Chippy just showed you how thin the AT200 is (7.7mm!) and now we’ve got full specs to share:

• Android 3.2 Honeycomb
• 10.1 inch capacitive LCD touchscreen @ 1280×800
• TI OMAP 4430 CPU @ 1.2GHz
• 1GB of RAM
• 5MP rear camera, 2MP front camera
• Up to 64GB of in-built memory
• Micro USB, Micro SD, Micro HDMI
• WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth (unspecified specification), and GPS
• Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer (digital compass), ambient light sensor
• Stereo speakers
• Rated for 8 hours of video playback

Nothing groundbreaking here, but this is in line with modern tablets and it is pushing the limits of thickness and weight which is sure to be appreciated by users.

Sascha of NetbookNews joins Chippy to discuss something odd; Samsung is removing the Galaxy Tab 7.7 from the show floor.

As you know, Chippy is our man on the ground at IFA 2011, and he’s been keeping us up to date with everything that’s been going on at the show. He and Sascha got together briefly to theorize about what’s going on with the Tab 7.7, listen below:

Update: Slashgear has more info and photos of the covered-up Tab 7.7 branding:

Hands-on with the Archos 80 G9 [specs sheet]. Overview of Archos’ new G9 tablets here.

We’re really looking forward to Archos’ new G9 tablets, their inexpensive price and unique features are going make them a welcomed addition to the world of Honeycomb tablets.

As Charbax of ARMdevices.net shows us, the TI OMAP 4460 found in the G9 tablets will run at different speeds depending upon the capacity (and the price) of the tablet that you purchase.

When Archos first announced the Archos 80 G9 and the 101 G9, they were said to eventually be available in 8/16/250GB capacities, while other specs would remain the same. However, at IDF they are now showing that the 8GB variant of both models will run at 1GHz instead of 1.5GHz.

The lower capacity makes sense to bring down the price even further and offer additional choice to customers. What I don’t quite understand is the lower clock speed. As far as I can tell, the 8GB model of the 80 and 101 is still running the same CPU as the 16/250GB models. Feel free to correct me on this, but I can’t think of any additional fee that would be incurred to use a different clock speed on the CPU, so I have to wonder why they are lowering the speed on the 8GB variants.

My best theory is that Archos wants the more expensive models to be the most appealing, and give an additional incentive for going with one of the higher capacity units. If that’s the case, I can’t help but feel like they’re artificially giving users of the 8GB variants the shaft, though I’m hoping there is something less dubious behind it.

Archos confirmed US pricing for the 16GB variants of the 80 and 101 back when they were first announced; $270 and $349 respectively, and we should see the other models officially priced soon. Charbax has the official EU prices for all models here. The G9 80 and 101 will become available at the end of September, according to Archos.

Chippy is on the IDF show floor and we’ll see if he can get this question about the CPU speed answered for us.

A few minutes after the Acer Aspire S3 demo devices were brought to the stand I managed to get some hands on. Check out the number of people crowded round the devices! This is important for Acer as they bellieve its the next generation of PC device growth and it was clear from the press conference that they are betting a lot of this category.

The Acer S3 will launch this month in key countries. US was mentioned as one of those countries. Core i3, i5 and i7 variants will be available and prices range €799 to €1999

As we move forward with Ultrabooks, its obviously going to be harder for manufacturers to be different. It might mean that the price becomes the most important factor, at least at the low-end of the price scale.

We’ve learnt that the Asus UX21 and Asus UX31 will officially launch in a few weeks with prices ranging up from €799

At an Intel event yesterday I managed to get some hands-on with the Asus UX21. More testing is needed but given the potential pricing, this could turn a lot of heads toward the ‘Ultrabook’ brand.

