02/13, 6:30pm
Huawei may have high-end phone, tablet in MWC show
Huawei's media event at Mobile World Congress may have already been spoiled early after company chairman Yu Chengdong possibly spoiled it in his Weibo profile. The February 26 Barcelona event would purportedly include the Ascend D1 Q, a presumably quad-core cousin of the Android 4.0-based Ascend P1 S. Its choice of chip wasn't mentioned, but would most likely be NVIDIA's Tegra 3 given the company's own event and other phones coming from Fujitsu and HTC.
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02/12, 12:15am
We review Dell's smaller XPS performance notebook
The 13- to 14-inch notebook screen size is currently one of the hottest areas of competition right now: it's where Apple, HP, and others start off their higher-end models. Dell has certainly been one of the most active in this space and has brought its high-end XPS line to that space through the 14z. We'll check in our Dell XPS 14z review whether the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Sony VAIO S, or comparable rivals will feel the strain.
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02/09, 6:20pm
Gaming laptop features 3rd generation Core i7 CPU
Samsung's new Ivy Bridge powered gaming laptop has popped up at the company's US website and is available for pre-order. The 17.3-inch NP700G7C-S01US is powered by a third-generation and so far unannounced 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM quad-core processor. It comes paired with a similarly unofficial, discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675M for graphics.
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02/08, 11:00pm
NVIDIA likely to show HTC Endeavor at MWC
NVIDIA has sent out invitations to a special event at Mobile World Congress that's likely a strong clue of what at least one partner will show at the event. It plans to show more "quad-core firsts," hinting that a Tegra 3 phone will appear at the event. Most likely, the reference is to either the HTC Endeavor or the upcoming Fujitsu Arrows phone.
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02/08, 9:05am
NVIDIA and Rambus sign five-year pact
Rambus on Wednesday struck a deal with NVIDIA to license its patents. The deal extends for five years and is in return for ending Rambus' lawsuit as well as any other legal action. Other details were secret, Rambus said.
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02/07, 7:40pm
Desktop replacement sports 6-core Intel CPU
Cleveland-based AVADirect is accepting pre-orders for a new gaming portable that integrates one of the refreshed, Sandy Bridge-E Intel Core i7 desktop processors into a laptop form factor. The Clevo P270WM is a 17.3-inch desktop replacement that can come equipped with either a 3.2GHz or 3.3GHz Extreme Edition chip. It can also house dual NVIDIA mobile graphics chips in SLI.
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02/06, 8:10pm
Dual-chip GTX690 tops list
NVIDIA's 2012 Kepler-based GPU lineup may have been revealed ahead of an official announcement. A list of alleged specs posted by EXPreview suggest the card range will be built from three different GPUs, including the GK110 produced from a 550mm² die. The flagship GTX690 is said to integrate two GK110 chips, for a total of 3.5GB of memory, with a 1.5GHz shader clock and a 4.5GHz memory clock.
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02/06, 5:55pm
Apple gets closer to using macroscalar name
Apple late last week quietly filed for a US trademark that shows it possibly getting closer to having its own chip architecture. After having slowly filed trademarks in countries outside the US, such as Trinidad and Tobago, the joint USPTO and Hong Kong application caught by Patently Apple suggests that Apple has been continuing development on a project it could be willing to show soon. Mentions of work had started as early as 2004.
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01/31, 11:35am
PadFone coming to MWC, ASUS invite promises
ASUS will bring its long-delayed PadFone device to the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona at the tail end of February, confirming earlier rumors. This news comes from ASUS itself, who sent out a media invite shared by Android Central. The PadFone was introduced in May and is actually two devices in one, with a 4.3-inch smartphone at the core and a 10-inch tablet serving as a dock and larger screen.
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01/30, 5:15am
Notion Ink CEO Rohan Shraven offers SoC insight
Notion Ink CEO Rohan Shraven has taken the unusual step of explaining why his Android-based tablet company opted to follow its NVIDIA Tegra 2-powered Adam tablet with a TI OMAP 4 processor for its Adam II . Rather than plumping for the quad-core Tegra 3, Shraven argues that the TI OMAP platform offers Notion Ink certain advantages. As a small vendor, with its limited software and hardware engineering resources, it believed that it could not leverage the NVIDIA Tegra 3 as well as it can the TI OMAP 4, leading to a better implementation for end users.
