Apple iPad Has a New Enemy: Amazon Tablets

This October the tablet market will have one more important member: Amazon’s own tablet. According to analysts and investors, Amazon plans to release a tablet computer by October. It will solidify Amazon’s position as the world’s largest Internet retailer.

Information on the features of the upcoming tablet is scarce. It’s expected to be a roughly 9-inch screen tablet which will run on Google’s Android OS, presumably Android 3.2 (or later, if another version comes available).

Unlike the iPad, it won’t have a camera. According to the Wall Street Journal's report, some people familiar with the device said the online retailer won’t design the initial tablet itself. What’s more, its production is being outsourced to an Asian manufacturer.

In a recent note, computer hardware analysts at Canaccord Genuity wrote to investors, saying that at least 1.5 million Amazon-branded tablets are being produced for the third quarter of 2011. And the target for the whole year of 2011 is 4.5 million to 5 million units.

This new plan will intensify the competition between Amazon and Apple Inc. Before, they have battled on digital books, digital music and mobile applications and they’ve already had some bitter clashes. In March, Apple complained saying Amazon had violated the trademark on the name "Apple Store".

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs had also once said that Apple’s general-purpose device iPad is much superior to Amazon’s single-purpose Kindle electronic-book reader.

"Amazon and Apple are frenemies" — both friends and enemies — said Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester Research analyst. They “rely on each other as partners.” For instance, Amazon sells digital books via its Kindle app in Apple’s iTunes Store. However, they also aggressively compete for customers' attention and dollars.

Currently, Apple is the incomparable leader in the tablet market. Since the iPad entered the market last year, Apple has sold 19.5 million of the devices by the end of March. There is a tough and long road ahead for Amazon to battle Apple in the tablet market.

However, compared to other companies, Amazon has more strength to go up against Apple, Epps said. One reason is because Amazon already has a digital-content store with a significant selection and following. What’s more, it has heavily promoted its digital offerings this year. Also, it can offer cheaper tablets. In fact, it could sell the tablet for a loss, hoping to make money on sales of movies, music and books.

Nonetheless, Amazon doesn’t have a natural brick and mortar outlet to sell its products, while Apple has its own retail stores. Besides, iPad is in its second generation and Amazon’s tablet may be not as refined as the iPad.

Will Amazon be able to compete with Apple head-to-head on hardware sophistication? Only time will tell.

Android 3.2 to hit Motorola Xoom

Motorola Xoom users will be pleased to hear that Honeycomb 3.2 will be released soon for tablet. A Motorola representative spoke to CNET and said “Google has started rolling out Android 3.2, in phases, to Motorola Xoom users”.

The update is going to offer a new viewing mode will will be tagged as ‘zoom to fill’, and it will enable SD card slot support also. Motorola will be the first company to get this update, which is positive news for Xoom owners.

The Android developers blog gives more information on this, which makes for good reading.

“When the user enables this new screen compatibility mode, the system no longer resizes your layout to fit the screen. Instead, it runs your app in an emulated normal/mdpi screen (approximately 320dp x 480dp) and scales that up to fill the screen—imagine viewing your app at the size of a phone screen then zooming in about 200%. The effect is that everything is bigger, but also more pixelated, because the system does not resize your layout or use your alternative resources for the current device (the system uses all resources for a normal/mdpi device).

In cases where an app does not properly resize for larger screens, this screen compatibility mode can improve the app’s usability by emulating the app’s phone-style look, but zoomed in to fill the screen on a tablet.”

Other tablets get improvements, including 7 inch designs. Other optimisations and tweaks are on the way, according to reports.

Kitguru says: Xoom users should be happy to get this roll out as it offers real world benefits for everyday tasks.

Nokia N9, ZTE Light Tab, Huawei MediaPad unveiled at CommunicAsia 2011

2011 CommunicAsia ICT exhibition divulged several brand new smartphones, tablets and other ICT devices from Asian manufactures. The trade exhibition that took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 21st to 24th June came into large public attention with the products like Huawei’s MediaPad and Nokia N9.

