Jul 20

Asus Drops Windows for Android in Eee Pad Tablet

Posted in: Android, ASUS, tablets, Today's Chili

Asus is working on a 3G Eee Pad tablet computer, and it will run on Google’s Android operating system. Our friends from the German site Netbook News headed over to Asus HQ and got the details.

The Eee Pad was originally slated to use Windows CE, but has dropped that in favor of whichever flavor of Android will be available at launch. And talking of launch dates, we’re looking at the beginning of next year, by which time Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) should be ready. And the 3G part? Asus will be handing off testing units to telcos in December, so if all goes to plan a Q1 Eee Pad looks good.

Android is likely to be the OS of choice amongst tablet-makers (apart from HP, with its newly acquired webOS and Apple, of course). It’s free, it is designed for mobile devices and above all it doesn’t have to fight against an incumbent Windows market. One of the problems with the first wave of Linux netbooks was their lack of familiarity: people buying cheap computers were used to Windows. This problem doesn’t yet exist with tablets, so Android may in fact become the next Windows.

ASUS EP101TC Now Shipping with Android [Netbooks News. Thanks, Sascha!]

Image: Netbooks News

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Jul 19

IPad and iPhone 4 International Launch Dates Announced

Posted in: ipad, iPhone, tablets, Today's Chili

If you live in one of the following countries, and you want to buy an iPad, we have some good news: It’ll be in local stores this Friday. Here’s the list.

Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

For people in some of those countries, availability was little more than a quick border-crossing away. Others had to have the magic tablet shipped in at great cost. Apple is sticking to its line about recommended prices, and is listing everything in US dollars. Anyone in a country outside the US knows that this is little more than marketing bunk. When Apple’s products are shipped from China to anywhere other than the US, the prices mysteriously climb. Thus, it can actually still be cheaper to get a unit delivered from the Homeland, even with import duties and shipping costs.

This official press release from Apple joins the news from the iPhone 4 antenna-gate conference last Friday that the iPhone 4 will also be going properly worldwide. The new iPhone will be available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland on July 30th. Good luck actually getting your hands on one, though.

iPad Available in Nine More Countries This Friday [Apple]

iPhone 4 to launch in 17 countries July 30, white model soon [iLounge]

Photo: Rego Korosi/Flickr




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Jul 18

Verizon’s LTE rollout is imminent, computers updated for 4G SIM cards

Posted in: 4G, exclusive, lte, tablet, tablets, Today's Chili, verizon, Verizon Wireless, VerizonWireless, vzw, Wireless

We just got some alleged (but very convincing) internal documents on Verizon’s 4G plans, and it’s mostly stuff we’ve already heard — 5-12Mbps down, aircards before smartphones, and plans to roll out in 30 cities in 2010. That said, documents dated this week show the company’s still on track to serve up 100 million connections by the end of the year, and a pair of independent tipsters have just sent us pics of Verizon computers ready and waiting for those precious LTE SIM cards. Furthermore, the docs also claim that the planned LTE isn’t just fast, it’s got a lag-destroying 30ms latency too, and fans of wider wireless computing can expect 4G tablets of some sort in 2011 as well. See all the goodies in our gallery below.

Gallery: Verizon Wireless alleged internal 4G plans

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Verizon’s LTE rollout is imminent, computers updated for 4G SIM cards originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 18 Jul 2010 15:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 14

Velocity Cruz Android Tablet: 7-Inch Display, $300

Posted in: Android, tablets, Today's Chili

Until now, the iPad has faced almost no competition. Soon, though, the Android and WebOS tablets will start to ship in bulk, and things may change. Amongst the first will be Velocity Micro’s Cruz lineup, which brings a wide-screen (16:9) tablet running Google’s Android OS for just $300.

It’s not the first Android tablet (the underwhelming, underpowered Archos 7 holds that distinction) but the Cruz is the first you might seriously consider buying. It comes from Velocity Micro, a company that makes notebooks and desktops but is probably best known for its high-end gaming PCs.

The touchscreen Cruz is flanked by an e-reader and a “kid-friendly” (read: drop-resistant) model, which come in at $200 and $150 respectively.

