Smart Home Blog

Lats month Lenovo released its new IdeaCentre Q180 home theater PC. The skinny box sports a 2.13GHz Intel Atom dual-core CPU with Radeon HD 6450A graphics and up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM. It’s enough for 1080p playback smoothly. Additionally it can have a 750GB HDD or a 128GB SSD and Blu-ray drive. To hook up displays and peripheries HDMI, VGA, and S/PDIF output can be used together with USB 3.0 ports. Wireless connectivity is performed via Bluetooth or 802.11b/g/n WiFi. Also the IdeaCentre Q180 comes with compact wireless keyboard. It includes QWERTY keyboard, trackball and keys for media control.

The price for Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 HTPC starts from $349. So, if you’re thinking about your own media center based on PC then new product of Lenovo can be your choice.

Xtreamer, well-known producer of network HD media players, recently launched new device – Xtreamer Ultra. But if you check its spec you may see that it doesn’t look like previous Xtreamer players. The Xtreamer Ultra sports Intel Atom D525 (dual-core 1.8GHz) processor, 4GB DDR3 memory, NVIDIA ION2 (GT218, 512MB DDR3), eSATA, 6 x USB 2.0 ports, 2.5-inch SATA drive bay, DVI-I, SPDIF, HDMI with 7.1-Channel digital audio BitStreaming + LPCM, external IR, and Gigabit Ethernet. Plus optional external 802.11n adapter will be available soon. So, actually the new Xtreamer product is Ion nettop like Zotac BOX, Acer AspireRevo or ASRock Ion330 HT. But the producer offers a good price – $200 in US and €200 in Europe, thanks to aggressive marketing strategy. Just install there XBMC or Boxee and you’ll have a small, quiet but power HTPC.

The Xtreamer Ultra is demonstrated on CeBit 2011 in Hanover. If you cannot visit it you may see its photos in the Engadget gallery.

[via eHomeUpgrade]

Tranquil PC has announced the limited availability of the fanless T7-HSG Atom2 powered Windows Home Server and a Media Center PC (will be released soon). Both devices will be based on the Atom2 (Z330) processor which displays as 4 x CPU history streams in Task Manager and is 64-bit compatible.

The T7-HSG is tagged at £299.00 and comes with 512MB DDR2 memory, 500GB hard drive, 4x USB2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet. It seems that with Atom2 we can have noiseless and energy saving media PC but with enough power to playback media content including HD.

[via eHomeUpgrade and We Got Served]