Tag Archives | Tablets

CES 2011: Samsung Previews Slider Tablet, Air-like Ultraportable

Posted by Jacqueline Emigh on January 6, 2011 at 7:19 am

Samsung's TX100 Slider PC

With so many mobile PCs hitting the market, hardware makers are doing all they can to differentiate their products, a trend particularly evident right now among tablets vying to unseat Apple’s iPad. Samsung is differentiating to the hilt with two Windows 7 mobile PCs unveiled on the eve of CES: a new “slider” tablet PC, and a slimline ultraportable notebook.

Samsung previewed both the TX100 — also referred to as the Slider PC 7–and the Notebook PC 9 at a news conference during CES Press Day on Wednesday in Las Vegas, amid a flurry of Samsung TV announcements.

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Checking in on Lenovo's IdeaPad U1 Hybrid Tablet

Posted by Jared Newman on January 5, 2011 at 9:10 am

Of all the CES 2010 tablets that turned to vapor, Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 Hybrid was my favorite. So I was delighted to see the dual-processor, dual-OS tablet-laptop back at CES 2011 on Tuesday, in the same pre-show event at which it debuted last year.

Lenovo likes to say that the U1 has “two brains.” Underneath the keyboard, there’s an Intel ultra-low voltage processor powering Windows 7. The screen is actually a removable 10-inch tablet (known as the “LePad” on its own) with an ARM-based Snapdragon processor that switches to a customized version of Android when removed from the base. While the tablet is removed, you can still use Windows by plugging the base into an external monitor.

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HP WebOS Tablet: Think February, Not January

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 4, 2011 at 4:06 pm

The bad news is that it looks like rumors that HP would unveil its WebOS tablet (possibly called the PalmPad) at CES were wrong. The good news is that the company has scheduled a WebOS press event in San Francisco for February 9th at 10am–and it seems like a very good bet that the tablet will make its debut there. (It presumably sent out the invites today to inoculate itself against anyone being disappointed if CES comes and goes with no WebOS news.)

I’ll be at the event and will provide live coverage–more details as we get closer.

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Toshiba Does an Android Tablet

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 3, 2011 at 1:17 pm

One of the things that will define this year’s Consumer Electronics Show is that it’s the first one of the iPad era–Steve Jobs having unveiled Apple’s tablet two weeks after last year’s CES. And since most of Apple’s competitors have been slow to come up with iPad-like tablets of their own, CES 2011 is going to feature the debuts of iPad rivals by the boatload.

One of them will be from Toshiba. The company isn’t ready to start shipping anything just yet. (It cheerfully admits that it likes to take its time and do its best to ship a more refined product rather than rushing into new markets.) But it’s released some details about an unnamed, unpriced tablet which it intends to ship in the first half of this year.

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Windows on ARM? Logical. Windows on ARM in 2013? That's an Eternity from Now

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 22, 2010 at 9:14 am

Numerous news sources are reporting that Microsoft plans to demo a version of Windows that runs on low-power ARM chips–rather than the x86 processors that Windows has been (mostly) synonymous with since its inception–at CES next month. Here are reports from Ian King and Dina Bass of Bloomberg, Don Clark and Nick Wingfield of the Wall Street Journal, and Ina Fried of All Things D.

I was startled by the news–until I thought it over, whereupon it didn’t seem so surprising any more. For decades, x86 processors (mostly from Intel and AMD) have been inside most computers that mattered, and so the fact that Windows ran on them was a virtue. (In fact, when Microsoft ported Windows NT to other CPUs in the 1990s–DEC’s Alpha and MIPS–the new versions turned out to be irrelevant, and so the company pulled the plug.)

But what happens if tablets and other new-wave computing devices become serious rivals to traditional PCs? x86 as it stands today isn’t especially well-suited to tablets, since it wasn’t designed from the ground up for energy efficiency and small form factors. (That was supposedly one reason why HP pretty much lost interest in its own Windows tablet and bought Palm’s Web OS.)

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Android vs. Android

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 21, 2010 at 10:02 am

Time for another Last Gadget Standing face-off! On the surface, Google and Samsung’s Nexus S and Barnes & Noble’s Nookcolor don’t have all that much in common—after all, one is a smartphone and one is a “reader’s tablet.” But they’re both based on the same operating system, Google’s Android, and that makes them distant cousins, at least.

I’ve reviewed and (mostly) enjoyed both of them–they’re both worthy Last Gadget Standing semi-finalists. Now it’s time for you to weigh in.

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