Hasta La Gadget!

Say the words “tablet computer” and ten bucks says it’s Apple’s iPad that springs to mind. But that doesn’t mean other companies aren’t busy building their own version of a touch-enabled, multimedia-sporting, slab of portable computing goodness.

Dell’s first effort at a tablet will be the Mini 5 (a name that is still in beta) — a slice of plastic and glass with a 5-inch capacitive touchscreen that according to Michael Dell will debut “in a couple of months.”

The Mini 5 will sport a 5-megapixel camera on the back, a separate front-facing camera that can be used for video conferencing, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1-GHz processor. The 5-inch screen also means it will be be closer to the Sony PSP in its form factor than the longer legal notepad design of the iPad.

The Mini 5 will run the latest version of Google’s Android operating system, version 2.0 or higher. And instead of the 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad, Dell’s tablets will support the 16:9 ratio. Widescreen films anyone?

“It’s a device optimized for media consumption,” Neeraj Choubey, general manager of the tablets division at Dell told Wired.com. “It will offer the full web-browsing experience so you have something that you are holding in your hand that replaces everything the smartphone does and takes on quite a bit of the features of a laptop.”

The Dell 5 Mini will also just be the first in a series. “We are going to have a family of tablets,” says Choubey. “The first one is a 5-inch screen but we want to scale that up to a variety of screen sizes.”

That means future versions of the Mini 5 could have larger screens that will be closer in size to the iPad.

Dell wouldn’t comment on pricing, beyond saying it will be “competitive,” or when it will launch this year. Apple’s iPad ranges from $500 to $830.

With the launch of iPad in January, the tablet PCs are going through a renaissance. Though PC makers have offered slates and convertible notebooks for nearly a decade, consumers haven’t bought them in droves. With its 9.7-inch display, sleek design and Apple’s relentless hype, the iPad could alter the way we experience mobile computing. And Dell knows this.

Three years ago, Dell started expanding its product line to include mobile products. Dell smartphones are now sold in Brazil and China and it hopes to bring a version to North America. Meanwhile, the company set up a tablet division, and three weeks ago Choubey joined Dell from venture capital firm Venrock.

As he sees it, the Mini 5 will offer the apps that are available on smartphones, a set of specialized tools and programs for business users, a strong movies and music experience and web surfing — flash and all included. Take that, iPad.

Along with the apps on the Mini 5 users will have quick access to e-mail, YouTube, Amazon’s MP3 store for music, as well as spreadsheet, presentation maker and documents. It will also support voice recognition.  And these are characteristics that will be common to all tablets from Dell.

Still it will be a hard sell to consumers, says Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner.

“If all you are bringing to the market is another media-playing or handheld-gaming device, then it’s not going to work,” he says. “It’s all about the services you have behind the device.”

And that’s where the iPad scores, with its strong developer ecosystem and 100,000 apps, along with iTunes and iBooks, says Baker.

Dell is betting it can offer that and add a compelling value proposition for business users: a promise that its tablet won’t just be a coffee-table device but instead a powerful productivity tool.

“There’s no reason why you can’t use the tablet to take notes in class,” he says.

Dell will also offer services such as syncing that will allow users to move music, documents and other data between their PC and tablet easily.

“At a very basic level, you would have a service that will share content across the devices seamlessly and have it in the cloud,” says Choubey.

Dell also hopes to draw on the Android ecosystem by offering developers the opportunity to port their Android apps to the Mini 5 and its successors.

For the Mini 5, though, its PlayStation Portable-like form factor could be a big drawback, says Baker. The Dell Mini 5 is closer in its looks to gadgets better known as mobile internet devices or MIDs, a category that has been languishing despite products from companies such as Lenovo and Archos.

“If the Dell Mini 5 is this small and it is pocketable, then why isn’t it a phone?” asks Baker. “If I am going to carry a second device, it better have something that’s a significant advantage over what I can do with my phone. With the iPad, the value proposition is a much larger display.”

But Choubey says the innovation is not just in the form factor but also in the business model. Dell will work with carriers to bundle inexpensive data plans for the Mini 5 and other tablets.

“That type of model — the way iPad was able to do with AT& T — will become more prevalent with these tablet devices,” he says. “It allows the carrier to increase number of devices per user.” Apple introduced a $15 for 250 MB, or an unlimited $30 a month, no-contract data plan for use with the iPad.

See Also:

• Dell Plans Its Own Smartphone, Analysts Say
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All?
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad
• Designers Unearth Apple Tablet Prototypes — From 1983

Photo: Dell Mini 5 (ndevil/Flickr)

You came, you saw, some of you were not convinced. So what’s a gadget blog to do when picture evidence isn’t enough? Why, get those pictures moving, of course, right up to 30 frames a second. The stunning titanium iPhone 3GS from this morning is back, proving not only its existence in the corporeal realm, but also its much-disputed ability to place a call — something that even the default plastic-backed units sometimes struggle with. Look, we’re not in Austria and therefore can’t lick it and tell you if it really tastes of titanium, but on the evidence we have the thing looks legit. Judge for yourself after the break.

Continue reading The titanium iPhone is real, really real (video)

The titanium iPhone is real, really real (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We got a glimpse of Bowers Wilkins snazzy new P5 headphones and MM-1 multimedia speakers late last year. It appears that the products will be available for purchase in the next months or so.

Now into its 11th generation of waterproof digital camera, Pentax continues to make things interesting.

The Bloom Box is the latest energy miracle that sounds too good to be true: Debuting with a wide-eyed segment on 60 Minutes, it promises to be clean, cheap and backyard-friendly, the solution to our energy problems. What is it?

