Hasta La Gadget!

Netflix and Hulu make great alternatives to cable TV. The downside: You’ve got to tether a computer to your TV with some kind of cable.

Fortunately, if you’re getting tired of the cord snaking from your laptop to your entertainment center, there’s an alphabet soup of technologies angling to help you out.

Not so fortunately, these technologies are varied and largely incompatible.

Consumers today can choose from WHDI, wireless HD, WiDi, wireless USB and Wi-Fi Direct. Confused? Check out our guide to these emerging wireless streaming-media technologies.

WHDI

Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI, was finalized in 2009 to give consumers a way to link the PC to the TV. Think of it as the wireless equivalent of HDMI. The technology has a latency of less than 1 millisecond, which means it’s good enough not just for watching movies but should also work well to stream games from your browser to the TV.

WHDI can stream 1080p video at up to 3 Gbps (gigabits per second). All you need is a wireless HDI dongle that can plug into your laptop and a little receiver that goes behind the TV. That set will cost about $150 and will be available early next year.

Meanwhile, TV makers such as Sharp and LG are rolling out TVs with built-in support for WHDI standard.

Slowly, the WHDI consortium hopes to convince PC makers integrate WHDI chips into laptops, similar to the way Wi-Fi chips are built in today.

WirelessHD

While other wireless technologies focus on streaming content from the PC to the TV, WirelessHD targets the most common electronic eyesore in homes: the black HDMI cables that snake out from behind the TV towards the set-top box, PC or the DVD player.

If built into TV sets, WirelessHD can offer fast data transfers of up to 10 GBps to 28 Gbps. That makes it the fastest of the lot for point-to-point data transfer.

So far, TV makers such as Panasonic, LG and Vizio have said they will offer wireless-HD–enabled sets by the end of the year.

Wireless USB

When the familiar USB port decides to go wireless, it means steaming-media companies can piggyback on to a powerful, widely understood technology.

Wireless USB is based on the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio platform. It can send data at speeds of 480 Mbps at distances of up to 10 feet and 110 Mpbs at up to 32 feet. Companies such as Logitech already offer UWB-based kits that can be used to connect your PC to the TV.

A startup called Veebeam launched a box that uses wireless USB to stream internet video from your laptop to the TV.

Wireless USB is more powerful for point-to-point connectivity than traditional Wi-Fi, because it offers more bandwidth and less interference, says Veebeam. It estimates 420 Mbps bandwidth for its wireless USB implementation.

WiGig

Picture yourself downloading a 25-GB Blu-ray disc in less than a minute. That’s what WiGig can do for you, says the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The Alliance is a consortium of electronics companies that has established a specification for a wireless technology. WiGig could offer users data-transfer speeds ranging from 1 Gbps to 6 Gbps — or at least 10 times faster than today’s Wi-Fi.

The alliance had hoped to make WiGig commonplace by the end of the year, but it has been slow going for the standard, which has not been implemented in any consumer products.

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So, Bluetooth — last fall didn’t end up being as frightful as you had probably imagined, but this fall is bound to be different. Or so the Wi-Fi Alliance says. If you’ll recall, Wi-Fi Direct promised to do what Bluetooth had been doing for years, but with far less fuss and on a protocol that’s much more widespread. A solid year has come and gone, and we’ve heard nary a word from any company who plans on implementing it. Thankfully for us all, that changes today. Starting in mere moments, Wi-Fi Direct devices will begin the certification process, and while we couldn’t extract exact product details or a release time frame for future wares on a media call regarding the announcement, we did get the impression that at least a few partners were trying to get Wi-Fi Direct wares onto shelves before Christmas.

As for functionality, the claims are fairly impressive. In order to make a direct device-to-device connection over WiFi, just one of the two need to be Wi-Fi Direct certified. In other words, a Wi-Fi Direct printer can recognize and interface with your Latitude D410 laptop from 1999, as all Wi-Fi Direct certified devices have to be able to control the one-to-one relationship. The goal here is pretty simple — it’s to create a protected connection between two devices over WiFi with as little hassle as possible. Think Bluetooth, but using WiFi. We also learned that “most” products certified will also support “one-to-many” connections, enabling a Wi-Fi Direct laptop to be in contact with a printer, connected HDTV and a tablet simultaneously, with no router in-between at any point. We should also point out that while 802.11a/g/n is supported over 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, there’s no requirement for Wi-Fi Direct products to support 802.11b, so legacy users may want to pay attention to that quirk.

