The speculated HTC tablet running Google Chrome OS will have to be put on hold, as HTC’s sales and marketing director claims that the company has halted all work on a planned tablet PC, instead, the corporation will focus on smartphone development, using Google’s Android mobile operating system.
Tablets are a fashionable topic right now – Apple are expected to announce their own model next week, and CES 2010 was positively dripping with touchscreens – but we’ve been hammering on about how useful a compact ultramobile device can be for years now. Before Christmas new UK startup PsiXpda dropped off their first offering, a compact UMPC with a slick, sliding/tilting form-factor, and asked us to give our honest opinion. At a shade under £500 ($820) the PsiXpda isn’t cheap, especially in a world of netbooks and “superphones”; check out how it does in the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Continued »
HTC's potential tablet plans have always been played down by the company - CEO Peter Chou edged around speculation a few months back, before speculating that his engineers were "carefully looking" at netbook possibilities later on - but that hasn't stopped the rumors. According to Smarthouse HTC are preparing "several working models of a touch tablet", including at least one running Google Chrome OS; their sources reckon HTC will be giving private demos of an Android version at CES 2010 next week.
Given they’re the ODM behind the Google Nexus One, and that they’re fast becoming one of the recognizable brands in smartphones, it seems like 2009 – and 2010 – really is HTC’s coming-of-age. Over at Wired they’ve been looking into what the company has done to rise from the ranks of OEMs, including setting a 95-percent “target failure rate” for its R&D division, to encourage faster idea generation, and slipping into bed early with Google.
In a world that’s short on all sorts of resources from oil and gas to water, recently we’ve been asked to cut down our use yet more. Last week, Ralph de la Vega said heavy users of music over data on the AT&T wireless network were bandwidth hogs, that 3% of smartphone users were using 40% of his capacity and frankly, we need to all cut back just a bit. Spectrum is among the few things that they’re not making any more of and, with more users than ever, it’s going to be hard to come up with the capacity needed to keep everyone happy. One solution to this is to shift some of the capacity off of current networks and come up with new broadcast models for content distribution. The folks at FloTV have done just that. The service has been around for a bit, mostly on handsets from AT&T that carry support for the service. In a reverse trend the FloTV folks have gone from the phone to creating a dedicated device for the service.
There’s a growing call to deliver desktop experiences on mobile devices, and in general that’s a good thing. I don’t want to be limited to cut-down, plain-text “mobile” versions of websites when I have a large smartphone display and speedy 3G connection that could readily handle the full version, and the push for full-HTML browsers (and things like Flash support) has already trickled down from a must-have on smartphones to a common feature-phone element. What’s lagging behind, it seems, is an understanding of how mobile device use differs from desktop use, and nowhere is that more evident than in social networking integration. Several devices promise to bring your online social life to the screen that’s always with you, but the experience is patchy at best.
One of Qualcomm’s more low-key demonstrations from today is actually the one thing you can try most readily yourself. Skifta aims to make media shifting more straightforward, using a single client PC or Mac that can then be accessed by any DLNA and UPnP client in your home or remotely. The system works using a simple web-based interface which will work on your desktop or cellphone browser (the Skifta team had an HTC Hero on hand to do just that), and then that content from pretty much any DLNA device gets funnelled around.
Video demo after the cut
HTC’s CEO Peter Chou has reignited speculation that the company is preparing some sort of netbook. Chou apparently told reporters at the Taiwanese launch of the HTC HD2 that the company was “carefully looking into that category and how it can be part of that”; the comment echoes the chief executive’s vague allusions to a tablet or MID style device when SlashGear talked to him at the HD2’s debut in London last month.
If you can predict a device’s success by site stats then we’d say the Verizon DROID by Motorola is going to be a hit. A week after launch and the DROID is still topping the charts for reader interest, and you’ve been peppering us with questions and comments about the Android 2.0 device. Set to hit shelves this coming Friday, the Verizon DROID is already being heralded as the device that will change Motorola’s fortunes; is that hyperbole, or is the DROID really that good? We’ve been putting the smartphone through its paces, so read on for the full SlashGear review.
Android 1.6 is only just rolling out to users of specific smartphones, but already we’re getting particularly excited about what’s set to occur in OS 2.0. The Boy Genius Report are doing nothing to minimize that excitement, either, with a photoset and run-through of just what’s going on in the latest 2.0 builds. Android 2.0 brings with it not only native Exchange support and a fresh – dare we say it “grown up” – new UI, but native Facebook integration, a unified email inbox and new Maps app.
Google have also obviously been working on streamlining usability, too, with more functional desktop widgets that step beyond mere shortcuts. You’ll be able to trigger a YouTube upload in literally two taps, from recording through titling and describing footage then squirting it off to the video sharing site, direct from the homescreen. Meanwhile, while there’s no multitouch support in either the browser or the new, layer-toting Google Maps app, there is double-tap to zoom.
SlashGear JP
