Hasta La Gadget!

Boy oh boy, these Taiwanese companies are seriously gunning to take the bottom out of the Honeycomb tablet market. After we saw ASUS stride forward with very competitive pricing on its 10-inch Eee Pad Transformer, we’re now being treated to Acer’s riposte, an eminently reasonable £300 ($483) price tag attached to its 7-inch Iconia Tab. Nothing is really skimped on here, you get the dual-core Tegra 2 and Android 3.0 one-two punch of hardware and software that’s become so popular lately, and of course the RAM is 512MB, not KB as indicated on Amazon’s listing. Perhaps the 8GB of storage will be a little on the light side, but given the price, we consider that a most forgivable shortcoming. Amazon notes the release date as April 20th in the UK and we doubt the rest of the world will have to wait much longer either.

Acer’s 7-inch Iconia Tab A100 priced at £300 in UK, launching April 20th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 04:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As much as we love our rumormongering, a good hard confirmation never goes astray around these parts, and we’ve just heard directly from Moto that its Xoom tablet will be arriving in the UK next week. When precisely, we don’t know, but the major electronics retailers will all be playing their part — Dixons (and its subsidiaries Currys and PC World) plus the Carphone Warehouse were specifically named. As to pricing, we’ve seen pretty strong indications that it’ll be £500 for the WiFi-only version and £600 for the 3G-equipped one, though there’s no immediate confirmation about which (or if both) will be coming next week. Either way, the important thing is that the world’s first Honeycomb tablet will be on sale in some form just as soon as the next British fiscal year gets started.

Motorola Xoom officially landing in UK next week, still has to finalize pricing and SKUs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh, woe is us. Or, to be more precise, woe is us if we wanted the Xperia Play on the UK’s O2 network on the day of its release, April 1st. The British carrier has been candid in admitting it found software bugs on the Play and is holding back release of the gamer-friendly device until those have been ironed out. We appreciate its effort in “testing the phone non-stop for weeks” and its reluctance to grab a quick buck by releasing imperfectly baked goods, but a major question remains — if this isn’t an O2-specific software problem, and we’ve heard no peep of O2 customizing the Android 2.3 build on the Play, why are no other carriers signaling a similar delay? Vodafone is still aiming to deliver UK pre-orders by April 5th and there seems to be no indication of flawed software from others. Only thing we can think of, given that O2 has the white Xperia Play exclusive, is that the white phone curse has struck again.

[Thanks, Ed]

Update: Here’s what Sony Ericsson has to say on the matter:

“Sony Ericsson Xperia[TM] PLAY will be launching on 1st April across all UK mobile operator partners except for O2, who have decided to prolong the testing period in order to ensure that the software meets the requirements of its procedures. Sony Ericsson will be workingwith O2 over the next couple of weeks to expedite the process and ensure that O2 customers can soon join consumers across the UK in being able to enjoy the world’s first PlayStation certified smartphone.”

Xperia Play delayed by O2 UK due to software bugs, what are the other carriers doing? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We noted Firefox 3’s spectacular eight million downloads in a day when discussing the recent launch of IE9, and that mark shall live on as a record for another day. Firefox 4 looks to have a had a thoroughly successful debut, going past the five million milestone within the first 24 hours of its release, but it hasn’t quite been able to overshadow its predecessor. And before you go comparing its numbers to the latest Internet Explorer, do be cognizant that FF4 released on a wider set of platforms, rendering direct stat comparisons a little dicey. That’s not stopping StatCounter, however, who notes that the latest Firefox already has a 1.95 percent share of the browser market, almost exactly double what IE9 can claim so far. Better get working on that XP compatibility, eh Microsoft?

Update: Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs has the final stats for the first 24 hours and it’s actually even higher than we thought: 7.1 million downloads around the globe. That’s in addition to three million users already running the release candidate for Firefox 4, which turned into the final release. Good work!

Continue reading Firefox 4 clocks up 7.1 million downloads within first 24 hours, fails to beat Firefox 3 record (updated)

Firefox 4 clocks up 7.1 million downloads within first 24 hours, fails to beat Firefox 3 record (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 08:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that it’s received its big US debut courtesy of Sprint and under the name EVO View 4G, HTC’s Flyer tablet is free to, um, fly under the radar with a WiFi version this spring, exclusively through Best Buy. Specs on the Flyer are somewhat atypical for the current crop of Android tablets, as it opts for Gingerbread instead of Honeycomb and a 1.5GHz Qualcomm chip intead of the popular Tegra 2 dual-core solution. That, and it’s a 7-inch tablet with a capacitive stylus and an aluminum unibody shell. Notably, this WiFi-centric variant looks set to beat the WiMAX-capable EVO View (which Sprint expects in the summer) to market, so we’ll be keeping a very curious eye on pricing as and when it is announced. For now, we have a retailer and a rapidly dwindling release window. Oh, and a press release, which you’ll find just past the break, augmented with a neat little promo video.

[Thanks, Michael]

Continue reading HTC’s WiFi-only Flyer launching exclusively with Best Buy ‘this spring’

HTC’s WiFi-only Flyer launching exclusively with Best Buy ‘this spring’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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