There’s also no new hardware requirements here, so in theory, any existing WiFi chipset could be upgraded via firmware to handle Wi-Fi Direct — whether or not that’ll happen on a large scale was a question the Wi-Fi Alliance couldn’t answer for us. Finally, they noted that the app ecosystem is likely to make this whole rollout a lot more interesting, particularly considering that Direct is simply a pipe that software can dictate as it sees fit. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the developments here; we’ve waited way too long for this to blossom, but we’re pretty jazzed about the possibilities. Head on past the break for a video overview of how Wi-Fi Direct works.

Continue reading Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon

Wi-Fi Direct certification begins today, device-to-device transmission starting soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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by Chris Foresman, Ars Technica

At long, long last, the Macbook Air has been updated. But if you were hoping for enough CPU muscle in the new models to keep a bunch of Flash-addled webpages from bringing the entire portable to its knees, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed — the Core 2 Duo is still with us in the new models. In fact, the 11-inch Macbook Air actually trails its predecessor in clockspeed, while the 13-inch model hasn’t changed at all.

Given that Apple really went all-out to upgrade the rest of the Air package, the choice of a geriatric CPU is a giant slap in the face to Intel’s latest portable processor options. Apple looked at Arrandale, Intel’s 32nm CPU with a northbridge/GPU combo integrated into the same package, and said, “No thanks, but do you have any more of the really old chips?” Ouch.

We hate to say we told you so, but we told you so — twice, even.

When Intel unveiled the Arrandale ULV parts for ultraportables a few months back, it was obvious that they were not destined for the Macbook Air. The problem wasn’t so much the CPU part of Arrandale — even though the ULV variant is indeed deficient in the cache and clockspeed departments when compared to the Core 2 Duo — the problem is the GPU.

The multicore GPU integrated into the NVIDIA 320M handily spanks the (admittedly improved) Intel integrated graphics glued onto the Core i-series processors. And it’s also compatible with OpenCL, something Intel has yet to support in its IGPs. Apple argued that the improved graphics power of the 320M was more important than improved CPU processing power when designing the recent 13-inch MacBook Pro update — that same logic (though you may disagree with the decision) still applies here.

That’s not the only problem. The dual-chip packages are considerably larger than the small-outline packages for the low-voltage Core 2 Duos originally introduced on the first MacBook Air. Even with the integrated northbridge and GPU, Arrandale processors still require a separate controller. The combination simply couldn’t fit on the MacBook Air’s minuscule logic board. Instead of giving up room to shoehorn in updated processors, Apple instead chose to improve the MacBook Air’s battery capacity. With seven hours of promised life without any need for an external battery, it can be argued that this is a useful trade-off.

Finally, we have to consider the 11-inch MacBook Air. While its bigger brother offers a 1.86-GHz or 2.13-GHz CPU, the smaller sibling is left with just 1.4-GHz or 1.6-GHz options. The reason for the difference here is simple: thermal design. The slower processors clock in at just 10W TDP (7W less than those used in the 13-inch models) making it much easier to cool the inside of the tiny 11.6-inch casing.

The combination of Core 2 Duo processor and NVIDIA 320M graphics is more powerful than the Atom and Intel IGP combo used in notebooks of similar size. While some comparable ultraportables use newer Arrandale chips in them, most also cost significantly more than the revised MacBook Air models. Apple decided to trade maximum performance for increased battery life and portability and still offer a lower price than the previous generation. Whether that tradeoff is worth it (and we’ll be checking this as we review the new models) is up to users to decide.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

Photo by Brian X. Chen / Wired.com.

See Also:

• Apple Unleashes New MacBook Airs
• Hands-On With Apple's New MacBook Airs
• Thank You Apple, for Killing the Optical Drive at Last
• Mobile-Inspired Upgrades Define Apple's PC Strategy

Apple and Google may be sitting on their piles of cash, but Intel sure is dipping into its reserves in a big way these days — the company has just announced that it’s following up its nearly $8 billion acquisition of McAfee with a multi-billion dollar investment in upgrades to its factories in Arizona and Oregon. That investment will total between $6 billion and $8 billion, and include the development of an entirely new fabrication plant in Oregon, in addition to upgrades at the two existing facilities that will allow Intel to move forward with its 22-nanometer manufacturing process. As you can no doubt guess, the investment will also be quite a boon to both areas — Intel says that the upgrades, which will take place over “several years,” will create as many as 8,000 construction jobs and between 800 and 1,000 permanent jobs at the facilities. Head on past the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Intel announces plans to spend up to $8 billion on U.S. factory upgrades

Intel announces plans to spend up to $8 billion on U.S. factory upgrades originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 19:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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