Acer has recently announced the addition of a MeeGo based tablet, the M500 to its Iconia tablet range at Computex 2011. Judging from the available pictures and videos of the Iconia M500 [tracking page], it bears a striking physical resemblance to it’s Android stable-mate, the A500, and has the same 10.1 inch 1280×800 resolution screen. The key difference is that it has a Intel based Moorestown processor under the hood. There is no information on the M500’s battery life at the moment — I will be interested to how good the […]

I tweeted this earlier today: “If companies want to differentiate in the tablet space, the should try smaller devices with keyboards. Slider, clamshell at 5-7” My follow-up tweets to queries highlighted that the time and ingredients are right now. A new attempt at the ultra-mobile PC shouldn’t be far away. The ultra mobile PC of 2006-2008 failed, yes, but not because of the wrong concept. Portable, desktop-style capabilities with flexible connectivity options, a slant towards social, always on and the best web experience possible is something a lot of people […]

Yesterday at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs took the stage to talk about iOS 5 and iCloud. Going against tradition since the first iPhone was announced, WWDC didn’t see the announcement of the latest iPhone hardware. We did, however, see the latest changes coming in iOS 5 and see the announcement of Apple’s new iCloud service. Before we get into it, you should know that consumers will see iOS 5 released to existing devices this Fall. iOS 5 will support the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod Touch […]

About a year and a half ago I looked deeper into Intel’s Moorestown to report on some of the key features. One of those features was power gating which could significantly reduce the power drain of the platform by turning of areas of the CPU/GPU when they weren’t in use. It’s the feature that brings Intel into the ‘always on’ space but offering a 50x reduction in idle power.  The only problem was that Windows wouldn’t run on the Moorestown platform so it was for Meego and Android only. Oaktrail, […]

How close are we to powering our tablets with on-device solar cells? In a recent test I ran a tablet connected to the internet at an average 200 mW. That’s screen off, wifi connected and polling in the background to update emails, location, twitter and other processes. It’s nothing really surprising because most of the tablets are built on smartphone technology. With the screen on though, usage will jump about 5-7x and if you push the CPU and add 3G you can reach 20X that power drain. Still, running everything […]

It’s clear that an Ultrabook is more than just a ultra-low voltage CPU and a thin chassis but how tight are the specs laid down by Intel? Are there any laid down by Intel?  Ultrabook is a trademark and therefore likely to be more than just an internal spec-sheet but with no guidance from Intel on what is, and what isn’t, we’ll just have to guess because this slide is pretty much all we have to go on right now.   Anandtech have made a good attempt at a definition […]

I managed to whip off a quick video showing some of the enhancements for the Eee Pad transformer delivered by the Android Honeycomb 3.1 update. I bought my Eee Pad from Taiwan and the hardware identifies it as Taiwanese hardware so I think I got the update earlier than devices from other Countries. Asus claim some performance increases and reliability improvements but they’re not that noticeable to me as I thought it was pretty responsive on 3.0. They have added some new apps including a video editor and the Kindle app. There’s still […]

There’s lots to learn from the demonstrations and information on Windows 8 from the last few days. Not only from Microsoft themselves but through the reactions and thoughts of commentators. I’ve given it some time, made some notes and am ready to put my thoughts down.These are the thoughts of someone that’s used tablets in both the commercial and consumer world, someone that loves social networking but someone that also knows how important Windows is for getting things done. First and foremost, we must remember how important the desktop is […]