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Monday, November 08, 2010

Samsung shows off 70-inch 'Ultra Definition' 3DTV

Continuing a fine tradition of large, high resolution prototype displays, Samsung Electronics picked today to show off its latest innovation, in the form of the world's first 70-inch, "Ultra Definition" 240Hz 3DTV. That UD tag indicates a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels that puts your current HDTV and even larger projection 1080p 3D units to shame. The big deal in this version is the super high speed silicon Samsung has developed to drive all those pixels fast enough to support smooth motion and 3D viewing -- glasses still required, of course.

Continue reading Samsung shows off 70-inch 'Ultra Definition' 3DTV

Samsung shows off 70-inch 'Ultra Definition' 3DTV originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rocketfish serves up 4-port WirelessHD kit, wireless headphones

Remember the FlyWire? Time to fuhgettaboutit it. While Belkin saw fit to kill the flagship wireless HDMI product of the last decade, a number of other firms have moved forward with similar ideas -- thankfully for far less cheddar in many cases. Take this guy, for instance. Best Buy's in-house Rocketfish label has just introduced a four-port WirelessHD kit, which consists of two separate pieces that work in unison to pipe 1080p content from up to four HDMI sources (one at a time, obviously) to a single HDMI-equipped display. It's utilizing the same 60GHz WirelessHD protocol that's been hanging around for years, and supposedly it can operate with around 33 feet of space between boxes. There's support for 3D video, CEC remote functionality and surround sound, and it'll even auto-sense which HDMI socket is active and change over to that one for you. At $299.99, it's definitely one of the cheaper ways to cut an HDMI cable from your setup, but only time will tell if artifacting is an issue. In semi-related news, Rocketfish is also debuting a set of wireless cans at $119.99, with the full details on those waiting just after the break.

Continue reading Rocketfish serves up 4-port WirelessHD kit, wireless headphones

Rocketfish serves up 4-port WirelessHD kit, wireless headphones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 09:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD reviewed: blisteringly fast in every conceivable way

Hard to say why OCZ Technology pushed out revision two of its RevoDrive so soon after the original launched, but it's hard to complain with numbers like this. Just in time to shock the performance hound in your life with an outlandish Christmas gift comes the RevoDrive X2, and this here PCIe SSD solution has now been benchmarked to the hilt. The bottom line? It's fast. Really fast. In fact, Hot Hardware calls it "simply one of the fastest PCI Express based SSD solutions" that they have tested, noting that it went toe-to-toe with Fusion-io's ioXtreme while costing a good bit less. Critics over at Tweak Town echoed those thoughts, and while both teams felt the $680 asking price for a 240GB model was a touch pricey, neither felt that it wasn't worth it if you've got the coin laying around. Hit the links below for more charts than you'd ever want to see as an eight grader.

OCZ RevoDrive X2 PCIe SSD reviewed: blisteringly fast in every conceivable way originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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advertisers getting smarter (video effectiveness) - http://bit.ly/bU3pqs; consumers shopping savvier (private label) - http://bit.ly/9yBfm8

To Improve Online Maps, Microsoft Analyzes GPS Recordings of 30,000 Beijing Cabbies [Maps]

Cab drivers know their cities intimately, using shortcuts and side streets to bypass traffic jams and (hopefully) get you to your destination more quickly. Now Microsoft is hoping to tap into this talent and design better driving directions for online maps.

Engineers at Microsoft Research Asia are analyzing GPS data culled from 30,000 Beijing cab drivers, hoping to find faster and shorter routes. They built a software program called T-Drive that uses real cabbies' trajectories gathered over a period of three months. On average, the cabbies' routes shave off 16 percent of a trip, saving 5 minutes for every 30 minutes of driving, Microsoft says.

Drive-time predictions from Web services like Mapquest and Google and Bing maps rely on the speed limit and the length of a road, as Technology Review explains. They warn users that trips can take longer depending on traffic, but for the most part, they're unable to help drivers navigate around a jam or a known problem area. Some projects aim to solve this problem - a Nokia and University of California program collects info from drivers' cell phones to provide traffic data, and MIT's CarTel program

involves in-car sensors that monitor traffic and feed a continually updated stream of data. But until now, no one has mined cabbies' wealth of traffic knowledge.

According to the Microsoft team, led by Yu Zheng, T-Drive outperforms the typical speed-limit time estimate. More than 60 percent of their routes were faster than the speed-limit-based approach, according to a paper describing T-Drive presented this week at the International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in San Jose, Calif. Of those more efficient trips, half were at least 20 percent faster than the old approach.

So far, it only works for cabs in Beijing, but it could conceivably work in any congested city with lots of cabs.