Hasta La Gadget!

MSI to reintroduce WindPad tablets at CES, claims Oak Trail improves performance and battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Turns out Andy Rubin might not be the only fella who’s been showing off the elusive Motorola Android tablet. Earlier this week, some lucky guy from Taiwan claims to have stumbled upon the same Honeycomb device, and was kind enough to share the above homescreen spy shot as well as some thoughts on his one-hour hands-on. We’re told that there’ll be a 7-inch version as well as a 10-inch version (the latter appears to be what Rubin had), and the one we’re looking at here has a 1280 x 800 display of unknown size, NVIDIA Tegra 2 T20 dual-core chip, gyroscope, a 5 megapixel main camera, and a 2 megapixel front camera. Memory-wise it has a 32GB embedded MMC and a microSD slot.

The poster reckons the hardware — which is “pretty light” — is all ready for launch, but Honeycomb still needs some final fine-tuning. Sadly, he hasn’t got a date, but said device will apparently be priced like the current Motorola high-end phones, and will be available in three flavors: UMTS, CDMA, and LTE (which we heard about a little while back). Well, only time will tell whether this guy really does have a good friend at Motorola, or that he’s been talking to some unicorns.

[Thanks, Samson]

Update: And just like that, the poster’s removed the offending screenshot and trimmed down his first post.

Motorola Android tablet specs and Honeycomb home screen leaked in Taiwan? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Android boss Andy Rubin showed of a prototype Motorola tablet running the forthcoming tablet-friendly version of the Android OS, version 3.0 Honeycomb at the All Things Digital “D: Dive Into Mobile” event.

The tablet runs on an NVIDIA dual-core 3D processor (unspecified by Rubin) and looks to be around seven-inches in size, or maybe a little bigger. Rubin starts off showing a new super-fast vector-based version of Google Maps which not only allows a quick two-finger swipe to enter a 3D building-view, but also loads way faster thanks to those vectors. Currently, Google Maps uses image tiles, which is why you do so much waiting on a slow connection. Vectors are way smaller in file-size and are infinitely zoomable, staying crisp all the way.

Google has warned tablet-makers off the current version of Android because it’s not designed for their larger screens, leading to tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which comes on like a giant cellphone. Android 3.0 Honeycomb will be the first tablet-ready Android OS, and it sounds like Google is taking the same approach as Apple, making “universal” apps that run on both phone sand tablets.

These apps will pack two different views. On a phone, you’ll see one screen at a time, much like you do now. On a tablet, these views will be shown together. From the video, it looks like the tablet view will be somewhere between the iPad’s one-screen view and a desktop like approach, with several windows (from the same app) on-screen together. The actual layout will be up to the app’s designer.

This looks like it will be Google’s reference design. Rubin says that his team partners with a hardware maker and a chip maker to build the reference device, whether it’s a Nexus phone or a tablet. He gave away no details about availability, but when pushed by D’s Kara Swisher on the subject of price, told her that the tablet in his hand had cost around $10,000. Snap!

Google’s Andy Rubin Shows Off Prototype Motorola Tablet [All Things D]

See Also:

• Your Froyo Tablet Probably Won't Support Android Market
• Samsung Galaxy Tab Garners Favorable Reviews
• Google Unveils Nexus S Smartphone, Gingerbread OS
• Gingerbread

Google’s Andy Rubin brought more than just a Nexus S in his bag of goodies tonight. On stage at D: Dive Into Mobile, the man has brought with him a prototype Android tablet from Motorola. It’s got video chat, an NVIDIA processor, a “dual core 3D processor,” and… oh yeah, it runs Honeycomb, not Gingerbread. Little else is known — Rubin immediately turned his attention to a new release of Google Maps — but we wouldn’t be surprised if we were looking at Stingray, a tablet rumored for a launch on Verizon shortly. Is it seven inches? Ten? We honestly don’t know — but our gut tells us on the bigger side of the spectrum, which would line up with rumblings that the Stingray would in fact be a full ten inches diagonally. Feast your eyes on our pics below!

Updated: Video after the break!

Continue reading Motorola Android tablet prototype makes a cameo at D: Dive Into Mobile running Honeycomb

Motorola Android tablet prototype makes a cameo at D: Dive Into Mobile running Honeycomb originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve literally been waiting for Tegra 2 tablets since CES in January, but that isn’t stopping NVIDIA boss Jen-Hsun Huang from extolling their virtues yet again, this time on a roadmap that points to just after next year‘s CES. In his company’s most recent quarterly results call, Huang was bullish about the disruptive potential of tablets, but insisted that they can’t simply be built like the Galaxy Tab (or the Folio 100, for that matter), which uses a smartphone OS stretched out to a larger screen. “A tablet is not a large phone,” says Huang, and he’s of course not alone in expressing frustration with Android’s current immaturity for the tablet realm, but once Google’s slate-friendly OS update drops, he promises NVIDIA will be ready to capitalize: “Our tablet and phone business is going to ramp. And it’s going to ramp hard.” We’re looking forward to all this ramping, oh yes we are.

CE-Oh no he didn’t!: NVIDIA chief calls Galaxy Tab ‘a large phone,’ can’t wait to show you some real tablets originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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