Computer Technology News & Tips

It’s official ladies and gentlemen, Google‘s Android platform is stupid popular. We can say that because, according to an engineering VP for the sultan of search, the Android army grows stronger by more than 300,000 smartphone activations every 24 hours. That comes out to 2.1 million activations a week, or more than 109 million a year, assuming the rate of new activations remains stagnant.

News of Android’s success came in the form of a short and sweet tweet (aren’t they all?) posted by Google’s Andy Rubin. That’s all he said, yet he managed to speak volumes about Google’s mobile OS in just his second Twitter post ever.

Need help wrapping your head around the significance here? Consider that Apple claims it activates 270,000 iPhones each day, 30,000 less than Google for each 24 hour period, 210,000 less per week, and more than 10.9 million less per year (again assuming the rate of activations doesn’t change for either company).

Yeah, it’s like that, and we have yet to see what impact Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and Honeycomb will have on these figures.

Source: Hothardware.com

Today Acer announced that they will be diving into the tablet market. The company unveiled a 7-inch and a 10.1-inch tablet, running Android. With the holiday season quickly approaching, Acer won’t be introducing the tablet this year, but will make the tablet available early next year.

The tablet hardware features a dual-core (1GHz or 1.2GHz) processor, HDMI output, 5-megapixel rear camera and front-facing “HD” camera for video calling. The Android-powered tablet will also support a 1200×800 high resolution, high colour screen with multitouch support. The tablet will be available with WiFi and 3G, and will come with a gyroscope, for the inner gamer in you.

Acer promotes the device as an HD entertainment tablet, being able to play and share HD videos, with the ability to output 1080p video through the HDMI port. The Acer tablet will also support DLNA, so you can quickly share multimedia between devices.

No prices were officially announced, but the tablet will be made available in April 2011.

Source: Neowin.net

Tablets, tablets and more tablets.  If we were asked to pick only one HOT product category this holiday shopping season, there wouldn’t be even a nanosecond of hesitation before we offered the words tablet PCs.  Tablet PCs may not be a new product category or idea but they certainly have come of age and 2011 is shaping up now to be the year of the tablet.  Apple made a big splash with the iPad earlier this year and Q4 is starting to look like it will bring a veritable tidal wave of Android and Windows 7-based devices competing for shopping carriage space versus Apple’s new 10-inch darling slate computer.  The good news is, all of this competition is bound to mean lower prices at retail.  Fittingly, a small company out of Paola Alto, CA no less — Cherrypal, made headlines recently with the announcement of their dirt-cheap $188 CherryPad tablet.

The CherryPad is a 7-inch slate that comes preloaded with the Android 2.1 (aka Eclair) operating system and is driven by an 800MHz ARM11-based processor by Samsung, backed by a meager 256MB of DDR2 system memory.  The device is also based on a resistive touch display, so it takes a bit of getting use to, if you’ve been working with devices like the iPhone or similar, where capacitive touch displays are ubiquitous.  Journey on here with us in this quick-take video review of the CherryPad.  Just what does $188 buy you in an Android tablet?  You’re about to find out.

Source: Hothardware.com