Thread: Anandtech News

We had another opportunity to handle the Lenovo S2110, the first commercial Krait tablet we've seen and had a chance to talk with the product team in a bit more detail. It's clear that Lenovo recognizes the market opportunities for mobile computing, and their line-up of tablets and smartphones will only get bigger. Their phone devices remain targeted primarily at the Chinese market, including the first Medfield phone to come to market, the K800. Lenovo's first generation tablet devices were more varied than what was released Stateside, but starting with the S2110 we should see more of their tablets and at a competitive price point. Lenovo's product manager quoted a target MSRP of just $399 for the 3G version of the S2110, and an aggressive release schedule as soon as Q2 2012. The tablet and keyboard dock would be bundled together for $549, and an LTE variant could presumably come in at a higher price point.
The pre-production sample they had on hand had less than stellar build quality. We were promised a much more rigid structure once production began, though shipping devices would feature the same textured back as found on the sample we handled. The display had excellent viewing angles and looked great (my picture taking skills notwithstanding), and the keyboard dock was light and had excellent build quality. Ports and expandability on the tablet were scant, though the dock includes full-sized USB and a SD card reader. Ice Cream Sandwich ran smoothly beneath Lenovo's skin, though network connectivity was not available so there was little to do but scroll through the UI.
Lenovo also had a K800 on display which felt smooth and responsive. The handset was lightweight and comfortable in the hand. The alpha sample they had for us to play with featured a substantial 1900 mAh battery, which should help the China only handset deliver excellent battery life. The IdeaPad K2010 is another tablet which, like the K800, will be sold in China only. It's powered by a Tegra 3 SoC and features a 1920x1080 IPS display, like the Asus Transformer Prime TF700T Anand previewed earlier this week.
Gallery: More Lenovo Krait Tablet Details: $399 Price Target




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Art Lebedev Studios premiered its Optimus Maximus keyboard in 2007; the device featured individual OLED displays for each key and provided a range of customizability never before seen in the PC input space. It also reached stratospheric heights in terms of pricing. The peripherals success has spawned an expansion of the line; first with the Mini Three and Aux (3-key and 12-key variants, respectively) and now with the Mini Six and the Optimus Popularis.

The Popularis is a full-sized keyboard that features the same customizability as the Maximus, with a few concessions in order to meet a lower price point (closer to $1,000 than $10,000). Of these concessions the most signficant is the elminiation of the individual OLED displays, in their place is a single LCD display, over which the keys are mounted. Beneath the Fn keys is a customizable display area that runs the full length of the device and can be used to show weather and stock information, or a design of your choosing. The keys are not as clicky and mechanically satisfying as its big brother, indeed I suspect key presses activate a capacitive layer between the display and the keyboard overlay.

The Mini Six expands on the Mini Three's concept, but foregoes the OLEDs as well and opts for the single LCD display. The industrial design for both the Mini Six and Popularis moves away from the brushed metal and oversized nature of the Maximus, opting instead for glossy plastics and a certain degree of thinness. The design remains cohesive across the larger Popularis and the smaller Mini Six, and either would stand out on anybody's desk.
In the end, any Art Lebedev product exists in this high end space that's ideal for edge case creative types, or people that appreciate far-reaching design and have the wealth necessary to indulge in these products. Art Lebedev studios, though, sees no problem in pursuing this type of market, they've expanded their business to include a design office in New York and hope to put the Popularis and Mini Six in many more hands than the Maximus reached.
Gallery: Art Lebedev Studios Expands Optimus Line




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Sprint had a reception this evening that gave us a chance to get a closer look at their first LTE devices: the Sierra Wireless Tri-Network Hotspot, LG Viper 4G and Galaxy Nexus LTE. Though Sprint had all three devices at the event, they did not have a functioning LTE network to show off. They announced their first four networks last week (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Atlanta) and still expect to deploy in these markets during the first half of 2012. In addition, Sprint is committed to covering 120+ million people with their particular PCS 1900 MHz brand of 4G LTE goodness by the end of this year. And kicking this intiative off with a phone as great as the Galaxy Nexus is certainly a good start. Gallery: Hands-on with the Sprint Galaxy Nexus LTE

Operation of the handset was left to Sprint's representatives, though they were happy to load up websites and demonstrate UI operation to our heart's content. And, the results were as good as expected. Software is obviously stable and satisfying, the hardware they had on hand matches Verizon Wireless' variant in shape and internals, though Sprint would neither confirm nor deny that the two variants would be identical in terms of components and size. What they would confirm is that they would have several NFC-enabled devices available by the end of the year, and that all of their NFC handsets would support Google Wallet.

