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Kermee
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AFAIK, the starting price is $149 USD... The higher priced SKU's come with either Vista Home or Vista Premium "Microsoft Tax"...
The real test is if the 9300M in those nVidia ION platforms will be able to completely off-load (full vs. advance) MPEG-2 (e.g. ATSC OTA 1080i MPEG-2) and still be able to do Temporal 2X deinterlacing all inside VDPAU...
Cheers,
Kermee
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Personallly I'd just velcro this tiny little box to my BigScreen, run a wire down to a USB dongle that I'd gladly drill a hole in my entertainment center and hide and plug in my CAT5e cable that is connected to my NAS.
Sure the tiny thing is well to tiny and it will look like an Octopus with added extras, but for the price and what it does I'm sure I'd be in heaven with a dual core unit. Worst case hide it behind your TV or put it in another box. Its first Gen so I'll cut it some slack.
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2009-04-14, 19:09
(This post was last modified: 2009-04-14, 19:15 by TomJensen.)
UK always have higher prices for tech stuff. Price points will come down when it hits stateside.
The base config (1GB RAM, 8GB SSD) will probably be USD$200-225. I think this'll be popular for tech peeps, as then they can add their own drive & OS. The regular config at ~$300 is more usable, but as said, pretty expensive for what you get. Even w/o the GPU, the EeeBox is already a superior value with built-in gig-E and WiFi, both of which the Revo lacks, and nobody is buying that.
Price points for these things will have to come way down, around $150-200 (below the impulse buy threshold). Not only that, functionality will have to come up, with built-in wireless connectivity to stuff like remotes, keyboard, LANs, etc. Right now, the Revo is an overpriced gadget for peeps who just have to be the first to have new toys.
I have faith in Acer as a price leader, to wit, the AspireOne. Once more vendors put out their wares, and Nvidia gets off its high horse and lower the premium on the 9400, I think we'll see more realistic offers.
Seeing how it's VESA-mounted (diagonally in back of LCD), now I see why there's a USB port on the corner: so you can use a normal USB WiFi stick, which will stick up above the LCD to get good reception. This doesn't work if you have a larger LCD, or if the mount is in a lower position.
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Yep, saw the .11b/g in the specs. Didn't see an RP-SMA antenna-out in the port specs (or in pics from Engadget), so it's probably using int. ants, which means reception will suffer, especially if it's mounted behind the LCD. Anyway, even assuming excellent reception, best-case throughput for 11g is ~22Mb/s, not good enough for 1080p. You need dual-band .11n as a minimum.
By all appearances--single-core Atom, no built-in .11n or gig-E--it's a low-end product relying solely on the Ion moniker as the sales pitch. Judging from the hard-ons some folks get for the Ion in this thread, that may be good enough to close the deal.
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Oops, that should be "dual channel .11n", i.e. 40MHz, although having dual-band definitely would help, given all the interference in 2.4GHz.