Tag Archives: debut

Mar 07

LG rumored to debut smartphone with edge-to-edge ...

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[More from BGR: Can Samsung survive without Android?]

The company is said to be planning to debut a high-end Android smartphone with a 5.5-inch full HD 1920 x 1080 resolution display and a pixel density of 403 pixels-per-inch. The handset, which could come to market as the Optimus G2, is expected to compete with the DROID DNA by HTC (2498), Samsung’s # Galaxy Note and Sony’s upcoming Xperia Z smartphone.

[More from BGR: Samsung teases TV with 'true innovation' and 'unprecedented new TV shape' for CES debut]

LG is also rumored to showcase a 7-inch tablet with a 1920 x 1200 resolution and a class-leading pixel density of 324 ppi. In addition, the company may debut a 4.7-inch smartphone with an edge-to-edge display as well as high-resolution ultrabooks, laptops and TVs.

CES is scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, Nevada from January 8th through January 11th.

This article was originally published by BGR

http://news.yahoo.com/lg-rumored-debut-smartphone-edge-edge-display-full-210003770.html

Aug 25

Windows 8 Reviews: Critics Criticize Its Usability ...

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By Michael Oleaga | first Posted: Aug 24, 2012 03:08 PM EDT

(Photo : REUTERS/Alex Gallardo) Microsoft hopes to combat Apple’s success with the iPad with tablets running its Windows 8 operating system.

It has been a little over a week since Windows 8 Release to Manufacturing (RTM) made its debut and reviews so far are mixed to negative.

According to Computer World, Windows 8 is “essentially the same” from its predecessors. However, when used as a tablet interface, the new operating system serves its purpose “beautifully.”

“Designed from the ground up to display information, it provides a significantly different experience from using an iPad or Android tablet — information-centric rather than app-centric,” says Preston Gralla of Computer World.

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When used on a traditional computer, Gralla noted Windows 8 “feels like a kludge,” due in part of the Start screen and its apps have a more natural feel when on a touch interface rather than the traditional keyboard and mouse.

V3′s review gives Windows 8 a fairly popular review of four out of five stars. their pros to the new operating system are the touch interface, recovery tool, and “wealth of built-in apps.”

The negatives are “Modern UI a major upheaval, legacy apps confined to desktop.”

According to V3′s Daniel Robinson, they tested the RTM on several products such as the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC and Lenovo ThinkPad X201.

“Our impression is that the new user interface will discourage many Windows users from upgrading, as it delivers little improvement in user experience for users on desktops and laptops over existing versions of Windows,” noted Robinson.

In an interview with Laptop Mag, Nielson Norman Group’s Usability Expert Raluca Budiu is quoted saying the “usability is worse” for PC’s using Windows 8.

“There are things that you can do more easily in Windows 8. For instance, it’s easy to share a news story through email or with friends on Facebook. but, I am not sure that these are the tasks that people do most often on a PC,” said Budiu, adding Windows 8 is best for content consumption rather than “content production and multitasking.”

Slate’s Farhad Majoo‘s review is titled “You’ll hate Windows 8.”

“In my time with Windows 8, I’ve felt almost totally at sea-confused, paralyzed, angry, and ultimately resigned to the pain of having to alter the way I do most of my work,” reviewed Majoo.

Majoo, as does other reviewers, note the changes Microsoft has done is to compete with the iPad and agree that for the most part it performs better on a tablet than on a PC.

As Latinos Post reported, if you bought a Windows 7 PC on June 2 or later, Microsoft is offering a discount for the upcoming Windows 8 on Oct. 26 for $14.99. The original price will be $39.

© 2012 Latinos Post. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

Windows 8 Reviews: Critics Criticize Its Usability on a PC; New OS Works Best on Tablets and “Wealth” of Apps (VIDEO)

Aug 24

BlackBerry Balance is the PlayBook’s killer ...

