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Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

At long last, a Sandy Bridge notebook!

By now, Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs need no introduction. Since their debut late last year, the procs have been on the hot list of every red-blooded power user. But getting at them hasn’t been easy. Particularly the mobile parts, which hadn’t even hit the market in new notebooks before the now-infamous SATA 3Gb/s port issue brought product flow to a grinding halt.
 
Thanks to AVADirect, however, our days of waiting and wanting are over. The company’s 15-inch Clevo P150HM features a shiny new 2.2GHz Core i7-2720QM. It’s not the fastest proc in … [Read More...]

Boy, are my Instagram friends going to be jealous. Now, when I share a photo using my favorite Lomo-Twitter mobile app, my photos are going to look sharper, crisper and better than everyone else’s.

Why? Because I’m not using the crappy camera on my phone. I’m using a nice prosumer camera with an Eye-Fi Mobile X2 card in it. Every time I press the shutter, my photo transfers wirelessly and directly to the phone in my pocket. From there, I can add whatever fancy, appy goodness I want, and share it on the internet.

Eye-Fi has been making waves for … [Read More...]

“Nice car! What is it,” the waitress asked as she brought us our food. She’d seen us drive up in a Spicy Red 2011 Kia Optima SX and she was interested — in the car, of course.

“It’s a brand new Kia Optima,” I replied.

“Oh,” the waitress said, crestfallen. “My mom says those aren’t very good cars.”

I wanted to point out the French seam on the dashboard leather, pop the hood and show off the all-new turbine housing that channels air to reduce turbo lag, let her take the car and floor it on a highway offramp, all … [Read More...]

Last night I had the chance to attend Samsung’s UK launch of the 900x, the same groundbreaking, breathtaking, game-changing ultrathin that I covered in both the unboxing video that I shot in my office, and in the video tour of the Miami PC showcase. 

The 900x is a seriously impressive PC – it’s loaded with a 128GB SSD, 7 hours of battery life and a new Intel “Sandybridge” i5, and wrapped in an aircraft-grade Duralumin chassis that weighs less than 3lbs.  It’s one of the finest PCs I’ve ever had the chance to use, and Samsung did it’s beauty and … [Read More...]

Skullcandy is known for making headphones that put fashion first and sound quality second.

You’ve probably seen its krazy-kool neon and graffiti-splattered cans stacked up for sale in mall kiosks, or clamped to the dome of some young’n on a skateboard as he whisks by and spills your latte all over your Haggar slacks.

The company’s demo skews young, and we all know the kids don’t necessarily care if their music sounds good, as long as it’s loud. Needless to say, Skullcandy’s headphones haven’t ever scored high marks among audiophiles. Being one of these snobbish elites, my expectations were not … [Read More...]

Which AV product is up to the task of keeping your PC squeaky clean and immune to malware?

In some ways, visiting cyberspace is kind of like entering a crowded subway car during the peak of flu season. You’re surrounded by all sorts of germs—in the form of trojans, spyware, viruses, rootkits, etc.—just looking for a vulnerable host to invade and feed on. Once you’re infected, these pests can wreak havoc on your system, swiping your personal information and passwords, annihilating your credit rating, and stealing your identity. To avoid a potentially virulent attack, you need to take precautions.

Wouldn’t … [Read More...]

Chevrolet has positioned the Cruze as a small car you’ll want to drive because it’s a good car, not because it’s the only one you can afford. That same philosophy is true for the Eco, the Cruze’s more fuel-efficient sibling, and it makes for a stylish, engaging car that just happens to be quite good on gas.

For the Cruze Eco, Chevy cooked up a batch of aerodynamic trickery and weight reduction from recipes based on the Volt. If designing the Volt was putting a man on the moon, the Cruze Eco is Tang and a pen that writes upside-down.… [Read More...]

