Hasta La Gadget!

You’ll be forgiven for being a little misty on who exactly Orbitsound is — the British company has only sold its T12 soundbar in the domestic market — but today it’s reminding everyone of its presence with a brand new product for CES-goers in the T14 you see above. The company’s patented “spatial stereo” sound is still the big selling point, promising a revolutionary aural experience that eliminates the need to occupy the traditional sweet spot for enjoying stereo sound. That’s achieved via six 2.5-inch drivers and a studio-class amp that “senses” surrounding acoustic conditions and calibrates output for best results. A bold claim, to be sure, but you’d expect no less for something that will cost $600 when it becomes Orbitsound’s first global launch later this year. Wireless technology is also put to good use, with the T14 communicating through the air with its accompanying subwoofer and wireless iPod / iPhone dock. We’ll be tracking one down while here in Vegas and trying to figure out just how spaced out its sound really is.

Continue reading Orbitsound T14 soundbar debuts at CES, will take its sweet time getting to market (hands-on)

Orbitsound T14 soundbar debuts at CES, will take its sweet time getting to market (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, look at you Europe, with your white Christmas blizzards and your fancy satellites. All proud and bragging as your second internet-beaming vehicle in as many months rockets off into orbital oblivion. Following November’s Hylas 1 is Ka-Sat, using the same spotbeam technology to rain down limited, focused areas of connectivity that are a couple-hundred kilometers across, allowing better management of overall satellite bandwidth. Hylas 1 used its beams to cover areas across the UK and Eastern Europe, while Ka-Sat will cover more areas of Europe and also hit parts of the Middle East. Maximum speeds offered to subscribers will be 10Mbps down, 4Mbps up, but with only 900Mbps on tap total per beam we’re thinking that could get a little slower on Saturday nights. Obligatory countdown and blastoff video below.

Continue reading Eutelsat’s Ka-Sat blasts off for adventure and good uplink speeds (video)

Eutelsat’s Ka-Sat blasts off for adventure and good uplink speeds (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 09:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An analyst note released by research firm IDC yesterday points out that in the nearly two months since Windows Phone 7’s retail release, the Windows Marketplace has swelled to 4,000 applications — a number that the Android Market took five months to reach. That’s impressive, no doubt, and the analyst behind the numbers notes that he “would not be surprised if Microsoft had the third largest app portfolio in the industry by the middle of next year.” Now granted, hitting number three would take very little effort on Microsoft’s part — they’d just have to beat webOS, BlackBerry OS, and Symbian, none of which have sparked iOS- or Android-like levels of developer interest. So beyond that, what does the growth mean? Read on!

[Thanks, Stephen]

Continue reading Windows Phone 7’s Marketplace grows faster than Android did at launch, doesn’t mean much

Windows Phone 7’s Marketplace grows faster than Android did at launch, doesn’t mean much originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s taken AMD a long time to refresh the top end of its graphics hardware, but today’s culmination to that wait has to be described as somewhat bittersweet. Sweet, because we’re finally getting a successor to the venerable HD 5870, one that offers improved power management and tessellation performance at a lower $369 price point, but also bitter because in terms of sheer firepower, the Radeon series doesn’t seem to have made quite the leap many of us had hoped for. The new top of AMD’s single-GPU pile, the HD 6970, offers 1,536 stream processors, an 880MHz core clock speed, and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 5.5GHz for a total of 176GBps of memory bandwidth. Its partner in crime, the HD 6950, is expected to list at $299, for which saving you’ll have to sacrifice some clock speed (down to 800MHz) and processing units (1,408 in total). There’s a neat little addition to both new boards: a Dual-BIOS switch that will act like Google’s hardware jailbreak toggle on the Cr-48, allowing tweakers to unlock the extra (unprotected by warranty!) performance headroom in their cards.

Early reviews all seem to agree that both the Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 have struck a very fine price-to-performance ratio. The 6970 manages to spar with the much pricier GTX 580, but given that it’s priced similarly to NVIDIA’s GTX 570, it scores plaudits for being a more than viable alternative. The HD 6950 is seen as the real value item here, however, particularly since it occupies a relatively unique spot in the price range, and most reviewers tipped it as their new bang-for-the-buck leader.

Read – HardOCP
Read – AnandTech
Read – Tech Report
Read – Guru3D
Read – PC Perspective
Read – Hot Hardware
Read – techPowerUp!
Read – Hexus
Read – TechSpot

Continue reading AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 launch assault on enthusiast gaming market

AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 launch assault on enthusiast gaming market originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Took ’em long enough, don’tcha think? After talking things up for years (and getting dangerously close to pulling the trigger in mid-2008) NASA has finally ejected a solar sail into space. But that’s not the kicker — it managed to eject NanoSail-D from a microsatellite, dubbed FASTSAT. We’re told that this “is the first time NASA has mounted a P-POD on a microsatellite to eject a cubesat,” and sure enough, things have gone swimmingly ever since the mission began on Friday. Aside from giving NASA the ability to test out the effectiveness of using a solar sail in orbit, this also proves that FASTSAT is a “cost-effective independent means of placing cubesat payloads into orbit safely” — that’s according to Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Moreover, the NanoSail flight results could lead to new methods of de-orbiting space debris in the future, not to mention get more and more of ’em there to begin with at a lower overall cost and with far less hassle.

NASA successfully launches NanoSail-D solar sail from microsatellite in space originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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