Hasta La Gadget!

As promised, Toshiba is marking June 13th with pre-order availability of its Thrive Android (3.1!) tablet, a device whose life aspiration and name happen to coincide perfectly. This 10-inch Tegra 2 portable has the usual 1280 x 800 resolution, dual cameras (5 megapixel on the back, 2 megapixel up front), a gigabyte of RAM, and a 23WHr battery, but it also brings nice expandability with full-size HDMI, USB 2.0 and SD card slots. The Easy Grip back covers can be swapped — which, yes, means you can also replace the battery — though you’ll have to splash out $20 for any non-black hues. The 8GB Thrive costs $430, followed by the 16GB unit at $480 and the 32GB option at $580. You can order yours directly from Toshiba or at Amazon, Best Buy or Office Direct, with deliveries slated for mid-July.

[Thanks, Matthew]

Toshiba Thrive pre-order now live, starts at $430 and ends up in your hands in mid-July originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jun 2011 05:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MasterImage and its parallax barrier 3D technology have been around for a while. Though nothing major — excepting the Hitachi H001 in Japan — has ever come of this company’s efforts, it’s back at Computex this year with a trio of reference display, showing off glasses-free 3D at 4.3-inch, 7-inch and 10-inch form factors. Resolution on both the 7- and 4.3-inch panels is 800 x 480 at the moment, but there’s a 1280 x 800 7-incher in the works that could be ready for production by the end of this year. The parallax barrier allowing for the autostereoscopic effect to happen adds only 1mm to the screen’s thickness, though it does halve vertical resolution — meaning an 800 x 480 screen will only show a 400 x 480 image when flipped to 3D mode. MasterImage builds the LCDs and controllers in these 3D imagers and is currently in discussions with what we’re told are “first tier” manufacturers of both smartphones and tablets. You can see the 7-inch display on video after the break — we found it able to match the 3D effect produced by displays requiring glasses, which is a good thing in relative terms, but as you see above, the two frames can and do get split up if you’re not perfectly positioned to soak up the third dimension.

Continue reading MasterImage touts 4.3-, 7- and 10-inch glasses-free 3D displays, interest from ‘first tier’ device makers

MasterImage touts 4.3-, 7- and 10-inch glasses-free 3D displays, interest from ‘first tier’ device makers originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As if showing up in two of the first four reference devices for Windows on ARM wasn’t enough of an achievement for NVIDIA’s quad-core Kal-El superchip, it decided to visit us in person here at Computex to demonstrate its splendid graphical prowess. Running Android 3.1 on a 10-inch, 1280 x 800 screen, it gave us a first-hand look at the Glow Ball demo that wowed us in video form just a couple of days ago. What we saw on the dev tablet before us was no less impressive; lighting was being rendered in real time and scattered over a multiplicity of surfaces, while the cloth simulation was, to use a terrible pun, silky smooth. NVIDIA also ran us through a sightseeing tour of the Unreal Development Kit and Lost Planet 2, noting that the PC game took only a couple of months to port over to work on the Kal-El architecture. Unfortunately, no new details were forthcoming about when Kal-El devices might be coming or what developers we should expect to see coding games and other content to exploit the platform’s evidently mighty capabilities. For now, we’ll just have to sate ourselves with the video after the break.

Continue reading NVIDIA Kal-El reference tablet hands-on (video)

NVIDIA Kal-El reference tablet hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jun 2011 04:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer’s David Lee just hijacked Intel’s netbooks and tablets Computex keynote to unveil a brand new 10-inch tablet: the Iconia M500. It’s the first in the company’s new M Series and runs MeeGo atop an Atom (Moorestown) processor. Its appearance and dimensions are strikingly similar to the company’s Android tablet, the A500, and that similarity extends to the resolution of the screen as well: 1280 x 800. The MeeGo interface is a custom Acer skin offering what was described as a “snackable UI.” The point seems to be to offer instant access to the things you care about, and the brief demo we saw featured a set of live widgets organized around an “Acer circle.” Mr. Lee, an Assistant Vice President with the company, tells us Acer’s new 10-incher will be on sale at (not by, sadly) the end of this year.

Update: We’ve just added a gallery of hands-on shots below and you’ll find video of the M500 after the break.

Continue reading Acer Iconia M500 runs MeeGo on an Atom CPU, coming at the end of this year (hands-on video!)

Acer Iconia M500 runs MeeGo on an Atom CPU, coming at the end of this year (hands-on video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s this? It looks like the MSI WindPad 100A that we discovered at CES and the WindPad 110W that we first saw at CeBit decided to make an appearance on the show floor here at Computex 2011. Only this time around they brought a new friend along to the party — namely the MSI WindPad 120W. To refresh your memory, the WindPad 100A is a 10-inch NVIDIA Tegra 2-equipped tablet running Android (Gingerbread here in Taipei, but potentially Honeycomb in the future) while the 110W uses AMD’s Brazos platform paired with Windows 7. The Windpad 120W shares the same exact 10-inch chassis as the 110W but swaps AMD’s Fusion APU for an Intel Cedar Trail-based chipset together with a tasty serving of WiDi and HSPA wireless. We still have no information about availability or pricing, but for now we invite you to check out the gallery below and hit the break for our hands-on videos.

Continue reading MSI WindPad 100A, 110W, and 120W hands-on at Computex 2011 (video)

MSI WindPad 100A, 110W, and 120W hands-on at Computex 2011 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 05:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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