Hasta La Gadget!

While the verdict is still out with regard to consumer appetites for a 3rd portable computing device, PC makers are betting the farm on consumer interest in tablets that fill the gap between small-screened smartphones and bulky (by comparison) netbooks/laptops. We’ve already seen an uptick in tablet devices on display at the big CES and CeBIT trade shows, now tablet and MID device vendors look ready to blow out Computex when it kicks off on June 1st in Taipei. According to Roy Chen, ARM’s ODM manager for worldwide mobile computing, more than 50 ARM-based tablet PCs will launch in 2010 starting in Q2 with “a lot more” landing in the third quarter — a date that just happens to line-up with the most optimistic Chrome OS launch schedule. ARM’s seeing so much interest that it had to rent additional floor space to show off the devices. Chen said that many of the tablets are slated for China although all of the world’s top 10 carriers have signed up as well. ARM was showing off two Android based tablets at the press event, including the 7-inch Compal device (pictured above) we gave a whirl at CES. Let’s just hope that tablet makers have plans for some compelling content and service hook-ups with a focus on the user experience — 50 near-identical slabs of touchscreen computing won’t generate much enthusiasm around here.

Over 50 ARM-based tablets launching this year originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s famous desire for total control over its operations seems to have extended to its manufacturing facilities as we’ve come across Cupertino’s Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report, which details audits the American company has done of its overseas suppliers and the failures identified therein. The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple’s already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit). Apple is, predictably, not jazzed about the situation, and has taken action through train-the-trainer schemes, threats of business termination with recidivist plants, and — most notably — the recovery of $2.2 million in recruitment fees that international contract workers should not have had to pay.

It should come as no shock to learn that cheaper overseas factories are cutting illegal corners, but it’s disappointing to hear Apple’s note that most of the 102 audited manufacturers said Cupertino was the only vendor to perform such rigorous compliance checks. Still, we’ll take what we can get and the very existence of this report — which can be savagely skewed to defame Apple’s efforts (as demonstrated expertly by The Daily Telegraph below) — is an encouraging sign that corporate responsibility is being taken seriously. We hope, wherever your geek loyalties and fervor may lie, that you’ll agree Apple’s leading in the right direction and that its competitors should at the very least have matching monitoring schemes. They may have to swallow some bad PR at first, but sweeping up the dirty details of where gadgets come from is juvenile and has no place in a civilized world. Hit the source link for the full report.

Apple supplier audit reveals sub-minimum wage pay and records of underage labor originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know, the vast majority of Chinese PMPs are underwhelming, and we can’t say for sure that the Windows G85HD is any different, but the video walkthrough of the user interface has us interested at the very lease. Reportedly, the all-white, touchscreen-centric device packs a Rockchip RK2806 processor, a 4.3-inch panel (800 x 480), 3.5mm headphone jack, 720p video output, 8GB or 16GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot, FM radio tuner, a Chinese-English dictionary and support for a multitude of file formats. There’s nary a word on when and where you’ll be able to find this, but if you find yourself situated in Shenzhen, feel free to scope things out at the local market and fill us in.

[Thanks, Sere83]

Continue reading Window G85HD PMP is somewhere between awesome and awkward

Window G85HD PMP is somewhere between awesome and awkward originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A Chinese company is claiming that its iPad knockoff is in fact an original design that has been copied by Apple. The P88 has been on the market in China for six months. It’s easy to recognize: It looks just like a big iPhone.

Xiaolong Wu, the president of the Shenzhen Great Loong Brother company that makes the P88, gave an interview to Spanish national newspaper El Mundo. If the iPad comes to China, he says, “We won’t have any choice but to report them,” because “it will certainly affect our sales.” The charge? Oddly, El Mundo reports the crime as “plagiarism,” although we assume it means IP or copyright infringement.

Wu says that Apple has not only copied the concept of a multitouch tablet, but also the design of the case and screen bezel. And pre-empting our obvious criticism, that the P88 is just a large-scale iPhone or iPod Touch rip-off, Wu says that “they have nothing to do with it, as they have completely different functions.”

As you can see from the picture above, Wu is being rather generous when he describes the P88 and the iPad as “completely identical”. The specs tell a different story. The 10.2-inch screen isn’t multitouch (it uses resistive touch), the P88 uses a hard-drive (250 GB), has an Ethernet port, a 1.3-MP webcam and Intel 945GSE chipset (likely to be paired with an Atom CPU, not listed) with a gig of RAM. It also runs Windows.

The kicker, though, is the battery life, low even for a keyboard-less netbook, which is what this is. Without the power cord you get just 1.5 (claimed) hours.

The whole story is ridiculous, and most likely a cheap play for publicity. Anyone confusing the two products deserves the P88. What is clear is that the Chinese company squeezed a (very bad) netbook into an oversized iPhone-style case and claimed to have some kind of ownership of this design. Good luck, Mr. Wu.

And one final thing. How much do you think this “cheap” Chinese copy might cost? It is $525. Oops.

‘Made in China’ vs Apple: ¿Quién copió a quién? [El Mundo]

Tablet PC P88 [HKJulong]

A Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology spokesperson has today delivered a statement affirming China’s willingness to allow Android devices to operate within the country without restriction so long as they adhere to the nation’s laws. This means that whatever China’s response to Google no longer obeying its censorship edicts may be, it won’t be to disallow Android — which kind of makes sense considering the growing roster of OPhones out there, all running a remixed version of the dessert-loving mobile OS. Then again, Google’s latest power play was to hold back Android handsets from entering China, so we’re not entirely sure how much the Mountain View outfit cares about the Middle Kingdom’s apparent benevolence.

China says Android can stay, misses Google’s point originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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