NVIDIA’s Tegra in the flesh, booting to Android and pumping out 1080p video
Nvidia is showing its Tegra chipset running android OS, running Quake 3 at 25fps, and displaying (unknown bitrate) 1080p video from the movie Cars.
For a few years now, I’ve envisioned a future device that would take movies in the same direction as music. Moving movie content from a disk based system, to a portable handheld system. You could download your favorite movies onto your portable device, hold your entire collection in the palm of your hand, and use the HDMI output to display brilliant high quality video on your display of choice. You could plug this device into a dock and watch on your home theater, you could take it in the car and plug it into the car’s video display to entertain your kids, and you could plug it into your hotel room display when you arrive at your destination. It is IMO the perfect HT device. Nvidia’s tegra device is the first I’ve seen that is capable of truly high end video in a portable device and while we are still a ways off from having enough storage space for your entire movie collection on a device this size, The video hardware is getting there. There are a few more hurdles, like getting enough harddrive space, and then getting the studios to adopt video downloads as a viable business strategy, removing those lame limits on the content we download. Until then though, check out the videos on Engadget.
NVIDIA really has a technical wonder in the Tegra APX 2600 chipset, and is more than happy to show it off, with a myriad of tech demos on display here at MWC. Some of this they showed off back in June of last year, but it’s no less impressive — there aren’t really any mobile devices out there capable of this stuff right now. Still, we’re here for the new, and NIVIDA showed up with Android running on one of its proof-of-concept units, and with another unit pumping out 1080p video, with a claimed 10 hours of battery life at that task. NVIDIA says it took them just a few weeks to port Android to the system, and we found it already quite snappy and even usable on the capacitive touchscreen-ed device. We also saw the forthcoming Android-running Yulong N8 and IAC S2 Tegra APX phones, along with an untitled CompalCom set — they were all in non-working prototype form, but it’s clear this chipset isn’t just for MIDs. Check it all out in the videos after the break and the gallery below!