electronics News

Plug an iPhone or iPod into pretty much any computer with a USB port, and you should get enough power to charge your phone or media player. Try the same thing with an iPad and your results are likely to be a bit less predictable. That’s because an iPad needs more power to charge and most older PCs ship with USB ports that simply don’t pump out enough juice.

Newer Macbooks do provide enough power to let you use your iPad while it’s charging. Most older computers will charge your iPad slowly if the screen is turned off, but if you turn on the display you’ll probably see that the tablet isn’t charging.

Up until now, it seemed like the simplest solution was to plug your iPad into a computer only when you needed to sync data — and to plug it into a wall jack when you needed to charge. But it looks like there are firmware updates that let you tweak computers with Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte motherboards so that they provide more power to USB ports — enough power to charge an iPad.

Your results may vary, and of course you may run the risk of shorting your motherboard if you don’t know what you’re doing. But if you’re willing to take that risk, you can find download links from all three motherboard manufacturers at Engadget. You can see a video of an iPad being charged from several different laptop USB ports after the break. That includes a Sony Vaio P mini-laptop which isn’t exactly a high power device.

Corning’s Gorilla Glass technology is supposed to make screens that are resistant to scratches and other everyday damage. The upcoming LG X300 mini-laptop uses Gorilla Glass, and so does the Dell Streak 5 inch Android tablet. And the folks at Engadget just happened to have a Streak prototype, so they did the only responsible thing and tried abusing the display to see what would happen.

First thing they did was attempt to stab the screen with a normal pen. And I don’t just mean tapping. I mean stabbing with some force… repeatedly. The pen didn’t leave any scratches or cracks.

Does this mean it’s safe to run a Dell Streak over with a car? No. But it does mean that it might be safe to throw the Streak in your bag without a protective cover on occasion.

Compared with traditional CRT monitors, LCD monitors to save energy and size of the main light has two major advantages. But with the emergence of LED backlight technology, which further highlights the two major advantages, in addition to lower power consumption than, many display manufacturers to further reduce the thickness and weight, the liquid crystal display of the body have been more light. Recently, the display will be a leader in Philips introduced two very thin Beyond LED display new – 191EL2, 221EL2. In fact, the second half of 2009, Philips from the first since the advent of LED displays, Philips has been working LED display R & D, promotion and popularization of the market has become the largest LED display manufacturer product model, covering 19-22 inch mainstream products, both new thin market, but also enriched the camp Philips Beyond LED display. Thin body, ultra-low power consumption, 2 million to 1 contrast ratio, ultra-high intelligence, will make these two new products in the market, business is booming.

I get why people like to disassemble laptops to see what’s inside. Because once you know that, you know whether it will be easy to upgrade the memory, storage, or other components — or install additional modules like Bluetooth, GPS, or 3G. But when it comes to tiny tablet-style devices like the Archos 7 Home Tablet, let’s be honest. There’s no way you’re going to do any serious hacking. There’s just not enough room inside.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to at least see what’s on the inside. Fortunately we don’t have to actually dissect one to find out, because the folks at nDevil have already done it for us — and they’ve posted a video to prove it.

The one thing that I did learn from the video is that the Archos 7 has an 18.5Whr battery – which could be user replaceable if you’re willing to risk opening up your system. After dissecting their unit and putting it back together, the folks at nDevil found that the Archos 7 simply didn’t work anymore.

You know how the Archos 7 Home Tablet has been up for pre-order at Amazon for a few weeks, and we were told that it would ship in June? Scratch that. It looks like you can purchase one today from the Archos Store.

The tablet has a 7 inch, 800 x 480 pixel resistive touchscreen display and runs Google Android 1.5. It supports 802.11b/g/n WiFi and has the hardware and software to handle 720p HD video playback. The base model has 8GB of storage space and a micro SDHC card slot that supports up to 32GB of additional storage.

The biggest drawback is that the device doesn’t ship with access to the Android Market. While you can probably install the same hacked version on the Archos 7 that works on the Archos 5, some apps from the Android Market won’t work on a non-smartphone device, and many others won’t run on the outdated Android 1.5 operating system.

Acer took an unusual step today and put out a press release to let the world know what it’s not working on. And that’s a netbook running chrome OS. Acer says it has “no short-term plans for such a product.”

