Hasta La Gadget!

BARCELONA — Tablets are what we wanted to see at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and tablets are what we’ve got. They all have their gimmicks, and LG’s Optimus Pad has 3-D. It also has a new screen size of 8.9 inches.

First, the 3-D. The Optimus has a pair of cameras in the back for shooting stereoscopic 1080p video. This footage can be played back later on a big TV (the Optimus has an HDMI-out port) or piped direct to a big screen as you shoot (as you see in the picture above). I jammed a pair of 3D glasses over my regular glasses, held the camera in my other hand and tried to snap a picture whilst balancing on my crutches. Despite these various handicaps, the picture is a pretty good representation of the headache-inducing footage you’ll see without the 3-D specs.

Put the glasses on and things don’t get much better. The 3-D effect is there, but it has none of the slick smoothness you’ll see from a properly-shot clip. There’s no way you’ll ever mistake the footage for anything but cellphone video, even though both cameras are 5MP.

And if you want to view your 3-D video on the screen, good luck. LG touts the Optimus Pad as able to display 3-D, but see it you’ll need to travel back to 1955. The “3-D” image is displayed as red and blue anaglyph, the kind which you need colored glasses to look at. Given that any color screen, ever, can do this, LG is pushing the truth a little here.

The rest of the Optimus Pad is sweet enough, with dual-core Tegra 2 chip, 32GB storage, 3G radio, 2MP front-facing camera (even worse than the other two) and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The 8.9-inch size is actually pretty good, although all the cameras seemingly bring the weight up to an iPad-like 630-grams. Take a closer look and you’ll see LG has opted to make the screen long and thin. That’s great for wide-screen movies, terrible for everything else (except, surprisingly, two-pane horizontal e-book reading). Finally, the 1280 x 768 pixel screen sounds good, but in practice it isn’t so great. Samsung’s Tab displays are way nicer.

My prediction for the Optimus Pad? Lots of (digital) ink spilled by hacks like me during the MWC this week, followed by terrible sales and a quiet death. You heard it here first, folks!

See Also:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Hands-On: A Plastic Toy With a Gorgeous …
• Hands-On With Samsung’s Five-Inch iPod Touch Rival

BARCELONA — Amid the fuss about Samsung’s new ten-inch Galaxy Tab and the Galaxy S 2 cellphone, an even more interesting product has gotten somewhat lost: A five-inch Wi-Fi-only mini-tablet, called the Galaxy S Wi-Fi 5.0.

The thin little media-player is somewhere between the already wrong-sized 7-inch Galaxy Tab and the regular Galaxy S cellphone, only without the phone or 3G parts of either. For such an odd product –- kind of like the too-tall, gawky girl from school –- it’s actually pretty great. The screen is way better for watching movies than the smaller display of, say, the iPod Touch, but despite the extra roominess it still slides easily into the back pocket of your jeans. And the screen isn’t far from the size of a dedicated e-reader like the Kindle, either.

I played with the Android-based mini-tablet and immediately liked it. It is very thin and light but suffers from none of the plasticky feel of the new tat-tastic Tab 10.1. Multi-touch response is fast, and as far as I could see under the bright show lights, the LCD display gives a very nice rendering of movies.

The Wi-Fi 5.0 also comes with a camera for Skype, and a phone-like speaker and mic setup for VoIP calling. And I have the feeling it would make an awesome Angry Birds machine.

One note. The picture up top shows the Tab Wi-Fi alongside a regular (Galaxy S) sized handset, for scale. What isn’t to scale is the hands that hold them: The kind girl on the Samsung booth that held the two for the photo has teeny hands.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel

BARCELONA — The expected deluge of tablets has started with Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, a big-screen version of the seven-inch Galaxy Tab which has sold about two million units. The Tab 10.1 — named somewhat awkwardly for its screen size — is the first hot ticket at the Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona, and we went hands-on.

The most important part of this tablet is the operating system. It’s running Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the first version of Android designed for tablets. Honeycomb turns out to be pretty sweet, and as far away from Apple’s iOS as you could imagine. In fact, its closer to something like Windows XP in terms of the look and feel, albeit with a very responsive, finger-friendly touch interface.

Honeycomb’s home screen presents you with a computer desktop, complete with messy icons, widgets and even a clock. Swiping and tapping work as well as you’d expect if you have ever used an iPad (it’s good), but confusion will cloud your pretty little head for a moment due to the lack of any hardware buttons (you get semi-permanent navigation buttons in the bottom-left of the screen). Honeycomb is clearly very different from iOS, and those who want a tablet version of a desktop OS will be very happy with it. I think it’s pretty ugly.

And the Tab 10.1 itself? A mixture of cheap and great. The screen is gorgeous, and the extra resolution over the iPad (1280 x 800 pixels versus the iPad’s 1024 x 768) makes movies pop. The screen can do 1080p, but that’s just a marketing check-box. At this size, it makes little difference.

