Acer Updates Iconia Tablets to Android 4.0

True to their word, Acer is announcing the availability of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update for their recently launched A200 tablet. We posted the PR blurb about the A200 in early January, and we were able to get some hands on time with the A200 at CES 2012. The quick summary is that Acer has trimmed a few features from the A500, like the rear-facing camera and HDMI port, but they also changed up the industrial design. While the plastic exterior may not sound as impressive as the aluminum shell of the A500, the reality is that in hand the textured plastic actually feels better (at least in our opinion).

As far as the Ice Cream Sandwich update, while Acer’s press release states that they’re updating all of the Iconia line to Android 4.0 (including the A100, A200, and A500), the reality of the updates isn’t quite so impressive. The update is currently being pushed to Iconia A200 customers (it’s not clear if you can get it faster by checking for a system update or not) and should be completed over the coming week. A100 and A500 users eager to get the ICS update on the other hand will have to wait a while longer—April to be precise.

Besides all the Android 4.0 goodness, there are a few features that are unique to Acer. Chief of these is their Acer Ring, allowing you to navigate directly to apps from the lock screen. While the idea is nice, in practice we haven’t found the Acer Ring to be necessary and at least the one time I looked at it, it felt a bit chunky and sluggish to launch and navigate (though I could say the same for Android 3.x in general on Tegra 2 hardware). The only other extra feature Acer mentions is an improved weather widget.

You can read more about ICS in our Galaxy Nexus review, though obviously there will be some differences when running on a Tegra 2 tablet. It should provide a better UI experience on Tegra 2 tablets, but unfortunately unless you’re one of the users that purchased an A200, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. The A200 8GB is currently selling for $330 while the 16GB model goes for $350. However, at this late stage in the life of Tegra 2, we wouldn’t recommend buying a new tablet running Tegra 2 hardware unless the price is under $200, especially considering Tegra 3 tablets are expected to hit sub-$300 prices in the very near future.

Gallery: Acer Updates Iconia Tablets to Android 4.0

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Gary Marshall: Tablets are no longer just idiot toys

From time to time even jaded tech hacks get a "wow!" moment. I had one last night when I saw that Avid had launched an iPad app.

Avid? The high-end video and ProTools firm? An iPad app? Yep, yep and yep.

Avid reckons the iPad makes a great wee video editor, and its Avid Studio plays happily with the firm's high-end desktop software. It's right, and it's not the only firm thinking along the same lines. Apple, of course, already does Garageband and iMovie, Adobe has Photoshop Touch, and there are stacks of digital audio products such as Auria and the tasty-looking Bitwig music studio.

Not bad for toys, eh?

Getting better all the time

What's really great about this is that we're still in the very early stages, both in terms of technology - we've gone from single core to dual core to quad core tablets already; imagine what horsepower tablets will have in five years - and in terms of what's possible for our tablets to do.

Take music, for example. You can use your tablet as a quick and dirty composition device, or as a controller for a desktop music production program, or as a fully-fledged studio, or you can slot it into another bit of hardware such as Behringer's utterly brilliant/completely demented iAxe or its faintly frightening iPad mixers.

This isn't about whether tablets are better than PCs or vice-versa; it's about people, and what they can do, and the ever-expanding universe of possibilities today's technology delivers and tomorrow's promises.

We've only had iPad-y tablets for two years. What on earth will we be doing with them in ten?

TI Wireless Charging - New Chipsets and 10W charging for Tablets

This morning we stopped by TI's power management group to check out what all they had in store, and got to check out some demos of their new second generation wireless power chipsets. The new solutions meet the 5W Wireless Power Consortium (Qi) standard, and have a smaller total package area. TI demoed the BQ51013 second generation small form factor power Rx PCB charging a variety of devices, including a Kindle. In addition, TI has some newer small form factor (BQ5002010 and BQ5002011) charging Tx solutions that further reduce BOM cost and require lower input voltage compared to their first generation counterparts.

TI also briefly teased its upcoming 10W solution charging an iPad 2. Though the current standard is just 5W for smartphones (1A@5V) obviously charging tablets and larger devices is something coming down the road for the Wireless Power Consortium. At present, inductive chargers achieve around 70% efficiency. 

Gallery: TI Wireless Charging

At present, inductive chargers for smartphones generally require an external sleeve or accessory battery cover with the inductive coil and charger inside. Newer second-generation Rx solutions will drive down the size of the inductive charging solution, and inductive coils PCB (instead of hand-wound coils) will make it possible to eventually also make including wireless charging support on the boards themselves.

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Sneak Peek at Future Toshiba Tablets

Ahead of CES, Toshiba revealed their Thrive successor, the Excite X10. This 7.7 mm thick slate would feature a 10.1" 1280x800 Gorilla Glass display and run Android 3.2 (and later 4.0) on a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP 4430 SoC with 1 GB of RAM. We didn't have a chance today to spend some time handling the device but we did see it and some of its kin locked behind glas on the show floor, and all four merit some mention. 

 

Sporting a unique frame, the smallest of the bunch was a 5.1" tablet with a 21:9 aspect ratio. Meant as a purely media consumption device the product is a response to the prevalence of premium film and television content available in this ratio. The displayed sample is meant to gauge interest more than indicate a production direction, so if this really appeals to you, don't get your hopes up.

 

Slotting in between the 5.1" concept and the 10.1" Excite X10 is an unnamed tablet featuring a gorgeous 7.7" AMOLED display. Colors were bright and vibrant, while viewing angles were excellent. No comment was made regarding the display manufacturer, though with LG stepping out of the small AMOLED market the list of possible vendors is limited. 

 

We will try and spend some time with the Excite X10 before the show ends, but in the meanwhile we spent some time ogling a tablet we never expected to see but could learn to love. At 13.3" the concept is meant to further fill the space between a tablet and a traditional PC, per Toshiba reps. If placed in production the device would feature a full line of accessories including a docking stand and a keyboard and mouse to provide input options that would help fill the role of the PC. Aiding in this desktop like experience would be a Tegra 3 SoC and a display that would most likely hit 1920x1080. Though quite large the slate was still impressively thin, measuring roughly 10 mm. 

We'll be sure to follow up with Toshiba frequently to see whether any of these products make it to market. 

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Intel Focuses on Tablets, Winds Down Digital Home Group

Intel's Digital Home Group (DHG) is responsible for the consumer electronics versions of the Atom SoC family. Last year we saw the launch of the Boxee Box and Google TV, both based on the Intel DHG's CE4100 Atom SoC. At the time Intel had grand plans for the Atom CE line, however today things have changed.

The DHG as we knew it is no more. Intel will continue to focus on CE applications of its SoCs however it will focus exclusively on the IP set-top media processor and gateway/cable businesses. Intel's information is somewhat vague but it's my understanding that the Digital TV processor business is what's being axed, and this is the group that ultimately sold into Boxee/Google TV.

The engineers working in the DHG have since been folded up into the newly formed tablet organization under Doug Davis. The folks working on the Atom CE parts arguably had even more mindshare penetration than those working on the smartphone/tablet Atom SoCs, so the move can only be a good one as the two groups will be able to combine expertise and experience. 

This move could also be a sign of things to come. Intel sees synergy between the tablet and the TV. Perhaps Intel sees the future of Boxee Box/Google TV offerings as being driven by a tablet rather than a stationary set-top box? It seems odd at first glance for sure, since there's obviously a benefit to having something permanent outside of your TV. But if you've already got a cable box, maybe a tablet is a better way to extend its functionality rather than adding another box to the stack.

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In Depth: Intel: Windows 7 tablets can outperform iPad 2

Today we used a Windows 7 tablet that delivered an equivalent user experience to an iPad 2 while doing so much more.

And it was an 18-month old single-core Atom tablet, too. Yes, really.

We wouldn't have believed it with our own eyes if we hadn't sat there swiping, zooming and firing multiple video streams across six different screens and devices with our own fingers. And all incredibly smoothly.

What Francois Piednoel, Senior Performance Analyst at Intel, and his extensive team have managed in the last nine months is quite staggering.

It has created what it calls a recipe for an improved end user experience and Piednoel has been travelling Taiwan the last three weeks talking with the tablet manufacturers and giving away this secret.

There's no altruistic reason why Intel wants the rest of the competition to succeed - once the software limitations are out of the equation then the tablet battleground then becomes all about hardware performance once more.

And Intel knows that in terms of straight performance chops its processors have got the edge.

The recipe

What Apple knows, and what Intel has only just realised fully, is that the end-user experience is king. We've all been benchmarking the latest tablets and the performance figures rarely ever show the iPad 2 as the winner.

All the perception model testing that Intel carried out in the last nine months though, showed that Apple's products just felt better to the end user. And much of that, it seems obvious, is down to the responsiveness and the smoothness of the device when you use it.

"If you run the benchmarks on an iPad 2 it doesn't get the best score...there's a disconnect between the two," said Bin Fu, one of Intel's Benchmark Managers.

The marriage of software and hardware that Apple has created with its devices means that it has total control over how they work as a whole.

"Apple had a recipe, now Intel has our own recipe to do that," says Piednoel. "The biggest strength of Apple - they got this wisdom from a platform everybody knows as the Amiga 500. All of those tricks come from this era, small hardware, difficult to program, but it was around for years."

The bottleneck for all tablets, whether they're MeeGo, Android, Windows or IOS, is the memory bandwidth and Piednoel explained the problem in simple mathematical terms.

Intel found the key to a good user experience over a mediocre one was to have a screen that scrolled at 60fps. That is one of the main things separating the iPad from its rivals.

The science

In order to do that though takes an incredible amount of resources meaning the operating system needs some serious optimisation routines to cope.

The 18-month old tablet we were presented with had a resolution of 1300x800 with a 32-bit screen running at 4bytes per pixel. That equates to needing 256MB/s to redraw the screen at 60fps.

