A new 12-inch netbook by Asus has just been spotted at an Italian online retailer’s page and it appears ready to make you rethink your idea of cheap. While right now you can hardly go much lower than €450 for a dual-core netbook with 12″ screen, the Asus 1215P asking price is just under €280.

Of course, a portion of the savings is due to the fact that the 1215P is running Linux, rather than Windows, but even factoring that in, its unbelievably cheap. For that kind of cash you are getting a 1.50 GHz dual-core Atom N550, 2 gigs of RAM and a 320GB hard drive on a 12-inch screen chassis. Read more »

HP and AT&T just announced that the US carrier will be getting a pimped up version of the TouchPad in time for the back-to-school season. The AT&T-edition of the webOS slate will have its dual-core CPU clocked at 1.5GHz, rather than the 1.2GHz of the regular one.

The AT&T-bound TouchPad will also be packing 4G connectivity, which will make it the first version of the slate with network data connectivity. Unfortunately, this won’t be an LTE radio, but a 3G one with 21 Mbps HSPA capabilities, but that’s still cool. Read more »

Asus has just spilled the beans of the pricing of the 3G-enabled version of their Transformer tablet. The Taiwanese company will charge you an extra €100 for the SIM card slot of the popular Android slate with an optional keyboard.

So the 16GB Transformer with 3G connectivity will set you back €500, while a 32GB unit will go for €600. Seeing that the Transformer was somewhat cheaper than most of its competitors, we were hoping that Asus won’t stick to the usual practice and demand €100 for the network connectivity, but alas. Read more »

It’s usually a good thing when rumors about an upcoming device start to intensify – it means that its official premiere nears. That’s why we are getting increasingly optimistic about seeing another iPad this year, rather than have to wait until 2012.

The latest piece of online gossip has it that the next iPad will appear in late 2011, and will carry the name iPad 2 Plus, rather than iPad 3. Despite the modest naming, the third iOS slate should represent quite a significant upgrade over its predecessor. Read more »

Although the Motorola Xoom launched with the bragging rights of being the first ever Honeycomb tablet, it never really tasted the kind of successes that Motorola (or Google) may have been hoping for. Not only was it considerably overshadowed by the iPad, it also got forgotten when newer and more exciting Honeycomb tablets started appearing.

One of the reasons for its lackluster sales could be attributed to its high price. So to address this Motorola has finally slashed the price of the base model by $100, bringing it down to $499. This, coupled with the fact that it has 32GB on-board storage, unlike 16GB on most of its similarly priced rivals, makes it bit better value. Read more »

The popular iPad has reached yet another milestone where it has grabbed 1.03% of the global web browser market share as of June, 2011. This includes all the web browser, including desktop ones like Internet Explorer and Firefox. To put these figures into perspective, the eight year-old desktop Safari browser has a market share of 7.15% whereas the fifteen year-old Opera browser has a mere 1.11% market share as of April, 2011.

These figures are even higher in the US, where the iPad accounts for 2.1% whereas the iPhone and Android devices have 2.9% and 2.6% market share respectively. Read more »

It appears that Mac OS won’t be the only Apple thing to get a major update in July. A really juicy rumor has it that the MacBook Air lineup refresh will be announced along with the Lion availability in a couple of weeks’ time.

Right now Apple’s most compact mobile computers are more of glorified netbooks than proper laptops with their low-grade CPUs. However if the rumors are to be believed those will get a significant update, including Intel i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge processors and a latest generation NAND flash storage. Read more »

The Tegra 2 platform was quite a success for NVIDIA, finding its way to a dozen of smartphones and tablets and it even became the standard hardware platform for Android Honeycomb. But the company is certainly not going to stop there. We already know that its successor, codenamed Kal-El, will come later this year with a quad-core CPU on board, but now we also got some details about the version after that, codenamed Wayne.

The 28nm NVIDIA Wayne will be commercially available as Tegra 4 and will actually come in two flavors. The less powerful one will sport “at least 24-core” CUDA-enabled GPU, which resembles contemporary GPU architecture and a quad-core CPU, clocked at least 1.5GHz. According to NVIDIA that should be enough to provide at least 10x the computing power of the currently available Tegra 2 chipset. Read more »

Remember the neat-looking Android tablet from the television manufacturer Vizio that was showcased at CES this year? Well it has finally been put up for pre-order on their site. It’s available in two models, where $379.99 gets you just the tablet and $399.99 gets you a custom-fit folio case and 16GB microSD card along with it. The device will start shipping on July 18, which is when you can buy it in a store as well.

For those who don’t remember it, the Vizio Tablet is based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and has a 1024 x 768, 8-inch touchscreen display, along with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, HDMI-out, stereo speakers with SRS TruMedia, front facing VGA camera, built-in IR blaster with universal remote app and 4GB internal memory that can be expanded via microSD cards. It runs on a 1GHz processor and has 512MB of RAM. Read more »

Sony’s Android tablets have been official for a while now but there’s tantalizingly little info on either of them. Tech geeks in Munich however got lucky enough to be treated to a quick hands on.

This resulted in a short (18 seconds all in all) video with the folding S2 tablet along with some impressions of the S1 (spoiler alert: Crash Bandicoot is go). Read more »

So you’ve been listening to all the noise, surrounding all the 3D capable devices coming to the market, and felt a bit jealous? Here is the remedy for you. A film, designed by the Japanese company Global Wave to be placed on you device’s screen, instantly transforms it from ordinary, to 3D.

While we have previously seen software based tweaks that do so Read more »

Nvidia has just updated their range of high-end notebook GPUs with the launch of the new GTX 580M and 570M, which are claimed to be the fastest notebook GPU ever. The 580M is said to offer six times the tessellation performance of any other notebook GPU (read Radeon HD 6970M) and 20% better performance than the previous generation GPUs. It will be available soon on the Alienware M18x and M17x gaming notebooks.

The M18x will give you the option of configuring it with two GTX 580M so you can burn through you battery faster than you can spell “Alienware”. Meanwhile, the M17x will offer the GTX 580M with Nvidia’s Optimus technology, that lets you switch between discrete and onboard graphics automatically depending upon your usage. Read more »

Sony announced a new 13″ VAIO Z laptop, which makes even the S Series model look chubby. Long story short, the new Z Series puts an Intel Core i7 processor in a body that weighs less than 1.2kg and is thinner than 17mm.

There’s also a clever dock that houses a discreet video card and a Blu-ray drive (which is great as neither of those two have a place on a portable device if you ask me). And typically for the Z Series, the laptop weighs less than its price in gold. Read more »

If you thought paying $430 was too much for a web browser on steroids that is the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook then Acer has something more palatable for you. The Acer AC700 Chromebook will start selling in the US this month for $349.99.

For that money you get a 11.6-inch LED backlit display, Intel Atom N570 dual-core processor, 2GB DDR3 RAM, 16GB flash storage, 2 USB ports, memory card slot, 1.3 megapixel webcam, HDMI port and a full size keyboard. Read more »

The start of the week brought some great news to the Acer Iconia Tab A500 users around the globe. The Honeycomb 3.1 update has just surfaced and those brave enough to try a manual flash might get it right away.

The update is the real deal, meaning an official Acer update, which just burst out ahead of its time. It could all be on purpose to test if there are any problems with it but as usual with such updates – those willing to risk it and try it sooner rather than later are in no short supply. Read more »