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Despite a tepid reaction from critics and new competition from Google and others, the BlackBerry PlayBook’s Balance feature sets the 7″ tablet from Waterloo apart from the pack.

RIM’s PlayBook is without a doubt, one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated devices ever launched.

From its poorly planned debut and lacklustre feature set, to the dearth of available apps (compared to other platforms) and a lack of cellular data at launch, the PlayBook has had a rough ride.

But RIM isn’t giving up on the PlayBook –  as evidenced by the newest 4G/LTE version – and neither should folks who want to use their tablet for work and play.

Despite its shortcomings, which incidentally are fewer and fewer as time goes by, the BlackBerry PlayBook possesses two features that make it unique in the tablet landscape. One of those features is the ability to tether your BlackBerry smartphone to the PlayBook, giving you full access to your BlackBerry’s features but on a much bigger screen.

The second is BlackBerry Balance. Balance lets you create a complete separation between work and personal tasks on the PlayBook, a truly outstanding feature that neither Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android platforms have been able to deliver.

Sure, you can enable parental controls on these devices, but these restrictions disable apps completely instead of creating a virtual wall between work and personal apps. It’s the baby-sitter or nanny approach to control.

With BlackBerry Balance, once you’ve indicated that you want to create a “work” container, you can lock the Messages, Contacts, Calendar and Work Browser with a single password. Once locked, these applications are no longer accessible, but the rest of the tablet’s apps remain available – even a secondary instance of the web browser for personal browsing.

This ability to put all of your sensitive work-related info behind a locked door is a boon to families and anyone else who finds that their tablet ends up being passed from one person to another. RIM’s realization that our tablets – even more than our phones –  are becoming shared devices, is a brilliant insight.

It’s not without flaws, however. the first being that in order to use BlackBerry Balance, you need to connect your PlayBook to an enterprise email account which is running RIM’s proprietary software on the back-end. if you just use a blackberry.net email address, or a POP email account like the one give to you by your ISP, the feature isn’t available to you.

Balance also plays somewhat heavy-handedly with your locked apps. For instance, if you have a work account and a personal account set up in the Messages app, once locked, you can’t access either. RIM needs to (and claims to have plans to) find a way to only lock that which is work-related, leaving all personal data accessible.

These limitations notwithstanding, BlackBerry Balance is easily the most compelling and unique feature on the PlayBook. I doubt it will be long before Google and Apple catch up, but in the meantime, RIM has a killer app on their hands.

At a time when the company is holding its breath for the next 4-5 months until it can release the promised line of BlackBerry 10 devices, it needs all of the help it can get.

BlackBerry Balance is the PlayBook’s killer app

Aug 09

22-Inch Viewsonic Tablet

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With the growing possibility of privately funded lunar missions, NASA has issued some guidelines asking future moon travelers to stay a safe distance from NASA sites and equipment.

LG is bringing true 1080p resolution to smartphones with a new 5-inch display that boasts 440 pixels per inch.

If tablets in the 10-inch range just aren’t big enough, you may be interested in the 22-inch tablet Viewsonic is teasing for a debut at Computex.

Research at MIT has yielded a breakthrough for one of our most pressing problems – getting ketchup out of the bottle!

22-Inch Viewsonic Tablet

Jul 02

RIM delays BlackBerry 10 until 2013, cuts ...

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The death spiral of Research in Motion appeared to accelerate Thursday as the device maker reported a huge miss in its quarterly earnings and said that its savior platform, BlackBerry 10, will not be ready until next year. the new operating system was supposed to debut at the end of this year, but the news now means RIM will lose yet another cycle and miss out on big holiday sales.

The company also announced 5,000 job cuts as it tries to trim costs. That’s a 30 percent cut of RIM’s workforce of 16,500 employees as of March. But the bigger news is the delay of BlackBerry 10. the company has been struggling through delays of previous products and can’t quite seem to get its act together. this new delay will only give rise to more concern that RIM is finished and won’t be able to mount a comeback against Apple and Google.

