Hasta La Gadget!

Ever tried watching Hulu or YouTube on a netbook? If your machine didn’t crash immediately, it probably choked and struggled its way through the clip. Nvidia’s latest system-on-a-chip, Tegra, could make your next netbook a veritable video powerhouse.

“It is basically a full motherboard on a PCB (printed circuit board) the size of a pack of gum,” says Mike Rayfield, general manager of the handheld GPU, or graphics processing unit, business at Nvidia.

At the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, Nvidia said PC manufacturers such as Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron and Mobinnova plan to release Tegra-based netbooks by the end of the year.

Tegra is the latest of several attempts by chip companies to carve out a slice of the rapidly growing netbook market, where sales are expected to nearly double to 21 million units this year from the year before.  Most netbooks run Intel’s Atom processor, which isn’t powerful enough to handle the demands of video or audio playback. Nvidia, whose GPUs are optimized for rendering video, animation and graphics, is betting it can fix that. However, to get a foothold in netbooks it will compete not only with Intel but also Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, a chipset that promises better power management, and Via’s Nano. The Nano appears in only a few netbooks but powers the Samsung NC20 to surprisingly good results in Wired.com’s review.

Tegra includes an 800-MHz ARM CPU, a high-definition video processor, an imaging processor, an audio processor and an ultralow-power GeForce GPU in a single package. The different processors can be used together or independently while consuming very little power, says the company. And devices based on Tegra could be available to consumers by the end of the year.

“This is the  most advanced ultralow-power computer on a chip,” says Rayfield. “We think it will bring the high-resolution experience we are used to on notebooks and desktop computers to netbooks and other mobile internet devices.”

Last year Nvidia launched Ion, a family of chips that aim to bring better graphics capability to low-cost computing devices. Tegra is completely different, says Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

“Ion is a chipset that pairs graphics capabilities with an Intel Atom CPU,” he says. “Tegra takes the graphics core and combines it with a CPU that is not an x-86 class.”

The Tegra family will include the Tegra 650 processor, which can run Windows Embedded CE or Google Android, and the Tegra APX 2500 processor, targeted at Windows Mobile smartphones.

The idea is to make mobile devices more powerful, capable of running high-definition video, even as they improve on power efficiency, says Rayfield. The Tegra 650 can offer about 130 hours of audio processing and 30 hours of high-definition video playback.

“What we are talking about here is that with Tegra you can get 120 times longer battery life while listening to music than with the Atom processor and about 10 times more than Snapdragon,” he says.

Still, netbook makers are not likely to rush into Nvidia’s arms. Nvidia is betting the appetite for music and video will drive demand for its products but it may have underestimated the stranglehold that Intel exerts. “In the netbook market, their chances with Tegra are not great,” says McCarron. “So it is possible that we could see them emphasizing Tegra-based devices in geographies such as China that are more receptive to non x-86 architecture.”

Photo: Tegra chip/Nvidia

If you are reading this post from your mobile device or from your wireless laptop at a coffee shop, your Internet habits are in the minority, according to a Monday report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

About 39 percent of the population embraces technologies that allow for on-the-go access like smartphones and wireless-enabled laptops, but 61 percent of people polled by Pew prefer to stay in their less connected comfort zone.

“Not everyone has the wherewithal to engage with ‘always present’ connectivity and, while some may love it, others may only dip their toes in the wireless water and not go deeper,” wrote report author John Horrigan, associate director at Pew.

That is not to say that this group is sticking to dial up and eschewing cell phones – many have mobile phones and high-speed access — but they are not exactly going to be lining up at the Apple store for the next iPhone or blowing their paycheck on the Palm Pre.

The report split this 61 percent into five groups: the desktop veterans, drifting surfers, information encumbered, the tech indifferent, and off the network. Desktop veterans (13 percent) are likely to have embraced the Internet early on but are content to remain on desktops with high-speed Internet connections, and are not particualarly interested in the mobile web. Drifting surfers (14 percent), meanwhile, have the tech hookup, like cell phones and high-speed access, but just don’t make the effort to go online very much. If they do, it is for basic information, and this group would not be bothered if they had to give up their cell phone or the Web.

What group do you fall into? Check out the full report on the Pew Web site.

Japanese telecom carrier NTT DoCoMo has introduced the first cellphone  in Japan to run Google’s Android mobile operating system. The phone called HT-03A is expected to be introduced in June or July, said the company. It is part of NTT DoCoMo’s summer line-up of 18 new devices.

The Japanese cellphone running Android OS comes nearly seven months after T-Mobile introduced the G1 cellphone in America, also the first in the world.

Like the G1, the HT-03A has also been produced by Taiwanese company HTC.  Not surprisingly, the two are near-identical in terms of their form factor. Both devices sport a large touchscreen and the familiar button configuration at the bottom.

The HT-03A has a 3.2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, 3.2 inch touchscreen, microSD card slot, Bluetooth and GPS. It will also have access to Android’s app store, the Android Market.  And will support Japanese characters through additional software. The device is available in white and black.

More pics of the phone.

Photos: HT-03A/NTT DoCoMo

For quite some time now, the number of people in the U.S. that have dropped landlines in favor of cell phones has gradually increased. However, it seems we’ve reached a milestone. According to the Associated Press, the number of U.S. households opting for only cell phones has for the
first time surpassed those that just have traditional landlines.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey released Wednesday said that fully 20 percent of U.S. households only had cell phones in the second half of 2008. That’s a three point increase since the first half of 2008–a big jump, statistically speaking–and also three points higher than the 17 percent of households with landlines but no cell phones.

For comparison purposes, in 2003, just three percent of households were wireless only, whereas a whopping 43 percent had landlines but no cell phones yet. In the meantime, about 60 percent of households have both landlines and cell phones. The report attributed the accelerated shift to the recession, and the fact that the cell phone offers extra features–namely, mobility and texting, among others–that landlines generally don’t have.

Nokia is planning a big app store launch with its Ovi brand here in the U.S., but it looks like things just got a little more complicated. Originally, Nokia was going to set up integrated carrier billing. This way, when you buy an app or media content, or sign up for a service, the cost would just be added to your next cell phone bill.

Unfortunately, for an undisclosed reason, that’s no longer going to happen, according to The Guardian. This isn’t necessarily a big deal, since RIM and Apple don’t offer integrated billing either–each one requires you to have Paypal and iTunes Store accounts, respectively. But it’s still not great news, especially since Nokia is struggling to get carriers to pick up any of their high-end, higher-profit smartphones here in the states.

Nokia is also cutting 360 jobs in its Internet Services division, as the vendor moves to integrate more properties under the Ovi Store umbrella, according to the report.