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01/28, 4:55pm
NVIDIA said pushing Kepler, trashing Radeon 7900
NVIDIA was accused this week of using dishonest marketing to try to skew gamers towards its next-generation Kepler graphics hardware. Posters in the ChipHell forums claiming to have details of the new graphics core were reportedly discovered to be NVIDIA marketers. They made bold claims about Kepler's prices and performance in what appeared to be an attempt to downplay AMD's Radeon HD 7900 line.
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01/27, 5:50pm
USPTO rules last of 3 core Rambus patents invalid
Rambus' litigation campaign suffered a possibly fatal setback Friday after the USPTO pushed word that it had invalidated the final patent out of three the company has been using to sue a large part of the technology industry. Having quietly made the decision on Tuesday, the patent office's appeals board left Rambus without any of the patents it has been using to sue NVIDIA, Hynix, HP, and others. The first two had been scrapped in September.
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01/27, 9:00am
ASUS Transformer Prime plagued by locking too
ASUS technical marketing overseer Gary Key has responded to complaints from Transformer Prime owners for another flaw. Responding to some reports on XDA-Developers' forums that the tablet freezes randomly after loading up the Android 4.0 update, Key anticipated a fix in early February. He hadn't pinpointed the cause, which didn't appeared to be tied to running any specific app or using the Prime for certain periods.
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01/24, 8:50pm
NVIDIA GPUs to drop because of drive shortages
NVIDIA gave further clues of PC revenue decline with its own outlook warning. It expected its revenue for the quarter ending in January to be $950 million, or $166 million lower than what it had predicted in the fall. It blamed hard drive shortages for a ripple effect, where the inability to ship enough PCs meant that they either couldn't ship PCs at all or had to sacrifice a graphics card for a more expensive hard drive.
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01/22, 12:50pm
Acer Iconia Tab A510 and A700 get Euro launch info
A pair of updates following a press event in Hamburg have given likely release dates for Acer's Iconia Tab A700 and its more mainstream A510 equivalent. Both Tablet Community and Tablet Test expect the quad-core Android 4.0 tablets to arrive in April. Production for at least the A510 was expected to start in February or March.
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01/20, 7:10pm
Sports Tegra 2 1GHz chipset and 16GB of storage
A few days later than expected, Acer's new Tegra 2-based 10.1-inch tablet has gone on sale in the US. The Iconia Tablet A200 is now available at Best Buy. The tablet had been anticipated to arrive on US shores this Monday.
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01/20, 2:10pm
Quad-core LG phone shows in leaked image
LG's first quad-core handset, carrying the working name of X3 thus far, has been spotted by PocketNow. It would get the same NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip as used in the Transformer Prime tablet from ASUS and would run Android 4.0. Along with this, the early specs would give it a large 4.7-inch, 1280x720 display and a thickness of less than 0.35 inches.
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01/18, 3:15pm
Early entry for a quad-core processor in a phone
HTC may be changing its codename for its new as-yet-to-be-released quad-core handset. Pocketnow reports that the company's future flagship phone would be referred to internally as the Endeavor instead of the Edge as it was previously known. In the global retail market, the smartphone may be branded the Supreme by the time it ships.
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01/18, 12:05pm
TSMC hints at big mobile, PC resurgence
TSMC in trimming back its expectations for 2012 also gave a possible clue as to a big mobile push early in the year. Company CFO Lora Ho anticipated a double-digit climb in demand for processors both in home electronics and PCs, implying some level of mobile technology. CEO Morris Chang added that the US would do relatively well in 2012, and that most of the poor performance would come from Europe and Japan.
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01/17, 11:55pm
Alienware X51 biled as smallest gaming PC ever
Dell's Alienware badge ventured into small form factor desktops for the first time late Tuesday. The X51 is billed as the smallest gaming PC desktop ever at no more than 13.5 inches at its largest dimension. Even with a 3.7-inch thick width, it can not only fit up to a GeForce GTX 555 desktop graphics card but replace this, the hard drive, and the RAM as new technology comes through.
