CES 2014: Alcatel Onetouch announce Idol X and Idol Mini smartphones coming to Canada

– ALCATEL ONETOUCH today announced the upcoming availability of the flagship Idol X and Idol Mini smartphones in Canada. Part of the Idol family of smartphones, designed to deliver rich features within a slim form factor, the 5" Idol X and 4.3" Idol Mini will be available in Canada through Bell and Virgin Mobile Canada in the coming weeks.

“This Canadian launch is a major step in ALCATEL ONETOUCH’s continued growth in North America,” said Steve Cistulli, Senior Vice President of North America for ALCATEL ONETOUCH. “We look forward to delivering on our promise to offer customers high quality smartphones at a great price.”

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NVIDIA brings PC gaming capabilities to mobile

The next-generation of NVIDIA mobile processors are going to be gamers’ dream come true. The new Tegra K1 has a Kepler architecture-based 192-core GPU, which is the same architecture used by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti (considered the fastest GPU in the world). The company boldly claims the GPU on the Tegra K1 is more powerful than the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.

The demo of NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang showed the Tegra K1 running Unreal 4 without glitch. The new game is said to require extreme CPU power that is enough to hang an underpowered system. There will be two versions of the processor: one 32-bit quad-core, 4-Plus-1 ARM Cortex A15 CPU available in the first half of 2014 and 64-bit dual Super Core CPU based on ARMv8 architecture and carries the codename Denver. The 64-bit version will be available at the second half of the year.

Source: NVIDIA

Acer refreshes Chromebook line

Acer wants to further its stake in the Chromebook market with a new 11.6-inch machine. The C720P-2600 model, or C7 for short, packs in a 1366 x 768 touch-screen, Intel Celeron 2955U processor in an approximately three-pound notebook. It also has 32GB SSD storage and 2GB RAM, which are typical specs for Chromebooks. The C7 will be on display at Acer’s CES booth and is said to carry a US$299. It comes in Moonstone White, is bundled with Gogo Inflight Internet passes, and will be available this month.

Source: CNET

Lenovo's Miix 2 10 and 11 tablets surface at CES 2014

We're starting to see all sorts of interesting new form factors thanks to Intel's Bay Trail Atom processors that seem to offer improved computing power without guzzling too much battery power. Lenovo's Miix 2 tablets, which somewhat resemble the form factor of Microsoft's own Surface devices, are tablet-first hybrids that can be docked into keyboard accessories for a fuller Windows 8 computing experience. The 10.1-inch variant runs the Atom processor while the 11.6 version runs an Intel Core processor. These new Miix tablet/laptop hybrids are coming in April 2014.