The LG Viper 4G will slot-in below the Galaxy Nexus as a mid-range LTE device, and will be priced accordingly. It features a 4" WVGA LCD display in a comfortable form factor, and runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), though Ice Cream Sandwich should follow in the second half of 2012. The SoC was confirmed as a Qualcomm-sourced 1.2 GHz dual-core solution, most likely APQ8060 paired with MDM9600 for connectivity. Sprint markets the device as being an ecofriendly solution, though that seems to be limited to a power sipping charger and casing made from 35% post-consumer recycled materials.

ierra Wireless Tri-Network Hotspot in Optional Dock

Lastly, the Sierra Wireless Tri-Network Hotspot takes the cake for unlimited connectivity options. The device looked much thicker than competing LTE and 3G products like Novatel's MiFi. Making room for as many as three cellular radios is no easy feat, and hopefully some room remained for a beefy battery to power those radios. Details for that device remain particularly scant, though we'll be sure to report in as we learn more.
Sprint also had several older handsets available, including their full line of WiMax devices, and the first device with a PCS based Direct Connect solution, the Motorola Admiral. In speaking with Sprint's reps, it's clear that unlike six or seven years ago, the Direct Connect feature is not terribly consumer facing, and is really best targeted at enterprise and industrial deployment. To that end, it's likely that most of the handsets we'll see with the feature will be enterprise oriented with an emphasis on ruggedness and reliability.
Sprint's position among the Big Three wireless carriers is not likely to change in the near term. Their growing relationships with spectrum solutions partners like Lightsquared and ClearWire demonstrate a commitment to developing as strong an LTE network as they are in a position to provide. And their commitment to customers is no less strong, they will be supporting the WiMax network they are transitioning away from until at least 2014; which means that today's WiMax device buyers will be at the end of their contracts around the time Sprint expects to complete its nationwide LTE network.



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We took some time to swing by D-Link's press room and got a look at all the nice networking gear announced via multiple press releases yesterday. In keeping up with the times, D-Link has come up with a very effective cloud strategy. The mydlink.com service forms the backbone of this strategy.

IP Cameras

Two cameras were on display. The first one was the D-Link DCS942L IP camera with enhanced day and night surveillance coming in at $149. Having a traditional industrial design, it captures video in VGA resolution at 30 fps. With a microSD card slot on the side, the video can also be recorded locally. It can be connected to the network through either the wired 100 Mbps port or the 802.11b/g/n wireless interface. Two way audio support is also provided.

Gallery: D-Link DCS-942L

D-Link has also come up with a PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) model (DCS5222L) capable of recording 720p surveillance video at 30 fps in H.264 format. All the features of the DCS942L are retained, but the extra resolution and the PTZ feature bring up the price to $249.

Gallery: D-Link DCS-5222L

Both the IP cameras have Android and iOS apps which work through the mydlink.com account.

Routers and Access Points

D-Link released a number of routers and access points today. The All-in-One Mobile Companion (DIR505) is an interesting little gadget capable of a number of functions. In the router mode, the device plugs into a power outlet and a wired Ethernet cable from the modem is connected to the 100 Mbps wired port. A drive can be connected to the USB port and the DIR505 acts as a wireless router with the USB drive contents visible to all devices connected to that wireless network. In the repeater mode, the unit acts in conjunction with an already existing access point and repeats the signal. An attached USB drive will also have its content shared. In a similar configuration, the DIR505 can also be configured as a Wi-Fi Hot Spot with a NAT for its own network. To top it all, the device can also charge your smartphone. The unfortunate aspect is that the wireless output is only 802.11g compliant and the wired port is 100 Mbps.

Gallery: D-Link DIR-505

The DIR605L cloud router is a very basic router with four 100 Mbps ports and 802.11n support. The interesting aspect of this router is the mydlink.com service attached to the unit. With the help of an Android / iOS app, it is possible to have a very dumbed down presentation of the usual router configuration pages (which is probably welcomed by the average consumer). It also presents information related to the state of the network.

