Daily Roundup: Kindle Fire HDX review, Xi3's Piston console impressions, Silk Road shut down and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Amazon Kindle Fire HDX review
Amazon's latest Kindle Fire tablets were announced to little fanfare -- at least compared to last year's airplane hangar event -- but the tablets themselves are no small deal. Jeff Bezos and Co. have made some great improvements to the already solid devices, leaving much less for want than last year. The Kindle Fire HDX comes with a 1,920 x 1,200 323-ppi display, a quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor and new software features that include a baked-in customer support system called Mayday. Amazon's latest Kindle tablets bring a lot of welcome upgrades, which we think will be sure to tempt consumers this holiday season. Read on for more.
Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11 Pro tablets hands-on
When Dell announced last month that it would be reviving its Venue brand, we were excited to get our hands on the company's new line of Windows 8.1 tablets. Today Dell launched two such devices, the Dell Venue 8 Pro and the Venue 11 Pro. The latter slate sports a Full HD (1,920 x 1,080) IPS display, Intel's Atom quad-core Bay Trail processors or a fourth-generation Haswell processor, and up to 8GB RAM. What we're looking at here is essentially a Surface Pro 2 competitor. The Venue 11 tablet will go on sale in the UK on November 7th for $500 / £349, while the Venue 8 is priced at $300 and will be available starting from October 18th in the US. Head up to the link above for our full hands-on.
Playing video games on Xi3's Piston living room PC / game console
Valve's three announcements last week rocked the gaming industry, and even further blurred the line between game consoles and PCs. Today, we had an opportunity to put Xi3's Piston Console through its paces, which is a first for anyone outside of the company. In the short time we got to spend with the machine, we found that smooth gaming was a hit or a miss. Lighter games played fine, but more resource intensive ones -- like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 -- seemed to push the limits. Click the link above for our full first look with the Piston gaming machine.
FBI seizes black market website Silk Road, arrests its founder
Some people may have thought it was inevitable, but today all doubt was eliminated when the FBI seized Silk Road -- an infamous website that hosts anonymized, Bitcoin-based drug and gun sales -- and arrested its founder. While the shutdown isn't likely to stop all online contraband purchases, it's potentially a major blow. At current Bitcoin values, the site had generated a whopping $1.2 billion in its mere two years of operation. The Silk Road had been using Tor, an anonymizing technology, to keep it hidden from authorities until the FBI proved it could break through the highly regarded service. Click through for more.
