I love asking companies if the timing of events is on purpose or purely coincidental. Not only do they almost always say that it’s purely coincidental, but they often try to claim that didn’t even realize a rival was also doing something when they made their plans. Sure.
Next week will feature another such situation. Earlier this week, News Corp. and Apple sent out press invites for an event to unveil the new iPad-only app, The Daily. And then this evening, we’ve just received an invite to a Google event to show off the latest version of Android, Honeycomb. The one meant for tablets. And guess what? They’re on the same day.
Sure, the events are on different sides of the country (though word is that News Corp./Apple had originally wanted to host their’s in the Bay Area too). And as such, the iPad event will be slightly earlier than the Android event (8 AM PT versus 10 AM PT). That doesn’t matter. The key is that controlling the news that day will be paramount for both sides. And Android just press-blocked the iPad.
The events are timed and situated in such a way that it would be absolutely impossible for a journalist with invites to each event to go to both. And while Google is being nice enough to host a live stream on YouTube (something which News Corp./Apple will almost for sure not do), it will still be a pain to extensively cover both. You’ll basically have to choose.
Normally, it would be all iPad next Wednesday. Now it’s likely to be more Android-controlled. And don’t think there’s nothing to the fact that Google is showing off a “taste” of Android shortly before the iPad 2 is expected to be unveiled.
Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple…
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Our list of the best Android tablets in the world - regularly updated
If you're looking for a tablet and don't fancy an iPad, then Android is the way to go: while Windows tablets are on the horizon, Android ones are here, they work and they've usually been tweaked to include finger-friendly interfaces too.
We've gone from zero Android tablets to stacks of the things in a very short space of time, and inevitably some are better than others.
Some have ten-inch screens, others seven and some just five, and there are big differences in battery life, processing power and on-board RAM. So which tablets are the most tempting? Let's find out.
Samsung Galaxy Tab
On sale: Now
Samsung's tablet becomes much more attractive thanks to heavy discounting: the first price above is from Tesco Direct, although the 3G model is still a good bit more expensive. It's a decent bit of kit let down by sluggish web browsing, and we're not convinced 7-inch tablets work as phones.
The Viewsonic Viewpad 7 is exactly the same, albeit slightly more expensive than the Linx Commtiva N700 - and confusingly, Viewsonic is marketing it as a smartphone. It's a terrible smartphone but it's a fairly competent 7-inch Android tablet: its 600MHz processor isn't really fast enough for Flash though, not to mention recent Android releases.
The Vega offers a lot of power for very little cash: a ten-inch, 1024x600 touchscreen, a dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor and a 6.5 hours of video playback isn't bad for just under £250. Storage is tight, though - you get a half-gig of flash storage, supplemented by a 4GB microSD card) - and the OS is Android 2.2. Flash Player has been pulled due to certification issues, but an update should fix that later in the year.
One of the most interesting Android tablets won't be cheap: online prices are currently hovering around the £720 mark. For your cash you'll get a dual-core Tegra 2 and a 10.1", 1280x800 display; you can also play full HD via HDMI. The Xoom has 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage (plus an SD card slot), twin cameras, Wi-Fi and optional 3G. Motorola claims 10 hours of video-watching power.
The eminently capable and exceptionally small Dell Streak 5 has been around for a while, but it's about to be joined by the more powerful Dell Streak 7 (7-inch) and Dell Streak 10 (10-inch) versions. Where the Dell Streak 5 runs a Snapdragon processor, its bigger siblings will be packing dual-core Tegra processors. All models boast Gorilla Glass, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Flash 10.1 support.
Asus has not one, not two, but three interesting Android tablets. The Eee Pad Transformer has a full-sized keyboard dock, the Eee Pad Slider has a slide-out keyboard, and the Eee Pad Memo has no keyboard at all. Bigger Eee Pads have Tegra 2s inside, while the Memo has a 1.2GHz Snapdragon.
Could the LG Optimus Pad have a 3D display? That's what the rumours say, although they also predict a £250 price tag. One or the other is possible, but not both. 3D or no 3D there's a dual-core Tegra 2 and an 8.9" display.
Take one fairly standard Android tablet and add a dash of Creative's famous audio flair. The result? Something with "pure Android audio", which offers high quality wireless audio via Bluetooth and pretty nifty sound when you use headphones. It's an older tablet, however, which means Android 2.1.