Gallery: D-Link DIR-605L

In addition to these two routers, we have two high end offerings. The DHP1565 is one of the first Hy-Fi devices I have seen. THe Hybrid Networking concept, pioneered by Atheros Qualcomm, integrates wired ethernet, powerline and Wi-Fi networking in a single router. The DHP1565 has four GbE ports, a 500 Mbps powerline connector (also the AC power input) and 802.11n support. There is also an explicit switch to make the unit act as either a router or an access point.

Gallery: D-Link DHP-1565

The HD Media Router 3000 is capable of simultaneous dual band operation to deliver a total of 900 Mbps (450 Mbps in each of the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands) bandwidth. Four GbE ports are accompanies by a USB 3.0 port for attaching drives and a SD card slot.QoS is implemented in hardware with Ubicom technology. D-Link demonstrated the efficiency of the QoS engine in action by playing back YouTube videos in a highly congested network and compared it with the software QoS implemented on other routers. The difference was clearly visible, and I believe this type of QoS implementation will be the way to go forward for the next generation routers.

Gallery: D-Link DIR-857

Entertainment and Media Storage

Boxee's LiveTV dongle was on display. It appears that D-Link, Boxee and Hauppauge have worked together to get this accessory out.

Gallery: D-Link Boxee Box - Live TV Dongle

D-Link also indicated the possibility of product announcements related to the NAS and media streamer markets in the next few months.





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To keep the flow of CES coverage steady, HP has announced ENVY 14 Spectre Ultrabook. The use of glass makes Spectre special: The lid, display, palmrest and trackpad are all covered with scratch-resistant glass. HP claims that the glass makes the laptop more durable, although the actual chassis seems to be aluminum too. HP didn't reveal the full specifications but Engagdet listed the specs of the entry, $1399, model:

HP ENVY 14 Spectre Specifications
Screen	14.0" LED backlit
Resolution	1600x900
Processor	Core i5-2467M (2/4, 1.6GHz/2.3GHz, 3MB)
Graphics	Intel HD 3000 (350MHz/1150MHz)
Memory	4GB DDR3 (Up to 8GB)
Storage	128GB mSATA SSD (Up to 256GB)
Ports	1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, audio in/out
Battery	Up to 9 hours
Software	Full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, 2 years of Norton Internet Security 2012
Dimensions (WxDxH)	12.88" x 8.7" x 0.79"
Weight	3.79lb
Price	$1399
Availability	February 8th (US) - March (others)

Spectre has a 14" screen but HP claims the chassis size to be more common in 13.3" laptops, which matches up if you compare it to e.g. 13" MacBook Pro (12.78" x 8.94" x 0.95"). The use of a bigger screen allows HP to use a higher resolution panel, as 1600x900 is more commonly found in 14" and 15" laptops (although there are 13.3" laptops like Sony Vaio SA and ASUS Zenbook with 1600x900). The stock configuration comes with Core i5-2467M but HP offers configurations with Core i7 ULVs as well (HP didn't list any SKUs, though).
At 3.79lb, Spectre is definitely heavier than most Ultrabooks we have seen. If you're wondering how is this still an Ultrabook, Intel requires +14" laptops to be thinner than 21mm, which translates to 0.83" - there is no weight limit. For sub-14" laptops, the height limit is 18mm (0.71"). $1399 also makes Spectre fairly expensive, or premium as HP says. The bundled software is worth over $200, but it's always a risky move to include shareware software as the end-user may not use it at all but still pays for it.
Source: HP, Engadget



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Last CES I dropped by Ambaralla where they had just announced their iOne smart camera SoC. Ambaralla is a big player in the camera and encoder ASIC business, and the importance of adding high-end ISP and video encoding as smartphone cameras become a very important topic. On one hand, we have smartphones increasingly becoming the camera of choice, and on the other, cameras becoming increasingly smartphone-like. As a refresher, the iOne consists of two Cortex A9s, an ARM 11 for camera management, and PowerVR SGX 540 graphics, alongside Full HD 1080i60 encode/decode. The promise last year was to combine Android or Linux alongside some of the traditional camera DSP for a big jump in quality.

This year Ambaralla showed off a number of products including the iOne SoC, including the Sony Bloggie Live, which runs Android (although in a locked, under-the-hood fashion). The platform lends the device the ability to both encode 1080p video, and live stream to services like qik, or share from its own WiFi hotspot (and DLNA) to iOS and other mobile platforms.

