Hasta La Gadget!

First, the good news: Xtreamer has its lovely little Ultra HTPC out and hooked up here at CeBIT. Now, the bad: the considerably more beautiful Prodigy streamer is under lock and key, and they won’t be doing any demos. Ah, well — may as well make the best of the situation, right? In brief, the Ultra might be the baddest little HTPC we’ve seen here at the show — Xtreamer seems to have nailed the equation with the small size and the price point. It doesn’t look cheap, either; we imagine it’s a little overbuilt-looking with those faux heat sink fins for some living rooms, but you can plug in an IR extender and bury the actual box in a cabinet if you like. The company’s staying very media platform-agnostic, shipping with Boxee and XBMC among others on a 2GB USB flash drive that houses the entire operating system. And at a shipping price of €200 (about $277), it puts the hurt on the Boxee Box. Look for it in early April.

Turning our attention to the Prodigy, this thing is seriously gorgeous for one reason: a large curved sheet of metal covering the top and sides. Functionality is another matter entirely, though, and as we mentioned before, Xtreamer isn’t demoing it here. On paper, at least, it should take care of business thanks to USB 3.0 and AirPlay support along with an internal 3.5-inch hard drive bay — and the company is currently taking pre-orders for €50 (about $69), which seems dirt cheap for what you’re getting. Like the Ultra, Xtreamer expects to ship it in early April.

Xtreamer Ultra HTPC hands-on — and Prodigy eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve got a desktop case with a view, we can’t think of a better thing to put on prominent display than a giant, red-trimmed graphics card — and that’s exactly what MSI’s new Radeon HD 6990-based unit provides. The dual-GPU card is lined up to be AMD’s 2011 flagship, and MSI proudly proclaims that it’s “the most powerful” unit around on the accompanying placard. Interestingly, this is just about the only card MSI’s got at its booth that isn’t available to handle outside of a case — we’re guessing these prototypes are still pretty rare, and really, they look prettier when they’re running at full clip on a motherboard with a ridiculous cooling unit anyhow. Follow the break for a quick video panorama.

Continue reading MSI’s Radeon HD 6990-based graphics card looks the part (video)

MSI’s Radeon HD 6990-based graphics card looks the part (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 07:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A lot of companies — including heavyweights like Microsoft — believe that motion control is the future of the human-machine interface. But it’s an awful lot of work to wave your hands around every time you want to change windows, isn’t it? Swedish firm Tobii, which specializes in eye control, teamed up with Lenovo to craft a run of 20 prototype Windows 7 laptops with eye control sensors built-in, and we had a chance to check out the setup here at CeBIT today.

The verdict? It works extraordinarily well — Tobii clearly knows what it’s doing, because even with our sloppy calibration at the start of the session, the system still detected where we were looking with pinpoint precision. One demo the company had set up was an Expose-style layout of all open windows, and we were able to target the smallest of the bunch (Calculator in this case) consistently and naturally — we never felt like we were “staring” to make something happen. Clearly this is a capability that’ll require some UX thought and research, because you don’t want the computer to just start doing things as you look around; most of the eye-controlled capabilities they’d baked into the laptop here were triggered with a key command, though one feature we really liked — a quick bar to access frequently-used media — was pulled up just by looking beyond the left side of the screen. It also worked very well and never came up when we didn’t want it to. The level of precision was further verified with a simple game they’ve created where you blow up asteroids before they impact Earth just by looking at them; the smallest rocks were only a few pixels wide, and we could consistently blast ’em.

As for commercialization, they’re still a ways off — they’re thinking two years if they can team up with the right partner. Tobii says that there’s a trade-off between sensor size and accuracy; the prototype has a sizable hump on the back and a roughly inch-wide strip running directly below the display, both of which are pretty impractical for a truly portable machine. The sensor must be below the display, we’re told, though it could be made quite a bit thinner — no wider than the bezel you’ve got below your notebook’s current display. Follow the break for a full video demo!

Continue reading Tobii and Lenovo show off prototype eye-controlled laptop, we go eyes-on (video)

Tobii and Lenovo show off prototype eye-controlled laptop, we go eyes-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s a trend we can get behind: ASUS and others are remixing existing, yet-to-be-released Android tablets with Honeycomb where it makes sense to do so. The Eee Pad MeMO, for instance, is now being promised with a Qualcomm port of the platform in time for its June launch — and along those same lines, the company is showing its Eee Pad Transformer here at CeBIT with a Honeycomb upgrade. Unlike the MeMO, the Transformer is just a straight Tegra 2 setup like the already-launched Xoom, which is likely why they were able to get it loaded on here and functioning relatively well in time for the show. The build ASUS has here doesn’t appear to be final — the Android Market is missing, for example — but what was there seemed to be running smoothly; considering the internals, we’d expect no less. Follow the break for video (pardon the lack of audio — there was some talking going on that we found distracting).

Continue reading ASUS Eee Pad Transformer shows up wearing Honeycomb to CeBIT (video)

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer shows up wearing Honeycomb to CeBIT (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Joining its Intel-powered 100W cousin at CeBIT this week is MSI’s WindPad 110W, basically an AMD Brazos-powered remix of the original with a slightly different design. You’ve got an optical pad on the upper part of the right bezel that controls a mouse pointer — if you’re into that sort of thing — but hopefully you’ll be touching the lovely 10.1-inch IPS display (which it shares with the 100W) directly most of the time. We would’ve liked to have taken the skinned load of Windows 7 for a spin, but MSI had its demo unit set up on a looping video and kept it under glass or in employees’ gentle hands for the entirety of our time at the booth, so we didn’t get a great sense for performance; they’re targeting mid-year for release, though, so they’ve got some time left on the clock to put some spit and polish on the package. There’ll also be a dock available that plugs into a connector in the bottom of the tablet — it wasn’t on-hand, but the company had some prototype docks connected to WindPad 100A dummy units (showing Honeycomb on their fake displays, interestingly, even though live 100As at the show are running Froyo). Follow the break for a quick video from all angles.

Continue reading MSI WindPad 110W eyes-on (video)

MSI WindPad 110W eyes-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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