Alienware M11x gets Core i5, i7 Upgrade and Nvidia Optimus Tech

Few gaming laptops have charmed us as much as the Alienware M11x. It's a bit bulky compared to other 11.6-inch ultraportable laptops, but absolutely tiny compared to most laptops designed for gaming. It's overclocked Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor and GeForce 335M mobile graphics chip give it the muscle needed to truly play all the latest games at high settings. With most notebooks that size, you have to turn the settings down pretty far to get decent performance. The big eight-cell prismatic battery gives it over 7 hours of working time in our tests, as long as you flip the switchable graphics over to the Intel integrated GPU.

Now, our favorite ultraportable gaming machine is getting even better. Starting later this month, the M11x will swap out the Core 2 Duo processor in favor of ultra-low voltage versions of Intel's Core i5 and Core i7. These chips won't have their default clock speeds raised, as the current version does, but these CPUs feature Intel's Turbo Boost technology that automatically overclocks the chips in certain situations. Alienware representatives tell us to expect a significant performance increase. Battery life should range from "the same" to "maybe 15 or 20 minutes less", depending on how you use the system.

The existing M11x features manual switchable graphics, where you enter a special keystroke to switch between Intel's low-performance but battery-friendly integrated graphics and the high-performance GeForce 335M discrete GPU. The new version will include the fantastic Nvidia Optimus technology, which automatically and invisibly switches between the two based on what application you're running.

The only other real change is a minor cosmetic tweak: The black version will feature a matte finish instead of the glossy black of today's model. The silver version will be identical.

Check out our Laptop Reviews.

Follow Jason Cross on Twitter.

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First Look: Android 2.2 (Froyo) with Flash Player 10.1

I got an advance look at Google's latest treat for Android phones, Android 2.2 (more deliciously known as Froyo) on the Nexus One. Announced this morning at Google I/O in San Francisco, the update will initially be available to Motorola Droid and Nexus One owners in June. Android users will definitely be happy with this update, which delivers faster performance, tethering/mobile hotspot and of course, Flash support.

Flash Player 10.1: Great for Watching Video

At last, full Flash support has finally arrived on Android. Overall, the whole experience is quite good, but I encountered a couple of issues in my hands-on. Video playback looked excellent on the Nexus One's screen. I watched a couple of trailers on the Warner Brothers' site and was impressed with how smooth playback the was.

Flash support brings some big gaming potential to the Android platform. I tested the South Park Studios' make-your-own avatar feature and was amazed with how speedy the game was. Other games, like a baseball game on Kongregate ran smoothly as well. Farmville fans will also be delighted to learn that the ridiculously-addictive social networking game is Flash-based as well. Now you'll never get away from your farm.

Of course, not all sites were so fast. While the kid's educational site Ecoda Zoo looked gorgeous on the Nexus One, it moved painfully slow. I tried playing a couple of beloved Flash games that aren't optimized for mobile and was disappointed that I couldn't play some of them without a keyboard. For example, with Dino Run, I had to press the "space" bar to do a certain action, but I couldn't access the touch keyboard (the keyboard only comes up when you're in a typing field).

Interestingly enough, there's a shortcut on one of the homescreens to a page with recommended Flash-enabled sites and games including South Park Studios, BBC, Sony Pictures, Armor Games and more. TechCrunch dug up the lists for both the Nexus One and the Droid and pointed out that the two are different. In fact, the list for the Droid is much shorter than the Nexus One's.

Missing from all of this Flash action, of course, is Hulu. I was really disappointed when I tried-and ultimately failed-to watch an episode of "30 Rock" on the Nexus One. According to Adobe, Hulu does not own distribution rights for their content on mobile devices and therefore cannot stream video to smartphones. With no Hulu on the iPad and no Hulu on your Android phone, isn't time for Hulu to develop an app? Let's hope so.

Android 2.2: Faster Performance, Wi-Fi HotSpot and Tethering

While Flash Player is clearly the biggest update, there are definitely a few gems in the update. I did some side-by-side tests with a Nexus One running 2.1 and right off the bat, I noticed how much faster 2.2 is. Native apps launched quicker and scrolling through Web pages felt smoother on my 2.2 Nexus One.

I'm not sure how the carriers will handle this, but I was able to turn my T-Mobile Nexus One into a mobile hotspot via T-Mobile without any issue. Tethering also worked without any issue with T-Mobile.

One of the biggest weaknesses with Android was the inability to download apps to your microSD card; you had to resort to using your precious internal memory. Now, with the 2.2 update, you can store your apps on a microSD card.

