Reviews
The tablet race continues to heat up. The iPad set the stage for this generation's tablet race, and although things have definitely tightened up, Apple's wunderkind, like it or not, remains the industry standard by which all others are judged. Seasoned technology buffs will likely recall that tablets had another go a decade...
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Way back in September of ’09, AMD launched the Radeon HD 5800 series, and along with it officially unveiled its Eyefinity multi-display technology, which now pervades all Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series cards in one form or another. Leading up to the release of the 5800 series, AMD tried to keep Eyefinity a close guarded secret, so its...
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The new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is a formidable system. It's generally being billed as Lenovo's champion of choice vs. the Macbook Air. That comparison makes sense based on the Air's visibility, but the X1 is set to compete across the entire spectrum, including new thin and light machines from Dell and HP and in the enterprise, where perhaps...
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Earlier this year, Pandigital announced a firmware upgrade for its 7-inch Pandigital Novel line of products that transformed the eReaders into full Android tablets. Although the Pandigital Multimedia Novel 7-inch Android tablet doesn't have the same powerful processor or specs as some of the other tablets we've reviewed recently, its low price...
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AT&T continues to flesh out their 4G capable smartphone offerings with a device that some might consider a "superphone," as the term has been coined recently. Take a goosed up, Samsung Hummingbird processor at 1.2GHz, drop in Samsung's gorgeous and gargantuan 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, power it with Android 2.2 (Froyo) along with...
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Virtually all of the system builders on the planet are looking to hop on board Intel's Sandy Bridge platform, but not all systems are created equal. Serving as a testament to the architecture's flexibility, some Sandy Bridge systems take aim at gamers, while other have multimedia chores in mind. Hewlett Packard's EliteBook 8560p can do...
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We don't typically start off an article by waxing historic on a company's brand, but unless you're really plugged into the technology circuit, and have been for a while, there's a good chance you're unfamiliar with AOC. Punch the letters 'AOC' into Google and they're not even the first entry, not at the time of this writing anyway (the...
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Boutique, ultra high-end, desktop and laptop gaming systems are sexy, but they aren't where OEMs make the majority of their money. More modest systems, like the one we'll show you here, drive bulk purchases; today we're reviewing Asus' ET2400IGTS. It's one of the nicer all-in-one systems Asus manufactures and it ships with a number of...
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It has been a while since we last evaluated a workstation-class graphics card from the FirePro product line. The V9800 launched in September 2010 and was officially the last card to sport the ATI logo. Since then, AMD has released its Cayman-based Radeon HD 6900 cards for the consumer market, among many other Radeon HD 6000 series cards....
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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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There was a period of time last year where it seemed like every other ultraportable was based on Intel's CULV platform. At the time, we figured that was just the way it was going to be for a while with ultralight notebooks. But then, AMD finally got around to shipping some Fusion based APUs. And since then, the mobile space...
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We knew HTC's Thunderbolt wouldn't be the only 4G LTE smartphone available on Verizon Wireless' network for long. Less than two months after the Thunderbolt made its debut, the Droid Charge by Samsung joined Verizon Wireless' lineup of 4G LTE smartphones. This smartphone boasts of a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 1GHz application processor,...
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NVIDIA continues to flesh out their DirectX 11 GPU line-up, this time with a relatively affordable offering that drops in right between the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and GeForce GTX 550. The aptly named GeForce GTX 560 (sans Ti) launching today is essentially a replacement for the popular GeForce GTX 460 1GB. It’s outfitted with a similar number...
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Not too long ago, we took a look at Dell's Venue smartphone. A slate-styled phone with Android 2.2 along with the company's own Stage UI. But it's arguable that the Venue is the quiet brother compared to the boisterous Venue Pro. Those who closely follow the smartphone space will likely remember Dell's early ambitions, and while the Aero never...
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VIA introduced its dual-core Nano just four months ago, but the company is already demonstrating that processor's big brother. The newly minted VIA QuadCore is--you guessed it--a quad-core processor that connects two dual-core Nano cores in an MCM (multi-chip module). The new chip won't actually ship for some months, but it may become...
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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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When Intel initially launched their second generation Core processor family, also known as Sandy Bridge, the processors were widely praised for their strong performance and power efficiency. Shortly thereafter, however, a defect in the processor’s companion 6-Series chipsets, which affected the reliability of some of its SATA ports,...
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Although Home Theater PCs have been around for quite some time, they are still somewhat tough to define. For some, the term HTPC conjures up images of an ultra small form factor, low-power system that will be used for nothing more than accessing multimedia files. But for others an HTPC is more akin to a hardcore piece of A/V and entertainment...
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We've seen a number of hot smartphones hit the market recently, including the HTC Thunderbolt, Droid Charge, and others. Although each phone has its own appeal, there are also a lot of similarities among today's hottest smartphones—most have a 1GHz processor, at least 16GB of storage in one form or another, at least a 4-inch...
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It's been a busy spring for OEMs, and Digital Storm is no exception. Earlier this year, Intel was forced to suspend shipments of Sandy Bridge's accompanying Cougar Point chipset while it fixed a design flaw. This, in turn, left both system OEMs and retail motherboard vendors no choice but to suspend/delay their own Sandy Bridge-based products....
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Although much of the scuttlebutt lately has revolved around AMD’s upcoming Llano and Bulldozer-based APUs, the company isn’t done pushing the envelope with their existing processor designs. In case you haven’t noticed, over the last few months AMD has continued to ramp up frequencies on their current bread-and-butter Phenom...
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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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