Hasta La Gadget!

Whether you love or loathe Apple, you have to be happy with the company’s aggressive upgrade of the iPad. It has led to Samsung, purveyor of an Android 3.0 tablet by the name of Galaxy Tab 10.1, to look more closely at its own hardware and pricing model and, according to executive VP Lee Don-Joo, “improve the parts that are inadequate.” We don’t know what those are, specifically, however he notes that “Apple made [the iPad 2] very thin” and also goes on to say that Samsung will be rethinking its pricing strategy with the Tab 10.1. It was originally going to cost more than the 7-inch Galaxy Tab, but in light of Apple’s new product, Samsung might have to cut into its profit margins… or maybe even forgo profits altogether to make its new Tab a success.

Samsung finds parts of Galaxy Tab 10.1 ‘inadequate’ compared to iPad 2, reconsiders pricing originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 07:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hello, Moto — no wait, Samsung… or is it LG? Three of the world’s biggest smartphone makers have leapt at the opportunity to serve up Google’s brand new Honeycomb build of Android, however their selection of menu items looks to be somewhat lacking in diversity. Motorola’s Xoom matches Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in both screen size and resolution (1280 x 800), while LG’s Optimus Pad / G-Slate offers only marginally smaller measurements with an 8.9-inch display spanning 1280 x 768. More than that, all three tablets run the bone-stock Honeycomb UI and are built around NVIDIA’s 1GHz Tegra 2 system-on-chip, leaving little room for differentiation on the basis of user experience or internal performance (LG would have you believe its 3D camcorder is a big advantage for its slate, but we’re not so sure). Most choices between the three, then, will come to things like brand loyalty, ergonomics and pure, basic aesthetic appeal. To help you judge the latter of those three points, we’ve prepared an exhaustive barrage of side-by-side photos below — we expect you to view every last one of ’em… at least twice.

Motorola Xoom vs. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs. LG G-Slate — battle of the Tegra 2 Honeycomb tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There she is, the HP TouchPad. It’s the webOS slate we’ve been yearning for ever since probing (then) Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein on our first-ever Engadget Show, but sadly, it looks as if HP has yanked any and all Palm labeling from the final product. Introduced today in San Francisco as part of a newfangled webOS triumvirate, the TouchPad (previously known by Topaz) is shaped almost exactly like the iPad. It tips the scales at 1.6 pounds and measures 13.7mm thick, which is somewhat of a downer for those already put off by the heft found in Apple’s slate. As we’d heard last month, HP’s shipping this one with its own Beats audio engine, Touch-to-Share (a feature that lets users easily transfer a website, document, song, text or call from the phone to the tablet — or vice versa — simply by tapping the two devices together) and a huge reliance on the cloud. Also of note, Jon just mentioned that this is only the “first in the webOS TouchPad family,” hinting that the Opal may be just around the bend.

Other specifications include webOS 3.0, “true multitasking,” Touch-to-share, instant-on productivity, a 9.7-inch display (1024 x 768 screen resolution), a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon CPU (!), inbuilt gyroscope, accelerometer, compass and 16GB / 32GB of internal storage space. There’s also a front-facing 1.3 megapixel webcam, support for video calling, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, A-GPS (3G model only), “twice the memory of a Pre 2” and a set of stereo speakers. Rubenstein claims that this here tablet is “screaming fast,” and the software UI we’re seeing looks downright luscious. There’s a new paneled email application a Growl-like pop-up notification system, support for Skype calling, compatibility with Amazon’s Kindle e-book store, plenty of cal / email integration courtesy of HP Synergy, a slick virtual keyboard, VPN support, wireless printing as well as Google Docs, QuickOffice, Dropbox and Box.net compatibility. One of the killer features that can’t be found on a competing tablet right now is this one’s ability to talk to the Pre 3 — so long as there’s a Touchstone involved, one can have their Pre 3 and TouchPad communicate, even piping over notifications and texts from the phone onto the slate. It’s a brilliant idea, and we’re obviously amped to see just how well it’s implemented.

Over on the accessories front, there’s a case / stand (which includes a handy flip-out kickstand for desk use), a wireless keyboard (yeah, this one!) and a new Touchstone dock that enables all of the wireless communication magic between webOS devices. If you’re curious about specific models, the first out of the gate will be a WiFi only version, with 3G and 4G variants to follow suit in due time. As for the all-important pricing and availability? “Coming this summer,” with pricing to be determined “at a later date.” Bah, humbug!

Update: Video after the break, and have a look at our hands-on here!

For more on all of HP’s webOS announcements today, click here!

Continue reading HP’s 9.7-inch TouchPad: webOS 3.0 tablet with 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon, coming this summer

HP’s 9.7-inch TouchPad: webOS 3.0 tablet with 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon, coming this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 13:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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