Hasta La Gadget!

Oh, don’t act surprised. As is the norm with these things, Dish Network has filed a countersuit against DirecTV. Last month, the latter company filed suit, claiming Dish’s “Why Pay More” ads were false and misleading. The countersuit, unsurprisingly, is also false and misleading advertising — in this instance, the claim “nothing comes close to the reliability and quality of DirecTV.” Dish asserts its signal reliability is exactly the same, 99.9 percent. Better strap yourself in, it’s gonna be a long and bumpy ride through the court system.

Dish Network countersues DirecTV over signal reliability claims originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Say all you want about how bad your local forecast is, it’s way more accurate than our local solar forecast. The last time we checked, solar storms are said to knock out GPS temporarily sometime in the next two years — the kind of window that would make even the most suave meteorologist smirk. With the launch of the new Solar Dynamics Observatory we’re hoping NASA can shrink that window down by, oh, at least a few months. The probe lifted off yesterday, perched atop an Atlas V rocket, and is now orbiting Earth. There it will study our sun with a series of optical and magnetic sensors, beaming data back at a rate of 150MBit/sec, making us ever so slightly jealous that this thing can get a better signal in space than we can down here on the surface. The launch fireworks are embedded below for those who weren’t glued to NASA TV yesterday morning.

[Thanks, Pavel]

Continue reading Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video)

Summer-loving NASA engineers launch SDO probe to worship the sun (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 08:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So it’s been a long day, you plop down on the couch, turn on the TV and grab your laptop and a cold beverage. But while you’re watching that re-run of The Office on TBS you come across an awesome video on the web – probably the Engadget Show – and instead of watching that expensive 40-inch HDTV you end up staring at the smaller screen. Okay, so maybe that’s our specific scenario, but you’d probably hook up your laptop to a TV in a number of different situations if it didn’t involve cables, dongles, and extra software — basically if it were just easier. Well, it’s supposed to be with the $999 Toshiba Satellite E205 and its included Netgear Push2TV adapter.

Exclusively sold at Best Buy as part of its Blue Label program, the 15-inch Core i5-powered laptop is outfitted with Intel’s Wireless Display — what we’ve taken to calling WiDi — which wirelessly connects the laptop to any HDTV using the included Netgear with just the push of a button. But can you really watch Hulu on the big screen without leaving your couch? And is the E205 even a laptop you’d want to use in the first place? We’ve been “testing” it — or watching loads of web video on our TV — for the last couple of days to find out. Read on for our full review!

Continue reading Toshiba Satellite E205 (with Intel Wireless Display) review

Toshiba Satellite E205 (with Intel Wireless Display) review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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These didn’t quite make it off the boat before CES, but if it’s a new Toshiba laptop you’ve been searching for, you can still get some satisfaction before the end of this month. The outfit has just announced that four of its machines are available in the US starting right this very moment, including the 15.6-inch Tecra A11 (starts at $879). This one packs an integrated numpad, NVIDIA GPU, an undisclosed new Intel CPU and a charcoal black chassis. Moving on, that Qosmio X500 workhorse that we first heard about late last year finally has its shipping papers (and a $1,549 starting point), bringing with it a Core i7-720QM processor, a GeForce GTS 360M GPU, 8GB of memory, an 18.4-inch display, 500GB (7200RPM) hard drive, a Blu-ray drive and a vivacious color scheme that’s guaranteed to polarize. The Satellite Pro L450 and Satellite Pro L500 are also slipping out to the suits in attendance, but with price tags starting at $529, the spec hounds probably won’t be drooling much here.

Toshiba ships Tecra A11, Core i7-packin’ Qosmio X500 and more originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LAS VEGAS — Toshiba this week introduced a high-end notebook powered by the newest Intel chips.

The Satellite A505 is a 16-inch notebook focused on home entertainment. Customers can choose between the Intel Core i3 (2.13GHz dual-core), Core i5 (2.2GHz dual-core) or Core i7 (1.6GHz quad-core) processors.

That’s a lot of numbers, right? What you mostly need to know is the Core i7 is Intel’s high-end mobile chip at the moment, and having a quad-core notebook will be pretty intense. Most premium notebooks last year shipped with dual-core processors, such as Intel’s Core 2 Duo, which is now the previous-generation Intel mobile chip.

The A505 features a high-definition widescreen display and “Resolution+” upconversion software that Toshiba claims will make even standard-definition DVD look more like high-definition. Configurations are available to add a Blu-ray player, an LED backlit keyboard and a slot-loading DVD drive.

The A505 is priced between $770 and $1,250 depending on the options you choose. More specs are as follows:

• Optional NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 1GB DDR3 discrete graphics memory
• Optional NVIDIA GeForce 310M with 512MB DDR3 discrete graphics memory
• 6GB DDR3 memory (max 8GB) memory configurations available
• Premium A/V components and upscale styling
• Two harman/kardon speakers
• Dolby Sound Room audio
• HDMI-CEC output

Photo: Toshiba