Hasta La Gadget!

Want some specificity about LG’s super-duper tablet roadmap? Last we heard from the Korean tech giant, it was canning plans for a Froyo slate and looking forward to a more suitable iteration of Android, which a senior official at the company has today clarified to mean Honeycomb, describing it as the “tablet PC-version” of the OS. He’s even gone beyond the call of PR duty in placing a release schedule for the 8.9-inch LG Pad in the first quarter of 2011, boasting that it’ll come with a dual-core Tegra 2 chip inside. That sounds terribly delicious to us, as does the note that LG has worked hard to accommodate the needs and wants of European and North American consumers — the release window is explicitly said to be for both domestic and overseas markets.

Update: We’ve just heard back from LG on the matter and the company says it has nothing official to tell us. It’d seem whoever the cited official in this piece is, he was dishing details that LG doesn’t want the world to know yet. LG’s PR team has also pulled a tweet about this story, ostensibly to cover its tracks.

LG Pad coming in Q1 2011, with Android Honeycomb, dual-core Tegra 2, and 8.9-inch screen originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 06:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you happen to be enthusiastic about Lenovo, tablets, and your American residency, look away now. Lenovo still plans to ship the Android-based LePad in China some time soonish, but its US roadmap can pretty much be summed up as “wait and see.” The company’s COO Rory Read has been cited as saying there are no plans to release a slate for the US market until at least Android’s Honeycomb version comes out, agreeing with Google on the point that Froyo is not “the right base to have a fully functioning pad.” Lest you think Windows 7 will fill the void until whenever in 2011 that Android tablet does arrive, Lenovo’s director of new technology, Howard Locker, sets you straight: “Windows 7 is based on the same paradigm as 1985 — it’s really an interface that’s optimized for a mouse and keyboard,” and the Thinking machine team doesn’t intend to build a slate around it. And if you were thinking of maybe picking up a LePhone as a consolation prize, tough luck, that won’t be arriving in the US for at least another two years (which in smartphone terms is basically “never”), although it’s good to know that it’s now got 13 percent of the smartphone market in China. You know, in case you own stock in LeCompany.

Lenovo says no Android tablet in US until Honeycomb; no Windows 7 tablet, period originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 05:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want to know where the next breakthrough in mobile technology will come from? Well, if Elpida and Sharp have their way, the answer will be the usual suspect of Japan, where they’re working away on new memory chips said to be capable of four orders of magnitude faster performance than the ordinary NAND flash storage of today. Dubbed ReRAM, or Resistive Random Access Memory, this project targets a 2013 date for commercialization and counts the University of Tokyo and Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology among its development team. Details on how such blinding speeds will be reached aren’t readily available, but the Nikkei reports power consumption will be down to “virtually zero” when the memory’s not in use. So with ReRAM and HP’s memristors both set for three years from now, can we schedule NAND’s funeral for 2014 or what?

Elpida and Sharp team up for ReRAM in 2013: 10,000x the speed of current NAND flash chips originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The whole world and his neighbor’s dog may already know when Windows Phone 7 will be announced, but when are the actual phones going to hit actual shelves? If you’re in the US, that time still looks to be a month away, but the UK release window has just been narrowed down from late October to a single, albeit still speculative, date: October 21. Our tipster forwards the above snapshot from a Three UK document showing a “Windows 7Phone” nestled in between the BlackBerry Torch and Samsung Europa. Its Super AMOLED display tells us we’re definitely looking at a Samsung handset, while the 4-inch diagonal suggests it’ll be the Cetus (SGH-i916/7). This sheet of revelation also finally gives us a hint as to the number of apps WP7 will start off with, enumerating them at “over 2,000 at launch.” We don’t know why Microsoft’s been so shy about that number — 2,000 good apps are more than enough.

UK carrier’s roadmap points to October 21 release for Windows Phone 7, over 2,000 apps at launch originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 09 Oct 2010 08:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Man, it’s got to be tough for the proud guys and gals at Toshiba these days. First the company gets whooped in the optical media format wars, and now it’s having to ingloriously bow out of the OLED race as well. Citing a recent uptick in LCD demand alongside the impact of the recent global economic crisis, Toshiba says its mass production plans for OLED displays have now been “frozen” and will be reviewed from scratch. That sounds like a company cutting its losses to us, which should make our fellow OLED enthusiasts all sorts of unhappy. There had better be some damn fine (and thin) LCDs in Toshiba’s pipeline if it hopes to keep us sweet.

Toshiba shelves OLED production plans, focuses on LCDs and licking its wounds originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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