When we stumbled upon an $800 price for the Motorola Xoom yesterday, our instinctive reaction was to leap forward to the next obvious question: when? Well, that call has now been answered by an internal Best Buy document that’s just dropped into our inbox, which explicitly pinpoints February 17th as the launch date for Moto’s highly touted, Honeycomb-equipped tablet. Stock is expected to land at the big box retailer on February 16th, with the big party going down the day after. There’s a note confirming that the Xoom will come with its promised 32GB of onboard storage, but anyone looking for confirmation or denial of the earlier pricing leak will be left disappointed. Guess we’ll all have to set our calendar alerts for about a month from now and exercise patience in the mean time.
[Thanks, dajarbot]
Update: Our tipster has also uncovered a price: $699.99. That’s a hundred green leaves south of Verizon’s supposed pricing and should soothe a few agitated souls.
Wow, insider tipsters are getting efficient! Verizon appears to have only just added Minimum Advertised Pricing for the Motorola Xoom to its internal systems, but already it’s been leaked out by more than one source. Android Central has the damning evidence, which lists an $800 levy for any prospective owners of the flagship Android Honeycomb device. It’s accompanied by a listing of the HTC Thunderbolt at $250, with the logical conclusion being that the Moto tablet will come unsullied by subsidies while the HTC LTE handset will probably cost that much on a two-year deal. That makes plenty of sense to us — the typical smartphone price is $200 and Verizon can point to the 4G goodness the Thunderbolt brings as justifying its $50 premium, whereas the Xoom’s cost seems to be in line with the Galaxy Tab’s pricing. Now, how about some launch dates, leaksters?
Maybe you thought the Motorola Xoom would be devoid of — or dare we say, spared from — a coat of Motoblur. Being the inaugural Honeycomb device, you’d expect Google to keep the tablet as vanilla as possible (e.g. G1, Nexus One, Nexus S). Indeed, Android’s director of engineering Dave Burke tells CNET UK that Xoom is a flagship product for Mountain View, but in the same reported meeting, Motorola’s Jonathan Nattrass said Motoblur will be coming to the tablet as a software update. In what form? We don’t know, but if we had to guess, it’s gonna be much more isolated that previous devices — special widgets, perhaps, and services for backup or tracking a lost slate. Let’s play wait-and-see on this one, at least until the top bar gets a cartoonish blue aesthetic.
Update: Motorola reached out to Phandroid to say that, yes, this is a “Google Experience Device” and as such, you should expect the platform and UI to be Google’s. Doesn’t exactly explain where Nattrass got his talking points, but for now let’s call it a strong rebuttal and move on. Certainly we’ll have a clearer picture once we can actually try Xoom / Honeycomb out for ourselves.
Looks like 2011 is shaping up to be the year of Android for electronics manufacturer HTC.
In a conference call Friday morning, the company reported a massive 93 percent increase in 2010 revenue over 2009, as first reported by PC World. 2010 sales weighed in at a respectable 24.67 million units, up 111 percent from 2009.
“The year 2010 was a breakthrough year,” CEO Peter Chou said in an earnings call Friday. “Going from a company of no scale to one of scale, that process was faster than I expected. Last year was the year that smartphones exploded.”
Android is a major force behind the company’s acceleration.
HTC expects to see $3.2 billion in revenues and 8.5 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2011. Most of that will be led by the company’s big push into smartphones running Google’s mobile operating system.
HTC plans to release a host of 4G Android phones in 2011, including the previously announced Thunderbolt, the Inspire and the Evo Shift.
Android, which became commercially available only in 2008, has grown quickly to become the fastest-growing smartphone operating system, with sales outpacing those of Apple’s iPhone by the middle of 2010. HTC was one of the first companies to embrace Android, a bet that paid off handsomely in 2009 — and appears poised to continue doing so two years later. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, much of the buzz was around Android-based tablets and high-end smartphones from manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG.
We may see even more Android-running HTC handsets released than those already announced, if leaked photos from PocketNow are to be believed. Multiple pictures of unlabeled HTC phones are currently circulating the blogopshere, including one that looks similar to the company’s Desire HD model. Other pictures include a large-screen HTC Oboe lookalike, a phone currently released in China.
Reports of an HTC tablet release circulated Thursday, rumored to launch some time in March. Two more HTC tablets are rumored to follow within the first half of 2011. The first tablet, reportedly named the “Flyer” by DigiTimes, is said to launch running Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread), but will be able to upgrade to the much anticipated version 3.0, or Honeycomb.
Currently the fourth biggest smartphone maker in the world, HTC has focused on manufacturing smartphones in particular — compared to that of relatively inexpensive feature phones — since being founded in 1997. Although HTC’s highly anticipated Google-branded Nexus One left a bad taste in the mouths of many customers, the company has continued to perform well. Total 2010 revenues amounted to $9.57 billion.
Photo: HTC’s forthcoming Thunderbolt smartphone. Jon Snyder/Wired.com
HTC is this week’s latest contender, as the company appears poised to launch three new tablets in the first half of 2011. We may see the first of these as soon as March, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dubbed the “Flyer,” HTC’s first tablet release is said to look like a larger version of the company’s Desire smartphone (above).
The Flyer will ship with the most-current Android version, 2.3 (Gingerbread), rather than the heavily-hyped 3.0 Honeycomb version, the upcoming Android OS designed specifically for tablet devices. DigiTimes says customers will be able to upgrade to Honeycomb once the OS is widely available. Google has not yet announced Honeycomb’s exact release date.
A March release for HTC would put the company in line with the slew of spring tablet releases to come, including the Motorola Xoom (which will launch with Honeycomb) and the recently leaked HP webOS tablet offering.
HTC announced three new 4G-enabled Android smartphones at CES in January: the Thunderbolt, the Evo Shift and the Inspire. Much like the Flyer tablet, all three phones operate on Android version 2.2 (Froyo).
For smartphone hardware manufacturers, keeping pace with Google’s frequent upgrade schedule is difficult. In the first two years of Android’s release, the OS was updated 4 times. And with carrier contracts usually requiring two years between free phone upgrades, that’s a lot of potential OS updates to be missed (especially if the phone isn’t able to update its OS when the new version is released).
HTC declined our requests for comment.
Photo of the HTC Desire by Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com
If 3D and tablets are the two unstoppable forces of modern consumer electronics, doesn’t it make sense to meld them into one, fearsome, trendsetting device? LG’s T-Mobile-bound G-Slate might be doing exactly that, we’re hearing, as a pair of different sites are reporting it’ll come with a 3D-capable display. The guys at GPS And Co have apparently heard directly from LG’s French arm, who told them the G-Slate would have a glasses-free 3D display and 3D camera, though the validity of that information is diluted somewhat by TmoNews‘ source finding 3D glasses listed as future accessories for this rather mysterious tablet. Yes, it’s contradictory information, but then Pocket-lint has also heard directly from LG and received a promise of “an actual working 3D device,” which should be expected shortly. That could be the 4.3-inch autostereoscopic panel we scoped out at CES or it could be another hint that the G-Slate’s been camera-shy for a very particularly, three-dimensional reason.
Asus has confirmed that three of its upcoming tablets will run the next version of the Google mobile operating system, Android 3.0. aka Honeycomb.
The Eee Pad tablet will run Honeycomb and start shipping this summer, Asus spokesman Gary Key told Wired in an e-mail message.
That contradicts a report in The Inquirer, in which Asus marketing specialist John Swatton said Asus Android tablets would not launch until the fall.
Information around hardware requirements and technical specifications for running Honeycomb has been murky at best. Korean consumer-electronics firm Enspert originally speculated that Honeycomb would require a dual-core processor in order to run. But according to a Twitter status update sent by Android Open Source lead Dan Morrill, there’s no “hard minimum processor requirement” to run version 3.0.
A leaked preview of upcoming Android 3.0 release (aka Honeycomb) dropped last week on the Android developers’ YouTube channel. We certainly noticed, and of course the scrutiny of the drastically different UI began shortly thereafter.
Google’s official preview video (above) provides us with the most in-depth look we’ve seen of the OS since Google’s VP of engineering Andy Rubin gave us a sneak peek of it in December. It’s too preliminary to make any absolute judgments, but from what little we’ve gleaned from the video, there are a number of pretty big changes. It’s a complete interface makeover.
After Apple’s runaway success with its 2010 debut of the iPad, expectations on tablet offerings from competing companies in 2011 have been high. And at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there was certainly no dearth of new tablet debuts. Estimates of the number of new tablets showcased at CES ranged in the 50s to the 80s. From what we understand, the Honeycomb operating system has been designed to take advantage of the tablet shape in particular.
