Hasta La Gadget!

Acer has today announced the introduction of its Aspire 5600U All-in-One PC. The company says the slim chassis is around 35mm thick, with the machine featuring a 23-inch screen with a 1920×1080 resolution, a 5ms response time, 250 nits of brightness, and 10 point multitouch. The PC is powered by Intel’s new Ivy Bridge processors, and there’s a discrete NVIDIA GPU too.

Acer will offer configurations with both Core i3 and Core i5 Ivy Bridge processors, with all models coming with NVIDIA’s GT 630M graphics. Up to 8GB of 1333Mhz DDR3 RAM can be installed in the machine, as well as up to 1TB of hard drive space with an optional 20GB SSD drive for faster boot up times. Two USB 3.0 ports are onboard, along with three USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet, HDMI input and output, a card reader, plus audio outputs. There’s also a Blu-ray drive upgrade option.

The company has also included TV tuners in the device, with options for dual DVB-T, hybrid DVB-T, or hybrid ATSC depending on your region. A webcam can be found at the top of the monitor capable of 1080p video, and the whole monitor can be mounted on a wall thanks to VESA compatibility.

Acer hasn’t mentioned what the 5600U will cost, or when it will be shipping, but it should be soon. In the meantime, check out our hands-on with the 5600U and the larger 7600U from Computex.

Acer Aspire 5600U AiO features Ivy Bridge and multitouch is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In the following hands-on blood-spewing experience with this next-generation first person shooter from the same folks that brought you Shadowgun, you’ll see zombies. You’ll see so many zombies that your head will explode. We’ll be showing off this game Dead Trigger THD, developed by Madfinger Games in collaboration with NVIDIA for their Tegra 3 quad-core processor, on the newest device to utilize that architecture, the Google Nexus 7 tablet.

If you’ve played Shadowgun, you’ll feel right at home with Dead Trigger. You’ve got essentially the same controls, the graphics are extremely similar, and the amount of fun you’ll have here is at least as high as it’s been in that non-zombie game. Here you’ll have a host of new weapons, a much more terrifying environment, and zombies. Understand this if you understand nothing else: there’s lots of zombies in this game. Lots of once-dead people who are now out to eat your brains.

You’ll see water and fluid effects like you’ll find nowhere else, similar to what’s been shown in the THD (Tegra High-Definition) version of Shadowgun. You’ll also see variable lighting as well as volumetric fog and some excellent rag doll physics all around. And lots and lots of blood.

NOTE: also be sure to have a peek at the tablet in this post in our Google Nexus 7 Review. Then have a peek at this game in the TegraZone and/or the Google Play app store right this second for the impossibly inexpensive price of $0.99 USD. It’s impossible not to grab. Grab it right now.

Dead Trigger THD zombie-killing Android FPS hands-on is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Gaming laptops are strange beasts. While they may have been lugged all the way to the LAN party, they aren’t too much fun to use on a plane. That was, until the advent of Alienware’s 11-inch M11x, which kept the fast internals at the expense of weight and battery life. When it was unceremoniously yanked by parent company Dell, it left a gap in the market for people who really did need a gaming laptop on the go.

Fortunately, Clevo stepped in with its W110ER, an 11-inch laptop that companies like Maingear and others have tweaked to sell as their own. Packing an Ivy Bridge CPU, NVIDIA’s Kepler-based GeForce GT 650M and the same 1366 x 768 display as the M11x, it’s obviously trying to step into Alienware’s shoes. So, is this the new standard-bearer for small-yet-powerful gaming laptops? Does it really blow us away with its power? Will you want to part with a minimum of $999 to get hold of one? Read on to find out.

Continue reading Maingear Pulse 11 review: a small and surprisingly powerful gaming laptop

Maingear Pulse 11 review: a small and surprisingly powerful gaming laptop originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Nexus 7 didn’t come as a great surprise when it launched at IO 2012 yesterday, but the $199 price tag still raised some eyebrows in astonishment. At under half the price of a new iPad, it’s competitive – though very different – to Apple’s slate, but it also undercuts a fair number of other Android tablets too. You can’t even accuse Google of milking international buyers to make up the difference, as prices outside of the US are, surprisingly, very reasonable too. The Nexus 7 will sell from £159 in the UK, for instance, versus expectations of around £250. So, how has Google (and hardware partner ASUS) managed to make the Nexus 7 so cheap?