We called the original Viewpad 10 a stinker, so what about its successor? It runs Android 2.2 with its own Tap overlay, there's a 1GHz processor inside, and there's a very useful option to give each family member their own account. We wish the iPad had that. The 10s is a vast improvement over its predecessor, although we'll reserve final judgement until we know the price.
Everyone knows they're building it, but nobody knows what they're building. That hasn't stopped the rumour factory, of course, which predicts a Tegra 2, 32GB of storage, 2GB of RAM and a 1280x720 touchscreen in Q1 or Q2 this year.
A UK release date still hasn't been confirmed, but some overseas customers are getting their pre-ordered Adams this week. The Adam promises a "revolutionary" 10.1-inch display offering 1,024x600 with a sunlight-friendly e-paper mode, and the innards are pretty decent too: the processor is a dual-core 1GHz Tegra, there's 1GB of RAM and you can choose from 16GB or 32GB of storage, expandable via MicroSD. Claimed battery life is 6 to 16 hours.
Lenovo makes nice laptops, so it's not a surprise that its LePad sounds... nice. There's a 10.1", 1280x800 capacitive touchscreen, a 1.3GHz Snapdragon, Wi-Fi, 3G and the ubiquitous Flash player. There's also a QWERTY-toting dock that turns it into a laptop. Which is nice.
Are you planning on buying one of Panasonic's 2011 TVs? If not then Panasonic's 4, 7 and 10-inch tablets aren't worth getting excited about. If you are though, things get more interesting: the tablets can control the TV or stream video from it, and you'll be able to watch replays on the tablet while the action continues on the big screen.
Toshiba's teasing us with a video for its new, unnamed tablet: we can see twin cameras, HDMI, mini USB and normal USB, an SD card slot and a swappable battery. So it'll probably weigh a ton. Here's hoping it doesn't suffer from the problems that plagued its predecessor, the Folio 100.
Acer has two Iconia tablets on the go: a 7-inch model with 1280x800 touchscreen, front-facing camera, dual-core processor, Wi-Fi and 3G, and a 10.1" model with HDMI, 1080p HD video playback, a gyroscope and the promise of console-class gaming. An April release suggests they'll be running Android 3.0.
Even though the focus of this blog at this point is mostly on the Android 2.1 update of the X10 family I have something else I would like to share with you.
There has also been lots of rumors around this and I just want to clarify what we’re working on and what to expect.
(I will continue posting information on the current SW-update roll-out after this!)
As many of you know, just before the release of the Xperia X10 we saw lots of discussions around any potential support for multi touch.
Myself and Sumit were then very clear on the fact that there were no plans of having X10 supporting multi touch and said so here on this blog mainly to not have you guys hoping for things that just wasn’t planned.
Since then, because of the huge reaction to this and the real desire for multi touch expressed by you the users, there has been lots of investigations going on and I now have some good news to disclose. We aim to enable multi touch (pinch zoom) in an over-the-air update for the X10. The timing for this update is still a bit work in progress but it will for most markets be during Q1 2011.
What has happened is that some brilliant engineers actually was able to change the driver and firmware for the touch digitizer to make some multi touch gestures work. We are still working on perfecting the user experience and I will keep you updated as work progresses.
I also want to be clear on what to expect from this feature. The digitizer in the X10 is not perfect when it comes to multi touch, there will as an example be situations like when the movement of the two fingers cross each other on the X- or Y-axis that could cause strange behavior. (There has been much online debating around what is “good” and “bad” Multi Touch in competitor phones and this is following the same lines.)
Therefore we also will not enable it everywhere but the current plan is to enable it for the following use-cases:
- Pinch/Zoom in the web browser.
- Pinch/Zoom in Google Maps.
Besides that there is also support in third party applications but because of the limitations on e.g. crossing axis there might be situations where it behaves strangely while it will work just fine for most use-cases.
The support is basically for gestures like pinch/zoom so don’t expect e.g. multi touch gaming with buttons pressed simultaneously on different parts of the screen to work.
Let me know if you have specific multi touch enabled apps you want me to test!
Below is a video where I show some of the use-cases and what to expect on a prototype SW in my X10.
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