Lifestyle

Nvidia has been teasing us with its Tegra platform for months and today the company and its partners had some substantial plans to announce and devices to show.

First, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage and introduced the Tegra processor. The processor, which aims to be extremely low-power, is made up of eight independent processors including ARM 11, ARM 7, GPU, 2D Engine, HD Video Encoder, HD Video Decoder, Audio, and Imaging.

“We are enabling a revolution. We are focusing only on products where the visual experience is vital to its users,” Huang said. Tegra is meant for small form-factor handhelds and for notebooks.

The Tegra platform will run Microsoft CE6 and Nvidia has created a user interface that lies over the basic operating system. The company has also teamed up with Adobe and Tegra will support full Flash and Flash accelerator. The processor and platform will also support full HD (1080p) playback.

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Today, Dell announced the Studio 14z, a 14-inch thin-and-light starting at a student-friendly price of $649. Curiously, despite its screen size it has no optical drive. That’s a design move we’ve grown accustomed to with netbooks, but don’t expect with larger screen systems. In any case, in part thanks to the lack of an optical drive, its starting weight is a very reasonable 4.3 pounds and it’s just .79 inches thick at its thinnest point.

The notebook also boasts FailSafe protection, a feature similar to LoJack for Laptops, which uses IP addresses to track a computer if it’s been reported stolen. Additionally, its USB ports can charge gadgets even when the notebook is powered down. Finally, it comes with Dell Remote Access software.

Consumers can choose from Intel Pentium, and Core 2 Duo processors, and hard drives with capacities as large as 500GB. A six-cell battery, Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics, and 1.3-megapixel webcam are standard. Upgrade options include Bluetooth and a Blu-ray drive.

The Studio 14z comes in six colors: Black Chain Link, Midnight Blue, Spring Green, Plum Purple, Ruby Red, and Promise Pink (if you buy the latter, Dell will donate $5 to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a charity that raises funds for breast cancer research). It starts at $649, and is available today online for U.S. and Canadian customers.

Notching 3.5 stars, Lenovo’s original IdeaPad S10 was a solid netbook but it had its drawbacks, including a cramped keyboard and a standard three-cell battery. Lenovo wasn’t ashamed to admit its shortcomings and fixed both of those main issues in its new IdeaPad S10-2.  For $349.99 the newest netbook on the block looks to make the competition shudder. We had some time to play around with the S10-2 a few weeks ago and came away impressed; check out our impressions and video of the system in action below.

The S10-2 differs most from its predecessor in looks. It has a rounder look and, according to the company, is .4 pounds lighter and .1 inches thinner. Instead of the matte lid of the original, it has a glossy cover (available in black, white, pink and gray) with adorned with a repeating pattern that looks strikingly similar to Target’s Bullseye. Surrounding the system are 3 USB ports (the first only had two), a 4-in-1 card reader, VGA and a head and mic jack. Lenovo nixed the Expresscard/34 slot of the original S10.

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Consumer Report’s June rankings for laptops are out, and Microsoft isn’t going to be too pleased. While the company’s aggressive advertising campaign emphasizes PCs’ low cost, Apple MacBooks dominate the upper echelon of the organization’s rankings.

The report, which is available on the Consumer Reports site, but only to subscribers, encompasses performance, design, versatility, battery life, screen quality, and technical support. Unfortunately, the ratings are so biased and the rating system so opaque, it sounds like CNBC’s Jim Goldman was running the Consumer Reports test lab.

High Ratings for Macs

In the 13-inch category, the leaders were the Unibody MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the last-generation plastic MacBook with scores of 62, 60, and 55, respectively. The HP Pavilion dv3 came in fourth place, just behind the plastic MacBook. More on the wacky scoring system further down.

The MacBook Pro led the 15-inch category with 75 points, followed by the Toshiba Satellite M305, which won 64 points. The Sony VAIO FW from the Microsoft’s third PC ad received a score of 62 points.

In the 17-inch category, the MacBook Pro steamrolled the competition by an even wider margin, winning 80 points when the top PC got 64. The HP Pavilion dv7 from the first PC ad got 54 points, placing fourth.

Now, for the analysis:  I call shenanigans. (Full disclosure: I own a Mac, and love it, and I still call shenanigans.)

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It looks like you won’t have to switch to Sprint for a little webOS lovin’ after all. At least that will be the case if the rumors surrounding the new Palm Eos are legit.

