Last Wednesday at his CES keynote, Steve Ballmer showed off three examples of what he called “Slate PCs,” from Pegatron, Archos, and HP. He said they were “perfect–perfect–for reading, for surfing the Web, and for taking entertainment on the go.”
Tag Archives | Tablets
Nvidia Offers a Taste of Tablets to Come
Laying unceremoniously towards the end of Nvidia’s booth at a press event tonight was an early prototype of the Ultra, an Android 2.0 tablet developed by ICD.
It’s the same tablet (or slate — I’m as baffled as Harry by the terminology shift) that appeared briefly, of all places, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a 7-inch tablet with all the trimmings: Wi-Fi, 3G, Webcam, MicroSD slot, 4 GB of internal memory and, of course, Nvidia’s formidable Tegra chip. An Nvidia representative promised more and better tablets at the company’s booth tomorrow, but I had to take a stab at this one tonight.
The Ultra was a bit buggy, which explains why Nvidia wasn’t making a big deal of it. As soon as I picked it up, it crashed. Then it took a while to load up. Then the touch screen acted a bit dodgy. And yet, I walked away excited.
What most impressed me was the tablet’s speed and smoothness. Maybe it’s the iPhone effect, but lately I’ve become obsessed by this sort of thing. And because I’ve never seen Android running so smoothly — even the Nexus One phone on display elsewhere at the event showed some choppiness — using the Ultra was a pleasure. A 1080p version of Star Trek played without a stutter, and the e-reader function flipped nimbly between pages.
We don’t yet know what Apple has in store — or for that matter, whether Apple has anything in store at all — but even if it’s something completely surprising, I could get comfortable with Tegra and Android as purveyors of working class tabletslates. We’ll see what else is in store tomorrow.
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Steve Ballmer to Demo Slate! Or Not!
When the New York Times’ Ashlee Vance blogged that Steve Ballmer would demo a “novel” HP slate computer at his CES keynote tonight, people got worked up and wondered if it was the semi-mythical Courier prototype. Now sentiment seems to be running against the theory that Ballmer will show off anything extraordinary. ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley thinks it might be a relatively prosaic new HP Windows 7 touch-enabled machine. Kara Swisher also says it isn’t Courier.
Sounds reasonable to me–Courier feels like something that’s most likely not ready to be a product just yet.
It’s amazing how quickly the tech world has stopped calling tablets tablets and begun referring to them as slates–a term that wasn’t bandied about much until rumors broke that Apple’s device might be named iSlate. Or can anyone explain to me what the difference is between a tablet and a slate?
Either way, I plan to be at the Ballmer keynote tonight. I’ll let you know what we see, or don’t see…
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Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1 Looks Rough, Still Neat
You may have heard earlier this week about Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, an 11.6-inch laptop with a fully detachable tablet screen. Lenovo had it on display tonight, and the press were clamoring to get a look.
Seeing the IdeaPad U1 up close, it’s hard not to get a bit giddy. You essentially get two machines in one, the base computer powered by a Core 2 Duo processor and the tablet running on a 1 GHz Snapdragon ARM chip. Peeling the tablet from its shell requires a simple pull away from the translucent red backing, then upwards.
Once separated, the tablet switches into a custom, Linux-based operating system that, sadly, is pretty jerky. However, the product is six months out, and Lenovo says they want to boost the smoothness factor before release. Otherwise, the tablet mode is easy enough to navigate, with four big panels for photos, videos, music and documents. There’s also a six-panel screen that includes a variety of widgets, such as weather and e-mail.
A couple other points of concern: the tablet’s screen got washed out pretty easily at off-angles — it was easy to notice this as other people handled the unit around me. And if you don’t like the red shell, too bad, because that’s all Lenovo has in store for now.
Still, the idea of a modular computer is exciting. It’s definitely possible to use both pieces at once, with the base plugged into an external monitor (or downloading files idly) while you browse away on the tablet. Put together, the computers combine resources, sharing storage and getting eight hours of battery life where the tablet alone gets less than five. Many of the other specs are up in the air, but you’ll definitely get 4 GB of RAM (512 MB for the tablet), 2 USB ports and a 1.3-megapixel Web cam.
Lenovo said they’re hoping to get the IdeaPad U1’s price under $1,000 for a May or June release.
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A Microsoft Tablet
The New York Times’ Ashlee Vance says that tomorrow’s Steve Ballmer Consumer Electronics Show keynote may feature…a tablet slate computer…
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Yet More Apple Event Stuff
Scuttlebutt on Apple’s alleged event to unveil its reported tablet is fast and furious today: Now the Wall Street Journal is saying the tablet will ship in March, and France’s Mac4Ever contends that some developers already have access to a new iPhone OS 4 SDK that lets them simulate a higher-res screen.
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Apple Event Later This Month
John Paczkowski of All Things Digital has joined the chorus of reporters saying that Apple will unveil something new and interesting at an event in San Francisco this month. He says, however, that the day in question may be Wednesday, January 27th, not Tuesday, January 26th.
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Joe Wilcox on Apple’s Tablet
I can understand how you can be a tablet skeptic–hey, I’m one myself–but I don’t quite see how you can be so certain that a product that nobody knows anything about for sure will be a failure…
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More Tablet Musings
Over at Ars Technica, John Siracusa provides some more worthwhile pondering about Apple’s “iSlate.” Even if the product somehow mysteriously fails to appear, it’s prompted some good reads (amid a lot of pointless blathering, it’s true). On slow news weeks, maybe we should make up imaginary Apple products and discuss them.
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Ten Million Apple Tablets? A Little Historical Frame of Reference
Apple rumor of the moment: Former Google, Microsoft, and Apple executive Kai-Fu Lee has blogged that he’s heard Apple thinks it can sell ten million “iSlate” tablet computers in its first year on the market. (I persist in putting quotes around “iSlate” since we don’t know if that’s the product’s name, assuming there is a product at all.)
That ten-million tablet is merely a rumor, albeit one spread by a smart guy who may have excellent sources. It certainly sounds ambitious. But how ambitious is it? For the sake of comparison, I dug up some sales figures for other Apple products–starting with the Apple I, and including both numbers reported by Apple and some third-party estimates. Here they are, after the jump.
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