Hasta La Gadget!

We thought Haier’s HaiPad looked oddly familiar, and a quick trip down memory lane suggests we aren’t (completely) bonkers: it’s a rebranded Quanta we spied at CES. The 7-inch slate now sports a custom Froyo skin from DianXin, an 800MHz processor, 802.11 b/g WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, and a WCDMA radio. We’re told that last antenna provides the slate with phone and texting capabilities just like some versions of another 7-incher we know. Also present are “dual-cameras” (which we assume means one on each plane), availability in five “stylish” hues, and a vague August ship date. With less than a month to scrounge up 3,299 RMB (about $500) and train to fight off thousands of felines, you had better get cracking.

[Thanks, Marco]

Haier’s HaiPad ships in August, to become the preferred tablet of lolcats everywhere originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint updates Samsung Galaxy Tab to Gingerbread, gets over post-holiday blues originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rooting is the dark side of the Android platform. It opens your phone up to a world of unsanctioned opportunities and typically has carriers swatting you back with illegal network usage fees. So you’ll understand how bizarre it is that Cincinnati Bell is offering Milestone XT720 users software and an instructional video how-to that boots Eclair out, for its Froyo successor. Making use of the widely-popular SuperOneClick app, intrepid owners will be walked through the usual root, back-up and ROM-flashing steps. But the regional carrier’s no dummy as the procedure ends with users unrooting their devices, freeing the network from unwanted congestion and reducing the risk of a bricked phone. Customers of this Ohio-based provider should check the source for a forbidden peek into Android’s underbelly.

Cincinnati Bell brings Froyo to Milestone XT720, holds your hand through rooting process originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 21:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last time we saw the Xtreamer Prodigy, it was shaping up to be quite the slick little media streamer with a Realtek 1185 chipset running at 500MHz, a plethora of supported codecs, and a fancy flash-based GUI with Android underpinnings. In the months since, the Prodigy hit the gym and now packs Realtek’s 1186 silicon clocked at 750MHz and HDMI 1.4 for pumping out video in three dee. There’s also Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11n WiFi, and support for up to a 3TB HDD in its 3.5-inch bay, so you can source your videos from home or abroad with the greatest of ease. Currently up for pre-order, this digital media distributing dandy will cost €149 (that’s $213 here in the States), but won’t ship until September.

Xtreamer’s Prodigy media streamer gets upgraded internals, shoots 3D video to your screen for €149 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Make sure your parents don’t mistake this for an iPad at Christmas

You know how the only non-iPod MP3 players that people buy are those $10 pieces of junk in dime stores, or by the checkout in cheap supermarkets? I have a feeling that the tablet market is going the same way.

With all the major players struggling to match the iPad’s aggressively low price, it may be left to junk like the $100 Arnova 7, a seven-inch tablet packed with all the latest tech — if we were living in 2005.

The tablet runs Android 2.2 Froyo, has a whopping 4GB storage, a mystery-meat processor, and an 800×480 pixel screen. The screen is — laughably — resistive, just like the ones we used to enjoy on our tablet PCs back in the day. Data can be gotten onto the machine via USB or microSD card, and you can sit back and relax as you watch movies at up to 720p (not bad, if it works without skipping).

And that’s it. What did you expect for $100? You want to know the battery life? Well, it seems that Arnova is too embarrassed about this to tell us. The product specs give both music and video playback time as “up to hours.”

It would be easy to laugh this off as a toy that nobody will ever buy, but the truth is infinitely sadder. Imagine poor little Johnny waking up excited on Christmas morning, tearing the wrapping paper off what he thinks is an iPad, and finding that his clueless parents have bought him this piece of tat instead.

Arnova 7 [Arnovatech via CrunchGear]

See Also:

• New Archos Tablet Is a Kid's Toy, Not Suitable for Adults …
• Kobo Comes to Next3 Android Craplet, Will Probably Sell a Ton …