I’ve been talking about this since, well, over a year ago.  Intel’s new-generation mobile platforms, including Oaktrail, Moorestown and Medfield, could couple well with Android. I don’t mean a community X86 project, I mean official, Google approved, power-optimised versions of Android. Honeycomb included.

Image right: Mock-up

Digitimes just reported that “Asustek Computer and Lenovo are to launch Oak Trail/Android 3.1 tablet PCs soon and also Cedar Trail/ Chrome models in the second half of the year. inch

Dual mode tablets will be possible and there’s even a chance that virtualization could let multiple OS’ run concurrently. Oh how I hope Intel get on stage at Computex and show Windows, Meego and Android running on the same device. Why? Because it’s a great choice for the pro-customer and when it comes to productivity, we need more CPU power than ARM-based solutions can deliver today. Intel should also be able to achieve ‘always-on’ with these new platforms too. When I asked Intel about Android a year ago they said that power optimisation work was lagging MeeGo. Lets see next week how far MeeGo has come. I’ll try and find someone in Intel to give us a Honeycomb update too.

Anyone fancy a triple-OS Samsung TX100?

VIa netbooknews.

Last night I took the plunge and dumped the official 2.3.3 Gingerbread upgrade on my Galaxy Tab via the ‘side-loading’ method based on an copy of the firmware being rolled out in Europe (but not available here in Germany yet.) I used simple instructions from The Galaxy Tab Forum (Hat Tip XDA Developers) and flashed the firmware along with a full factory reset and spent about 4 hours late last night testing, restoring my apps and listening to music.

The music wasn’t just for fun. Previous builds of the Galaxy Tab were never that good at being an MP3 player due to stuttering under load. I’m please to report that this problem has gone. I had 8 programs running to the point where even text input was failing but the audio kept-on playing.

So what else is new?

If you’re happy with your Tab right now I don’t recommend going the side-loading route to get Gingerbread. It’s easy but risky and for what you’re getting it’s not worth the risk. I’m not saying the upgrade is underwhelming, I’m just saying that the upgrade isn’t a huge one in terms of instantly noticeable changes. A new, lighter font, greets you and as you swipe down the notification area and then across home screens you’ll notice that it is super smooth but that’s pretty much it for obvious changes.

The text select method has changed slightly (in-line with the new 2.3 text selection tool I beleive) but Samsung already had that on 2.2. They were also ahead of the curve on audio enhancements and a few other 2.3 features.

There’s a few videos below showing part of the upgrade and a review of the upgrade below. Here are my notes so far.  I should note that if you’re into ‘rooting’ your Galaxy Tab,  please double-check that this upgrade doesn’t lock the bootloader.

• Smoother transitions in some areas. Noticeable in notifications area and browser scrolling.
• New sketch note app
• SIP/VOIP support removed from Gingerbread (at least I can’t find it!)
• Pulse app included
• No new themes or backgrounds (a feature of Gingerbread)
• Better battery usage section possibly not working properly. (screen, WiFi usage doesn’t appear to be correct)
• No WiFi dropouts (i experienced this on a previous EU stock firmware)
• No truly noticeable web speed improvements. Some checkerboarding when scrolling quickly while page is loading.
• Modified indicator icons in top home-screens bar
• New text selection tool (as per standard android 2.3 i believe)
• Audio playback now stable under load. No stutter
• One user interface crash/reboot experienced after playing Need For Speed.
• Browser download manager

Overall the Tab has been stable and reliable. I’m looking forward to apps that take advantage of the new touch responsiveness APIs. (The browser does appear to be one of those apps.)

I managed to get a few hours hands on with the Blackberry Playbook [tracking page] today. First impression out of the box was: Wow, it’s tiny.

Laptopmag has done a comprehensive review of the device and they are pretty much on the money with their assessment. I didn’t experience any of the software issues they had though except for the slowness to rotate the screen when I turned the device.

The form factor is very similar to the Samsung Galaxy Tab and as you can see in the picture it’s roughly half the size of the ipad 2.

I actually found the square design refreshing and it definitely looked and felt different to the other rounded edge tablets. The unit felt solid and well built. The PlayBook has a soft-touch almost rubberised back and this gives a nice grippy surface to hold onto. It was easy to hold in one hand and light enough to do so for an extended period of time. The Playbook measures 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches, and is thinner than the Samsung Galaxy Tab but is slightly heavier.

It has a 7 inch display but interestingly the bezel forms part of the touch sensitive surface of the screen and allows gestures that make the tablet do things. For example you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to return to the home screen. The gestures were easy to learn and remember, and I picked them up and was using them naturally very quickly.

