Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been seeing plenty of ASUS’ newest, and possibly most attractive netbook — the Eee PC 1008HA Seashell — around here as of late, and the slim model’s gotten plenty of solid reviews in the UK, where it’s already available. Nobody can talk about the ‘shell (as we refer to it) without praising its handsome exterior, and with good reason, too: even if you’re not a fan of a curvy, thinned-out approach, it is most definitely refreshing to see a netbook that doesn’t just look like… every other netbook. We decided to take the newest ASUS for a spin, comparing it to the netbook we’re friendliest with — the HP Mini 1000 — to see how they stack up against one another. Could we swim through the blackened, dark abyss of netbook confusion and emerge with a clearer sense of ourselves? Does clarity come at a cost? Can the 10.1-inch Seashell fulfill all of our netbook dreams? Join us after the break for our musings.

Continue reading ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Seashell review

Filed under: Laptops

ASUS Eee PC 1008HA Seashell review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 May 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s little doubt that Yahoo Widgets took the HDTV market by storm at CES, in fact by the end of the first day of the show, it was news if a manufacturer didn’t announce the feature. Initially we didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but after spending some time with the Widgets, we started to see the light. Unfortunately something has changed in the past five months and now that we have it in our home to play with, it just doesn’t seem the same. The one word we’d use to describe the difference is “laggy” — check out the video after the break to see for yourself. The demos at CES were down right snappy, but even in our hard wired tests connected to the internet via a 20Mbps FiOS connection, the widgets loaded so slow we’re not sure we’d actually even use ’em. To make matters worse, because most people don’t have internet connections behind their HDTV, they’re going to need some sort of WiFi adapter to make this work. The Samsung 7000 series HDTV we tested has an optional USB dongle that sells for $80, but we couldn’t even get it to work despite the hour of our life we wasted on it.

Continue reading Hands-on with Yahoo Widgets on a Samsung 7000 series HDTV

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Hands-on with Yahoo Widgets on a Samsung 7000 series HDTV originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 May 2009 12:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ross Rubin (@rossrubin) contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Amazon’s Kindle DX includes a few tweaks such as automatically rotating the orientation of the screen when it is placed in landscape mode and adjustable page margins because… well, CEO Jeff Bezos seems to like the feature. Literally, though, the biggest change is the new 9.7-inch electronic ink screen, which displays two and a half times more content than the 6-inch screen on the Kindle 2 and Sony Reader. The expanded display allows more detailed graphics to be seen without zooming or panning, and is better suited to a wide range of source material including maps, technical diagrams, and sheet music. But textbooks and newspapers were singled out as two printed sources that are particularly significant for the forthcoming device.

These publications both benefit from the larger Kindle screen size, but each face different challenges in finding success on the Kindle DX. For newspapers, the Kindle DX cuts down on the costs of printing. Newspapers, though, are already struggling against competitors that did away with that expense years ago, including blogs that break stories and online entities such as Craigslist, eBay and Google that have siphoned away advertising revenue. Textbooks, on the other hand, have no major electronic competition, and print still retains advantages such as better readability and color. But digital textbooks must compete with used textbooks, a major market on college campuses, and likely will not be able to be resold if other digital content is a predecessor.

At the Kindle DX launch, representatives from The New York Times Company and Case Western Reserve University both characterized their involvement with the Kindle DX as a trial or experimentation. What’s behind the arm’s length embrace?

Continue reading Switched On: Big Kindle on Campus

Filed under: Handhelds

Switched On: Big Kindle on Campus originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 May 2009 17:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You wouldn’t think what amounts to a screen-size upgrade over the Kindle 2 would provoke such heated debate, but discussion at Engadget HQ has been at fever pitch since Bezos & Co. announced the Kindle DX this morning. Rather than try and condense the opinions of the staff into one Grand Unified Theory of The Ebook Market, we thought we’d let everyone speak for themselves — check it out below.

Update: Paul tacked on his thoughts as well.

Continue reading Editorial: Engadget on the Kindle DX

Filed under: Handhelds

Editorial: Engadget on the Kindle DX originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 May 2009 14:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yeah, we think you should make the switch.

Let’s come right out with it — you should be running a dual-band 2.4 and 5GHz WiFi network. Why? Because the 2.4GHz spectrum is cluttered with everything from other networks to Bluetooth to cordless phones and microwaves, and all that RF interference slows everything down, making file transfers interminable and HD streaming nearly impossible. On the other hand, 5GHz 802.11n is clean and incredibly fast — we’re talking almost hardwire fast. But you can’t just move up to 5GHz without leaving your phones and other legacy devices behind, so you’ve got to keep 2.4 around as well — which is really easy if you’ve got a simultaneous dual-band router like Apple’s new Airport Extreme or something like the D-Link DIR-825, and only slightly harder if you don’t. And, as luck would have it, Apple just sent us a new AEBS to play with, so we thought we’d show you how to configure both kinds of setups. We promise you’ll thank us.

Continue reading How-to: set up dual-band WiFi (and juice your downloads)

Filed under: Networking

How-to: set up dual-band WiFi (and juice your downloads) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 May 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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