In the same month in which Apple showed off iOS 6 and Google debuted Android 4.1, the last thing RIM wanted to do was announce that BlackBerry 10, which is based on its QNX platform, wouldn’t make it to market on time. the company is saying it will now appear in the first quarter of next year. I don’t know how RIM survives this and it really does make you wonder how much urgency the company feels in making this turnaround.

The company announced that revenue came in at $2.8 billion in Q1, a 33 percent decline from $4.2 billion from the previous quarter and a 49 percent decline from the same period last year. RIM posted a loss of $518 million or $0.99. even excluding special items, RIM’s adjusted loss was $192 million or $0.37. both figures blew past the expectations of analysts, who were expecting revenue of $3.1 billion and a loss of 3 cents per share.

RIM had shipments of 7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones and shipped 260,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. That continues a downward trend from the previous quarter in which RIM moved 11.1 million smartphones.

RIM’s CEO Thorsten Heins said on a conference call the delay to BlackBerry 10 came about because the task of integrating so much code for the new operating system proved to be a more difficult than previously thought. Heins said he was committed to delivering a high-quality product and was set on not pushing ahead prematurely.

“I will not deliver a product to the market that is not ready to meet the needs of our customers,” he said. “There will be no compromise on this issue.”

But he admitted the next few quarters would be challenging as RIM weathers the platform transition. That’s an understatement. RIM will have to keep pushing BlackBerry 7 devices, trying to convince existing users to upgrade now instead of waiting for the even better BB10. New users will also get hit up but with so many great option in the market available now from Apple, Google and even Microsoft, it’s a tough sell jumping on to a dying platform when you can buy something state of the art.

But even selling those devices will continue to hurt the bottom line because the average selling prices keep dropping. Next year, BlackBerry 7 devices will serve as entry and mid-level devices with BB10 taking premium customers. But it’s hard now to command a premium on devices that will be obsolete soon.

Heins believes the company can emerge from its 5,000 person restructuring leaner, but that’s what every CEO says. the trick will be to get the remaining people to really operate at a faster pace. there isn’t any sign, however, that RIM is capable of executing at a quick rate.

There was some slim hope that RIM could turn things around with BB10, which inspired cautious optimism from my colleague Kevin. But as I’ve mentioned before, RIM doesn’t seem to operate with enough urgency. even if it delivered BB10 this year, the road would have been extremely tough with so many people voting with their feet away from the BlackBerry platform. But now the chances of getting back in the game as a full hardware player are even more challenged. My colleague Kevin predicted this year that RIM would be purchased mainly for its patents or would refocus as a services-oriented entity. That is looking more and more likely now with each passing quarter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

RIM delays BlackBerry 10 until 2013, cuts 5,000 jobs

May 14

Lenovo IdeaPad U400 Review – ...

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Share This Review: Introduction

As 2011—the year that saw the genesis of the slim-yet-powerful ultrabook—ended, we found ourselves once again awed by today’s mobile-computing technology. from a design and performance perspective, it was a great year for notebooks. With the debut of so many exciting products, 2011 closed with the resounding bang of a laptop lid: Notebook innovation is alive and well.

While fast, superlight ultrabooks dominated much of the mobile-computing conversation during the final quarter of 2011, not all consumers need (or want) the absolute lightest notebooks available, especially considering that these wunderkind laptops aren’t cheap. If a super-portable machine means spending a bunch more money or giving up screen size, storage capacity, an optical drive, and graphics power, all of a sudden, a heavier machine might not seem quite so unattractive!

