N-Trig teaches DuoSense to write on Android screens, tablet to come in the first half of 2011

This one isn’t much of a surprise — considering N-Trig told us just a few months ago that “the most useful Android slates will be pen-enabled” and that it was working on Android support — but today the Israel-based company has officially announced support for Google’s mobile operating system. What does that mean? On a technical level, it means that N-Trig’s DuoSense pen and capacitive multitouch solution, which is currently on tablets like the HP Slate and Dell Latitude XT, will work on top of Android slates. On a product end, it means that we’re going to start seeing an Android slate or two that takes advantage of pen in 2011. According to N-Trig’s VP of Marketing Gary Baum, one company is far along in developing an Android slate based on DuoSense and there are “several others that are coming along.” Baum wouldn’t give us any specifics on those companies, though he did tell us that we should see one product in the first half of the year, while the majority will be waiting for Honeycomb. We’re still crossing our fingers for Honeycomb in the first part of 2011, so we don’t want to read into that too much, but he also stressed that third-party software developers are working on applications that take advantage of pen and that some of them may be previewed at CES. We’ll be digging as much as we can into what company’s pairing pen with Android, but until then, we leave you with the full press release after the break.

Continue reading N-Trig teaches DuoSense to write on Android screens, tablet to come in the first half of 2011

N-Trig teaches DuoSense to write on Android screens, tablet to come in the first half of 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI to reintroduce WindPad tablets at CES, claims Oak Trail improves performance and battery life

You’ll remember that back at Computex MSI introduced two tablets or so-called WinPads — there was the Windows 7 / Atom slate and another one of the Android / ARM variety. Well, MSI is planning to resurrect those with some slight improvements for CES, and this time it’s gearing up to actually release them both. First up is the 10.1-inch Windows 7 Home Premium version, which will be one of the first Intel Atom Oak Trail-powered devices out there, says the company. According to MSI’s Director of North American Sales Andy Tung, Intel’s tablet solution does show both battery life and performance improvements over the current Atom chips, but it’s “not extremely significant.” Based on our discussion with Tung, we got the feeling that it’s a step in the right direction for Atom but still not as long-lasting as it needs to be to compete with ARM-based tablets. Beyond that, the tablet measures less than an inch thick and will have a 1024 x 600-resolution, multitouch display, mini-HDMI and mini-USB ports, an SD card slot, and an accelerometer. Tung wasn’t ready to reveal pricing, but he said it should be available in early 2011.

On the Android side of things, MSI’s got a dual-core Tegra 2-powered 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800-resolution slate prepped with the same selection of ports and features — although, this one is slightly thinner and also has a drop-proof design. So, what version of Android will it run? Well, that depends on Google’s timing, says Tung. If Android 3.0 or Honeycomb is available by the February / March timeframe MSI will go with that option — however, if it’s not, it will go with Gingerbread, so it can hit the market earlier in 2011. We have to say both tablets sound rather intriguing, but will they be able to go up against the hundreds of others coming at CES: The Tablet Year? We’ll know more in Vegas, that’s for sure!

MSI to reintroduce WindPad tablets at CES, claims Oak Trail improves performance and battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola Android tablet specs and Honeycomb home screen leaked in Taiwan?

Turns out Andy Rubin might not be the only fella who’s been showing off the elusive Motorola Android tablet. Earlier this week, some lucky guy from Taiwan claims to have stumbled upon the same Honeycomb device, and was kind enough to share the above homescreen spy shot as well as some thoughts on his one-hour hands-on. We’re told that there’ll be a 7-inch version as well as a 10-inch version (the latter appears to be what Rubin had), and the one we’re looking at here has a 1280 x 800 display of unknown size, NVIDIA Tegra 2 T20 dual-core chip, gyroscope, a 5 megapixel main camera, and a 2 megapixel front camera. Memory-wise it has a 32GB embedded MMC and a microSD slot.

