Despite the flood of tablet debuts this year, Google’s Android slates aren’t taking off. It’s not the hardware—in part, it’s the lack of tablet-optimized apps. Google wants that to change. Read the comments on this post
Posts Tagged ‘tablet’
Google rallies tablet troops with app workshops
August 5th, 2011 
admin 
Posted in Tech News 
Tags: article, Gadgets, lack, news, Programming, rest, tablet, tablet-debuts, year. 
Comments OffAndroid 3.2 on the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer: Tested
August 5th, 2011 admin Back in June, Google announced that Android 3.2 would be arriving beginning this summer for Honeycomb tablets. Motorola, being Google's launch partner for Honeycomb, was first to get the update. Next on the list was ASUS and as of late last week, Eee Pad owners in the US started getting their version of Android 3.2. I updated my Eee Pad over the weekend and the process went seamlessly. As long as you've got more than 25% left on your battery you're good to go. If you haven't updated your Eee Pad since the launch you'll need two updates to get to 3.2. The 3.2 update on the Eee Pad brings about a new splashscreen as well as a TegraZone app. TegraZone is NVIDIA's custom marketplace that leverages the Android Market. TegraZone is used exclusively for games that are optimized for NVIDIA's Tegra 2 SoC. The update itself is relatively minor from a feature standpoint. Read on for our quick look and performance analysis of Android 3.2 on the Eee Pad Transformer.
Posted in Tech News Tags: battery, honeycomb, launch-partner, process, started-getting, summer, tablet, update-itself, Weekend Comments OffThe HTC Flyer Review
July 1st, 2011 admin This is HTC's first tablet and unlike the Android tablets that launched last year, it doesn't suck. At the same time, unlike those that came out this year – it doesn't run Honeycomb. You see, NVIDIA was Google's target partner for Honeycomb and Qualcomm was pretty behind on porting the OS to its hardware. As a result the only Honeycomb tablets on the market today use Tegra 2. Qualcomm is a minority shareholder in HTC and as a result the Taiwanese manufacturer tends to only ship Qualcomm SoCs in its products. With the NVIDIA option pretty much off the table, so was Honeycomb. Yet HTC clearly saw it as very important to deliver a tablet this year. I'm getting close to overusing this quote but I will never forget what AMD's Eric Demers told me : the best way to lose a fight is to not show up. The tablet battle has only just begun and only through tireless iteration will we see clear leaders emerge, so not showing up to this early fight isn't an option for most of the players. If you don't have the hardware platform to ship Honeycomb on time and all non-Honeycomb tablets seem to fail horribly, what is a company left to do? Try something different of course. Read on for our review of the HTC Flyer!
Posted in Tech News Tags: honeycomb, leaders-emerge, qualcomm, Review, tablet, taiwanese, target-partner, very-important, year. Comments OffAcer Iconia A500 – Honeycomb on a Budget
July 1st, 2011 admin Next in our series of Honeycomb tablet reviews is the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The A500 was the second Honeycomb tablet to go on sale, and is one of four on the market at present, all of which are very similar. They share basic specs—10.1” 1280×800 displays, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 underhood, 1GB LPDDR2 RAM, 16-64GB onboard NAND, front and rear facing cameras with HD video capture, basic wireless connectivity options, and stock versions of Android 3.0/3.1 Honeycomb (albeit with different preloaded software packages). The hardware similarities makes things like design and price that much more important, and the latter is where Acer seemed to have an edge. Long a sales leader in the budget notebook market, Acer jumped into the tablet game with a price advantage—the Iconia A500 came in at $449, in comparison to $499 for the iPad and $599 for the WiFi-edition Motorola Xoom (though it is worth mentioning that the Xoom comes with twice as much onboard storage as the Iconia and iPad). ASUS released the $399 Eee Slate Transformer soon afterwards, but supply issues meant that the Acer was the cheapest readily available Honeycomb tablet for some time. More recently, some retailers have dropped the prices of the Iconia, with MacMall selling it on their eBay store at one point for just $379. On paper, that’s a screaming deal, but it's decent even at MSRP.
