From CNET News.com: There have been a slew of network high-def digital media players on the market lately, and soon there are going to be even more.

Netgear announced Tuesday two new HD media players: the NeoTV 350 HD and the NeoTV 550 Ultimate. Similar to the Seagate GoFlex TV or the WD TV Live Plus, the NeoTV players are designed to play back digital content stored on USB external hard drives, network storage devices, or the Internet.

According to Netgear, the new players support both DLNA and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) streaming standards, video resolution up to 1080p with Dolby Digital, and DTS surround sound.

In addition to this, the NeoTV players have a SD slot so they can play back content stored on this type of media as well.

NeoTV 550 Ultimate also has an eSATA port to host faster external storage devices, offers support for portable Blu-ray readers, and sports advanced metadata tagging that lets users browse cover art.

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From CNET News.com: The future in which you can display your laptop's content wirelessly on an HDTV is getting closer.

Amimon, a member of the WHDI consortium that makes Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) chips for wireless HDTV connectivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has been picked by Asus to power the upcoming WiCast EW2000 PC to TV connectivity kit. This means Asus' WiCast kit will use Amimon's WHDI technology to enables users to wirelessly connect their computers to their TVs. Asus also announced that it has joined the WHDI consortium.

WHDI is an emerging wireless technology that offers wireless alternatives to the current HDMI cables used in most home entertainment devices for displaying content on TV screen. WHDI is capable of carrying both sound and video signal wirelessly at the same quality as HDMI cables. Earlier this year, Amimon revealed that it had sold half a million WHDI chips to hardware makers, predicting a wide adoption of the technology.

According to Amimon, Asus' wireless PC-to-TV kit allows consumers to view the entire contents--including Internet video, movies, flash media, digital photos and PC games--of their desktop, notebook, or Netbook screen on their TV. The company claims that the technology has extremely low latency--less than one millisecond--and therefore would show no difference when compared with the traditional HDMI or VGA connection.

Apart from computers, the WiCast can also connect any source device with an HDMI port, such as set-top-boxes or gaming consoles, to an HDTV that supports HDMI. The kits includes one HD Video transmitter and a receiver. The former is to be connected to the HDMI port of a source device, such as a computer, and the latter is to be connected to a TV. WHDI kits like Asus' WiCast are necessary for existing HDMI-based devices. Future devices will have built-in WHDI capability, so that they can connect to one another other wirelessly out of the box.

The Asus WiCast kit will use Amimon's second-generation chipset, the AMN2120/2220, which works in the 5Ghz frequency band and offers high-definition quality up to 1080p at 60Hz. The kit will be available next month and is slated to cost around $200.

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From X-bit Labs: LucidLogic on Monday announced its new initiative to boost popularity of its HydraLogix 200 real-time distribution processor. If previously the company offered to install the chip onto mainboards, then with the Unity architecture the firm proposes to install it directly onto graphics cards to bring additional performance to various multi-GPU configurations.

“The Unity architecture provides a win-win situation for the market and for consumers. Graphics board vendors can increase the total market for multi-GPU computing from the low end to the high end. And as a consumer, why wouldn’t you choose to buy a graphics card with HydraLogix on board? You only get more," said Offir Remez, the president of Lucid.

The Hydra engine sits between several graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as system logic and acts like a dispatch processor within an array of graphics chips to distribute tasks between the processors. Technically, Lucid HydraLogix 200 processor can be installed onto a motherboard or onto graphics card. The technology drives the GPUs, performing scalable rendering of a particular image or scene, and relies on “unique adaptive decomposition and acceleration algorithms to overcome bottlenecks”. The Hydra engine combines a PCI Express system-on-chip with exclusive software technologies that load-balance graphics processing tasks, delivering near-linear to above-linear performance with two, three or more graphics cards, according to the company’s promises. Lucid claims that even completely different GPUs – from ATI and Nvidia, for example – can work in the same tandem.

Installation of HydraLogix 200 chip onto Unity graphics boards allows consumers to use different mainboards and platforms while still enjoying greater scalability of Hydra-powered multi-GPU arrays. The HydraLogix 200 currently supports both dual and triple multi-GPU configurations, and provides 80% or more graphics acceleration for popular PC games.

"The market for multi-GPU systems has shown continual growth even in a down economy. Lucid’s expansion of its HydraLogix technology to the graphics board further expands options for OEMs, ODMs and consumers, and should provide additional momentum to the growth of reasonably priced, high-powered gaming systems," said Jon Peddie, the head of Jon Peddie Research.

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From PC World: Online iPad shoppers used to be forced to wait up to a week for their tablet orders to ship. But now orders ship within 24 hours as Apple has apparently solved a nagging iPad supply problem. According to Apple's online store all six versions of Apple's iPad ship in just 24 hours from the time of purchase -- down from up to seven days in recent weeks.

Since it first launched the iPad in April, Apple managed to sell more than 3.27 million tablets, according to figures from late July. Now, after months of delays and estimated delivery times as much as three weeks at peak times, Apple's official online store displays a delivery schedule of just 24 hours.

Apple basically ran out of iPads the week it launched the tablet in the U.S.. The company said it has sold 500,000 units during launch week, and had more than 200,000 pre-orders for the WiFi-only iPad before the tablet even went on sale.

With such high demand for its iPad, Apple had to immediately delay the international launch of the tablet until the end of May, while the company prepared to introduce the WiFi+3G iPad by the end of April in the U.S. New pre-orders for the 3G iPad also had to be delayed by a week.