We’ve waited a long time for Google Cloud Print, and it’s every bit as convenient as we had imagined. The new service from Google makes it possible for PC users to wirelessly print to a networked printer from smartphones, laptops, and tablets capable of supporting Google services, such as Gmail or Google Docs. To get your own Google Cloud Print party started, follow these simple steps.

1. Download Google Chrome Beta 4

Google Cloud Print supports a number of flavors of Windows, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7. No matter which version of Windows your rig is rocking, you’ll need … [Read More...]

It’s official: 2011 is the year of incremental progress. Mobile handsets have settled into a groove featurewise and are now gently nudging their way upward in speed, power and capabilities.

If we’re going to be stuck in a climate of baby steps, at least Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G is an example of baby steps done right.

From the moment I got my mitts on the S 4G, something felt eerily familiar. I’d seen many of its elements before — the unsettlingly light chassis, the glass and faux-chrome accents, and even the flashless 5-MP camera. As it turns out, the feeling of … [Read More...]

Tegra 2 makes for a scary-fast smartphone

As far as referendums on nVidia’s new Tegra 2 processor go, Motorola’s and AT&T’s Atrix 4G is a shining success. It throws off beastly performance and also manages to greatly reduce power consumption. However, when viewed as a referendum on the ARM architecture’s potential to scale up and supplant x86 in laptops and desktops—or even run Windows—the outlook isn’t quite as promising.

First the basics. This is the fastest phone we’ve ever seen. In our CPU, GPU, and combined benchmarks, the 1 GHz dual-core Tegra 2 CPU and GeForce ULP GPU core helped … [Read More...]

All the high-end phones coming out these days match up pretty closely on features. So how about something totally different — a phone that doubles as the guts for a full-sized laptop?

The Motorola Atrix is a 4G Android phone for AT&T that performs well enough on its own, but it’s also available with one crazy-unique accessory: a laptop-shaped dock. There’s no additional processing power in the laptop, but with the phone piggybacking on the laptop’s rear hinge, your tiny device instantly gains a much more human-sized interface: a big keyboard and a big screen.

It turns out this is … [Read More...]

Think Volvo and you think utilitarian automobiles that shuttle you from point A to point B safely, reliably and indefinitely.

For all their virtues — pathological obsession with safety comes to mind, as does anvil-like durability – Volvos aren’t exciting. They’re cars only soccer moms, Vermonters and tweed-jacketed professors can love.

It’s a stereotype, of course. One that overlooks the company’s hot rod “R” models, among other things. But it is sufficiently pervasive that the Swedes have had enough. They’re billing the all-new S60 as “the naughty Volvo,” a technological marvel equally adept at hauling kids and hauling ass.

And … [Read More...]

This tutorial has been on my mind off and on for several months now. Joining the team here at Windows Guides has given me the opportunity to finally post it. After my son asked me a few weeks ago for a good proxy I thought maybe I dedicate this and the next tutorial to him.

This is a long yet not a really difficult tutorial if you follow along. I have done my best to simplify it as much as possible. May I suggest you read the whole thing and get your … [Read More...]

This little box delivers a mind-blowing audio experience

Audiophiles are frequently criticized as having more money than sense. This is especially true when it comes to digital audio components. “It’s digital,” so the argument goes, “it’s perfect because it’s all or nothing.” So when we tell you this combo DAC, pre-amp, headphone amp, USB device costs twice as much as the computer and 50 percent more than the receiver we used to test it ($1,895), some of you will label us fools for bestowing our Kick Ass award on it. Well, you’re wrong.

Granted, we probably didn’t experience the best … [Read More...]

A new version of Rdio’s iPhone app is available, and if you’re a fan of the music streaming service, you should download it immediately. If you haven’t yet turned the corner on subscription-based streaming, this update makes it worth a look.

Some of Rdio’s best tools for discovering new music were previously only available on the website, but the new app now includes these tools, vastly improving the mobile experience. It’s also more stable and easier to use.

For those of you new to Rdio (“ar-dee-o”), here’s the deal: It’s an on-demand, cloud-based jukebox. You search for an artist, an … [Read More...]