Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve been keeping an ear to the techie ground, you’ll probably have heard some analyst chatter suggesting RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook may be delayed due to issues relating to its supposedly poor battery life. That scuttlebutt has now turned out to be mostly unfounded, with RIM clarifying the situation through a communiqué sent to Erictric:

“Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented. RIM is on track with its schedule to optimize the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.”

To be sure, it’s not an outright denial that there may be PlayBooks floating about with disappointing battery performance, but the immaturity of the software on them is clearly such as to invalidate any conclusions drawn. Perhaps more important than the imprecise discussion of battery longevity (what does “comparable” even mean in this context?) is the note that the company is still on track to complete its software optimizations and deliver its first tablet on schedule. Guess we can all quit worrying now.

RIM: BlackBerry PlayBook battery life is still being optimized, won’t cause delays originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Dec 2010 04:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The guys over at Pocketnow have been doing their intellectual property homework lately and they’ve uncovered an atypically broad trademarking effort being carried out by Motorola. The Droid maker has sought to be associated with the term “Xoom” in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and even Taiwan, signifying that whatever the company intends to do with the name will play a pretty significant role in its future plans. The category applied for is defined as “Mobile computers and related accessories,” which really narrows things down to the one device Moto has in its labs that everyone’s talking about: its Android Honeycomb tablet. All this legal team activity seems to point to its name being the Motorola Xoom, but there’s still time for minds to change and branding to be revised. Hey, at least we know what the logo will look like.

Motorola seeks ‘Xoom’ trademark around the world, could well be the name of its Android tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 06:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like Netflix? Then get ready to prove it by sharing your film interests with your social network. Netflix is looking to hire a “Facebook Integration — Engineer / Architect” into its new Social Systems engineering team. According to the open position posted to the Netflix jobs board, the senior web engineer will, “conceive and build the systems that enable Netflix applications and systems to use the social graph to create a more social Netflix experience” Specifically, the ideal new hire should be familiar with Facebook’s Open Graph API to build a customer-facing service. It’s just a guess, but we’d expect this to ultimately allow Netflix subscribers and wannabes to like, view and filter Netflix offerings based upon their social input and preferences. Interesting, because Netflix abandoned its homegrown Friends feature earlier this year. Guess now we know why.

[Thanks, Eric]

Netflix hiring Facebook Integration engineer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 05:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, it’s December, what else are you going to do but monger rumors of the next iPad? Reuters has rounded up no less than four sources from within Apple’s component suppliers, all expressing their belief that the hallowed tablet will be refreshed some time in early 2011. A pair of the tipsters could only go so far as to say that production at places like Wintek and Simplo is expected to ramp up in the first quarter, while the other two were more decisive in identifying the cause for the extra activity as Apple’s next tablet iteration. As to the future iPad’s camera or cameras, one source says it’ll feature both a back-mounted and a front-facing module, with Largan and Genius identified as having received new orders from Cupertino for churning out imagers. Notably, the latter is currently also supplying the iPhone 4’s photon collector and there’s no confirmation that whatever they produce will inevitably land in an iPad 2, but the tea leaves seem to be in agreement: parts are targeted for a February shipment in preparation for an April iPad refresh. Whether the new slate arrives at that time, however, will be another matter altogether.

iPad 2 will have rear and front-facing cameras, say multiple sources originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Dec 2010 03:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like a netbook, only not. The latest thing to drop into our “crazy rumor” inbox is the Windows 7 tablet conceptualized above. Blogeee have it on the authority of two separate sources that Samsung is planning a 10-inch slate device dubbed Gloria, which would run Windows 7 and have a slide-out keyboard. What you see above is only a mockup of how this Gloria might appear — if she ever does appear at all — though we’re told it’ll include a Samsung software overlay to make Windows 7 that little bit more touch-friendly. We’ve yet to find any other corroboration for this beyond Blogeee‘s sources, so treat it as the unconfirmed bit of salacious info that it is, but if you must feel hopeful about the future, March and April are the months mentioned for a potential release.

Samsung Gloria to be a 10-inch Windows 7 tablet with slide-out keyboard? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Dec 2010 06:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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