The Cruz tablet looks a bit like a cut-down iPad. It has 802.11n Wi-Fi, 800 x 480 pixels on the little 7-inch screen, 4-GB storage (expandable via SD-card, with an 8-GB card in the box), an accelerometer, a seven-hour battery-life and (oh Lord, can it be true?) a USB port.

The Cruz is essentially a slab of screen, which is just what a tablet should be. As such, it will succeed or fail based on its software, which is Apple’s big advantage, and also on battery life. The seven-inch screen seems like a great idea — for some, the iPad is too big — but the 16:9 ratio is a little odd for a device that can be used in portrait orientation.

Velocity Micro confuses the customer with the other options. For $100 less ($200), you can opt for the 4:3 “e-reader” which is essentially the same tablet with less memory (none built-in, 2-GB card in the box), slower Wi-Fi (802.11g) and a 800 x 600 display (yes, more pixels, but not capacitive, demoed above).

The tablets all ship Sept. 1, just six weeks away. Once we get them in our hands, we’ll see how they measure up to the iPad.

Cruz Tablets [Cruz Reader via Richmond Times Dispatch]

Press release [Engadget]

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Jul 12

Palm webOS Headed to HP Tablet, Printer

Posted in: HP, palm, printer, slate, tablet, tablets, Today's Chili, webos

Now that HP  has sealed its acquisition of Palm, the PC maker is working hard to get Palm’s webOS mobile operating system onto HP products.

Palm’s webOS will power HP upcoming tablet, says HP CTO Phil McKinney. The tablet known as HP Slate had earlier been designed using Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system. HP also plans to put webOS on printers, says McKinney.

“There’s a gap for devices that are larger than a smartphone but smaller than a netbook,” he told attendees at the ongoing Mobile Beat conference in San Francisco. “Slates could fit in that category.”

Unlike rival Dell, which chose the Google-designed open source Android OS to create its cellphone and tablet, HP spent $1.2 billion to buy Palm. The transaction closed earlier this month.

HP wants to control all pieces of the mobile ecosystem, says McKinney.

“If you look at success in the market, they are those companies who can control the end user experience and the entire experience stack,” he says.

That sounds more like Apple and less like Google. But it is clearly the direction that HP wants to go. In March, HP seemed poised to launch its Slate tablet offering sneak peeks of the device through carefully edited videos. Leaks of the company’s plans for the Slate pegged the price of the device at $550.

But in a surprise move in April, HP announced its buying Palm and with that it sent the Slate back to the drawing board.  McKinney says HP is not yet ready to announce a launch date for the Slate.

“I am not going to pre-announce products but I will say that we are investing money into research & development and marketing at Palm.”

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Photo:HP




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Jul 10

RIM’s Blackberry Tablet might be seven inches, feature dual cameras and 1GHz CPU?

Posted in: BlackBerry, RIM, rumor, rumors, tablet, tablet pc, TabletPc, tablets, Today's Chili

The rumor mill’s been churning out quite the picture of RIM’s Blackberry tablet over the past several months, and it’s a research analyst who’s most recently picked up the brush — Ashok Kumar of Rodman & Renshaw, to be precise, who anticipates a 7-inch touchscreen device with a 1GHz processor, plus front- and back-facing cameras for video chat. Since that’s a good 1.9 inches smaller than the slate rumored a couple months back, this latest spiel fills us with doubt… but hey, it’s not like we had confirmation that RIM was even producing such a device, anyhow. It may be a while before we find out for sure, as Kumar told investors that even should the company succeed in an attempt to move up the schedule, the device still wouldn’t launch until the end of the year.

RIM’s Blackberry Tablet might be seven inches, feature dual cameras and 1GHz CPU? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Jul 09

Barnes Noble Updates E-Reader App with Landscape View, Brightness Control

Posted in: e-books, ipad, tablets, Today's Chili

Barnes and Noble has updated its iPad e-reader app, and it has fixed many of the oddities that made me describe it as “adequate” back in May.

The biggest changes are in the reading interface. You can now dim the display from within the app, just like you can in iBooks and Instapaper. Brightness is one of my biggest niggles with the iPad in general: I’m forever heading over to the settings app to tweak it. There should be an always-available shortcut. Anyhow, in the B&N e-reader, it’s fixed.

Next is the behavior in landscape orientation, which now sows a two-page spread instead of just going wide.

