Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been following WHDI’s story for quite awhile now, and Brite-View looks like it will be one of the first to bring the wireless HD technology to laptops with its HDelight. The setup is pretty self explanatory — you’ve got a larger-than-we’d-like box that hooks up to your laptop via HDMI and then a even larger box that attaches to a monitor or HDTV. The Brite-View guys had a demo running at the Netbook Summit, and we found ourselves quite impressed — thanks to the second-generation 5GHz WHDI chip, there’s no noticeable latency when streaming 1080p video from the laptop to the larger display. According to Brite-View, the delightful product (sorry, we had to) will ship this summer for some amount under $150. Not a bad deal, but even if the quality is better than Intel’s WiDi, you really can’t beat the convenience of having the technology built-in to your laptop — though, WHDI’s CEO promises a similar solution by the end of the year. Jump on past the break for a quick video of the HDelight in action (and the full presser, too).

Continue reading Brite-View HDelight brings WHDI to laptops and netbooks

Brite-View HDelight brings WHDI to laptops and netbooks originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 15:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, Acer may already have the Ion 2-powered Aspire One 532g in its arsenal, but who’s going to complain about two more HD-capable, 10-inch netbooks? Showing some serious love to AMD, the Acer Aspire One 521 and Gateway LT22 both pack new 1.2GHz AMD V105 processors along with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4225 graphics. The latter is what had us most impressed when we caught some time with the duo at the Netbook Summit — the 521 and LT22 handled 1080p WMV video and light gaming without any stuttering. We’ll hold our real performance conclusions until we can test the battery life on these bad boys, but other than that they look like decent netbook contenders with the standard 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drives. And unlike the typical Atom netbook, they have HDMI ports. We can’t say we’re the biggest fans of the 521’s in-your-face Aspire One branding on its glossy cover, but the LT2203 delights with its textured matte lid. No word from Acer on the availability and pricing of these here in the US, but hit the gallery below for some imagery, or the source link even further below for a video of these two in action.

AMD netbooks: Acer Aspire One 521 and Gateway LT22 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 17:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been a long, long time coming for Pentax lovers with big hands, but the medium format 645D is finally nearing completion. Announced way back in March of 2007, the former 30 megapixel concept is now a 40 megapixel monster, relying on a Kodak-sourced 44 x 33mm sensor that’s more than twice as large as those found on your average DSLR. To make room, the camera itself is naturally bulky, but the control layout is said to be very similar to the K7, so users should be able to get up to speed quickly — after performing the requisite number of bicep curls and bench presses to prepare, of course. There’s an overview video of this $10,000 studio-bound beast after the break, and plenty more photos at the source link.

Continue reading Pentax’s medium-format 645D previewed, is a lot of camera to love (video)

Pentax’s medium-format 645D previewed, is a lot of camera to love (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 May 2010 11:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With that hotly-anticipated May 12th release date just around the corner, you might be wondering how Steam on Mac will perform. You’re in luck, because some of our favorite Mac news sites have just finished testing the software’s closed beta. The verdict? It’s practically the exact same as the Windows version, except there’s almost nothing to buy. Save for the Growl-like notifications at the top of the screen, the UI is all but indistinguishable, and as promised,data and purchases (if playable) automatically carry over in their entirety from your Windows Steam account. Team Fortress 2 even has cross-platform capability, allowing Mac users to play online with their Windows counterparts, though several journalists noted you might want to invest in a two-button wheel mouse if you don’t want to be found out. Source Engine performance on Mac wasn’t quite as good as on Windows in tests using the exact same hardware (thanks, Boot Camp), but admirably comes close nonetheless; Electronista was able to maintain a similar framerate in Portal just by disabling two levels of anti-aliasing. Not all Mac users will be able to partake in these games, however; though a MacBook Pro with a discrete 512MB GeForce 8600M card could run them well and a GeForce 9400M laptop managed on low settings, those with only integrated Intel graphics chips might find themselves in for a painful surprise.

Read – Electronista
Read – MacRumors
Read – MacWorld
Read – AppleInsider

Steam on Mac preview roundup: all but identical to PC originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 May 2010 18:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We just spent a few minutes playing with the beta version of Skyfire 2.0 for Android that was released today, and we’ll cut to the chase: this is easily the best browser we’ve used on the platform. Clearly we’ll need to spend more time with it to make sure it can handle all the typical sites you’d want to visit while you’re on the road — but loading the desktop version of Engadget is always a great barometer for this sort of thing, and this browser rocked it. Rendering is about as reasonably fast as you can expect it to be (on our Snapdragon-powered Nexus One, anyhow), and everything we saw displayed spot-on perfect (save for embedded Flash, of course), but if you’re in a situation where you don’t need to see the full page or it looks screwy, you can toggle it to send an Android user agent right from the app’s toolbar below the URL field. It works just about as well as Steel and the built-in browser on a G1 we tested, and Flash videos work just fine there as well.

The browser touts compatibility with Flash videos, too, so we headed over to YouTube to try our hand at it; it immediately detected the presence of a video and popped up the so-called “SkyBar” at the bottom of the screen, where you can press the Video button to load the video in a new window. It doesn’t work embedded in the page, but considering how small your phone’s screen is, that’s really for the best — you get the full-screen experience, and in our testing, it looked fantastic. One downside is that you don’t seem to be able to scrub videos while they’re playing, but maybe this is something these guys can get patched up for the final release. Follow the break for our full video!

Update: One annoyance we’ve noticed is that pinch-to-zoom works in “steps” — it’s not smooth, which makes it pretty weird to use, but remember that Opera Mini doesn’t support it at all.

Continue reading Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android video preview!

Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android video preview! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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