Nokia stole the show in Singapore with its successor to N8 smartphone on MeeGo OS. Despite the partnership with Microsoft Windows Phone 7, the Finnish technology maker announced a great smartphone on MeeGo, jointly owned by Nokia and Intel.

The new Nokia smartphone comes with a cheek design and has a 3.9-inch AMOLED display.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS are key features of the device, which will get 16GB and 64GB versions.

Indeed, N9 may be one of final products from the mobile maker on operating system other than Windows Phone. The company has reached in an agreement with Microsoft toll roll out exclusive hardware solutions for the software giant.

Chinese telecommunication product builder ZTE announced its tablet dubbed ZTE Light Tab 2 V9 at the Asian technology trade show. ZTE Light Tab 2 V9 runs on a 1GHz processor and will have a 7-inch display with a 1,024x600-pixel resolution.

Another super hit product of the show is Huawei MediaPad, a tablet on Android 3.2 Honeycomb. Huawei MediaPad has a 7-inch display with dual cameras, Wi-Fi, HSPA+ support and many other features. Sony Ericsson announced its new Xperia Ray, Xperia Active and Xperia Txt in the show.

Huawei MediaPad Will Wield Android 3.2 'Honeycomb'

Huawei is the latest vendor to produce a tablet computer, announcing plans to launch a 7-inch MediaPad based on Google's as-yet-unreleased Android 3.2 "Honeycomb" operating system.

Huawei introduced MediaPad, a 7-inch tablet computer running Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) forthcoming Android 3.2 "Honeycomb" powered by a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2GHz processor.

Huawei, which unveiled its plan June 20 at the CommunicAsia conference in Singapore, said the device weighs less than a pound and is less than a half-inch thick.

The slate supports 1080P full high-definition video playback and an HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) port, and features a 5-megapixel auto-focus, rear-facing camera with HD video-recording capabilities, as well as a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera to enable video chat.

Intended as a media consumption tablet to challenge the likes of Samsung's 7-inch Galaxy Tab and HTC's Evo View 4G, the MediaPad supports Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) Flash 10.3 and comes preloaded with Facebook, Twitter, Let's Golf and the Documents to Go applications. There is 8GB of internal storage.

The device, shown on Engadget, connects to HSPA+ (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) networks with a peak of 14.4M bps, as well as WiFi.

The biggest news with this machine is the Android 3.2 platform. Android 3.2 is basically the same as the current Android 3.1 platform—with scalable widgets and USB host support, among other perks—rolling out on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

However, 3.2 is tailored for the 7-inch screens and other slate sizes and supports Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) chips, according to This is My Next.

The MediaPad has only 6 hours of playback, which might inhibit some consumers expecting the 10-hour battery life Apple's iPad affords people. The MediaPad could ship in the U.S. in the third quarter of this year.

Huawei is mostly known around the world as a telecommunications solution provider, but the company has launched about 10 low-cost Android smartphones and sold some 7 million mobile devices in the first quarter.

Huawei is just the latest of several companies perhaps unexpectedly coming to the fore with Android tablets.

Panasonic unveiled a ToughBook last week, while Lenovo has two Android tablets on tap for the summer, one for consumers and one for businesses. Toshiba meanwhile is launching its 10.1-inch Thrive Android tablet July 10 for $429.

Chinese Gadget Maker Unveils World's First Ever Android 3.2 Tablet

Google Inc. (GOOG) has been much more choosy with Android Honeycomb than it has with past versions. It did not release the source of the new tablet operating system, despite claiming that it was still open source. And the company frowned on 7-inch Android 3.0 and 3.1 designs, pushing 9 to 10 inch designs instead.

Now a Chinese company, Huawei has unveiled a slick new 7-inch tablet running Android 3.2, a point-release upgrade of Honeycomb. With the new version of Honeycomb, Google is reportedly at last easing up on the pressure against 7-inch designs. In fact, Android 3.2 is tailor-fit for these designs.

Reportedly, Android 3.2 is the final release to come from Google before the long awaited "Ice Cream Sandwich" Android version, which is expected to merge the disjointed tablet and smart phone codebases.

