Lenovo A1 7″ Android Tablet Revealed

Today we have some news regarding the latest tablet to come from Lenovo. They are calling this the A1 and it will be their 7″ offering in the Android tablet market. Although we have both bad, and good news regarding the Lenovo A1 we’ll share all the details below as well as plenty of pictures they were nice enough to provide.

While no official announcement has been made yet Lenovo will be bringing the A1 tablet to market coming sometime in September and what makes it stand out is the amazing price. That is part of the good and bad news. The good first, the Lenovo A1 tablet will only be $199 at launch, the bad is it will only run Android 2.3 Gingerbread — no honeycomb here. The specs are pretty impressive though and this would make a great mid-range and well priced tablet for someone on a budget.

The Lenovo IdeaPad A1 is a 7″ Android 2.3 affordable Android tablet. It will feature a Cortex A8 1.0 Ghz single-core processor, a 3 MP rear and 0.3 VGA front facing camera. Coming in at 11.9mm thin (0.46 inch), and weighing just 400g. Lenovo is using a magnesium alloy roll-cage internal frame design to keep the tablet strong, yet thin and light. The 7″ LED display will have a 1024 x 600 resolution similar to the Galaxy Tab 7 and offers a great visual experience.
As well as the usual Bluetooth, Wifi, micro SD, micro USB and stereo speakers one unique feature is it will have offline GPS and navigation with its unique chipset that will be powered by Navdroyd. Users can expect to see the device hit the shelves in September starting at $199 for the 16GB model and they will also offer a 32GB model but pricing has yet to be confirmed.
What do you guys think? A great price for a 7″ tablet or a no go without Honeycomb?
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Pogoplug Mobile promises unlimited content streaming for Android Hands-on

Pogoplug today has just announced their brand new Pogoplug Mobile hardware and software for Android and iOS, bringing unlimited wireless streaming of all your content right to your favorite mobile devices. Pogoplug has been around for a while already and have continued to update their software for Android including a major UI overhaul earlier this month. Today they are back with an all new product.

While cloud-based storage and content streaming isn’t anything new Pogoplus has some great features unique to their service that really makes them stand out. What we have is streaming of photos, music and video libraries from home over your own “personal cloud” to mobile phones, tablets, and laptop all on the go. It even offers automatic and secure backup of mobile content (optional of course).
Pogoplus hardware and software hands-on



The new Pogoplus Mobile will retail for $79.99 and be available starting this October. With a sleek new design and form factor Pogoplus Mobile will be your at home personal cloud storage device. Simple insert any SD card for extra storage or connect as many different external hard drives as one needs. Like in the video you can simply leave your Pogoplus Mobile home with a 1TB or any sized drive attached and have access to stream any content you have anywhere in the world with the new mobile hardware and application.
Shown in the video above a neat new feature is the automatic backup of pictures or videos from your mobile device. Once captured it not only instantly sends it back home to your Pogoplus Mobile device and storage, but it also makes a permanent backup and multiple sizes for when you don’t need the image full-size, or if your connection is lacking and a smaller bitrate file would be more accessible. The Pogoplus app will do all of this automatically in the background so you can do other things, or continue streaming content all while it backs up in the background.
More details will be available shortly
Pogoplus App for Android

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Toshiba AT200 Official, 10.1-inch display and 7.7mm thin

Toshiba has just made it official. The AT200 is the codename for their brand new ultra-thin Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet. Could this be the Excite? According to the official press release they’ve nicely been passing around now the device is on display somewhere at IFA 2011, we can expect this tab to come in at only 7.7mm thin. It is not only lighter, but will also be thinner than the Galaxy Tab 10.1

This could very well be the Toshiba Excite we’ve heard about recently, not to mention the up close picture posted yesterday. If previous rumors are correct most likely these are one and the same, since it was also being talked about as ultra-thin.

Reading through the Toshiba press release we can see a few exciting features are listed. As usual we have a 10.1″ 1280 x 800 resolution display, 1GB of ram, but this wont be NVIDIA. It’s said to be powered by a 1.2 Ghz dual-core Texas Instrument TI OMAP 4430 processor. Come in three different sizes — 16GB, 32GB, and even 64GB. Pair all of that with a 5 MP rear shooter with LED flash, and a 2 MP camera on the front for video we have a great tablet. All that power, boosted camera and CPU while staying thinner than anything else on the market — Well done Toshiba.
We are also hearing 8-10 hours of battery life. Toshiba was not able to provide pricing or availability at this time but we should see this device soon, and before the end of the year but they better hurry.
[via SlashGear]

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Nielsen: Android takes 40% of U.S. smartphone market in July; iOS flat, RIM down a point

Google’s Android platform gained once again during the three-month period ending in July, increasing it’s share by 1% over second-quarter totals to grab 40% of the U.S. smartphone market. Apple’s iOS stayed flat at 28% and RIM’s BlackBerry OS lost one point from June-quarter figures to fall to 19%. Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined to take 8% of the market — with Windows Phone responsible for just 1% on its own — and the ghost of smartphone operating systems past is now buried somewhere in the “Other” category. Nielsen also notes that 40% of mobile phone users between May and July of this year owned smartphones, and Android topped iOS in the firm’s survey of which smartphone platform users intend to buy next. From “innovators” to “late adopters,” each consumer group Nielsen polled but one — “early adopters” — found Android to be the most appealing OS for their next purchases. A chart outlining consumers’ next desired smartphone operating system follows below.

