Hasta La Gadget!

Everyone deserves a second chance, right? In the world of cheapo tablets, sure! Or at least that’s our attitude when it comes to a company like Augen. Sure, it was just about a month ago that it released its $150 GenTouch78 at Kmart, but it’s planning some future tablet products and hoping to right all those previous wrongs. According to the statement put out by the company, this new set of “Espresso” tablets will be unveiled at CES 2011 and will span from 7 to 10 inches diagonally. They’ll still be aggressively priced and range from $200 to $400, but at least this time around it’s planning for some with capacitive touchscreens. Other specs are of the fairly cookie cutter mold: WiFi, an accelerometer and more storage space. No word on what version of Android they’ll run, but there’s mention of a new “human friendly input.” That all sounds much better than the previous GenTouch products we’ve seen, but by the time January rolls around there’s no telling what the tablet landscape could look like. We’ll be following this one to see if Augen can keep the caffeine in its system, but hit the break for the full statement and one more render.

Continue reading Augen planning its next generation of tablets, not giving up without a fight

Augen planning its next generation of tablets, not giving up without a fight originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sharp is going to launch its brand new e-reader in Japan this fall with US retail availability to follow by the end of the year. Riveting stuff, isn’t it? Well, the company’s President Mikio Katayama does his best to spice things up by proposing this device will aim “to rival the iPad,” and it may well sport a color LCD if earlier indications still hold true, but what’s really got us hot under the collar is the potential for 3D down the line. Katayama claims to have witnessed great enthusiasm for 3D — particularly when it comes to games — and posits it as a likely future direction for this new ebook reader. Multifunctional devices are what people want, he says, and since Sharp already has a 3D smartphone in the pipeline and a glasses-free 3D tablet display in the lab, we can’t see many technical hurdles to the realization of his vision. Let’s just hope his depth perception is accurate when it comes to measuring the interest in three-dee.

Sharp’s e-reader ready to ‘rival the iPad’ by year’s end, may have a 3D future originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 03:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of these days AMD is gonna have to stop talking about its Atom-killing Bobcat and Xeon-ending Bulldozer cores and finally release them. But, until that happy moment arrives in 2011 (fingers crossed), we’ll have to content ourselves with more presentation slides. First up, the Bobcat core is AMD’s long overdue play for the netbook/ultrathin market. Pitched as having 90 percent of the performance of current-gen, K8-based mainstream chips, AMD’s new mobility core will require “less than half the area and a fraction of the power” of its predecessors. That sounds like just the recipe to make the company relevant in laptop purchasing decisions again, while a touted ability for the core to run on less than one watt of power (by lowering operating frequencies and voltages, and therefore performance) could see it appear in even smaller form factors, such as MIDs. The Bobcat’s now all set to become the centerpiece of the Ontario APU — AMD’s first Fusion chip, ahead of Llano — which will be ramping up production late this year, in time for an early 2011 arrival.

The Bulldozer also has a future in the Fusion line, but it’s earliest role will be as a standalone CPU product for servers and high-end consumer markets. The crafty thing about its architecture is that every one Bulldozer module will be counted as two cores. This is because AMD has split its internal processing pipelines into two (while sharing as many internal components as possible), resulting in a sort of multicore-within-the-core arrangement. The way the company puts it, it’s multithreading done right. Interlagos is the codename of the first Opteron chips to sport this new core, showing up at some point next year in a 16-core arrangement (that’s 8 Bulldozers, if you’re keeping score at home) and promising 50 percent better performance than the current Magny-Cours flagship. Big words, AMD. Now let’s see you stick to a schedule for once.

Continue reading AMD’s Bobcat and Bulldozer, 2011 flagship CPU cores, detailed today

AMD’s Bobcat and Bulldozer, 2011 flagship CPU cores, detailed today originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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E Ink Holdings, the company behind the power-sipping screens contained within Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Readers, is keeping to its schedule for the biggest overhaul of its display technology yet. Color panels are reportedly now sampling out to device vendors and China-based Hanvon has already answered the call — it promises to deliver color E Ink readers by the end of this year. Two varieties of touchscreens are also being prepared: the first is a capacitive panel to sate the kids’ need to flick and swipe everywhere, while the second will include a pen-friendly digitizer that should make annotations a doddle (or should that be a doodle?). Better response times and reflectivity are also being touted, though the big question is obviously when this good stuff will make its way into mainstream devices like the Kindle. If you believe Jeff Bezos, that won’t be any time soon.

E Ink begins sampling color and capacitive touch displays, on track for late 2010 launch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Here’s something that seems to have slipped the net from Kevin Turner’s recent presentation on Windows Phone 7 devices. While discussing the move to Microsoft’s next great hope in the mobile space, the Redmond COO told the world that the transition is expected to happen in the October timeframe across Europe, and in the November timeframe in the US. This is the most explicit anyone from Microsoft has been about the likely launch date for Windows Phone 7, and sets up the intriguing potentiality of Europeans getting to savor the goodness of the brand new OS ahead of their US brethren. See Kevin dishing the info on video after the break.

[Thanks, Abed]

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 coming to Europe in October, US in November, according to Microsoft COO (video)

Windows Phone 7 coming to Europe in October, US in November, according to Microsoft COO (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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