Thread: Anandtech News

The slate computing market is about to explode, with a literal flood of new tablets releasing over the coming months. Many of them will be Android based, running Nvidia’s Tegra 2 SoC. Nvidia made a big deal about Tegra 2 back at CES 2010, but for some reason, it’s taken quite a bit of time for anything running the platform to hit the market. Finally, we have one - the Viewsonic G Tablet. The G Tablet is a 10" slate running Android 2.2 on top of Tegra 2 and a $399 pricetag. For the money, it's packing a lot of power and features. But the real question is how Tegra 2 stacks up against Hummingbird and Snapdragon, along with how much faster the dual-core A9 is than the A8-based SoCs.

So, what's the performance like? Read on to see our impressions and benchmarks.



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Christmas time is coming and perhaps you want to give your significant other a new PSU. "Hey honey, check out this awesome new power supply I got you so you can... um...." Anyway, we gathered up several high-end power supplies from manufacturers all over the world, and we're here to see which one comes out on top. When you're looking at 1kW and larger power supplies, determining the "best" product isn't easy, as the manufacturers have different opinions on what is important. Some will go for pure efficiency, others for lower noise, or better cooling, etc. You'll have to decide which features are the most important, but let's look at this quintet and see if any can clearly rise above the rest.



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For better or worse, new user interfaces are all the rage right now in the console gaming scene. Nintendo was first to the block in 2006 with 3D motion-controlled user interfaces, leveraging a unique combination of IR sensors and 6-axis MEMS accelerometers in a handheld remote. The motion-controlled Wii has enjoyed a nice long run being the sole platform for motion-assisted gaming. Flash forward to late 2010, and Microsoft and Sony both have readied their response to the Wii - the Microsoft Kinect and Sony Move, respectively.

It’s taken the greater part of four years (and one name change) for Microsoft’s answer to make it to market, but Kinect is finally out and ready for mass consumption. We’ve spent nearly a month playing with Kinect and are finally ready to release our impressions.


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Back on December 2nd AMD’s Catalyst Product Manager, Terry Makedon, posted an interesting if cryptic note on his Twitter feed: “Catalyst 10.12 is going to be HUGE”. Since then there’s been some speculation on just what was going to be huge, but nothing quite hit the mark until the last couple of days.

With release date for the Catalyst 10.12 driver set finally upon us, AMD has taken the wraps off of what they’ve been up to. The huge news? The Catalyst Control Center is getting a significant interface refresh; its latest since the middle of last year, and certainly the biggest one to date.

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The Nexus S, spiritual successor to the Nexus One, is finally here. The Nexus One was supposed revolutionize in the way people buy mobile phones stateside, effectively decoupling phone upgrade schedules from the slow march of two-year contracts - thus allowing Android to evolve rapidly. Though the success of Google selling unlocked hardware directly to consumers turned out to be less than a smash hit, the Nexus One became the best place to get the unadulterated, pure Google version of Android, and moreover the place updates always appeared first. Though the Nexus One has aged gracefully and kept feeling relatively fresh with speedy platform updates, it’s hardware is definitely starting to look dated.



The Nexus S includes a host of definite improvements over the Nexus One, the question is whether it’s better than competition that already is moving incredibly fast. The Nexus S also launches Android 2.3 “Gingerbread,” which includes changes such as a revamped UI with GPU accelerated animations, better stock keyboard, better power management controls, and a bunch more. We’ve been playing with the Nexus S since Friday - read on for our full review of both the Nexus S and Android 2.3.



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In 2009 AMD launched the highly successful Radeon HD 5800 series to great fanfare and even greater shortages. With a 6 month lead on NVIDIA, AMD had the high-end market locked up tight, and in spite of recurring GPU shortages was able to make the best of the situation. Ultimately their one-sided dominance did come to an end with NVIDIA's GTX 400 series launch, but it's not until the past month with the GTX 500 series that NVIDIA gained a clear upper-hand over AMD's long-lived 5800 series.

Hot on the heels of the Radeon HD 6800 series launch and NVIDIA's GTX 500 series launch, AMD is making a truly fresh start in the high-end market. Launching today is the Radeon HD 6900 series, marking the launch of not just AMD's competitor for the GTX 500 series, but also the start of the company's future. With the launch of a new GPU architecture premiering with the Cayman GPU, this is anything but a typical GPU launch.

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You demanded them, we listened, and finally some fruit fell from HP's tree. We have an Envy 14 in house getting tested right now, and today we bring you the results of the Envy 17. HP—and to an extent the rest of you—have posited the Envy line as PC-based alternatives to Apple's MacBook Pro notebooks. Today we're testing that theory with the big daddy, the Envy 17. An Intel quad-core, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics, and a splashy 1080p screen. Does it get the job done?

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Last year we put out our first ever public Call for Writers. Over the past year we've added many new faces to AnandTech and we're looking to do it again. It takes a great deal of time to cover the products that we do on AnandTech and we continue to have more to review and analyze than we have time to actually review and analyze them. We need your help.

I'm continually impressed by how ridiculously smart our readers are. The comments in our articles alone are some of the most well informed content on the web. You guys know your stuff. Which is why we turn to you for writers.

This time around we have some more specific needs that need to be filled, although we're always looking for more writers in general. The categories we're looking for writers are below:

CPUs
Video Cards
Motherboards
Memory
Cooling
Smartphones
Tablets/Notebooks/Netbooks
Apple
Storage (NAND based and HDDs)
Displays
News

If you find that you're passionate about another topic that isn't listed, please get in touch with us. Although those are the areas we're looking for, we always need more writers across the board.

You'll also note that there's a new category listed above: News. In 2011 you will see the return of regular news and short form content to AnandTech. We've been doing a bit of that lately but we're looking to expand it. If you're up to date on what's going on in tech and want to keep others up to date as well, this may be a good fit for you.

The rules are the same as before. If you're interested in writing for AnandTech, simply email your name, location (you can write from anywhere) and a writing sample to callforwriters AT anandtech DOT com. The writing sample can be any of the following:

1) A sample of a product review you've written. This can be any product in the categories mentioned below, the review can follow any format and be of any length. Ultimately your content would live on AnandTech, so take a look at our reviews and how we do things and keep that in mind as you submit your sample. You don't need complete testing. If you don't have things to compare the product being reviewed to just outline how you would test, what tests you'd run, what you'd compare to and how. Obviously the more complete your sample is, the better it looks :)

2) A sample guide. This can be a how to, a tutorial, or anything of the sort. I'd caution you against submitting a guide to building a PC, try to do something a bit more unique.

3) A sample analysis piece/column/editorial. This would be something similar to our Micron ClearNAND analysis or my take on the Google Chrome OS announcement. Again, these are just examples, think of something creative on your own :)

4) A sample set of blog/news posts. We're looking to bring back some tech news to AT with the new site. Submit a handful of interesting stories along with your brief analysis. These can be product announcements, interesting revelations around the web, drawing attention to a forum post, etc...


We'll read every submission although we won't always be able to respond to each one.

If you enjoy the site, if you like what we do and think you'd like to be a bigger part of it - drop us a line. As always, thanks for reading!


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