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01/17, 4:40pm
Ideum 65-inch 3D Presenter made for public spaces
Ideum, which makes Microsoft Surface-like computer tables such as the MT-50, has now revealed its 65-inch MT65 Presenter display that hangs vertically, on a wall. The multi-touch 3D display is meant for public consumption and is thus covered by tempered glass. It can recognize and track up to 32 touch points.
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01/16, 8:25pm
OTA update doesn't recognize device serial numbers
Late last month, after several delays, ASUS began shipping its much anticipated Transformer Prime tablet, but with Android 3.2 instead of Android 4.0. The company promised that it would begin offering an over-the-air (OTA) update to early adopters on January 12. ASUS met that deadline, but xda developers reports that owners are experiencing problems with updating their slates.
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01/13, 2:25am
Razer 2012 lineup tested at CES
We had the opportunity to explore Razer's whole CES 2012 lineup this week. The company kicked off the year by shipping the Blade and revealing thhe Naga Hex mouse, but its true surprise was exploring tablets with Project Fiona. We'll see how all three have fared after the break.
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01/12, 8:40pm
We try Audi's new Tegra-based dash system
Audi used CES to unveil a new take on its car interface based on NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 chip, and we got to try it for ourselves on the CES show floor. The new approach promises a much more discreet but also simpler and more powerful approach to controlling the car and its media than before. Read on for an early look.
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01/09, 2:40am
We try Lenovo's two CES 2012 tablets
Lenovo had a surprise in store after it confirmed the IdeaTab S2 by giving a preview of its K2 cousin: the second model will run on a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and carry the same 1080p screen concept as the Iconia Tab A700. Both, however, are part of a Lenovo strategy to make up for the rough start from the K1. We tried both ahead of CES and got to see if it will be much of a threat to the iPad.
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01/09, 12:55am
Toshbia Excite X10 to reach US
Toshiba's Excite tablet, or the AT200, received its US debut on Sunday as the Excite X10. The Android 3 tablet is due to arrive before the end of the month in 16GB and 32GB versions. Unusually, though, Toshiba is hoping to ask for a premium above an iPad, asking $530 for a 16GB version and matching Apple at $600 for the 32GB edition.
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01/08, 7:00pm
Lenovo to show six new desktop PCs at CES
Lenovo will bring six desktop computers to CES this week, including four IdeaCentre all-in-ones from the B-series, the easily upgreadable H520s and the slim IdeaCentre K430. The IdeaCentre B540 uses a 23-inch frameless touchscreen with 1080p resolution and an integrated VESA mount that can be equipped with 3D capabilities. It can be equipped with NVIDIA's GeForce GT 650M graphics card with 2GB of RAM and DirectX 11 support.
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01/08, 5:25pm
Acer shows A700 tablet with Tegra 3
At the end of Acer's live event, Acer teased the Iconia Tab A700. While not mentioning it by name, the company confirmed that the Android tablet was quad-core -- already known to be using the Tegra 3 -- and played HD video as proof. It gave no details or a release date.
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01/05, 1:55pm
Iconia Tab A200 coming on January 15 for $330
Acer's upcoming budget-priced Iconia Tab A200 tablet is due to arrive on January 15 in the US, priced at $330. Its specs will include a dual-core, 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 10.1-inch, 1280x800 touchscreen display. While Android 3.2 will initially be onboard, it will be updated to Android 4 sometime in mid-February.
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01/05, 1:05pm
TelyHD living room HD video chat supports Skype
A young company by the name of Tely Labs has just released a Skype-compatible HD video calling system for the living room. Its just-launched telyHD set-top has the ability to call Skype users on their smartphones, notebooks or desktop PCs. There are no monthly fees for this service, but users do need the set-top connected to their HDTV and have a free Skype account.
