Hasta La Gadget!

LAS VEGAS — Dell has managed to pack an entire Alienware gaming rig into a tiny, 11-inch notebook body, and it kicks ass. It will also cost less than $1,000.

Regular readers will know I’m a Mac user. Normally, no matter how good a PC might be, if it doesn’t run the Mac OS I’m not interested. The Alienware M11X is the first machine to tempt me to the other side.

Dell decided not to bother with a heavy, power-thirsty CPU. Instead, the M11X is tricked out with a Core 2 Duo and hardware to push graphics. The NVIDIA GT35M can be switched in and out, so you can pick the internal graphics hardware for your e-mail and a 6.5-hour battery life, or fire up everything for two glorious hours of on-the-go gaming on the 720p, 1366 x 768 screen.

The M11X even goes one better than the MacBook Pro, which has a similar GPU-switching trick, but requires a logout to do it. When I asked Alex Gruzen, Dell’s VP of consumer products, if you had to restart the machine to change modes he smiled. “No, you just hit a switch,” he told me, “it takes about two seconds.”

I took the machine for a spin. On battery power, the M11X was running Modern Warfare 2 at full tilt, with almost everything turned on, at 30fps. It looks gorgeous. Kick up the volume and the sound thunders, crisp and clear, from a pair of speakers under the front edge, and when you pick it up and flip the thick but compact body over, there is even a glowing red light inside the fan-hole. Classy.

So nice is the output that, through the press conference, there was a Star Trek game running onstage on a big screen. We all assumed it was powered by the huge Alienware desktop next to it. It turned out that it was powered by the little M11X, which outputs via HDMI, DisplayPort or VGA.

It’s probably the best netbook you could buy, and it comes in at under $1,000. I wonder if I could Hackintosh it?

LAS VEGAS — A crowd of gadget enthusiasts gathered at the entrance to
the Consumer Electronics Show here Thursday, awaiting admission to one
of the world’s largest gadget shows.

Organizers expect 110,000 people to attend this year’s show, a decline
of about 25,000 from last year. Despite the downturn, hundreds of
exhibitors will still be showing thousands of new products, from watch
phones and giant 3-D televisions to USB humping dogs and electronic
air fresheners.

It will be just as hard to get a taxi, and healthy food will be just
as unavailable as in previous years.

LAS VEGAS –Motorola launched its third Android smartphone, an attractive, compact device with some surprising hardware innovations and a user interface that aggregates social networking feeds, email and contacts.

The phone called Backflip has a 3.1-inch touchscreen, a QWERTY physical keyboard that opens up in an unexpected way, a touch sensitive navigation panel on the back and a nifty mode that allows it to be postioned on the table top to act like an alarm clock.

The device is expected to hit the market in the first quarter of the year  but the company did not disclose pricing or a telecom partner for the device.

“This is a phone with a great keyboard, a big screen and integration with social networking,” says Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha.

Since Google debuted the open source Android operating system in October 2008, Android devices have flooded the market. More than ten Android handsets are currently available with more waiting to burst into the spotlight. AT&T announced Wednesday that it will offer  five new Android smartphones this year. On Tuesday, Google introduced its own Android handset, the HTC designed Nexus One running the latest version of the Android OS, Android 2.0

Motorola is trying to stay a step ahead, says Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group.  ”We have seen a lot of Android models appear quickly on the market,” he says. “So it’s starting to become more important for manufacturers to differentiate themselves.”

An eye-catching phone

Like the Motorola Droid, the Backflip has a physical keyboard and a touchscreen. But Motorola seems to have listened to complaints about the Droid’s difficult to use keypad.

The Backflip’s keypad feels solid and has generously spaced buttons that ensure you don’t end up hitting the wrong keys. The keyboard also opens up differently.

“Most people are used to a forward flipping keyboard or an upward slider,” says Paul Nicholson, global marketing director for Motorola. “The Backflip’s keyboard opens up in the reverse direction.”

That allows the phone to fold up and sit on a table top like a horizontally placed picture frame. In that mode, the Backflip displays a clock, turning it into a bedside timepiece.

Another interesting innovation is a one-inch touch sensitive swatch on the back of the phone. That trackpad supports gestures such as swipe and double-tap. So users can browse the internet or flip through the device’s seven home screens by touching the back of the phone.

The idea works well enough and it won’t be long before other handset manufacturers offer the feature.

Beyond that, the Backflip has all the usual features–Wi-Fi connectivity, 3G, a 5-megapixel camera and a video recorder.

Motorola did not disclose what kind of processor is powering the phone. With the 1 GHz Snapdragon processor–included in the Google Nexus One–setting the standard for speed, much will depend on how powerful the innards of the Backflip turn out to be.

Chaneling the Cliq

When it comes to the user interface, the Backflip is identical to Motorola’s first Android phone, the Cliq. The Backflip has Motorola’s custom skin called MotoBlur that combines information from social networking feeds such as Twitter, and Facebook with email contacts and the phone address book. It also offers free online backup of the data on the device and a find-my-phone service for lost devices.

Models of the Backflip at the Motorola  event were running Android 1.6 but the company says it hasn’t decided which version it will ultimately ship with.

Overall, the Backflip is a gorgeous piece of hardware and cements Motorola’s position as a handset manufacturer that can create phones strong enough to stand out from the clutter.

Though Motorola hasn’t announced the pricing for the Backflip, NPD’s Rubin says it could cost about the same as a Cliq–$100 with a two-year contract. And being a GSM phone, it is likely this device could end up on AT&T.

See Also:

• Review: Motorola Cliq
• Motorola’s First Android Phone Takes Aim at Social Networks
• Review: Motorola Droid
• Hands On: Motorola’s New Android Phone Nails Design

Sanyo Xacti VPC-SH1 full HD camcorder with wide-angle lens announced originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like pretty much every other 8-inch digital photo frame on the market, but unlike most others (the Cameo notwithstanding), Pandigital’s Photo Mail LED frame can accept emailed photos over AT&T’s network. Unlike the aforesaid Cameo, however, you’re not asked to pay a monthly fee to keep this one online (it ships with 300 photo downloads, with extra bundles available when you need them), and the representative we spoke with hinted that this one might just be the first of many more with AT&T in different shapes and sizes. The user interface was simple enough to navigate, and we were told that photos emailed to the frame actually hit a linked Snapfish account first (where the high resolution version is stored), resized, and then beamed down to the frame. Have a closer look below if you’re so inclined.

Pandigital’s AT&T-lovin’ Photo Mail LED frame hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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