#well the 720p is workable so at least i have that

[anders-hawke]

rip 1080p files... i can’t work with your glitches. get off my computer

[componentplanet]

Living With the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

If you’re on the road a lot – or were on the road a lot – and you’ve got to do business work that can’t be handled with a smartphone or tablet, you may want to invest in a seriously good, seriously compact notebook computer. The very lightest weigh in under 3 pounds, sometimes approaching just 1 kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. The best is the Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1, with a 14-inch display, priced from $1,400 to $2,400.

Working from home? The small size makes for a great computer-at-home when multiple adults and students are sheltering in place in the age of coronavirus: sitting at a kitchen table, draped across a couch, or lying in bed.

It’s not merely the ThinkPad X1 Carbon’s low weight. It’s the compact size, barely bigger than a sheaf of paper a half-inch thick. It’s the small power adapter and the 10-15 hour battery life. It’s also knowing that the machine is not going to break down when you’re on the road, or when you’re working from home and your company’s nearest IT guy is sheltering 20 miles away. ThinkPads don’t break very often. The price delta over a mainstream five-pound portable is not insignificant, but it’s less important than the fact that you’re remaining productive.

Great view(s): The companion ThinkVision M14 USB C display doubles screen real estate. It’s perfect for times when the hotel doesn’t let you jack into the big screen TV. (No, not all hotel rooms have this kind of view. Some trips, you get lucky.)

Second Display Extends Main Display

ThinkPad M14 display. Thick USB-C cable provides power and signal.

Dropping down from a larger, heavier notebook of 4-5  pounds also reduces how much bulk you have to carry when traveling. I’m on the road 20-plus times a year. (Well, I was until, uh, everybody stopped traveling.) The photo above was shot during a week at an auto show, where I needed to write stories; process photos; work social media to raise my ExtremeTech stories’ visibility on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; and keep up with friends and family, working not just in the hotel room-with-a-view but on shuttle buses, in downtime between meetings, or at airport departure gates.

For years, I’ve traveled with a thin HDMI cable 10-15 feet long ($15-$50) that I could jack into the hotel’s big TV if I could access the rear jacks, if the TV didn’t lock out access to the HDMI2 jack, and if the TV could be seen from the desk. That let me look at dozens of photos in Adobe Lightroom or stream videos. Now I travel with a second display, the ThinkVision M14 USB C display ($250), that quickly plugs in when I’m in the hotel or working in a convention center press room. Feet on the base let you get the screen bottom level with the base of the computer’s screen.

The 14-inch ThinkPad X1 Carbon is only a little smaller in every measurement. Calculate total size (volume) and weight, and the Extreme Gen 2 is half again as bulky and heavy. You notice it.

Whether stepping down to the hotel bar or at home headed to the media room to watch TV, I find that I now tuck the X1 under my arm – instead of my iPad – if I might want to check mail or social media. It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t do that with a 15-inch laptop weighing 5 pounds. Even the very nice ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 is just a little bigger in every respect (table above), enough so that you feel the size and heft going from place to place. And this one’s light compared with most notebooks with 15- to 16-inch screens.

The left side of the ThinkPad X1 has a USB C/Thunderbolt connector for power, a second that also connects the ThinkPad docking station, a wired Ethernet connector that requires a $35 adapter, a USB 3 jack, and an HDMI (full-size) jack.

First-Class Mechanicals

I’ve been a long-time user of laptop and notebook PCs. I wrote a book on using laptops in the early days, and was thrilled to see weights come down from 10 pounds and then slip below 5 pounds. Over time, I’ve valued ruggedness and reliability over low prices or (until now) the absolutely lowest weight. The X1 lets you have it all. Other than a low price: The cheapest X1 is still well over $1,000 and the every-options-box-checked X1 approaches $2,500.

If you go out on the road or commute daily by mass transit, when you lift the lid, you want the machine to come back to life every time, right away. For that, it’s worth a higher initial price point. It absolutely is when the company is paying, but probably is even when you’re paying. (Maybe you don’t need the 4K display upgrade on a screen measuring just 12 inches across.)

Mostly, I do the usual things on the road: deal with email, write documents and stories, chatter on Slack, and check social media. For that, any laptop works. I also handle a lot of photos and videos. For those, the X1 Carbon is more than workable. That said, Adobe is finally pushing its Photoshop and Lightroom tools onto the iPad and they’re certainly usable.

I have a 30-inch desktop monitor at home. Away from home, I compensate with the ThinkVision secondary display or jacking into the hotel TV when it’s accessible.

The right side has a headphone jack, always-on-for-power USB 3 jack, and a locking connector.

The X1 Carbon has two USB and two Thunderbolt/USB jacks plus a wired-Ethernet connector that requires an adapter. There is also a microphone array and a 720p front-facing camera with IR illumination for dark locations. You can almost double the price by upgrading:

14-inch 1920 x 1080 full-HD display (400 nits) to touchscreen to 2560 x 1440 WQHD to 3840 x 1440 UHD (500 nits)

CPU from 10th generation Intel Core i5-10210U at 1.6GHz to 8th generation i7-8665U at 1.9GHz

Solid state drive from 256GB to 512GB to 1TB storage (2TB not offered)

8GB to 16GB RAM

Windows 10 Home to Pro

ThinkPad keyboards have always been first-class. Use the TrackPoint, touchpad, or your own mouse to point.

Not the Only Ultra-Light Notebook

There are at least a half-dozen competing ultraportable laptops, those weighing 3 pounds or less, typically with 13- or 14-inch displays, solid-state hard drives, and battery life over 10 hours. The two that draw the most attraction are the Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 and the Apple MacBook Pro 13-Inch. They’re both premium-priced and score high for reliability. I like them both; my wife has a 13-inch MacBook and she’s an artist, and that (artist) is a near-automatic win for Apple.

If you can live with 512GB not 1TB of storage, one of the best deals on the X1 Carbon is Costco’s take-it-or-leave-it $1,500 single configuration: the more powerful Intel Core i7-8565U processor, the larger 16GB RAM config, a 1920 x 1080 touchscreen with 300 nits brightness (the other X1 displays are 400, 300 and 500 nits), and Windows 10 Home.

Other good choices are the Dell XPS 13 (13-inch LCD, 2.7 pounds) and Inspiron 14 7000 (14-inch LCD, 2.9 pounds), HP Envy 13 (13.3-inch LCD, 2.6 pounds), and LG Gram 14 14Z90N (14-inch LCD, 2.2 pounds). Most offer 8GB or 16GB of RAM (typically soldered down) and 256GB to 2TB of SSD storage (512GB and 1TB are most common). If your company just buys one brand of portable PC, they’re all pretty good. You may want big-screen monitors at your home and office work desks, and 24-inch displays are so inexpensive now.

The Apple MacBook Air (13.3-inch LCD, 2.8 pounds) is even lighter than the MacBook Pro 13, but it’s light on I/O as well: You use the two Thunderbolt/USB-C for external VGA, HDMI, or wired Ethernet.

Of note is the LG Gram 17, a 17-incher with 2560 x 1600 (WQXD) resolution, weighing just 2.9 pounds with a rated 17-hour battery life. So it’s super light, but also may call for a larger backpack or shoulder bag, and you want to be extra careful you don’t torque or stress the case.

Over the years, I’ve used IBM/Lenovo, Compaq, Dell, Gateway, HP, NEC, Panasonic, and Toshiba laptops. All were major productivity enhancers at the time. The most dazzling was a 4-pound NEC UltraLite at a time when only a handful of laptops were under 10 pounds. I still have it as a souvenir, next to an ancestor’s Underwood 5 typewriter. Right now, the go-to notebook for me is the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon because portability matters. Even when the word portable, for now, means only from the den to the living room to the kitchen table.

Now read:

AMD and Intel’s Latest Mobile CPUs Go Head to Head in Benchmark Leak

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Why TFLOPS Are Bad for Comparing PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X Performance

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/282800-lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon-review from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/04/living-with-lenovo-thinkpad-x1-carbon.html

[infotainmentplus-blog]

Steam Link Android app review: PC gaming goes mobile The beta version of Valve’s Steam Link app for Android hit the Play Store about a month ago, allowing gamers to stream their favorite PC games to their smartphone or Android TV. I’m very well acquainted with Valve’s TV hardware version of the technology, so let’s dust off a Bluetooth controller and see how it works on a phone. If you want to give the app a try for yourself, you can grab it for free from the link below. install the steam link app (beta) Simple to setup Credit where it’s due, Valve makes in-home streaming easy to set up and use. Just install the app while Stream is running on your PC, connect up a Bluetooth controller, and you’re good to go. The Steam Link app will test your network capability upon first connection, giving you an indication of whether your system will provide a stable frame rate. The default is set to Balanced quality at 15Mbps, but you can improve or downgrade this quality depending on the app’s test result (more on that in a bit). The app interface is simple enough, presenting a quick button to start playing or some additional settings if you’re looking to optimize streaming performance. Once you’re connected, your PC will automatically enter “Big Picture Mode,” providing simplified navigation to your favorite games and other Steam features using a controller. I experienced occasional connection issues launching the app. Even though Steam was running on my PC, the app sometimes couldn’t detect my computer. This happened sometimes on the Steam Link hardware too. Turning my phone’s Wi-Fi off and on again fixed the problem. Performance and networking Achieving a solid connection is the key to a good Steam Link experience and the rules are the same for the app as they were for the hardware version. For best results, you’ll want to connect your PC to your router via an ethernet cable to reduce the round trip latency significantly. My setup is nothing special. I have a basic hub provided by my ISP at the other end of a long room from my TV which has a Steam Link plugged in, although it offers a fast 5GHz channel which comes in handy. I don’t use extenders or mesh networking. Around my reasonably sized two-bedroom flat, there’s only one major Wi-Fi dead zone and that’s the only place I witnessed any connection drops. The Steam Link app offers the same three quality presets as the TV hardware. Beautiful provides the best quality video compression but requires a steady 30Mbps connection. Fast compresses the stream more heavily but only needs a 10Mbps link, making it ideal if you suffer from patchy connectivity across your home. Balanced sits nicely in between, at 15Mbps. Fast Quality Beautiful Quality Using the built-in network diagnostic tools, I clocked around 1ms network latency virtually everywhere and packet losses under one percent, even on the Beautiful preset. Your mileage will obviously vary depending on your distance from your router and home layout. I didn’t run into any network problems, but the app struggled with video decoding performance, something that wasn’t a concern for the Steam Link TV hardware. The flagship phones I tested couldn’t keep up with the 60fps output with my PC using the Beautiful preset, producing results that dipped into headache-inducing low 20s. The situation is slightly better with the Balanced option, but you’ll want to go for Fast to really lock in high frame rates. Dropping the resolution down to 720p, or even down to 480p for lower end hardware, worked too. Phones with HEVC can boost network throughput, but I still recommend Fast streaming quality or a 720p resolution for best performance. Fortunately, Fast rendering video artifacts usually easy to spot on a large TV are undetectable on a small smartphone display, and dropping to 720p barely touches the image quality either. You might be able to boost performance and bandwidth a bit more if your phone supports HEVC hardware decoding, but it’s not enabled by default. This option is located in the app under Settings > Streaming > Advanced > HEVC Video, and toggle it to enabled. Results varied for me with HEVC enabled, so its usefulness will depend heavily on your setup. This setting didn’t make a meaningful difference on the hardware I tested — it’s really designed to eek out extra performance in lower bandwidth situations like on a 2.4GHz network. Enabling this on phones that don’t support hardware decode decreased performance. One final note, a lot of phones default to strange resolutions, like 1,808 x 1,024 with the Note 8, which heavily impacts encode and decode performance compared to a standard resolution like 1080p or 720p, so definitely change this right away if performance is sluggish. Ultimately, using a combination of Fast quality and 720p is a worthwhile compromise when streaming to a phone. There’s no noticeable loss in quality on a small screen, encode and decode frame rates go up, latency goes down, you’re more free to roam around without connection drops, and the lighter load means better battery life for your phone. I’d even go so far as to recommend this setup if your phone supports HEVC decoding too. Big Picture could be better Steam’s Big Picture UI, which runs on your PC when using both the Steam Link app or TV hardware, is built to improve large screen and controller navigation over a PC keyboard and mouse setup. Navigating through with a Bluetooth controller on your smartphone will feel very familiar to Steam Link hardware users. Some options aren’t always the easiest to find, but on the whole navigating through menus, picking games, and configuring your setup is straightforward enough. The UI prompts don’t necessarily match your controller interface, but that’s an inevitable trade-off when supporting a wide range of third-party products. Valve has missed an opportunity to improve the experience for Steam Link app users though. Your smartphone’s touch screen continues to work when running the app, meaning navigating via touch is often a lot faster than scrolling through menus with D-Pad buttons. Unfortunately, the UI isn’t tweaked at all for smartphone interfaces, and many options are a little on the small side for pressing with a finger. Some quality-of-life software improvements for smartphone users would be welcome. You can’t really expect smartphone users to type on this cramped keyboard. While it’s easy enough to launch your favorite game with a tap on the large icon, scrolling through the majority of the smaller menu options is a pain. There’s no support for Android keyboards in chat yet, and touches don’t always register when you press on the cramped Steam software keyboard, making typing an inconsistent experience. I’d also like to see swipe support introduced for moving through some of the menus rather than having to press the shoulder buttons. A more mobile-optimized experience is going to be needed to iron out these bugbears. Tailored features will hopefully be implemented by the time the Steam Link app exits beta. A replacement for a TV Steam Link? As well as portable game streaming you can, of course, connect your phone up to a TV via HDMI to play on your big living room screen. This could cut out the need for a Steam Link hardware box entirely — at least if didn’t have so many issues. Given that streaming is rather demanding on the battery, you’ll want some form of HDMI dock with a charging port. I tried the idea out using both the Samsung Dex Station and an OTG adapter hub. Both worked, but remember the Dex Station costs $150 and the Dex Pad is $70. An OTG hub with charging costs just $20 —sometimes less — making it by far the most affordable option. Valve’s Steam Link retails for $50, but is often on sale for $20. In my experience, you are better off just getting that, for a few reasons. The original Steam Link is better than using phone/HDMI, but the app is a great proposition for Android TV owners The first is performance. I tried streaming to the TV on a variety of hardware configurations and had mixed results, most likely due to the extra computational power required to encode the HDMI output in conjunction with decoding the stream input. The Huawei P20 Pro didn’t like the situation at all, producing a much lower frame rate than before. The app also crashes in EMUI desktop mode. Performance was also sluggish on the Galaxy Note 8 when streaming in Dex desktop mode. Editor's Pick Streaming games might be coming to Netflix (Update: Netflix responds) NME Update (06/13) at 3:26 p.m. CT: Netflix has reached out to Android Authority to clarify a few points on the story. The streaming service confirmed that Minecraft: Story Mode, a licensed five-episode interactive narrative … Screen mirroring produces the best results. The Note 8 and LG V30 produced smooth frame rates in this mode. However, you’ll have to endure a duplicate screen in your field of view, which you don’t get with Dex mode. The odd aspect ratio of these devices also means you’ll end up with black bars on your TV stream, even after messing with the Full-Screen optimized app settings. It’s a less than premium experience that I wouldn’t recommend paying for. Ultimately I think streaming with a phone using HDMI is a fair way to test out if you’ll use TV streaming, providing you have the necessary components already at hand. However, the so-so performance and screen mirroring bugs mean smartphones definitely aren’t a replacement for Valve’s dedicated TV hardware. If you have an Android TV and can install the app, these same niggles won’t apply. Final thoughts Valve’s streaming solution is pretty great in my experience. The Steam Link app version showcases that the technology works just as well for portable devices as it does for your living room set. On both, your home network configuration will make or break the experience. Valve recommends an ethernet connection between your PC and router. That’s certainly been the only workable solution my experience. Unfortunately, the smartphone use case adds a few complications. The wide variety of video decoding and encoding hardware out there makes predicting streaming performance very difficult. You’ll certainly want to make some quality compromises compared to the hardware version to ensure a smooth frame rate. Valve's technology works great, but the variety of smartphone hardware make the experience inconsistent. I cannot recommend using your phone and Steam Link app as a replacement for Valve’s TV hardware. The performance is notably worse, even if you accept the necessary hit to video quality and the questionable compatibility of devices with non-16:9 aspect ratios with TV sets. Picking up a Link for $20 during a sale (which happens very often) is by far the best bet for TV streaming at this point, unless you have an Android TV. Editor's Pick 15 best Android games of 2018! Gaming on mobile has been improving at a far greater rate than any technology that came before it. Android games seems to hit new heights every year. With the release of Android Nougat and Vulkan … Overall I’m impressed by the technical capabilities of the beta version of the Steam Link app. A few mobile-centric quality of life improvements to the software are probably needed, and will hopefully be implemented come the full release. Now I just have to figure out what PC games I actually want to play on a small screen with a controller. , via Android Authority http://bit.ly/2lvnfmB