Engadget has apparently received a leaked internal Dell announcement, as well as a few images of more upcoming devices in the Dell ‘Mini’ family. We knew that Dell was planning more devices than just the Dell Mini 5 [product page], and now we’re getting our first look at the rest of the family which includes 7” and 10” slates. I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if these are renders of the same device. We’ll likely see some changes before they make their way to the market. No specs have been shared at this time, but it should be safe to assume that the larger slates will be running Android and using the ARM platform, just as the Mini 5 is.

Engadget is also saying that the Dell Mini 5 (A.K.A. “Streak”) will be released sometime “later this summer”. There has been evidence in the past to suggest that AT&T will be the U.S. carrier for the Dell Mini 5.

A few days ago I did some research and analysis on the new ‘Queensbay’ platform from Intel It’s a highly integrated 2-chip system comprising Tunnel Creek processing platform and I/O chip that takes the platform used on many current MIDs and UMPCs and optimizes it in a similar way that Pinetrail did for netbooks. Despite some improvements in size and graphics power and a hint that it might be capable of some cool consumer and media devices, it’s not the Apple A4 / Tegra 2 competitor that I’m guessing will get referenced in articles today. That job lies with Moorestown and I’ll tell you more about that later today on Carrypad. Update: Intel Moorestown article now available.

Tunnel Creek was formerly announced today. See Intel Press Release.
More detailed information has already been made available. See below.

Tunnel Creek integrates a lot of activity on one die and offers a doubling of GPU power, an increase in memory bus speed, an open PCIe bus Southbridge architecture that allows for third party chipsets, a SATA storage interface and a promise of a lower bill of materials. It is possible to build some nice little handhelds out of it and one could imagine interesting tablets with Nvidia Ion on board but later today, we’ll hear more about something that’s been build ground-up for handheld tablets, mids, smartphones, active remote controls and of course, the ‘iPad killers.’

I’ll write about Moorestown later today but for the time being, here are some schematics for Tunnel Creek; the first showing the differences between Menlow (I’m using a PC based on Menlow right now) and Tunnel Creek and the last slide showing Tunnel Creek vs Menlow in a mediaphone scenario.

There are a couple of things there that I didn’t mention in my previous article. Number 1 hardware accelerated video ENCODE. 2) Audio DSP functions. This leads me to believe that Tunnel Creek is in fact a version of Lincroft, the processing unit used in the Moorestown platform. We’ll talk more about that later.

For the Intel IDF presentation on Tunnel Creek (from which the above slides were taken) see the IDF 2010 Beijing Content Catalogue and search for ‘Tunnel Creek’ (Unfortunately I can’t link direct as the catalogue generates one-time URLs.)

For a primer on Moorestown, see the links below. More detailed information on Moorestown architecture is expected from IDF later today.

Moorestown Digging a little deeper.

Intel’s Moorestown Platform. From Smartphone Through Smartbook and Beyond.

Updated (18 Jan 2010) with the Intel IPAD that I had never heard of until I read about it today. Shame on me!

I’ve been writing about ‘pads’ , tablets and other consumer and mobile internet devices for over 4 years now. Carrypad started through a desire for a new category of devices and under various names it focused on a sector that most people simply dismissed. ‘There’s no room for a device between a smartphone and a laptop’ they said; conveniently forgetting their digital camera, navigation device, book, gaming device and the growing need to surf while on the crapper.

Today, the iPad landed and has turned the tech-media world from nay-sayers to yay-sayers. Everyone loves the iPad and the coverage has sky-rocketed. Unfortunately, it’s not really happening here because I’m in Europe and sales haven’t started here yet. Can you imagine how frustrating it is for me?

Being English though I’m biting my lip and trying to positive and focusing on the iPad coverage that starts here on Monday when Ben, our Senior Editor, gets his iPad out in Honolulu. It’s a shame that there’s no Saturday delivery service but we’ll let the Engadgets of this world deal with the Day 1 craziness and take some time to read the first reports over the weekend.

Another slightly frustrating  element of iPad day one is thinking back on all the iPad-like devices that tried so hard to get it right before so while we’re waiting for the iPad, I think we should raise a few of the Pads of the Past up onto the pedestal and say ‘thank you.’

My first hat-tip goes out to Pepperpad who in 2005 produced a 9 inch touchscreen device running on an ARM core and running a heavily tailored finger-friendly user-interface. The specifications list and focal point of the device sounds like a true winner but Pepper Computer were simply too early.  The initial price was high, the performance was terrible and the battery life wasn’t that thrilling. Personally I loved the device (I bought a PepperPad 3, the 7 inch version) although it wasn’t exactly pretty! Unfortunately Pepper went under before they could realize their ideas with better technology.

