RCA Airnergy Charges Gadgets with Nothing But Wifi Signals [Chargers]

Forget PowerMats and wireless charging and the like, because the Airnergy wi-fi signal harvester is my new front runner for the future of gadget charging.
It's not exactly new tech, as ohGizmo notes, but it's the first application that's of any real use to consumers. Put simply, Airnergy takes the energy created by wi-fi signals and stores it in a rechargeable battery. At CES, the device was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes.


Pretty handy, and supposedly available this summer for $40. Not too shabby, and very appealing considering how ubiquitous wi-fi hotspots are these days. Very simple, somewhat cheap and incredibly useful if it works are advertised—by far one of the coolest things I've seen come out of CES this year. [OhGizmo]

Qualcomm's Dual-Core 1.5GHz Snapdragon: Smartphones Are About to Go Hyperspeed [Guts]

Qualcomm's current 1GHz Snapdragon is the muscle that makes the Nexus One so fantastically speedy, but Qualcomm isn't sitting on their laurels—they just announced two new chips that are going to power the next great mobile devices.
First up is the single-core Snapdragon 8X50A, a 45nm chip that's essentially the next version of the 1GHz chip in the Nexus One. It's clocked at 1.3GHz. But what we're really excited about is the dual-core 8X72, which uses two Scorpion cores to achieve 1.5GHz. Luis Pineda, Senior VP at Qualcomm, assures that the 8X72 is suitable for smartphones (not just smartbooks or netbooks) and can handle 1080p video. Both the 8X50A and 8X72 will be out this year, going head to head with the Tegra 2.
[Gizmodo via Hexus via Slashgear]

NVIDIA unveils the next generation Tegra processor

NVIDIA unveiled the next generation of its Tegra mobile processor at CES yesterday, promising to deliver tablets, smartbooks and smartphones with a blazing web browsing experience, HD video, Flash 10 support and multi-day battery life. Rather than go on and on, we will simply let the Tegra 250 specs speak for themselves:

• The world’s first dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU running up to 1GHz
• Eight independent processors to handle web browsing, HD video encode and decode and mobile 3D gaming
• 10x faster than the processors used in smartphones today, and up to 4x the performance of the previous generation Tegra processor
• Advanced TSMC 40nm process with active power management to provide amazing battery life (140 hours audio and over 16 hours of HD video playback) despite being always-on and always-connected
• Support for 3D touchscreen user interfaces
• Up to 1080p video encode/decode and support for HD Web streaming formats and complete HW accelerated HD multimedia engine for visually stunning movie playback
• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 acceleration for streaming video and 3D mobile games
• Resolutions ranging from four-to-eight times that of smartphones
• Form factors and screen sizes ranging from 5-15 inches

This second iteration of the Tegra mobile chipset is in the production stage with a development kit ready and waiting for eager programmers to build applications for this next generation in mobile computing. While you wait for those drool-worthy mobile devices to emerge, you can check out a 3D gaming demo showcasing the prowess of the Tegra 250 chipset. And oh yeah, remember that the video blow is from a mobile device, not an Xbox 360.



[BGR]

Dell Has a Tablet-Like Prototype, Too [Tablets]

Not wanting to be the only kid on the block without a faux-tablet in the works (or fauxblet, as I’m going to call it for now), Dell has announced that they, too, working on a slate-style PC.

Dell’s concept is a 5-inch touch-screen device running Google’s Android operating system. The big pull seems to be that the devices can be connected together to play games across machines.

Like the other fauxblets unveiled at CES thus far, specific details about the device’s specs or a projected release date were not revealed.

What would make up your dream tablet or fauxblet device? Let us know!
[Mashable]

LG reveals details about its 2.6mm 42-inch LCD HDTV

Grab two SD cards and sandwich them together. Done? That’s how thin the latest 42-inch LG LCD TV is: 2.6mm. My kid would break it. No, I would break it.
Even though the TV is super-duper crazy thin, it still maintains top-tier specs: 1080p, 120Hz, and edge-lit LED backlighting. The set weighs in at only 4 kilograms too, which LG says makes it perfect for wall mounting. That’s light enough that duct tape could hold it up. Or push-pins.
LG will reveal more about the set in a few weeks at CES and we’ll be there to make even more jokes about how thin the TV is. And I thought the TVs were getting too thin last year.
[CrunchGear]

Rumor: Intel Atom N450 (Pine Trail) to launch on January 3rd?

Fudzilla is reporting that Intel’s new Atom N450 chipset – codenamed Pine Trail (see previous coverage here) — will officially launch on January 3rd.

Previous reports suggested that the chipset will be made available to manufacturers sometime this month, to which I speculated that we’d see Pine Trail-equipped netbooks around the holidays. If Fudzilla’s report is true, though — and the site makes no reference to any sources, so take the information with a grain of salt — then it appears these new netbooks would make an appearance just in time for CES.
Whatever the case, the 1.66GHz CPU will apparently sell for around $64, which is $20 more expensive than current N270 package. The Pine Trail platform shifts the system from a 3-chip architecture down to a 2-chip architecture in order to save physical space and, theoretically, reduces power consumption and improves performance.

New Atom N450 for netbook launch is January [CrunchGear via Fudzilla via SlashGear]