@(Unverified)

Tegra1's main problem was that it was hideously late. If it had gone up against the other ARM11 parts, it would have competed really nicely but, by the time it was ready, device makers had already picked much more powerful products such as OMAP3 and Snapdragon. As you say, those crazy battery life claims were pretty much complete gibberish.

The good news is that Tegra2 looks much _more_ than twice as fast and I've heard rumours that it's on schedule for the first half of 2010 to compete very nicely against OMAP4, Snapdragon 2 etc. Its PortalPlayer heritage should deliver some minor advantages in battery life against these other dual core chips too, but nothing major. That said, they're really reliant on TSMC sorting out their recent manufacturing problems.

ICD = Innovative Converged Devices, the team behind Velocity Mobile and the Momento digital photo frame

Tegra1 has an ARM7 core but that's not actually usable by normal software. It's basically an embedded micro for doing some ancillary stuff. The main core is an ARM11, not an ARM9.

Tegra2 should be 2 x Cortex A9 and I'm expecting it to be closer to four times the performance of Tegra 1 and to take the performance lead in the ARM space plus give Atom a hell of a run for its money (software compatibility aside)

Dual Cortex A9, not Dual ARM9!

@bob

The rumour on the street is that the second generation Tegra will be a dual core Cortex A9 with twice the memory bandwidth:

http://news.driversdown.com/News/200906/05-11271.html

Now that sounds tasty, but then we've also seen dual core 1GHz+ Marvell, OMAP 4 and Snapdragon chips announced for next year and, since it's ARM we're talking about, you can include lots of other companies in there too as being likely to bring out similar products (Freescale, Broadcom, Mediatek, Samsung, Infineon, ST-Ericsson and so on)... PLUS there's whatever Intel / AMD come up with to retaliate!

I think we're in for a really good few years for gadgets - competition is good :)

That canvas demo is insane - it looks smoother and more detailed than surface!

Nobody's going to claim that an ARM CPU and GPU is more powerful than a Core 2 Duo and nVidia desktop graphics chip, but it's incredible what you can achieve with well-optimized software versus just throwing faster and faster hardware at the problem.

My god, is there nothing nVidia can't do? :)

On a normal transflective LCD, there is a colour filter that sits on top of the display with (usually) red, green and blue filters for each subpixel. Underneath the panel is the equivalent of a 2-way mirror. There are two problems with this:

1) The colour filter massively reduces the brightness of the light, both as it goes in and again as it comes out
2) The mirror layer cuts down on the amount of light that can get through from the backlight

What that means is that standard transflective displays are darker and less efficient indoors than a transmissive display and also that outdoors, they only are about 5% reflective.

Pixel Qi have totally redesigned the layout of most elements of the LCD in order to get around those two problems so that it reaches equivalent performance to electrophoretic displays (such as e-ink) in black & white outdoor performance while retaining the ability to do colour and animations.

It also outputs at higher resolution in b&w mode than the electrophoretic displays, so text looks much better.

I can't wait to have a laptop that's actually usable outdoors! I've tried the Tosh and it's disappointing.

Very little indeed.

Recharging a typical phone over the course of a year will take about 1 - 2 kWh of power.

I'm not in the US, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe electricity costs about $0.12 per kWh...

So, assuming you can completely replace the charger with the solar panel (which you most certainly can't), you probably can't save more than 25 cents. You can bet that the solar panel costs a lot more than that.

The benefit to you is therefore negative.

However, there are hundreds of millions of phones in regular use across the world - multiply that energy use by hundreds of millions and there are some pretty big savings to be had... assuming you don't use more energy than you will save in use while manufacturing your "green" phone ;)

Or, alternatively, the HD2's screen could be on a darker setting and the camera has overexposed the part of the photo showing the iPod's screen.