Finally, there are also a few subtle cosmetic tweaks in the update. On the homescreen, there are three permanent shortcuts to the dialer app, the app menu and the browser. Éclair (2.0/2.1) only has a shortcut to the Menu app. Other than that, 2.2 looks pretty similar to 2.1.

The next treat for Android fans is Gingerbread, coming in Q4 of 2010. What do you want to see in the next version of Android? Leave your answer in the comments below.

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Samsung Galaxy S: How Does It Measure Up to the Competition?

This spring, Samsung introduced the Samsung Galaxy S, a super Android smartphone to rival the HTC EVO 4G, the various Droids (both Motorola's and HTC's) and of course, the iPhone 4. Versions of the Galaxy S will be making its way to U.S. shores this summer in four different form factors to all four major U.S. carriers. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the original European Galaxy S and did some quick side-by-side comparisons with the other hot phones of the summer.

Design and Display

When I first picked up the Galaxy S, I was amazed with how thin and lightweight it was. I was also surprised by how familiar it looked. The design is actually very iPhone 3GS-like with an all black, shiny plastic body and minimal buttons on the phone's face. It is thinner than both the EVO 4G and the Droid X measuring 0.39-inches thick, but slightly beefier than the ultra-slim 0.37-inch iPhone 4. It is the lightest of the bunch, weighing a scant 4.2 ounces.

The Galaxy S's feather-light weight is due in part to the Super AMOLED technology, which the Samsung first introduced at Mobile World Congress on the Samsung Wave. Super AMOLED technology has touch sensors on the display itself as opposed to creating a separate layer (Samsung's old AMOLED displays had this extra layer) making it the thinnest display technology on the market. Super AMOLED is fantastic; you really have to see it in real life to experience it. Colors burst out of the display and animations appeared lively and smooth.

The Galaxy S' 4-inch display is larger than the iPhone's (3.5-inches), but smaller than the HTC EVO 4G and Motorola Droid X's displays (4.3-inches). Despite its smaller size, the Galaxy S outshined both the Droid X and the EVO 4G in my casual side-by-side comparisons. The side-by-side with the iPhone 4 was a closer call. The iPhone 4's display appeared slightly sharper, but I thought the Galaxy S's colors looked more natural. It is really hard to declare a winner--both displays are stunning.

Samsung TouchWiz 3.0 with Android 2.1

The Samsung Galaxy S runs Android 2.1 (Eclair) with Samsung's own TouchWiz 3.0 user interface. Overall, this version of TouchWiz is a lot better than the version on the Samsung Behold II for T-Mobile, which was slow and difficult to navigate. But while this version is an improvement, I encountered some familiar issues with TouchWiz 3.0. Despite the 1GHz Hummingbird processor, the phone lags when launching apps, flipping through menus and scrolling down contact lists or Web pages. This could be due to the fact that this is a pre-production unit, however, and not everything is in perfect working order.

Like HTC Sense, Samsung has its own social media aggregator. Social Hub combines streams from your Facebook, MySpace and Twitter accounts into a single view. It is a useful feature if you need a simple way to keep track of your networks. One odd feature is Mini Diary, which lets you create blog entries with photos, weather info, texts and more. This would be a great feature if you could actually sync this information to your blog or Facebook profile--but weirdly, you can't.

Camera

We put the Galaxy S's 5-megapixel camera through a modified version of our PCWorld Lab Test for point-and-shoot digital cameras along with the iPhone 4, the Motorola Droid X and the HTC EVO 4G. Unfortunately our test panel was not very impressed with the Galaxy's photo quality. The Galaxy S phone earned the lowest score out of the four and an overall word score of "Fair." It finished ahead of the Evo 4G in terms of exposure quality, but finished in last place in our color accuracy, sharpness, and distortion tests.

On the other hand, it took second place in overall video quality. Its performance was skewed heavily toward good performance in bright light. According to our panel, bright-light footage looked a bit underexposed and slightly grainy in a full-screen view, but great at smaller sizes. The Galaxy S's auto-focus searches a bit before locking onto a crisp image. Its microphone actually picks up audio a bit too well: our audio clip sounded far too loud and blown-out, while it was barely picked up at all by some of the other smartphones in this comparison. In low light, the footage was a bit too murky and undefined to earn a better rating. Read the full test results in our Smartphone Camera Battle: iPhone vs. the Android Army.

Keep an eye out for full reviews of the Samsung Galaxy S phones including the Samsung Epic 4G (Sprint), Samsung Vibrant (T-Mobile) and the Samsung Captivate and the Samsung Fascinate (Verizon).

