Let’s start this fine Monday with a launch straight into space: once with an Android Device, another time with a Samsung balloon full of paper planes. Next lets get back to Earth with the continuation of the 3D wave with some Tegra 2 3D Chips that’ll be popping up this spring. Grab a big fat update to ADW Launcher EX with several new docks and fixes. Next order of business, Florian Mueller’s been found bunked out – who is he? He’s the guy who found a bunch of Oracle codes in Android’s open source code, saying the suit against Android has total footing -doesn’t appear that way any more. Then remember that $10K iTunes gift card prize for the 10 billionth app downloaded? The mother of the girl who won it hung up on the “you won” call. Check out a column by Don Reisinger by the name of Dear Logitech: The Revue Is Overpriced, and another column by Tim Bajarin called Techies can be Foodies Too Finally, make sure you’re not getting had – you probably don’t need AOL anymore. All this and MORE on SlashGear Morning Wrap-Up.
The first Notion Ink Adam pre-orders are seemingly finding their way to customers, with at least one UK buyer of the Android slate having received his tablet today. Documented over at Notion Ink Fan, Shane Trafford reportedly gave his delivery guy “a big hug” when he handed over the slate.
As we’ve already seen from the official unboxing, Adam comes in a box which converts into a desk stand for the tablet. There’s also a software update waiting, which apparently took around 20 minutes to download; no word on what sort of connection that was over, nor what new functionality it delivered.
So, it seems the much-anticipated Adam is finally landing. If you’ve pre-ordered and are waiting for your tablet, let us know in the comments; Shane’s was a WiFi model with the Pixel Qi display.
It’s not just a Tegra 2 3D chip we can expect later this year; the remainder of NVIDIA’s leaked roadmap for 2011 has emerged, courtesy of Bright Side of News, and it seems the company plans to begin sampling Tegra 3 in Q4. The new processor will be the world’s first mobile quad-core chip, packing up to four 1.5GHz Cortex-A9 cores in the T30 SoC for tablets.
Tegra 3 will pack 3x faster graphics than Tegra 2, and be capable of driving a 1920 x 1200 display. That opens up the possibility of super-high pixel density tablets when paired with a suitable display panel. There’s also Blu-ray video support and NVIDIA’s ULP CPU mode for “ultra-low power” consumption.
The NVIDIA AP30, meanwhile, will be targeted at smartphones, and offer either dual- or quad-core SoCs capable of driving 1366 x 768 displays. The company expects both chips to sample in Q4 2011, which suggests commercial products using the T30/AP30 in early 2012 and which are software compatible with previous chips.
How aggressive can NVIDIA get? That’s the question puzzling our brainboxes right now as we gaze upon the complete version of the slide that let us know about a potential Tegra 2 3D chip over the weekend. It’s not every day you hear of a 1.5GHz quad-core mobile SOC, but our discovery of corroborating evidence for the T25 module sitting alongside it makes us more willing to credit the possibility of a Blu-ray-crunching, 13,800 MIPS-capable, multicore Cortex-A9 Tegra 3. Moreover, the roadmap of production samples in Q4 of 2010 fits perfectly with NVIDIA’s claim that Tegra 3 was “almost done” in September of that year. The ULP designation on this listing stands for Ultra Low Power in NVIDIA parlance, which would indicate an aggressively tuned power management system — the only way we can envision a quad-core anything operating within a tablet. Fall 2011 is when we should know for sure.
Motorola’s XOOM looks set to arrive in under a month’s time, with a Best Buy leak tipping both pricing and release date for the Android slate. According to Engadget‘s sources, XOOM stock will hit Best Buy on February 16, in time for a sales launch on February 17.
As for pricing, that’s expected to be $699.99. Onboard storage will be 32GB and the tablet will run Android 3.0 Honeycomb, likely the first slate to see a public release with the new OS version. More on the Motorola XOOM in our hands-on.
NVIDIA was a huge player in the mobile arena at this year’s CES. Their dual-core Tegra 2 processors that will be included in this year’s upcoming “super phones” are expected to completely change the mobile processing market, and now it seems that they are planning a “Tegra 2 3D” chip that will start shipping this Spring.
According to a leaked slide meant for the Mobile World Congress presentation, the Tegra 2 3D will be clocked at 1.2GHz and will be based on a Dual Cortex A9. According to this slide, NVIDIA will start production this quarter with units ready for devices in Spring of this year.
This is a bold, yet understandable, move for the company as all of the world’s focus seems to be shifting to 3D display technology. The chip is said to be powerful enough to power a Master Image TN-LCD display using cell parallax which would allow the mobile device to create a 3D effect, similar to Nintendo’s 3DS.
Looks like we will have a lot of impressive 3D-ready mobile devices set for the second half of 2011!
Darn, we’ve barely started getting acquainted with Tegra 2, yet NVIDIA seems to already be preparing the stage for a sort of Tegra 2.5 — a 1.2GHz dual-core chip that’ll be marketed as a 3D-capable mobile processor. This T25 silicon is apparently set for mass production in the first quarter of this year, with availability coming up in the spring. Given the noises we keep hearing about 3D going mobile, this is one rumor that makes a lot of sense — and even if you’re a staunch supporter of the 2D creed, you can’t deny that a sped-up Tegra 2 CPU sounds pretty delicious. We’ve managed to also track down some technical chatter about adding support to Chromium OS for a 1.2GHz T25 from NVIDIA, seemingly corroborating the leaked image above. Oh boy, it’s gonna be a hot summer for mobile computing this year!
There isn’t a lot of meat to this, but there is certainly a ton of sizzle. If you are a fan of devices that pack NVIDIA Tegra 2 technology inside some are expecting Tegra 3 to debut at Mobile World Congress next month.
If it does in fact debut next month, it would be about a year since Tegra 2 showed up back at CES 2010. Netbooknews reports that NVIDIA’s Tegra GM has said, “I’m going to come pretty close to my cadence of a launch every year. It will be in production around the same time as my competitors’ first dual-cores will.”
We still have no idea what the official specs of Tegra 3 will be, but if this rumor has any truth to it, we will know in only a few weeks. Tegra 3 is expected to be a quad-core cortex A9 offering with a GeForce 8 or 9 series GPU that supports CUDA. Sounds pretty sick doesn’t it.
T-Mobile USA has poured cold water onto rumors of price leaks for the upcoming Dell Streak 7, which had been guesstimated at $330 after what appeared to be Equipment Installment plan information was spotted at the bottom of the 7-inch tablet’s information page. According to the carrier, that information “is the result of a technical error and is incorrect.”
Unfortunately they won’t say what the accurate figures actually are, only that the official numbers will be shared in the “near future.” Launched at CES 2011 earlier this month, the Streak 7 has a WVGA capacitive touchscreen, NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and support for T-Mobile USA’s HSPA+ network.
Pricing for Dell’s upcoming Streak 7 tablet may have been prematurely posted, with T-Mobile USA apparently giving details of its Equipment Installment plan for the 7-inch slate. According to the Dell Streak 7 product page, as spotted by Streak Smart, the tablet will be available as a “$82.50 down payment, plus 3 monthly payments of $82.50, required”; that would work out to $330.
There’s no mention of the Equipment Installment plan – which breaks the on-contract price down into four interest-free payments – on the Streak 7′s page itself, but the wording is identical to other products currently available through the carrier. It’s worth noting that this would still require you to take out an agreement with T-Mobile, since it’s just a way to spread the upfront subsidized cost of the Streak 7, not the price of a SIM-free version.
