Hasta La Gadget!

The Acer C7 Chromebook is now a bit more powerful. With the RAM doubled to 4GB, the latest flavor of Acer’s inexpensive but still tasty Chromebook should be able to handle a few more simultaneous tasks. Plus, the new model ships with a 6 cell battery able to last 6 hours rather than the 4 cell found in the original. Too bad Acer couldn’t manage these upgrades without inflating the price from a cute $199 to a slightly intimidating $279.

Acer previously noted that the C7 was a huge hit with the education crowd, once accounting for 5-10% of all of its US shipments.

The C7 is now more expensive than the Samsung Chromebook. For $249 the Samsung Chromebook is less expensive, thinner, and sports a longer battery life. However, the Acer still tops the Samsung in some areas.

The Samsung Chromebook only contains a 16GB hard drive where the Acer rocks a 320GB HDD. Plus, with an Intel Celeron 847, now backed with 4GB of RAM, the system is a touch more powerful than the Sammy’s ARM SoC — an important fact for those looking to put Linux on the little notebook.

The new C710-2055 is priced at $279 and initially headed only to Acer’s commercial market. At that price it’s sadly out of the impulse buy range, but still a good deal for a platform quickly gaining traction. The original C7 was a huge hit with the education crowd; a repeat performance is likely in the cards.

Despite being such a (relatively) new category of device tablets are racing up on their smaller cellular cousins, with rapidly growing user adoption and smartphone-surpassing web page traffic generation. Little wonder then that tablet apps are also generating increasing amounts of revenue — predicted to pass smartphone app revenue within five years.

Making a forecast in a new report, analyst ABI Research predicts tablets will account for more than a third (35%) of total app revenues this year, or some $8.8 billion out of a total pool of $25 billion. That’s still a way behind smartphones of course — projected to generate $16.4 billion this year, or just under double the amount generated by tablet apps — but the revenue share is growing and ABI reckons tablets will surpass smartphones in app revenue generation by 2018.

The reasons for tablets to become ultimate app revenue winners are down to their larger screen, which offers plenty of scope for developers to build attractive wares, and also lower cost slates helping to ramp up tablet ownership and increase app downloads, reckons ABI.

“The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities,” says senior analyst Aapo Markkanen in a statement. ”One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet at its earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.”

The analyst adds that the tablet category is also well placed to open up the computing market by addressing underserved demographic groups such as the elderly and children. “The really big deal about tablets is how they will help to finally bring the computing age to, for instance, children and the elderly,” says Markkanen. ”The business opportunity associated with them is undeniable, but at the same they can also bring about very significant social benefits.”

On the OS front, ABI predicts that the lion’s share of the app wealth this year will continue to be generated within Apple’s iOS ecosystem: it expects 65% of the combined $25 billion to come from iOS vs just over a quarter (27%) from Google’s Android ecosystem. While “the other mobile platforms” will generate the remaining 8% between them (ABI does not break this out).

Despite dominating app revenue, ABI recently predicted that Apple’s iOS will only account for 33% of the smartphone app downloads this year, vs. 58% being Android apps. However Apple’s tablet lead with its iPad devices continues to be a big one, with ABI expecting 75% of the tablet apps downloaded this year to be iPad apps, vs. just 17% being Android apps. Amazon (with its Kindle Fire tablet) is projected to get around 4% app share, while Windows tablets are relegated to around 2%.

As if smartphone maker HTC doesn’t have enough to worry about in an Android space so saturated with Samsung-branded hardware it’s driving HTC’s sales back to 2010 levels. But now the Taiwanese company is facing the prospect of having to fork out for damages if haptics company Immersion gets its way. Immersion, which counts Samsung among the licensees for its “touch feedback technology”, had been content to stay a U.S. lawsuit against HTC — in order to wait for the completion of an International Trade Commission investigation into whether HTC has been infringing some of its patents. But, given HTC’s recent performance in the mobile space, Immersion has decided this strategy is no longer appropriate and today said it plans to ask for the stay of its lawsuit to be lifted — so that it “may prosecute its claim against HTC for damages immediately”.

The ITC action was originally scheduled for “final determination” on October 28, 2013 — after which Immersion may have been able to secure an exclusion order against HTC preventing infringing devices being imported into the United States. But with HTC’s fortunes in the doldrums, Immersion reckons it can get a better outcome via the U.S. District Court route, where it can win damages, attorneys’ fees, and potentially injunctive relief.

“Given HTC’s recent performance in the mobile market, we believe an exclusion order preventing HTC from importing infringing devices would no longer be an impactful win, and we are turning our energies to seeking damages for past and ongoing shipments of infringing devices,” noted Immersion CEO Victor Viegas in a statement.

Immersion filed its original complaint against HTC (and also Motorola) with the ITC on February 7, 2012, alleging infringement of six U.S. patents relating to the use of haptics technology — namely: 6,429,846 (“the ’846 patent”); 7,592,999 (“the ’999 patent”); 7,969,288 (“the ’288 patent”); 7,982,720 (“the ’720 patent”); 8,031,181 (“the ’181 patent”); and 8,059,105 (“the ’105 patent”).

A multi-year license for Immersion’s haptics technology signed by Samsung last week included a patent license covering “Samsung’s prior and future use of simple forms of haptic effects, sometimes referred to as Basic Haptics, in its smartphones and other mobile devices”, according to the company.

Immersion, which was founded back in 1993, says it has more than 1,300 issued or pending patents in the U.S. and other countries.

Austin-based re:3D just started a Kickstarter campaign for the Gigabot, a large-format 3D printer designed to build things on a 24x24x24 inch built envelope, allowing you to make much larger objects than you can with similar printers like the Makerbot. You can get the bot kit for $2,500 or a pre-assembled unit for $4,000.

The company was looking for a $40,000 pledge and has already surpassed $60,000, so there’s a good chance this thing will ship in time for when you need to build a 13,824 cubic-inch Christmas present.

The team launched the project at SXSW, and the company is founded by Samantha Lynne Snabes and Matthew Fiedler and a number of others with experience in manufacturing and design. They write:

It prints primarily in PLA right now because it does not have a heated build plate, but there are plans to offer that option in the future. While PLA isn’t ideal for some industrial situations, the plant-based plastic is still very usable and workable.

You can check out the project here or just imagine what it would be like to print out your own head, to scale, in corn-based resin.

Spoiler: The video above shows SpaceX’s 100-foot-tall Grasshopper rocket blasting off, hovering in the air for about 30 seconds and then descending back to terra firma. And it’s set to Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. That’s it. There’s no drama, fireworks or anything shocking, but it’s still absurdly important and totally worth watching.

This launch marks the reusable rocket’s most significant flight yet. It reached a record 262.8 feet before lowering itself back down on its own launch pad. Elon Musk called it the Johnny Cash hover slam.

Designed to launch and land vertically on its metal legs, the Grasshopper is part of SpaceX’s long-term roadmap. The company has yet to reveal when it intends to use the model — or its successors — for space flight. The rocket has been in testing since September 2012, with each test launch reaching a bit closer to the stars above.

“The US is a country of explorers,” stated Musk at his SXSWi keynote adding “People need to believe that [space travel] is not going to bankrupt them.”

For several years Musk has championed the idea that humans must be a multi-planet species and a reusable rocket, like the Grasshopper here, is a big part of his grand vision.