Tablets

One More Tablet Gone; Can Microsoft Avoid the Same Fate?

image courtesy of BerryReporter Clinton recently wrote an opinion piece entitled, “As RIM Writes Off The Playbook, The Pressure is on Microsoft to Make a Complete Windows 8 Tablet“, in which he says: This morning the Wall Street Journal reported that RIM is taking a $485 million charge for their lackluster tablet, the Playbook. The charge comes by way of a markdown in the value of the massive inventor that RIM still has of the devices. It is a brutal and costly reminder that if you kinda-sorta-maybe-woulda-shoulda your tablet strategy, the price can be steep. Very steep. and The challenge facing Microsoft is that they are…

News & Features

Killing webOS Cost HP HOW MUCH?!? Also, HP Nabs #2 Tablet Spot for 2011!

Two interesting pieces of contrasting TouchPad news: one about failure and the other success. From AllThingsD, we get a snip from the recent HP earnings report specific to Palm, webOS and the impact of folding up that business on their results. Here is their quote from the earnings report: Non-GAAP earnings and operating profit information excludes after-tax costs of $3.3 billion, or $1.56 per diluted share, related to the wind down of HP’s webOS device business, impairment of goodwill and purchased intangible assets, amortization of purchased intangible assets, restructuring charges and acquisition-related charges.

News & Features

TruConnect Brings Cheap & Easy 3G to Your Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet!

Last month I reviewed the TruConnect ‘pay as you go’ mobile broadband solution, saying: TruConnect absolutely delivers on their claims of a simple device, easy setup and configuration, and clear pricing of as little as $4.99 per month. Beyond that, every person needs to make their own value judgement in terms of the data fees. For light or occasional use, you can get 250MB for less than $15 a month, but once you break 1GB of monthly data you might be better off with a full access plan. The good news is that you have no contract and no termination…

Gear Bits

HP TouchPad Go: The 7″ Tablet I Want … But Will Never Have!

This week you are going to see 95% of the small tablet news focused on the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, but there is another 7″ tablet device that we just got some more pictures of that will never hit the market – the HP TouchPad Go.

Reviews

Review: Asus EeePad Transformer

The tech press has maligned Android tablets. There just hasn’t been one that has caught the up to the iPad according to many people. That may soon change with tablets like the one I have, the Asus’s EeePad Transformer. Hardware Much of the hardware on the Android tablet front has eerily similar specs. Like most Android tablets that have a version of Honeycomb, the Transformer has an Nvidia Tegra 2, 1 GB of ram, 16 or 32 GB of Flash (mine has 16), WiFi (B,G and N supported), Bluetooth V2.1+EDR, HDMI out, MicroSD Slot, a 5 megapixel camera on the back and a…

Reviews

Android Powered Tablet Review: Vinci Tab, Early Learning System for Children

There is no denying that our kids are growing up in a constantly changing digital world. My two boys have developed the same connection with gadgets and digital devices as I have, only at a much younger age. I have been careful when turning them loose with my devices but often let them play with the iPad or iPhone, and they love it. Since they could barely walk, they have been able to use our IOS devices easily and without much instruction. While most of us remember the first time we used a TRS 80 or Apple IIe in school,…

News & Features

Kogan Launches 8″ and 10″ Android Tablets

As Michael pointed out this week, pricing of some upcoming tablets has shown that the manufacturers haven’t been listening. Some people want tablets, but most want iPads, and to get the average consumer interested, the price needs to be low enough to make it an impulse buy. Kogan’s new Android tablets look to fit the bill. Available in 8″ 800×600 (SVGA) and 10″ 1024×768 (XGA) models, the tablets come with Gingerbread 2.3 (no Honeycomb here, folks), a single core 1GHz Cortex A8 processor with 512MB RAM, 4GB built-in storage, microSD slot (up to 32GB can be added) HDMI output and…

Gear Bits

Unboxing the Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0 US Edition

I took advantage of a recent W00t deal, and I now have a US Edition of the Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0. This is the US edition, as opposed to the more common Asian/European version. Let’s take a look! Features • The 5-inch (12.7cm) display allows you browse full web pages and read small text without resizing the screen. The Galaxy S Wi-Fi 5.0 supports various video formats (DivX, Xvid, H.263, Ogg, MPEG4, Flac). It also delivers an impressive viewing experience on the large screen • SoundAlive maximizes the performance of Samsung mobile devices for real sound quality via Samsung…

Editorials, Reviews

How I Chose the Tablet for Me

Tablet computing is all the rage now. Microsoft coined it, Apple popularized it and there are many others including Microsoft itself that are vying for a piece of the large pie that Apple already owns. It isn’t the death of the PC, but I am convinced it’s a device almost everyone will eventually own. Some may replace their computer entirely with a tablet device, while others will just use it to augment the laptop or desktop they use. Either way, it’s the future and I’ve decided I need to look at getting one. Follow me along the journey of selecting my…

News & Features

Lenovo Gets Down to Business with the ThinkPad Tablet

One of the big surprises for me tonight at the Pepcom Holiday Spectacular! (we’ll have much more from this event over the next few days) was the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. The ThinkPad Tablet is the first tablet specifically designed for business settings. It has some great features, feels great in the hand and it has one more KILLER FEATURE that I’ll reveal at the end of the post. First, here’s what Lenovo has to say about their latest and greatest offering. ThinkPad Tablet Brings Android to Business: The ThinkPad Tablet combines the superior media and entertainment experience of the IdeaPad Tablet…

Editorials

The “Other” Reason the BlackBerry PlayBook Got No Play

I attended RIM’s rollout of the BlackBerry PlayBook and they were kind enough to give each of us in attendee one to take home and use. Since that time I have taken the device out of its box every week or so to play with it a bit. Unfortunately, after using it for a brief time back into the box it goes. Time and again this is what happens.