Case in point: Lenovo’s $899 IdeaPad U400, which, due to its screen size (14 inches) and weight (4.4 pounds), fits into our "thin-and light" laptop classification. (Computer Shopper classifies "thin-and-light" notebooks as models with screens ranging in size from 13 to 14.9 inches, unless they weigh less than 4 pounds; ultrabooks are rapidly redefining these rigid categories, though.) Similar in configuration to Dell’s $999 XPS 14z, which also impressed us, the IdeaPad U400 is a gorgeous machine with lots of great features. Its performance on our benchmark tests was quite similar to that of the XPS 14z, too, which is to say above average. However, a few glaring flaws, such as a serious touch-pad quirk and a lack of a performance boost from its discrete graphics accelerator, left us feeling that Lenovo has some more work to do on this machine.

You can custom-order an IdeaPad U400 on Lenovo’s Web site in a wide range of configurations, or opt for one of two basic (preconfigured) flavors. we tested the $899 IdeaPad U400 (model 09932DU), which uses the 2.4GHz Intel Core i5-2430M processor and 6GB of RAM. Lenovo also offers a $1,099 model 09932GU, which boosts both components, to the peppier 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620M and 8GB of RAM. Both systems come with Windows 7 Home Premium; you can upgrade to Windows 7 Professional with Microsoft’s built-in upgrade feature for $89.95.

Lenovo IdeaPad U400 Review – ComputerShopper.com

May 11

ViewSonic ViewPad G70 tablet leaked ahead of MWC

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By Tyler Lee on 02/22/2012 03:40 PDT

If ViewSonic tablets that will run on Windows 8 isn’t your thing, and that you’d much prefer a tablet with Android on board, well it looks like ViewSonic may have such a device planned for you in the form of the ViewPad G70. The tablet has yet to be officially announced but it appears to have been leaked ahead of its MWC debut courtesy of a source of Pocket-lint.

According to the source, the ViewPad G70 will be a 7” tablet with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on board and will sport a display resolution of 1024×600 with a pixel density of 169ppi, similar to that of the ViewPad 7x. it will come with HDMI, micro USB and a mini USB port, both front and rear-facing cameras with the latter sporting a sensor of 2MP, and will offer 4GB of internal storage that can be expanded via a microSD card slot.

It will also offer 1GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, but unfortunately it was not revealed as to what speed it has been clocked at. While its pricing and availability remain unknown, an online retailer has the ViewPad G70 listed as $349 which does seem pretty good for money assuming that’s price it will be sold for upon release. We expect the tablet to be revealed at MWC 2012, so check back with us then for more info.

Related articles:ViewSonic reveals their MWC 2012 lineupLG Optimus LTE2 has its photos leaked onlineLG LS970 “G” with quad-core processor and 4.7″ display rumored to be arriving on Sprint

ViewSonic ViewPad G70 tablet leaked ahead of MWC

May 06

New Asus Transformer Pad 300 tablet coming April ...

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(Credit:Asus)

It looks as though we’ll have another new big-nametablet hitting stores in a little more than a week as a new Asus Transformer Pad 300 has started popping up for preorder at some online retailers.

The Taiwan-based tablet maker has apparently dropped the “Eee” from the name, and the new Transformer will join the Galaxy Tab 2 to make its debut on April 22, according to a report from PC World.

Like its predecessor, the Transformer Prime, the new tablet features a quad-core processor and snaps into a keyboard dock (sold separately) to become a full-fledgedAndroid laptop, but at a lower starting price than the Prime.

Retailers including BJs and Office Depot show a price of $399.99 for the Transformer Pad 300 with 32GB of memory, 1GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor — once it comes into stock.

Other key specs include Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Bluetooth, front- and rear-facing cameras, a 10.1-inch display, Wi-Fi, 4G, and 10 hours of battery life that extends to 15 hours with the additional battery in the optional keyboard dock.

With the new 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2 looking at a $250 price tag and this reduced cost Transformer Pad matching the price of the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 2, it looks like the strategy more slate makers are adopting to compete withApple’s iPad this season is to undercut the dominant tablet. The recently released new iPad features some key upgrades — most notably the high-resolution Retina Display — but the price point remains the same, starting at $500.