My second shout-out in the consumer internet device category goes to Nokia who took a big risk and released the 770 Internet tablet in late 2005. It was aimed at people wanting media, a good web browser and was the first in a range of four devices that used a community-supported Linux build called Maemo. Maemo is now an important part of a long-term strategy for Intel and Nokia in their MeeGo product and is for me the most interesting ecosystems for building consumer internet devices.

The third and final shout goes to Archos who for many years have been combining media playback with Internet connectivity in an easy-to-use consumer-focused package. I still have (and use) my 605Wifi and it taught me that while the 605 was very slow to access web pages, I had more patience for slow websites when I was sitting in a comfy chair. Archos are now at the stage where they have a family of consumer internet devices from 5 inch to 9 inch and are planning to launch even more this summer.

Update: All the devices above date back to 2005 when I was starting to get very interested in the idea of a companion device but there are plenty of devices that pre-date these. The Intel IPAD, for example, is the most amazing story. Intel used ARM CPUs (they has an ARM license and Xscale, ARM architecture CPUs) in a product that, internally, was called the IPAD. It allowed you to surf ‘up to 150 feet’ from your PC. It almost reached the market but got stopped by another initiative in Intel. Read the story of the Intel IPAD here.

So to everyone that was part of Origami, the ultra mobile PC world, all the Tablet PC fans and bloggers and the thousands and thousand of people that have discussed the idea of mobile and handheld computing with me over the years I raise my glass.

Written, 29th-31st March.

When the iPhone launched, it entered a pre-existing smartphone market. It was a great event for consumers because manufacturers in that market were forced to play catch-up which meant great options and deals for customers. In the Consumer Internet Device space of the iPad, the landscape is different. This time round Apple have stepped into a relatively new market and set up shop alone. There they sit with their complete product offering (at a great price) and wait for competitors. They’re likely to be waiting a long time because the iPad outshines anything we’ve seen in prototype form from anyone else by a huge margin and it would be safe to assume that every financial director responsible for a consumer handheld product has put the brakes on their own products. It means that instead of manufacturers increasing their efforts to put new devices out there, many of the new products will get held up, or even canned. For the smaller companies like ICD, Fusion Garage and Notion Ink, this could be catastrophic as investors re-asses the opportunity. If they are lucky, some of the prototype products will end up going back to the drawing board where the system integrators will be pondering long and strong over their app-stores and content offerings. The big problem here though is that there isn’t an OS or application ecosystem out there that can compete. I can’t think of any worthy alternative to the iPhone /iPad OS right now.

Forget any unknown (outside geek circles) Linux distributions because they lack a reputable app-store or focused developer community. Forget Maemo, Moblin or MeeGo because they won’t be ready until much later in the year. Forget any new unknown proprietary OS because the customer won’t trust it and the developers won’t be interested. Forget Windows 7 because it’s a big fat heavy blob that can’t keep up with finger-driven social, photo and location-aware applications. Even Android isn’t good enough and it’s worth discussing why.

I use Android on a daily basis and enjoy it a lot. The Archos 5 is a fantastic internet device but it highlights why Android is useless. Android doesn’t have a marketplace. The Android you’re thinking of is ‘Google’  Android and it makes a huge difference to the product.

The Marketplace and other closed-source, approval-required Google apps is what makes Android tick and any Android tablet that tries to enter the marketplace without it is committing suicide. The disappointment experienced by people when they can’t sync their mail or even populate their contacts application, access Google Maps, Buzz and other key apps will kill any momentum a device ever had. The problem is, these manufacturers are finding it difficult to get the marketplace and add it into Android. Google don’t appear to be  ready to expand outside the smartphone arena.  Maybe they’re scared of splintering Android. More splintering of the platform could upset developers and cause more application incompatibility problems and that would be an even bigger problem.

Mobinnova Beam, Archos 7 Home Tablet, Compaq AirLife 100 and other devices that I can’t talk about here are all going to hit a brick wall if they don’t get that app-store sorted out.

Right now, there isn’t an easy solution unless you’re a huge company with influence. Someone like Dell can make an oversize phone called the Dell Mini 5 and invest in the carrier deals, licensing, firmware support and certification processes that make Marketplace possible. That’s one product out of, what, 50 or so tablets, MIDs and smartbooks that we’ve seen at Computex, CES, CeBIT, MWC, CTIA and other shows. Even HP Compaq haven’t been able to achieve it with the AirLife.

If I was building a tablet I’d be praying for Google to free-up that marketplace and app-suite and I would be praying that my investors didn’t pull out during the waiting period. That waiting period is unknown right now and investors really don’t like broken critical paths without a fix date.

