen e-reader brings text-to-speech and internet browser originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fermi hardware might still be two months away, but NVIDIA has done the sage thing and released some tantalizing numbers and architectural details to keep the fanboys chirping in the meantime. The GF100 will signal the end of tiresome rebadging and clock speed massaging, and early adopters will find 512 CUDA cores, 48 ROPs, and a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface sprawled across three billion transistors. Big changes are also afoot in how the card will do its work, with a reorganization toward a more parallel workflow leading to promises of up to eight times better geometry performance than on the GT200. HardOCP reports that anti-aliasing results have improved “notably,” while the video we’ve got stashed after the break for you shows the GF100 beating the GTX 285 handily in a Far Cry 2 benchmark. Still, the PC Perspective crew expressed some apprehension about the massive die size and how it could impact yields given the still young 40nm production process — a sentiment echoed by other publications who questioned whether NVIDIA would not have been better off trying for a less ambitious, more gaming-oriented board. We should all know that answer soon enough.

Read – AnandTech
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – PC Perspective
Read – HardOCP
Read – Tom’s Hardware

Continue reading NVIDIA Fermi / GF100 architectural details revealed

NVIDIA Fermi / GF100 architectural details revealed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That Korean-language version of the XT701 we saw recently is starting to make more sense now that we know exactly what was up Moto’s sleeve: meet MOTOROI. The company’s very first Android-powered phone for South Korea takes most (but not all) of its cues from its China Unicom-branded doppelganger, featuring a 3.7-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video capture, HDMI-out, and — like most phones sold in and around Seoul — support for T-DMB television tuning. Like the Droid, it’s available with a home charging dock that’ll turn it into a handy alarm clock; unlike the Droid, though, the MOTOROI features multitouch browsing out of the box similar to the Milestone in Europe. The oddly-named phone (is “ROI” acceptable for short?) launches early next month on SK Telecom.

Motorola takes Android to Korea with MOTOROI originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Jan 2010 23:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Proving once again that those who don’t watch The Engadget Show are always going to be one step behind those who do, our latest star guest Erick Tseng has dropped a dollop of exclusive wisdom on us: Android’s next big iteration will be known as Froyo. That’s short for “frozen yogurt” and fits right in line with the zany naming scheme that has delivered us Cupcakes, Donuts, and Eclairs so far. If you had your money on Flan being next in that alphabetical order, sorry to disappoint. No additional info could be squeezed out of the Google man at present — such as how much further along Froyo will be from Android 2.1 (technically considered part of Eclair) or when we might expect the upgrade — but we’ve got a name and that should be plenty to get us started on another wonderful journey of soothsaying and speculation.

Next Android version will be called Froyo, says Erick Tseng originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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