Hasta La Gadget!

Small form factor? Check. Low power consumption married to 1080p video playback capabilities? Of course. Quiet cooling? Naturally. Those are the basic requirements for, and their fulfillment is the means by which we judge, a good home theater pc. They’re also the highlights of Zotac‘s Ion 2-powered ZBOX HD-ID11 barebone (you have to add your own RAM, storage and OS) nettop, which recently visited AnandTech‘s labs for some old fashioned review action. It’s a highly illuminating read, particularly for those interested in the differences between NVIDIA’s Ion generations, which throws up a mixed bag of results. While you’ll be quite alright watching Full HD Blu-rays on the ZBOX, Flash hardware acceleration — yeah, that old nugget again — is not yet implemented well enough, resulting in a maximum of 480p resolution before Hulu streams started glitching out on the reviewer. A June driver update from NVIDIA should rectify this issue, and we’re encouraged to wait it out and see what we might see then. In the mean time, you can just delve into the complete analysis which awaits at the link below.

[Thanks, Wowzers]

Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11 and its Ion 2 innards reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 May 2010 11:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s hard to say at this point if this new spate of Inspiron machines are just region-specific lappies or totally new breeds of a tried-and-true original, but either way, they’re alive and well on Dell’s own website. So far as we can tell, the Dell Inspiron 13R, 14R, 15R, 17R and M501R are exactly like their non-R contemporaries save for a few choice options: the GPU assortment is far more robust on the new flavors, while there’s a larger quantity of choices in the operating system, RAM and wireless departments. There’s also word that a Dell Dock feature is built right into these, making it easier to access media for those who aren’t exactly technically inclined. To quote Walt Mayo, vice president Dell Consumer Asia: “This is a laptop that moms will love and youths will desire.” We can’t say we fit that demographic in any way, shape, or form, but we can appreciate the “smudge-resistant palm rests, full-size, ergonomically-designed keyboard and stiffer frame” when compared to the other Inspirons. These seem to be available now over in Australia and New Zealand, which means that order pages could go live at any moment for the rest of planet Earth.

[Thanks, Mitch]

Dell Inspiron 13R, 14R, 15R, 17R and M501R quietly surface originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 May 2010 02:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve just returned from a ride with the TomTom Go Live 1000. In general, the device met our relatively high expectations set by a purported flagship navigator from the likes of TomTom. Unfortunately, the prototype unit guiding our vehicle was limited to a scripted demonstration on pre-selected routes. And when we did veer off course thanks to an unhelpful, but rather posh, voice guiding us to turn left a bit early, it took about 8 seconds for the ARM 11 device to reroute — not bad but not exactly the 0 seconds we were promised during the pitch. Again, we were told that this was the result of using a prototype device… though it must be a near production-ready model given the summer launch timeframe. The unit also wasn’t equipped with the automatic volume adjustment that raises and lowers volume based on the ambient noise around it. We did witness the Webkit UI in action and it does seem significantly improved based on our brief 15 minute test ride with it. However, it was still cumbersome enough to give our tour guide (a TomTom quality manager) fits as he tried to jump between 2D and 3D navigation modes. And the capacitive touchscreen was a mixed bag: at times it seemed to require the kind of finger mashing usually reserved for resistive screens; at others it was a bit too sensitive to effectively target street names from a pick list while being jostled about on a Dutch road (accidentally brushing the display selected the entry either above or below the street desired). As bad as all this sounds, we had the good fortune to have a Garmin nuvi 1690 in the vehicle with us to go head-to-head, flagship-to-flagship, and the Go Live 1000 was the clear winner in getting us back to our starting location. Check the Go Live 1000 in action after the break.

Continue reading TomTom Go Live 1000 taken for first test drive (video)

TomTom Go Live 1000 taken for first test drive (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Good news, mobile gamers — NVIDIA‘s looking out for you and yours, and if you’re tired of lobbying to Congress about the inequities between driver releases for desktop GPUs and driver releases for mobile GPUs, you can finally move on to some other just cause. NVIDIA’s Verde driver program has been a relative success over the years, but it’s about to become a lot more gnarly when the company outs its 256 Series drivers in a few months. At that time, NVIDIA plans to “completely unify its GPU drivers, so mobile and desktop users will be able to get the latest releases simultaneously.” Users won’t find the desktop and laptop drivers in the same package, but we’re sure each one will be clearly marked on the download page. It’s worth noting, however, that these unified releases will only work with laptops featuring discrete GPUs, hybrid solutions utilizing NVIDIA-branded IGPs and Optimus-enabled machines; rigs with multi-vendor solutions (like the Alienware M11x, which uses an integrated set from Intel) won’t be allowed to join the party.

In related news, the upcoming release of the 197.16 driver for laptops will bring along support for external displays with 3D Vision, enabling 3D Vision-ready laptops to pipe 3D content to 3D Vision-ready LCDs with ease. Good news all around, but you’ll have to give those links below a visit if you’re hungry for more.

NVIDIA Verde to sync up desktop and laptop GPU driver releases, generate smiles galore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There couldn’t possibly be any less fanfare from Apple on this, but the company’s recently released Technical Note TN2267 for OS X 10.6.3 might just be the GPU-sized opening that Adobe and, consequently, Flash users have been waiting for. Here’s the key bit:

The Video Decode Acceleration framework is a C programming interface providing low-level access to the H.264 decoding capabilities of compatible GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. It is intended for use by advanced developers who specifically need hardware accelerated decode of video frames.

Now, we’re not exactly “advanced developers,” but it seems pretty clear that this is designed to give developers access to some inner workings of OS X that have previously been restricted to Apple itself — access that has been evident in Flash tests that show it performs much better in instances where it can access a computer’s GPU. No word from Adobe on this just yet, but we’ve got to guess they’ve already taken notice.

Apple Technical Note TN2267: an opening for GPU-accelerated Flash? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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