When RIM Revealed the BlackBerry PlayBook in September 2010, the tablet was met with great excitement and hype, particularly from the professional, die-hard BlackBerry crowd. According to RIM, the PlayBook was designed to "give users what they want, including uncompromised web browsing, true multitasking and high performance multimedia, while...
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Half-baked. That would describe the large majority of Android-based tablets we've seen come through our test labs here at HotHardware thus far. Even Motorola's Xoom, though infused with Google's latest Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) release, felt like it could use a bit of polish in spots, though most of the refinement wouldn't need to come...
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The Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet is one of the more interesting Android tablets on the market in that it has a keyboard docking station that essentially allows it to convert to an Android 3.0 Honeycomb-based netbook on the fly. Add to that a powerful dual core 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and a reasonable MSRP of $399 (just the tablet,...
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One day while sitting in an office going over TPS reports, someone over at Western Digital heard a voice. It whispered, "If you stream it, they will come." After hearing this, he marched into the board room and pitched his idea for a streaming media player, and thus the WD TV series was born. Now whether or not it actually played out like...
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Dell's fairly recent entrant into the tablet market certainly made a splash when it hit the scene a few months ago, with the company's CEO and namesake randomly making cameo appearances with the device in hand, like one of his one personal private stock toys. Of course, once we got our hot mitts on it for a proper man-handling, we became...
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In early September, Steve Jobs took to the stage and unveiled the new-and-improved Apple TV. What was once considered a “hobby” device was reworked, streamlined, made more affordable, and aimed squarely at the masses. It enters an increasingly crowded market of devices that offer near-instant access to libraries of recent movies...
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Home Theater PC buffs rejoice, wireless transmission of HDMI® connections has finally come of age. Though there are currently two camps gaining traction in the market (Intel's WiDi and WHDI), the bottom line is lag-free full HD 1080p wireless video/audio transmission is now a reality. No longer does that HTPC need to be shoehorned...
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For all but the most budget conscious buyers, piecing together a home brewed rig often entails forking over a premium for certain components, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're a gamer, you probably bought a high-end graphics card (or at least that's what you should have done). Do you spend more time ripping videos than...
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Apple has been in the line of fire lately. It's an unusual place for the company, which has found itself on the positive end of things for quite a while. In fact, for a string of years, it seemed as if Apple could do no wrong. The iPhone 3G and 3GS were huge hits, as was the new "unibody" MacBook design. And then there was the iPad, which...
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Google's Android mobile operating system originally launched back in 2008 with the introduction of the industry's first "Google-phone," the T-Mobile G1. The G1 was built by HTC, and at the time, it was fairly cutting edge. It wasn't the most exciting piece of hardware the world had ever seen, but it offered consumers with...
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A little over two years ago, Intel formally unveiled the low-power Atom processor and its related chipset and platform technologies. At the time, Intel's vision for Atom had the diminutive CPU powering a diverse line-up of mobile internet devices, or MIDs, web-connected tablets, portable media players, and handheld gaming devices. Suffice...
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A few years ago and again only recently, a select few notebooks hit the scene with "switchable graphics". That is to say, these notebooks are able to manually switch between low-power integrated graphics solutions in the notebook chipset, to more powerful, and higher-performing discrete graphics processors. To enthusiasts, power users, or...
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At this year's CES show in Vegas there have been more than a couple of relatively exciting announcements and of course Intel was intent on joining the party. Today we got to spend some quality time behind closed doors with the folks in Intel's Mobile group learning a bit about some of the new features that will be coming to their Core...
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The night before the first day of CES is typically filled with numerous parties and pre-show expos loaded with hot new products and technologies. We attended one such event last night, Digital Experience, where a number of major players were peddling their wares. While at the event, we got to see a real-live NVIDIA Fermi-based graphics card...
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Perhaps one the more significant defining digital attributes of the first decade of the the 21st Century could be the size of the ginormous digital media collections so many of us have amassed--media collections made of up a disparate assortment of video, photos, and audio files from a wide variety of sources. The advent of digital...
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The original BlackBerry Bold made its debut about a year ago. Even though the original model is still a solid device, it's now time for a flashier, faster model that will make you yearn for an upgrade. The latest RIM BlackBerry Bold 9700 is available through T-Mobile and AT&T. We evaluate the T-Mobile version here.As T-Mobile's first 3G...
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The market for nettops—small, highly-integrated, mini-ITX desktops, typically based around Intel's Atom—didn't explode off the block the way netbooks did in the past 18 months, but an increasing number of manufacturers from Acer to Dell have released new designs built around the standard, and the systems in question are steadily becoming more...
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Consumer DSLRs with HD video capabilities are becoming more and more prevalent these days. As a result, manufacturers are constantly battling to find ways to differentiate themselves and their products from the others. Nikon's D5000 offers a few features that help set it apart from other options in the company's line as well as from the models...
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In the last year, a handful of camera manufacturers have added HD video recording capabilities to their DSLRs. Nikon initially beat Canon in this race by introducing the $999, 12.3 megapixel D90. Canon wasn’t too far behind, though, with its $2,699, 21.1 megapixel EOS 5D Mark II that is capable of capturing 1080p (better than the...
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Don’t be fooled by the Nikon Coolpix L100’s DSLR-like looks. Although the L100 looks like a high-end camera that could compete with the functions of a DSLR, it’s really a relatively simple point-and-shoot with a wide angle 15x zoom lens as well as image stabilization, a 3-inch LCD, and a high speed burst shooting mode of 13fps...
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Olympus’ latest E-620 DSLR targets users who are interested in something better than a budget entry-level DSLRs, that don’t want to pay for an upper mid-range or semi-pro body. This new camera is packed with features from the higher-end E-30, but uses a body that’s closer in size to the compact E-420 DSLR. By combining high-end features...
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The more well-known industry trade shows, like CES, Computex, and E3, are not necessarily the only venues where technology journalists can get a gander at the latest-and-greatest offerings from a bevy of tech companies. Pepcom is a Florida-based company that holds mini tech trade-shows for the media throughout the year, and its most-recent...
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