Now that Samsung’s new Honeycomb tablets are ready for launch, they’re moving forward yet again. J.K. Shin, president of Samsung’s mobile communication division has announced that they’re working on an “enhanced” LTE Galaxy Tab which will be launched later this year, thought he didn’t specific which model will get the LTE treatment. For your info, Samsung now has an 8.9-inch Tab and 10.1-inch Tab, but there’s no guarantee that both models will have LTE. Shin said that Samsung is already in talks with US and South Korean carriers to launch the 4G tablet.

He also teased a third version of the wildly popular Galaxy S handset series for the first half of 2012. A proclamation arriving on news that the delectable Galaxy S II has just set a record for the fastest selling smartphone in Korea after unloading one million handsets in the first month of domestic sales. A new Galaxy S with quad-core overclocked SOC next year? Hell yeah!

Oh and by the way, Shin also had a bit to say about Samsung’s ongoing legal battle with Apple. “We didn’t copy Apple’s design,” he said bluntly, adding that Apple’s allegations “will not be legally problematic.” Hmm… I don’t think Apple will agree on that.

SOURCE via Wall Street Journal

Do you know Liberty City? If you’ve played Rockstar Games GTA, then you’ll know. It’s the virtual city in the game. But do you know that you can actually find this city in Google Map? Yes, the NBTD programmers in gta4.net have just recreated Liberty City into Google’s server using the Google Maps API, and it’s even available on Google Street View because they crazily cobbled together 80,000 screenshots to provide full-blown Street View!

“All roads are covered, except for a few on/off-ramps that weren’t very interesting,” writes Adam from GTA4.net. “There’s around 3,000 separate panoramas which were stitched together from almost 80,000 in-game screenshots (captured with a script) and the final set of tiles consist of over a million images.”

Head to Google Maps, type “Liberty City”, and it’ll direct you to some place east of Wichita, Kansas, and dance around as if you’re actually playing GTA Liberty City.

SOURCE via Kotaku

Sony’s PlayStation 3 is already quite portable, especially when the slim version was launched. But some people aren’t impressed with that, as you still need a dedicated 1080p HDTV to go along, which means that you can’t play your PS3 at the airport or at McDonalds or Starbucks.

But now it’s not a problem, at least for PSHax member Pirate, who has just completed his PS3 mod. What did he do? Well, he turned his PS3 into a water-cooled laptop!

The cooling system replaces the stock heatsinks, allowing for a slimmer design. Weighing in at 15 pounds, it’s also got a built-in keyboard and speakers, a 500GB hard drive, and a 720p / 1080i screen. Yes, it’s a laptop made of a Sony PS3!

If you’re interested, well, good news. Now you don’t have to do all the dirty works, as Pirate’s putting it on eBay, where it’s currently heading north of $1,500. He’s not looking to make a profit, promising that after costs a portion of the selling price will go to server expenses at PSHax, with another portion dedicated to tornado relief efforts in Joplin, Missouri. Now that’s a good lad there!

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Apple has refreshed their Mac lineup with the latest Intel Sandy Bridge processors, but not all of them. The MacBook Air and Mac Mini are still using the aging Intel Core 2 Duo processors, and so what’s holding Apple back from the refresh? Well, it seemed that Apple is testing out their A5 ARM SOC on their MacBook Air.

Not surprising, as the A5 processor is capable of 1080p playback, and is dual-core, making it somewhat more powerful than the Intel Atom processor and comparable to the lower end Intel Core 2 Duo processors. What’s more, it uses less power, and doesn’t require a cooling solution.

According to Japanese website, Macotakara, a trial of the ARM chip is already underway. Apple’s reportedly been experimenting with a Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Air with the A5 on board, and “according to someone who has seen a model running with [Apple's] A5 processor, the performance is better than had been thought.”

I won’t be surprised if Apple actually throws in an overclocked 1.5GHz A5 chip into the MacBook Air. Previously we heard that the MacBook Air is bound for a refresh sometime in June or July using Intel’s new 17w Sandy Bridge mobile processors, so things may be turning in a way or another, but I’m pretty sure the refresh is on the way.

SOURCE via CNET

The ARM processors are getting stronger and stronger by the year. The market is already invaded by dual-core ARM processors since the end of last year, and Nvidia is already sampling some quad-core Kal-El SOC to manufacturers. Apple is also said to be testing ARM processors on their MacBook lineups. But ARM has a big ambition.

The company’s president, Tudor Brown, has just appeared at Computex to declare that ARM wants to conquer the “mobile PC market”, where the company currently only has a 10 percent share. He’s aiming for 15 percent by the end of this year, and an Intel-provoking 50 percent by 2015.

50-percent is quite an achievement, but it depends on how strong ARM processors can go. We assume that ARM will be aiming at the low-voltage notebooks and netbooks at the moment, and if Nvidia’s quad-core Kal-El is as strong as Nvidia says, then the midrange notebooks may actually be powered by ARM processors very soon too. But four years is quite a long stretch, I’m pretty sure the giant chipzilla won’t be sitting quietly in these four years.

SOURCE via PCWorld

Asus shown off the Eee Pad MeMO earlier this year, but didn’t manage to ship it. Well to be accurate Asus still hasn’t announced any date and price for the Eee Pad MeMO, but they manage to give us more info about this tablet. The 7-inch Honeycomb slate is going to have a glassless 3D IPS panel with 1280 x 800 resolutions. Asus also mentioned that the accompanying MeMIC Bluetooth headset will be thrown into the box. My god, this sounds like an awesome deal, IF Asus managed to price it decently.

Well look what we have here. Looks like Asus’s Padfone is real after all. Asus has just removed the curtain for this tablet at the Computex 2011 in Taipei yesterday. The device shown at the event is just a mock-up and prototype, but Asus plan to sell this product around the Christmas holiday season, and get this, Asus says that this thing will come with the very latest version of Andoird “at that time”. Do I smell some Ice Cream here?

Indeed, this product is a combination of an Android phone and a tablet dock, and Honeycomb does not support smartphone, at least the resolution is a hinder at the moment, even Asus’s Benson Lin said so, so it’s only reasonable to have Ice Cream preloaded onto the Android smartphone in order to support the tablet’s resolution.

The smartphone is the real hardware at work here, as the other pair, which is the tablet, only houses a 10-inch touchscreen display, a set of speakers, an extended battery, and an I/O extender, and a dock for the smartphone. It doesn’t work by itself, because there’s no ‘organs’ in it.

ASUS also tells us there’ll be other functionality enabled by the tablet panel, but that’s being kept under wraps for now. Compatibility between the display dock and subsequent phone generations is being contemplated but couldn’t be confirmed, and as to the UI, ASUS says it’ll be almost the same as its second-gen Android tablets. You heard that right, second generation ASUS Android tablets — to succeed the Transformer and Slider — will be coming around the same time as the Padfone. That means Ice Cream tablets!

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