Hasta La Gadget!

Well, this is sad. While we told you earlier this week that the Ion 2-powered ASUS Eee PC 1201PN wouldn’t be arriving until late May, a number of European sites have gotten early review samples of the 12-inch “netbook” — if you choose to call it that — and have discovered that it doesn’t use NVIDIA’s Optimus automatic graphics switching technology. That’s right, instead we’re told by NVIDIA that the discrete GeForce 201M GPU runs continuously and Intel’s integrated chip is never used — a configuration which sounds like it’ll absolutely kill the battery life on this machine. According to Hardware Zone, ASUS made this choice aiming to be the first to market with the next generation of Ion, but an Optimus version of the ASUS Eee PC 1201PN will be ready later this quarter. It also appears that an Eee PC 1215N with both Ion 2 and Optimus is floating around, but we haven’t confirmed what’s going on with that. We’re sorry if we confused you even more, but we’ll be keeping our eyes out for the early reviews of the 1201PN to see if our predicted two hours of battery life is on the mark.

Update: The 1201PN cannot be updated with firmware to enable Optimus — the hardware isn’t there for the automatic switching.

First wave of Ion 2 ASUS Eee PC 1201PNs lack NVIDIA Optimus originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If there’s one thing a fledgling technology needs, it’s good marketing. That aside, the next most vital thing is industry support. Today, an even dozen broadcast groups have banded together in order to back the soon-to-launch Mobile DTV format (ATSC-M/H), with Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Fox, Gannett, Hearst, ION, Media General, Meredith, NBC, Post-Newsweek and Raycom forming a joint venture to develop a “new national mobile content service.” The service will utilize the broadcast spectrum already set aside in order to allow member companies to “provide content to mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming.” That’s pretty big news for a tech that’s been struggling to gain acceptance in America, and if all goes to plan, Washington, DCers will get a chance to indulge first when it goes live in the nation’s capitol on May 3rd. A showcase on that date will demonstration a Mobile DTV-capable Samsung Moment and Dell Mini 10 (amongst others), though we’re still having a tough time digging up firm pricing for any of those. Get ready, folks — Pimp My Ride is about to get a huge second wind.

Mobile DTV gains national mobile content service, broadcast group support originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Apr 2010 01:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well well. We’d always suspected that the JooJoo tablet was hiding something extra to run HD video and Flash, and it’s just hit the FCC with full documentation and a teardown confirming that there’s an NVIDIA Ion GPU paired with an Atom N270 packed inside. We’re also seeing a 3G card in there, although it’s unclear whether it’ll be active or installed at launch — we’ve been told the 3G version won’t be ready until sometime later this year, but things have been changing fast, so that may be in flux as well. There’s also a picture showing it running Windows, but we’re assuming that’s just for testing purposes — we’d also bet it’d be an easy little hack. But back to Ion for a second: our experience with first-gen Ion netbooks has been one of decreased performance and drastically reduced battery life, so we’re very curious to see how the JooJoo holds up compared to modern netbooks running Intel’s Pine Trail chips and NVIDIA’s Optimus-based Ion 2. We’ll see — it’s supposed to ship in just a few weeks. Two more pics after the break.

P.S.- Oh, and Fusion Garage got back to us yesterday with a list of supported local video formats, and it’s pretty decent: AVI, MPEG-4, MOV, WMV and WMA, FLV (Flash Video), VOB, OGG, OGM and OGV, MKV (Mastroska), DiVX and XViD. We’ll see how the battery holds up, though — our very own Joanna Stern predicts a best case of 3.5 hours with WiFi on and a video playback time of two hours.

Continue reading JooJoo hits the FCC, reveals NVIDIA Ion, 3G card

JooJoo hits the FCC, reveals NVIDIA Ion, 3G card originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure NVIDIA’s Ion 2 is all the rage right now, but ASUS still has a few tricks left in store for the progenitor nettop GPU. The EeeBox EB1501U sports a typical nettop processor — in this case, the older Diamondville Intel Atom 330 dual core — with Ion One, and as an added bonus, there’s USB 3.0 support. Also under the hood? A 2.5-inch, 320GB HDD, DVD drive, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi. As for the other home theater PC box, the EeeMedia EM0501 isn’t quite as exciting — just a 800MHz Samsung ARM processor, a variety of codec supports, and HDMI out. Still, given history, it’s a pretty solid addition. Pricing and availability? Your guess is as good as ours for now. Enjoy the pictures for the time being.

ASUS’ EeeBox EB1501U packs ION and USB 3.0, need we say more? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Explaining automatic graphics switching and the benefits thereof can be a somewhat dry affair. You have to tell people about usability improvements and battery life savings and whatnot… it’s much more fun if you just take a nice big engineering board, strap the discrete GPU on its own card and insert an LED light for the viewer to follow. NVIDIA has done just that with its Optimus technology — coming to a laptop or Ion 2-equipped netbook near you — and topped it off by actually pulling out the GPU card when it wasn’t active, then reinserting it and carrying on with its use as if nothing had happened. This was done to illustrate the fact that Optimus shuts down the GPU electrically, which is that little bit more energy efficient than dropping it into an idle state. Shimmy past the break to see the video.

Continue reading NVIDIA’s Optimus technology shows its graphics switching adroitness on video

NVIDIA’s Optimus technology shows its graphics switching adroitness on video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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