Texas Instruments is AWOL from Windows RT fray
The Windows RT tablet entries are piling up and expected to make their debuts on Oct. 26 along with Windows 8. But one of the original ARM-based chip manufacturers has turned into a no-show. Without comment or any public confirmation that I can find, Texas Instruments simply isn't on the map.
Here are the Windows RT tablets I'm expecting to see on Oct. 26:
- The Asus Vivo Tab RT, which uses the Nvidia Tegra 3
- The Dell XPS 10, which uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
- The Microsoft Surface RT, which is widely rumored to use the Nvidia Tegra 3
- The Samsung ATIV Tab, which uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
I haven't yet seen an official announcement from Lenovo, but there have been rumors for months that it will ship a Windows RT tablet with an Nvidia chip around General Availability time. Read more...
Microsoft report confirms Surface tablet will ship Oct. 26
Microsoft Surface tablets will go on sale on Oct. 26, the same day that Windows 8 becomes available, the company disclosed in a 10-K report filed on July 26 with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Pricing for the Surface tablets, which run Windows 8 or Windows RT, wasn't disclosed. Microsoft didn't respond to a request for comment on the 10-K report or its tablet pricing plans on Monday.
In the 10K filing, Microsoft said, "The next version of our operating system, Windows 8, will be generally available on October 26, 2012. At that time, we will begin selling the Surface, a series of Microsoft-designed and manufactured hardware devices." Read more...
Microsoft acknowledges Surface may trigger OEM hostility
Microsoft yesterday confirmed what most analysts and company watchers had concluded last month when the firm unveiled its own tablet, that it risks alienating the computer makers which account for the bulk of Windows sales.
In a document submitted Thursday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft acknowledged the potential problem. "Our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform," Microsoft said in the 10-K filed for the second calendar quarter of 2012.
The New York Times' Bits blog first reported on Microsoft's SEC filing. Read more...
Microsoft’s Surface proves software is dead
Did Microsoft finally get the memo on software licensing? While Microsoft's legal department continues to believe that software licensing is the industry's best business model, its mobile team now acknowledges that software is just one piece of an overall product, and not even the part that consumers buy.
With the launch of its end-to-end Microsoft-designed Surface tablet, Microsoft has declared what much of the rest of the industry already knows: software is dead.
Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady best explains this come-to-Jobs moment for Microsoft. As O'Grady points out: "The market has not generated a large technology vendor oriented around selling software in twenty-two years," as companies like Facebook, Google, Red Hat, and more have learned to sell services based upon or built around software. But the software itself? Free. Read more...
iPad 3 may be nearly impossible to find
Hype is at a fever pitch for the iPad 3. With less than a week until Apple pulls back the curtain at the event, we’re probably only a couple of weeks away until the tablet goes on sale. It’s going to sell in record numbers, and we’d know this even if older iPads weren’t being traded in at unprecedented rates.
There may be one big problem with this though: there just won’t be enough iPads to go around. According to people with inside information at DigiTimes, those fancy new Retina Display LCDs may be in short supply until the second quarter of 2012.
When added to what is looking like unprecedented demand, this could make the iPad 3 an extremely hard-to-get product. This isn’t out of the norm for Apple releases, as store shelves are often bare for the first few weeks to months of a new product’s lifecycle. But the iPad 3 release could take this hard-to-get nature to a new level.
Face it: everyone is going to want that Retina Display. Apple will wow us at next Wednesday’s event, and people who don’t even use electronic devices will be asking you about that Retina Display. Owners of two generations of iPads will be pawning their old slates and looking to snag a shiny new iPad 3. But there won’t be enough for everyone. It’s going to be insanity.
Much will hinge on whether Apple takes pre-orders for the new tablet. The company typically does for new products, but there were no pre-orders for last year’s iPad 2 release. If there are pre-orders available, we’d recommend finding out the exact time that they begin (we’ll let you know here at Geek) and set your alarm. Call in from work if you have to, just get that pre-order in asap. It may be the only way that you’ll have an iPad 3 in your hand before April.
If there are no pre-orders, then prepare for a mad rush that will make Black Friday look like a leisurely stroll through the park.
(Source: geek.com)
Samsung wins against Apple in the Netherlands on tablet design
The Court of Appeal in The Hague has ruled that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is sufficiently different from Apple's European design patent that the tablet can remain on sale in the Netherlands.
Samsung welcomed Tuesday's ruling, which affirmed an August 2011 ruling that the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is distinctive and does not infringe Apple's intellectual property rights, a spokesman said via email. The ruling again demonstrates that Apple's products simply do not warrant the intellectual property protections that it believes they should have, he added.
One of Apple's core legal claims against Samsung is that its rival copied the design of Apple's products. Apple has argued that it's no coincidence that Samsung's latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. Read more...
Samsung scores victory against Apple in Germany
The changes Samsung Electronics has made to its Galaxy Tab 10.1 are enough so that it is no longer a copy of Apple's iPad, a judge at the district court in Dsseldorf, Germany, said on Thursday.
The court blocked German sales of the original version of Samsung's 10-inch tablet in September, after Apple argued that Samsung's product looked too much like the iPad. To circumvent that ruling, Samsung modified the appearance of the tablet to create the Galaxy Tab 10.1N.
However, Apple still felt Samsung was copying its hit tablet, and last month filed a motion to block the Galaxy Tab 10.1N, as well. Read more...
Hands on: Asus Transformer Prime — the world’s first quad-core tablet
Man -- what a month it's been for Android.
First, we had the introduction of Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, and its accompanying Galaxy Nexus flagship phone. Now, another mobile tech first is about to drop into our lives.
The new Asus Transformer Prime tablet is officially set to launch later this month -- on the week of December 19 in the U.S., according to Asus. The Transformer Prime is the world's first quad-core tablet, and armed with Nvidia's new Tegra 3 processor, it pushes portable touch-based computing to powerful new heights.
Processing chops aside, the Transformer Prime has plenty to offer -- both as a straight-forward tablet and as a keyboarded PC-like device. The Transformer Prime, like Asus's first-generation Transformer, is built to connect with a custom docking accessory that effectively turns the tablet into a laptop. Unlike its predecessor, however, the Transformer Prime is sleek, thin, and oozing with electronic-style sexiness. Read more...
Unboxing the First Quad-Core Android Tablet
It's a tablet! It's a laptop! It's the first quad-core, Nvidia Tegra 3-powered mobile monster. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is most definitely here. We unboxed it at PCMag Labs, and we'll have a full review later today.
The Transformer Prime goes on sale in about two weeks for $499 (32GB) and $599 (64GB). The keyboard dock, which is almost a must here, costs an additional $149.
Besides being built around a powerful quad-core 1.4GHz processor, tablet has an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 10-inch, 1280-by-800 super bright "super-IPS" LCD screen, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Read more...
Kinect-like device makes everything a touchscreen
What would it look if you didn't have to carry around a phone, tablet or other touchscreen gadget to tend to your email and other on-the-go computing needs?
A team at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University have an idea. The researchers have unveiled a project in the works that uses a Kinect-like camera to transform any surface into a touchscreen.
And I do mean any surface — a piece of paper, a wall, a table, your hand, your arm ...
The proof-of-concept prototype — called OmniTouch — is a wearable camera/projection system that "allows the wearer to use their hands, arms and legs as graphical, interactive surfaces," according to a write up at the Microsoft Research website. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBCUniversal.)
The OmniTouch prototype my be rather large and bulky - not to mention downright goofy looking - at this stage, but researchers say that miniturizing it would not be difficult.
"Today’s mobile computers provide omnipresent access to information ... It is undeniable that they have forever changed the way we work, play and interact," the team writes in the OmniTouch research paper here. "However, mobile interaction is far from solved. Diminutive screens and buttons mar the user experience, and otherwise prevent us from realizing their full potential." Read more...
Three questions that could put out Amazon’s Fire
A US congressman is pushing Amazon for details of its cloud-based browsing, Silk, specifically asking what data the company is gathering and how it intends to make use of it.
In an open letter (2-page PDF/263KB, short and to the point) Congressman Edward Markey asks Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos specifically what information is being collected by Silk, how Amazon intends to make use of it, and how the company will go about ensuring users have given explicit permission to have their behaviour monitored in this way.
That last point intimates that such permission should be explicitly requested, while Amazon was probably hoping that the usual user assent to unread Terms & Conditions would suffice. Read more...
Sony to ship first Android-based tablet in September
Sony's Android Honeycomb-based single and dual-screen tablets will be called Tablet S and Tablet P, and will cost 479 euros (US$690) and 599 euros (US$860), the company said Wednesday at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin.
The two tablets were announced in April and have until now been known as the S1 and the S2.
Like so many other vendors of Android-based tablets, Sony hopes it can make a dent in Apple's sales of the iPad and grab a piece of the growing tablet market.
Sony's products take the tablet sector to a new level, according to Howard Stringer, the company's chairman, CEO and president. Read more...
Hands on: Norton Mobile Security protects your Android phone
Worried by the spate of news stories about malware targeting Android phones and tablets? There's a way to get some peace of mind: Symantec's just-released Norton Mobile Security, which promises the same type of security for Android devices that its big brother counterpart offers for PCs. (The app was previously available as a beta.)
Norton Mobile Security comes in free and for-pay versions. The free version (which Symantec labels Lite) includes an anti-malware module and an anti-theft module that lets you remotely lock an Android device if it's lost or stolen.
The malware scan is simple and straightforward. You can scan manually or have Norton scan on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. You can also scan your SD card -- an option that's turned off by default because it may slow down your system during the scanning operation. On my Droid X, it took 15 seconds to scan normally, and one minute and 56 seconds to scan the SD card as well -- not, in my opinion, a significant difference, and a small price to pay for more complete protection. Read more...
Apple’s device dominance drives e-book price-fixing lawsuit
A Seattle law firm has targeted Apple in an e-book price-fixing lawsuit partly because of the company's dominance in smartphone and tablet sales, the firm's managing director said.
Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Seattle law firm, has filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of conspiring with five top publishers to illegally fix the prices of e-books. The publishers named in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, are HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
Apple's strong market share in the smartphone and tablet businesses gave it the power to drive up e-book prices across the industry, including at rival seller Amazon.com, said Steve Berman, managing director at Hagens Berman. "Apple was the catalyst to all of this," he said Wednesday. Read more...
Survey: Tablets used widely for business
Your employees' promises that they'll use a company-issued tablet for business purposes is probably on the up and up, according to the research firm Social Nuggets.
Business activity accounts for more than 25 percent of all activity on Apple iPads and BlackBerry PlayBooks, while it accounts for just under 20 percent of all activity on Android tablets, research by Social Nuggets shows. Games and shopping where also popular activities on tablets, as shopping accounted for 23 percent of the activity on Android tablets and games accounted for 17.5 percent of activity on iPads. Read more...