Other fixes are welcome but not really essential. You can now delete samples from within the app; there is “improved” support for periodicals, syncing purchases, bookmarks and notes is quicker and there are the obligatory bug-fixes.

I’m losing count of e-reader/bookstore apps for the iPad now. We have Kindle, B&N, Kobo, iBooks, Borders (or is that Kobo?). I kind of like that I can get content from any of these without having to buy a whole bunch of e-readers. On the other hand, it’s a pain to have to jump between them. Imagine having to use different music apps depending on where you bought the MP3.

B&N e-reader [iTunes. Thanks, Brittany!]

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Jul 09

Droptext Adds Dropbox Text Editing to iOS

Posted in: ipad, iPhone, Software, tablets, Today's Chili

Dropbox, the free cloud-storage and kinda-backup service, is awesome. One of its best features is to let you share all the documents on your computer with your iPad, iPhone, Android device and soon, your BlackBerry. It would seem, then, to be the perfect way to work around Apple’s excruciating file-transfers for the iPad. There’s just one catch: you can’t actually edit your files.

Droptext fixes this. The application, from developer Kevin Smith, does one thing: It connects to your online Dropbox and lets you edit text files. Up until now, you have had to open the file in a separate application and then try to save it back, somehow, into the original Dropbox folder as a copy. That, or you need to buy one of the capable but ugly and expensive office apps like Office HD.

Smith’s app is dead simple. Once you have signed into your Dropbox account, you can browse files and folders. Anything that is editable has an icon. Tap that icon and the document opens in edit view. Tap “Save” to save. That’s it.

Any plain text file can be opened, from TXT through PHP, HTML and M. RTF and Word docs cannot be viewed or edited, however. You can also create and delete files, although to actually send them anywhere you’ll need to fire up a different Dropbox-aware application.

In my short testing, Droptext crashed on me several times. The iTunes store page promises “bug fixes” as “coming soon”. The biggest draw of this app is the price, though. At just $1, it’s worth having the 2.9MB app around for when you need it.

Droptext [iTunes via iLounge]

Dropbox Anywhere [Dropbox]

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Jul 08

Gadget Lab Podcast: Dell’s New Tablet, Sluggish iPhone Uploads and Apple TV

Posted in: Apple, apple tv, att, podcasts, tablets, Today's Chili

In this week’s Gadget Lab video podcast, Brian X. Chen and Priya Ganapati touch on more wireless woes reported by iPhone users.

Apparently in some cities, the iPhone’s upload speeds were slowing to a crawl. AT&T has responded and said the drop was due to a software bug that will be addressed — but not before angry conspiracy-theorist customers accused the telecom company of purposely capping speeds for the device.

          
 

In brighter news, Ganapati shares her hands-on experience with the Dell Streak, a 5-inch touchscreen tablet device that feels like a supersized smartphone. Perhaps Dell is aiming to offer a tablet that will actually fit in a woman’s purse, unlike the iPad?

And looking further in the future, Chen talks about recent credible rumors that the Apple TV may be getting a software overhaul to run iOS, the same operating system that powers iPhones and iPads. Such a change would pose interesting implications for videogames, TV apps and more.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our mugs, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds.

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Jul 08

IRiver Overprices New Wi-Fi Story E-Reader

Posted in: e-readers, tablets, Today's Chili

IRiver, a loser in the war between the iPod and All Other MP3 Players, has added a Wi-Fi e-reader to its smart Story range. The new Story is now on sale at the UK bookstore WHSmith, and will link up with WHSmith’s own e-book store.

Like iRiver’s old media players, the Story offers a lot of features not found elsewhere. In addition to decent format support (EPUB, PDF, TXT, FB2 and DJVU) it also displays comic-book sin the CBZ format, although of course you can’t view them in color on the grayscale 800 x 600 e-ink screen. You can also record voice-memos, listen to music (MP3, WMA and OGG) and slide in an SD card of up to 32GB (it also has 2GB on-board storage).

The big problem is the price. In a world where you pay $150 for big-brand e-books from Sony and Barnes and Noble, and even the Kindle is under $200, the Story costs way too much. The RRP is £250, which translates to an astonishing $380, or the price of the new black Kindle DX. Good luck with that.

Store page [WHSmith. Thanks, James!]

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