There’s a 3-megpaixel camera above the screen, along with a notification LED. There’s also a 5-megapixel camera on the back and the quality from both was very good. Two small slots on each side of the display are the speakers and they were surprisingly good in the quiet room.

The top of the PlayBook has a power button and volume controls with a Play/Pause button as well – a neat feature for media. A headphone jack is on the top right.

The device also has a micro-USB port which allows connection to a PC as a hard drive for file sharing. This worked as advertised and almost made up for the lack of a full sized USB port. As long as you have the cable it will be pretty easy to get files onto the device. A micro-HDMI (D-port), and charging contacts for an optional charging dock (no extra ports on the dock) are located on the bottom edge. The unit will charge from the supplied adapter or via USB when plugged into a computer.

Output from the HDMI was good and allowed full HDMI mirroring as well as presenting mode which meant you could be sending an image, slideshow or video to an external monitor while using the tablet for other tasks.

An interesting option in the settings was for the power management. This affected the multi-tasking capability. The options are Showcase, Default and Paused. On the homescreen if you swiped to switch between apps the running apps became smaller windows. Each app continues to run in these windows demonstrating that the OS is multi-tasking these apps and switching between them was ast and smooth. In the showcase power setting the apps still operated in the windows and this was demonstrated by showing a video still playing in the smaller window and while flicking the app selector left and right. This is obviously the most power hungry setting. In Default mode the setting employs smarter power management and in paused mode every app pauses it’s behaviour automatically when you navigate to another app.

Connecting to the Blackberry phone was simple and I tested out the Blackberry Bridge function as well as 3G tethering. The Playbook is WiFi-only and therefore doesn’t have a 3G capability without tethering to your Blackberry phone. Using the browser over a 3G tether was slow and even with a good 3G signal it then had to travel over Bluetooth which may be the bottleneck. Accessing email, files, and calendar functions over the bridge connection was easy but when opening larger files I really felt the slowness as it could take 20-30 seconds to open a 3MB PDF. I think I would use the bridge connection for email as having a larger screen and big on screen keyboard is much better than the small phone screen but for reading larger word documents or PDF files I would have to download them before attempting to read as otherwise it was just painful waiting for the pages to render.

The RIM sales represtative also mentioned that they will definitely be releasing a 10 inch version within months and hinted at some special features on it but refused to reveal what. While I prefer the small, pocketable size of a 7 inch device I know guys in my organisation prefer a 10 inch screen so the playbook 7 inch will not get a lot of interest from my co-workers. I feel that RIM has realised this barrier to entry in the enterprise business market and that’s why they are releasing a 10 inch version.

Overall the Tablet was well made, had lots of processing power and felt like a well rounded unit with a good mix of features.

If you measure the power used by a netbook PC when it’s in standby, a frozen unusable state, it uses around 500mW of power.  Leaving a netbook on with WiFi connected in an idle state with the screen blanked, maybe with an email program polling occasionally, you’ll see about 10 times the power usage. In PC terms, 5W is impressive but if you go to the smartphone world and take a look at the figures there, there’s a huge huge gap that needs to be tackled. As smartphones become tablets, become smartbooks, there’s a threat that ‘always-on’ becomes ‘must-have’ and that X86-based devices will struggle to compete in casual computing scenarios.

Smartphones are designed from the ground-up around the concept of ‘always-on. From the moment a smartphone is conceived, every element of the design has to be checked for power consumption which is why a smartphone can sit connected to the GSM telephone network drawing power consumption levels lower than 50mw. That’s 1/10th of the power consumption taken by a good netbook when it’s in a frozen state. Impressive.

But what happens when you connect a smartphone to the internet ? You can use cellular data services to achieve a good rate of connectivity by switching on UMTS for example. Switching to WiFi on a typical smartphone brings faster connectivity and, in a lot of cases, lower power that can be done on cellular networks. A smartphone can run a multitasking operating system and remain connected to internet and voice networks in well under 500mw of power, the same as it takes a netbook to sleep.  In fact, the best smartphones are running in this configuration for over 24hrs on a 5Wh battery which is an amazing 100mw of power usage. Turn on some background internet activities and it will jump to an average 200mw!

What happens if you take an ARM platform that’s in the same processing power category as a low-end netbook. Put it in a 10 inch screen form factor and do the same test? Actually, it’s the same as a smartphone. The only difference between a high-end smartphone and a smartbook with a 10 inch screenand a huge battery is the screen itself and when that is off, there’s practically no difference at all.