It doesn’t hurt to have relatively mundane hardware. Tegra 3 is no longer a brand new chipset, with the early-adopter tax likely rubbed off, and in fact Google is using the even cheaper KAI version announced earlier this year. That means the 1GB of memory can be the cheaper DDR3L sort commonly used in PCs; meanwhile the 8GB or 16GB of internal storage is unlikely to add greatly to the bill-of-materials. The display is, at 1280 x 800 resolution, better than the 1024 x 600 panel we’ve seen on other cheap slates like RIM’s heavily-discounted BlackBerry PlayBook, but then nor is it an expensive Super AMOLED as on, say, some of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab models.

The rest of the tech is tablet-by-numbers, with only NFC a mild stand-out (and an inexpensive one at that). The camera – front only, as the Nexus 7 does without the rear shooter – is a mere 1.2-megapixels, fine for Google+ Hangouts but not something you’d want to capture precious memories with. Finally, the case is simple molded plastic and rubber, not metal as on the iPad.

“Google’s intentions with Nexus 7 are very different from every other Android OEM”

Meanwhile, unlike every other Android OEM, Google’s intentions with the Nexus 7 are very different from the usual “make some money” approach. The race to the bottom of the Android tablet market has been tempered, a little, by each manufacturer’s hope to secure at least some margins on each unit they sell. After all, they make their money on hardware.

Google, though, is seeing Nexus 7 as a means to an end, not the end-product itself. As Android chief Andy Rubin said at Google IO yesterday, the missing piece in tablets running the platform to-date has been the software ecosystem: there were simply not enough compelling apps to make slates look competitive against the iPad.

Nexus 7 Android 4.1 Jelly Bean hands-on:

The Nexus 7, then, is a device to spur interest, adoption and hard work from Android developers. In that way it’s a slightly different proposition from the Nexus phones we’ve seen so far: they were intended as guiding points to the mobile handset industry, resetting specification goalposts that had begun to atrophy amid OEM apathy. The tablet, then, can be cheap because it doesn’t need to be anything more, and Google can opt for relatively mainstream hardware.

That in doing so it also mounts a challenge to Android upstart Amazon – which has been using a similar gateway-hardware strategy with the Kindle Fire, selling a cheap tablet and relying on ebook and media sales to deliver a longer-term revenue stream – is a pleasant bonus, especially since the retailer worked so hard to strip out Google’s own store options in the Fire and replace them with its own.

Google is doing everything it can to get users to start spending money in the Play Store. Free app downloads are well and good, but Apple continues to crow about the amount iOS users spend on paid apps and in-app purchases, and Google would like a share of that market too. Receiving $25 of free Play credit promised for all Nexus 7 buyers is, unsurprisingly, contingent on having “a valid form of payment” in your Google Wallet account. Google is also taking a page out of Amazon’s book with the Kindle, shipping the Nexus 7 automatically paired to users’ accounts – presumably with the same payment information as used to buy the tablet itself – so that it can be used to buy apps out of the box.

It remains to be seen whether Nexus 7 owners can be trained to spend money on software by a little free credit, but if interest in the tablet by the developers at Google IO is anything to go by, a $199 price point might be enough to persuade them to branch out into tablet app development. There’s more on the Nexus 7 in our review.

How is the Nexus 7 so cheap? is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Some of the mystery has been taken out of it, but Google has officially taken the wraps off of the Nexus 7, its first reference-grade tablet. The 7-inch slate is the first and currently only device shipping with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and takes advantage of its optimization for smaller tablet screens, magazines and movies — it’s also the first to ship with a finished Chrome for Android. Like what was widely suspected, the tablet is built by ASUS (shades of Eee Pad MeMO ME370T, anyone?) and mostly draws our attention in terms of what we get for the money: that quad-core Tegra 3, 1.2-megapixel front camera, NFC and 1280 x 800, IPS-based LCD are traits we’d normally look for in a pricier tablet. How much pricier, you ask? Google is asking just $199 for a dainty 8GB model and $249 for a 16GB version — that’s a lot of speed for the money, especially with a $25 Google Play credit and a slew of bundled content. There’s no SD card slot, however. We’ll test the Nexus 7 as soon as we can, but you can swing by Google Play (and possibly local stores) to order one in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US with a mid-July shipping window.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s opening keynote at our event hub!

Continue reading Google makes the Nexus 7 tablet official: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a $199 price (video)

Google makes the Nexus 7 tablet official: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and a $199 price (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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