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From Verizon in Q1 Since Andy Rubin showed the prototype of Motorola's tablet running on Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS, it has been filling the news posts and now it is finally officially announced. The Motorola XOOM is a 10.1-inch slate tablet powered by Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip. The official announcement includes the specifications as well as the fact that this one will be heading to Verizon and will be available in Q1. The 4G connectivity will also be available as an update in Q2 2011. The full specification list includes a 10.1-inch capacitive screen with 1280x800 resolution, a 5 megapixel...

Boy oh boy, HTC is entering the tablet arena with quite a bang. The company has just taken the wraps off its brand new 7-inch Flyer Android tablet, which touts a 1.5GHz single-core CPU, 1GB of RAM plus 32GB of flash storage, an aluminum unibody construction, 1024 x 600 resolution, a tablet-optimized version of Sense, and... what's this, a pressure-sensitive stylus! The HTC Scribe trademark we saw floating around in legal waters turned out not to be the branding for a tablet, it's actually the name HTC gives to the technology enabling what it calls a "groundbreaking pen experience." Other...

Note to Readers: Saumitra is one of the newest members of our smartphone team. He has contributed to articles in the past but we'd like to formally welcome him to the AnandTech team. Saumitra will be focusing on everything Android and iOS. Welcome Saumitra! The tablet market today is a far more interesting place than it was just over a year ago. Since the launch of the iPad, there hasn’t been a real competitor to iOS in the tablet space. We’ve seen customized versions of Android for larger devices like the Galaxy Tab, but they’ve all had their fair share...

Microsoft is scrambling to get some traction in the slippery tablet space, even though it invented the genre back in 2002. The next version of Windows, called Windows 8 for now, is supposed to embrace the tablet form better than anything produced to date. That should be a long way out, but information leaked by Dell implies it will release a Windows 8 tablet in Q1 of 2012. Can that timetable be met? ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley isn’t betting the farm, but offers an interesting scenario that would allow such aggressive timing on Dell’s part. Her conjecture, and she makes...

Roadmap 'till Q1 2012 In addition to the Dell smartphone roadmap, Android Central managed to get their hands on the tablet roadmap as well. The roadmap features a bunch of new models including the Gallo, Rosemount, Sterling and Opus One, Silver Oak and Peju. The Streak 10, also known as the Gallo, should be coming in April, running on Honeycomb. In addition to Gallo, Dell is apparently preparing an update for Streak 7 as well. The next one is Rosemount, a 10-inch Windows 7 tablet with a 1366x768 screen and a release date set for June. The Sterling is the...

If there's any one takeaway from both CES and Mobile World Congress this year it's that NVIDIA is unequivocally a player in the SoC space. With design wins from LG, Motorola and Samsung, NVIDIA may not have the entire market but it has enough of it to be taken seriously. In our Optimus 2X Review I mentioned that it looked like NVIDIA was going to be moving to a 6-month product cycle in the SoC space. The intention is to out execute its competitors frequently enough that they are either forced out of the market or into making a mistake...

BARCELONA (MarketWatch) — ARM Holdings Chief Executive Warren East would be “disappointed” if the British microchip designer captures only 20% of the computing chip market by 2015, he told MarketWatch in an interview on the sidelines of Mobile World Congress Wednesday. ARM which sells its processor blueprints to chip makers like ST-Ericsson for a licensing fee and a royalty on each chip shipped, dominates the mobile phone and tablet market. On the PC market, however, Intel Corp. has a near monopoly. As the lines between mobile phones and computers have blurred over the past three years, Intel and ARM have...

Comes in 2014 Nvidia always liked secrecy, but if you want to work in mobile phone industry you have to show your cards years in advance. This is what everyone does, ARM, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm etc. Nvidia has just showcased its Tegra 3 codenamed Kal-El and claims that this quad core 28nm part is five times faster than Tegra 2 and even slightly faster than a Core 2 Duo. This is what Nvidia claims and it will probably be true in certain tests. Kal-El is the birth name for Clark Kent, the chap better known as Superman, just in case...

So it turns out that NVIDIA roadmap we saw last month was as true and pure as driven snow. The barely conceivable quad-core Tegra chip that it listed has now been made official by none other than NVIDIA itself, with the company also informing us that the new silicon is already sampling out to prospective clients. Known as Kal-El internally, this will most likely turn into NVIDIA's Tegra 3 as and when it's ready to enter the consumer market. Tonight NVIDIA whetted our appetite for what's to come with a demo that can most fittingly be described as an exhibition...

The Touchpad, not reliant on Android, Windows or (of course) iOS, is a sign that HP demands to be taken seriously as a software company.Yes, HP (HPQ) has now jumped into the tablet fray with its TouchPad.  It's a whiz-bang cool gadget, and some folks will want to rush out and buy it.  Are we talking iPad numbers? Not likely, but whether HP sells as many of its flavor of tablets  in this first outing isn't perhaps as important as HP finally wrenching its destiny away from Microsoft (MSFT) and placing it in its own hands. Let's be very clear,...

