Gone are the days of Blackberry being business only.
With the rise of a new CEO who wants to stay on track with the leading markets, Blackberry maker, Research In Motion (RIM), is going for a complete overhaul of the company. RIM has recently missed new product deadlines and targets for sales, while at the same time all of their competitors in the smartphone market eagerly took their customers from them, while promising a more user-friendly experience.
The Sony Tablet P has been talked about since August, of last year, and was shown off during yesterday’s Sony press conference at CES; it’s a fresh outing for Sony in many ways. To start off, it’s the only fold-able Android device out there and it’s currently running Android 3.2 Honeycomb, which seems an odd choice since Ice Cream Sandwich has been out for a while. Though perhaps that’s for the best, since I don’t have an Android device. The Tablet P sports two 5.5″ displays with a resolution of 1024×480 which gives more than enough pixel room to do everything you’d need to on a tablet.
Last year wasn’t the best year for Sony. After the whole PSN debacle, Sony has been struggling to sort out their PR. With spirits up, the Presidents of Sony took the stage earlier tonight for their first press conference of this year’s CES 2012. Some of the highlights of the show tonight were the new Walkman Android smartphone, Netflix for the Vita on day one, Xperia Ion, Bloggie, 4K resolution, 3D, Will Smith and Kelly Clarkson.
The Tablet S from Sony’s stable has had price reductions recently, wherein the 16 GB model is now priced at $400, a $100 slash in price, while the 32 GB model has also had a $100 slash in the price and is now selling at $500. The technical specifications of the tablet however remain unchanged with the 1280×800 9.4 inch display featuring rear and front cameras, 1 GB system memory, Android Honeycomb and eight hours of rated battery life. Sony is not the first company to reduce the price of the tablets in recent times with the largest price deflation being seen in RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook. It has been selling at as much as $300 less than the actual price in recent weeks.
The Playbook, which uses the Blackberry QNX operating system and other Android systems are recently seeing a substantial decline in the initial intended price range of $700-$800 which most tablets started out with. 10 inch consumer Android tablets like the 16 GB Acer Iconia, Lenovo Ideapad K1 Tablet have been listed at $359.99 and $319.99 respectively on Best Buy in recent weeks. The 16 GB Asus Eee Pad Transformer and the 16 GB Toshiba Thrive are also both priced at $400.
The release of the Kindle Fire, though in a different segment of 7 inch tablets, is speculated to be the main reason for the large price slashes we have seen in the last few months. Amazon’s latest offering has taken the market by storm, forcing other manufacturers to reduce prices in order to even hope to complete with the Kindle Fire. Verizon seems to be the only optimistic carrier though, pricing the Motorola XyBoard between $529.99 and $729.99. The decline in the prices of tablets seems to have not affected Apple and the iPad which sold over ten million tablets in the last quarter and is still priced between $499 and $829.
The New York Times has released the news that within the next 2 weeks, Amazon will bring out a major update to the Kindle Fire firmware. The users feel this is a much needed move, since they have been faced with problems in the device such as poor performance, along with there being no scope for the users to edit the ‘carousel’ system and eliminating old, unused and embarrassing icons.
HP recently announced that their mobile platform WebOS will be now be released to the open source software community. Analysts speculate that this move is mainly aimed at allowing other smart phone manufacturers to use the OS (leading to greater adoption and more applications) and will lead to greater development of the platform. It is also expected that an open source WebOS will lead to the creation of a truly viable alternative to Android in the open source OS niche, since Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Apple’s iOS (the two other major platforms in the market) are both closed ecosystems.
Another remake for the popular Capcom title Mega Man X — this time for iOS — is in the works, and set to arrive this month.
Reports on Andriasang indicate the new version is based on the currently available mobile edition. Still, enjoying Mega Man X with touch screen controls is a questionable concept, as the mere thought of an SNES side-scrolling game without conventional buttons is scary.
Motorola and Apple are currently at loggerheads not only in the technology market, but also in the courtroom. This battle is over a lawsuit filed by Motorola against Apple Inc. The German court that is hearing this case recently gave Motorola a formal order of prohibition against Apple. This would mean that Motorola has the right to stop Apple from selling products in Europe that violate Motorola’s patents directly.
It was highly anticipated that Motorola will soon release a successor to the XOOM tablet. But as a sequel to the honeycomb-run tablet, Motorola launched two versions of XOOM 2 – XOOM 2 and XOOM 2 Media Edition. The new twins in the market have slimmer designs than XOOM and they have stark similarities to the RAZR look. As of now, they are available in Wi-Fi versions only.
Hewlett Packard has refurbished their Tablet PC Slate 500 and rolled out the Slate 2. The Slate 2 will carry a price tag of $699, bringing it down by a hundred dollars. The major changes to the 8.9 inch tablet are the addition of Swype and a change of processor to Intel Atom Z670.
The Kindle Fire, from Amazon has recently taken the world by storm because of its low pricing and this seems to have led its competition, Barnes & Noble (right from the ebook reader days) to seemingly accelerate the release of its own tablet, the Nook Color 2. Rumour has it that this device will be released on November 7th and will potentially be called the Nook Color 2 but there is every possibility of a new name. The new version will allegedly have a revamped processor and a better screen and will be touched up with some modifications in design.
Back in August, Hewlett Packard had reduced the price of the TouchPad to a mere $99 because it planned to discontinue the tablet completely due to weak sales and demand. This led to a massive firesale and now it seems HP has finally run out of TouchPads as a notice went around the company notifying the same.
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