GeekwithEnvy

Product Spotlight

Wifi Analyzer

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This handy little app will help you optimize your wireless network as well as find others with ease, and all for the great price of free. You can get this Android app from Google Play and start optimizing your wireless network immediately.

WiFi Analyzer Screen Shot

Besides being fun this app is useful when trying to pin down which wifi channels are less crowded. It has an easy to read display with good amount of customizable features. With the the Scan interval option set at its shortest you can watch your signal increase or decrease in near real time. One of the view options included is the signal strength over time which i found quite useful when checking for interference. This app is simple but very useful and for free its definately worth checking out.

The Nvidia Tegra 3

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Nvidia Tegra 3 Chip
Nvidia Tegra 3 Chip

The Tegra 3 is one powerful little chip, featuring four cores plus a fifth “power saver” core to create what Nvidia is calling Super 4-PLUS-1™ which provides power when needed by enabling and disabling cores based on workload. The chip is made to deliver console quality gaming and superior HD video.
If your not familiar with this chip, this is the work horse behind the new Google Nexus 7.

The big thing I personally see with this chip when going through all of its specs are the all the power saving features and efforts to improve overall responsiveness. Mobile devices like the Nexus 7 have been noted for smooth performance, Nvidia attributes the smooth feel to its DirectTouch™ architecture that is designed to improve touch responsiveness by handing a portion of the touch processing onto the Tegra 3 processor.

The overall feel of the device has long been a deciding factor for me when choosing mobile devices. It really takes alot away from the experience even when there is a small amount of lag when navigating.

The Tegra 3 is also inside many other devices including the Acer Iconia Tab A510, Asus Transformer Pad TF300 and the Toshiba Excite 10 Tablet.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

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Jelly Bean

Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” is by far the smoothest feeling Android release to date. Not only is the mobile OS easy on the eyes but it also has a lot of nice user interface changes that make life a little easier.

This is a very powerful and responsive mobile OS that offers great competition in the mobile market. I have been following Android since its first release and it has come a long way since the beginning and so have the devices that run it. I feel that this is the best android release yet.

Here are a few new features in Jelly Bean:

-Browser gets enhanced with better performance for HTML 5 animation and video along with an updated JavaScript engine that helps pages load much faster.

– When using Camera you can now swipe to the viewfinder to review photos with out exiting the app and then swipe back to take more photos.

-Another innovative feature is Android Beam, a great way to share photos and videos, simply by touching two Android devices back-to-back.

-Face Unlock is now more accurate and smoother then before and now can require that the user blink to ensure that a live person is trying to unlock the device.

-Messaging collects recipients as chips making it easier to compose new messages.

-Wi-Fi protected setup (WPS) is now supported with button press and PIN support.

These are just a few of the new enhancements in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. For a complete list of features and enhancements head over to the Android website.

Alienware M17x R4

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The Alienware M17x has amazing performance, an HD display and high-definition surround sound for a pretty amazing gaming experience. As always Alienware delivers on eye candy as well by offering up some amazing visual appeal to the hardware itself. This laptop is sure to deliver on power.

Looking like part of the star ship enterprise, it really is a great looking laptop. Everything about the design feels like a gaming laptop from the body and keyboard straight to the specialized software. The Alienware Command Center software allows for some nice customization options that you really don’t see anywhere else. Other nice features include shutting down unnecessary programs and playing certain music when launching your favorite games.

Just as you would expect this laptop has the horsepower to drive today’s demanding games with the 3rd gen Intel i7 at its core and graphics driven by the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX. Display options vary with the 17.3-inch WideFHD 1920 x 1080 120Hz NVIDIA 3D Vision Bundle being the best selection.

Another nice perk with these laptops is that they come without any preloaded software that normally comes with new machines, this is really a nice feature that anyone can appreciate, considering most of us spend the first half hour removing all of it anyway.

The M17x R4 is really an amazing piece of hardware that makes portable gaming a reality. Packing all that power into a tiny shell comes at a price though when it comes to battery life, which is something that engineers will need to improve in the future but this laptop is still a gaming beast and I think well worth the buy.