Sit back and take notes while we… talk about Supernote. This note-taking app quietly debuted on the
Eee Pad Transformer and
Slider earlier this month, when ASUS rolled out an
OTA update to Android 3.2.1, but the company has now provided substantially more details on the feature, which promises to “revolutionize the way you take notes in class.” With Supernote onboard, students can write or scribble using either the keyboard or their own fingers. That isn’t exactly enthralling, in and of itself, but what’s cool is the fact that Supernote will convert each hand-drawn item into an image, allowing users to seamlessly modify or delete their own characters as if they were typed text. The tool also makes it easy to insert graphs or charts, thanks to an “Add Annotation” option that integrates diagrams directly into your lecture notes. And, perhaps best of all, the app will even let you insert photos, meaning you can just take a shot of your professor’s blackboard and worry about understanding it later. Intrigued? Check out a demo video, after the break.
Continue reading Supernote lets you take some pretty super notes on your ASUS tablet (video)
Supernote lets you take some pretty super notes on your ASUS tablet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Let’s begin with the usual disclaimer: Apple patent applications do not mean the outlandish technology will be arriving in the next iPhone, just that someone in a
Cupertino basement cooked it up during a marathon “imagining” session (possibly while enjoying a cool glass of purple stuff). The company’s latest drawings-and-charts masterpiece concerns the construction and placement of photovoltaic cells and, more importantly, using the sun’s energy to illuminate a display. By using a mirror pointed at the sky, you could reflect some rays toward your screen to supplement an LED backlight, or by turning the top lid of your
Macbook into a solar panel. Although we can see one minor drawback in using solar powered backlighting — if you have to point your display toward the sun, you’re gonna need some
powerful shades.
Continue reading Apple solar patent wants a sunny display light for your Sunny (De)light
Apple solar patent wants a sunny display light for your Sunny (De)light originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’ve known about Kal-El — the quad-core mobile processor from NVIDIA — for a fair amount of time, but a lot of the finer details have remained a secret as we’ve anxiously awaited its debut in tablets and smartphones. Fortunately, we have some reading material to bide our time as the company published white papers discussing benefits of the new CPU, and for the most part it’s what you’d expect: NVIDIA touts higher performance, better battery life and improved physics-based gaming when more cores are involved and working together.
What came as a surprise to us was the fact that this quad-core CPU actually utilizes five cores: in addition to the standard four main Cortex A9 high-performance cores, Kal-El throws in a fifth Cortex A9 “companion” core specifically designed to handle less demanding tasks in effort to minimize power consumption caused by active standby processes. How is it done? The Companion core’s max operating frequency gets capped at 500MHz, offering higher performance and greater efficiency per watt when running menial tasks such as push email, Twitter / Facebook sync, widgets, background apps and live wallpapers. This leaves the four main cores free to take care of the stuff it does best — games, web browsing, transcoding / editing audio and video, 3D, physics simulations and image processing, to name a few — allowing performance bumps of up to 50 percent when compared to Tegra 2. We can tell that quad-core devices are going to make us very, very happy. If charts and geeky stats brighten up your day like it does ours, head to the source to read the papers in their entirety.
NVIDIA releases Kal-El white papers, announces a fifth ‘Companion’ core for less demanding tasks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Charts, diagrams, charts, measurements, and more charts. This summation of nearly every document that passes through the FCC sounds only slightly more fun than staring at the Matrix all day, yet we still find ourselves a bit giddy when seeing highly anticipated phones take their turn getting the Federal nod of approval. And so it is with the
Samsung i937, which is most likely the Focus S — one of
three tantalizing Windows Phone choices aimed at reaching stores “this fall.” It’s about what we’d expect, really: aside from sporting the usual AT&T frequencies, there’s not much more that we can discern from the pages and pages of numbers and colorful pictures that depict phone radiation. Exciting stuff, we know, but
Windows Phone 7.5 is at least one step closer to being in the clutches of our lonely mitts.
Samsung Focus S wanders through FCC en route to AT&T originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Sep 2011 00:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ferrari’s been one of the most respected car manufacturers in the world since the 1940s, but it hasn’t exactly gotten there by being bleeding-edge. In the early ’60s, when rear-engined cars were sweeping the charts in Formula One, Il Commendatore — Enzo Ferrari — refused to take one racing, famously saying “the horse doesn’t push the cart along with its nose.” It would take many humiliating defeats before his company would finally put that horse where it belongs. Being an early adopter, obviously, was not a priority. It’s only in the past few years, with cars like the Enzo and 458 Italia, that Ferrari has truly embraced modern ideas of whizz-bang tech to make their cars genuinely faster — not just easier to drive.
That’s just the beginning. Automotive technology is finally starting to accelerate the way personal computing devices have for the past few decades. New means of propulsion are combining with ever-greater integrated systems and it’s easy to see this as leading us toward a generation of cars faster and still more efficient than anything we’ve yet seen on the roads. Ferrari calls this four-wheeled singularity the “hypercar,” and to get an idea of just what that car of the future might look like it invited 50 teams of designers from major universities around the world to compete. Join us as we look at some of the best creations.
