Posts about Engadget as of October 14, 2009

10/14/2009
Up until now, Panasonic has been the only company to display 3D HDTVs in the public. But this week at IMID in Seoul, Samsung has emerged with a new 55-inch LCD display that looks like it could rival Panasonic. The details about Samsung’s HDTV are limited right now, but we do know it comes with HD (1920 x 1080) resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate. The TV requires a set of “shutter glasses”, which is the same technology Panasonic announced a few days ago.
10/14/2009
HP didn’t exactly do the best job keeping this one under wraps , but it’s now finally gotten official with its new Pavilion dv8 “entertainment laptop,” which packs some fairly impressive (if not all that surprising) specs across the board. That, of course, starts with a big 18.4-inch, full 1,920 x 1,080 screen, and continues along the high-end track with a Core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM (expandable to 8GB), dual 320GB hard drives, NVIDIA GeForce GT230 graphics with 1GB of RAM, a built-in TV tuner, and a Blu-ray drive.
10/14/2009
Acer’s President Gianfranco Lanci is talking some big talk these days, but not completely without reason. The Taiwan-based computer manufacturer says it does not expect to see a decline in revenue this year over last, meaning that it should clear somewhere in the realm of $17 billion — its 2008 revenue figure. Much of the good news (and sales) hails from Asia, where retail markets have not been as hard hit by the economic insanity of the last year.
10/14/2009
Mobinnova’s élan , or the Beam as it’s reportedly known as now, is a curious beast. It runs Windows CE, yet it’s packing NVIDIA’s Tegra graphics technology. Thus, it’s not really a netbook, but calling it a smartbook might be short-changing it. Whatever the case, a recent interview with Mobinnova’s CTO Mark Anderson has unearthed plans to launch the machine at CES 2010 with an undisclosed mobile carrier (or more, maybe) in America.
10/14/2009
3D theaters? Okay, that’s acceptable . 3D HDTVs? Sure, go ahead and waste your dollars inventing something that no one’s asking for. But 3D laptops? We’re pretty sure the line was somewhere back there, and now it’s been decidedly crossed. Acer’s Aspire 5738DG (not to be confused with the two-dee Aspire 5738PG ) is the company’s first portable machine to utilize its 3D CineReal technology, which is little more than a “3D coating” on the display that gives off mind-bending effects when viewed with a pair of polarized eyeglasses.
10/14/2009
MyDellMini forum member Rob928, take a bow. This honorable gentleman has only gone and transformed an aging 9-inch netbook into a new-fashioned internet tablet . it might still be a chubby little thing , but there’s no denying the usefulness of using the entire screen to navigate instead of the usually cramped netbook touchpad. With a 16GB SSD upgrade alongside the venerable Atom N270 and 1GB of RAM, this device will even boot faster into Windows than your run-of-the-mill netbook.
10/14/2009
And with that, Acer jumps into the touchscreen laptop waters. Due out on the ever-so-popular October 22nd along with Windows 7 is the Aspire 5738PG laptop, with support for two fingers at once pinching, flicking and double touching their way across the OS, or if you’d prefer, it’s also got a numeric keyboard and multi-gesture touchpad. Housed inside is an Intel Core 2 Duo with ATI Radeon HD 4570, a 15.6-inch LED-backlit screen with 1366 x 768 resolution, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, HDMI out, four USB 2.0 in, 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N.
10/14/2009
We swear we’ve seen this before at least a couple of times , but ask Acer and the 11.6-inch Timeline AS1810TZ is a brand new, LED-backlit and Windows 7-packing ultraportable with a full-sized keyboard, eight hours of battery, multi-gesture touchpad, and a dual-core Intel CULV processor. All the amenities are here, as well, including 802.11b/g Draft-N, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, webcam, mic, and a handful of color options. Care to guess the official release date? October 22nd it is, alongside Windows 7 and a plethora of other newly-minted machines.
10/14/2009
It’s a little tough to believe that it took MSI this many months to bring its X-Slim X400 from the trade show floor to the digital market place, but at long last, the outfit’s 14-inch slimster is finally on sale here in the States. For those badly in need of a refresher, $799.99 gets you a 1.3GHz SU2700 processor, 2GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, WXGA panel, GMA 4500MHD GPU, WiFi, 4-cell battery, HDMI / VGA ports, a pair of USB sockets, a multicard reader, external DVD burner and a three-year warranty.