Engadget’s Cyber Monday 2013 roundup
As tempting as post-Thanksgiving savings are, some of us simply aren’t brave enough to face the Black Friday hordes. That doesn’t mean stay-at-home shoppers aren’t still looking for a bargain: Cyber Monday is upon us, and there are deals aplenty. …
Dell preparing to squeeze 4K resolution onto a 24-inch monitor
It’s hard to know whether PC monitors will continue to be much of a focus for the new Dell. Nevertheless, the relevant department looks to have been gearing itself up for 4K, as Bright Side of News and others have spotted a leaked product page for…
Engadget’s Black Friday 2013 roundup
Don’t think that the Black Friday shopping rush this year is all about the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. We’ve rounded up a smorgasbord of Thanksgiving week deals that should appeal to tech-savvy shoppers of all stripes, whether they’re looking for …
Alienware’s X51 now ships with AMD’s 4K-capable flagship graphics card
If Haswell innards weren’t enough to incite a purchase of Alienware’s X51 gaming PC, perhaps a 4K-capable GPU could push you over the edge: Dell’s little gaming-machine-that-can is now available with AMD’s Radeon R9 270X. This card brings the chip…
Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide 2013: Laptops
Welcome to Engadget’s holiday gift guide! Head back to our hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month.
Chances are you stick with a laptop longer than a smartphone — not everyone can afford to upgrade machine…
Dell Venue launched in Hong Kong
Isn’t it fun when you hit the right place at the right time? We just happened to be chillaxing in Hong Kong when Dell chose the city for the Venue’s global launch (and it’s actually hitting the shops slightly ahead of South Korea), so a quick hands-on is inevitable. As we’ve seen previously, this HK$3,999 (US$514) handset is essentially the Venue Pro’s Android 2.2 cousin sans, sporting the same curved (or “Shear Design”) vibrant AMOLED display at 4.1 inches and 800 x 480, but missing the slide-out keyboard. Under the hood lies a 1GHz Snapdragon with 1GB ROM and 512MB RAM, along with the usual microSD expansion, 1400mAh battery, 8 megapixel AF camera with LED flash, Bluetooth 2.3 EDR, WiFi and AGPS.
There aren’t any surprises in terms of software — the Venue shares the same snappy Stage UI and Swypekeyboard with the Streak, except for the lack of landscape orientation for the homescreen (and that’s with orientation enabled in system settings). As for hardware, the killer feature here is the screen, and we found its curved Gorilla Glass to be surprisingly nice for our thumbs while swiping across it. The AMOLED panel underneath is also vibrant with great viewing angles. Elsewhere, build quality is almost solid bar the squeaky battery door, but at least it provides some grip. That’s all we got for now — we’ll delve into more details in our forthcoming review, so stay tuned.
Shenzhen netvertible flips its lid, apes Dell Inspiron Duo with days to spare
If you thought the Inspiron Duo would be the only netvertible to have a slick spinning screen, think again — with less than three months since Dell’s design debuted and ten days till it ships, that trap-door design’s been copied by the gadget giants of Shenzhen. This time around, it’s not an obvious KIRF, but it’s also not a terribly powerful little PC — where Dell at least attempted to push the envelope with a dual-core Atom N550 processor, 2GB of RAM and a Broadcom Crystal HD chip, here we’re looking at a bargain-basement netbook with all the usual suspects (Atom N450, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, Intel GMA 3150) and what looks like a tiny optical trackpad. At least it’s got a capacitive screen! No word on when or how much you can expect to pay if flipping bezels are your thing.
Hands on with the Dell Inspiron Duo Convertible Netbook
Our friends over at Laptop Mag have spent some time with Dell’s new convertible systems the Inspiron Duo. The Duo comes with a premium 320GB 7,200 rpm drive as well as a dual-core 1.5-GHz Intel Atom N550 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and Windows 7 home premium. That it also comes with a 1366 x 768 screen, and it’s a huge step up from low-end netbooks.
This netvertible is different then every other convertible netbook on the market since you spin the screen around that then rotate the whole lid left or right. So the screen screen not the lid is rotatable. This is an interesting design concept since it allows the device to use the firm hinges of a regular notebook. The biggest down side to this innovation is that the bezel is incredibly thick not only does it have a rubberized lid around the screen, but also some black padding on the screen itself. This form factor has always had one draw back and its the hinge however the rotating mechanism seems incredibly sturdy. No matter how many times they flipped it, the lid quickly slapped firmly into place. Read more 
Dell Streak Android 2.2 update
Dell has updated its 5-inch Dell Streak tablet-come-phone to Android 2.2 this week, and Pocket-lint has managed to grab a handset off Dell for a quick review to see what’s new and what the update brings users.
The biggest change is the introduction of a new User Interface called Dell Stage, that sees apps, songs, web pages, and photos bundled into collections and then presented as “Stages” for you to access.
There are eight stages at the moment and these are: Contacts, Email, Gallery, Home, Music, Social, Web.
Users can add to remove them how they see fit, and underneath the skin is still the standard Android looking tiles that allow you to place your favourite apps.
Also new is the addition of quick launch buttons with the emphasis on being quick. Press the small dots in the bottom corners of the screen and you’ll have about half a second to touch the correlating home tile.
Beyond the Dell Stage skin users will be getting a whole host of additions which include: improved performance & memory management, Adobe Flash 10.1 support, support for more apps like the native Twitter client, Skype for Android, the Firefox Beta browser, Live Wallpapers, the ability to create a portable W-iFi hotspot, an improved more-responsive phone dialler interface and enhanced Microsoft Exchange support.
Dell's Stage UI headed to Streak, also unofficially works on EVO 4G (video)
The first time the words “Stage UI” passed our lips, they were in relation to the Dell Thunder leak, but now we’re hearing that Dell’s custom Android user interface will actually appear alongside Android 2.2 when the update finally arrives on the five-inch Streak. We’ve just learned that’s going to happen this winter in Japan when the Streak launches on SoftBank at the very least, as both are advertised for early December there, but we expect we’ll see the updated OS even sooner in the US and Europe for obvious reasons. What’s more, an unofficial build of Froyo that leaked out for the Streak last month has since been found to have Stage UI on board. StreakSmart‘s got a video of a custom ROM running a series of Dell-specific widgets on the Streak, and sister site Good and Evo managed to trick the very same software to run on a rooted HTC EVO 4G. You can see examples of both on video after the break, but here’s the basic idea behind the UI — giant panes of contacts, apps and shortcuts that fill an entire screen each, but leave your app drawer accessible at a swipe. If you’re feeling daring, you can try the ROM for yourself at our more coverage link. Just be careful flashing that new baseband, eh?
AIVAnet 