Best of What's New 2011

Gadgets

Nvidia Tegra 2

Android life saver

Gadgets 6 of 11

Nvidia Tegra 2 Nvidia

The dual-core Tegra 2 chip has one purpose: to give Android tablets and phones more battery life (up to an entire day) without sacrificing power. The processor draws just a tenth the juice used by its predecessors while still smoothly rendering high-def video.

To save power, the chip divides tasks—video encode and decode, image processing and audio—among groups of transistors, and it activates those areas only when it needs them. Tablets from $330

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Tested

We've been anxiously awaiting the Motorola Xoom's arrival ever since we groped it at CES. The first dual-core tablet! The first tablet to use Android's tablet-only Honeycomb OS! The first Android tablet that doesn't immediately make us think "look at that giant phone"! And, yeah, the first legitimate iPad competitor, period. What we found was a great tablet--not a "promising" product, but a tablet that is seriously fast, fun to use, well-designed, and very pretty (when was the last time you heard "pretty" applied to an Android device?). Read more