Zinio’s smartphone and tablet apps make it easy to bring a lifetime’s worth of magazine content with you on the go, but performance has been inconsistent, especially when navigating through pages or zooming into photos and text. The company’s latest app improves upon both critical elements, however, taking advantage of the Nvidia Tegra chip in your Mototola Xoom or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to smooth out page transitions and pinch-to-zoom. Nvidia posted a side-by-side comparison video demonstrating the improvements on a pair of Xooms, and there’s clearly a noticeable difference. You can try it out for yourself by downloading Zinio version 1.10.3641 from the Android Market, or jump past the break for the demo.

Continue reading Zinio brings Tegra hardware acceleration to Honeycomb tablets

Zinio brings Tegra hardware acceleration to Honeycomb tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9, the first major update for Microsoft’s browser in nearly two years. Internet Explorer 9 is a huge leap forward for the IE line, bringing much-needed web standards support, better performance and hardware acceleration for faster graphics and animations on supported PCs.

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Adobe has acknowledged that there’s a war going on for developers, and it believes it has some increasingly popular weapons to win the hearts of mobile developers in Adobe Air and Flash. On the eve of the Mobile World Congress, the company shared some statistics about Air and Flash, hoping to get developers to see the value in its cross-platform tools.

Adobe said Adobe AIR applications are now able to run on more than 84 million smartphones and tablets running Android and iOS — and by the end of 2011, it expects more than 200 million smartphones and tablets will support Adobe AIR applications. Developers have built thousands of Air apps including 1,500 apps for Android Market in the first two months since Air apps became available there in October. It’s unclear how many times the apps have been downloaded but Adobe said Air has been downloaded 1 million times on Android (consumers need to download Air in order to run Air apps).

Adobe said more than 20 million of the smartphones shipped in 2010 had Flash Player 10.1 installed, with more than 6 million downloads of browser plug-in in the Android Market. This year, the company expects more than 132 million smartphones to have Flash Player installed, including 40 percent of all smartphones shipped in the first half of the year, while more than 50 tablets will ship or be able to download Flash Player. RIM’s Tablet OS and HP’s webOS platform will join Android in supporting Flash when they launch. Adobe is showcasing its newly released Flash 10.2 at the Mobile World Congress and will be highlighting Stage Video, its technology for improving video performance through hardware acceleration. Stage Video, which is supported on Android 3.0 and BlackBerry Tablet OS, offers more efficient use of the processor and memory and should improve battery life, one of the big knocks on Flash.

Anup Murarka, director of product marketing, said the demands of developers to support more platforms is growing, highlighting the need for tools that can help developers leverage their work. With an army of tablets running Android and credible iPad challengers in the BlackBerry Playbook and HP TouchPad, which will largely support Adobe runtimes, Adobe thinks it’s in a good place to benefit from the tablet boom. The company has been harping on its cross-platform tools but it now believes it’s getting enough reach and performance to really be compelling for mobile developers.

Adobe still faces a challenge in trying to evangelize its tools. While the company feels like it can help developers make apps that stand toe-to-toe with native apps, it has to overcome the perception that Air and Flash apps don’t perform as well as native apps and make as good of use of the hardware. Adobe will probably never match the performance of native apps but with new platforms emerging and the market for apps expected to hit  billion this year, it makes sense for Adobe to continue to play up its cross-platform potential and hope eager developers short on time and cash respond.

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We’ll soon live in an age when netbooks have both CPUs and GPUs and it will be grand. Unicorns and rainbows will dance off of our screens in harmony — and Internet Explorer might become relevant again. The video after the jump shows what IE9 is capable of when a next-generation NVIDIA Ion GPU is paired with an Intel Atom CPU verses a standard netbook with an Atom all by itself. The differences are obvious and makes a solid case for Internet Explorer. But most of us will probably visit the International Space Station before setting IE as our default browser even if it renders graphics faster. [via liliputing]

According to Steve Jobs, running Flash video on the iPad would cut its battery life from 10 hours to a measly 1.5. At least, that was his pitch to Wall Street Journal execs recently. But could it possibly be true?

Well, yes and no. Jobs is picking and choosing here between hypothetical versions of Flash. If the iPad version of Flash were to have hardware acceleration, which Flash 10.1 offered up for desktops (though not OS X), that wouldn’t be remotely the case. If Flash on the iPad were to support hardware video decoding where available, it wouldn’t require nearly as much CPU. You’d lose battery life, sure, the same way you lose battery life watching any type of video on any system, but nothing near as dramatic as 85%.

Of course, that hardware acceleration isn’t currently possible on Macs, because Adobe doesn’t have access to the appropriate APIs. So Jobs can easily on a imaginary version of Flash that doesn’t have hardware acceleration and come up with an imaginary battery life impact.

Jobs’s bigger fib might be his description of ditching Flash as “trivial.” It’s not. While HTML5 is good, it’s not great—yet. And even when it becomes great, it’ll take major sites years to make the switch—however long it takes for the majority of internet users to stop using outmoded browsers. And that won’t be for a very long time. Certainly longer than the first few generations of the iPad.

So. Would Flash make the iPad’s battery life only 1.5 hours? Maybe, maybe not. But the bigger question is: will we ever get the chance to find out for ourselves? [Gawker]

Yesterday, we saw the best laptops at any price. But what about their little brothers, the netbooks? Quite simply, here are the three best models that you should choose from, provided by Mark Spoonauer from Laptop:

Toshiba mini NB205

Starting Price: $399.99 ($382.36 now at Amazon)
If you’re going to be staring at a 10-inch screen for hours on end you deserve a design that doesn’t feel claustrophobic, and the 3-pound NB205 delivers with the biggest touchpad in its class and a spacious chiclet-style keyboard. This netbook doesn’t look cheap either, thanks to the textured lid and slick color options (black, white, pink, blue or brown). We’re not fans of Windows 7 Crippled Edition, but the NB205′s nearly 9 hours of battery life and 250GB hard drive make this $399 machine a great deal. [Review]

HP mini 311

Starting Price: $399
What a difference Nvidia graphics make. This Atom+Ion-powered netbook can not only handle mainstream games like World of Warcraft without breaking a sweat, it takes full advantage of Flash Player 10.1′s hardware acceleration for dramatically smoother Hulu playback on the 11.6-inch screen (or bigger screen via HDMI). You can even edit video on this 3.2-pound powerhouse, which comes with a stylish HP Swirl pattern in black or white. If you care about longer battery life, get the cheaper Windows XP version.
[Windows XP Review] [Windows 7 Review]

Samsung N140

Starting Price: $384.99
Samsung made a splash last year with its first netbooks for the U.S., and the $399 N140 builds upon the success of the NC10 but modernizing the design, adding Windows 7 (though it’s Starter), and beefing up the hard drive to 250GB. Available with a burgundy or blue lid and outlined with silver trim, this Atom machine performs like other netbooks but features a glare-free matte display and comfy keyboard. You also get decent audio courtesy of SRS Sound. [Review]

Mark Spoonauer is the editor-in-chief of Laptop Magazine and Laptopmag.com, which reviewed over 130 notebooks and netbooks during 2009. To see all of their top picks of the year, click here.