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Thursday, February 03, 2011

Agility Saietta unveiled, the decidedly unconventional electric sports bike

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/03/agility-saietta-unveiled-the-decidedly-unconventional-electric/

A new player has entered the electric motorcycle game, joining the likes of Brammo's Empulse but doing it with rather more... unconventional styling. It's the Agility Global Saietta, an all-electric sports bike that will come in two flavors: the 50 mile range Saietta S and the 100 mile Saietta R. The latter of the two will be quicker than the first, getting to 60 in under four seconds, whereas S riders will have to wait another tick of the stopwatch. Naturally that extra range and speed will cost you: £9,975 for the S and £13,975 for the R, figures that equate to roughly $16,200 and $22,650. Hefty sums, both, but nobody said being on the cutting edge of the humpbacked sport bike trend was going to be cheap. We weren't given any specific horsepower or weight figures, but we're told the power to weight ratio is 675hp per ton. You can make your own guesses about weight to try and get a firm power figure, but it certainly should be peppy enough.

At this point we don't know much about the bikes themselves beyond what you can see in the photos, which show a trellis frame cradling a sizeable battery pack. The swingarm is a combination of machined parts and pipes, rear suspension elevated to make room for the electric motor sitting just above the pivot point. Front suspension also shows an unconventional design, offset steering linkage and a single damper eschewing the traditional fork design found on your average (non-BMW) motorcycle. These images are, of course, just renders, but the bike has just made its word debut at the MCN London Motorcycle Show and we'll be bringing you some actual pictures as soon as we get them. As to when those who order the bikes will get theirs, we're told shipments begin in April.

Update: We have some pictures from the Saietta launch at MCN. Real, honest to gosh photos, these.

Gallery: Agility Saietta

Gallery: Saietta Launch

Continue reading Agility Saietta unveiled, the decidedly unconventional electric sports bike

Agility Saietta unveiled, the decidedly unconventional electric sports bike originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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JVC GC-PX1 can't decide if it's cam or camcorder, does 1080p60 video and 10.6 megapixel stills

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/03/jvc-gc-px1-cant-decide-if-its-cam-or-camcorder-does-1080p60-v/

JVC GC-PX1 can't decide if it's a camera or camcorder, does 1080p60 video and 10.6 megapixel stills

We missed JVC's GX-PX1 camera when it was at CES, just a concept at that point but now getting more real. Impress got a little hands-on time with the curious model that features an incredibly slim, compact-like body behind a hunky, camcorder-like lens assembly. It'll do 1080p60 at 36Mbps, writing to SDXC or 32GB of internal memory, can capture 10 megapixel stills and, if you don't mind stepping down to 640 x 360, will manage 300 frames per second. There's a tiltable LCD on the back and a 10x optically stabilized zoom lens up front. The camera is due to be released later this month, but JVC hasn't seen fit to tell us how much it'll cost just yet.

JVC GC-PX1 can't decide if it's cam or camcorder, does 1080p60 video and 10.6 megapixel stills originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD Radeon HD 6970M reviewed: major leap from HD 5870M, not quite a GTX 485M

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/03/amd-radeon-hd-6970m-reviewed-major-leap-from-hd-5870m-not-quit/

What has 960 shaders, two gigabytes of dedicated GDDR5 memory with throughput of 115.2GBps, and the ability to churn 680 million polygons each and every second? Yes, the Radeon HD 6970M. AMD's fastest mobile chip to date has been doing the review rounds recently and the response has been unsurprisingly positive. Most modern games failed to trip up the 6970M even at 1920 x 1080 resolution, though the usual suspects of Crysis and Metro 2033 did give it a little bit of grief. All in all, the leap from the HD 5870M was significant, although NVIDIA's still relatively new GeForce GTX 485M has managed to hold on to its crown as the most powerful GPU on the mobile front. Benchmarks, architectural details, battery life tests (what battery life?), and value-adding enhancements await at the links below.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M reviewed: major leap from HD 5870M, not quite a GTX 485M originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Android Honeycomb / Motorola Xoom hands-ons: widgets, Grocery IQ, and Monster Madness (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/02/android-honeycomb-motorola-xoom-hands-ons-widgets-grocery-iq/

Fully-functional Xooms with complete (or seemingly complete) builds of Honeycomb are out in force here at Google's event in Mountain View today, and a bunch of partners are hanging out to demonstrate the tablet apps they've been working on. We checked out both Monster Madness -- a game that's been on Xbox 360 and PS3 for some time -- and Grocery IQ, both of which obviously bring very different experiences to the table (unless you consider grocery shopping "a game," which some of us admittedly do).

Though we thought we detected some stuttering and lag from Monster Madness when it was demoed on stage, the experience up close and in person was much smoother -- definitely 100 percent playable. We double-checked and confirmed that the tablet game is a 100 percent content port from the console games, you're not missing anything here. It features three control modes that let you toggle between two on-screen analog sticks, one stick, and a fully accelerometer-based mode that most users probably won't consider practical because you've got to tilt the screen too much. Interestingly, the developer noted that there's a low-res mode that he actually toggled in an area of the game with a lot of water because it tends to slow down, despite the fact that it's running on Unreal Engine and is fully optimized for multiple cores. Could it be that game studios are already pushing the limits of this hardware from day one?

Moving onto Grocery IQ, it's basically a fancy shopping list with coupons -- it's already on both iOS and Android phones, and odds are good you already know what it is. What was really interesting, though, was that we got a full demo of "application fragment" layout switching between landscape and portrait views (the app has a two-pane view for tablets) and the process of adding and removing widgets. As with some of the first-party widgets we've seen, Grocery IQ seems to have done a good job making its widgets visually rich and engaging -- particularly the coupon browser, which appears as a stack of rotating coupons with color graphics. See videos of both products after the break!

Continue reading Android Honeycomb / Motorola Xoom hands-ons: widgets, Grocery IQ, and Monster Madness (video)

Android Honeycomb / Motorola Xoom hands-ons: widgets, Grocery IQ, and Monster Madness (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 14:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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