Notion Ink has announced the first details of its second-generation Adam II Android tablet, revealing a partnership with Texas Instruments and plans for using a customized version of Ice Cream Sandwich. The new tablet – seemingly called Adam II, though as far back as mid-2010 Notion Ink was talking about an “Eve” successor to its Adam first-attempt – will use a chip from TI’s OMAP44xx range, jumping ship from NVIDIA and the Tegra series in the original tablet.
The "Internet of Things" drive, where every electronic device can communicate with each other in a mesh of digital linkery, continues to gather pace, with Texas Instruments unveiling a low-cost embedded WiFi chipset targeting everyday gadgets. The TI SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3000 is described as a "self-contained 802.11 network processor" that minimizes the effort involved at making consumer, home and office devices internet-aware.
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I'd say I always get a bit wary when a device toots its own horn about one specific specification it has and doesn't speak much at all about the rest, but who am I kidding: I love strange ideas like making a tablet able to be completely submerged in water with waterproofing enough to tell the tale. This isn't the only waterproof tablet to be shown off this week at CES 2012, the other being the Pantech Burst, which is said to be able to take a full minute of dunking without damage, but did prove itself to be much more hearty than that with a several-minute-dunk during its announcement at the AT&T developers keynote early in the week. What Fujitsu has here is that same waterproofing, but in a tablet that was revealed for sale in Japan several months ago.
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Today we saw some amazing advancements in temperature sensor technology by Texas Instruments. The TMP006 is the first single-chip passive infrared temperature sensor to date, and is extremely smaller than any currently available. It can easily be incorporated into smartphones, tablets, notebooks, and countless other mobile devices. More accurate temperature readings through using the TMP006 will allow manufacturers to optimize system performance.
See that little square dot? That's TI's next generation temperature sensor, sitting next to the old model and the CES award it won the company.
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Haptic feedback is a big part of what makes modern touchscreens usable - as early adopter of the original iPhone know, typing on a flat surface is a pretty poor method of tactile interaction. Texas Instruments is aiming to improve the current generation of vibration motors, vibrators and software by developing new piezo (Greek for "to press") series of drivers.
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Texas Instruments' new TI OMAP 4470 series system-on-a-chip was revealed earlier, but they gave SlashGear a special look at the new series at CES. Thanks to various improvements in the architecture and efficiency of its chips, the ARM system has some impressive gain in performance, especially in the gaming sector. Advancements are quite impressive: on one benchmark, the new series showed double the framerate in a 3D environment demo.
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Texas Instruments has announced a full system infotainment solution that will bring feature-rich entertainment and multimedia capabilities to cars. The system includes TI's C6000 Jacinto processor designed for automotive infotainment as well as automotive-grade OMAP mobile processors. There's also TI's new automotive WiLink 7.0 and Bluelink 7.0 connectivity solutions that can turn a car into a mobile hotspot.
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Texas Instruments has brought along a new demo to CES 2012, showing Windows 8 on an OMAP4470 processor ahead of the Windows-on-ARM release tipped to take place in mid-2013. The aim, TI says, is to show just how well Microsoft's next-gen OS runs on an ARM chipset, helped ably, the company tells us, by the PowerVR SGX544 GPU.
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Always Innovating's HDMI Dongle has a mundane name but packs plenty into its thumbdrive-scale casing: a TI Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 processor running Ice Cream Sandwich, turning any TV into a full Android computer. Running at between 1GHz and 1.8GHz depending on load, the HDMI Dongle packs the same specs as a decent smartphone: a healthy 1GB of RAM, microSD, WiFi and Bluetooth, with support for up to 1080p Full HD and H.264 video decoding.
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When the first Toshiba Android tablet was released, it seemed like a really big deal - at one point it was even rumored that they'd be the ones to host the tablet-centric Android 3.0 Honeycomb as a hero - alas that did not happen, and now that the first iteration (call the Toshiba Thrive, just so you know) is both too fat and unwieldily to sell as a top dog, the big T is sending out a new generation called Toshiba Excite. This tablet was revealed a few weeks ago as a contender for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 with its dual-core 1.2Ghz Texas Instruments OMAP4 processor and its 10.1-inch display at 1280 x 800 resolution - and today Mobile Syrup relays Toshiba information that it'll be on sale come February 2012.
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Samsung, Toshiba and Lenovo will lead the Windows 8 on ARM platform, according to the latest supply chain leaks, with Microsoft putting Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and NVIDIA in the driving seat for choosing their development partners. The three chipset companies have each selected two partners from the tablet/notebook industry at Microsoft's instruction, Digitimes' sources claim, one major collaborator and one minor.
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Samsung showed off what makes it special this morning, with the new Exynos 5250 mobile chipset getting official ahead of its debut in next-gen smartphones and tablets next year. A 2GHz dual-core – with what Samsung reckons is twice the overall grunt of the company’s current 1.5GHz dual-cores and four times the 3D graphics prowess – the Exynos 5250 is also interesting because, unlike NVIDIA, Samsung has opted for a pair of ARM Cortex A15 cores, rather than four A9 cores as in the Tegra 3. That’s going to raise plenty of questions about comparative performance, heat output and power frugality, but perhaps most importantly – in the marketplace, at least – it’s going to prompt an interesting marketing challenge for every company pushing a tablet or phone.