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Galaxy Tab 7.7 Hands-on

Samsung is on something of a roll with its Android tablets, pumping out three different sizes in the space of a year. Twelve months on from the original 7-inch Galaxy Tab comes the Galaxy Tab 7.7, packing a slightly larger display, higher resolution and faster, 1.4GHz dual-core processor. Perhaps more important for ultramobile users is the reduced size and weight, however. Read on for our hands-on impressions.

Galaxy Tab 7.7 Hands-on


The metal chassis measures just 7.89 mm thick and tips the scales at 335g, hiding a 5,100 mAh battery in addition to a GSM/EDGE/HSPA+ modem (though it remains to be seen if the US carriers lock out voice functionality). The 1280 x 800 Super AMOLED Plus display has huge viewing angles and matches the resolution of bigger Honeycomb slates, and as we know from the Galaxy S II it’s color-rich and bright. TouchWiz arguably makes more sense on the 7.7-inch screen, pulling together the various social and multimedia content to the homescreen.

Performance – considering the software isn’t final yet – is swift, and one-handed use is simple thanks to a casing that’s thinner than Amazon’s Kindle (albeit a little heavier). Samsung reckons it’ll last for 10hrs of video playback on a single charge, though obviously we haven’t had time to test that promise. More on this great new tablet in our hands-on video!

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Galaxy Note Hands-on [Video]

Bigger than a Galaxy S II but smaller than a new Galaxy Tab 7.7; offering the latest in capacitive touch but also a stylus; the Samsung Galaxy Note is a device with a few personalities. Intended to pull together phone, paper notebook, games device and tablet into one pen-enabled smart handheld, it’s certainly one of the more ambitious gadgets we’ve seen at IFA 2011.

 


First impressions are that it’s an oversized Galaxy S II, with pretty much identical design language. It’s obviously bigger, though not as thick as you might expect; you can still slot it neatly into a front trouser pocket, for instance. The stylus whips out of the bottom – unlike HTC’s Flyer, it gets a dedicated storage slot – and can be used to grab and annotate screenshots, write handwritten emails and messages, use handwriting-recognition (which works surprisingly well with neat cursive) and generally navigate the phone. That would be pointless if the accuracy wasn’t up to scratch, but it is: we could get fine-flowing ink and various line-widths thanks to the pressure sensitivity.

The 5.3-inch Super AMOLED HD display is, at 1280 x 800, the same resolution as Samsung’s tablet line-up, but the panel technology shows its worth with huge viewing angles and brilliant colors and detail. Colors don’t invert even when you’re looking almost side-on. At 178g and 9.65mm thick it’s a little more in the hand or pocket than the GSII but still easy to hold in a single hand, and the bigger display makes using the on-screen keyboard a particular pleasure.

Samsung’s TouchWiz-customized Android Gingerbread software isn’t finalized yet, but the Galaxy Note still put in a solid showing. The custom S Memo app works well, showing up as a sharing option in the standard Android list, and allowing you to clip photos, voice, text, handwriting and drawings; alternatively you can take a screenshot by holding down the side button on the active stylus and double-tapping the display. Crops can be freehand shapes, and eventually Samsung will release a collaborative whiteboarding app, which will allow two remote Galaxy Note owners to work together on the same page.
Galaxy Note Hands-on

Then there’s S Planner and Samsung’s other customized apps to suit the higher-resolution screen. Gone is the wood-effect UI on the Galaxy Tab, replaced by a feature-packed Filofax alternative with pinch-zooming between the various month/week/etc views and support for dragging and dropping appointments around your schedule. It works well, and the extra pixels mean less swiping and paging to find exactly what you’re looking for or get an overview of your week or month. The email app is polished too, with a split-screen view in landscape orientation that shows inbox and message preview simultaneously. Unfortunately the Gmail app is Google’s standard one.

We’re still waiting to see just how long the 2,500 mAh user-accessible battery will last, if owners of the Galaxy Note take Samsung at its word and try to replace their phone, media player, notebook and portable games device in one sweep. Similarly, Samsung’s plans for the S Pen SDK, allowing third-parties to take advantage of the stylus, will depend on how keen developers are to further customize their apps. Still, while before we might have said 5+ inches was too big for a smartphone, the Galaxy Note has us reconsidering.

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