At IDF this week, Intel showed off a demo of Nuance’s Dragon Assist software running on an Ultrabook. Dragon Assist, currently in beta, is a Siri-like approach to PC voice control. Using natural words and phrases you can ask the computer to do a number of tasks. The demo that Intel showed on stage was quite impressive — it was fast, accurate, and potentially quite useful. But would you use it?

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6Ghz of Krait CPU in one platform!

We just had a demo, the first, of Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon platform, the APQ 8064 which contains four Krait Cores running up to 1.5Ghz. There’s a new graphics module coming too and that’s based around an Adreno 320.

I am certainly not qualified to talk in-depth at the Xperia Play gaming experience but I was certainly quite excited to see the hardware controls and game quality. In the video you hear me talking to a Sony Ericsson representative about the product. We discuss battery life, pricing, availability, get a gaming demo and take a look round the device.

The Xperia play runs Android 2.3 on a Snapdragon 1Ghz CPU (MSM8255with Adreno 205 GPU) with a 4 inch ‘Reality’ display at a true 16:9, 854 x 480 resolution. Note that Android 2.3 brought in some touch responsiveness extensions and enhancements.

What’s important to me is that another major company is now switching to the ARM/Android chassis for another product category which means Android is now in phones, tablets, media players, cameras, gaming devices, TVs and smartbooks. What’s category do you think Google are looking at for it’s next ‘device-specific ‘ branch of Android? Set-top-boxes is something I’ve been keeping an eye on.

Have a look at the awesome Atomic web browser for the iPhone and iPad. The app costs 99 cents in the app store and it’s a universal app, meaning you pay for it once and you get the iPhone and the iPad version. While the browser has a lot of great features, such as easy user agent spoofing, the feature that I like the most is the way that it handles tabs. It’s much faster and much more intuitive than Safari. Atomic web has become my new browser on my iPhone and iPad. Very much worth the 99 cent asking price.

Google somewhat quietly released Google Reader Play early last month. Reader Play is essentially an alternate way to view Google Reader and is designed to present interesting and relevant items in a simple and pleasing way — it seems particularly suited to large screened devices. While several people, upon release, noted that Reader Play would probably work great on large TVs, the first thing that came to my mind was how well it could work with the iPad. Of course, that was only a theory because we didn’t have an iPad at the time for testing. Now that the iPad has been released, we can give it a try.

To my delight, Reader Play works pretty darn well on the iPad. Part of this is because YouTube videos can be played directly inside Reader Play, without having to launch out to the external viewer. Note that this isn’t Flash, it’s simply the iPad recognizing the video as a YouTube video and playing it with it’s own special YouTube player right inside the frame. Have a look at Google Reader Play in action on the iPad in the video below:

Here is a short demo of chromeTouch, a Google Chrome extension which enables touchscreen and inertia scrolling within Google Chrome. Works great if you’ve been waiting to find an alternative to Firefox and the Grab and Drag addon!

Find chromeTouch here.

I also mentioned another extension that I added to increase the smoothness of the scrolling, that is called Chromium Wheel Smooth Scroller.

I know its been a while, but I’ve been waiting to get my hands on a full tablet PC so that I could do better demos than simply using my Sony VAIO UX180 and showing you what’s happening using a monitor as I have done in the past. Hopefully you will agree that the format of this video demo is better than those that I did previously!

But beside all of that, have a look at the Crayon Physics Deluxe video demo.

The game works great with touchscreens and there is even a demo that you can try before purchasing:

• Official Crayon Physics website
• Download the Crayon Physics Deluxe Demo

The idea of the game is that you are drawing with a crayon, and your drawings become physical objects that interact with the rest of the crayon based levels . The goal is to get the red ball to touch the star, then you get to move on to the next level. There is more than 70 levels to complete in the full game. The game was also the grand prize winner of the Independent Games Festival in 2008!

As we await news of the supposed imminent release of the Always Innovating Touchbook [Portal page], I wanted to bring attention to a demo of the forthcoming Touchbook from a product launch conference called Demo. The demonstration itself is actually a few months old, and maybe it was just me, but it seems like this video demonstration of the hardware didn’t get much notice. Below we can watch the Touchbook being demonstrated by the founder of Always Innovating, Grégoire Gentil.

It is interesting to note that although this seems to be somewhat early hardware, it has the same red top that is purportedly going to accompany the first batch of units that are due to be released this month.