Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

2011 Audi A8 gets factory-installed wireless hotspot option

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/25/2011-audi-a8-gets-factory-installed-wireless-hotspot-option/

We'd heard that the 2011 Audi A8 would be getting a UMTS modem in mid-2010 to help with things like Google Earth, and it looks like Audi has now delivered that and more -- it's just announced that the car is the first anywhere to be available with a factory-installed WLAN hotspot option. That will apparently let you either drop your SIM card into the car's on-board system or pair your phone with it via Bluetooth, and then share wireless internet access with up to eight WiFi-enabled devices at speeds up to 7.2 mbps -- assuming you actually need any more devices than the two dozen or so that are already built into the car, that is.

Continue reading 2011 Audi A8 gets factory-installed wireless hotspot option

2011 Audi A8 gets factory-installed wireless hotspot option originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 02:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell Streak official: exclusive to O2 UK in early June

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/25/dell-streak-official-exclusive-to-o2-uk-in-early-june/

Let's all feign surprise now, as Dell has just gone official with its worst kept, though perhaps sexiest, secret ever. The former Mini 5 has been christened the Streak and is launching at the beginning of next month. The UK will be getting the first bite at this cherry, with the rest of Europe following soon thereafter and the US a disappointingly distant third with a launch "later this summer." If you've been living under a (Round) Rock, this is Dell's big foray into the smartphone market: a 5-inch supersized Android handset, housing a 1GHz Snapdragon, a 5 megapixel cam, 16GB of built-in memory (expandable to 48GB via MicroSD) and a customized UI. Curiously, Dell's opting to market the Streak as "the ultimate portable tablet pc" and would prefer that this device, albeit fully equipped to carry out cellular calls like a phone, not be called a smartphone.

We got a chance to play with it during a briefing in London recently, and frankly, aside from the snazzier paintjob, there's nothing new to report. Just like the prototype unit we've previewed to exhaustion, the device on hand was running Android 1.6 and Dell's skinning team hadn't yet laid on the goodies that we've been promised. The battery is the same 1,530mAh cell as before, and we even managed to get the browser to crash in the exact same fashion that our own Streak exhibits on occasion. Now that's consistency. We're not being told the specific Android version that the Streak will ship with, but a couple of flavors are being mulled over right now. Till we get more info, we suggest sitting back, relaxing, and perusing the gallery below for the roaring red number that's currently on show. It won't be available at launch -- you can have any color so long as it's black -- but "a range of colors and designs" will swiftly follow to sate any aesthetic concerns. Video and full press release after the break.

Update: The Carphone Warehouse listing for the Streak shows Android 1.6 as the OS with an "OTA upgrade available soon." Pair that with word direct from Dell that Android 2.2 and Flash 10.1 are coming "later this year," and you can connect your own dots [Thanks, Azza].

Update 2: O2's website now has a precise date for us: June 4.

Gallery: Dell Streak official: exclusive to O2 UK in early June

Gallery: Dell Streak official pics

Continue reading Dell Streak official: exclusive to O2 UK in early June

Dell Streak official: exclusive to O2 UK in early June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 05:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG Display busts out 84-inch 3DTV with 3,840 x 2,160 res, we want the 2D version

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/25/lg-display-busts-out-84-inch-3dtv-with-3-840-x-2-160-res-we-wan/

Yesterday we brought you Samsung's 19 inches of transparent AMOLED goodness, today LG counters with an 84-inch 3DTV boasting UHD resolution and a claim to being the world's biggest of its kind. To be honest, at that size you really can't get away with old reliable 1080p, so it's comforting to see LG's keeping pixel pitch in mind when designing its headline grabbers. In other news coming out of the SID 2010 show, LG is demonstrating a "liquid lens" TV that'll give you glasses-free 3D, though the details of how that works are a bit scarce, while the company's also pushing its IPS wares in a big way, with a 47-inch HDTV, a 32-inch pro monitor, and a 9.7-inch (sounds familiar) smartbook on show. Also at 9.7 inches, we have color e-paper that's slated for mass production before the end of the year, while that flexible e-paper from January is also making an appearance. A pretty comprehensive bunch of goodies from LG, we'd say.

LG Display busts out 84-inch 3DTV with 3,840 x 2,160 res, we want the 2D version originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 05:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola's 4.3-inch Droid Shadow found in a unicorn gym?

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/25/motorolas-4-3-inch-droid-shadow-found-in-unicorn-gym/

Color us highly skeptical of the backstory, but Gizmodo claims to have received a picture of Motorola's rumored 4.3-inch Droid Shadow. The device above was supposedly left behind at a Verizon corporate gym in Washington. As the story is told, a gym employee managed to snap the photo above and identify an HDMI jack, 8 megapixel camera, Snapdragon processor, and 16GB of storage before the handset was remotely locked and the owner returned to claim it. Suspiciously, there's only one photo of the device shown at precisely the same angle as the supposedly leaked "getting started" image seen three days ago -- right, just enough time to cobble together a Photoshop. The refined Motoblur UI seems to align though so who knows... really, who knows?

[Thanks, Aaron]

Motorola's 4.3-inch Droid Shadow found in a unicorn gym? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 06:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: 'world's fastest' mobile GPU now official, landing in June

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/25/nvidia-geforce-gtx-480m-worlds-fastest-mobile-gpu-now-offici/

NVIDIA has just announced that the GTX 480M, the mobile re-spin of its extravagantly overpowered Fermi desktop parts, will be arriving in the middle of next month. Touted as the world's fastest mobile graphics processor, this chip will bring 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to up to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. These are clear and convincing advances over the incumbent Green Team leader, the 360M, but things start to look a little worrying when we check the 480M's clock speeds. The processor speed is nearly halved from the desktop GTX 480, at 850MHz, the memory does only 1,200MHz, and the graphics run at 425MHz -- we didn't know anything worthwhile even operated below 500MHz these days. Either way, you're getting a computing powerhouse, with the 480M's 897 gigaflops comfortably dwarfing its predecessor's 413 and promising almighty tessellation performance. What it all means with regard to keeping your frame rates up while traversing the Terminus Systems, we can't yet say. We'll let the benchmarking gurus figure it out -- go past the break for the full press release and spec sheet.

Continue reading NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: 'world's fastest' mobile GPU now official, landing in June

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480M: 'world's fastest' mobile GPU now official, landing in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 May 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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