Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve confirmed with our own sources what was almost an established fact already: there will be a version of Samsung’s 4.3-inch Galaxy S II Android smartphone relying on a dual-core Tegra 2 chip for its processing. The second-gen Galaxy S launched at MWC this year with Samsung’s own Exynos dual-core solution at its heart, but it seems that yields of that chip haven’t been good enough to sate the expected high demand for the handset. So, in steps NVIDIA with its soon-to-be-ubiquitous Tegra 2 — which runs at the same 1GHz as Exynos and offers comparable performance — to fill in the supply gap. The decision as to which part you’ll get in your next Samsung smartphone will depend on which territory you’re in, with Americans and Brits likely to get first bite at the Exynos cherry.

[Thanks, Anshul]

Confirmed: Tegra 2-equipped Samsung Galaxy S II is coming originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Finally Motorola gives us a chance to say something positive about its pricing of the 10.1-inch, Tegra 2-powered Xoom tablet. UK electronics retailer PC World has just put up its Xoom pre-order page, which will surprise many waking Brits with an extremely reasonable £450 ($730) asking price. That’s £60 less than the direct competitor 32GB WiFi-only iPad — the Xoom only has one storage option of 32GB and the model listed here comes without 3G — and perhaps more importantly, is only £10 more than the 16GB version of Apple’s tablet. It’s common knowledge that to take on the iPad empire you’ll have to at the very least match its price, and Moto is doing even better than that in the UK. There’s only one worrying sign, we haven’t been able to place a Xoom into our shopping basket yet, as the “Pre-order today” button seems to be malfunctioning, but we’re guessing that’s a temporary glitch that will be fixed without the price shooting up skywards.

Update: T-Mobile Germany has also revealed its Xoom pricing, this time for the 3G model: €699.95. Distribution will begin at the end of April and T-Mo will have a three-month exclusive on the tablet in its native land. The pricing positions the Xoom a mere 95 Euro cents above the 32GB-equipped iPad WiFi + 3G, meaning that your choice will truly come down to preference and not economics. See T-Mobile’s full press release after the break.

Update 2: The PC World price and pre-order have been pulled. Gulp. Let’s hope they comes back unchanged.

[Thanks, John]

Continue reading Motorola prices WiFi-only Xoom at £450 in the UK (update: €700 in Germany with 3G)

Motorola prices WiFi-only Xoom at £450 in the UK (update: €700 in Germany with 3G) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 05:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Just as we lay to rest the ghost of a phantom Tegra 2 chip inside the LG Revolution, here comes the specter of another unconfirmed appearance for NVIDIA’s dual-core application processor, this time inside Samsung’s Galaxy S II. If you’ll recall, we were initially informed by Samsung’s PR crew that their new Android flagship would run on NVIDIA’s hardware, however a subsequent correction informed us that the processor inside would in fact be Samsung’s own Exynos. Now, it turns out, both might be true. AnandTech have come across some benchmark results showing a GT-i9103 with Tegra 2 listed as its grunt provider, while Pocket-lint and others have noted that Samsung’s own spec sheet for the Galaxy S II states that the dual-core Exynos “may not be applicable in some regions.” The likeliest scenario here is that Samsung hasn’t yet reached sufficient volumes with its own processor production and will rely on NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 for handsets outside its critical markets — much in the same vein as it replaced Super AMOLED with Super Clear LCD screens in Russia and some other territories. Don’t fret too much, though, performance disparities between the two aren’t likely to be overly significant.

Samsung’s Galaxy S II to have a Tegra 2 version? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Which dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 system-on-a-chip rules the roost? It’s probably too early to tell, but if you’re looking for a preliminary verdict, AnandTech has benchmarked all three of them now. Texas Instruments’ OMAP 4430, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Samsung’s Exynos 4210 went head to head in a gauntlet of browser and graphical benchmarks, and it looks like the LG Optimus 3D’s OMAP 4 came out on top, boasting minor but significant improvements practically across the board. Good news for the BlackBerry PlayBook, no? Oh, and if you’re wondering why the iPhone 4 and Atrix 4G fall behind their older brethren in the image above, remember that they both have to render images at a higher screen resolution. More graphs at our source link below.

LG Optimus 3D’s OMAP 4 benchmarked, pulls ahead of Exynos and Tegra 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alright, we’ve just laid eyes on some internal Samsung documents and can bring you the official names and specs of the successors to the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab. Firstly, the Galaxy S II will tout a 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 Super AMOLED Plus display, a 1GHz dual-core Orion / Exynos processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3.0, and 24Mbps HSPA+ connectivity. All those stats were leaked earlier this morning, along with the image above, and we’ve once again seen the 8.49mm thickness for this device, although we now believe it is the measurement at its thinnest point — it’s likely that the S II will fatten up to 9.9mm, presumably to accommodate the camera module, one of the last remaining parts of smartphone construction that require extra girth (NFC being another).

As to the Galaxy Tab II, it is indeed the 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet we’ve been hearing so much about, with the added bonus of it being a Google Experience Device. That should mean no Samsung-derived skin customizations atop the stock Android 3.0 UI — exactly what we expect to see from the Motorola Xoom. Also matching the Xoom are the resolution, at 1280 x 800, and CPU speed, at 1GHz, though we couldn’t determine whether the Tab II will be a dual- or single-core tablet. Our money’s on seeing the Exynos 4210 appear in both new Galaxy devices, but we’ll have to wait until Samsung’s presser tomorrow to find out for sure. One more note of import on specs: we saw a 16GB / 32GB / 64GB storage listing, but couldn’t be sure what product it referred to — wouldn’t it be lovely if the Galaxy S II was the first smartphone to step past the 60GB barrier?

Finally, looking toward the future, Samsung is apparently working on a 4-inch WVGA display with 3D capabilities — presumably autostereoscopic like LG’s Optimus 3D — and an intriguing “Motion UI” control scheme. The latter will allow you to pan inside Google Maps and StreetView just by the movement of your phone, as well as zoom in and out of pages by tilting the handset up and down (a gyroscope will be required for both functions). Samsung also has big plans for LTE, with a focus on pumping out whatever you receive over the 4G connection to a nearby HDTV using dual display technology. The two applications we caught sight of were personal broadcasting, where your Sammy handset would act as an extremely sophisticated internet TV receiver, and cloud-based gaming. Here’s hoping we learn more about these future ventures tomorrow.

Samsung Galaxy S II and 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab II confirmed for MWC, 4-inch 3D display, LTE-based cloud gaming coming later originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Feb 2011 11:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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