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Nvidia Unveils Next-Generation Ion Platform

We've been pretty big fans of Nvidia's Ion product for netbooks, which turbocharges the lame integrated graphics found in Intel's Atom line with something really capable of decoding all that hi-def flash video on the web and even playing a few basic 3D games. If you'll recall, the previous generation of Intel Atom based netbooks were three-chip solutions: you had the Atom CPU, the "North Bridge" containing the memory controller and integrated graphics, and the "South Bridge" with all the I/O and interconnect stuff. The Ion platform replaced both the North Bridge and South Bridge with what Nvidia calls an MCP - media and communcations processor. It's basically a single chip that includes the memory controller, I/O, and integrated graphics. In other words, the original Ion brought the three-chip Atom solution from Intel down to a two-chip solution, while improving graphics performance. It was a major selling point.

The Next Generation Ion, revealed today, sort of makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, not because it's a bad products, but because the marketing message isn't clear to consumers. It's no longer a "platform" - it's an add-on to an existing platform in the same way that any GeForce discrete graphics chip is an add-on to any notebook of any other size. It's just... GeForce for netbooks. For this and other reasons, the whole marketing message around the Next-Gen Ion is a little worrisome. Allow me to explain.

The new Intel "Pine Trail" platform for netbooks (those netbooks with the Atom N450 or N470 CPU) gets rid of the North Bridge chip - the Intel graphics and memory controller have been integrated into the CPU itself. So with Pine Trail, Intel is down to a two-chip solution: the CPU and the South Bridge. What the next-gen Ion does is boost that back to a three-chip solution by adding a GPU, complete with up to 512MB of it's own DDR2 or DDR3 memory (something that wasn't required in the original Ion, mind you). This graphics chip connects to the South Bridge via a PCI Express x1 link.

The new Ion will use the same Optimus technology Nvidia recently unveiled for larger notebooks. This is cool stuff. Basically, it's automatic switchable graphics that you, as a user, never need to even think about. Instead of the computer having an internal hardware switch to turn off the Intel integrated graphics and turn on the Nvidia discrete graphics, the computer simply always displays the Intel integrated graphics' frame buffer contents. The special Nvidia driver detects when you start viewing video or running 3D graphics and will power up the discrete graphics, copying the frames it renders to the Intel integrated graphics' frame buffer. Then, it automatically shuts off and powers down when you stop viewing video or running 3D. Optimus is really cool stuff, but the fact that the next-gen Ion uses it only further underscores that what once was a replacement "platform" for Atom-based netbooks is now an additional discrete graphics chip.

The Next-Generation Ion will come in two flavors. One has 8 graphics cores, the other 16. They're really the same chip, based on a very low-end version of the GT2xx family, with some parts "fused off" on the 8-core version to achieve the lower power and thermal requirements of smaller netbooks. My guess is that it's the GT218 chip, found in the GeForce 210M. The 8-core version can have either a 32-bit or 64-bit memory interface, while the 16-core version always has the 64-bit memory interface. You'll find the 8-core chip almost exclusively in 10-inch or smaller netbooks, while the 12-inch ultra-premium netbooks and desktop "nettops" will get the 16-core version, since they have a little more wiggle room on thermals and power. Nvidia says performance of the 8-core version should be comparable to the original Ion, while the 16-core version should be as much as twice as fast.

Here's another problem with the marketing: you don't know which one you're getting, really. One version of the chip is literally twice as fast as the other, but both are simply called "Next-Generation Ion." Nvidia tells us all the 12-inch netbooks and nettops are using the 16-core version, but there's nothing to force manufacturers to do this. If someone wants to make a super-thin 12-inch netbook and use the 8-core version, you really wouldn't know it unless the manufacturer spells out in the specs exactly which version of the "Next Generation Ion" it's using. This is like Nvidia selling two different GeForce mobile chips, one twice as powerful as the other, and not giving them different model numbers to differentiate each other. In fact, that's exactly what this is.

Nvidia is focusing on the "experience" of Ion, which is genuinely much better than the stock integrated graphics you get with an Atom based netbook or nettop. The video decoding acceleration is worlds better, as is the 3D graphics performance. That was true of the previous generation, too. Nvidia has made some hay with the press about how the new Ion has a package size of 23mm by 23mm, which is 40% the size of the origional Ion's package, thanks in part to a shrink from 65nm manufacturing to 40nm. This is a completely disingenuous comparison. The first-gen Ion was an "MCP" product, a complete GPU plus memory controller plus I/O controller in one. It replaced two Intel chips with one from Nvidia. The new Ion replaces nothing, it adds a 23mm by 23mm chip and a bank of dedicated graphics memory to the new two-chip Intel Pine Trail platform.

