AMD, Intel, and Nvidia rule the desktop graphics scene, but in the consumer electronics world, ARM flexes its muscle with the best of them. Towards that end, ARM today unveiled its new Mali T604 GPU with up to 5 times better performance than current Mali graphics chips, company claims[......]
At the time of its theatrical release, many in the consumer electronics industry hoped that “Avatar†would usher in a new era in home entertainment, an era where 3D is no longer a novelty but the norm. James Cameron's magnum opus didn't disappoint and is now viewed by many as a watershed in 3D's march to the living room.[......]
Welcome to the first edition of my new column, Top of Mind, in which I’ll discuss a variety of issues percolating at the top of my brain. Some topics will be from the news, others will spring from my life as a tech geek, and many will be related to my day-to-day work as reviews editor here at Maximum PC. One trend that’s been bugging me lately is the proliferation of products that come with subscription plans attached. [......]
Despite releasing a Kindle app for the iPad, Amazon isn't giving up on their own hardware just yet. Lab 126, the Amazon department responsible for the Kindle hardware, has been on a hiring spree as of late. Many of the new positions are for testing and product creation. [......]
See what you can accomplish if you whine about something enough? Even the mighty Apple, which lords it above consumers with it’s ‘my way or the highway’ software approach, will capitulate and give the customer what he wants: the iPhone is getting multitasking . Not right away, mind you[......]
The direction of robotics is something of a puzzle. On the one hand, the most successful robots are those designed for a single, repetitive function. On the other, there’s this insistence to create a human replicant: something “more human than human,†in the words of the Tyrell Corporation, despite the distinct limitations for success[......]
The e-Reader market has taken a turn, headed toward more expensive multi-purpose devices (e.g., Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s expected full-color multi-touch Kindle). This puts existing single-function e-Readers, which are priced relatively high, in some jeopardy. To keep the ‘pure’ e-Reader market alive and healthy, something cheaper and faster is going to be needed, and Freescale has obliged with a new chip, the i.MX508 [......]
There’s been much discussion of the reasons for the long life of the current generation of game consoles, but it looks like one of them may finally be on the way out. [......]
With all the buzz around tablets this year, it seemed natural that HTC would get into the game. Just as more details were starting to leak out, someone decided they were getting a bit ahead of themselves, and the project has been suspended . Rumor had it that one of the proposed tablets would be running Google’s Chrome OS[......]
All that and a hard drive, too! Netgear’s EVA9150 improves on the previous-generation Digital Entertainer HD EVA8000 in just about every way. But its best feature has to be the integrated 500GB hard drive, which adds a mere $50 to the new product’s price tag. Its inability to stream movies from a Netflix or Amazon account or connect to Hulu, on the other hand, are major shortcomings[......]
