Day one of the Consumer Entertainment Show(CES)2013 in Las Vegas has seen a couple of reveals to potentially bend the rules of the existing mobile technology market.
First up was the unveiling of Nvidia's Tegra 4 mobile chip,which the company boasted is the"world's fastest mobile processor".
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Nvidia has so far neglected to back up this promise with any hard fact-such as the chip's actual clock speed-but 72 custom GPU cores probably can't lie.Six times the theoretical horsepower of the Tegra 3,Nvidia reckons this difference means 2.6 times faster web browsing speeds as well as general improved app performance.
Nvidia also demoed a digital imaging system called the"Nvidia computational photography engine",which purports to improve HDR(high dynamic resolution)photography-by effectively shooting two photos at once-and thus possibly even video.
Perhaps most importantly of all,the Tegra 4 comes with 4G LTE processing on board.This was a failing of the Tegra 3 which,when used in phones,meant processing was slowed down considerably when separate LTE hardware needed to be attached to the chip.On-chip LTE could help Nvidia stand up nicely next to whatever Qualcomm plans next.
But whatever Nvidia is planning in the pocket-sized market,laptop maker Lenovo isn't interested,because today saw the company announce a 27in monster tablet that it's calling the IdeaCentre Horizon Table PC.
An all-in-one machine running Windows 8,it can be stood up in the style of a regular PC for touchscreen-driven everyday use,but can also be collapsed on its back and released from its power cable to become a potentially collaborative interactive'table'for all manner of group user experiences.
So far,this seems to extend only to specially customised versions of tablet board games,but the idea of excitable product-planning meetings sitting around a device like this doesn't seem unreasonable in the near-future.
Lenovo says the device will go on sale this summer for the relatively bargain sum of$1,699(£1,056).