I'm all for giving users the ability to get away from the truly awful Intel integrated graphics and buy something better. The new Ion is definintely good news in that regard. But let's call a spade a spade - the new Ion is just a really low-end GeForce mobile discrete graphics chip for Ions. To be fair, Nvidia doesn't claim the Next Generation Ion is a "platform" in its marketing materials, as far as I can tell. But by keeping the same branding as the previous product, which is a platform, it confuses consumers about what they're actually buying.

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Why I Switched from iPhone to Android

Last week, I joined what must be millions of other technology nerds (if my Twitter and Facebook friends are any indication) in getting rid of my iPhone 3G* in favor of an Android-based phone. Why on earth would I do such a thing? Aren't iPhones basically the best smartphones on the market? Increasingly, I'm not sure that's the case. Besides, it's not simply about overall phone quality.

The reasons I switched closely mirror those than Daniel Lyons outlined in his piece at Newsweek. Here's the breakdown of the reasons I jumped ship, and why I think many formerly loyal iPhone users might be jumping ship, too.

First, there's AT&T. I live and work in San Francisco, which is basically ground zero for crappy AT&T service. I was tired of the dropped calls, but I don't talk on the phone all that much. The bigger problem was having "four bars" of 3G service, trying to go to a website, and being told there was no network connection. I can't count the times I've reloaded a web page or TweetDeck trying to get my seemingly well-connected phone online. My contract with AT&T was over, so this was a good opportunity to jump ship to Verizon. I don't really care if Verizon's 3G isn't quite as fast as AT&T 3G. Slightly slower but reliable beats faster and spotty every time. (This, by the way, is why carriers and phone vendors should cut it out with the exclusivity deals. When AT&T loses a customer, so does Apple. When Apple loses a customer, chances are high that AT&T does, too.)

Then we have Apple's app store policies. Apple is changing the terms in their OS 4 update to the iPhone (coming this summer) to basically disallow any intermediate software layers in the creation of iPhone apps. This means devs can't use Adobe's popular Flash-to-iPhone compiler, nor products like MonoTouch. The Unity 3D engine may or may not be affected. Is it Apple's right to do this? Maybe, but I don't really care. Apple's official reason is that intermediate software layers produce sub-standard products. The sorry state of iTunes on Windows, which uses CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics, might prove their point. But shouldn't developers and consumers be the ones to decide if software is crappy or not? And if Apple is so concerned about software quality, how come so many Apps make it to the App Store in an almost unusably buggy state? How come there are so many completely worthless junk apps? Apple's quality concerns are demonstrably B.S.

Apple also refuses to support Flash in its browser. Fair enough. Maybe the future of web video and interactive entertainment is HTML5, but the now of web video and interactive entertainment is Flash. Video sites that rely on protecting content can't use HTML5 video yet, and HTML5 is a long way from having the tools or penetration necessary to make the equivalent of Flash's incredibly popular web games. Google went ahead and demonstrated how well Flash can run on a phone - Apple claims they give you the "whole web" on iPhone and iPad, but Google is actually delivering it.

Which brings me to Froyo (Google's cute name for Android 2.2). I'm mighty impressed by what Google is doing here. It's very fast, has some great new developer features, integrated honest-to-goodness Flash 10.1 without compromises, tethering, and more. Of course, iPhone OS 4 brings with it a host of big changes, and it looks like video chat will probably be part of that. But I'd have to buy a new iPhone, and that may mean sticking with AT&T. The only problem is, I don't have any confidence that Apple will implement video chat in some sort of standards-compliant way. I feel like video chat is likely to be iPhone-to-iPhone only, or maybe to Macs with iChat.

Ultimately, my reason for switching can be summed up thusly: I used to feel that, to get the best smartphone software and hardware experience, I had to live in Apple's walled garden. Now, the walls are getting higher, and life outside the garden looks better and better. I can get a really great smartphone without some company telling me I can't switch out the keyboard, or the dialer, or the voice mail program, or the browser. I can get a world-class smartphone without putting up with AT&T's spotty network. I don't have to put up with supporting a company that enforces its restrictive App Store policies in a seemingly arbitrary and draconian manner. I'm not sure I agree with those who say Google has "leapfrogged" Apple in phone development, but I certainly think they're doing a comparably good job.

So, last week, I walked into Best Buy and bought an HTC Droid Incredible, and so far I've been more than happy with it. Now if only more game developers would flock to Android as customers seem to have done. Oh well, I still have my iPad for that (I'd buy someone's else's tablet if anyone was making a tablet nearly as good as the iPad).

Follow Jason Cross on Twitter .

* I didn't actually get rid of it. I still have it, it's just not my phone. I'll hang on to it as a portable game machine, for now.

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