The poster reckons the hardware — which is “pretty light” — is all ready for launch, but Honeycomb still needs some final fine-tuning. Sadly, he hasn’t got a date, but said device will apparently be priced like the current Motorola high-end phones, and will be available in three flavors: UMTS, CDMA, and LTE (which we heard about a little while back). Well, only time will tell whether this guy really does have a good friend at Motorola, or that he’s been talking to some unicorns.

[Thanks, Samson]

Update: And just like that, the poster’s removed the offending screenshot and trimmed down his first post.

Motorola Android tablet specs and Honeycomb home screen leaked in Taiwan? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s big week: Nexus S, Honeycomb tablets, Chrome OS laptops, and eBooks to boot

We gotta hand it to Google: if its goal was to own the technology news cycle for 48 hours, mission accomplished. The Mountain View-based company spent the first two days this week laying out pretty much every big announcement it possibly could: a new flagship phone coming next week (the Nexus S), a new Android build (2.3 Gingerbread), a preview of the next Android build (Honeycomb) on a never-before-seen Motorola tablet, the debut of its cloud-based laptop platform (Chrome OS) with hardware, and a giant plunge into the growing e-book market — and that isn’t everything. We’ve done our best to condense all the days’ highlights into something easier to digest, so read on for a recap on all things Google!

Continue reading Google’s big week: Nexus S, Honeycomb tablets, Chrome OS laptops, and eBooks to boot

Google’s big week: Nexus S, Honeycomb tablets, Chrome OS laptops, and eBooks to boot originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android Honeycomb coming ‘next year,’ adds tablet support

Sure, Google might have just dropped Android 2.3 Gingerbread on the Nexus S just today, but that’s old news — Andy Rubin just took the stage at D: Dive Into Mobile and announced that Honeycomb is due “next year” with support for tablets. Andy demoed the new version of the OS on a Motorola prototype tablet, and it was very different, and highly customized — although there were still grids of icons, the apps were more “desktop” in flavor, and the traditional Android buttons weren’t present. We’re waiting for more details, we’ll let you know what’s up.

Android Honeycomb coming ‘next year,’ adds tablet support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Leaked Photo: Is This the Sony Ericsson PlayStation Phone?

Engadget has photos of what it says is a prototype Sony Ericsson slide-out phone with PlayStation-PSP–style gaming controls. The phone has a multitouch trackpad (it’s hard to slide analog sticks beneath a screen) and purportedly will appear sometime next year running Android 3.0, aka Gingerbread.

Rumors of an Android 3 PlayStation Phone first emerged in August. But we’ve been down this road many times before, with devices reported to be imminent, then killed off.

According to Engadget, the phone’s screen is “in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches” — they have photos, but not a copy of the phone itself, so there’s some guesswork involved. The phone is also reported to have a 1-GHz Qualcomm processor, 512 MB of RAM and 1 GB of ROM.

That’s not much storage if the phone’s going to store games, pictures, video, books, apps or other media. Apparently the phone takes microSD cards but not memory sticks or UMD. That’s one way to solve the storage problem, albeit a cumbersome one.

Engadget also claims there will be a special Sony Marketplace offering Android apps for the device. Custom Android app stores for custom Android devices seem to be the thing to do: Barnes & Noble is getting ready to do just that for its new Nook Color.

Kotaku reported earlier this week that Sony executives were showing off a slide-out widescreen gaming device that the company was calling the PSP2. The Wall Street Journal reported this summer that Sony was working on adding 3G networking to its gaming devices, and on handheld devices offering wireless communication, gaming and e-reading.

NowGamer reports that Sony’s European division stated that the leaked photos are fakes, but then changed its official response to “no comment.” NowGamer points to details suggesting that the photos are fake, including “a large amount of dirt collecting around the screen, as well as mention of ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons on the interface.”

Assuming all of these projects are active, they could be complementary devices, offering slightly different features and price points, or it could be a single convergent device offering everything. I guess we’ll find out sometime in 2011.

