Andromium‘s Superbook (LDM Product Roundup – Vol 23 No 19) – the laptop ‘shell’ powered by a smartphone – is now live on Kickstarter. Prices start at $85. It was funded within 10 minutes, and had raised more than three times its goal within an hour.
A new media player by Giada PC, the Giada G330, has been designed specifically for video walls. Able to control up to six displays at once, it is now available in Europe. The player features an Intel H110 chipset and AMD Radeon HD 7750 GPU. UltraHD resolution (24Hz) can be reached, split across four screens, or 2560 x 1600 across six. As well as DisplayPort (x6), the player features USB-C, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 (x4) ports. It is available now for €1,050.
Lenovo went quiet on its OLED hybrid, the X1 Yoga, since showing it at CES (Lenovo Deluge Led by OLED Notebook). However, it has now posted the unit for sale on its website. Prices start at $1,550 for an IPS-LCD model, or $1,870 for the OLED version. Lenovo is currently running a promotional discount, putting these prices at $1,160 and $1,400, respectively.
(I have been waiting for the Lenovo T460S so that I can upgrade my PC, but wanted the model that was announced that would have a discrete Nvidia GPU. Although there have been reports that it might arrive since April, there is no sign. I suspect that it will never arrive – the current T460S has been criticised for a less than stellar battery life and the Nvidia option is likely to make this worse. Man. Ed.)
MMD has provided us with a definition of its UltraColor technology (Philips Boosts Colour in Panel). According to the firm, backlight chemistry was fine-tuned to produce a more balanced white light, which produces a wider colour gamut.
Nvidia has launched a new version of its Titan X graphics card, which packs a huge amount of computing power into a single unit: 11 TFLOPS, to be precise. The card features 12 billion transistors, 3,584 CUDA cores (1.58GHz) and 12GB of GDDR5X RAM (480Gbps). It will cost $1,200. Although the card can be used by consumers, it is intended for deep learning, autonomous vehicles and VR.
Samsung is rolling out a firmware update for its 2016 SUHD TVs, which is designed to enhance the quality of HDR viewing – even if the source is not in an HDR format. It will add an ‘HDR+’ function the TVs, which can upscale SDR content to an HDR-like quality. The update is available for 2016 SUHD TVs now, and will be available for all HDR-capable 2016 TVs by September.
ViewSonic is working with UIEvolution to create an integrated hardware and software package called Smart Module Displays. These combine ViewSonic’s displays with UIE’s ExperienceManager platform. ExperienceManager is used to build guest entertainment and digital signage experiences.
