Hasta La Gadget!

Enjoy your brief tablet vacation while it lasts. It’s a nice, brief respite from the flurry that produced 80+ tablets at CES the other week, and will continue to manifest itself in offerings from a number of manufacturers both large and small. It seems safe to assume that we can expect new tablets from companies like Apple and HP in the near future.

HP’s entry is expected to surface on February 9th, during an already-announced press conference. The company is likely to show off some of the fruits of its Palm acquisition via a number of new pieces of hardware for the “Something big, Something small, Something beyond” event. The above tablet is expected to be in the mix. It’s apparently a rendering of the Topaz device, courtesy of an Engadget “tipster.”

The tablet completely lacks buttons on its face and features a front facing camera, a micro-USB port, and three built-in speakers, according to the site.

Add Acer to the growing list of companies with new tablets in the pipeline. The Taiwanese computer manufacturer has announced plans to release both a 7-inch and a 10-inch tablet in 2011.

The new tablets are intended to gradually replace the company’s line of netbook computers, said Acer’s Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-Hsian. “That’s the direction of the market,” Lu told Computerworld. The company will still continue to produce netbooks, but will begin to phase out its range of netbook models while producing the new line of tablets.

The tablets will run the Android OS (version unspecified) on Intel’s new line of quad-core Sandy Bridge processors. With the move to Sandy Bridge, Acer is aiming to outmuscle the numerous Nvidia Tegra 2–powered smartphones and tablets announced earlier this month at CES.

Acer’s Lu declined to state price points and specific release dates for the new tablet offerings.

It’s a huge shift for Acer, a company which has sold tens of millions of netbooks over the past decade and has relied on the ultra-portable netbook as the key component of its business strategy to date. The announcement comes on the heels of a recent Gartner report on worldwide PC sales that shows Acer’s 2010 growth down 1.9 percent from 2009.

“Media tablets undoubtedly intensified the competition in the consumer market,” said Gartner analyst Mikako Kakagawa in the report. “These devices do not replace primary PCs, but they are viewed as good enough devices for these who want to have a second and third connected device for content-consumption usage. Mini-notebook shipments were hit the most by the success of media tablets.”

Also, this isn’t the first tablet we’ve seen from Acer. After sales of the company’s 11.2-inch convertible tablet-notebook combo fizzled on arrival in May 2010, Acer discontinued it after only a few short months.

Acer’s tablet offerings also appear to completely reverse the company’s position as of only a year ago, when Acer’s Taiwan president Scott Lin said the company had no plans to pursue a tablet option, and that the iPad would be unlikely to impact the netbook market.

“Apple has built [its] business out of carving its own niche,” Lin told the DigiTimes last February, “which means that while Apple could see success with devices like the iPad, other players are unlikely to be able to replicate its result simply by copying.”

Tablet sales overall have been robust, with industry analysts estimating Apple’s 2010 holiday iPad sales somewhere in the range of 5 to 7 million units, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab hitting the 1 million sales mark in early December. The market is expected to continue to grow, as many of the dozens of tablets we saw at CES make their way to shelves this year.

See Also:

• Acer Debuts New E-Reader, Android Phone
• Acer’s Google Chrome OS Devices Likely in June
• Acer Gives Sneak Peek of New Kindle-Shaped 7-Inch Tablet

A MacBook modified into a tablet: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Hyperfocal. The word sounds so…intense. Maybe it is. By taking your lens and aperture into account while focusing at just the right spot, you can milk every bit of sharpness scientifically possible out of a scene. More »

This article was written on November 08, 2006 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

I am a huge fan of the services that Google offers even though I have found myself switching to other alternatives lately. Mostly because I have found other companies, such as Netvibes for my personalized homepage, that offer better features for what I would like to do.

One thing that has always upset me is that most of Google’s services don’t work properly in Opera. It is a really great browser and many of Opera’s users would probably use Google’s services if they actually worked. The Opera team is dedicated to making their users happy and one thing that they try to do is make sure Gmail is always working, since that is probably the most popular Google service. However, it shouldn’t be up to them to fix the issues.

So here are a list of Google’s services and how well they work in Opera 9.02:

• Google AdWords – Duh! Of course it works…think profit!
• Google Classic Homepage – there is a little bit of JavaScript on the page but it works fine in Opera.
• Google Analytics – works great but it is Flash based so I didn’t expect to have any problems.
• Google Calendar – works but you are prompted with a “not compatible” message every time you try and load Google Calendar. If you press “Cancel” at that prompt it will load and function fine. Masking the browser as Mozilla or Internet Explorer prevents the popup but the calendar does not work properly. Google should remove the popup window.
  
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets – You can’t even try to use the services unless you mask Opera as Mozilla. Once I did that the Google Docs seemed to work great from what I tried but the Google Spreadsheets was virtually unusable. When Writely (the name before Google bought them and called them Google Docs) was being developed they were working on getting support for Opera and actually contacted the Opera team to discuss issues. They resolved many of them but I’m not sure if they ever got to the point of officially supporting Opera. If they didn’t I’m sure that it is no longer a concern.
• Froogle – works great but why wouldn’t it? I mean they have a large sidebar with advertisements so they can make some money!
• Gmail – works very well thanks to the Opera team. They are constantly patching problems that Google creates when changing things in Gmail. However, the Gmail Chat will only work if you mask the browser as Mozilla and after doing so you should be able to chat with people just like in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Google Notebook – for starters there is no extension available to use the Notebook inside the browser, but that isn’t really Google’s fault because Opera only supports widgets. The actual Google Notebook page, however, appears to be halfway functional at first but trying to edit a note is impossible.
• Google Page Creator – it prompts you with a message saying that the browser isn’t compatible but masking Opera as another browser quickly bypasses the check. That doesn’t do you much good because none of the links work on the site so you can’t even create a new page.
  
• Google Personalized Homepage – surprisingly works perfectly. It does seem to load a little slow compared to other browsers though.
• Google Reader – This one absolutely boggles my mind. It is loaded with AJAX and yet it works flawlessly with Opera! There isn’t even a warning saying that the browser is incompatible…it just works! How come the Google Reader team can get things done right?
• Google Video – no problems that I have noticed. Looks like you can even use the web-based uploader!

I was pleasantly surprised at how many Google services do actually work with Opera but there are several popular ones that don’t. I give a lot of credit to the Google Reader team for developing such a powerful web application that works with more than just Firefox and Internet Explorer. Maybe they will spill some of their knowledge over to the other teams.

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Related Posts:

Making Google’s Services Work with OperaYour Week In Review With Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Gmail & Google Calendar In Opera Without MaskingHelpful Tip: Get Gmail 2 in Opera 9.5Opera 9 Has Been Released

No huge surprise here, but the FCC just approved Comcast’s purchase of NBC Universal by a 4-1 vote. Details of the ruling aren’t out yet, but FCC chairman Julius Genachowski had been pushing for strong regulations forbidding Comcast from cutting itself sweetheart deals on NBC content or prioritizing its own video traffic on its pipes, so we’d assume that’s part of the agreement here. The only nay vote was from Commissioner Michael Copps, who said the deal “opens the door to the cable-ization of the open Internet.” Ouch. We’ll let you know when we find out exactly what the FCC’s actual conditions are — and keep in mind this deal won’t be wrapped until the Justice Department weighs in, which is expected to happen next week. Can we say it? Oh, we’re going to say it: stay tuned!

FCC approves Comcast’s purchase of NBC, Justice Department up next originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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