Hasta La Gadget!

Along with Vizio’s new tablet, we had a chance to look at the HDTV maker’s new Android device, unsurprisingly dubbed the Vizio Phone. The phone is still in the early stages (both the hardware and software aren’t production ready at all), but there’s a lot of promise on both the industrial design and user interface sides. We had a chance to go hands-on with the phone and take a pretty deep look at the UI, so follow along after the break for lots more info and a complete video walkthrough of the Vizio Phone!

Continue reading Vizio Phone hands-on preview

Vizio Phone hands-on preview originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s Christmas Day, which probably means that at least one toy that you received (or gave) won’t be fully functional until Monday. Why? Batteries. It’s an age-old problem, that “batteries not included” thing, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve fell so in love with Sanyo’s Eneloop line. Without question, the Eneloop rechargeable AA batteries are amongst the best and most reliable that money can buy, so whenever another Eneloop product pops out, it obviously catches our eye. Sanyo’s branching out pretty severely with its latest device, and being that at least 3.5 members of the Engadget staff have strummed a six-string once or twice, we had to take a closer look at the Pedal Juice when given the chance. For those that missed last month’s introduction, this pedal-sized block of energy is designed to provide 9V power to six or seven effects pedals, miniature amplifiers or electric drum pads (amongst other musical doodads). So, does this thing live up to the Eneloop reputation? Find out after the break.

Continue reading Sanyo Eneloop Pedal Juice battery pack preview

Sanyo Eneloop Pedal Juice battery pack preview originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Dec 2010 22:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The LG Star. The dual-core beast from the east that was once a mere twinkle in our eye has managed to find its way to the Engadget mansions, having been lent to us by a very generous (and very anonymous) tipster. It’s clearly a test device, as evidenced by its diagnostics menus and lack of a lockscreen, but there’s no disguising the power that lies within it. We put the Star through a battery of common Android benchmarks and the results were, in a word, outstanding. Basically, Tegra 2 will give anything your current phone‘s running an inferiority complex. Join us after the break as we delve deeper into this upcoming powerhouse of a handset from LG. One thing’s for sure: CES 2011 can’t come soon enough.

Continue reading LG Star preview

LG Star preview originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 11 Dec 2010 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, would you look at what showed up on our frigid doorstep this morning? That’s right, we are now the proud owners of Google’s first Chrome OS laptop — the Cr-48. Obviously, we ripped open the box and got right to handling the 12.1-inch, Atom-powered laptop. So, what does the thing feel like? How’s that keyboard? And more importantly, how’s Chrome OS looking? Stand by for our impressions, which we’ll be adding in depth over the day. First impression: this thing is different. Here are some quick bullet points, one of our favorite formats for presenting data in a list:

Hardware

• The entire body is made of a soft, beautiful matte black. It feels very Droid-like, just a little less rubberized.
• Overall, it looks a lot like a black MacBook, including a magnetic latch with a split spot for getting your finger in and lifting the lid, a very similar keyboard, and a similar hinge design.
• There’s on of those large Envy-style clickpads. It has great multitouch scroll, and great general mousing feel (better than most Windows laptops), but it also has some of that Envy trouble of disliking a finger floating on the lower part of the pad. Basically, you have to click or mouse, you can’t be doing both at once.
• The matte screen overwhelms us with gratitude. Thank you, Google. Thank you.
• There’s ultra-wide ctrl and alt buttons on the left side, thanks to the lack of a Windows Key.

Software

• It starts up instantly, and it’s actually really hard to tell if we’ve put it into standby or not because there are no drive noises, and we haven’t hit upon any fan noise yet either.
  
• We’re having trouble installing Photoshop.
• Our apps haven’t synced over from our desktop’s copy of Chrome, which must be a still-forthcoming feature.
• You need an internet connection for the very first setup and login, but you can login to an existing user while the device is offline, and access anything that’s cached or HTML5-stored on the device — like some of those new Chrome Web Apps.
• While wake from standby takes less than a second, a cold boot takes around 15 seconds to get to the login screen, and another 6 or 7 seconds to login after you’ve entered your password.
• The remainder of our impressions will be about Poppit!.
• Flash is really bad, both with general applications and particularly with video. Adobe hasn’t built Flash acceleration yet for Linux, and there’s not a hardware acceleration chip, either. Hulu is like a slideshow, YouTube works, but not great.

The most important thing to remember is that this product is in no way designed for the mass market, and it’s up to Samsung, Acer, and other forthcoming third parties to actually build the hardware we’ll end up buying in the long run. Still, there seems to be a lot here that laptop manufacturers of all sorts could take note of, and generic-ified or not, the Cr-48 is pretty striking.Developing…

Google Cr-48 Chrome laptop preview originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 13:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s flipped the switch on extending iTunes preview clips to the totally revolutionary length of 90 seconds. Only songs that last for two and a half minutes or longer and a limited number of artists are benefiting from this change — which seems to be of Apple’s unilateral doing — and it’s only effective in the US iTunes Store. Trust us, we checked our UK accounts and were met with those mediocre, entirely unsatisfying 30-second previews on everything. We reckon there’s still a little more intrigue left in this tale, particularly when it comes to propitiating the record labels and securing international deals, but we’ll leave those negotiations to the well shaven dudes in expensive suits — for you and us, there’s a whole load of Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West stuff to go and preview.

iTunes’ 90-second song previews go live, on select songs and US-only for now originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 02:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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