The heart of the box is a fuel cell. Though Bloom Energy‘s CEO K.R. Sridhar—a former NASA scientist—says it’s a new kind of fuel cell. And though it’s cleaner than any combustion engine out there, it still relies on fossil fuels and biofuels—not just hydrogen, like some other kinds of fuel cells do. Nevertheless, the folks at Bloom are doing something that could help make reduced emissions a reality for big businesses first, and then later, for homes.

To get a good grip on why we should care about this thing, let’s first look at the basics of fuel cell technology.

Fuel Cell Basics

Like a battery, a fuel cell is an electrochemical cell, basically meaning it derives electricity from chemical reactions. Sandwiched between two electrodes—an anode and a cathode—is an ion-conducting material called an electrolyte. Fuel flows in one side, over the anode. An oxidant flows into the other side, over the cathode. What happens, very basically, is that the fuel and the oxidant react, like strangers locking eyes across a room. The metaphorical sparks that fly from that encounter are actual electrons, which flow into the fuel cell’s circuit. Bingo, electricity. As with any molecular reaction, the recombination of atoms produces some waste as well—like water or carbon dioxide. So while it’s cleaner, there’s definitely a byproduct.

To be clear, a fuel cell’s not like a battery; it’s like a power plant. Once it converts fuel to energy, it sends that energy out the door. And as such, it requires some peripheral way to physically storing the fuel ingredients, and some way to capture produced electricity—such as a battery.

There are a several different kinds of fuel cells—unsurprisingly, since they were invented in the 1830s. Generally, they are categorized based on what their electrolyte is made out of, but sometimes they’re referred to by their fuel and oxidant, which varies too. You’re probably most familiar with “hydrogen fuel cells,” like for cars and small electronics. These are in fact proton exchange membrane fuel cells, which happen to use hydrogen as a fuel and oxygen as an oxidant. (The PEM fuel cell is what is specifically diagrammed above.)

Solid Oxide Fuel Cells

Bloom Energy’s Energy Servers are of the solid oxide variety of fuel cell. There’s two ways to do up an SOFC: A tubular design, which you can see above, or a planar design, which is what Bloom uses, as you can see below, since it allows them to be stacked into very neat boxes.

A solid oxide fuel cell is made out of all solid state materials—that is, every major component is made out of ceramic-like stuff. Bloom Energy claims their fuel cells are made out of “sand” baked into ceramic squares, and that’s just what an SOFC is. The exact material is a slightly secret sauce as are the black and green “inks” that coat the ceramic plates. Bloom’s got a pretty nice little Flash animation showing the basic process.

The major thing about an SOFC versus other fuel cells is that the material composition means they can run crazy hot—up to 1800ºF, says the US Department of Energy—and have to, since the ceramic materials don’t become active until they reach a certain temperature. Only at this temperature can they perform the chemical reactions with the fuel and oxidant we talked about above. The problem with the high operating temperatures is that traditionally it has lead to higher maintenance costs. You know, stuff breaks down. The goal for this technology is to have an “uptime” of 99.99%, as cited by cited by Scott Samuelsen, who’s the director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California-Irvine. Bloom’s own trial at Google cites a 98% uptime.

The types of fuel cells you hear more about—the “methanol” ones that can already power laptops—do their business at a much lower temperature. Toshiba has one that typically runs at 120º to 200ºF. Though Bloom’s is obviously not a tech that could be a laptop’s power source, the Bloom Box’s higher operating temperature is a big advantage over “legacy” fuel cell technology. Bloom Energy VP of Marketing and Products Stu Aaron told me it gives them “fuel flexibility.” They can use biogases from land waste or fossil fuels like propane—so far in demos it’s been an even split between biogases and natural gas—whereas low-temp fuel cells require hydrogen in a much purer state that has to basically be refined or extracted via chemical processes.

While some other SOFCs use the hot exhaust generated by the reaction kind of like a cogen—a means of capturing heat emitted by a power generator, so that it too can be converted to electricity—Bloom’s Energy Servers simply recycle the heat within the cell, since the temperature generated by the reaction is almost exactly the heat needed for the reaction to happen. The rated efficiency spec for their current energy server is greater than 50%, compared to around 10% to 15% for solar (though University of Delaware-led researchers did recently hit a world’s record of 42.8% for solar).

Again, to be clear, the energy generated isn’t emission-free: These servers generate a small amount of CO2 when converting natural gas or bio-gas. It is less than what would get released if the same fuel was combusted, however. Customers can pick which of the two kinds of fuel they’d like to use; the trade off is between “optimizing for cost or carbon reduction,” depending on the company’s priorities, says Aaron.

Electricity In Bloom

Right now, the only box that Bloom is selling is a 100-kilowatt-hour energy server, which you can check out there. Inside are thousands of solid oxide fuel cells—each one able to power a light bulb. The cells are arranged in stacks, which are aggregated into modules, and so on, with a common fuel input. Right now, they’re just for corporations—like Google and Coca-Cola—and run about $700,000 to $800,000 each. The goal’s to get them down to three grand, where they’d be suitable for home use. That may still sound expensive, but they pay for themselves in 3-5 years, says Aaron, with an energy cost of 8-9 cents per kW hour vs. the 13-14 cents it typically costs in California. (It saved eBay $100,000 on their power bill.)

But cost is where the real skepticism comes in. Fuel cells aren’t a voodoo technology. They work. They produce energy. What analysts, and others, are wondering is whether Bloom’s really cracked the secret to making them cheap, at least some day. The critic that CBS trotted out on 60 Minutes, Green Tech Media’s Michael Kanellos, says that while there’s a 20 percent chance we’ll have a fuel cell box in our basements in 10 years, but “it’s going to say GE.” Which is fine with me, actually, because that means another season of 30 Rock jokes.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about fuel cells, terrorist cells or Boom Blox here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.