The new tablet, dubbed the "MediaPad", features a slick 217 pixels-per-inch IPS capacitive touch panel, indicating an approximately 1200x800 pixel resolution. Also onboard is a dual-core 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) CPU (likely the same model found in Hewlett-Packard Company's (HPQ) webOS TouchPad), 8 GB of Flash storage, a microSD slot, Bluetooth, HDMI (1080p) out, GPS, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, 5 megapixel rear-facing camera, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Battery life is predicted to be around 6 hours and Adobe Flash 10.3 comes preinstalled.

The small slab measures in at a modest 10.5mm thick and weighs 390g (0.86 pounds).

It comes with a built in HSPA+ (14.4Mbps). No plans for a Wi-Fi only version have been announced. Pricing is also not yet available.

The new tablet was revealed at the CommunicAsia convention in Singapore. A wave of invading Android 3.2 slates is expected to hit the U.S. soon as well, though Huawei has not revealed when the MediaPad might land in the States.

Google Nexus 4G Gets Detailed: 4G LTE, 720p Display, Android 4.0

Now, before we dive in, we should note that the report isn’t sure whether this is a Nexus branded device or if this is just a flagship device that will launch with Android Ice Cream Sandwich much in the same way the Motorola Droid launched with Android 2.0 and the Xoom with Android 3.0. That being said, let’s look at a phone that might just make you foam at the mouth.

First, this Nexus 4G is apparently going to be running on a next-generation dual-core 1.2GHz or 1.5GHz CPU. No, no Kal-El for this thing. Instead, it’ll apparently run an OMAP 4460 or a low powered Snapdragon. In addition, it supposedly has a “monster-sized” screen that has 720p HD resolution and it will apparently come without any of the physical buttons that generally come below the display.

It should also have a 4G LTE radio inside when it arrives which means it’s possibly going to be AT&T’s first 4G LTE smartphone – which also means that it might not be a Nexus device considering all of them have started on T-Mobile – and it might also come with 1GB of RAM and 1080p HD video capture and playback. As for the cameras, a 5MP rear camera with advanced sensor, and a 1MP front facing camera for video chatting.

The Nexus 4G will also apparently arrive with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and may be the first device to do so. All of this apparently will come in a super thin form factor making this one of the most desirable phones in recent memory, if true.

As for a release, it’s supposedly supposed to arrive around Turkey Day which is a couple of months after AT&T is going to be releasing its 4G LTE network upon the world. If you recall, it took a couple of months for Verizon to push out 4G LTE smartphones so these dates seem to be more than just a coicidence.

Even if this thing is not the next Nexus device, anyone out there planning on picking it up?

Google Nexus 4G coming with Android 4.0 and 4G LTE capabilities?

It looks like Google is continuing the Nexus lineage with what might be called the Nexus 4G, and according to rumors it will be a beast of a phone. The device will be the first to feature Android 4.0, also assumed to be called Ice Cream Sandwich. Additionally, it will have a 1.2-1.5GHz processor, which might make the Nexus 4G a powerful device assuming Android 4.0 isn’t a system resources hog. However, BGR reports that it might not be NVIDIA’s Kal-El processor, and instead might be a TI OMAP 4460.

If you think that’s something, the Nexus 4G is also said to have 4G LTE capabilities, which can only mean that it’s going to hit AT&T or Verizon when it’s finally released. I’d assume it’d be for the latter, especially since AT&T will be launching its LTE network starting this summer, and the new Nexus device is slated to be released in November – just in time for the holidays.

Additionally, the Nexus 4G might have 1080p video recording and playback, a 1MP front-facing camera and a 5MP rear camera. However, it sounds like the 5MP rear camera will be more along the lines of the one found on the iPhone, with larger pixels and greater low-light performance.

It almost sounds too good to be true, but then again, if I went back in time two years and told you that smartphones would have 8MP cameras, 1.2GHz dual core processors and day-long battery life with 4G capabilities, you’d probably laugh at me. So here’s to hoping.