Hasta La Gadget!

T-Mobile and LG have decided not to sit still in the shadow of Motorola and Verizon’s high-powered 4G Honeycomb tablet partnership and have just announced their intention to introduce the T-Mobile G-Slate. Few details are known at present other than those headline-grabbing 4G (or pseudo-4G) capabilities and Android 3.0 operating system. This is probably the exact same tablet that LG is hosting an event for tomorrow. Jump past the break for some video conferencing, browser, and e-reading demos in awesome, fluid, streamable video. Hey, even if you don’t care for either T-Mobile or LG, this is a pretty nice exposition of the Honeycomb interface.

Continue reading T-Mobile G-Slate announced: 4G, Android 3.0, made by LG

T-Mobile G-Slate announced: 4G, Android 3.0, made by LG originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, look who just oozed into being, Google‘s latest flavor of Android, the tablet-friendly 3.0, Honeycomb. We heard talk that 3.0 would be exclusively for tablets, as in not for phones, and that looks to be played out with the text “Entirely for Tablet” seen early in the video. Perhaps the best thing to say is that this looks more or less nothing like Android. Sure, the browser is the same, and the Gmail app will be familiar to iPad users, but trust us when we say there’s a lot of lovely UI in the video above to admire…and a lot of glowly blue lights, too. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who saw Tron:Legacy on opening night.

Update: The video is back! It’s embedded below.

Continue reading Google shows off Android 3.0, the ‘Entirely for Tablet’ Honeycomb (video)

Google shows off Android 3.0, the ‘Entirely for Tablet’ Honeycomb (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, would you look at what we found hanging around Toshiba’s CES kick-off party. Okay, so Tosh’s still unnamed tablet wasn’t running Honeycomb like the final unit will, but Toshiba’s loaded Android 2.2 on there to give us a better idea of how it will work when it’s finally ready. There’s really not much we can say that we didn’t already say before — it’s still a very nicely made tablet and we’re really digging that rubberized back. As for the screen, the viewing angles were quite wide and Toshiba showed off its Resolution +, which will enhance video or photos on the fly to make them look more HDish. If you’re interested in seeing a bit more, hit the break for a short video.

Continue reading Toshiba’s unnamed Tegra 2-powered Android tablet powers on!

Toshiba’s unnamed Tegra 2-powered Android tablet powers on! originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 02:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here they are: ASUS’s duo of Tegra 2-powered, 10.1-inch tablets with unique physical keyboards. Starting with the craziest of them, is the Eee Pad Slider (pictured on the left), which reminds us a lot of HTC’s old school Shift with its slide out QWERTY keyboard. The device is planned to run Google’s Honeycomb, sports a IPS, 1280 x 800-resolution display, and houses mini-HDMI and miniUSB ports as well as a microSD card slot. The 2.2-pound / .5-inch thick slab also has dual cameras — a 1.2 megapixel front-facing one and a 5 megapixel one with an LED flash on the back. We have to say we love the idea of always having that keyboard around, but if you don’t want to drag along a physical keyboard all the time, ASUS has something for you too. It’s the Transformer, and like the Eee Pad we saw at Computex, it’s a 10.1-inch tablet that will come with a laptop like dock with a full size keyboard and touchpad. The tablet part — like the Slider — will run Android 3.0 and packs a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, two cameras, and a 1280 x 800-resolution IPS display, however, the dock has an integrated battery that will keep the tablet running for 16 hours on a charge — the tablet on its own should last eight. We’re obviously aching in our seats here waiting to get these two in our hands so stay tuned for some crazy videos of the two in action — until then we leave you with the specs after the break.

Update: How much will it cost you to keyboard-ify your slate and how long will you have to wait? ASUS says the Transformer will run between $400 and $700 and the Slider from $500 to $800. Expect them in April and May respectively.

Continue reading ASUS Eee Pad Slider and Transformer are here for those that can’t imagine using a tablet without a physical keyboard

ASUS Eee Pad Slider and Transformer are here for those that can’t imagine using a tablet without a physical keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:33:00 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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