To prove this, I took one of the most powerful mobile computing platforms in a large 10 inch form factor device with 32GB of storage, 1GB of RAM and integrated WiFi. The device has a 23wh battery (about half that of ‘6-cell’ netbooks. The device is the Acer Iconia Tab A500 Android tablet which runs honeycomb. I connected to the Wifi (at 54mbps) and left the device connected with the screen off while it did it’s stuff in the background. Marketplace checks, email checks, Twitter checks and even some GPS usage by Google Maps. A weather service was running, the volume was set to silent and Bluetooth was turned off.

Over a 48  hour period with a few screen-on moments for checking progress (and a 10 minute in-use period as my daughter grabbed it to use a paint program)  I measured 46% fall in battery usage of which 5% was due to screen-on time. Take away the screen-on figure and you have 209mw of power usage.  The Acer Iconia Tab is nothing more than a smartphone inside!

‘Always-on, Always Connected’ will be a ‘Must-have.’

Always-on tests are interesting because it’s a hands-off test that people think only applies to idle smartphones.  In fact, it applies to many computing scenarios. With location, polling, sync, presence, alarms, push updates and of course, cellular voice and messaging becoming the norm in the hand, they will also have appeal on the desk. Not having to wait 5 seconds for a machine to start-up, another 5 seconds for a Wi-Fi connection and another 10 seconds for tweets, emails and other features to catch up is annoying.  There’s also a bunch of other screen-off, connected activities that are interesting. Servers for example. By that, I mean computers and gadgets that serve information to the Internet. This doesn’t just cover web servers. Think about internet-connected weather stations and web cameras, in-car data storage and notification systems. Then there are the devices that just don’t need big screens; Connected musical instruments. Digital cameras with 3G. Internet Radios. Low-power internet connectivity is important for these devices.

Related: Social Netbooks and ARM’s Lock-In Netbook Opportunity.

Summary

The point here is not to highlight that ARM is better than X86, it’s to highlight the gap. This gap is currently a huge advantage for ARM-based platform designers.

• The first point is, if manufacturers using X86/PC architecture don’t get products to market with active standby soon, with the help of Intel (the only X86 player trying to tackle this problem) customers will have a chance to experience, and may not turn back from, ARM-based always-on products.
• The second point is that this is a screen-off gap. Current screen technology is killing ARMs advantage in the ‘in-use’ scenario where screens are larger than 7 inch. It reduces the ARM advantage from 20x in idle to about 4x with a 10 inch screen being backlit. When the devices CPU is being actively used, the advantage drops even lower to around 2x. [Acer Iconia Tab 4W. Samsung NC210 8W)
• Finally, the Acer Iconia Tab A500 is a good example of low-power internet connectivity. It’s likely that other devices in this ARM tablet segment hit the same figures.

Keep an eye on high-end ARM-based platforms over the next year or two. Honeycomb and iOS are leading the way into the professional space with their software and application ecoystems and you might find that this always-on advantage starts to lock people in soon.

Thanks to everyone (350+ people) that dropped in on the live session with the Acer Iconia Tab A500 last night. I have to say that there’s no better way than to spend a focused 3 hours testing a new device than with a camera and knowledgeable audience!

We recorded three sections of the live session and the important notes and videos are below.  I will continue to test the A500 and if I find anything of major importance, will report it here. You’ll find further reports on Honeycomb over at UMPCPortal as I take on the task of tracking productivity apps that become available in the ecosystem.

So far I’m seeing good hardware from both looks, materials and an efficiency perspective but a number of software problems from the OS to the apps level that really fall below expectations. At 499 Euro I would expect to see multiple video codec support, a supplied micro HDMI cable and at least a simple stand or case. With the stability issues and application issues seen,  it raises a red flag at the moment. Unless you need the Iconia Tab A500 (and this applies to the other 2 Honeycomb Tablets available right now) I’d say wait for two things. 1) Price drop of about 15-20% should arrive within months. 2) Asses ongoing firmware updates and progress of Android applications for Honeycomb. Of course, you’ll also need to track future products from competitors. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is likely to be available in the next week or two.

Notes:

• Battery life: 6hrs full use. WiFi, 50% screen, testing. I suspect you could run it dry by gaming on it for 5 hours but on the other hand, you might get more than 6hrs use if you’re gentle on it.
• Battery life: 100hrs on, WiFi,  screen off. In idle state, with the Wifi on and screen off and with the device set to synchronize various apps, it will last between 75 and 100 hours. (Up to 4 days.) That’s a good figure.

Here’s the battery drain graph showing our testing, an overnight ‘sleep’ and some work I did with it today.

