Remote access
In keyboard mode, the pad illuminates to show a complete touch keyboard. The key layout on our sample appeared to be for a pan-European Revo, so most of the vowel keys were crowded with accented variants. There is a UK version, though, which is less busy – check you get one.
The tablet remote resides in the body of the beast
As well as the standard Qwerty keys, there are several more suited to a remote, including Home, Back and cursor arrows. They have a light, positive touch, sometimes a little over-sensitive, but each key-press is beeped, so at least you know when you’ve double-keyed.
The Revo 100 is based on a 64-bit, dual-core AMD Athlon II Neo K325 processor, slightly surprisingly twinned not with ATI graphics, but with an nVidia ION GPU. There’s 2GB of DDR3 memory fitted and a socket for another stick, if you want to increase it. The Sata hard drive is a 2.5in, 500GB model.
It’s good to have a Freeview tuner included in the machine, as it’s then set-up through Media Centre for TV playback with a minimum of fuss. However, there’s only a single tuner, so you can’t watch one channel while recording another, and the tuner isn’t HD-capable, an odd design choice on a machine geared to HD output through Blu-ray.
Benchmark Tests
PCMark Vantage Results
Longer bars are better
The machine works well. Although the processor runs out of steam if you try and play games that need much processor poke, it’s well capable of running Blu-ray at 1080p with no noticeable artefacts, as well as HD content from other sources. It’s obviously up to Internet browsing and can also stream content from a wide variety of sources, thanks to Clear.fi.
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COMMENTS
Tesco ?
Curious, which Tesco model are you describing?
Tuners...
A lot of old plasma displays are just that - displays (*not* TV's). However, with a single tuner it should be possible to record multiple shows assuming they share the same multiplex. At least, MythTV allows this. I assume MythTV runs on this, hence the choice of Nvidia (with hopefully VDPAU support)?
Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated
> Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated
Yes. But you are not the one in control of this if you are using Flash.
This is why most Flash video still sucks.
@JEDDIDIAIAHAH
Flash has the ability to be HW accelerated - there are apis for doing it. Whether those APIs are used is another matter though.
And a decent GPU will handle most stuff (the one I work on does H264, 263, WebMM, MPEG, JPG etc)
Hiding in the tall grass.
> And I thought Linux users were above the "Solve
> everything by chucking more power at it" mentality?!
We are. You just have to be smart about how you throw the "power" around.
It's not the CPU that does the real work on these kinds of boxes. It wouldn't even be doing the real work if you were using a recent Mac Mini. All the heavy lifting would be done by the GPU.
They very expensive supercomputing setups out of nothing more than a big tower and a bunch of GPU cards.
Even Flash can will the GPU if the webmaster in question bothers to enable newer features in the plugin.
