In a meeting with Toshiba Europe today we got an update, and more hands on with the Toshiba Z830 Ultrabook. It’s light, well featured and will come in Portégé and Satellite versions meaning business, and consumer specifications. Toshiba haven’t decided on final specification line-up yet and price targets weren’t given but from what we learnt today, we can’t see the Z830 coming at under $/€1000. First though, lets give you the video, taken after the meeting. It’s one of the most complete overview’s to date so worth watching.

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“We’re in for another boom”
“In everybody’s hands”
“The functionality and utility of a tablet”

Intel’s latest set of promotional material related to the Ultrabook consists of three very short videos showing Intel analysts views on the 22nm process and the advantages of an Ultrabook.

Personaly I hope they produce something a bit better than this in the near future because this looks like It was rushed through the editing room.

Can someone explain to me why an Ultrabook has the functionality and utility of a tablet? Where are the focused, low-costs apps and store? Where’s the always-on.capability, the touchscreen, the 350gm-700gm weight and the $200 starting point?

You may disagree but in my opinion, Ultrabooks are the devices that can do everything that a tablet can’t! They are the devices you need if you’ve got a tablet. You can now throw away the dusty netbook and get busy with 720p video editing, 1080p video conversion, music creation, comfortable text input, full and unlimited web browsing, flexible interfacing and expansion, multi-user usage, office software, software development and enterprise compatibility.

I know there are design elements that come from tablets but thin design and quick-start don’t give them the functionality and utility of a tablet.

As for ‘In everybody’s hands’ well that’s bordering on the offensive. Consumers buy $500 pcs, not $1000 PCs, in many countries it’s less or nothing at all.

Sorry Intel. I appreciate your lead and skill with the technology but you’re going to have to get busy on the message. Tablets are satisfying huge amounts of consumer computing requirements and in many cases do things better than a PC architecture. The Ultrabook has its place and we’re excited about that but let’s be honest and realistic about where it can effectively fit in.

Videos after the jump. . .

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I’ve always loved slider devices, and this is probably why I’m so excited for the Eee Pad Slider which has recently made its way through the FCC and should be arriving in stores soon.

Brad Linder of Liliputing points out a lengthy hands-on video of the Slider that recently went up on YouTube. I must say that the video only makes me more excited… the device looks really well built and the sliding mechanism seems to work great!

The only thing I’m not happy to see is that there is no mouse! I feel like Asus could have easily put a nub-mouse or optical mouse on the device and that would save people from having to use the only USB port on the Slider for an external mouse.

Damian and I are at it again with another indepth review of the Asus eeePad Transformer and this time, we decided to throw as many USB goodies at the Transformer [tracking page] and keyboard dock as possible in an attempt to defeat it.

The USB selection included a Samsung USB keyboard with a trackpoint, a rather ancient looking Microsoft USB mouse, an USB Flash drive, a Sarotech ABIGS multimedia hard disk enclosure and a USB SD Card reader.

This video segment was totally unscripted and thus the we were genuinely surprised and excited that the Transformer worked and functioned with every USB device tested.

This is good testimony that the Transformer and the keyboard dock accessory is a real contender to replace the netbook as most of the common USB devices that we rely on for everyday computing will function on the Transformer.

Damian also commented that Asus will be releasing some useful Transformer adapters (including USB) for the tablet really soon which means you won’t need to get the optional keyboard dock in order to tap into the USB goodness!

The next challenge we had for the Transformer was hooking it up to a LCD TV via the HDMI out connection.

Note that the Transformer uses the mini-HDMI which differs from the Acer Iconia A500 that uses the micro HDMI instead. (If you’re looking for HDMI cables, don’t miss our guide on how to avoid getting ripped off)

There were no issues with getting the display mirroring working albeit a ‘gremlin’ moment when the LCD output display froze — this was rectified by detaching and reattaching the HDMI connector on the Transformer.

We tested video playback using 2 sets of 720p and 1080p video files and playback was disappointing on both the tablet as well as the LCD TV display out – both audio and video were terribly choppy and experience dropouts. This was encountered even after the latest Android system update which promised performance improvements which certainly weren’t evident in the video playback.

The system update did deliver some new cool features such as video editing application but that is review for another day, so stay tuned for that!

We’ve got the LG Revolution on hand and have prepared an unboxing video for you which also features a flash test. I’m happy to report (and somewhat impressed) that the LG Revolution has so far handled YouTube 720p flash video quite well. This surprised me because the Revolution is using a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU as opposed to Nvidia’s Tegra. Have a look below:

JKK of JKKMobile has his hands-on video up and he takes us round the Asus PadFone explaining the technology behind the dock and the phone. It’s basically an HDMI screen and USB extender that also provides charging from a built-in battery. There’s an audio, mic and USB port extender too.

Our product page is here. We’ll add information, links and videos as we find them.

via @jkkmobile

Nvidia’s Tegra and Tegra 2 hardware has been quite popular over the last year, bringing powerful CPU and GPU performance to tablets and smartphones in a standardized package. Today, Nvidia is showing off the next version of Tegra, codenamed Kal-El, which will power tomorrow’s tablets and smartphones.

Kal-El is the next iteration of Nvidia’s mobile CPU/GPU series and features the world’s first mobile quad-core CPU, and a whopping dodeca-core GPU (that’s 12, folks!). Nvidia is expecting five times the performance of Tegra 2 out of Kal-El!

They say that seeing is believing:

This impressive video demo shows some intense dynamic lighting and real-time physics. Both lighting and animations are traditionally pre-rendered onto scenes in mobile games and cannot be interacted with in real-time. Nvidia says that Kal-El’s four CPU cores and twelve GPU cores make dynamic lighting and real-time physics animations practical for the first time on mobile devices.

In the demo you’ll watch as the demonstrator disables two of the four CPU cores to simulate how the game would run on a dual-core CPU. The results aren’t very pretty as the cores max-out and the framerate drops to at least half of what it was. Returning to four cores shows each core running around 70% and the game playing very smoothly. What’s great is that Nvidia expects the production CPU to be 25-30% faster than the hardware being used for this demonstration!

The game will be available on the Android Marketplace (likely through the Tegra Zone application) once it’s complete.

Nvidia has been sending out Kal-El samples to production customers since February and expect Kal-El devices to begin production this August.

Sascha joined me in the studio last night for a full-on 3.5hr marathon testing and discussion session with 10 different tablets. The iPad2, Asus Eee Pad Transformer, Acer Iconia Tab A500, HTC Flyer, Blackberry Playbook and Samsung Galaxy Tab were the focus of our efforts and we recorded three parts of the live session for you to view below.

The Blackberry Playbook impressed with its smooth UI, video handling and gestures. The Flyer beat the other 7 inch tablets in a browsing test (and is as fast as any Tegra2 + Honeycomb browser I’ve tested.) The Galaxy Tab was crowned the value-for-money king and in the 10 inch category, we couldn’t really find a winner. The iPad2, of course, just sits in a special space all on its own and isn’t truly challenged by the 10 inch Android devices although as Honeycomb and Honeycomb-optimised apps start for mature, that could change., especiall when we look to lightweight hardware like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Anyway, here are the videos. We hope you enjoy them. All products are owned by Sascha or myself.

Don’t forget the detailed HTC Flyer Live Review tonight, May 18th,  at 2100 CEST (Berlin) on Carrypad.com/live. Follow @chippy for more on that.

The first video is an overview of all the tablets Two 10″ Devices were tested in detail in Part 2 Three 7″ devices were tested in detail in Part 3