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Pepcom Show Touts 720p Zune, New NVIDIA Toys, And Phones Galore
MojoKid writes "Recently, at the Pepcom Digital Experience show in New York, NVIDIA demonstrated the capabilities of the upcoming Lenovo S12 netbook, which features a single-core Atom CPU and an NVIDIA ION graphics processor. However, probably more interesting to some, NVIDIA was also showing off its new Tegra system-on-a-chip CPU, which will be powering the recently-announced Zune HD portable media player. The device was being demonstrated in a netbook form-factor and was streaming full quality 720p HD video over HDMI. On the networking front, Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit — a speedy alternative to wireless networking."
Well, given that the Zune display is expected (as MS hasn't announced anything) to still be sub-standard definition, there isn't much point to having 720p video on the device UNLESS you also commonly carry around a dock so you can connect the Zune to another display that IS 720p.
Otherwise, it would be better for the video to be encoded at the resolution of the Zune's display.
Getting on my Apple soapbox now, this really looks like a 'bullet-point' type feature, like FM-radio, or that bizarre wireless-sync feature MS touted with the last version of the Zune (where they conveniently failed to mention that the Zune still had to be physically plugged into a power source to sync, making the feature at best 'remote' sync and not wireless sync at all). This kind of marketing has been shown over the last 5 years to be completely ineffective against the iPod.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
While I suppose from a very technical point of view, you're "streaming" over hdmi, that's no more streaming than it is over a vga cable or over the air. What it *does* do is confuse consumers by making s.t...re...am....i.n.g sound like a good thing. "streaming full quality" is an oxymoron in normal contexts.