There are several reasons why iOS devices have always managed to beat Android devices in the touch-responsiveness department. For one, the way that the on-screen elements are rendered is different between the two operating systems. Then there’s the fact that each Android device may use different touch-controllers from one device to the next. Nvidia is taking a stab at upping the touch-responsiveness of Tegra 3-equipped devices by offloading some of the touch input responsibilities directly onto Tegra 3. They call this ‘DirectTouch’.

Nvidia demonstrates that the Xoom with Nvidia Tegra 2 can handle around 110 touch samples/second with one finger. As each finger is added, the number of samples/second drops. With Tegra 3 and DirectTouch, samples/second nearly double to around 200 for one finger. As more fingers are added, it seems that DirectTouch intelligently scales to keep the samples/second around 200, even with 10 individual inputs!

What an increased number of samples/second really means is more accuracy. Increasing the samples/second by 2x as we see here means that the hardware and software are able to record where the input is happening twice as often. At slow speeds, such as scrolling a webpage, this isn’t all that important. However, as the speed of the input increases, the samples/second become more important to maintain accuracy, which is why Nvidia says that this will be particularly useful for gaming.

LG has announced, and will be showing off at MWC (starting tomorrow), the Optimus 4X HD. This is LG’s first quad-core phone and uses the Nvidia Tegra 3 platform. It’s likely that we’ll see a number of Tegra 3 smartphones announced and shown at MWC this year. Tegra 3 has actually been on the market for a few months in the form of the Asus Transformer Prime, but we’ve yet to see it available in phone-form.

I’m happy to report that the Optimus 4X HD comes pre-installed with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which will help really make use of the 1.5GHz quad-core CPU which is equipped with 1GB of RAM. There is 16GB of in-built memory, and the screen is a monster 4.7″ 1280x720p IPS display which, if anything like the LG Spectrum’s screen, is sure to please in terms of colors and sharpness. There’s an 8MP camera on the back and a 1.3MP camera in the front. Additionally, the phone is equipped with 4G LTE; LG will have to be really careful with this phone to ensure that it has reasonable battery life. The battery capacity is 2150mAh.

Chippy is on the show floor at MWC starting tomorrow, stay tuned for more!

Tegra 3 is the world’s first quad-core mobile platform, Nvidia assures us, and along with those 4 CPU cores come the Tegra 3 GPU which has 12 additional cores of its own. Nvidia is happy to show off the graphical capabilities of the Tegra 3 GPU, which they claim to be up to 3x faster than the Tegra 2 GPU. A few months back (when Tegra 3 was still being called Kal-El) Nvidia demoed a game called Glowball on pre-production hardware. Now, Nvidia is showing off a new level of the game, running on a production version of the Transformer Prime:

If you were already anticipating the Transformer Prime, I can only imagine you are now that much more excited; you’d be hard pressed to call that demo anything but impressive. I’ll be curious to see some benchmarks, but I’d say Tegra 3’s graphical capabilities are right up there with Apple’s A5 CPU/GPU found in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

I think it’s great to see that competition has created extremely high performance mobile computing platforms, but when it comes to gaming on tablets, casual play is still where the segment thrives. As soon as you push touchscreen gaming beyond casual, you absolutely need a controller to achieve a reasonable experience. Even though we should be able to connect Bluetooth peripherals (or even USB), it seems that there is not yet a defacto controller to suit the needs of beyond-casual gaming on mobile devices.

What say you? Do you find beyond-casual gaming on tablets impractical with only a touchscreen to control them?

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime (aka Transformer 2) leaked last month but now it’s all been made official. Tegra 3 has been confirmed, and although the Transformer Prime will ship with Android 3.2, they are confirming that it can be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich.

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Of course, it wouldn’t be a Transformer without the signature attachable keyboard, and Asus is claiming that the Transformer Prime will get a whopping 18 hours of battery life from a full charge using both the tablet and the dock.

With the Tegra 3 quad-core processor (once codenamed Kal-El), Nvidia says that you can see improvements in speed up to 3x over Tegra 2, with up to 61% less power consumption. The lower power consumption is thanks to a fifth “companion cube” “companion core” that is designed to do the easy lifting, completely shutting down the quad-core CPU when it isn’t needed. Once you start doing tasks that require significant power, everything is shifted from the companion core to the quad-cores and the companion core is shut down. Nvidia calls this process Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing or vSMP.

The GPU included in Tegra 3 utilizes 12 processing cores and can automatically convert OpenGL applications and games into stereo 3D, allowing you to hook up your tablet to a 3D HDTV or 3D head mounted display (like Sony’s upcoming HMZ-T1).

The Transformer Prime itself is an impressive 8.3mm thick, which will make it the thinnest 10″ tablet available on the market (that is, until Toshiba releases their 7.7 mm thick AT200). It is also one of the lightest 10″ tablets at 586 grams, though still behind the Galaxy Tab 10.1. This is all without the keyboard of course.

The Transformer Prime screen retains the 1280 x 800 resolution and IPS technology used on the original Transformer. 1GB of RAM accompanies the Tegra 3 processor. Unfortunately, Asus has not moved the USB port onto the tablet itself, as per Damian’s hopes; you’ll still need transform into the keyboard mode to access the USB port. Unfortunately they’ve actually reduced the count from two USB ports to one, which seems like a step backward considering the good USB peripheral support of Android Honeycomb and beyond. The Transformer Prime alone has micro-HDMI, 3.5mm headphone/mic input, a built in mic, micro-SD card reader, and stereo speakers.

The Transformer Prime is Priced at $499 for a 32GB model or $599 for a 64GB model. There are two colors available: Amethyst Grey and Champagne Gold. The keyboard dock, which includes one USB port and a full-sized SD card reader and battery (and will add 537 grams to the Transformer Prime), is optional and will run you an additional $149.