Hasta La Gadget!

Now here’s a way to excite all the tablet naysayers. Slap that ultra-efficient Tegra chipset inside a 10.1-inch touchscreen tablet, make the display a matte (yay!) Pixel Qi slice of glory and then stand back as all of geekdom rejoices. We’re still only looking at renders, but this device is all set to make waves at CES with an impressive spec sheet that also includes WiFi, Bluetooth, UMTS/HSDPA, and A-GPS on the wireless front and connectivity via USB, HDMI, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The most important thing is still that display, though, whose efficiency leads to the unnamed device boasting 48 hours of battery standby juice, also good for 8 hours of HD video playback or 16 hours of WiFi-enabled Engadget reading. Driven by a default (for now) Android UI and supposedly capable of running three simultaneous 1080p streams with little frame loss, this should be one hot piece of kit come January. For now, we have another shot after the break as well as the full data sheet.

Continue reading Notion Ink smartpad comes with Tegra, aims to be first Pixel Qi device

Notion Ink smartpad comes with Tegra, aims to be first Pixel Qi device originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A new survey from Comscore shows that the iPhone has jumped ahead of the ailing Windows Mobile in the US. Comscore measured actual ownership instead of sales figures (as in “What phone do you use?”). RIM’s Blackberry still comes out on top, but in October  Apple jumped ahead of Microsoft, with almost nine million users to Windows’ 7 million.

And remember, Apple has just the three generations of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, while Windows Mobile has been shipping on a whole range of devices for several years. Interestingly, although Palm comes in ahead of Symbian and Google (Android), these figures discount the Pre WebOS as there just aren’t enough Pres out there to show on the charts.

With manufacturers like HTC, traditionally a big WinMo handset maker, defecting to Android (HTC makes the Nexus phone for Google), Microsoft had better watch out. As the mobile market grows and slowly pushes out the desktop and laptop computer, Windows’ stranglehold on the computer industry will continue to slip.

What were the top smartphone operating systems in October? [Fierce Developer via Cult of Mac]

You’ll excuse us for poking a bit of fun at the IEEE, but after it took seven years to finalize a wireless standard that didn’t change for most of that time, we have to wonder how long a new battery rulebook is going to take. IEEE Std 1725 is the current set of commonly agreed rules, in effect since 2006, but apparently “the cellular industry has grown tremendously since then” and our needs as consumers have changed. No kidding, 1GHz processors and 1080p video recording can kind of do that. The Cell Phone Battery Working Group (a real entity!) will hold its first meeting on the topic in February, and the final outcome will lay out up-to-date rules on the requisite quality, reliability, construction, and discharge characteristics of modern cellphone batteries. Let’s hope “smartphones that last more than a day” figures somewhere on that list.

IEEE begins work on new cellphone battery standard, we circle 2029 for ratification originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 04:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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cnet asia (crave): LED lighting products for the home are finally heading Asia’s way. The Ledino collection, under Philips, will be its hero product when the Dutch company sets up its first exclusive Philips Home Lighting Concept Stores in Singapore come January 2010. This will be followed by four more before end of next year.

This initiative is part of the company’s direction for the region, clearly to increase sales through retail and distribution via Philips-branded showrooms. However, these will differentiate themselves by being set up to simulate realistic home environments, rather than cramp every nook and crany of a store with light fixtures.

The aim is to improve the consumer shopping experience in picking the correct lighting product for the different home spaces, said its senior manager for Corporate Communications at Philips Electronics Singapore, Lim Bee Hong.

China, which opened its first Philips Home Lighting Concept Store last year, will have 80 across the Mainland by this year. India has 33 stores, while Thailand will be debuting its first one this month.

Philips to light up Southeast Asia with LED concept stores [cnet asia (crave)]

We’re still not totally clear on how exactly Verizon intends to enter (or rather, re-enter) the Palm stage in 2010; we know there’s definitely a WiFi-equipped CDMA Pixi out there that’ll likely find its way into Big Red’s clutches, but otherwise, we really need to wait for this event at CES next month. Well, maybe — we’ve got another little clue here in the form of some tips to PhoneArena stating that a “Pre Plus” has found its way into the carrier’s systems, which fits in nicely with info we’d previously received from one of our trusted sources that Verizon’s Pre would be somehow “different” from Sprint’s though we don’t yet know how. As far as we can tell, this isn’t the same as that WiFi Pixi (wouldn’t it be confusing if it was?), so we should probably expect at least two webOS models on Verizon over the next few months. In other news, that Motorola Calgary (pictured) appears to be shaping up as the “Devour” with a 3 megapixel cam and Blur running on Android 2.1 — yes, 2.1, not 1.5, which should give hope to CLIQ owners that an update is probably in the works. Finally, there’s talk of an LG VS750 in a mega-thin form factor running WinMo 6.5 with global roaming capability, but we don’t have a picture of that one just yet. Anyhow, back to the Pre Plus, we’re accepting all guesses as to what the “Plus” in the name might stand for — 16GB of integrated storage or a microSD slot seem like obvious candidates, but feel free to get creative with us.

[Image via BGR]

Verizon getting Palm Pre Plus and Android-powered Motorola Devour? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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