Hasta La Gadget!

You know a job title is tenuous when even the guys who announce it have to put it in quotation marks — Intel’s just signed up the Black Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am as a “director of creative innovation.” The hip hop star responsible for flooding CES 2010 and every BlackBerry event since with an irritatingly cheery tune (which we’re sure we don’t have to name) is about to commence a long-term, “hands-on” collaboration with Intel on its development of “new technologies, music and tech advocacy.” Basically, it sounds like he’ll act as an ambassador for the chip company, who’ll in turn pretend to listen to his zany ideas about mega-giga-bass. Then again, Lady Gaga’s similar partnership with Polaroid produced these glasses, so what the hell do we know?

Continue reading Intel hires Will-i-am as ‘director of creative innovation,’ whole world is nonplussed

Intel hires Will-i-am as ‘director of creative innovation,’ whole world is nonplussed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When first we saw Fujisoft’s PALRO robot doing its thing we were charmed but, as it didn’t speak English, we had to adore it from afar. No longer. The little critter has obviously mastered our language quite quickly and can be seen below chatting with an even more robotic humanoid about such idle things as the weather, career aspirations, and just how great PALRO is. How great is PALRO? PALRO is really great — but humble. Inside that barrel chest is a full-fledged PC with an Atom Z530 processor, 4GB of flash storage, and an Ubuntu kernel keeping everything in check. It’s available as ever for educational and research institutions for about $3,600, but we’re trying to get one ourselves. If we can get it to type prepare yourselves for many more posts about software based on real Japanese cutting-edge technology.

Continue reading PALRO robot masters English, will never shut up again (video)

PALRO robot masters English, will never shut up again (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 07:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Add Acer to the growing list of companies with new tablets in the pipeline. The Taiwanese computer manufacturer has announced plans to release both a 7-inch and a 10-inch tablet in 2011.

The new tablets are intended to gradually replace the company’s line of netbook computers, said Acer’s Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-Hsian. “That’s the direction of the market,” Lu told Computerworld. The company will still continue to produce netbooks, but will begin to phase out its range of netbook models while producing the new line of tablets.

The tablets will run the Android OS (version unspecified) on Intel’s new line of quad-core Sandy Bridge processors. With the move to Sandy Bridge, Acer is aiming to outmuscle the numerous Nvidia Tegra 2–powered smartphones and tablets announced earlier this month at CES.

Acer’s Lu declined to state price points and specific release dates for the new tablet offerings.

It’s a huge shift for Acer, a company which has sold tens of millions of netbooks over the past decade and has relied on the ultra-portable netbook as the key component of its business strategy to date. The announcement comes on the heels of a recent Gartner report on worldwide PC sales that shows Acer’s 2010 growth down 1.9 percent from 2009.

“Media tablets undoubtedly intensified the competition in the consumer market,” said Gartner analyst Mikako Kakagawa in the report. “These devices do not replace primary PCs, but they are viewed as good enough devices for these who want to have a second and third connected device for content-consumption usage. Mini-notebook shipments were hit the most by the success of media tablets.”

Also, this isn’t the first tablet we’ve seen from Acer. After sales of the company’s 11.2-inch convertible tablet-notebook combo fizzled on arrival in May 2010, Acer discontinued it after only a few short months.

Acer’s tablet offerings also appear to completely reverse the company’s position as of only a year ago, when Acer’s Taiwan president Scott Lin said the company had no plans to pursue a tablet option, and that the iPad would be unlikely to impact the netbook market.

“Apple has built [its] business out of carving its own niche,” Lin told the DigiTimes last February, “which means that while Apple could see success with devices like the iPad, other players are unlikely to be able to replicate its result simply by copying.”

Tablet sales overall have been robust, with industry analysts estimating Apple’s 2010 holiday iPad sales somewhere in the range of 5 to 7 million units, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab hitting the 1 million sales mark in early December. The market is expected to continue to grow, as many of the dozens of tablets we saw at CES make their way to shelves this year.

See Also:

• Acer Debuts New E-Reader, Android Phone
• Acer’s Google Chrome OS Devices Likely in June
• Acer Gives Sneak Peek of New Kindle-Shaped 7-Inch Tablet

A MacBook modified into a tablet: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

You’d be forgiven for expecting that the dual-core Tegra 2 that swept all before it at CES would be the king of tablet processors for a good while, but Acer is already plotting ways to overthrow it. Admittedly, Acer is kind of cheating by jumping into x86 land and snatching some unspecified Intel Sandy Bridge silicon, but are you really going to complain about getting multi-core grunt under the hood of your well-lubricated Android machine? An official from the company has promised two to three new tablets, sized at either 7 or 10 inches diagonally, for the first half of this year — a tasty morsel of information, which he garnishes with the forecast that netbooks will eventually be phased out in favor of such touchy-feely slate devices. If you can fit a full second-gen Core CPU inside a tablet, why the heck not?

Updated: Acer’s US team has clarified for us that the Android tablets it announced in November are still set to hit in April. Obviously, these Sandy Bridge versions would be farther off, but we’ve also heard from another source that Acer would likely wait for Intel’s ULV-based Sandy Bridge processors, which aren’t due until the spring / summer timeframe. We’ll let you know if we hear more…

Acer building Sandy Bridge tablets for Android, will use them to ‘phase out’ netbooks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading KDJ-One is a gigantic Game Boy with an audio workstation inside

KDJ-One is a gigantic Game Boy with an audio workstation inside originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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