More Android 4.0 tablets seem to be popping up every day, with the potential for a Google tablet and a Kindle Fire follow-up in coming months. Heck, the way things are going, it wouldn’t even be that far out to expect a Boeing tablet this year.

New Asus Transformer Pad 300 tablet coming April 22 for $399

May 02

Discounts Offered on Name Brand Consumer ...

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Whitney Manning is proud to announce the launch of the new Internet storefront, TekkTron.com. Shoppers are invited to browse the new Web store for deals on desktops, all-in-one PCs, e-readers, laptops, and tablets. among the name brands featured are Apple, Acer, Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, hp, and Lenovo. Visit the site’s brand new blog, TekkTronBlog.com, for further information.

Enid, OK (PRWEB) April 29, 2012

Web entrepreneur Whitney Manning is pleased to debut http://www.TekkTron.com. Customers are invited to browse the new Internet storefront’s comprehensive collection of name brand consumer electronics offered at discount prices.

At TekkTron.com shoppers can find deals on computers that will help them keep up in this fast-paced digital age. Choose from name brand all-in-one computers like the hp TouchSmart, Toshiba all-in-one PC, and the ASUS ET2011ET-B011E. Set-up a home office with a desktop computer from Acer, Cybertron, or Lenovo, or get work done on the go with a lightweight, portable laptop. Apple accessories, including leather cases and dual stations for the iPad, can be scooped up well below retail prices.

Tablets are the hottest consumer electronic on the market at TekkTron.com has them fully stocked. Shoppers can choose from Acer, ASUS, hp, and ViewSonic tablets. Highly coveted Samsung Galaxy Android tablets and the Sony Tablet S are featured at discounted prices. the NOOK color e-reader by Barnes & Noble is also available.

Customer service is of the utmost importance at TekkTron.com. the site is continually updated with new inventory to ensure that customers can always choose from the latest and greatest technology. Orders are filled and shipped promptly in keeping with the company’s commitment to complete customer satisfaction. Feedback is always welcome and responded to in a timely manner.

“I’ve tried to consider every aspect of the customer experience in crafting this business,” said Manning. “From the selection of products to the pricing to the lay-out design of the site, the customers’ needs have been considered every step of the way.”

Manning, a self-professed computer nerd, maintains a blog, http://www.TekkTronBlog.com. there product reviews, analysis of electronics trends, and purchasing advice are doled out on a regular basis.

About the Company:TekkTron.com is owned and operated by Web entrepreneur Whitney Manning.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2012/4/prweb9453633.htm

Discounts Offered on Name Brand Consumer Electronics at TekkTron.com

May 01

Toshiba Excite 13 Android Tablet

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A number of companies are busy developing tablets and Toshiba is no different. Toshiba’s first move into this arena came in the form of the Toshiba Thrive which by all accounts could be considered a rather clunky device due to the thickness of the tablet.

Open to feedback, Toshiba took all of the comments that they received about their first tablet, went back to the drawing table and came up with plans for another device. this time around, the tablet made its debut some four months ago at the Consumer Electronics Tradeshow. Known as the Excite tablet, what distinguishes this device from Toshiba’s first model is the effort that was made to thin this device down. this device also came standard with a 10-inch display screen.

Today, Toshiba has added to the Excite line up by introducing their newest addition, the 13-inch Excite 13. Not only is the display screen bigger then any of the earlier Toshiba tablets, but amongst Android tablets, the Excite 13 features the biggest LED touchscreen available on the market today. Pixel resolution on this device comes in at 1600×900 and with an emphasis on thin design, Toshiba has managed to pack the innards of this device into a 0.4-inch thin, 2.2 pound device. Aside from its smaller dimensions, the Excite 13 also comes standard with a four speaker sound system, an SD card slot, a micro USB data port, an HDMI port and 1GB RAM. The entire unit is also powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU.

Expect to see the 32GB Excite 13 go on sale this June for $649.99 while the 64GB model will retail for $100 more.

Source

Toshiba Excite 13 Android Tablet