When you factor in Windows 7 transparency layers then you triple the required bandwidth. Eventually you end up with an operating system that writes 7 times for each pixel under Win7, the effective pixel-depth. Under Android that drops to around 6 and with iOS around 4.

Pixel-depth is how many times you are going to draw the pixel on the screen for a certain resolution.

With Intel's demonstration software layer running happily on top of a standard Windows 7 installation, it drops to 4 times like the iPad.

Still that requires a full 1GB/s of memory bandwidth and when the total platform bandwidth of tablet platforms is between 1.6GB/s and 2.4GB/s that's no small number.

And that's just to get the screen scrolling at 60fps.

That then leaves the app programmer only 600MB/s on an Atom platform with which to work. If he uses any more than that and you start dropping frames and the end user experience deteriorates.

"To make something like an iPad then you need to be a reasonable person," explains Piednoel. Meaning that you need to stop the programmers making calls on the hardware at the expense of the user expeerience.

Responsiveness

Another issue with the Windows touchscreen experience has been the complete lack of responsiveness.

The iPad has a reaction time of around 15 milliseconds, so you barely notice the lag between moving your finger and the screen moving. In Windows tablets programmers have been unable to get the response time below 200ms.

Essentially it's all down to the fact Windows is a mouse-centric OS. The reason the 200ms time has become a barrier is because that's the amount of time the OS waits before executing a single click order.

Why? Because it needs to wait around to see if there's going to be a second click...

This is what Intel calls a eureka moment.

Now by fooling the Windows OS into thinking the tablet overlay is a video game it suddenly gains access to the Direct Input libraries and response time is carved up.

As Matt Dunford, World-wide Benchmarking Manager states, "there were some things in the OS that were limiting Atom from achieving its potential."

With this simple software-level fix in place even as ancient, and seemingly pathetic a tablet as the single-core Atom device we had in front of us is, it can do things the iPad simply hasn't the horsepower to do.

There's now no waiting around for Microsoft to get its next, touch-friendly version of Windows out the door.

Within 12 months the playing field could be levelled by a simple software download. And you know what? That Windows 8 demo we saw earlier in the week is suddenly looking even more tasty.

Check out our video below:

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Video: Windows 8 for tablets and touchscreens revealed

Microsoft has unveiled an operating system it denied ever having last week – Windows 8. When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer let slip that Windows 8 was on the horizon, the company retracted his words explaining that there was no immediate plans for an OS update but at the D9 conference this week it was shown off.

Windows 8 is set to be a new and improved touchscreen version of Windows, which takes more than a little inspiration from Windows Phone 7 – the company's smartphone OS.

The demo of Windows 8 (which is said to be just a codename at the moment) was done on a prototype tablet and a desktop.

Windows re-imagined

In a release about Windows 8, Microsoft said: "Windows 8 is a re-imagining of Windows, from the chip to the interface.

"A Windows 8-based PC is really a new kind of device, one that scales from touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse."

This "scaling" is apparent in a number of new features for Windows 8. These include many features already found on Windows Phone 7.

There's the fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen; live tiles with notifications; the convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen; web-connected and web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript and some fully touch-optimised browsing.

Microsoft has optimised Windows Phone 8 for touch, but is stressing that it will work just as well with a keyboard and mouse.

"The new Windows experience will ultimately be powered by application and device developers around the world — one experience across a tremendous variety of PCs."

As for a Windows 8 UK release date. Well, it seems that Ballmer was right, as it looks like it will be hitting shops in 2012.

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Computex 2011: MSI's Brazos, Cedar Trail and Tegra 2 Tablets

I met with MSI yesterday, a company that has been going through a bit of an  identity crisis as of late. ASUS is the only motherboard manufacturer that really made the transition from a component vendor to something more than that. MSI is trying its best to go back to its roots and develop a strategy that will work for it in the long run.

Tablets are of course a big deal these days and MSI had a number of tablets in its Windpad line on display.

 First off we have the Windpad 120W, a Cedar Trail based tablet (32nm Atom). Unfortunately, although Intel promised fanless designs for Cedar Trail it looks like the Windpad 120W will use a small, slow spinning fan to help keep it cool. The 10-inch tablet will have WiDi support for wireless video streaming similar to what you can get on an Arrandale or Sandy Bridge notebook today. It's unclear what formats or resolutions will be supported. Presumably Cedar Trail isn't going to have the transcoding performance of a Sandy Bridge so you should lower your expectations for WiDi on Atom accordingly. Pricing and availability are TBD on the 120W.

 Next up is a Brazos version of the 120W, the Windpad 110W. We get a similar chassis but a C-series APU inside. Pricing will be around $599 for the Windows 7 equipped tablet. Finally, MSI also has its Windpad 100A, a Tegra 2 based tablet running Android. Currently the tablet is running 2.3.3, however MSI's goal is to release it either with Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich late this year. The industrial design on the Windpad will change by then, hopefully to a thinner form factor. 

 We'll see a sooner release from MSI running Gingerbread, in a chassis that likely looks very similar to what you see here. {gallery 1106}]]>