After our mixed feelings on the HP Envy 13, we were excited but also a little bit scared to see the 13′s big brother, the Envy 15. It’s running a Core i7 processor clocked at 1.6GHz, and has 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4830 discrete graphics fronted by a 1920 x 1080 15.6-inch display despite the fact that it doesn’t have a built-in disc drive. Luckily there’s an external Blu-ray packed into the box (that’s a $225 option on top of the $1,800 base price), but most games and apps these days are available via download anyway, so it’s not that big of knock on your power-user cred. The unboxing experience is actually identical to that of the Envy 13 (quite elegant), and we were happy to see that when we fired up the laptop the trackpad seemed better configured than that of the pre-update Envy 13 we reviewed. We were less enthused to see that the IE comes pre-installed with HP and Norton toolbars — pretty janky for a premium machine — but luckily we rarely have to see the ugly sight of IE more than once on a new machine. For the most part this is just an Envy 13 bigged up, and that’s nothing to complain about.
Filed under: Laptops
HP Envy 15 unboxing and hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/NSF_backs_development_of_laser_guided_robot_wheelchairs’; It’s been well over a year since we last saw the laser-guided, self-docking wheelchair developed by folks at Lehigh University, and now the team is back with an altogether more ambitious project. According to associate professor John Spletzer, the recipient of a five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the goal is to “extend the autonomy of the wheelchair so it can navigate completely in an urban setting and take you wherever you need to go.” This will be done by equipping robotic chairs with laser and camera sensors (which the team developed for the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge) as well as exhaustive, Google Street View-esque maps of the city where they will be operating. Of course, these guys will be operating in a busy urban environment, so in addition to large-scale 3D maps, they must be equipped with motion planning features for operating in dense crowds and a changing environment. It’s too soon yet to say when these things might become available commercially, but if you’re a resident of the Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Hospital in Allentown, PA, you might have your chance to test one soon enough.
[Via PhysOrg]
Filed under: Robots
NSF backs development of laser-guided robot wheelchairs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Matrox has been distancing itself from the consumer market for awhile now, but even we couldn’t resist this one. Hailed as the planet’s first single-slot octal graphics card, the M9188 supports up to eight DisplayPort or single-link DVI outputs, and if you’re up for getting really crazy, you can hook up a pair to drive 16 displays from a single workstation. The card itself packs 2GB of memory and supports resolutions as high as 2,560 x 1,600 (per output), which should be just enough to create the Google Earth visualization system you’ve always dreamed of. In related news, the outfit also introduced the far weaker 1GB M9128, which can drive a grand total of two displays for $259. Oh, and as for pricing on the octal guy? Try $1,995 when it ships later this quarter.
Filed under: Peripherals
Matrox pushes eight displays with a single-slot PCIe x16 GPU originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We’re still reserving our doubts about the viability of the enTourage eDGe — after all, at $490 you can buy yourself a respectable netbook and a halfway decent ereader for the appropriate occasion — but we won’t say that we’re not interested. Just under a month after it hit the scene, the dual-screen device has landed (in prototype form) over at Gearlog, and while some of the features weren’t functional, the physical build shouldn’t change much when it goes final. At first glance, the whole thing just looks a bit dated, but then again, we’ve still got the ultra-fresh Nook on the brain. Hit the read link to have a look yourself, won’t you?
Filed under: Displays, Handhelds
Dual-screen enTourage eDGe ebook reader gets a little hands-on time originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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