Hasta La Gadget!

You’d be forgiven for expecting that the dual-core Tegra 2 that swept all before it at CES would be the king of tablet processors for a good while, but Acer is already plotting ways to overthrow it. Admittedly, Acer is kind of cheating by jumping into x86 land and snatching some unspecified Intel Sandy Bridge silicon, but are you really going to complain about getting multi-core grunt under the hood of your well-lubricated Android machine? An official from the company has promised two to three new tablets, sized at either 7 or 10 inches diagonally, for the first half of this year — a tasty morsel of information, which he garnishes with the forecast that netbooks will eventually be phased out in favor of such touchy-feely slate devices. If you can fit a full second-gen Core CPU inside a tablet, why the heck not?

Updated: Acer’s US team has clarified for us that the Android tablets it announced in November are still set to hit in April. Obviously, these Sandy Bridge versions would be farther off, but we’ve also heard from another source that Acer would likely wait for Intel’s ULV-based Sandy Bridge processors, which aren’t due until the spring / summer timeframe. We’ll let you know if we hear more…

Acer building Sandy Bridge tablets for Android, will use them to ‘phase out’ netbooks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Often when you hear minimum spec doom and gloom, it proves to be wildly inaccurate, or only part of the picture. This time, however, it’s worth a closer look. PC Magazine‘s Sascha Segan is confidently citing the director of Enspert, a Korean consumer electronics company (which recently announced its own Android tablet), who claims that Honeycomb will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor. He’s also confident that Motorola’s tablet will be the first device to market with the new version of Android, and his other minimum specs line up with the idea of Honeycomb being initially a tablet-only release. Apparently 1280 x 720 is going to be the minimum resolution, with screen sizes “as small as” 7-inches, though it sounds like 10-inches could be the default. These specs seem to clearly leave out Galaxy Tab, along with anything else on the market or soon to arrive that doesn’t have a Tegra 2 chip. It also makes sense that the Galaxy Tab 2 is going to be using Tegra 2 — Samsung clearly won’t be deterred.

And how about phones for Honeycomb? The picture is decidedly murkier, other than the fact that we could see a temporary splintering of the platform while tablets show off their new Honeycomb digs, with enough battery to back up that dual-core proc. Of course, dual-core handsets are right around the corner, so we doubt handsets will be without Honeycomb for long — Google should know which side its bread is buttered on. There’s also the possibility that this Enspert source is only talking tablets, and phones (which are required to push way fewer pixels, and have much stricter battery requirements) will get a pass on the dual-core requirement altogether. No matter what, you should settle in for a year of entertainment as Google continues to iterate its wildly successful operating system, and manufacturers strain to keep up.

[Thanks, Jason]

Honeycomb to require dual-core processor, initially tablet-only? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh boy, we’ve not been shy about our love for NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, but the tablets that have opted to use it so far keep meeting the same miserable end: discontinuation from shop floor availability. First the Toshiba Folio 100 bit the British dust because of a bunch of quality control issues, and now Viewsonic’s G Tablet is getting its marching orders from Staples, with only a “manufacturing defect” cited as the cause. If we weren’t such charitable souls, we might suggest the defect was simply that this tablet wasn’t very good yet someone still chose to manufacture it. Let’s not be hasty, though — it’s a good idea to see what Office Depot does with its inventory before completely writing the G Tablet off.

[Thanks, Rob]

Continue reading Viewsonic G Tablet pulled from Staples stores, ‘manufacturing defect’ to blame

Viewsonic G Tablet pulled from Staples stores, ‘manufacturing defect’ to blame originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 13:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like a netbook, only not. The latest thing to drop into our “crazy rumor” inbox is the Windows 7 tablet conceptualized above. Blogeee have it on the authority of two separate sources that Samsung is planning a 10-inch slate device dubbed Gloria, which would run Windows 7 and have a slide-out keyboard. What you see above is only a mockup of how this Gloria might appear — if she ever does appear at all — though we’re told it’ll include a Samsung software overlay to make Windows 7 that little bit more touch-friendly. We’ve yet to find any other corroboration for this beyond Blogeee‘s sources, so treat it as the unconfirmed bit of salacious info that it is, but if you must feel hopeful about the future, March and April are the months mentioned for a potential release.

Samsung Gloria to be a 10-inch Windows 7 tablet with slide-out keyboard? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 06:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sharp’s evolutionary tablets are coming, people. It’s just that they’re coming to Japan and they’re not going to be terribly affordable when they do arrive. The Kin maker has just revealed a December 10 launch date for its Mobile and Home Galapagos models — a 5.5-inch slate with 1024 x 600 resolution and a 10.8-incher with 1366 x 800 resolution, respectively — pricing them at ¥39,800 ($474) and ¥54,800 ($653) for the Japanese market. As usual, direct currency translations are inadvisable, but if you must have a price comparison of some sort, the larger Galapagos model (equipped with an 8GB microSDHC storage card) costs ¥4,000 less than Apple’s 32GB WiFi-only iPad. Of course, the big differentiator in Sharp’s mind will be the e-bookstore and content ecosystem it’s working so hard to create for these Galapagos terminals — the value of which has yet to be determined.

Sharp’s Galapagos media tablets landing December 10, costing quite a few Yen originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 02:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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