Hasta La Gadget!

So, you’ve read the rumors, scoped out the leaks, and circled multiple dates on your calendar — just to cover all of your Droid 3 bases. You can now add a catalog of accessories to the stack of intel for this Motorola slider, including an inductive battery door (most likely harnessing the power of Qi), and a smattering of cases and screen protectors. Also thrown in the mix is a 1930mAh extended battery so you can fuel a marathon of South Park reruns and take full advantage of the last week of unlimited data from Verizon. Although knowing about the accessories is nice, we’d prefer to find out the important stuff… ya know, like how much Big Red’s new Droid will cost.

Droid 3 accessories leaked, Moto’s new slider gets wireless charging back plate and more originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Jul 2011 08:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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These six tablets span four operating systems, multiple screen sizes and a range of connectivity features. (Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com)

In today’s crowded market, looking for a tablet is like buying a new car. Everything looks great when it’s slick, polished and sitting on the lot. The hard part is keeping track of what’s under the hood.

Wired.com took some of the front-runners from the current tablet field — the brand-new HP TouchPad, Apple’s iPad, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and others — and stacked up their features side by side in the chart below.

In the wake of Apple’s iPad, which released April 2010, technology manufacturers are quickly churning out competing slates in hopes of luring customers into the new product category with fancy hardware and flashy apps. The tablet market is quickly gaining momentum with a new slate hitting stores every month.

(Speaking of apps, don’t miss our breakdown of software ecosystems, explaining the pros and cons of the app stores on each mobile operating system.)

That’s a lot of info to digest, right? Fret not, tablet shoppers: Here’s some of that info broken down across seven categories.

Body

Essentially, choosing a piece of hardware that works for you boils down to taste and utility. Want something light and airy that won’t wear your arm out while e-reading? Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 has everyone beat; It’s the thinnest, lightest 10-inch tablet out to date, even besting the super-svelte iPad 2.

Maybe you want something smaller, or with a rubberized backing to combat your butterfingers. Almost the size of a trade paperback, BlackBerry’s seven-inch PlayBook would best suit your needs.

Tablets like the TouchPad, Xoom and first-gen iPad all weigh and measure in at approximately the same range, but with some of the recent slimmer releases, they’re starting to look positively bulky.

Power

In this generation of tablets, you aren’t going to see any chips backed by less than 1 GHz of processing power. Our two Android tablets run on Nvidia’s powerful Tegra 2 processor, while Apple’s iPads are powered by the custom-made A4 and A5 series chips. RIM decided to go with a Texas Instruments OMAP, which Palm used in its Pre smartphones. Only the TouchPad clocks in at 1.2 GHz, running on a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ 8060 CPU.

Most of these tablets come with 1GB of RAM to keep things running smoothly, save Apple’s offerings — the iPad 1 comes with a paltry 256MB, while its successor doubles that amount.

It’s difficult to run a consistent processing benchmark across three different platforms, so we’re not going to give the edge to any one tablet quite yet. Still, Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon chip ran smooth as silk in the TouchPad — especially while multitasking — so we’re inclined to give it props.

Frontrunner: HP TouchPad

Cameras

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Shooting photos on a tablet is just weird. Like, “defending yourself in a food fight with a cafeteria tray” weird. Still, we’re all about choice here at Wired.com, and if you want to shoot photos on your tablet, some of these slates can accommodate.

Except for the first-gen iPad, which lacks any cameras at all. Similarly, the TouchPad comes with a front-facing camera for the Skype-loving crowd, but no rear camera for the shutterbugs.

All the rest come with front and back-facing cameras of variable quality, the iPad 2’s being the poorest of them all. The PlayBook has the highest resolutions on both front and back cameras, but you’ll lose viewfinder real estate with the device’s smaller screen. Conversely, the Xoom dips a touch in front-facing camera resolution while bumping up your screen size considerably.

Edge: Motorola Xoom

The Atrix 4G is today an eminently more intriguing smartphone than it was yesterday. Leaked code from Motorola’s upcoming Gingerbread update for the handset has made its way into the hands of the always-eager coders at xda-developers, which has resulted in two things: one, the discovery that Motorola intends to unlock the Atrix’s bootloader when it upgrades it to Android 2.3, and two, downloadable files to let you do exactly that today, even if you’re still stuck on Froyo. Moto users have been pleading for this change for a long time and Motorola did pledge to make it happen across its portfolio of devices, but it comes as a mild (and happy) surprise to see this change being effected retroactively. Check the links below to see how you can unchain your phone’s bootloader if you can’t wait for the official software to drop.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Atrix 4G bootloader unlocked: you can hack it up today or wait for official Gingerbread update originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jun 2011 02:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know that microSD card slot that’s been laying dormant in your Motorola Xoom? Provided you don’t reside in the US, that’ll be getting activated soon as part of the tablet’s Android 3.1 update, which is starting to roll out now and should have all of Europe covered within the next few weeks. Motorola explicitly identifies this as a firmware update for “non-US” Xooms, so Canadians would be well advised to check their software update utility, though the big question is why didn’t the American 3.1 update include microSD support as well? What tangled web of intrigue lies behind this selective activation?

[Thanks, Alan]

Motorola Xoom gets Android 3.1 update that activates microSD card support outside the US originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon said otherwise earlier this week, but Motorola has now finally chimed in to say that a Gingerbread update for the Droid 2 Global is not, in fact, rolling out at the moment — as Droid 2 Global owners have probably noticed. Unfortunately, it’s not provided any indication as to when such an update will start rolling out, but it does seem like you can rest assured that it’s still a question of “when” not “if.”

Motorola says Droid 2 Global Gingerbread update isn’t ready after all originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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