The Samsung Galaxy Tab situation thickens, with the company now insisting that rather than admitting customer sales of the 7-inch tablet were “quite small“, executive Lee Young-hee said they were “quite smooth.” According to Samsung, mishearing of Young-hee’s comments have led to confusion over whether Galaxy Tab shipments have proved disappointing or not.
Samsung has even snipped out the relevant section of the financial call to illustrate it (you can find the whole thing here) and it certainly does sound like “quite smooth” to our ears. You can find that in the video below.
Still, it doesn’t address claims made by researchers today that the Galaxy Tab has seen significant return rates, reaching as much as 16-percent in the US following the holiday period.
It’s the season for smartphone teasers; LG has been working the Optimus 3D angle, and Samsung has been making a song & dance about the Galaxy S2, the dual-core successor to their wildly popular Galaxy S family. All in the run up to MWC 2011 of course, and in the excitement it’s easy to make a mistake: like, oh, forgetting to double-blur your Galaxy S2 pre-advert and mask out the device itself.
Video after the cut
As Engadget spotted, while Samsung’s video editing people have been very careful to mask out any sign of a device in its models’ hands, that thoroughness didn’t quite extend to any reflections in shot. So, when the grinning lady in the screencap above is busy being blinded on the right, she’s also looking straight at an unmasked smartphone in the reflection on the left.
Now, it’s not clear whether Samsung has actually used real Galaxy S2 handsets for the filming of the promotion – we imagine those with better eyesight than us are already creeping through the 1080p version of the teaser on a frame-by-frame basis – but we won’t let that worry us too much. After all, SlashGear is off to MWC 2011 in just a couple of weeks time, and we’ll have all the news for you then.
LG’s G-Slate got a teasingly brief show on-stage with T-Mobile back at CES 2011, then flashed its 3D camera array in a K-Pop music video, and now the tablet has cropped up again online. MysteryGuitarMan has managed to acquire the Honeycomb slate but seems reluctant to do more than just whip it in front of the camera while talking about 3D.
Video after the cut
Still, that glimpse is enough to show the LED flash next to one of the camera lenses, here separated by a metal “with Google” strip as on the back of the LG Optimus 2X. There’s also a brief view of the ports on the bottom of the slate.
So, we can add that the presence of 4G and Google Talk support, but we’re still generally in the dark about everything the LG G-Slate will offer. Perhaps Enya will show up with one next, and tell us about WiFi and Bluetooth.
A video demo of Fujitsu’s Stylistic Q550 tablet has been released, and the company seems pretty keen to differentiate the slate from other Windows 7 machines. According to director of mobile product Meinolf Althaus, Fujitsu’s custom UI attempts to mimic the usability of a hammer: not in that you have to thump it, but in that you automatically recognize how to interact with the tablet, rather than needing to remember what does what.
Video demo after the cut
Meanwhile content creation also gets some attention, being more like a stack of LEGO – i.e. you can actually produce documents – than a slab of chocolate. Meinolf does love content consumption, mind. The eagle-eyed might spot what looks to be a QWERTY keyboard dock in some of the sketches on the wall behind him.
Finally, rather than a scratchy kitchen scouring pad, the Stylistic Q550 will be like a soft scarf – somewhere welcoming and warm, thanks to the overlay showing a day-to-day pane of widgets, calendars, RSS feeds and more. We’ll have to actually wait and see how well the Fujitsu holds up in day to day use, but we definitely give the company credit for stepping out of the ordinary when it comes to their promos.
Skype has stripped the beta label from its Skype for Mac app, and in the process made group video calling a premium – i.e. paid – feature. $4.99 gets you a day’s use of group video, or there’s a monthly subscription for $8.99. Meanwhile, Skype has also slimmed down the UI and stuffed more of IM conversations into the screen at any one time.
There’s also the return of full-screen video calls, and an easily revealed chat pane for when you’re in the midst of them. The new UI changes are welcome, certainly, but group video calls going premium will be a disappointment to many. You can download Skype for Mac here.
If you can be sure of anything, it’s that Sony will be pushing the NGP with its own particular brand of “wacky” trailers and adverts ahead of the next-generation console’s release. The first example has arrived, and the poor NGP itself is little to be found; instead there’s plenty of “inspiring” messages like “play life” and the suggestion that NGP gamers will be terribly social.
Video after the cut
To be fair, that’s a possibility given the NGP’s “Near” system; part of the PlayStation Network, it will keep an eye out via WiFi b/g/n for any other NGP consoles in the immediate area, and show you what titles they’ve been playing and other stats. Whether that’s quite the same as having the whole world in your hands remains to be seen.
Sony Ericsson’s MWC 2011 announcements keep getting chipped away; first the Hallon got an in-depth preview, and now it’s the turn of the XPERIA Play to get the same. A PlayStation Phone prototype turned up at Engadget and they did the only sensible thing and put it through its paces, coming away reasonable impressed with what functionality is working so far.
The biggest question we have – how well the touch-sensitive joysticks work – still goes unanswered, since there aren’t any games available to test them with, and emulators seemingly wouldn’t map them. However, as you can see in the video below, general gaming did work, and the Android 2.3 Gingerbread smartphone seems reasonably swift with its 1GHz processor and Adreno 205 graphics.
The software appears to be unfinished – WiFi doesn’t work, for instance – but the separated Timescape and Mediascape apps we saw on the XPERIA Arc are present and Sony Ericsson’s media app plays 720p H.264 with no problems. There’s also a useful widget overview view, triggered with a pinch gesture.
So far so good, but the real differentiator from the ever-more-crowded Android marketplace will be Sony Ericsson’s line-up of games and how much the XPERIA Play costs; those factors we won’t know until MWC next month. SlashGear will be there to bring back all the official details, rest assured.
If you need to leave someone a message, you could either entrust it to a Post-It note or you could go the slightly more obvious route and use a 12-foot long LED matrix. That’s what kitesurfer did, using a total of 512 blue LEDs and a slab of frosted acrylic to make a 20-inch high display that runs the length of his home office.
Video demos after the cut
An ATMEL Mega8 controls the various LED arrays, and gets its commands from a Linux-based embedded computer. That also runs a basic webserver, meaning that messages can be set via a website or even your smartphone.
Altogether the project cost around €200 ($273) though half of that was the lengthy sheet of acrylic that covered the front of the matrix.
A new Apple advert for the iPad has been revealed, “iPad is Iconic“, suggesting that there are over 60,000 iPad-specific apps for the best-selling slate. Several of those apps get a demo in the new video, including the djay virtual turntables, the Wall Street Journal news app and iWork’s Pages.
Video after the cut
There’s also American Airlines’ app for buying tickets, iBooks, Movie Slate and Vanity Fair. The video comes on the heels of Apple announcing 10bn downloads at the weekend, and ahead of what’s expected to be a tablet-centric Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona next month.
Viewsonic’s GTablet didn’t exactly impress early-adopters with its stock interface, but it seems Notion Ink may have inadvertently come to the rescue. xda-developers modder roebeet has taken the Notion Ink ROMs and whipped up a custom Eden build for the GTablet, putting the three-pane UI and slick browser onto the rival slate.
Video demo after the cut
While you might think that Notion Ink would be less than impressed by the port, in actual fact it seems they’re relatively unconcerned. In his latest blog post CEO Rohan Shravan says “XDA community we love you!” seemingly in reference to the speedy hack.