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As you probably know, Chippy is in the trenches at IDF as we speak type. In addition to a solid hands-on with the devices, he’s also doing testing and keeping us up to date with some audio logs. Let’s first have a look at the blazing speed of the Galaxy Tab 7.7 as indicated by the Sunspider benchmark:

As you can see, the Tab 7.7 scores a ridiculously fast 1440.4ms on Sunspider which actually beats out the Onkyo TW Windows Slate that I tested a few months back by about 27%.

This score, which is thanks to a fast dual-core processor and the latest build of Android, puts the Tab 7.7 at the number 1 position on our Sunspider benchmark chart:

Chippy faily notes that Chrome has improved in performance since then so just I ran Sunspider on a fairly modern Atom based netbook (1.6GHz HP Mini 311 with Nvidia ION) and the scores are comparable with the Mini 311 scoring 1336ms, putting the Tab 7.7 only about 8% away from that score.

This is mighty impressive; here we’ve got the Tab 7.7 which is rated for around 10 hours of battery life, not to mention much longer on standby, and it has browser performance similar to a much larger netbook that has considerably less runtime. Intel might be in trouble…

Chippy Chimes In

Chippy was able to make a little time to share with us a quick audio log with some thoughts on the Tab 7.7 and the Galaxy Note. I’ll let you listen for yourself, but I will say that I share many of his sentiments:

Today at IFA, Samsung announced the Galaxy Note, a new phone with a ridiculously large 5.3 inch screen and a stylus.

You may have seen my speculation the other day that the Galaxy Note might have actually been something exciting, like a sliding smartbook, but it seems I may be the only person who realizes that bigger isn’t better when it comes to Android smartphone screens.

We’ll get to being critical about the device in just a moment, have no doubt. For the time being though, let’s get some specs out there:

• Android 2.3
• 1.4GHz dual-core CPU
• 5.3 inch Super AMOLED display @ 1280×800
• Front and rear cameras @ 2MP and 8MP respectively
• HSPA+ connectivity
• 1080p recording and playback
• GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, and WiFi a/b/g/n
• 16/32GB built-in memory and a MicroSD slot for storage expansion
• 2500 mAh batter

The stylus is active which should make for smooth and natural feeling digital writing.

It seems like Samsung designed this device to straddle the line between tablet and phone, but I find that to be a flawed concept from the start, tantamount to UMPCs that came in at a thumb-board-sized keyboards but with keys designed for touch-typing!

To me, the 5.3 inch size of the Galaxy Note’s screen means that the device is too big to be an ergonomically designed phone, but smaller than someone would want for a tablet.

As for handwriting input, the Galaxy Note isn’t going to be a useful device if it tries to pull an HTC Flyer and launch a product that has the technology to write on the screen, but no proven usage scenarios.

Don’t get me wrong, in my day-to-day activities, I use an HP Tablet PC and I love the touchscreen for digital inking. The difference is that, in Windows, the digital inking experience is built-in at an OS level (and even then it is still criticized). The Galaxy Note, on the other hand, comes with an OS (Android 2.3) which has no core support for digital inking input everything having to do with handwriting at this point is either proprietary or third-party. I mean, come on! Look at the press shot at the top of this post. Is this really how Samsung things people would use something like this… to draw constellations on a picture on their homescreen and annotate it with some stupid text? There are far more useful ways to use written input, but it looks like no one has figured them out yet on Android.

Naturally, Samsung says that they’ll be including some apps specific for pen use, but it’s yet to be seen if they include any truly useful functionality, or just silly proof-of-concept apps like the ability to annotate screenshots. I’ll be happily wrong if Samsung built some really useful functionality out of the digital inking ability of the Galaxy Note, but I don’t see it happening.

The only points the Galaxy Note will see from me is that the device actually has a built-in stylus silo, so you won’t have to carry it around separately in your pocket. Oh and the Super AMOLED display is likely to look really good!

That’s my take anyway. What do you think, would the Galaxy Note be useful in your life?

Pricing and carrier availability have yet to be announced, but we’ll update as we hear more.

Update: Hands-on video!