See Also:


The PlayStation Phone

It’s hard to believe that what we’re looking at is real — but we assure you, the picture above is in fact the PlayStation Phone you’ve long been waiting for. As we reported back in August, the device you see is headed into the market soon, likely boasting Android 3.0 (aka Gingerbread), along with a custom Sony Marketplace which will allow you to purchase and download games designed for the new platform. The device snapped up top (and in our gallery below) is sporting a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 (a chip similar to the one found in the G2, but 200MHz faster), 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is in the range of 3.7 to 4.1 inches. Looking almost identical to the mockup we hit you with this summer, the handset does indeed have a long touchpad in the center which is apparently multitouch, and you can see in the photos that it’s still bearing those familiar PlayStation shoulder buttons. For Sony buffs, you’ll be interested to know that there’s no Memory Stick slot here, but there is support for microSD cards.

The particular model in these shots is still in prototyping mode. As such, the unit doesn’t have a custom skin (not even SE’s Timescape design seen on the Xperia devices), and is said to be rather buggy. We’re digging into more facts as we speak, but it’s likely that much of what we reported earlier is still accurate, and though the device could still be headed for a 2010 release, 2011 is looking much more realistic. Still, there’s a lot of time between now and the holidays… so keep your fingers crossed!


The PlayStation Phone originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google catches giant Gingerbread man, mounts on front lawn (video)

Cupcake, donut, eclair, froyo. That’s not just a list of Android iterations, it’s also an inventory of all the giant decorations (along with a large green robot) that cover the GooglePlex lawn. And today marks the introduction of a large gingerbread man. Historically, such tasty statues have been in honor of its related milestone’s completion, so we’re wagering that Android 3.0 (or is it 2.3?) will be officially unveiled in the very short future. Run, run, as fast as you can to the video after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Google catches giant Gingerbread man, mounts on front lawn (video)

Google catches giant Gingerbread man, mounts on front lawn (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android 3.0 due to start hitting tablets in December ahead of January launch

Android 3.0 due to start hitting tablets in December, launch in JanuaryA holiday tradition? Making things out of gingerbread, and Google is doing its part to keep that practice alive according to a report stating Android 3.0 is set to hit some tablets this December. Those will just be early samples destined only to light up the eyes of engineers who’ve been very, very good this year, but the rest of us naughty boys and girls will get to see those slates when they launch to the public in January. We hear there’s a little electronics show happening that time of year, and supposedly HTC, Samsung, and Motorola will be showing their Gingerbread tablets there, amongst others (but not Lenovo, apparently). We can’t wait to get a taste.

Update: Thanks to James for pointing out that it’s still unclear whether 3.0 is going to be Gingerbread or, indeed, the truly tablet-minded Honeycomb release we’re really waiting for. This report states specifically that 3.0 is hitting tablets in December, with 4.0 later in 2011. Is that Gingerbread and Honeycomb, or Honeycomb and Ice Cream? Also, is anyone else hungry?

Android 3.0 due to start hitting tablets in December ahead of January launch originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 12:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Advent Vega tablet won’t come with Android Market, might get it as part of Gingerbread update (video)

Lack of Google’s official app store has been a thorn in the side of would-be Android tablet makers for a good long while, and it looks like the Tegra 2-powered Advent Vega will be no exception when it hits the high street tomorrow. Electricpig took the £249 device for a spin, chatting up Advent product manager Adam Lockyer the whole time, and discovered that while the 10-inch tablet will come with the 5,000-app-strong Archos AppsLib store, it won’t have Android Market at launch. “The plan is that when you get to January time, there’s a new release of Android and you’ll be able to get the marketplace on this product,” Lockyer said, suggesting that maybe — just maybe — the availability of Android Market itself might be one of the fragmentation issues Google intends to fix in Gingerbread. Wouldn’t that be nice? Video after the break.

[Thanks, Chak I.]

Continue reading Advent Vega tablet won’t come with Android Market, might get it as part of Gingerbread update (video)

Advent Vega tablet won’t come with Android Market, might get it as part of Gingerbread update (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Oct 2010 13:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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