As you can see in the video above, a surprisingly fast, albeit buggy version of Android 3.0 Honeycomb is working on the British Advent Vega tablet, complete with hardware acceleration. There’s no Wi-Fi yet and we’re told this is still very much an alpha build, but with a crack team on the case, you can expect things to move at a fast pace – we love Gmail on the Motorola Xoom, so we can’t wait to see it gracing something that costs half the price.

The Advent Vega currently ships with Android 2.2, but without Google’s proprietary apps, such as Gmail, Google Maps and Android Market. However, a simple hack appeared soon after launch allowing easy installation of these must have programs.

(via Tablet Roms)

We’ve seen plenty of rugged tablet cases before, including ones you can chuck out of buildings or hit with an axe. But this is the first time we can recall seeing a slate tossed from the sky. It’s a plug for G-Form‘s new padded iPad cases, and while the testosterone of the presenter may not convince you of its merit, the fact that the screen is still working surely will. Watch:

Tucked away behind glass, the Iris Pro is a desktop slate, with a pen to input directly onto its transparent screen. The device is supposed to pull information, and juice up, Iris Core, the wrist-worn personal computing device Asus reckons we’ll all be wearing in the not-too-distant future.

Still with us? Good. The Iris Pro slots into a docking station which packs a pico projector, and is able to slap images all over the nearest wall. What we didn’t expect, was to see a working prototype of Asus’s high tech testbed today. Its colour transparent screen and pico projector were both in full working order, although at the time it was simply playing a video and projecting a static image.

Check it out in the video below, and image gallery above, along with other Asus Iris kit. What do you think? Has Asus struck gold, or is its vision of the future a little warped?

See, the scrolling action used on current MacBooks works as you’d expect a trackpad to function: Scroll two fingers down, and the screen scrolls down. On a touchscreen though, that action is reversed, since you’re “moving” the screen upwards to “scroll” down. Is that why OS X Lion has these actions mysteriously reversed by default? It’s the only explanation we can come up with.

Has Apple unwittingly let slip a demonstration of the first truly touchscreen Mac OS X feature? See it in action in a video after the break.

Video via 9to5Mac

The Asus Eee Pad MeMo runs Android (Froyo in the video and this version, but it will be running Android Honeycomb by the time it makes it to market). The touchscreen is capacitive, but there’s also a stylus too. This raised some eyebrows at launch, possibly because there hasn’t ever been a truly successful device that’s had a stylus.

The software isn’t final, but we were impressed with the painting app, which with the stylus means that the Asus Eee Pad MeMo can react to pressure, adjusting your brushstroke accordingly. A spokesperson for Asus said that the stylus was also added because the web is not built for touchscreens, which is a valid point – the stylus means it’s easier to browse on the smaller screen.

We also discovered that the Asus Eee Pad MeMo has phone functions, and it will be shipping with a small “Nokia sized” add-on for making phone calls. There wasn’t a hardware version we could take a look at, but this sounds a bit clunky to us. Asus weren’t sure on whether the phone device would be sold separately or shipped in the box, but it puts the Asus Eee Pad MeMo firmly in a category with the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The UK will be one of the first to get the Asus Eee Pad MeMo, arriving in March this year.

Here’s a short demo of the Asus Eee Pad MeMo in action:

Out March | £320-£450 | Asus

What do you think? Is this a device that doesn’t know what it’s purpose is, or is it a decent alternative to the Galaxy Tab?

Tablets coverage from CES 2011 powered by Dixons

At a glance, we must admit that both are very similar indeed. While the Asus PrimeSense camera is considerably smaller than Kinect (it’s lacking an RGB camera, mic and movement motors), there’s something ever so familiar about the design, something that becomes even more obvious in the software we saw it running.

Hold your hand over a large square tile for a while to trigger a selection? That’s how you navigate around using the Asus PrimeSense camera. Calibrate and see your body’s outline in a window in the bottom right hand corner? Yup, that’s another thing it shares with Kinect.

But there are some crucial differences, and we must admit, gaming aside, the Asus PrimeSense camera has the potential for seamless media watching from the comfort of your sofa, and to even better Kinect. You see, it comes in two parts: one that hooks up to a Windows PC, and streams content via wireless HDMI to the second part, the camera hooked into your TV.

Read our Microsoft Kinect review now

You can play games – we were treated to a demo involving a green monster whirring swords matching your arms’ flailing. And the movements were closely in sync. People moving in front didn’t drop the connection, though calibration time definitely seemed longer than we’re used to with Kinect.

But the really exciting aspect of the Asus PrimeSense camera is the ability to pull up your own media with a wave of your arm. That’s right: not what’s available on Zune, Sky Player or Last.fm, but your own pictures and videos on your own hard driven, easily Kinect’s most glaring omission. You can scroll through endless thumbnails of your piccies at speed, and because the connection is via wireless HDMI, crispy sharp movies at the wave of a hand should be no trouble either.

One crucial missing aspect however is that the Asus PrimeSense camera is not capable of voice control as Kinect is. This was entirely Microsoft’s input in Kinect, and Asus doesn’t look to have included it here, instead opting for a not particularly wieldy on screen QWERTY keyboard.