Last week there was a rumor going around that Acer would show off netbooks and/or tablets running Google’s upcoming Chrome operating system at the Computex Trade show in June. But as I pointed out at the time, Chrome OS isn’t ready for prime time yet — and while it’s possible Acer or other companies could have a tech demo or two on-hand at Computex, it’s way too early for anyone to talk about releasing products based on the unfinished operating system.

Does this mean that Acer won’t ever bring a Chrome OS netbook to market? Hardly. We could still see something later this year — when Google officially launches the operating system for PC makers to load on netbooks and other devices.

Until then, you can always download and install an unofficial, pre-release copy of Chrome OS.

There’s good news and bad news about that new Acer Aspire One 521 netbook that was introduced the other day. The good news is the folks at Notebook Journal.de have gotten their hands on a demo unit. The bad news is they’ve discovered it has issues playing HD video from YouTube.

Standard definition video looks good enough — and so does 720p HD video in windowed mode. But when you try to blow the video up to full screen mode, it looks pretty choppy. 1080p HD video looks like a slideshow.

The Acer Aspire One 521 has a 1.2GHz AMD V105 single core processor, ATI Radeon HD 4225 graphics, and a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display. The laptop should be able to handle HD playback for local video files stored on your hard drive, it looks like it might have problems with Flash video — at least until Adobe releases a version of Flash Player that supports the graphics card in this machine — although it’s also possible that the reviewer simply didn’t install the latest release candidate for Adobe Flash Player 10.1

You can check out a video showing HD video playback on the Acer Aspire One 521 after the break. If you happen to speak better German than I do and notice anything I missed, let us know in the comments.

We’ve seen quite a few HTC Hero clones out of Shenzhen since the original one made first appearance, but it seems this is the first one that runs Android OS. The phone seems solid-built, and gets a capacitive touchscreen, which is rare to find on a Shanzhai phone. What’s more, it gets a HTC sense alike user interface. Its specs that we know include a 3.2 inches 320×480 HVGA capacitive touchscreen, a 400MHZ processor, 128MB RAM, 256MB ROM, Android 1.5 OS. Thought only with Android 1.5, it’s said it comes with multi-touch support too. The specs are very good, but it just sells around $150 dollars.

You might think the Archos 7 Home Tablet is nothing more than a slightly larger Archos 5 Internet Tablet… and yo’d almost be right. But Engadget’s Joanna Stern has a detailed review of the new 7 inch tablet running Google’s Android operating system, and she found plenty to like… and plenty to dislike about it.

She likes the tablet’s build quality, even though it’s made mostly of rather cheap plastic. She likes the 7 inch display and overall small size and weigh of the device. She’s not a fan of the resistive touchscren display with narrow viewing angles.

There’s also no accelerometer or software feature for rotating the screen — which is a major step back from the Archos 5 which could easily be used in landscape or portrait mode.

The biggest problem Joanna had was that the Archos 7 runs Google Android 1.5 which means it doesn’t ship with newer Android apps — and it’s tough to download third party apps because the tablet doesn’t come with access to the Android Market. Instead you get access to the AppsLib store which has only about a thousand third party apps — not the tens of thousands of apps available in the Android Market.

The Archos 7 actually has a slower processor than the Archos 5, but Joanna says it didn’t feel all that slow, and the tablet does an excellent job as an audio and video player. When I reviewed the Archos 5, I found that it locked up occasionally and required a reboot, but when I asked her about that, Joanna says she thought the Archos 7 felt pretty stable.

Overall it sounds like the tablet is a mixed bag… but it’s a $199 mixed bag. At that price, it almost doesn’t matter if it’s not the best tablet, media player, or Android device on the market. At least it’s on of the cheapest.

It’s been a good 17 months since Asus first introduced the world to its computer-in-a-keyboard concept. But the device is finally shipping today. Amazon has the Eee Keyboard in stock for $599 and says it can offer 1-day shipping, which means the first early adopters could have the Eee Keyboard as early as tomorrow.

At $599, I’m still not sure why anyone would buy a keyboard with a 4 hour battery and a computer stuffed inside when it would be cheaper to just pick up a cheap nettop, stick it next to your HDTV, and buy a separate wireless keyboard.

But if you’re still interested, here’s what you get with the Eee Keyboard: Windows XP, Wireless HDMI, a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1G of RAM, and a 5 inch, 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen for launching applications and viewing some content on the keyboard without bringing it up on your TV.