NVIDIA Demo Digital Mag & Farmville On Tegra Tablet

What's the best use for an NVIDIA Tegra 250 second-gen tablet? If you said Condé Nast's Wired digital magazine demo, or indeed popular Facebook game Farmville, NVIDIA have you covered. The company had their latest tablet prototypes on show, and were demonstrating the finger-friendly magazine together with the addictive farming game.

Neither may be quite as eye-catching as a full HD video demo, or high-performance gaming (though NVIDIA obviously had those tasks on display too), they do show the flexibility of the second-gen Tegra chipset. NVIDIA's Michael Rayfield, general manager of the mobile business unit, told us that he reckons digital magazines will be the tipping point for tablet-style devices, and the interface certainly does benefit from a large touchscreen.

As for Farmville – which Rayfield sheepishly admitted to being a little addicted too himself – Tegra is powerful enough to run the Flash app full-screen from the Facebook webpage, with the same performance as you'd see on a desktop. NVIDIA have had to make no changes in order for it to be finger-friendly. Elsewhere in Flash, the chipset is easily capable of driving 720p YouTube HD videos.

According to Rayfield, several smartphones are in the works running the Tegra 2 – in fact manufacturers had access to the chipset as far back as July 2009, despite NVIDIA only publicly announcing it in January at CES 2010 – which should be making an appearance later this year. Of course, it'll also be making an appearance on tablets, which are also due sometime in 2010.

Wired digital magazine demo:

Farmville on NVIDIA Tegra 250 tablet:

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