What hasn’t been made clear yet, however, is whether or not Honeycomb will be a tablet-exclusive version, or whether it will also be available for phones.
Android UI director Matias Duarte speaks to the issue, however effusively, in an interview with Engadget: “What you see in Honeycomb is absolutely the direction for Android,” Duarte says when directly asked about portability.
From what we can see in the new video, Duarte’s influence on the new UI is palpable. He came to Google in May from HP-owned Palm, where he developed the webOS interface for Palm devices, seen below:
Duarte’s scrollable page widgets from the webOS interface above are reminiscent of those seen on Honeycomb in the recent video from Google:
The Rubin demo screen shot and the screen above grab from Google’s leaked video share the same minimalist aesthetic, even more so than “Froyo” version 2.2 seen on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab (an OS which Duarte had no part in creating).
Surface area is obviously greater when moving from a 4-inch smartphone screen to that of a 10-inch tablet, and the scrollable Gmail, calendar and browser bookmark widgets sitting side-by-side simultaneously make good use of the increase in screen size.
Another stark difference: the complete lack of physical buttons on the device itself. “With Honeycomb,” says Duarte in the Engadget interview, “you don’t need to have physical buttons.” Note their complete absence in the wide shot of the Xoom:
Instead, physical navigational buttons have been replaced with on-screen versions of themselves, as seen in the arrows in the Xoom’s bottom left-hand corner, while the full app menu is still accessible in the upper right-hand corner:
But manufacturers aren’t beholden to buttonless devices. “Our partners can take that and do what they want with it,” Duarte says in the Engadget interview. “If somebody feels that, for their application, physical buttons are absolutely the right thing to do? Great. They can do that.”
Other app demos in the video seemed relatively straightforward, with heavier emphasis on their tablet application. Google Books leverages the tablet’s shape for page-turning and reading purposes, much like opening an iBook on the iPad. Gmail interactivity remains similar to its “Gingerbread” application — scrollable inbox, no-frills white-and-gray color scheme — but is now separated into two columns for navigability’s sake.
Remember those eccentric ASUS Android tablets at CES? Yeah, it’s all a bit of a blur for us as well, but turns out both the Eee Pad Transformer and Slider prototypes just made it to the BETT (British Educational Training and Technology) Show in London this morning, so we decided to wander along to get our hands dirty again. Sadly, the Transformer had a bit of a rough ride from Vegas and remained dormant, but we were still able to admire its sturdy keyboard dock with great key press travel. And in case you’ve forgotten, said dock is also an external battery that doubles the juice up to 16 hours. UK shoppers will see this slate popping up in the stores around May or June for £379 ($597), and its docking kit for £100 ($158).
We were more fortunate with the functioning Slider prototype, even though it had the same sliding issue we saw at CES. But fear not, as we were told that the engineers are already reworking the mechanism, and here’s hoping that they’ll do something about the flexing keyboard as well. As for software, we didn’t have time to test everything, but we were surprised by the general snappiness of the current Froyo test build. And speaking of which, we’re not too sure what the plan is with ASUS’ Android roadmap — even though we were told at CES that Honeycomb will be on these tablets at launch, the folks we met today said that they’ll be shipped with Gingerbread instead; and even then, there’s no time frame for the 3.0 upgrade just yet. Anyhow, this is less of a concern for the Slider given its July or August launch, but it’ll cost you a hefty £429 ($676).
Additionally, both tablets will see their 3G variants in the UK a quarter after their respective launches, but regardless, it’s never too soon to start a petition for your carrier to spread the ASUS tablet fever.
Maybe, just maybe, you’ve noticed that Engadget relocated this past week to the City of Sin for CES 2011. Oh yes, we set up camp in a double-wide trailer, liveblogged our hearts out, combed the show floor, and worked our rear ends off to bring you more gadget news than you ever thought possible. It’s true, we’ve written over 720 posts (40 or so about tablets alone!), shot more than 180 videos, and brought you over 350 photo galleries in the last seven days. That’s a ton of technology news and products, but naturally, only certain ones have been able to rise above the rest and stick out in our scary collective hive-mind. With that said, we’ve complied our annual best of list for you, so hit the break and feast your eyes on what are bound to be some of the best products of the new year.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
