02/25, 1:15pm
NVIDIA DirectTouch on Tegra 3 gets partners
NVIDIA just ahead of Mobile World Congress on Saturday lined up partners for its unique DirectTouch (PDF interface technology. Atmel, Cypress, N-Trig, and Synaptics will have touchscreen controllers that can use NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 to handle some of the touch input processing instead of just their own circuitry. The method not only improves the responsiveness dramatically but could lower power use by keeping just one chip active.
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02/13, 12:30pm
iFixIt gives Droid 4 poorest 4 out of 10 score
The Motorola Droid 4 is the latest subject of iFixit's teardowns. The team managed to remove the non user-removable battery fairly easily, though the hardware QWERTY keyboard is oddly integrated into the motherboard and difficult to repair. This was the main reason iFixit gave the Droid 4 its lowest repairability score to date, at 4 out of 10.
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11/02, 12:20am
Atmel touchscreen chips struggle in Q3
Atmel gave an outlook on Tuesday for the fall that was one of the few cluews as to how well iPad rivals were faring in the market. It expected its touchscreen contoller chip sales to drop 12 to 16 percent, as low as $402.7 million, at a time when shipments were normally up. Some of the company's tablet customers, including Dell and Samsung, had higher than usual inventories that pointed to a lack of sales.
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02/14, 10:25am
Atmel, NVIDIA to bring out large, capable tablets
NVIDIA and Atmel at the Mobile World Congress show on Monday announced a partnership that will see them create large touchscreen tablets. While the touchscreens will come from Atmel, NVIDIA's Tegra 2 chip will power the devices. A demo model will be shown off that sports the maXTouch mXT1386 screen.
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12/30, 12:55pm
EU settles on micro USB for universal phone power
The European Union on Wednesday formally established its micro USB charging standard for phone charging. The approach proposed over a year ago will guarantee that phones and phone chipsets from at least 14 companies, including Apple, LG, Motorola, Nokia and RIM, will support charging over a micro USB connection without needing to switch chargers. The measure was implemented to cut back on both wasted chargers and to let users switch chargers without risking damage or undercharging.
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09/11, 6:00pm
Atmel maXTouch controller has multi touch support
Atmel is hoping to move forward the technology behind touchscreens its new maXTouch series of capacitive touchscreen controllers. The new developments are unique in supporting an unlimited number of separate and simultaneous touch inputs along with a particularly fast screen refresh rate of 250Hz. The maXTouch controllers will allow the creation of touchscreens that are larger than 10 inches with zoom, rotate, handwriting and shape recognition functionality. Atmel also claims the maXTouch devices will have the lowest power needs in their class.
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