Continue reading Engadget previews Ferrari’s future hypercars at the World Design Contest (video)
Engadget previews Ferrari’s future hypercars at the World Design Contest (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We had a feeling the Samsung Galaxy Note would be a hit on the benchmark scene, but now its unsurprisingly speedy results are documented. Greek site TechBlog installed Quadrant Standard on one of the phone / tablet hybrid demo units at IFA 2011 and produced a benchmark score of 3,624, exactly where we’d expect a Sammy-branded 1.4GHz dual-core CPU to end up; in comparison, our review of the 1.2GHz Samsung Galaxy S II produced an outcome of 3,396. Here’s the letdown: the Galaxy Note is expected to top the charts in pricing as well, as it’s being reported that we should see the device show up in Scandinavia by year’s end for no less than €715 ($1,000 in the US). Let’s hope those benchmarks are worth the cost, because there’s one thing that can’t be denied — it makes the HTC Jetstream feel like a bargain.
Continue reading Samsung Galaxy Note tops benchmarks, price sheets (video)
Samsung Galaxy Note tops benchmarks, price sheets (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Sep 2011 01:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Thinking about picking up an (inconceivably expensive) HTC Jetstream? After all, it just slipped into AT&T’s online store this weekend. We’ll just leave this link to HotHardware in the source below, in case you want to check out some comparative benchmarks before trading $700 for a 2-year contract. Not that it performed poorly mind you, it raced neck-and-neck with Lenovo’s IdeaPad K1 — we just like think charts and tables are cool. Videos too — hit the break to see the folks at HotHardware give the 10-inch slate a quick hands-on.
Continue reading HTC Jetstream hits AT&T store, gets benchmarked
HTC Jetstream hits AT&T store, gets benchmarked originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Sep 2011 17:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Over the past few months, we’ve peeked Intel’s roadmap more than once, but all told we’ve been treated to scant few details about its high-end desktop line, Sandy Bridge E (that’s “E” for enthusiasts). Today, though, VR-Zone is reporting that the next generation of these CPUs will ship without fans or heatsinks — a tacit acknowledgment, perhaps, that Intel’s home-brewed cooling system will be inadequate in the eyes of hobbyists anyway. We reached out to Intel for comment, and while the company stayed mum on the topic of cooling, it did go out of its way to clarify another point the folks at VR-Zone made in their report. The outlet had said that the forthcoming 3820, 3930K and 3960X CPUs will be rated at 130 watts, but will consume closer to 180W and draw up to 23 amps from the 12V2 supply rail — all without overclocking, mind you. An Intel rep writes: “TDP expectations for the 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 processor family for socket LGA-2011 are in line with previous generations of high end desktop products.” In other words, built-in cooling system or no, the TDP should be in line with what we’ve seen from other Extreme-branded processors. As for the cooling, it’s unclear when, exactly, we’ll get the full spill — the CPUs are rumored to launch before the end of the year, with the quad-core 3820 arriving after the six-core 3930K and 3960X.
Will Intel’s Core i7 Sandy Bridge-E CPUs ship without fans or heatsinks? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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These days, it’s hard to shake the urge to pop a solid state drive into your next laptop, but even if you’re down with dropping the requisite coin, the restrictive capacity choices may make it darn near impossible for pack rats to bite. For those fitting squarely into that category, there’s Western Digital’s newest laptop drive: the 9.5mm 1TB Scorpio Blue. It’s one of the first in this form factor (read: the one that slips into most everything smaller than a Clevo) to hit the 1TB milestone, and at just $99, it’s a veritable bargain. The benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware threw it through the usual gauntlet of tests, pitting it against a 500GB Scorpio Black and a 640GB Seagate Momentus. As you’d likely expect, the 1TB spinner bested the competition in SiSoftware, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark tests, though not by a tremendous margin. Still, taking performance up a notch while also boasting a full terabyte of space makes it somewhat of a no-brainer for capacity freaks, and you can hit the source for a barrage of charts proving as much.
WD’s 9.5mm Scorpio Blue 1TB laptop hard drive gets benchmarked originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jul 2011 21:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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ThinkGeek’s really letting the jams out this time. The company is no stranger to shirts emblazoned with playable instruments — but a messenger bag? Its new Electric Rock Guitar Bag features 14 buttons for a fretboard so you can strum any songs in a Major key, and a detachable amp that cranks all the way up to an obligatory
11. You’ll also have room for a 17-inch laptop, while its eight pockets can hold your Green Day and Blink-182 chord-charts. Come August 28th, 50 bucks is all it’ll cost ya to
rock while your
rolling during the commute, but in the meantime, we know the perfect
synth player for when you wanna get that office band started.
Think Geek’s Electric Guitar Bag holds your laptop, lets you ‘rock’ the commute originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jul 2011 06:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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