Filed under: Transportation
McDonalds to offer ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Arrington's incorporated a separate company, called CrunchPad, and has apparently spent two-thirds of the last six months working on it with his 15-man team from Fusion Garage.
It's been iterated a bunch before, but worth saying again, that the Atom-powered touchscreen CrunchPad is strictly for internet consumption—it boots directly into the WebKit browser and there's no hard drive or keyboard, though you can plug in a keyboard if you want. It does support for Flash, so Arrington's claim that compared to netbooks, "most people will find it works as good as a netbook or better" for getting their internet on sounds pretty reasonable, given its 12-inch screen. Pointedly, it's not meant to compete with Apple's mythical tablet, whenever it graces the world.
I'd take the under $300 CrunchPad over a netbook any day, since it seems like it'll surpass them at the one thing they were supposedly designed to do—eat the internet. And it still blows my mind it took a tech blogger to actually make it happen. [! Bits]
Filed under: Displays
Samsung's XL2370 'highest performance' 1080p monitor goes global in August originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Jul 2009 01:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
The drive is one of few things easily upgradable on these devices. On the Dell Mini 9, its a matter of removing two screws on the back plate, and two screws that hold the drive in place (which, if you've never seen a netbook SSD drive before, looks more like a RAM module.) The 64 and 128MB modules take up the space reserved for the WWAN card, so don't go that route if you have WWAN.
While I was able to restore my Mac OS X Time Capsule backup, it wouldn't boot til I used the DellEFIbootmaker (allows you to boot into the drive you just restored) and then ran DellEFI to restore the partition to a bootable condition. Oh, the Leopard install process which you use to restore won't read off of a Time Capsule, so you have to copy the restore file to a USB drive before hand. Anyhow, none of this is the point.
Look at how much faster the writes are, especially the random ones. The only sacrifice you end up with is a bit of big block read performance.
It's a bit of a shame the stock SSDs h! ad these compromises in the first place, though. If you're buying a netbook, its worth checking the forums for results like these on the models you're interested in, and perhaps buying a low capacity stock model, and upgrading to an aftermarket drive later. (The Super Talent drive I tested wasn't cheap, though, at $200 for the 64GB model and $380 for 128GBs.) Kind of ridiculous next to the cost of a $200-$300 netbook, I admit. *shame*
One other thing to consider: The runcore SSD upgrades for netbooks have little microUSB ports on them, so you can load up and back up files/images from another machine. Handy for Hackintoshing, for sure, but I think they top out at 64GB, taking up only a single wide form factor.
[Super Talent Dell Mini 9 SSD]
Crave got a little hands-on with the svelte Atom-powered Archos9, and without even thinking about it, published their post calling it a fairly accurate capacitive touchscreen. That makes us happy: Tablets, especially a little guy like this 9-incher, need as accurate tracking as they can muster. Archos's previous "tablets," the Archos 5 and 7, used mushy resistive touchscreens that worked okay but are firmly last-gen right now, and we're excited to see a slick capacitive interface with the highly-touchable Windows 7 OS.
Yet in Archos's press release for the Archos9, they list the screen as resistive. Now we trust Crave, and we believe that they (like the rest of us) can tell the difference with each finger press. So what's the story here? Crave doesn't seem to have any idea; all the documentation says resistive, but it certainly didn't feel that way to them. This may seem like nitpicking, but it might be a dealbreaker for us. Handwriting recognition is far worse with resistive screens, they can only pick up one signal at a time (so multitouch is out), and the screens thems! elves ar e often much muddier or washed-out looking than capacitive.
So help us out, Archos. We want to like this thing, we really do, but we'd like to know what we're dealing with first. Anyway, full presser below. [Crave]
ARCHOS REDEFINES MOBILE COMPUTING WITH ITS TABLET PC
New Ultra-Thin and Ultra-Fast ARCHOS 9 PCtablet Delivers Full PC Computing, Video Conferencing and Access to Media on a Full Touch Screen Handheld Device.
DENVER, CO – July 2, 200Your browser may not support display of this image. 9 ARCHOS is leading the innovation charge in the MiniPC market with the introduction of the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet. This new PCtablet combines the performance of a high-end PC with breathtaking design, excellent ergonomics and an astonishing touch interface. It gives PC users an entirely new way to work, stay connected and enjoy the Web and digital media on an ultra-thin and extremely fast full touch-screen tablet.
The ARCHOS 9 PCtablet is the ultra portable PC; extremely thin, just 0.63", and ultra lightweight, less than 22.29 oz. The ARCHOS 9 pushes the boundaries of style and function.
With a full touch-sensitive 9" screen, users can enjoy a comfortable computing experience. The resistive screen allows emails and documents to be composed easily via a built-in virtual keyboard. The innovative optical trackball and buttons allows easy navigation on screen, and provides an uncompromised PC experience.
The ARCHOS 9 features the new Z515 Intel® processor, Microsoft Windows 7® Operating system and an integrated multimedia platform that uses WiFi 802.11b/g connection and Bluetooth 2.1 for extremely fast computing anywhere, anytime.
Additional software includes Microsoft Office®, Web TV & Radio, video conference, antivirus, parental control, photos and movies edition applications and more.
The ARCHOS 9 PCtablet will be available this fall, 2009.
Posts