Reviews

Review: Acer Iconia Tab A100 7″ with Android Honeycomb – Everything Right & Wrong with Android Tablets

Recently the Acer Iconia A100 Android tablet went on sale, and I have had a couple of weeks to play around with one and formulate some opinions. Dan also grabbed one, and we had been chatting about the Iconia back and forth until he returned his. Even before I got the A100 there were a few things I had read about it that were troubling, and other things that had me quite excited! I wanted to document some of the great things about the tablet and latest version of the Android OS … and some things that make the moniker…

Editorials

When Is an Android Device Not an Android Device?

When the Grid 10 was announced by the ever-reliable Chandra Rathakrishnan last month, it was said to run Android apps but not be an Android device. This was later clarified to mean that it is actually an Android kernel running the show, but thoroughly skinned and possibly even forked to a version of Android incompatible with future Google-backed updates. We’ll see someday, maybe. Now TechCrunch is reporting that Amazon’s long-rumored tablet will be hitting the market in a couple months, running a completely forked Android kernel. This one is apparently pre-2.2 (how far pre is undefined) and has been so modified…

News & Features

Putting Android Tablet Sales In (Humorous) Perspective

The iPad is not yet 1.5 years old, and Android tablets are approaching their first anniversary. But while one product is mature and selling well, the other is still struggling to find success, and with some good reasons – the fragmentation that plagues Android smartphones is worse on tablete; app compatibility restrictions are often nonsensical; and the core design choices made are often counter-intuitive. Marco Arment, the creator of InstaPaper and Marco.org has put together an amusing look at how the sales of all Android tablets compare to sales of some obscure video game console ‘failures’. HP hasn’t released any…

Events

Sony Tries to Get in Shape for Selling Tablets, but Will You Buy its New Bod?

When Sony provided a sneak peek last week of the two new tablets it plans to launch later this year, it also offered a glimpse into the unspoken imperative it faces: Because it’s late to the game, trailing Apple by, um, years, and others, like Samsung, by months, its biggest hope to gain a toehold in the ever crowded field of similar devices is to do something different — really different. And different it’s done, as least so far as the second of its tablets is concerned — the one code-named Sony Tablet S2, a dual-screen clamshell device that bears…

Gear Bits

Unboxing the Toshiba Thrive Android 3.1 Tablet

Yeah, I did it. I picked up the new Toshiba Thrive Android 3.1 Honeycomb Tablet. I’m just starting to check it out, but here is a quick unboxing video. More later…

Gear Bits

Toshiba Thrive Tablet Gets a “Special” Sneak Peek Unboxing via YouTube

Image courtesy of Gizmodo If you’ve seen one unboxing video, then you’ve seen well….Unboxing videos are a great first look at a device but Toshiba is stepping it up with their latest Sneak Peek. I saw this first on my twitter timeline and after a few dozen RT’s I figured it was worth a look. The video steps out of the normal boundaries of unboxing and adds some serious creativity. Even though The actual device is not even shown in the video, it’s definitely worth two minutes of your life. The Thrive is Toshiba’s first Android tablet, and it has a…

Reviews

Android WiFi Tablet Review: The HTC Flyer and HTC Scribe Digital Pen

Judie: When I attended Mobile World Congress earlier this year, there was one device which stood out for me above all others — the HTC Flyer. The Flyer is an aluminum-bodied 7″ Android tablet; my introduction to it came while I was still carrying a Samsung Galaxy Tab daily, and I could not get over how much better the Flyer looked and how much more solidly built it felt. It was positively Apple-esque, and that is not a bad thing. Couple that with the matching aluminum digital pen which suddenly made note-taking and doodling seem like some long-lost table feature…

Editorials

Tablets Galore: A Quick Look at The iPad 2, HTC Flyer and Asus EEE Pad Transformer

I’ve been checking out a number of different tablets and, for a brief period, had more than usual at home at one time. Here’s a brief, biased look at three current offerings: one awesome, one quite impressive and one that did not impress at all. (Spoiler Alert/Disclaimer: the EEE Pad Transformer had not been updated to the Honeycomb 3.1 update that will be available tomorrow. It MAY improve some of the performance issues. No update, however, can fix the cheap plastic feel, the single microphone’s bad speech recognition performance and the tinny speakers.)

Editorials

The HTC Flyer: Mobile Computing Then and Now

The HTC Flyer has arrived. It is the latest device from HTC and their jump into the tablet market. This isn’t their first major move into the mobile computing world though. No, back when the UMPC was the big deal HTC brought out an innovative device that had the potential to take the world by storm. It didn’t but a quick look at the two of them together makes it clear: the Flyer is pretty much a direct descendant of… Oh just watch the video.

Gear Bits

The HTC Flyer Arrives …

Not much to say about it, as the picture says it all! The Best Buy WiFi version of the HTC Flyer has just arrived, and I can’t wait to start playing with it! Just thought I would share my excitement! =)

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