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01/05, 12:00am
Lenovo updates ThinkPad Edge ahead of CES 2012
Lenovo's lead-in to CES has included three new ThinkPad Edge models. Fronting the pack, the S430 has an 0.8-inch thickness bordering on ultrabooks but still keeps to regular notebooks: it uses Ivy Bridge-era Intel Core processors and is one of the first Windows PCs with Thunderbotl, giving it very high speed storage and displays on one cable.
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01/02, 9:35pm
Toshiba 6th gen tablet with quad Tegra 3 appears
Old benchmarks just discovered this weekend hint that Toshiba might already have a replacement for the Excite tablet in development. Although only labeled as the "Tostab06," a generation ahead of the Excite, the Android device originally marked at Anshouji in October has the same 1.4GHz clock speed as a quad-core Tegra 3. Its benchmarks are also fast enough to match up with those of the Tegra 3-equipped ASUS Transformer Prime and are much faster than any other tablet.
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01/01, 2:30pm
Sony cuts Tablet S to 400 dollars
Sony produced signs it was looking to clear stock of the Tablet S on Sunday as it cut prices across the board. Both the 16GB and 32GB versions of the Android tablet have dropped by $100 to start at $400 and $500 respectively. No indications exist yet that it's clearing stock.
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12/27, 3:50pm
Acer Iconia Tab A200 due in UK January 6
The recently introduced Iconia Tab A200 from Acer has just shown up at UK retailer Very in both black and red versions. The listing reveal the price of the 10.1-inch tablet to be £299 (about $470) after tax, with North American prices likely to be lower than that if it crosses over. Both are similar apart from color.
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12/23, 2:55pm
Legal cases against 5 others continues
Rambus on Thursday said it had signed a patent license deal with Broadcom. In conjunction with the five-year agreement, the two companies have settled a legal battle that began last year when Rambus sued Broadcom and five other semiconductor makers of copying its memory technology as well peripheral connectivity technology. No other details of the agreement or settlement have been released.
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12/22, 11:55pm
Razer CEO explains Blade delay
Razer chief Min-Liang Tan stated this week that the Blade's SSD upgrade would lead to the gaming notebook missing the holidays. The switch to the much faster storage happened at the "eleventh hour," he said, making it impossible to ship in 2011. The first models of the 17-inch notebook would ship in mid-to-late January instead.
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12/22, 12:30am
AMD Radeon HD 7970 retakes speed lead
AMD on Thursday retook the top spot for single-card graphics speed through the Radeon HD 7970. The video card is the first anywhere to use a 28 nanometer chipmaking process and uses this to pack 2,048 cores, or a third more than the Radeon HD 6970 it's replacing. Performance comes also through a newly widened 384-bit memory bus, PCI Express 3.0, and a full 3GB of GDDR5 memory, again a record for a single-chip card.
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12/21, 7:10pm
Hasbro says ASUS stole Transformer name without OK
Hasbro late last week sued ASUS for allegedly violating its trademarks with the Transformer Prime. The toy designer claims ASUS is too close to blending the Transformers and Optimus Prime names. In a statement, Hasbro asserted that ASUS was effectively banking on association with the legendary animated show, comics, and toys to sell the Transformer Prime.
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12/19, 7:55am
Best Buy and Amazon delay ASUS Transformer Prime
ASUS' claims of the Transformer Prime arriving on time have been cast into doubt on Monday. In spite of an intended launch Monday, new reports from Engadget readers buying from Amazon have seen their orders "inadvertently cancelled" and ask them to pre-order again with a $10 gift card as compensation. Best Buy, meanwhile, has told advance order customers that theirs have been "back-ordered" by one to two weeks.
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12/16, 6:40pm
Foxconn, NVIDIA announce joint venture in China
Foxconn Electronics and NVIDIA have teamed up on a new research and development center in Tianjin City in northern China, Digitimes revealed on Friday. It will focus on smartphones and tablets along with cloud computing. Foxconn chairman Terry Guo and NVIDIA CEO Huang Jen-hsun were at the signing ceremony, but didn't reveal financials or other details on the joint venture.
