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Episode 40: Road tripping and torture-testing the HTC One

Summer's here, almost officially, which means the road trip season is upon us. We set out to try to find out which gadgets could entertain you on a long drive, or at least keep the kids out of your hair, and whether the phone that's arguably the hottest of the season could handle some road trip mishaps.

But here at Always On, we road trip in style. No cramped back seats for us ... we were rolling in The Woody, a massive high-tech RV that's the custom showcase creation of OCRV Paint and Service. Thanks for the ride, … Read more

Presenting...a truly mobile startup. Literally!

SAN FRANCISCO--There's a whole lot of mobile startups these days, but how many of them are actually, you know, mobile?

A company called Needle is, and if you'd wandered near South Park here today, you would have seen its so-called Mobile Contact Center -- essentially a huge RV -- parked on the street with several employees working away inside.

Ostensibly based in Salt Lake City, Needle contracts with retail partners to provide them experts to chat with end users. The idea is that there's likely no one better suited to explaining a product, or answering questions about … Read more

Cisco RV110W review: Affordable small-business VPN option

Generally, getting a VPN for your business that allows remote users to access the local network via the Internet as though they were physically at the office means you'd need a real server or a relatively expensive VPN router. It doesn't have to be that way anymore with the RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall that Cisco announced today.

This is a router designed specifically for small businesses of five employees or fewer. Its built-in PPTP VPN server is limited to supporting up to five concurrent remote users. The good news is that the router is very easy to use … Read more

Rand McNally GPS for the Winnebago crowd

Summer is coming. Thousands of lumbering behemoths will soon take to the roads, loaded with families or retirees. These RVs are misunderstood creatures. They may clog up the highways and decorate Wal-Mart parking lots, but they have needs just like other vehicles. RVs need GPS love, too.

Rand McNally is courting the RV community with a new GPS device designed just for them. The TripMaker RVND 5510 sports a name that's almost as long as an actual Winnebago. It comes stocked up with information that would make a regular car driver's head spin.… Read more

Samsung's new laptops--new Intel processors, plus a thin surprise

LAS VEGAS--Samsung announced three laptops of note at CES 2011, all of them featuring Intel's new Sandy Bridge 2nd-gen Core processors. One aims at the executive market, while the others focus at the high and low end of average consumer laptops.

The RV511 is a thin and very affordable $599 multimedia budget laptop, featuring a Core i3-380M CPU, 15.6-inch display, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.

The RC512 is Samsung's high-end 15-inch offering. At $1149, it packs a Core i7-2630M CPU, Nvidia GeForce GT430 graphics, 6GB DDR3 RAM, a 750GB hard drive, and a Blu-ray … Read more

Retro boom box JVC RV-NB50 Kaboom adds iPod compatibility

LAS VEGAS--We've seen a handful of iPod boom boxes with retro styling--the Lasonic i931 and Altec Lansing Mix iMT800 come to mind--and now JVC is joining the party with the RV-NB50 Kaboom.

This newest Kaboom keeps the CD player, FM radio, and tubular design of the earlier Kaboom model (first launched in 1998), but it adds the requisite iPod dock and line-in port. The Kaboom can also play back digital audio files from USB drives. JVC throws in a shoulder strap too, so you can blast the Kaboom's 40-watt speakers on the go. The unit will be available … Read more

ATI and Nvidia face off--obliquely

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI division are taking different approaches to graphics processing in the next generations of their products. Both strategies have strengths and weaknesses, and I think it's too soon to pick the eventual winner in this long-running fight.

Before I get into my analysis, I should say that Nvidia paid me to write a white paper on the implications of its new GPU architecture (code-named Fermi) for high-performance computing applications. The white paper was released as part of the Fermi launch event at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference last week.

Nvidia also paid for white papers from two other well-known microprocessor analysts, Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 and my friend and former colleague Tom Halfhill of Microprocessor Report. UC Berkeley professor David Patterson wrote a fourth white paper, and Nvidia wrote one of its own. All of these works take a different approach to the subject; all are worth reading if you need to understand what Fermi is all about.

In short, I think the Fermi architecture has been more thoroughly white-papered than any graphics chip design in history. All five of these documents are available on the Fermi home page on Nvidia's Web site, and just in case that page is moved or changed, you're welcome to take advantage of my own mirror of my white paper.

I've spent much of the last several days reading these documents plus David Kanter's excellent article on Fermi over on his Real World Technologies site. David managed to get some details on Fermi that Nvidia didn't give to the rest of us.

I've also had time to go through the coverage of ATI's recent launch of the RV870, which is what Nvidia's Fermi-based chips will be competing against. The first of Nvidia's chips bears the internal code name of GF100, and it's huge. Here's a life-size photo:… Read more