WHDI Reviews – Wireless HDTV News

Acer Aspire S3-951-6646 13.3-Inch Ultrabook on Amazon

Intel has launched a branding and promotion campaign designed to uplift Ultrabooks in the eyes of the masses. According to the message Intel is trying to push, Ultrabooks represent the new generation, or as they put it, the new “era” for computing.

Ultrabooks, as most of you must know by now, are ultra thin portable computers that replace the tablets of the world by being as light and also as fast. These are Intel Core processor based machines and the brand is owned and controlled by Intel. These would have replaced the already dying breed of netbooks but the price difference is what keeps that from happening.

The marketing campaign for Ultrabooks is the apparently the largest ever launched by Intel after their 2003 Intel Centrino campaign. Centrino was a milestone for the IT industry because it brought things like WiFi to laptops and made them standard issue everywhere.

The campaign is both online and on print and TV. With the hundreds of millions of dollars that Intel is putting in to this campaign, the company is definitely matching the efforts of the rest of the industry when it comes to Ultrabooks. Intel has been really bullish on this new standard even though it is essentially the PC counterpart of the MacBook Air.

The main selling points for the Ultrabooks over the MacBook Air is usually the availability of Windows and the better specs and larger size for the same price. A lot of people want a fully native Windows machine that allows them to run all their complicate productivity applications. This group of people have been sorely missing a category of devices that will be a bridge between the extremely light and portable tablets and the heavy, production oriented laptops that most of us heft around right now.

Ultrabooks are meant to fill up that gap and also provide a much-needed variety in the market. The MacBook Air is just one model and for $1000 you can buy the 11inch model. But for approximately the same price you can get an Ultrabook that is 13.3inch and is also much faster with a larger SSD unit. And there are multiple of these models to choose from.

With every major PC maker entering the Ultrabook market by summer this year, consumers will have their pick from the likes of HP (world’s largest PC manufacturer), Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus and more.

Ultrabooks will also get another leg up once Windows 8 is launched. Windows 8 stands to bring a brand new UI to the market for the world’s most commonly used OS and with it will come Ultrabooks with hybrid designs for converting to tablets. Windows 8 will also make the Ultrabooks run faster and have instant-on features that are as speedy as tablets.

The ASUS U53JC-A1 15.6-Inch Thin and Light Bamboo Laptop comes with a dual-core Intel Core i5-450M processors with the Turbo Boost overclock feature to push it up to 2.66GHz. It also features Nvidia G310M graphics with 1 GB of dedicated VRAM and Optimus Technology for intelligent graphics switching to save battery life. It has 4GB of DDR3 1066 MHz RAM — arranged in 2 slots of 2 GB each. The hard drive has a capacity of 640 GB with an RPM speed of 5400. It comes with a super multi optical drive and Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed. On the connectivity front, it has Windows wireless 802.11b/g/n and also WiDi (Wireless Display) — Intel’s wireless HD streaming feature. There’s also Bluetooth.

This is a laptop geared towards entertainment, a point driven home by the specs and the 15.6 inch HD LED display. There are HDMI and USB 3.0 ports and an 8 cell 5600 mAh battery with a rated battery life of 10 hours. In reality, you can expect a around 6-7 hours with average usage including surfing, some video and music playing.

The U53JC-A1 is a good laptop to have if you are looking for something that is going to be good for entertainment on the go. With 1GB of dedicate graphics and 4GB memory, gaming is quite good on this Intel Core-i5 machine. And since this is a WiDi enabled model, you can easily stream that game to the larger display if your HDTV of HD projector. WiDi requires that you have the Netgear Push2TV (sold separately) for receiving the WiDi signals from your laptop. But even though you have to invest separately for Push2Tv, having the transmission device onboard makes things much cleaner around your laptop. WiDi uses the same Intel wireless architecture, so it is not an additional drain on your system either.

Overall, as a mobile entertainment system, the ASUS U53JC-A1 15.6-Inch Thin and Light Bamboo Laptop is a pretty good option to have around.

The HP Pavilion dv5-2130us laptop PC is a 14.5 inch diagonal (13366 x 768) HD LED bearing device. It is positioned as an entertainment hub more than anything else, which explains it carrying WiDi with it. It is powerd by an Intel Core i3-370M Processor (2.40GHz, 3MB L3 Cache) and has 4GB DDR3 SDRAM memory, expandable up to 8GB. Storage is in the form of a Serial ATA hard drive and it comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit pre-installed. Graphics is handled by the inbuilt Intel HD graphics chip. It comes with an integrated 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN, Wireless LAN 802.11b / g WLAN.

There is a 5 in 1 memory card reader, 3 USB ports (2.0), one HDMI, VGA (15-pin); 1 RJ -45 (LAN), 1 Headphone-out and 1 Microphone-in. One good thing about it is that you can video chat in low light conditions due to it’s built in TrueVision HP webcam. It also has Lightscribe for custom CD labels. The laptop uses the puffy HP ClickPad and full size island size chiclet keyboard making navigation easy.

But my main focus is the WiDi that it comes with. It streams your media content, from photos to videos and music, right on to your HDTV and to your home theatre set up by extension. However, you will have to invest in a Netgear Push2TV adapter for your HDTV separately. It does not come with the laptop, which is a bit of a let down. However, having WiDi inbuilt makes sure that you do not have to plug in a separate dongle and it also gives you easier access to your media files. WiDi is an Intel developed technology, which also means that it works seamlessly with the laptop. So there’s no setup to be done. The HP Pavilion dv5-2130us laptop PC is going for $610 on Amazon right now, which makes it good value for money.

The recent series of demonstrations that Amimon conducted of their WHDI dongle, made sure that a lot more people are now playing close attention to WHDI’s development in the newly emergent Wireless HD video content streaming market.

The renewed effort from Amimon to make technology popular has highlighted the fact that it is in fact very flexible in how it works and that it is also extremely capable at replacing wired HDMI connections. In a direct parallel to the disastrous lag issues in Intel’s WiDi (based on the WiFi Plus standard), the WHDI protocol has almost no lag at all for human beings.

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In our previous post we wrote about new Galaxy GTX 460 video card supporting wireless HD via WHDI (Wireless HD technology). And today we got news from AMIMON about even better way to connect PC to HD television using wireless technology. It is called WHDI stick – a dongle inserted into HDMI port which is capable of transmitting uncompressed 5Gbps HD signal up to 30 meters and with less than millisecond latency.

It is hard to say how the actual production device will look like in its final form since it is only available as prototype (even in prototype form it already looks quite small and similar in size to USB flash drive). To receive the signal on the TV side you will need a receiver box which is similar in size to wireless router and could be placed behind the television. Read more »