Thanks to the racket on the show-floor, I have no idea how good the speakers sound, but they do stereo, which is a step up from the iPad.

From the front, then, the Tab 10.1 is easily the equal of the iPad. Then things start to go wrong. It’s very clear that a $500 tablet is impossible for anyone but Apple to build without cutting corners. The Tab not only has a plastic back, but the metal-looking bezel is in fact silvered plastic, and looks as tacky as the dime-store toy-tablets that will surely flood stores soon. This does make the Tab 10.1 light (600g vs. 730g for the 3G iPad), but it also makes it feel cheap. And while overall the Tab 10.1 is thinner than the iPad (10.9mm vs. 13.4mm), the iPad feels thinner thanks to its tapered edges.

The camera is interesting for one reason: It proves that a ten-inch tablet with a camera isn’t a stupid idea. The large screen makes it easy to compose (although the camera app has a lot of chrome around it, so you don’t get full-screen shooting, but this may be fixable with a preference). But the 8MP camera itself is junk, and takes photos almost as bad as those taken by my piece-of-crap Samsung Beyoncé cellphone. Samsung certainly cut corners here, too.

Overall, it’s a decent enough effort, and offers a vanilla version of Honeycomb to play around with.

The trouble is that both hardware and software are rough around the edges. Honeycomb feels like Linux on the desktop before Ubuntu came along, and the Tab 10.1 itself feels like somebody made a toy plastic iPad. The screen stands alone as being quite excellent, but it’s not enough to save the rest.

See Also:

• Galaxy Tab
• Galaxy Tab
• Samsung’s Galaxy Tab: iPad’s First Solid Contender

Qualcomm just refined the term “blowout” here at Mobile World Congress. It’s obviously a critical show for the wireless supplier, and while the 2.5GHz Snapdragon CPU is the undisputed highlight, there’s quite a bit of chipset action worth paying attention to if you’d prefer that your next handset / mobile hotspot be capable of handling the world’s most advanced network technologies. First off, there’s the Gobi3000 modules, which Qualcomm just announced were shipping en masse. Compared to the Gobi2000 that has been infiltrating laptops and MiFi devices for the past year, this one doubles the HSPA downlink speed and enhances the Gobi common application programming interface (API) functionality for enterprise applications. The design supports single-mode (UMTS) and multi-mode designs (CDMA / UMTS), and should be popping up soon in devices from Huawei, Novatel Wireless, Option, Sierra Wireless and ZTE.

Next up are the MDM9625 and MDM9225 chipsets, which are designed to support LTE data rates as high as 150Mbps within mobile broadband devices. These guys are fabricated using the 28nm technology node, and are backwards compatible with previous generations of LTE and other wireless broadband standards, giving consumers using USB modems powered by the MDM9625 or MDM9225 chipsets an uninterrupted broadband data connection on nearly any network around the world. These are being launched alongside the MDM9615 and MDM8215, which are similar chips designed to support multi-mode LTE and dual-carrier HSPA+, respectively. As for the MDM8225? That’s being released today to support HSPA+ Release 9 (the latest version, obviously), which will support 84Mbps on the downslope (not to mention dual-carrier HSUPA operation) and should fit into at least a couple of T-Mobile USA devices by 2012. Finally, Qualcomm has nailed down a deal that’ll enable all future Snapdragon-powered Android devices to “have access to instant streaming of TV shows and movies from Netflix.” Just sounds like a pre-loaded installation to us, but hey, we’ll take all the optimization we can get when it comes to streaming video on the mobile.

Qualcomm ships dual-mode Gobi3000 WWAN chip, intros LTE / HSPA+ chipsets galore originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Qualcomm (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)  | Email this | Comments

We had a feeling we’d be hearing about Intel’s Atom for smartphones here at Mobile World Congress, and Intel did in fact take the stage today to talk about its forthcoming Medfield processor. The company has announced that it is starting to sample or test its 32nm Medfield processor for mobile devices with its customers (obviously, it’s not telling us with ones) and more importantly that it will ship in a phone. Yep, Intel’s Senior Vice President Anand Chandrasekher spoke quite firmly about how the platform will in fact ship in smartphones and that it will also support Android. He pulled out the phone above just as a proof point, and while he didn’t say who made it, we have a sneaking suspicion it is that Aava Mobile phone we’ve heard about.

Chandraskher also took direct aim at ARM (he even called out ARM’s CEO Warren East), and hammered home Intel’s focus on battery life. He didn’t quote exact run time, but he did say that “on active power we are most efficient architecture on the planet.” We actually believe he repeated that will have the “longest usage time” at least three times. What about standby? He was a bit more vague on that, but did say it would be competitive there as well. We’ll be doing our best to track down that Medfield-powered handset up there, so stay tuned.

Update: Our friend Chippy from CarryPad caught a bit of Aand’s talk on video. Hit the break for that.

Continue reading Intel talks Medfield: will ship in a phone and have the longest usage time

Intel talks Medfield: will ship in a phone and have the longest usage time originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments