You know how mobile chip-maker Qualcomm has been on a bit of a buying spree, snapping up smaller companies to bolster its technology? It turns out Qualcomm isn’t alone. Chip-maker Broadcom just announced that it’s spending $3.7 billion to buy NetLogic Microsystems. Broadcom produces chips that are used in smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and set-to-boxes, among other things. The company…

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Wireless chips that bundle WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPS and other functions are pretty standard for smartphones. But most notebooks and netbooks which offer Bluetooth use separate wireless cards for WiFi and Bluetooth functions. That makes it easy to offer Bluetooth as an option rather than a standard feature. But wireless chip-maker Broadcom wants to make it easier to just offer…

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Habey has introduced a new version of its HD video decoder which is even smaller than the HB-VD904 PCIe mini card the company introduced last summer. The new Habey HB-VD920 is a half height PCI Express Mini card which you can add to any netbook, tablet, or desktop computer to enable support for 1080p HD video playback. The HB-VD920 is…

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The Acer Aspire One Happy is an upcoming 10 inch netbook from Acer that appears to be a rebranded version of the Acer Aspire One D255. The main difference is that the Happy comes in bright pastel colors — and oh yeah, it has slightly more ridiculous name. But Peter at Netbook News spotted another interesting tidbit about the Happy…

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The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator is a media coprocessor that adds support for HD video playback on computers with slow processors and graphics cards that normally wouldn’t be able to handle high definition video. A handful of netbooks on the market today ship with the card pre-installed, and hackers have been picking up cheap Broadcom cards from eBay for…

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The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator is a PCI Express card that you can throw into a number of netbooks or other devices to enable 1080p HD video playback on a computer that normally wouldn’t have enough processing power to handle high resolution video. While the original card wasn’t exactly enormous, it looks like Broadcom’s second generation Crystal HD video…

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The Asus Eee PC 1005PR looks exactly like the Eee PC 1005PE — until you turn it on. That’s when you’ll find out that the netbook has a high resolution 1366 x 768 pixel HD display and it can handle HD video playback thanks to a built in Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator. Asus first showed of the Eee PC…

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The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator is a mini PCI-E card that you can throw in some netbooks and notebooks to enable HD video playback even on low power devices with Intel Atom or similar processors. A handful of netbooks including the HP Mini 210, Dell Inspiron Mini 10, and HP Mini 5102 are available with the Broadcom card preloaded….

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Hewlett Packard’s HP Mini 210 comes in a variety of attractive colors, and features a slim new design with a removable access panel making RAM and hard drive upgrades ridiculously easy. The base mdoel is just $280, but for $330 you can get the netbook with a high definition, 1366 x 768 pixel display. And for $365 and up, you…

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[/caption] Dell is now offering the Inspiron Mini 10 netbook with an optional Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator. The decoder gives the mini-laptop a bit of help decoding 720p and 1080p HD video, something which an Intel Atom-powered netbook would normally struggle with. The announcement comes hot on the heels of the launch of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta 3,…

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Chip maker Broadcom designs the HD video accelerator found in a handful of netbooks today, as well as a wired and wireless communication technology found in a huge number of phones, computers, digital media boxes, and other devices. With tablet-style devices set to take over the world (or at least with dozens of PC makers looking to release tablets in…

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The Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator allows low power netbooks with Intel Atom processors to play 1080p HD video without breaking a sweat. Normally if you try to do this on a machine with an Atom CPU and integrated graphics, you’ll end up watching a slideshow rather than a full-motion movie. Not all media players play well with the video…

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