Reviews
The Motorola Xoom tablet has been met with plenty of hype, and perhaps rightfully so since it is the first tablet to ship with Android 3.0 (aka Honeycomb), the first version of Android designed specifically for tablets. Although there are a number of tablets slated to hit the market this year, Motorola has the benefit of being the first company...
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At this point, there's no shame in saying it: the floodgates have opened up for AMD's Fusion. What began as a trickle -- as AMD finally introduced a shipping version of the long-awaited Fusion platform -- has turned into a steady stream, and we're definitely excited to see APUs, as AMD calls the product, finally making an impact. AMD had played...
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Of the six smart phones on the market that run Microsoft's latest phone OS, Windows Phone 7, HTC designed and manufactures three of them. It's latest, and most expensive, is Sprint's first-and currently only-WP7 option, the HTC Arrive and it arrived at Sprint just last month. Meanwhile, prices on WP7 phones from AT&T and T-Mobile have...
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Many enthusiasts generally prefer to roll their own rigs, but when it comes to notebooks, the notion of building a system from scratch becomes less practical and appealing. Things tend to get expensive, your build options aren't as robust as they are with desktops, and working in tight quarters will test your patience. That's where system...
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Is there anything sexy about PC components? For about 99% of the population, the answer is probably no. But since you're reading this, chances are that you've fallen in love with the design of a component at least once. Maybe the draw was strong enough to reel you into the world of enthusiast computing, where the skill of overclocking is revered,...
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It's been several weeks since Asus announced that certain socket AM3 motherboards would support AMD's upcoming Bulldozer processors. Since then, we've turned up additional rumors on the nature of such support. MSI has also announced its own plans to retrofit some existing AM3 boards with Bulldozer compatibility. What follows is the general...
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A couple of weeks ago, AMD took the wraps off of the Radeon HD 6450, an affordable DirectX 11-class graphics card targeted at users looking to upgrade from basic, integrated graphics solutions. We posted a quick look at the Radeon HD 6450 in our news, and while the card wasn’t a barn-burner, it was certainly a step up from integrated...
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HTC was the first manufacturer to provide a 4G phone though a US carrier when it shipped the HTC EVO 4G from Sprint. At the end of last year, HTC promised it would once again be the first to 4G with another carrier. And days later, the company announced the Thunderbolt smartphone with Verizon Wireless. It's been a few months since the...
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With the dust having settled on Intel's staggered Sandy Bridge launch and the early chipset issues having been ironed out, we're finally starting to see PC makers come out with builds based on the Santa Clara chip maker's second generation Core architecture. And if there's a platform ideally suited to showcase what Sandy Bridge is capable...
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It was back at the Consumer Electronics Show that we first caught a glimpse of the Corsair SP2500 2.1 channel speaker system. Dave and I were traversing the show floor while our compadres Mat and Jennifer were off gallivanting at a few private meetings at some lavish Las Vegas hotels. As we headed straight into the Corsair booth to check out...
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When we heard Asus was coming out with a P-IPS display, we were a bit taken aback at the thought of Asus getting into the high end monitor game. But as the old cliche goes, there's a first time for everything, and the PA246Q ProArt 24-inch LCD monitor is Asus' first foray into the professional display market. Every other monitor Asus...
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Just a few years ago, it would have been a stretch to think Dell would venture into the smartphone business. With the exception of a few stand-outs, Dell has always been fairly conservative with their products and had never really strayed too far from the PC and its associated peripherals and accessories, although they did make a...
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Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that the new processors will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It's been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural...
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When AMD and NVIDIA release a new batch of next-generation graphics processors, gaps typically form in their respective product stacks as the entire top-to-bottom line-up of new products is fleshed out over time. When new GPUs are introduced, they usually offer increased performance at a given price point, which drives the cost of comparable...
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If you are in the market for an ultralight notebook with a gorgeous LED backlit LCD and don't want to spend more than $1,000, the Lenovo IdeaPad U260 should be on your short list. The U260's claim to fame is its 12.5-inch form-factor, making it larger than your average netbook--but at a mere 18mm thick and 3 lbs, it's almost as light...
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When it comes to smartphones and wireless data services, 4G is definitely one of the hottest features today. And while various wireless service providers are touting their 4G networks and upcoming plans for 4G, there are still a relatively small number of smartphones that actually support 4G technology and can take full advantage of the speed...
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Intel officially announced the new SSD 320 Series drives yesterday, which feature proprietary Intel SSD controllers paired to cutting edge 25nm NAND flash memory. This new family of drives, however, isn’t geared for ultra-high performance. While still fast, the overarching goals with the Intel SSD 320 series were increased reliability...
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With the early 2011 refresh of the MacBook Pro family, Apple came out with both guns blazing. Not only is the entire lineup now powered by Intel’s second generation Core i5 and i7 mobile processors (commonly known by its codename, Sandy Bridge), but the new MacBook Pros also feature the brand-new Thunderbolt I/O technology (the official...
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Over the years, we have consistently been impressed by cutting-edge dual-GPU powered graphics cards, not only for their relatively high performance, but because of the engineering involved to design, build, and bring the cards to market, in form factors not much bigger than their high-end, single-GPU based counterparts. From the GeForce 7950GX2...
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For their new generation of notebook processors, Intel decided to take the opposite approach that they took in their desktop architecture, where they launched their mid-range quad-core product first, with a promise of top-end multi-core performance to come just a bit further down their roadmap. From a mobile standpoint, the Core i7 2820QM...
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The magic is back for a second act, baby, and it doesn't play for the Lakers (that's the other Magic). The magic we're talking about plays for team Apple, and while the competition tries to come up with a so-called "iPad killer," Apple may have beat them to the punch. How's that for irony? We're of course referring to the iPad 2, Apple's second...
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Intel's Sandy Bridge processors have won acclaim for their hardware-accelerated video transcoding capabilities, dubbed Quick Sync, but there are significant limitations in the current iteration. LucidLogix, a company that's heretofore been known for its multi-GPU Hydra hardware, has developed a software-only solution named Virtu that it claims...
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