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12/14, 6:50pm
May have Android Ice Cream Sanwich preinstalled
ASUS Italy has revealed on their Facebook site that the availability of the Transformer Prime tablet has moved back until the end of January. The company has apologized to potential customers for the device not being available in time for the Christmas shopping season. The Italian arm of ASUS also indicated that corporate HQ had decided that the tablet worldwide will have Wi-Fi, but not 3G.
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12/13, 9:25pm
NVIDIA drops proprietary lock on CUDA tech
NVIDIA took a major step towards spurring growth of its CUDA general-purpose code technology for video cards on Tuesday by posting the CUDA source code. Developers and education now have access to a variant on the LLVM compiler that will let them add new processor types and languages. The extension could see CUDA run on AMD's Radeon hardware, Intel's integrated graphics, and even use relatively old code like Fortran.
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12/11, 1:55am
ASUS quickly dampens Transformer Prime rumors
ASUS quickly responded to NCIX's claims of a Transformer Prime delay by issuing a countering response. It claimed to SlashGear that the warnings of missing the December 19 target weren't official. The suggestion was made either that NCIX didn't have full details or that an outsider had fed bad information.
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12/10, 7:45pm
ASUS to give up market share to fix Wi-Fi range
ASUS encountered a large setback in its attempt to take the tablet market with the Transformer Prime late Friday. Online retailer NCIX messaged pre-order buyers at Phandroid and elsewhere that the quad-core Android tablet had been delayed "worldwide" and likely wouldn't make Christmas, if not the whole year. The Wi-Fi range on the metal-shelled tablet didn't "meet their standards" and was being improved before shipments started.
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12/10, 6:45pm
Toshiba Thrive 7 ships Dec 11 but yet has no price
A Toshiba teaser confirmed Saturday that it would ship the Thrive 7 to the US on Sunday, December 11. The company's second tablet in the country will arrive as promised, albeit after a three-month wait. Unusually, Toshiba made no mention of the price, although it's presumed the starter 16GB version will cost less than the $399 for an 8GB 10-inch Thrive.
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12/08, 2:05pm
Razer to ship gaming laptop in time for holidays
Razer's gaming notebook,
the Blade, should soon be available for pre-order and shipping in time for Holiday gift giving. The portable was
announced in August and targets gamers looking for a truly mobile playing experience. Razer claims the laptop's thin black design with silver highlights was inspired by the Army's KA-BAR combat knife.
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12/07, 1:35pm
LG Optimus Pad LTE shows up in South Korea
An LTE version of LG's Optimus Pad tablet has shown up in South Korea. It runs on the country's U+ 4G network and gets a faster, 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor rather than the 1GHz Tegra 2 of the original. Its dual five-megapixel cameras for 3D also look to have been replaced with eight-megapixel units.
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12/07, 8:45am
NVIDIA 600M starts with slight upgrades, rebadges
NVIDIA on Wednesday formally introduced GeForce 600M notebook graphics with what's now known to primarily be a respin of the 500M series. The 610M, 630M, and 635M are all parallels to the 520MX, 540M, and 555M, but all edged down in the lineup to be considered more affordable parts. The 635M does get an upgrade in support for faster 3.6GHz equivalent GDDR5 memory, giving it a higher 57.6GB per second of bandwidth over the 555M's 50.2GB.
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12/06, 6:55pm
Android sluggishness dissected versus iOS
Recent Google intern and soon-to-be Microsoft intern Andrew Munn has given an explanation as to why many Android devices are considerably laggier and less responsive than iOS or Windows Phone devices. While iOS puts graphics drawing as a real-time priority and lets users manage which priorities can be rendered in the background, Android treats the interface as a normal priority. As a result, Android devices can often bog down when they're trying to conduct other tasks at the same time.
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12/05, 1:45pm
PadFone to get Tegra 3 CPU, debut at MWC?
The ASUS PadFone will be officially unveiled at the Mobile World Congress show in February, a source told Engadget. At the same time, NetbookNews's Nicole Scott believes the device will be powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU like the Transformer Prime tablet, and not the Snapdragon S4, as previously believed. As its name suggests, the PadFone will be a hybrid device which docks a smartphone into a tablet element.
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