More notes:

• Honeycomb observation: Why no HD available through YouTube application?
• Stability. When using a USB keybaord the device crashed 4 or 5 times. I also saw the A500 crash twice without the keyboard but under heavy testing. Stability could be better.
• Screen resolution and viewing angles are very good. Color, contrast too. Brightness average.
• PDF one-page view is readable. That’s something you can’t do on a 7″ tablet, whatever the resolution.
• Speakers clear, loud
• Finish of design is excellent. Metal back gives it a stylish look and feel.
• MicroSD card works. 3G Card slot is blocked off on this Wifi-only model.
• Docking port was a surprise. No details of what is passed through that though.
• No MicroHDMI cable supplied to test the HDMI output.
• No extra codecs. (WMV, Divx and other formats don’t play) Have yet to see a 1080p file play back on the device.
• Camer quality and video quality is so-so.
• Gtalk video quality also, so-so. Easy to use though.
• Weight (and this applies to many 10″ tablets) is still too heavy for one-hand holding for any length of time.
• No built-in, or supplied stand
• No USB mouse support
• USB keyboard and mass storage supported. 3G dongle not tested.
• Honeycomb apps seem few and far between. Existing apps in Market are often for portrait mode only and do not use all the space well.
• Performance is comparable with other Honeycomb/Tegra2 tablets.
• There’s possibly a Gyroscope sensor that improves responsiveness in games that use it. (Unconfirmed)
• Compass, GPS confirmed.
• Skype audio works without headset (built-in mic and speakers work. Rear faceng speakers help cut down feedback)
• Google Earth impressive
• No noticable heat build-up
• Power cable only 1M in length
• Approx 28GB of 32GB free for user storage.
• Acer includes non-standard multimedia apps.

Videos:

Part 1 – Overview

Part 2 – Testing Browser and Performance

Part 3 – Further testing. Video, Cam, Batt, USB

The Acer Iconia Tab A500, a 10 inch Honeycomb tablet arrived today and, as per the ‘law’ I unboxed it straight away for you.

Interestingly, it crashed during the first tests! I was messing with an external keyboard at the time but that wasn’t expected. I also found out that there’s only one language installed and that the media player can’t handle WMV or DivX files that I had on a USB stick. Not a good start.

The screen has good viewing angles and the speakers are reasonable too. Set-up was, as always with Android, a breeze and working down in my studio I was able to see hotspots that I don’t usually see so the Wifi seems strong.

I’ll leave it there for the time being as we’ve got a live session running with the Acer Iconia Tab A500 this evening where we’ll find out everything there is to know. We’ll record some of the session and get it written up for you in a first-impressions post at the weekend.

Full Specifications, Links, Images, Reviews for the A500 are here.

Update: The session is complete and the live videos and notes are now available here.

Honeycomb tablets are starting to filter-in so naturally, I need a permanent device to test upgrades and new applications with. There are three models available in Europe (my location) at the moment.

The Motorola Xoom is a tablet that I’m personally not that impressed with. At 580 Euros for the Wifi version that doesn’t have a working microSD card slot yet I think it’s way too expensive. Prices will come down fast of course, (MRRP is 629 here so discounting has already started) but today, it’s not the device I would choose.

I had an order in for the Asus Eee Pad Transformer which I think is one of the more interesting options. At 422 it’s offering much the same as the Xoom for a much more realistic price. Unfortunately, stock is limited and my order got pushed out into June. I cancelled.

The third device on the market is the Acer Iconia Tab A500. It has been available for a few weeks in various geographic locations and when I saw it available for 499 Euros and with 24hr delivery (32GB version) I jumped at the chance.

Details on the Acer Iconia Tab A500 are available through our product page. (click right) and we’re please to see DLNA and 32GB of storage.

Live, Open Review Friday 6th May 2100 (Berlin)

Update: The session is complete and the live videos and notes are now available here.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Friday night live review but it looks like we’ll have quite a few coming over the next months. Let’s start the ‘open season’ with the A500 and a light beer.

We’ll run a couple of hours of live video for you with chat and people are welcome to steer the review and encouraged to ask questions. The action will take place here at 2100 Berlin time (See here for your timezone.) It’s casual, bring a friend!

[Note: Amazon have guaranteed a delivery on the 6th but things do occasionally go wrong. Follow Chippy on Twitter for the latest]

Over the coming weeks I’ll be talking productivity with Honeycomb over at UMPCPortal.com

If you’re in the market for a 7 inch slate, Samsung’s 7 inch Galaxy Tab is the undeniable leader in this area… but it’s definitely not the only device you should consider. Take, for instance, Enspet’s Identity Tab e201. This 7 inch device is nearly spec-for-spec identical to Samsung’s Tab, less a lower screen resolution, but it actually performs just as well and even beats the Galaxy Tab on some benchmarks. Have a look at the two in a head-to-head video below: