Author Archive: Gareth

Samsung Galaxy Tab now Official

It seems like since the iPad was released, every single tech company in the world is manufacturing an Android tablet to rival Apple’s. And the first one to try and take down the iPad from it’s throne is the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Announced this morning in Berlin, the Galaxy Tab is a 7″ Android tablet running Froyo. Other specs include a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, Flash 10.1, a 4,000 mAh battery, quad-band GSM, a 3MP rear facing camera, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, full HD video playback at 1080p, microSD slot for upto 32 GB cards and all of that weighs only 380g!

Now what makes this different from the iPad is that it makes phone calls. The Galaxy Tab uses a HSUPA 5.76 Mbps / HSDPA 7.2 Mbps radio on the 900, 1900, 2100 MHz bands. The Galaxy Tab is set to launch later this month in Europe and here in the UK. Then later on this year Korea, the US and the rest of Asia will get it. There is no word on pricing or carriers, but could this be the iPad killer?

Source

Update:

Orange HD Voice announced

Orange today announces the biggest advance in voice calls in 20 years with the launch of its mobile High Definition (HD) Voice service, enabling businesses to benefit from the next era in mobile communications.  Increased call clarity and the filtering out of background noise make important business conversations possible no matter where they are conducted.
Call clarity has emerged as a necessity for many businesses. Recent research^* from Orange has shown that 75% of business owners believe clear call quality to be the most important aspect of their mobile device; with 33% saying they routinely struggled to hold phone conversations due to the noisy environment they work in. With HD Voice, neither a noisy work environment or being out of the office are barriers to a successful call with customers, colleagues or suppliers.

Android Reaches Another Milestone: Motorola Milestone 2 Announced

After the success of the original Milestone and the XT720, the Milestone 2 has just been given the go ahead by Motorola. The Milestone 2 is the GSM version of the Droid 2 which was released in the states a few weeks ago but with a few major differences. for example, the Milestone has 720p video recording unlike its American cousin. However, Motorola had to screw us over some how and they’ve done it by putting MotoBlur on it rather than stock Android. Yes, I know what you are thinking, why Motorola why?

But otherwise the Milestone 2 and the Droid 2 are pretty much exactly the same. They both support a 3.7″ capacitive touchscreen at a resolution of 854 x 400, a 1GHz processor, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5-Megapixel camera and 8Gb of internal storage. See more pics and a video after the break.

5 new Archos devices. All Froyo!!

This press release from Archos has just arrived showing the shape of things to come from Archos and it looks lovely. Frive Android tablet, from mini to max covering almost every desired desired size have been announced. Of late Archos have been hammering out budget mp3 players with a semi-attractive feature set but a fantastic price tag. This time around the feature set looks too good to be true especially when it comes to the, still, highly acceptable price tags. Read on for more:

SIM-unlock method for all Galaxy S phones

If you recently purchased — or have plans to purchase – a phone in the Samsung Galaxy S line, the folks over a xda-developers have a pretty interesting tutorial up on their forums. The instructions detail how to carrier-unlock your Galaxy S phone (e.g. Captivate, Vibrant, etc.) without the need to pay for a SIM unlocking service. The process is four steps long and looks to be a 4 or 5 out of 10 on the difficulty scale. Hit up the read link if you want to give this one a shot… and do let us know if you have any success.

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[Source]

HP confirms webOS tablet hitting in early 2011 Inbox X

Despite all the hubbub about CEO Mark Hurd, Hewlett-Packard posted great earnings for its quarter and the company confirmed that it will soon have multiple tablets to compete with the Apple iPad.

The company said the Apple iPad may have hurt the sales of some of its laptops but it said a Windows tablet will be coming soon, maybe even as soon as the next few weeks. This device will likely be based on Windows 7 and should target the enterprise market with corporate-friendly features like video conferencing and integration with back-end business databases.

What really gets me excited is that HP also confirmed it will bring out a webOS tablet in early 2011 and this will be a mass-market device. HP spent $1.2 billion to acquire Palm earlier this year and it plans to “double down” on the webOS platform by putting it in a variety of devices like smartphones, tablets and even printers.

I’m a fan of webOS because I think it’s an elegant and beautiful smartphone OS – in fact, it’s probably the best 1.0 version I’ve ever seen. The Palm hardware didn’t do it justice and I think the “cards” user interface metaphor would work extremely well on a big tablet.

Let’s hope the HP webOS tablet has at least a 1 GHz processor, WiFi, GPS, multiple cameras and a few USB ports. I could see 3G being useful but I think tablets will mainly use WiFi connections.

An HP webOS tablet couldn’t come soon enough, as the Apple iPad is gaining some serious momentum – it has sold more than three million units in a few months. We may even see a revamped Apple iPad in time for the holidays.

It’s not just Apple HP has to worry about, as we’re about to see a slew of tablets from companies like Samsung, Research In Motion, Asus, Toshiba and others. We’ve put together a list of the five most-anticipated tablets and you should check it out.

[Via VentureBeat]

Thanks Kevin

webOS 2.0 and mystery Roadrunner HD device spotted in app logs Inbox X

That mystery webOS 2.0 device with the codename Roadrunner has been spotted for a second time within the usage stats of another webOS application. Last week, the app logs of a Foursquare app for webOS coughed up a single reference to webOS 2.0 and identified a mystery device with a codename of Roadrunner. This week a second app produced yet another reference to webOS and fingered a second device with the codename Roadrunner HD.

This second and exciting reference is from a gaming app titled Cloud Hopper and adds “HD” to the end of the Roadrunner moniker. Similar to the original leak, this information was gleaned from the usage data provided by Metrix, an analytics package for webOS developers. The Metrix data in this second leak suggests that the Roadrunner HD device sports a 640×960 resolution, which is nice a jump from the 320×480 of the original Roadrunner leak.

Adding some credibility to this rumor is the fact that Cloud Hopper is closed source, making it difficult to spoof the webOS 2.0 and Roadrunner HD user agent strings. The usual warning to take this rumor with a grain of salt applies as we can not verify the authenticity of these claims. Nonetheless, we can’t help but ponder the thought of a high-end webOS smartphone or a smaller-size tablet out in the wild. It is a tantalizing idea, no?

[Via PreCentral and Twitter]

Thanks Kevin