Throughout the summer, the estimated shipping time for the iPad from Apple's official online store stayed at seven to ten days for delivery, according to a chart compiled by CNN Fortune. In August, this went down to five to seven days, then to one to three days last week, and now to 24 hours.

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From CNET News.com: Intel has agreed to acquire Infineon Technologies' Wireless Solutions business for approximately $1.4 billion, the companies announced late Sunday, as the world's largest chipmaker seeks to boost its presence in smartphones.

"The global demand for wireless solutions continues to grow at an extraordinary rate," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said in a statement. "The acquisition of Infineon's WLS (Wireless Solutions) business strengthens the second pillar of our computing strategy--Internet connectivity--and enables us to offer a portfolio of products that covers the full range of wireless options from Wi-Fi and 3G to WiMax and LTE (4G)."

Infineon ranked fourth in cellular-baseband shipments last year with a 10.7 percent unit share, according to a recent report from The Linley Group. Baseband chips enable wireless broadband, or 3G, on smartphones and tablets.

The Germany-based company is a major supplier to Apple, Nokia, Samsung, and others.

Intel said its goal is to expand mobile and embedded product offerings in the areas of smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and embedded computing devices. "Through this effort, Intel will pair WLS' best-in-class cellular technology with its core strengths to enable the delivery of low-power, Intel-based platforms that combine its applications processor with an expanded portfolio of wireless options," Intel said. An application processor is the main processor inside of a smartphone.

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From CNET News.com: YouTube's fledgling movie rental program may soon be getting some Hollywood muscle in the crowded fight for domination of digital movie and television content distribution.

YouTube-parent Google is negotiating with major Hollywood studios to stream movies from their catalogs to a pay-per-view basis by the end of the year, according to a report in the Financial Times (subscription required).

The service is expected to stream movies on demand for $5 each, according to the report, which cited sources with knowledge of Google's plans.

A YouTube representative declined to comment on the report, saying "We have nothing to announce at this time."

The move would put Google in competition with Apple, which is reportedly working on a new digital-video service perhaps tied to a new generation of Apple TV, and Netflix, which early this month signed a five-year deal worth nearly $1 billion to stream movies from Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM. Hulu, which is owned by Walt Disney, News Corp., and NBC Universal, is reportedly considering an initial public offering worth $2 billion.

YouTube has long been expected to get into the video-on-demand business, especially since Google removed video content purchases from its (now-defunct) Google Video service at the end of 2007. Google first hinted at its intentions in April 2009 when it announced plans to build payment mechanisms into its video-sharing site. Late last year, reports surfaced that YouTube was in talks with a number of film studios in an attempt to warm them to the idea of renting their films on the service.

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From DailyTech: It's been a long four years, but AMD has finally hits its stride after its acquisition of ATI Technologies way back in 2006. After agreeing to purchase ATI for $5.4B, AMD was besieged with quarterly losses stemming from the purchase, constant pressure from NVIDIA in the graphics market, and beatdowns from Intel (who wasn't exactly playing by the rules of fair business) in the processor market.

With most of its troubles now behind it, AMD is looking to kill off the long-standing ATI brand and bring Radeon and FirePro graphics solutions solely under the AMD umbrella according to AnandTech.

According to AMD's own research in markets from around the world, it came to the following three conclusions:

* AMD preference triples when respondent is aware of ATI-AMD merger
* AMD brand [is] stronger than ATI vs. graphics competitors
* Radeon and FirePro brand awareness and consideration [is] very high

The move will also help to further consolidate AMD's branding which has pretty much gotten out of hand in the past few years [see figure on right]. AMD will begin the transition later this year to phase out ATI branding and move to a more simplified product branding lineup. By 2011, AMD's product lineup will consist of AMD's Opteron for server processors, Vision (which consists of a CPU/GPU hybrid) for consumer processors, and Radeon/FirePro for graphics.

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From DailyTech: The first sign of the shift to mobile computing could perhaps be seen when laptop sales surpassed desktop sales for the first time ever in the last calendar quarter of 2008. Or perhaps it was when was when cell phone subscribers surpassed land line subscribers in 2009.

Today with the soaring popularity of tablet devices and smartphones, it's clear that mobile designs are being favored for the majority of use cases over larger stationary ones. That spells trouble for desktop software makers. Among those feeling the crunch is Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser.

While Mozilla has the second most popular browser in the PC (desktop/laptop) market, it has hardly made a dent in the mobile browsing market dominated by Opera (Opera Mini, Mobile), Apple (Mobile Safari), and Google (Android browser). Mozilla hopes to change that and just took a big step forward, releasing alpha builds of the next major version of Fennec browser (2.0) for Android and Nokia's N900 smartphone.

Fennec 2.0 is a ground-up effort that creates an efficient Firefox-like browser tooled for a multitouch-driven mobile environment. It boasts the distinction of being the first mobile browser to support ad-ons (bad news for those looking to advertise to the mobile sector) and uses Firefox Sync to share Awesome Bar browsing history, bookmarks, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs with your PC.

To improve performance, Fennec 2.0 runs two process in a method it calls "Electrolysis". One process performs the rendering of Web content and running Javascript. Another takes user input and supports core functionality. Mozilla says the feature makes Fennec much more fast and responsive than the average mobile browser.

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