TechieGroups

Rob Kerr THE INQUIRER

Review Below par budget phone, even with its green credentials

For the past couple of weeks I've been playing with an absolute beast of a phone. With a 4.3" diagonal screen, 800 x 480 resolution and a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC the HTC EVO 4G is the Android phone to beat today – at least on paper.

Read on for our full review as we test everything about this phone. Usability, battery life, network performance, video playback and more. If you want to know what it's like living with the first SUV-sized Android phone, here you go.

Last month Ryan Smith published his findings on OS X Portal performance. While we're all glad that Valve ported the Steam engine to OS X, we weren't very happy with the performance of the initial release. Since then Valve has updated its Steam client and games as well as released Half Life 2 Episode 2 for the Mac. We take a look at its performance in both OS X and Windows on two different Macs, unfortunately the story isn't much better than last time.

Read on to get the full story.

Nick Farrell THE INQUIRER

That is a lot for an Apple gadget

Acer's latest Ferrari-branded laptop looks to compete in the crowded CULV ultraportable market. Packing an X2 L310 processor and HD 3200 graphics, on paper at least the Ferrari One should compete relatively well. Does AMD have a viable answer to the long battery life CULV laptops? Do the HD 3200 graphics offer any real benefit? And should something that's actually quite slow carry the name "Ferrari"? We may not have an answer to that last question, but we can certainly shed more light on the first two items.

A friend of mine who works at Intel emailed me asking for my help in this. Kyron Horman, the son of an Intel employee, has gone missing. The report is vague but seems to imply that the child went missing somewhere in Multnomah County, Oregon. He is 3'8" tall, weighs 50 lbs and has brown hair/blue eyes. He was last seen wearing black cargo pants, white socks and worn black Sketcher tennis shoes with orange trim. If you have seen him or have any information with regards to his whereabouts please contact the Multnomah County Sherrif's Tip Line at 503-261-2847.

Our hearts go out to the Horman family and we hope for a safe return of their boy. Thanks in advance for your help and for reading this.

Update: More information here.

 

Earlier this year Apple updated its entire MacBook Pro lineup. The update wasn't cosmetic, the 2nd generation unibody design carried over from 2009. Instead the 15-inch and 17-inch notebooks got Core i5/i7 CPUs paired with NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPUs. The 13-inch model was left with a Core 2 Duo and only saw a big improvement in GPU spec with the integrated GeForce 320M.

Clearly valuing a consistent GPU experience over a faster CPU, Apple decided to keep the Core i-family of CPUs out of its most popular MacBook Pro. As a result the new MacBook Pro offers roughly twice the 3D gaming performance of its predecessor, but only a small improvement in CPU performance. The standard memory size is now doubled to a respectable 4GB.

Battery life has also improved pretty significantly. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro now offers the best battery life in Apple's entire lineup. In our light web browsing test we measured a full 9.75 hours of battery life on a single charge. Our worst case scenario? 3.56 hours.

Check out our full review for everything from battery life to display quality and thermals.

Nick Farrell THE INQUIRER

Friendly fire in CPU versus GPU war Friendly fire in CPU versus GPU war

While we're still waiting on our EVO 4G review sample, AnandTech Mobile Editor Vivek Gowri got his hands on the HTC EVO 4G. Android 2.1 running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC with a giant screen and 4G network support makes for one beast of a phone.

Read on for Vivek's thoughts.

When we reviewed Zotac's ZBOX HD-ID11 we noted that the upgrade to the Next-Generation ION didn't feel like much of an upgrade. Performance improved in some cases, but power consumption got worse and in 3D games and Flash playback performance actually dropped. The latter was a particular problem because many want to buy these NG-ION nettops for use as streaming content devices.

NVIDIA recently gave us a driver to improve the Flash playback situation on NG-ION platforms and we put it through the paces. While it doesn't fix everything, there's at least light at the end of this tunnel. Read on for the story.