Hasta La Gadget!

Canon’s EOS-1D Mark IV has been slinking around at retail availability for some time now, and while we brought you plenty of sample imagery from the camera over a month ago, it’s taken awhile for the thing to get the full review treatment. Digital Photography Review has finally done the deed, dedicating a whopping 33 pages to Canon’s low-light, 1080p wunderkind. It’s that last new feature, video, that the review finds fault in, with the same jellyvision we’ve seen on other HD-shootin’ DSLRs (seemingly no worse here than elsewhere), but the review feels that the movie mode here doesn’t feel sufficiently integrated with the camera. Meanwhile that low-light, high-ISO shooting performance is impressive, but not quite up to the performance of the Nikon D3S. Everything else, though, seems to be a nice evolution over the older Mark III — if you have a similarly advanced budget.

Canon EOS-1D Mark IV survives marathon 33 page review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, Hivision — always up for making us chuckle. Just weeks after we spotted the outfit’s $149 netbook with a lackluster Cortex A9 processor, along comes this: the PWS700CA. Reportedly, the company is still scouting distributors in order to get this thing out to the masses, but if all goes well, it could be sold to end users for right around a Benjamin. What makes this one marginally interesting, though, is the fact that Android is on board; yeah, it’s not like Google’s mobile OS is really cut out for netbook use, but it sure beats the browsing experience found in Windows CE. The device you’re peering at above will eventually ship with a 600MHz ARM926 processor, 128MB of RAM, a 7-inch display (800 x 480 resolution), 720p video playback support, WiFi, Ethernet and the usual complement of ports. Hop on past the break for a look at how it fared in testing, and feel free to ping Hivision directly if you’re feeling all distributor-y.

Continue reading Hivision’s Android-based PWS700CA netbook gets video review, may sport sub-$100 price tag

Hivision’s Android-based PWS700CA netbook gets video review, may sport sub-$100 price tag originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Signal booster. There, we said it. Quick — what immediately comes to mind? We’re guessing you’re suddenly disgusted by the fact that you paid $19.99 (plus a nominal shipping and processing fee) for one of those worthless stickers back when your Snake-laden Nokia candybar had the worst reception of all time, but Wilson Electronics’ Sleek is a horse of a different color. Our good pals over at Gadling were able to test out the Sleek after catching it at CES, and amazingly enough, they found that it worked exactly as advertised. It’s engineered to be mounted in a car so that your phone can rest in the cradle while you use some sort of headset to communicate, but an AC adapter is available for those who need a boost indoors. The only real downside (besides the steep $129 asking price) is that you can’t very well have your mobile in the cradle and the cradle upside your head. Unless, of course, you’re still looking to relive the days when Sidetalkin‘ was all the rage. Man, where’s the N-Gage when we need it?

Wilson Electronics Sleek signal booster reviewed: surprise, it works! originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whoa, Nelly! Just weeks after Intel came clean with its new Pine Trial nettop and netbook platform, the company is today cutting loose with a few more. This go ’round, we’ve got the 32nm Arrandale (which consists of the Core i5 Mobile and Core i3 Mobile) heading for the laptops and the 32nm Clarkdale chips over on the desktop front. Starting with the former, most reviews found the CPU + GPU solution to be faster than rivaling Core 2 Duo + integrated GPU options, with the Core i5 being particularly potent in highly threaded applications. Better still, battery life didn’t seem to take a hit even with the extra performance, though high-end, high-res gaming was still a lesson in futility when working without a discrete graphics card. Overall, the chip was a welcome addition to the fold, but we got the feeling that the first wave was priced too high and offered too little of a performance increase on the gaming side to really warrant a wholehearted recommendation. As for the Clarkdale? The Core i5 661 that everyone seemed to snag was found to be blisteringly fast, with most folks deeming it the outright champion in the dual-core realm. Unfortunately, the integrated GPU was — again — not awesome for hardcore gaming, and the questionable pricing didn’t exactly thrill some critics. Do yourself a favor and dig into the benchmarks below — we get the feeling we’ll be seeing oodles of machines hit the wires this week with these chips within.

Arrandale reviews
Read – HotHardware
Read – AnandTech
Read – Tom’s Hardware
Read – PCPerspective
Read – Legit Reviews

Clarkdale reviews
Read – NeoSeeker
Read – HotHardware
Read – HardOCP
Read – TechSpot
Read – AnandTech
Read – PCPerspective
Read – Legion Hardware
Read – Overclockers Club
Read – Bit-tech

Intel’s Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs get benchmarked for your enjoyment originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 01:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We hate to be the bringers of bad news, but it looks like the Archos 9 might be serving as a bit of a morality tale, showing why and how PC hardware and software might not be quite ready for the large form factor tablet experience. That’s not to say there aren’t some plusses to the device pointed out by UMPC Portal in its review, like the great build quality and style of the tablet, the sensitive, flush touchscreen, and some great connectivity, but the sum seems less than its parts. The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the 1.1GHz Atom Z510 processor, which is sluggish and single-threaded, and Windows 7 Starter, which is lacking in the standard Windows 7 tablet functionality. We don’t know all the reasoning at play here, but the result is a slow computer with a hacked-on touchscreen keyboard at a $550 pricepoint that doesn’t the hit handheld UMPC size sweetspot and can hardly stand against a netbook in cost or utility. Sounds kind of mean when we say it like that, doesn’t it?

Archos 9 reviewed: too big, too slow, too ‘Starter’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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