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 […]

At the BlackBerry World 2011 conference, RIM demonstrated its upcoming Android Player application which will allow PlayBook users to run Android applications. This could be the gambit that RIM needs to get up to speed in the app sector while seamlessly enhancing the user-experience.

Those of us interested in looking at how far tablets have moved into business and what the opportunities are will be interested in this webinar that ABI Research are setting up for May 12th. Jeff Orr, someone I’ve had great conversations with in the past about the ultra mobile market, will host the session. This is a topic I’ll continue to cover on UMPCPortal as the ‘X-Over’ continues. I’m looking forward to putting Honeycomb on Tegra 2 [Iconia A500 Live Session is already planned for tomorrow] up against Windows on […]

Details on the Acer Iconia Tab A500 are available through our product page. (click right.) Live, Open Review Friday 6th May 2100 (Berlin) Update: See here for recorded videos and notes. 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 […]

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 […]

While Acer’s Iconia Tab A500 10 inch tablet has already been made available and been reviewed, its smaller sibling, the 7 inch Iconia Tab A100 (WiFi-only) and A101 (3G equipped) is now up for pre-order from Amazon UK. The site also lists both version of the device launching on the 14th of May, just 10 days away! The asking price for the 3G equipped Iconia Tab A101 is £399 ($661 USD!), however, you stand to save 100£ ($165 USD) off of that price if you go for the WiFi-only Iconia […]

An announcement on the Google mobile blog tells us that Google Talk with video and voice chat will be released to Nexus S [product page][review] devices in the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 update. This is great news in itself, but once you realize that it’s only for Android devices running Android 2.3 or higher, you’ll see why it’s actually sort of upsetting. According to data released from Google Android 2.3 only represents 2.2% of current Android devices so it may be a while before we see […]

You’d think that creating a WiFi-only of one of the most popular 7 inch tablets would be as easy as not installing the components that make cellular communication possible, but it looks like Samsung may have made some more significant changes to their WiFi-only Galaxy Tab which appears to be using an older CPU and a slower GPU. Perhaps as cost-saving measure, the WiFi-only Galaxy Tab is using a “1GHz A8 Cortex processor inch according to the official product page inch, while the 3G equipped version of the Galaxy Tab […]