The iPad has already conquered this new market and consumers looking for an alternative handheld device will have to wait and pray that Google, Nokia and Intel; with their Marketplace, OVI and AppUp stores, accelerate their work and get a solution to the integrators before time runs out.  Palm’s WebOS could be an option to look at too.

Watch out for Archos in the summer because their PMP, MID and tablet strategy hinges 100% on Android. If it comes with Marketplace, we can all  breath again. If not, we might as well all buy an iPad and have some fun while we wait for 2011.

CID = Consumer Internet Device.

There’s always a surprise or two on the last day at an exhibition. I spotted this newbie on the Sequans booth at MWC and it wasn’t until I reviewed my photos this evening that I bothered to look any further into it. It turns out to be quite interesting.

The Moblic E7 has a 4 inch WVGA touchscreen in an attractive body which includes a slider keyboard, a 600Mhz CPU, 8GB Flash, Wimax Support, Micro SD card and a huge, 2000mah battery. As for the details on the CPU, we’re not sure although the Wimax chipset supplier (Sequans) mumbled something about Atom before confessing he really knew nothing about it. The large battery does suggest a hefty CPU though so maybe this is a Moorestown handset!

More likely is that it’s a 3D-capable ARM Cortex-A8 platform than anything with Intel inside and that would pair nicely with the 256MB RAM for some full-on Internet or gaming action. OS is unknown at this point although we I note that Mobilc announced a partnership with Microsoft in the middle of this year. Maybe it’s a Zune-Xbox-Windows 7 Series thingy!!!

We managed to tease it out from behind glass but only had time for pics and a look around the device which felt very well built. Obviously we’ve sent off an email requesting more details.

You can clearly see that this is designed for gaming on the go.

The Moblic webpage yields the following…

Definitely a competitor to the ODroid. What do you think?

We showed you the other week that Engadget got their hands on a pre-production version of the Dell Mini 5 — they initially hooked us up with a nice gallery, but I’ve personally be waiting eagerly for a full list of thoughts, and according to the Mini 5’s popularity chart over in the product database, many of you have been too! Luckily, today is the day that Engadget has decided to grace us with additional Mini 5 info. They’ve done a pretty thorough write-up for a device which isn’t even ready for retail, but we can’t blame them — the Mini 5 is looking better every day. Be sure to watch the video walkthrough in their article, it’s the first thorough hands-on that we’ve seen (out of Dell’s hands) since back when the Mini 5 was known as the Dell Streak! Note the incredible vertical viewing angle at 1:10 in the video.

Or perhaps we should say base? Anyway, a Greek site has turned up the first look at the Dell Mini 5’s dock. The dock has HDMI out as well as USB port (likely to power the unit and transfer files from a computer) The Mini 5 [Product page] will be able to do 720p video as stated and demonstrated at MWC earlier in the week and the HDMI will help you get that to an HDTV. There is a rather peculiar video, on said Greek site, in which we get a look at the sleek dock. Unfortunately the camera doesn’t get up close and personal.

Hopefully the dock is either very inexpensive (bundled with the unit perhaps?) or offers some sort of functionality that hasn’t yet been revealed. It seems silly not have built HDMI directly into the device, but perhaps Dell is trying to squeeze some extra money out of those that want to use the device as a portable HD player.

via Engadget

As expected, the Dell Mini 5 was available for hands-on at the Pepcom event at Mobile World Congress and we wasted no time in getting our hands as near to the device as possible. Dell Are being a little careful about handing it out right now which means the software probably isn’t ready but in the demo and Q&A we had with Dell we resolved some of the outstanding questions.

Video notes:

• The Dell Mini 5 is one of a family of devices.
• Available with and without 3G
• Available through carriers and the Dell online shop. (Or at least, that’s the intention)
• Full Google Android experience.
• Tailored UI with widgets
• Media support for H.264 and other codecs. (Although we didn’t get the impression that Dell are targeting this as an Archos 5-killer in that respect.)
• Facebook and contacts integration looked good.
• On Pricing, Dell say they will address ‘price points that customers are interested in.) We interpret this as meaning it will be very low cost with carrier subsidy.
• Very nice hand-holdable form factor and weight. Almost exactly the same look and feel as the Archos 5 Android tablet.
• Availability will be ‘by summer.’ We estimate this as June, July timeframe but this could just be for the first carrier-supplied versions. It could take a while for the device to roll out globally.

Overall we’re impressed with the specifications and build of the Dell Mini 5, optimistic about pricing  but will reserve judgment on battery life until we’ve had a good chance to test it. The 5.5Wh battery just doesnt sound like it’s ready for all-day action.