We’re told the Asus PrimeSense camera is out before July, with an estimated price of around $199.99 (£130). Which, conveniently, is exactly what Kinect costs. So, which will you be buying?

While we were shown the BlackBerry PlayBook in operation yesterday, today was the first time journalists were able to handle the device, and our time with it cast aside any doubts that RIM had been hiding anything. Pawing through the homescreens, menus and web browser, we saw no hiccups.

Some of BlackBerry 6′s design has made it into the QNX tablet OS: you can pull up a tray of apps and slide through it based on different categories for instance. But the browser is all new, and thoroughly impressive: we saw a video playing on YouTube, and it was honestly the smoothest Flash video we’ve ever seen on a mobile device, that includes the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

As you can see in the video, RIM has quite plainly lifted a great deal from palm’s webOS operating system: the swipes from the bezel onto the screen to bring up context menus, the ability to close an app in card form by swiping up. But frankly, there’s every chance that RIM may also have improved upon it: it really is that delightful.

Finally, we also got a lovely demo of the BlackBerry PlayBook blazing through a game of Quake 3. It was a video, alas, since a touchscreen doesn’t exacty lend itself to frantic first person shooter controls, but RIM assures us that it’s a clip of the PlayBook rendering a simulation. It’s nice to see a company not known for its gaming chops going through this rite of passage with a new device so soon.

Now, can we have a release date please?

Tablets coverage from CES 2011 powered by Dixons

Out 2011 | £TBC | BlackBerry

The Motorola Xoom itself is really rather nondescript. It looks just like you’d expect a tablet to look in 2011. It’s thin, black, and nothing unusual. What is striking however, is Android 3.0.

Based on what we saw (Which was admittedly mostly videos being played on the device of how the software should run, rather than the apps themselves – early days), Android 3.0 is radically different from Android 2.2 and 2.3 on mobiles. For one, there are no physical buttons: instead, the home, menu and back buttons sit at the bottom of the screen at all times.

But the extra screen space with the 1280×800 resolution gives you space for much more to do and see at any one time. Thumbnails in the gallery are actually large enough to make out. Gmail actually has its own widget, complete with a preview of several emails on your homescreen, and in full screen, has a two pane view, just like Gmail on the iPad.

We also got to see the new Google Maps and its swift vector based graphics in operation on the Motorola Xoom Android 3.0 tablet, and it certainly was impressive: multitouch gestures mean you can swoop through maps in three dimensions, with no load times or pixellation.

Finally, we also got a glimpse at the new on screen keyboard in Android 3.0. It actually resembles the pre Gingerbread keyboard with greyish keys, but no one could show us how responsive the keys were – perhaps not surprising, with a few months to go still until launch.

It’s too early to make judgements on Android 3.0, but from what we’ve seen today, we can see why Google has held off endorsing Android tablets until now: this could well be worth the wait, and worthy of sitting alongside such tablets as the Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy tablet.

Tablets coverage from CES 2011 powered by Dixons

The first video shows off the slick multimedia functions of the Blackberry Playbook, with HTML5 and Flash support and boasting that it outperforms the iPad. It shows the BlackBerry PlayBook rendering full desktop versions of web pages without any trouble, including Facebook with chat functions working, and Flash gaming and video watching.

We’ll be getting our dirty mitts on the BlackBerry PlayBook later in the week here at CES in Vegas, so keep your eyes peeled for our first look.

What do you think about these latest demos of the BlackBerry PlayBook? Are you itching for one? Drop us a line in the comments!

[via Engadget]

]]> http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2011/01/04/new-blackberry-playbook-video-teasers/feed/ 1 http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/11/30/blackberry-playbook-black-eyed-peas-video/ http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/11/30/blackberry-playbook-black-eyed-peas-video/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:14:33 +0000 James Holland http://188.65.36.75/?p=104201 Spot the BlackBerry PlayBook! We’ll give you a clue, it’s slap bang in the middle of this video for the Black Eyed Peas’ awful new song, The Time. Leaning heavily on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack for inspiration, the song has the new BlackBerry PlayBook shoehorned into its whizzy CGI music video. The song might not be much cop, but the PlayBook? Looking better every time we see it.

The Black Eyed Peas’ lead singer Will I. Am is seen waving a BlackBerry Playbook around, while the world turns to pixels, he’s using RIM’s iPad-a-like to gawp at a cartoon version of himself. Unfortunately, we don’t see much PlayBook functionality, just shots of it acting as a gigantic viewfinder. Meanwhile, Fergie and that other two Black Eyed Peas chaps jig around, but don’t get their hands on the prized BlackBerry tablet.

We daren’t guess how much it cost RIM to insert the BlackBerry PlayBook into the BEP’s latest masterwork, but we’d expect it was quite a lot. Still, not enough to stop Will I. Am referencing arch-rival Apple and being the ‘Mac daddy’ in his lyrics. Whoops.

See the BlackBerry Playbook in action in the video below.

]]> http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/11/30/blackberry-playbook-black-eyed-peas-video/feed/ 1