Hasta La Gadget!

Pandigital isn’t beating around the bush with the two tablets it’s showing here at CES — they run Android 2.1, they’re not getting Froyo, and they’re most certainly not getting Honeycomb. These slates come in 7 and 9-inch varieties, and the 9-inch Novel comes in both AT&T 3G and WiFi-only models. To rub salt in the wound, these guys don’t have any Android Market support, and they won’t be getting it any time soon (or ever, for that matter). On the bright side though, you get B&N’s Nook app pre-installed on the Novel (get it?). Unfortunately, we’re most upset that Pandigital hasn’t seemed to change any of the things we disliked so much with the first version — the screens aren’t glamorous and the performance is still painfully sluggish. If you’re looking for a cheap Android tablet, we’d probably suggest waiting for something with a little bit lot more flare.

Pandigital 7- and 9-inch Android tablets hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Say what you want about its beta-fied OS, or the need to tether it to access its more powerful functions, the Playbook is The Hotness: beautifully built, quick, and just dead sexy. Check out our killer custom flyby video. More »

The white curtains just lifted here at the Samsung booth at CES to unveil the Samsung 4G LTE Smartphone. This Verizon LTE-ready beast touts a Super AMOLED Plus display, runs Android 2.2 with TouchWiz and features a front-facing cam. On the rear it’s got an 8 megapixel auto-focus shooter and mini HDMI on the hip. We’re busy sorting out details and grabbing pics more. Stay tuned!

Update: We’ve added the gallery with hands-on shots for your viewing pleasure!

Update 2: Samsung nor Verizon were willing to talk labels, but it’s a pretty safe bet this phone is the SCH-i520 we peeked earlier in the week.

Samsung 4G LTE smartphone for Verizon (SCH-i520) first hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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10, 9, 8, 7… quick, get out your phone at tweet “Happy New Year” to all your followers before the ball drops! If you found yourself tweeting your New Year’s wishes instead of kissing your boyfriend, hugging your friends, or calling your mom as we entered 2011, you’re not alone. According to the Twitter Blog, just four seconds after midnight in Japan on January 1, an all-time record number of Tweets sent per second (TPS) was set as 6,939 TPS were sent.

The East coast time zone alone reached its peak of 3,000 TPS, which is almost more than the entire world sent during the peak moment of the World Cup. Twitter made a video which visualizes New Year’s Eve tweet data across the world. The circles get larger as more tweets are sent at that moment. It’s a neat because you can actually see the different amounts of tweets in each time zone as each one hits midnight. 

Check out the video after the jump!

Though it’s just being called the “Samsung 4G LTE Smartphone” at this point, rest assured: the Android-powered device is very much real and very much destined for Verizon’s airwaves. Though the inclusion of LTE is obviously a high point, the phone’s claim to fame might be that it’ll be among the first devices in the world to feature one of Sammy’s newfangled Super AMOLED Plus displays (4.3 inches, in this case) that offers even better contrast and outdoor viewability than the original Super AMOLED did. You’ve got TouchWiz-skinned Android 2.2, an 8 megapixel camera with flash paired to a 1.3 megapixel front-facing unit for video calling, and a 1GHz processor that seems to mirror what’s already being offered on most of the Galaxy S series today — no dual-core madness here.

We had a few fleeting moments to touch (but not photograph) the phone recently, and the screen is definitely a sight to behold — we’re not sure how Samsung managed to make a more contrasty display than Super AMOLED, but it did. We’ll admit, we didn’t love the tapered shape — we thought it looked a little strange sitting on a table, though some might like it and it’s certainly not a big deal either way. We also weren’t huge fans of the big physical buttons below the display, a surprising counterpoint to the recent trend toward capacitive buttons on high-end Android devices. It’s a heavy phone, though probably not heavy enough to bother folks who are in the market for a 4.3-inch display anyway — and hey, we won’t know for sure how it stacks up until we pit it head-to-head in a brutal deathmatch with Verizon’s other version-one LTE phones like the Droid Bionic. Follow the break for the full press release.

Continue reading Samsung sends Verizon an unnamed Android smartphone with LTE, Super AMOLED Plus display

Samsung sends Verizon an unnamed Android smartphone with LTE, Super AMOLED Plus display originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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