CES 2011 - Android Police - Android News, Apps, Games, Phones, Tablets

Jan

Galaxy Tab Prices Slashed On Both Sides Of The Pond: $250 At T-Mobile USA, £359 At Tesco UK

Posted by Abhiroop Basu in Deals, Galaxy Tab, News

TmoNews posted an image last night confirming that tomorrow, the price of the Galaxy Tab with a new T-Mobile 2-year contract will be cut to just $250 after mail-in rebate - $50 less than the current mark. Price cuts for the Galaxy Tab have been popping up all over it seems, and after Verizon announced that it'll be getting a new-and-improved 4G Galaxy Tab with a faster 1.2GHz processor, it makes sense. Unfortunately, the Tab will still cost you 500 big ones off-contract at T-Mo.

And if you live in the UK and are in the market to buy an Android tablet (or any tablet, for that matter), now is the time to consider the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Jan

NVIDIA Tegra 3 Will Make PCs Obsolete In 2012

Posted by Abhiroop Basu in Development, News

CES 2011 was an occasion for manufacturers to flood the market with a plethora of Android devices, and powering many of them was NVidia's Tegra 2 chip.

Released late last year, the Tegra 2 chip uses the "system-on-a-chip" design to integrate an ARM CPU (1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 processor) and a NVidia GPU into one package. This allows faster communication between the cores and the integrated memory controller. Most of the tablets and smartphones, and other unique hybrids, launching in 2011 will be using the Tegra 2 chips.

But, no sooner has the dust settled and NVidia is already planning for the future. A leaked slide from NVidia reveals that the Tegra 2 will soon be replaced by the Tegra 2 3D, which will subsequently be usurped by the "world's first mobile quad-core processor," the Tegra 3.

Jan

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc Shows Up In A Detailed Video Walkthrough, We Wipe Off Drool Yet Again

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in News, Sony Ericsson, Videos, Xperia Arc (Anzu, X12)

A couple of weeks ago at CES 2011, Sony Ericsson announced its latest Android handset - the sleek and sexy Gingerbread-running Xperia Arc. They've also invited the press, Android Police included, to attend a media breakfast where we ended up spending over an hour of quality time with the new device, documented in great detail here. If you have questions about the Arc, I highly recommend you dive into the above post, as it contains a plethora of useful bits and pieces, all wrapped in a convenient package.

Though the Arc was promised to land in consumers' hands sometime in Q1 2011 and no review units have been sent out just yet, the writers from an Italian blog HDBlog.it managed to get their hands on both the Misty Silver and Midnight Blue models and give the hardware and the interface a very thorough walkthrough.

Jan

Sony Ericsson Confirms That Xperia Arc Running Android 2.4 Was A "Misconfiguration"

Posted by Abhiroop Basu in Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News, Sony Ericsson, Xperia Arc (Anzu, X12)

During CES 2011 Sony Ericsson's newest smartphone, the Xperia arc, was sighted running Android version "2.4".

A few weeks ago there were rumours that Honeycomb, Google's next iteration of the Android platform, would actually be Android 2.4 and not Android 3.0. Although it was later confirmed that Honeycomb will indeed be Android 3.0, rumours suggested that an incremental update to Android was being readied. The About section of the Xperia arc, displayed below, appeared to confirm that there was indeed a version 2.4.

However, yesterday a post appeared on the Sony Ericsson Product Blog confirming that the version numbers "higher" than 2.3 appearing in the display of the Xperia arc phones was merely a "misconfiguration" and "nothing to get too excited about".

Jan

Nox Audio Unveils Admiral Touch Headphones, Running Android With A Built-In Screen

Posted by Nate Kimmey in News

Are you concerned that not enough of your gadgets are running Android? Well then, we have some good news for you: Nox Audio has decided to show off their latest set of "revolutionary" headphones, the Admiral Touch. In addition to everything you would expect from a set of wireless headphones (including a retractable mic), they have one particularly interesting feature: they're running Android 2.1 on a 2.4" LCD screen attached to the right cup, powered by an ARM11 processor with 256 MB of RAM.

Right now, the screen is only capable of changing the headphones' modes, but with a microSD card slot, USB cord (it uses an eight-pin port as opposed to the standard USB, however), and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, we're sure to see some interesting hacks in the future.

Jan

The Coolest Android Gadget At CES 2011: Recon's Android-Powered, GPS-Enabled, Camera-Streaming Snow Goggles [Video]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Devices By Manufacturer, Froyo 2.2, News, Videos

I've been roaming the booths of CES for 3 days now, and I think I've seen almost everything even remotely related to Android that was worth seeing. One company, Recon Instruments, has been on my mind since the beginning, however, and I'm really glad I finally made it to their booth today.

Their current product, called Transcend, is a full snow goggles solution incorporating a little color LCD screen in the bottom right corner. This screen is small but it gets magnified optically to show a whole array of information, such as your current speed, temperature, altitude, time, vertical odometer, and the trail map overlaid on top of Google Maps (among other things).

Jan

CES 2011: Hands-On With Sharp's Galapagos 003SH Glasses-Free 3D Android Phone. Surprisingly, It Works! [Video]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Galapagos 003SH, News, Sharp, Videos

It's officially the 3rd day of CES, and I finally made it over to the giant Sharp ~~booth~~ pavilion, where I was able to get a hands-on demo of the first and only 3D Android handset, which is currently only sold in Japan. Don't worry though - it's coming to the U.S. and possibly other locations this year. Perhaps you've heard of it - meet Sharp Galapagos 003SH, which is capable of not only showing 3D menus, pictures, and videos, but allows you to snap some as well. In addition, it supports 3D-enabled games, one of which I was able to demo.

Jan

CES 2011: Video Walkthrough Of Toshiba's Anonymous Tegra II Tablet

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News, Thrive / Regza / Antares / AT100, Toshiba

Last Updated: April 16th, 2011

While Toshiba's original attempts at an Android tablet running on the Tegra chip didn't exactly go down a storm, they seem keen to continue with Android devices, and brought a new tablet with them to CES. Artem got a video demo from one of their reps, and as you can see there are some attractive features to note.

Like the Motorola XOOM, the nameless Toshiba tablet (henceforth "Anon") has a 10.1" WXGA (1280x800) screen, which was unsurprisingly nice and crisp. It also sports the convenience of full-size USB and HDMI ports, along with a full SD card slot allowing for storage expansion up to 64 GB.

Jan

CES 2011: Opera For Tablets Demo [Video]

Posted by Brian O'Toole in Applications, News, Videos

Opera Software's Jeremy Forrester spent some time showing off Opera's latest browser, which was designed specifically for tablets. The browser was shown running on Samsung's Galaxy Tab.

The browser is not completely finished, but you can get a good idea of how it performs in the video above. It works nicely with Adobe Flash and should provide a familiar experience to those who are have used Opera's previous mobile browsers. More info will be made available by Opera come MWC in February.