Also on display was a tablet by Panodic running Android 2.3.x and 4.0.1 being used as a set top box with HDMI out playing full BluRay disk 1080p H.264. The Panodic also includes a camera on the backside for stills and video.
Gallery: Ambarella iOne Devices and Wireless Sharing


WiFi sharing (getting an image out from the device on onto a smartphone or tablet for sharing) is also an increasingly relevant use case - something I routinely try to accomplish with an EyeFi card in conjunction with a portable hotspot. Ambaralla will enable similar streaming and image download functionality in its A7L SoC with Qualcomm Atheros running SoftAP and newly announced Wireless Camera Development Kit.
It's clear that the smartphone/tablet platform and P&S camera will eventually merge at some point, as the device you always have on you ends up being the smartphone. The stepping stones to getting there are inclusion of some of the traditional camera DSP inside SoCs with application processors suited to running beefier OSes like Android.
Source: Ambaralla



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Tegra 3 tablets are a big thing for NVIDIA right now, and we’ve seen quite a few new tablets using the SoC. At NVIDIA’s booth, they had a bunch of ASUS Eee Prime Transformer tablets set up with a variety of games and other software. Grand Theft Auto IV was running on one unit, but more impressive was the multiplayer ShadowGun running on two more tablets. Both of those games (personally, at least) pale in comparison to another tablet with Skyrim “running” on Tegra 3. It wasn’t actually running on the tablet natively, but NVIDIA worked with SplashTop to get and optimized remote desktop connection to a PC running Skyrim—in all its glory. Of course it’s really the desktop doing the work, but the game was running smoothly with the WiFi remote desktop stream.
The other thing NVIDIA had on display were some Tegra 3 tablets running Windows 8. These were behind glass and you couldn't interact with them, but Microsoft did some live demos of Windows 8 on an Eee Prime Transformer at their keynote Monday. It appears Tegra 3 is well on its way to being ready for Windows 8 (and vice versa).
Gallery: NVIDIA Tegra 3: Games Plus SplashTop Streaming of Skyrim





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We just stopped by Buffalo's booth at CES 2012, who were kind enough to let us use a WiSpy DBx from Metageek we're working on reviewing to look at an 802.11ac signal. The WiSpy DBx is an inexpensive (for spectrum analyzers) spectral analysis tool, and with 802.11ac specifically the interesting thing to look at is what 80 MHz OFDM window. This is as opposed to the 20 or 40 MHz channels that are a part of 802.11n.

With the markers shown, clearly 80 MHz OFDM

Buffalo was running a 3x3:3 80 MHz 802.11ac demo at their booth, with two AirStation WZR-1750H APs and their visible Broadcom miniPCIe 802.11ac solution visible. The two cards were just wired together (even though 802.11ac works on 5 GHz) just to ensure no spectrum crowding issues affected the demo. However, Buffalo let us get nice and close to the pigtails, close enough to catch some of the 5 GHz RF leaking out. Wired together the simple network with two APs talking to each other was doing just over 800 Mbps of traffic.
Gallery: Buffalo AirStation WZR-1750H 802.11ac 80 MHz in Chanalyzer





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Earlier this week Crucial announced its first SSD caching solution: the Adrenaline SSD. The drive will be available in a single capacity: 50GB with 64GB of 25nm MLC NAND onboard. The controller is identical to the Marvell design used in the m4. Crucial tells me that the firmware is identical to what you'd get on a normal m4. Adrenaline will ship with some SSD caching software for Windows 7 but Crucial wouldn't tell us which package will come with the drive.

The target market is users who want a simple way to upgrade their slow hard drive based machines without the hassle of migrating data or the price of a high capacity SSD. Expect to see the drive ship before the end of Q1.



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Two days ago Intel made the mistake of playing a video of a DX11 game (F1 2011) instead of running the game itself on an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook. We mentioned the gaffe in our original post on the topic and followed up yesterday with a video that showed the title working on an Ivy Bridge notebook. Unfortunately the Ultrabook from the original demo wasn't available at the time, but we finally got some hands on time with the exact system that Mooly used in the original presentation:

The Ivy Bridge part inside runs at 2.0GHz by default but it supports configurable TDP, which is where the 2.5GHz value that Windows reports comes from. Intel isn't entirely sure how it's going to report configurable TDP values at this point. The part is a 17W ULV CPU.

The game is F1 2011, we confirmed it was once-again running in DX11 mode and at Medium quality defaults at the Ultrabook's native 13x7 resolution.

Video of the system is running below:





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