The Lenovo IdeaPad U1, which combines a Windows laptop and an Android tablet into one device, was one of the most intriguing products I saw at CES 2010. It was also one of the most intriguing products I saw a year later at CES 2011.
Indeed, the U1’s path to a U.S. launch has been long and slightly vaporous, but now, it’s nearly here. According to Engadget, the U1 has arrived at the FCC for approval — a decent indication that it might graduate from trade shows to retail shelves.
ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley is reporting on a rumor: Microsoft may be trying to finish up work on Windows 8 by April of next year. She thinks it’s plausible–or at least not obviously crazy. Me, too. For one thing, the conventional wisdom that the OS is likely to show up for the holiday 2012 season is, as far as I know, based more on history than on anyone knowing anything specific about Windows 8. For another, Microsoft has a huge incentive to get this thing out the door–not so much for its PC business, but for tablets, where it’s not yet really in the game and won’t be until Windows 8 is available. And Steven Sinofksy, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows, has a pretty good track record for exceeding expectations when it comes to shipping products in a timely fashion. (Enough so that I think that anyone who parrots the classic “Microsoft never gets anything out the door” meme hasn’t been paying attention over the past few years.)
Adweek’s Lucia Moses is reporting that Philadelphia’s Inquirer and Daily News are planning to start selling a cheap Android tablet bundled with for-pay digital content from the newspapers. It’s unclear whether the plans involve an off-the-shelf tablet, but I assume that the papers’ owner isn’t planning to design a tablet from scratch on its own. Even hardware companies seem to be having a hard time pulling that off…
Research firm IDC says that tablet sales (the iPad excepted) are lower than expected–but that Barnes & Noble’s Nook is now outselling Amazon’s Kindle.
I’ve sort of given up on keeping track of Apple rumors (which is why I cheerfully ignore most of ’em and never write about them here). But here’s Josh Topolsky of This is My Next with a snapshot of the current thinking on the question “When will we see the next iPhone and iPad, and what will they look like?“
Samsung may be onto something with the TouchWiz interface that it plans to release for the Galaxy Tab 10.1.
A new promotional video for the tablet shows off what Samsung is calling “Mini Apps” — a collection of utilities that can be launched on top of other Android applications. These include a notepad, calendar, task manager, clock, music player and calculator. They’re the kind of utlities you’d find on a desktop OS, coming in handy for other tasks.
Tablets need more of this. One of my big frustrations with current tablet software is how inconvenient it can be to perform one task that requires two programs, such as taking notes off a web page or adding up numbers from an e-mail. Switching between apps can be a chore if you have to go back and forth several times.
Almost all of the reviews of HP’s TouchPad (here’s mine) have the same gist: “This tablet is extremely rough, but WebOS is neat .” HP can apparently live with that.
PreCentral says it has info on HP’s plans for WebOS devices for the rest of the year–including a 64GB white TouchPad, an AT&T “4G” model, a 7-inch tablet, and the Pre 3. Sounds interesting–but judging from the first TouchPad, what WebOS really, really needs is a thorough debugging.
One reason why RIM’s decision to let the PlayBook tablet access e-mail only via a BlackBerry phone wasn’t such a hot idea: it’s only now that AT&T customers are able to do it.
My iPad is bursting at the seams with wonderful applications. If I had to pick just one of them as the romantic ideal of what a tablet app can and should be, it would be Flipboard. This “social magazine”–which brings together stuff from Facebook, Twitter, and the entire Web into a wonderfully browsable package–simply couldn’t have existed in the pre-iPad era. And its user interface is a thing of wonder: an amazingly polished, fun experience that both feels like a magazine and like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s not just the best one I’ve seen on an iPad app; it’s one of the best ones I’ve seen on anything.
Can you tell that I kind of like this program? Well, now I like it even more. The company is rolling out an update today, and cofounder Mike McCue briefed me on it last week and gave me the chance to spend a couple of days with it before it hit the App Store.
Flipboard hasn’t changed radically, but there are a bunch of improvements that make it even more….well, Flipboardy.
