Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve seen the future of Intel’s mobile platform, and it isn’t all roses and sunshine. Three years after the chipmaker told us Moorestown would reduce Atom’s energy consumption by a factor of 20, company execs told us earlier today that they’ve more than reached that goal with the new Z6xx series. Problem is, in the smartphone realm Intel’s competitors haven’t been sitting idle; according to one of Chipzilla’s cantaloupe-and-magenta bar charts, it seems the company has merely caught up in terms of battery life. That’s not to say the chips aren’t worlds better than previous Atoms — Intel sees 1.5GHz smartphone processors that slay Snapdragons and up to 1.9GHz in a tablet PC variety — but 5 hours of web browsing is most decidedly not the 24 hours of productivity Intel previously promised. Besides, who knows: Qualcomm also has a 1.5GHz SoC in the works, though it may not be available by the time Intel’s chips ship in the second half of the year.

None of this is to say that Intel won’t continue to dominate in the netbook marketplace — we shudder to think at the potential when combining a nice, chunky battery with Intel’s nearly leakproof new chips, and perhaps a small serving of switchable graphics while we’re at it. But without a single new MID or smartphone to show us this morning — Aava Mobile and OpenPeak‘s offerings seemed unchanged from our previous encounters — we’re not sure if the company’s other mobile ambitions have any sway. Not technical enough of a discussion for you? Peruse our gallery for the nitty-gritty.

Intel reaches for the ‘smartphone zone’ with Moorestown-based Atom Z6, comes up shorthanded originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 May 2010 02:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS CEO Jerry Shen sure is making the rounds this week talking up the company’s upcoming entry into the tablet arena, but before giving up some more Eee Pad details he clarified that he doesn’t anticipate tablet sales surpassing that of netbooks. The latter category is for personal computing while tablets are based on consuming content and Cloud computing. Shen said something similar when we spoke with him at CeBIT, but this time he also added that without Apple the tablet category would have been slower to ramp up. We’d say he’s on the money with that one, but still he plans to launch an Eee tablet in early June at Computex. And though he mentioned there being a few versions, he revealed the “first phase will use Microsoft software.” We don’t know if that means the tablet will be Intel powered and run Windows 7, or pack a Tegra 2 processor and boot some version of Windows CE like we saw at CES. Regardless of what happens, we’d say Microsoft’s happy to hear this all after this week’s news.

ASUS CEO: netbooks will outsell tablets, Eee Pad to run ‘Microsoft software’ originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Color us excited. HP’s Todd Bradley just made an interesting proposition on the conference call about its Palm acquisition. Specifically, Bradley said, “Between smartphones, slates, and potentially netbooks, there are a lot of opportunities here.” You read that right: slates and potentially netbooks. The tablet route is pretty obvious, but having the netbook / smartbook form factor is quite a twist. Think about it, a Foleo descendant you can be proud of — whodathunkit? If you’re worried HP has forgotten about other platforms, we need only point in the direction of the Android-fueled Airlife. Obviously nothing to announce at this point, but doesn’t that just get us hopeful — roadmap announcements are said to be forthcoming closer to the merger being finalized. The call is still ongoing, so stay tuned!

HP: opportunities for webOS ‘smartphones, slates, and potentially netbooks’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS Eee PC 1015P netbook hits the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A little bit of Euroland investigation this morning has revealed signs that Intel’s upcoming 1.66GHz N455 and 1.83GHz N475 Atom processors are close to making their official debut. Netbook Italia spotted the official Toshiba website posting up an NB305-10F model a little prematurely — a page that was promptly yanked, but not before our amici were able to note the inclusion of the DDR3-compatible N455 CPU, a gigabyte of RAM, 250GB hard disk and otherwise unchanged specs. The expected price for that netbook is noted at €350 ($467), which is also the price at which the upgraded HP Mini 210 — spotted by German outfit nDevil — is listed on Amazon.de. Shipping dates are predictably not yet ascertained, though it’s looking like things are about to get moving nice and swiftly from here on out.

Toshiba NB305 and HP Mini 210 to be upgraded with Atom N455 CPUs and DDR3 memory originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Apr 2010 08:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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