After launching the 7-inch HTC Flyer tablet with Gingerbread OS, Maxis seem keen to bring in the almighty tablet king of Android at the moment. Yes, I’m referring to the Motorola Xoom that was launched in US in February. At the moment, it’s the most powerful Honeycomb tablet available in the market, until the Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes of course.
Spotting a 10.1-inch capacitive LCD display, it is powered by a 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor and paired together with 1GB of RAM. Judging from the listing on Maxis website, it seems that the company will only be offering the WiFi version of the tablet in the Malaysian market.
According to the words on the street, this tablet will be available to consumers sometime in May. If that is really the case, the Xoom will become the third tablet to be available in Malaysia next month together with HTC Flyer and Asus Eee Pad Transformer.
Why the BlackBerry PlayBook is delayed so much, we’re not sure. However, I’m pretty sure it’s due to the software, as they’re starting from scratch this time. The PlayBook doesn’t even have integrated email manager when launched, but RIM CEO assures that it will be coming soon, as Jim Balsillie assures that the consumer experience will drastically improve over time.
This is what Mr Balsillie said to Bloomberg, “We’ll have an over the air email client to announce very very soon. We have BlackBerry World — our user conference — in a couple weeks. Stay tuned for all capabilities we have coming out on this stuff.”
He also said that RIM is keener to focus on how the PlayBook is fully functional today when used in combination with a BlackBerry handset in business environments.
Honestly thus far we’ve yet to see how well Honeycomb run on a tablet, in a recorded video. Samsung showed off their improved Galaxy Tab 10.1 which is now slimmer, but they never powered it on, making us think that they’re just a mock-up. However, now we have a functioning model in Tinhte.vn’s capable arms. They’re the same Vietnamese site that’s been leaking delicious Apple prototypes in the pass. They found the 0.33-inch thin slate at an unnamed Samsung booth, powered it up, and proceeded to dive into the sticky-sweet mess of Android 3.0 and iPad 2 comparisons that such a discovery affords. There’s even a comparison of Angry Bird Rio, if you want to know.
We’ve seen people stuffing Linux into portable USB drives, and some ‘lite’ version Windows XP too. But now, it seems that Windows 8 will also have a similar feature. A recently leaked Windows 8 shows that there’s a feature called Portable Workspaces, which enables you to take a 16GB (or greater) external storage device and dump a bootable, runnable copy of Win 8 on there. It remains to be seen just how many copies one could create, and whether they ever expire or, indeed, whether they can themselves be copied onto an HDD like a ghost image, but it’s easy to see this as a boon for support personnel. Hopefully this will improve the privacy of mobile desktop
If you think that Windows 8 still has a long way to go, well think again. Last week there’s a leak torrent of Windows 8 in the form of build 7850. However, today we’ve got a peek at what claims to be a newer build, 7955, of the upcoming OS and it’s starting to show a few of those Metro flourishes we’ve all been anticipating. In the video after the break you’ll catch a glimpse of a new Windows Phone 7-inspired login screen and the (somewhat perplexing) ability to set a video as your user tile. It’s not a drastic overhaul — it still looks a whole lot like Windows 7, as you’d expect at this stage
Intel and Micron has geared up their NAND development, and both companies have announced that they’ve achieved the 20nm manufacturing process, when last year both only started 25nm flash production. The impressive 20nm process is capable to create an 6GB MLC NAND chip that measures only 118mm² and allows for a 30 to 40 percent reduction in board space. Of course, those 8GB chips can also be combined for far more storage, so you can count on seeing even higher capacity phones, tablets and SSDs sometime after production kicks off in the in second half of 2011. At that point, Intel and Micron also plan to show off a 16GB device that promises to allow for 128GB of storage in a solid-state storage solution smaller than a postage stamp. Bizarre? No sir, this is Moore’s Law, and soon we will have a 1TB HDD the size of one of your hair.
It seemed like things aren’t going very well for Skype. Android Police has discovered that Skype’s Android client leaves your particular info wide open for grab. The publication reports that the app has SQLite3 databases where all your info and chat logs are stored, and that Skype forgot to encrypt the files or enforce permissions, which is similar to leaving keys hanging out of the door.
What does that mean? Well, any rogue app could now easily grab all your data and phone home — an app much like Skypwned. That’s a test program Android Police built to prove the vulnerability exists, and it works wonder, despite only asking for basic Android storage and phone permissions, it instantly displayed our full name, phone number, email addresses and a list of all our contacts without requiring so much as a username to figure it out.
Android Police says Skype is investigating the issue now, with no estimated time to patch.
Recent Comments