Nicole Scott of Netbook News tells me she isn’t too impressed. She has a point. Its hardly the most attractive device in the Tablet space. The thing is, this will come in at a very nice price. Ben has already highlighted a $300 price which means you have a better option than the Viewpad 7. You’re getting an arm v7 more which means significant performance implements with Android 2.2 and the ability to run apps like flash 10.1. I have a video which I’m going to upload as soon as I buy a new charger for my netbook bit at least I can give you some images from the showfloor here at MWC. One of the images includes the specs and we’ll get this in the database for you as soon as possible.
Mobile World Congress is well underway with announcements and product launches coming from a bevy of manufacturers, HTC included.
At their press conference this morning they announced no less than 6 new Android devices, one of which is the Flyer, a 7 inch 1.5GHz packing tablet weighing in at 415 grams.
The Flyer has up to 32GB of internal storage expandable via microSD card, 1GB RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, 3G, GPS and both front and rear facing cameras at 5 and 1.3 megapixel respectively.
HTC plan to differentiate from other tablet manufacturers by including a capacitive stylus for handwriting, note taking and general annotation. Notes can be captured in ink or voice and have built in Evernote synchronisation. Also included with the Flyer are access to several new key services from recent partnerships or acquisitions that the company has made. Their recent investment with OnLive, a gaming service that renders 3D games and streams games to your device see’s integration with the Flyer whilst HTC’s acquisition of Saffron Digital will provide access to downloadable movie titles via the new HTC Watch application.
At first it looked pretty chunky to me in the press photos but JKKmobile has managed to get his hands on and compare it to the Galaxy Tab and the difference was fairly minimal.
Whilst its certainly got a lot of character I have to wonder about the new tablet version of HTC Sense running on a Android 2.4 core, sure there will be a lot of additional functionality added in typical HTC fashion but with Honeycomb around the corner, its a risk.
Whilst we wait for Chippy to do his thing and get some hands on time check out JKK’s video;
This is the Samsung Galaxy S Wifi 5.0 with, obviously, a 5″ screen (Wvga). It has the 1Ghz SP5C110 cpu inside and, confirmed, full Google market and apps suite making it quite unique. It records 720p (fixed focus) and has a nice 5MP camera. It’s built well and slots nicely into a few categories I can think of. People wanting a full Android experience without a contract for a start.
Launching this month in Korea and soon for global markets. A 2500mah battery should see it lasting a long time between charges. DLNA, Samsung app market, GPU, accelerates top off the specs.
Video coming soon but here are a few pics. More coming later.
I’ve just shot a video of the Iconia A100 tablet here at MWC and its an interesting one. Tegra 2, Honeycomb, 5MP AF cam, gyroscope, hdmi outand possible 3g. No word on pricing or timescales. This could make a great mobile gaming device. Video coming later.
Remember that cool-looking tablet user experience we saw back at Computex?, well it’s back and it’s official. It’s now the official Tablet User Experience for MeeGo.
We’ve had a close look at the demonstration, seen below on an ExpoPC, and talked to Intel’s Michael Richmod, the marketing manager for this product. Developers attending the Applab this week at MWC are going to get a pre-configured Meego tablet to walk away with and the Meego image, built with the latest 1.2 beta, will be available for download later this week.
Intel have completely re-written the ‘panels’ user interface in QML (Qt Meta-Object Language) that now enables Intels customers (remember this isn’t an end-user product) to customise the UI. Intel tell us that this enables them make customisations and, by having a baseline to work from, to shorten their time-to-market figures. Note that QML also enables 3D acceleration in the UI.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a deck of panels in a tablet UI (cough*webos*cough) but remember, these panels are really apps in their own right rather than representations of running software. Each panel flips to offer customisations, a nice feature. It would be great to see each running represented as a panel and we hope, really hope, that Intel and the MeeGo teams have made it easy for developers to create new panels. UI customisations will be difficult without a range of panels to choose from.
There’s no filesytem exposed in the UI but the UI does retain certain desktop features like ‘right-click’ which is implemented as tap-and-hold through the MeeGo applications suite. Also missing is a centralised notifications system although there could be a panel for that!
The MeeGo build and user experience is currently only for the ExoPC hardware (also seen used in other manufacturers devices, WeTab included) but the Lenovo S10-3T will be supported soon. Intel wouldn’t comment on Moorestown and Oaktrail target products possibly because there aren’t any that are officially available yet! We hope that problem sorts itself this week because the MeeGo stack badly needs some sexy hardware. Take what HP did this week as an example of an OS, dev tools and products being presented as one bundle.
As for apps, Intel have chosen the Chromium open-source browser rather than the Firefox Mobile option that has been talked about for the handheld user experience. Although Intel partners can choose other options, we don’t expect that to change (although an official Chrome build would be nice.) You’ll also find an email client, calendar, video player with open source codecs, audio player, social network subsystem, sharing subsystem, image viewer, instant messenger and the configurations pane. We didn’t spot AppUp or any other way to attach to Linux repositories although do remember that this is Linux to the LSB standard.
Intel are welcoming feedback on this build and do plan to turn around iterations based on that feedback. The Intel Atom Developer Program is the forum for that.
Al in all we think a lot of people are going to be excited about this. The response we had on the original panel demos at Computex was overwhelmingly positive. We’ve got reservations about the notifications system, and would have liked to see multitouch support, easier app switching, some more advanced demo hardware, Appup, third party applications [breath…] and we have ongoing questions about QML, the Nokia owned product that slipped from it’s mainstream positioning last week. Is it enough to beat WebOS and Honeycomb? With this full-fat Linux stack leaning a bit more to traditional computing architecture and with Oaktrail and Moorestown products coming soon, there’s definitely an opportunity here for a fully productive operating system with a quality touchscreen-UI. We’re trying to think of another 7-10 inch tablet-focused operating system that offers a full desktop browser and the opportunity to span consumption and productivity scenarios. We can’t!
Stay tuned as we get briefed on products and plans today.
In a previous post I highlighted my surprise at how different Honeycomb really is. The UI is totally different, the apps totally re-worked and obviously the core has been optimised for fast touch response. Check it out in this video from MWC 2011
We’ve had a chance to have some hands on wit the Motorola Xoom. To be honest, I’m quite amazed at the difference Honeycomb makes. The multi-pane enhancements make such a difference. The YouTube app has just come alive! Smooth UI (better than the Galaxy Tab) proves that the core has been optimized for a better touch experience too. I’m impressed, and yet worried about how much it will cost. This is a premium.product that will have a premium price.
We’ve got a video to show you and will be posting it as soon as we have the chance.
