No, it’s not a joke, but it’s not hands-down proof that Microsoft will allow it either. The Tegra platform is fully capable of 1080p playback (as you’ll hear after the jump roughly two minutes into the video), and the Zune HD has already been outed as being built on the Tegra platform. Now, with this in mind, there are still a few things holding Microsoft back from enabling 1080p video playback on Tegra: The Zune HD likely won’t have the hard drive space to store more than a few movies in full 1080p resolution, nor is there much of a point in squandering space on a 1080p film and playing it back on a reduced screen. Storing 720p and scaling it down for playback on a smaller screen while on the move makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense to do this with massive 1080p video, especially when there isn’t even much of a perceived difference in quality when outputting both 720p and 1080p to a TV. Keep in mind as well that while Tegra’s power usage is awesomely low, playing 1080p video is still more energy-expensive than playing 720p, so 1080p will also reduce battery life. The benefits v. drawbacks aren’t in favor of 1080p, but at least it’s comforting to know that the ZuneHD is capable.

The reason this matters, though, is that for those enthusiasts out there who want the capability to throw 1080p at their TVs from their Zunes, this may be nothing more than a quick hackjob to enable. If Microsoft decides to produce a high-capacity model down the road (say, 320GB), I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it officially enabled on the Zune HD by default.

As for the Tegra platform, I managed to run into two separate Tegra netbooks, one of which was throwing 720p video at a TV without any problems. Tegra itself is ridiculously tiny, and NVIDIA seems to be working quite hard to get deals with car manufacturers, smartphone makers, netbook makers, TV makers, etc. for the Tegra platform. The goal, basically, is to get Tegra embedded into anything in which it might possibly fit, which is to say, basically everything. Power usage is also amazingly low, which opens the gates for many applications.

Update: I’ve checked the specs for the two different Tegra Systems-on-Chip, and neither state support for 1080p. However, there’s clear confirmation in the video that at least one of the Tegra models is 1080p-capable, so who knows. Thanks goes to @clubdirthill for sparking a desire within me to look into the matter.

More details on everything (including the size) can be found in my video of NVIDIA’s Tegra platform, which happens to be below the fold in both vanilla and HD YouTube form.

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HP joined the netbook craze after it saw the market potential for the tiny devices (something Acer has used to propel itself toward the number 2 spot amongst computer OEMs). This one carries less of a netbook-y feel and more of a business-y feel than other typical netbooks, which might help HP reach an audience slightly more concerned about aesthetics than the typical netbook buyer. Things to note:

• It runs Vista, which is great. Thing is, I’m unsure as to whether it runs Windows Vista smoothly enough under load thanks to the chipset being used. This is one of those netbooks which might be a better grab once it’s loaded with Windows 7 thanks to 7’s performance and power usage optimizations.
• The keyboard is spill-resistant (there’s a difference between this and spill-proof), which means that it can likely withstand an accidental coffee or coke spill without problems. Your best bet would be to dry it off quickly.
• Build quality is excellent, and the tool-less design (with switching ram, anyway) is definitely a plus. The only catch is that I can’t think of too many instances where a user would want to upgrade ram on a netbook.

There are two separate add-ons which I also take a look at in this video; one of which is a USB expander that adds extra USB ports, dedicated headphone/mic jacks, as well as a NIC. It’s not a complete docking solution, but it should serve perfectly fine for people who just want to plug one USB cable into their netbook at work as opposed to setting it on a dock. The other is just an external optical drive, which might (again) only really be a necessity in the office.

As with the last video, you can catch this hands-on video after the jump in both vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD.

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NVIDIA’s first ION-based netbook went on sale a few days ago (the Lenovo S12, seen above and in the video), and I managed to get a good run-down of the thing as well as with OCZ’s as-yet-unreleased ION netbook. Things to note:

• ION is essentially a GeForce 9400m repackaged for netbook use, so the same graphical abilities seen in lower end MacBook Pros are also available with netbooks running ION.
• Because there’s a CUDA-enabled 9400m GPU, other CUDA-accelerated tasks can also be run on these netbooks, such as video encoding. The video demonstrates this.
• As can be seen in the video and in the above screencap, Windows 7 runs on these netbooks just fine, which makes sense given that there’s a pretty decent GPU sitting inside these things.

You can catch the video demonstrating 1080p video from the netbooks (as well as other tasks) after the jump in both vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD.

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