Earlier this morning, The Boy Genius Report showed off a blurry image of Palm’s follow-up to the Pre. It looked a lot like a BlackBerry Bold was stretched vertically, but details were slim other than the foggy photo shot.

This afternoon, Engadget released a clearer image, specs, and a name for the new webOS phone. It’s codenamed Castle and dubbed the “Eos.” It sports quad-band GSM/HSDPA support in the 850/1900 bands, which means it could run on AT&T’s network.

The Eos measures 4.3 x 2.1 x 0.45 inches (that’s right, less than a half inch thin) and has a 2.6 inch 320 x 400 capacitive touch-screen display. Other features include 4GB of onboard storage, a 2-MP camera, POP/IMAP e-maill, GPS, and Bluetooth.

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Acer officially launched the first Nvidia Ion powered computer with its nettop AspireRevo last week, and like we have been hearing for months now, the Nvidia Ion netbooks are on the way.

Pocket-Lint.com is reporting that a number of companies are preparing to announce Nvidia Ion powered netbooks in June and many of them will be available as soon as July.

The site’s source was hesitant to reveal which companies would unveil Ion netbooks, but “confirmed that there will be some big announcements from ‘key’ players at Computex, the annual PC trade show in Taipei at the beginning of June.”

Nvidia’s Ion graphics solution combines Intel’s Atom processor with GeForce 9400M graphics.  We reviewed the Ion Reference Design and were impressed with its graphics performance and are drooling to finally see it hit netbooks.

Remember your first cell phone? How about your first laptop?

LAPTOP recently delved into the annals of gadget history to find the game-changing devices that started it all and the stories behind them. For instance, the first cell phone was developed in the early 1970s, but wasn’t officially released until 1983, when the FCC decided what to do with it. Remember the Rio MP3 player? It beat Apple to the punch with its 1999 debut, so why did it fade into the background while the iPod went on to dominate the MP3 market?

Read all about the game-changing gadgets, their back stories and what their inventors envision for gadgets of the future here. Then sound-off in the comments on your first piece of mobile tech.

Facebook today released the latest version of its BlackBerry app. While much of the interface layout looks the same, there’s a new integration with your address book, as well as a few enhancements to how you can interact with your friends.

When you view your friend’s status update timeline, you can now click on your friend’s profile picture and choose to write on your friend’s wall, or comment on their status. Notifications are also delivered to your home screen.

How to Integrate with your Address Book
To connect a friend’s information with your existing phone book, simply choose “Connect to BlackBerry Contact.” When your friend calls, you’ll see their most recent Facebook photo pop up on your screen.

You can even have birthday reminders stored in your BlackBerry Calendar.

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Today, Microsoft launched Exchange 2010 in public beta. The popular server software, which works with Outlook to make e-mail and calendars accessible on a plethora of mobile devices, boasts lower operating costs than the current version, Exchange 2007. A series of new features also address another problem: distracting office e-mails.

Lower Operating Costs

Exchange 2010 does several things to lower costs for businesses. For one, IT managers will have more choices in licensing and delivery options. Specifically, they can choose to deploy Exchange on premises, as a service from Microsoft and its partners, or both.

Secondly, direct-attached storage has dropped in price, which Microsoft estimates can save companies up to 85 percent on storage costs. The server also promises better disaster recovery software, which will save companies time (and possibly money) on calls to their IT departments.

Better E-Mail Etiquette, Guaranteed

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We’re live at the Acer event, where we just had the chance to go hands-on with the T4810, the 14-inch member of Acer’s just-announced Timeline line of 13.3, 14, and 15.6-inch notebooks. The Timeline series start at $699 and promise 8-10 hours of battery life in tiny, light form factors.

The T4810 we got a chance to play with had a 1366×768 14-inch screen, 2GB of RAM, and a 1.2  GHz  Intel CULV U3300  Core 2 Solo processor. Acer tells us the system will have an SSD option, but the unit on display had a 120GB Seagate Momentus 5,400 rpm drive.

In our few moments with the Timeline, we were struck by how light it felt in our hands, how bright the screen was, and how cool the temperature remained. We were also impressed with how unobtrusive the battery was - it barely stuck out of the bottom.

Despite its slim battery, Acer promises the system wiill get between 8 and 10 hours of endurance. It also promises a new green AC adapter that uses only 0.1 watts of power after a system’s battery is fully charged. We look forward to teesting the Timeline, which is expected to ship in early June, as soon as review units become available. Until then, check out our hands-on video and gallery below.

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