While I was scheduling my Mobile World Congress meetings I got an email request from Intel. It wanted to give me a quick tour of the latest MeeGo UI for tablets. MeeGo, as you may remember, was the combination of Intel's Moblin OS and Nokia's own efforts. While MeeGo isn't completely abandoned by Nokia, it's looking unlikely that Nokia will be a major player in it going forward considering the fresh partnership with Microsoft. Intel is still trucking away with MeeGo and unfortunately appears to be retaining the less-than-ideal name despite the recent shakeup with its partner (at least Moblin...

We're here at HP's webOS 2.1 event in San Francisco. HP has announced a couple of big things today; a tablet (HP TouchPad), a (tiny) smartphone (HP Veer) and a professional phone (the Pre 3), all running the webOS 2.1 operating system.The TouchPad is a 9.7" (1024x768) tablet powered by the Qualcomm MSM8x60 SoC with a 1.2GHz dual-core Scorpion CPU, a 1.3MP webcam, 16 or 32GB storage, 1GB RAM and 802.11 b/g/n. The TouchPad weighs in at about 1.6 lbs and 13mm thick. The TouchPad WiFi-only version will be coming to US sometime this summer with 3G/4G versions and other...

A tablet probably can't succeed without a complementary smartphone base.With Hewlett-Packard set to unveil its first webOS-based tablet on Feb 9, we think the company's gambling it can leverage its $1.2 billion Palm acquisition to turn mobile thin-clients into an opportunity rather than threat.

Android app market opens on the interwebs Google has given the world an extensive demonstration of Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, a new incarnation of the mobile OS designed specifically for tablets. At a press event at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Google man Hugo Barra showed off Honeycomb's so-called "holographic" UI as well as several new Google applications and services that run atop the OS. The new interface, Barra said, offers a multitasking button for browsing currently running applications; widgets for quick access to various services, including Gmail and Google Calendar; and notifications that pop up at the bottom of the...

Even though Microsoft’s public stance, when asked about the impact of Apple’s slate is “iPad? What iPad?”, the Redmondians are preparing the company’s partners for battle in 2011. Microsoft is making available to its reseller partners marketing collateral to help them defend against the iPad’s encroachment into the enterprise market. I had a chance to check out a PowerPoint dated December 2010 on “Microsoft Commercial Slate PCs” that the company is offering to its partners to help them explain Microsoft’s slate strategy to business users.Check out ten slides from Microsoft’s iPad Battle Plan for Partners

updated 10:15 am EST, Mon January 24, 2011 NVIDIA Tegra 3 leaks with late 2011 ship date NVIDIA may be first to have a shipping quad-core processor in a tablet. A new copy of the same slide that showed the Tegra 2 3D has listed the Tegra 3. The design would closely follow Qualcomm's own ambitions and see a 1.5GHz, quad-core design that would be more than twice as fast as any Tegra 2. BSON heard that triple the graphics power would be onboard to decode Blu-ray video and to power a 1920x1200 main display.To keep the power draw reasonable,...

Verizon, Google and Motorola executives kicked off the official start of the Consumer Electronics Show and this year’s tablet craze with a product and partnership of their own to compete with Apple’s iPad. The first tablet running Android 3.0, also known as Honeycomb, will be on the market in February, executives announced at Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s keynote Thursday. The Motorola Xoom tablet will be available exclusively on the Verizon network. Mike Maclaren, a Google engineer, joined Verizon and Motorola executives on stage to give the audience a sneak peek at the features of the Xoom and some of...

Oh, hello. A trusted tipster just sent in these internal renders of HP / Palm's "Topaz" webOS tablet, which is one of two tablets currently being developed in Sunnyvale. That's right, two tablets: the 9-inch Topaz and a 7-inch model codnamed Opal -- a lineup that fits nicely into Palm's "Something big, Something small, Something beyond" tagline for its upcoming February 9th event. Looking at the render, we're seeing the no-button design we'd previously heard about (we're assuming the gesture area rotates with the display), a front-facing camera, a micro USB port on the bottom, and what appears to be...

Big GHz fight in 2011 Qualcomm has decided to show its dual Scorpion based MSM8x60 mobile CPU and it also told the world that this CPU can hit 1.2GHz, per core that is. The chip has an Adreno 220 GPU that we know little about and of course its a 45nm chip since 28nm should be only ready in the latter part of 2011. The chip should be able to do high definition stereoscopic 3D video, and multi-party video conferencing as well as some nice gaming. It is intended for tablets and phones and you can bet that you will...

Heating up clock wars Whether you like it or not, the ARM revolution is happening today and these small chips are starting to matter to the world just as much as Intel and AMD chips do. They will get to many tablets and mobile phones in 2011 and onward and most of the 2011 models are dual-core. We just mentioned the 1.5GHz OMAP 4440 chip yesterday and we got confirmation from a source close to Texas Instruments that this fancy fast chip can ship in the second half of 2011. Texas (non-chainsaw) chaps do believe that that have a good...