ImageWould you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 — and oh yeah, it’s packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the “worlds fastest graphics card,” it’s loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you’ll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration [...]

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We got a little worried when ITG missed its January unveiling for the xpPhone 2, but yesterday, this Windows 7-powered smartphone finally made its debut public appearance in Guangzhou, and we happened to be there to scoop up a demo unit. Since we last came across the second-gen xpPhone, its ambitious Chinese manufacturer has dished out more detailed specs: the 17.5mm-thick device comes with a 4.3-inch 800 x 480 LCD made by Sharp, multitouch input, an Intel Atom Z5xx series processor up to 2GHz, up to 2GB of RAM, up to 112GB of SSD made by Silicon Storage Technology, microSD expansion and a multipurpose [...]

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We had some hands-on action with Acer’s new Aspire S3 Series Ultrabook this morning, in a packed and sweaty Berlin hall at IFA 2011. The Taiwanese giant has really impressed us with its great value laptops this year, so we were keen to check out this ultra-slim lapt top, which is just 17mm at itshickest point, and 13mm at its thinnest. This makes it slightly slimmer than the Samsung 9003X, which was already impressively slender. The metal chassis looks reassuringly solid, constructed from a lightweight aluminium/magnesium alloy. We were impressed at just how light the Aspire S3 feels when [...]

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HP, the world’s number one laptop manufacturer, makes an enormous range of machines, including what they describe as business-rugged models. The EliteBook 6930p is one such laptop and is designed for use by small, medium and large businesses. The 14.1-inch produces a sharp enough image for reading and editing office documents. Unlike the Hi-Grade’s screen, it doesn’t feature a shiny Super-TFT coating, meaning there are no reflections in bright or rapidly changing light to worry about. HP’s DuraCase technology is in evidence here and the laptop’s chassis is made from [...]

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Although not a specialist in rugged machines, Hi-Grade – a company based in the UK – has released the Notino R5500. It is a semi-rugged machine which isn’t designed for quite the same extreme conditions as the Dell E6400 XFR and Getac B300, but has a variety of features that make it considerably more durable than the average laptop currently on sale. The 15.4-inch screen boasts a 1280 x 768-pixel resolution and is very crisp and clear. The screen itself is shock-mounted to reduce the risk of damage from an impact and is also very bright, making it great for viewing in brightly lit conditions. Alloy [...]

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