Posted in Tech News Tags: basic-wireless, cheapest, does-the-acer, ebay, iconia, notebook-market, price-advantage, tablet, wifi Comments OffToshiba Thrives in the Tablet Market
June 19th, 2011 admin We had an opportunity to meet with representatives from Toshiba this afternoon to talk about their upcoming consumer hardware, but while the majority of it is still under NDA (including some very exciting notebook refreshes), one of the biggest announcements is ready to go today: the Toshiba Thrive, their entry into the tablet market.
Posted in Tech News Tags: afternoon, including-some, still-under, tablet, the-majority, their-upcoming, toshiba, upcoming Comments OffSamsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Review: The Sleekest Honeycomb Tablet
June 19th, 2011 admin I remember standing in the audience of Samsung's CTIA press conference as it announced, for the first time ever, pricing and availability of its unreleased Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 before shipping. The smartphone (and early tablet) industries have gone this long without having to really compete based on price, mostly because in North America the carriers subsidize much of the cost. If every device costs $199 under contract, why get carried away with details like how much it actually costs? The Galaxy Tab however was playing in a different space. While Apple ultimately caved to the pressures of carrier subsidies with the iPhone, the iPad remains completely unsubsidized and its followers buy it by the millions. The magical price point is $499 and it was at Samsung's CTIA press conference that it announced it would be matching Apple's $499 price point, and even dropping slightly below it for the 8.9-inch version. At the time it seemed like a bold move, enough to give Honeycomb the fighting chance it needed. The Galaxy Tab would be thinner and lighter than the iPad 2 but competitively priced as well. This wouldn't be another Xoom. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (top) vs. ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (bottom) Then ASUS showed up. At $399, the Eee Pad Transformer not only offered a different usage model to the iPad and Galaxy Tab, it brought a lower price tag as well. Availability has been slim thanks to component shortages, but with the Eee Pad selling for $399 the Galaxy Tab at $499 all of the sudden seems overpriced. Based on specs alone you'd be right. Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 has the same NVIDIA Tegra 2 tablet SoC inside, 1GB of LPDDR2 and 16GB of NAND on-board. You get a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 PLS display and 802.11n WiFi support.
Posted in Tech News Tags: apple, based-on-price, based-on-specs, drawing, Galaxy, iPhone, north, north-america, samsung-galaxy, tablet, time, transformer Comments OffHP webOS TouchPad tablet makes surprise appearance at Computex
June 6th, 2011 admin HP’s planned iPad killer, the HP TouchPad, popped up among the booths at the Computex show in Taipei this week, and an enterprising reporter got video of the tablet performing a few different tasks. While the video doesn’t exhaustively show the tablet’s functionality, it does demonstrate that webOS writ large is a pretty sight to behold. SanDisk, the company that supplies storage for HP’s devices, had a TouchPad on display at its booth at Computex. A SanDisk representative took a 16GB version of the tablet through tasks including e-mail navigation, the multitasking card display, and watching a movie. The e-mail client uses a three-column layout, and an e-mail open in the third column can be swiped to the left to give it more room to display, similar to the iPad Twitter client. Video playback looked smooth, and the SanDisk rep showed off the two stereo speakers along one of the long sides of the TouchPad. The operating system looked pretty snappy overall, though it was difficult to tell at certain points if the rep was trying to tap or scroll the screen and the gesture didn’t register. The UI looked like it could use a little scaling up—in the card view, the tablet only had four app icons in the launch bar (the same number as the tiny HP Veer) though it clearly has room for a few more. What looks like a small microphone and a front-facing camera occupy either end of the TouchPad’s bezel, but those features aren’t discussed in the video. Official details on sizing and pricing of the TouchPad are still scarce, though a
Posted in Tech News Tags: Gadgets, little-scaling, playback-looked, show-the-tablet, tablet, tell-at-certain, Touch, touchpad Comments Off
