There might be an 8.9″ Kindle Fire in the blueprints for a 2012′s launch, says Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley.

According to him an upgraded 7″ and new 9″ models are expected to launch in mid-2012. Read more »

Chinese officials started confiscating iPad slates from retailers, following the defeat in the naming rights lawsuit for the Cupertino-based company. Many retailers have had their stores visited by employees of Administrations of Industry and Commerce and their in-stock iPads taken away.

The campaign comes despite the appeal lawsuit that is still going in the Chinese court. There’s no saying when it will be over, but Apple will obviously have trouble selling its tablet in the world’s most populous country until then. Read more »

The Huawei MediaPad came by our office and we took some time to get to know it better. Huawei is one of those manufacturers that are big, but not very well known. They seem to have created a top-notch product with the MediaPad.

The MediaPad is a 7″ Honeycomb tablet with an aluminum unibody. At 390g of weight and 10.5mm thickness, it’s lighter and thinner than the Amazon Kindle Fire. Read more »

Amazon has been picking up on the iPad ever since the first version of the Apple slate launched, but the latest effort of the online retailer is pretty good even for its own high standards.

Amazon points out that if you happen to have $500 to spare you might want to purchase a hard-to-see-in-the-sun iPad or the best way to read a.k.a. Amazon Kindle eReader and a couple of Kindle Fire slates. Read more »

The next generation iPad is nearing its launch and so the rumor mills are now in full force. What we have today, though, is not a rumor but a purported photograph of the aluminum shell of the next generation iPad (which I will refer to as the iPad 3 for now).

What you see above is the aforementioned photograph, with the iPad 3 shell on the right. The photograph was uncovered by RepairLabs, who noticed that the new shell has different mounts for the logic board, which suggests a redesigned logic board, most probably to accommodate a larger battery. They also said that the shell did not look noticeably thicker than the iPad 2′s, which is contrary to current rumors that suggested that the iPad 3 will be slightly thicker. Read more »

Microsoft has announced that they will be launching the beta version of Windows 8, called the Consumer Preview on Wednesday, February 29 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The fact that Windows 8 has been designed from the grounds up for tablets suggests why Microsoft would want to announce its next operating system at a mobile event.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s application store for the Windows 8 is also expected to go live on the same day. As you may know, the Windows Marketplace will be the only place to download Metro-style apps on Windows 8. Read more »

Owners of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which its fair to say has one of the longest names in tablet history, should expect a pleasant surprise during the next few days.

Reports are already coming in that US owners of this quad-core beauty are receiving notifications for a new OTA update. The update to improve the Prime’s connectivity. Read more »

HP’s TouchPad made quite a stir with its wild firesale back in the summer of last year. However, some of the lucky buyers ended up with special versions of the tablet with Android running on it, suggesting HP are at work on an official Android port for it.

Since those special units weren’t supposed to end up in consumers’ hands and were shipped out by mistake, HP wasn’t obligated to make the kernel’s source code open source. Now, though, they did, giving the kernel source to the open public and specifically to the CyanogenMod 9 team. Read more »

Toshiba and Carphone Warehouse are bringing “the world’s thinnest tablet” – the Toshiba AT200, or as users stateside know it, the Excite X10. It measures just 7.7mm thick and weighs 535g.

We first saw the AT200 last September at IFA when it beat the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (another tablet to debut at IFA) by 0.2mm in terms of thickness, despite having a larger 10.1″ 1280×800 screen. Read more »

In a rather embarrassing blunder, Motorola has admitted to selling refurbished Xooms to new owners without wiping the data off of them, left there by their previous owners. The ‘affected’ devices include those that were resold through Woot.com between October and December 2011. This includes about a 100 devices out of the total 6200 devices resold by Motorola so far.

To make up for this gaffe, Motorola will give previous owners of the affected tablets a complimentary two-year membership of Experian’s ProtectMyID Alert to mitigate any risks. This applies to those who returned their Xooms between March and October 2011. Those who bought these refurbished devices will be getting a $100 American Express gift card. All you have to do is ship the device back to Motorola (they’ll pay for it) and then they will wipe it clean for you and send it back. Read more »

RIM has decided to speed up the rate at which Android apps are submitted to the BlackBerry PlayBook section of App World – from now on, every Android app developer who submits an app by February 13 has a chance of getting a free PlayBook tablet.

We’re talking a free 16GB PlayBook, which retails for $199. Sounds like a great freebie, and there’s not a lot of work involved if you already own an app. Read more »

As with the Honda’s tantalizing CRV Superbowl ad, Samsung have thrown in their two cents ahead of the main event to join the ranks of Volkswagen, Go Daddy and Victoria’s Secret.

As it goes, Superbowl ad space is the cream of the crop when it comes to TV advertising space and Samsung have spent it advertising their new Galaxy Note. Read more »

The new 7-inch tablet by ZTE provides decent specs at a price that can readily compete with the big boys.

Set to feature the latest Android Honeycomb version, 3.2, the Optik will also have a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor and 16GB of internal memory. Read more »

Nowadays, your average smartphone or tablet comes with wireless connectivity options such as Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n and maybe 3G as standard and each of these has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Speed is the key in wireless data transfer and Panasonic are working on some tech that promises to be quick, really quick; able to transmit a DVD wirelessly in 60 seconds thanks to WiGig. Read more »

The white color Galaxy Note has been an elusive bird and it’s rarely been sighted. We finally have one and we’ve prepared a bunch of photos for you.

Samsung announced the Galaxy Note back in October, but it launched only a black version of the unique phoneblet, as we like to call it internally. Just before Christmas though, the Galaxy Note appeared in snow white dress in Korea and a few other markets.

A few days ago the white Galaxy Note hit the UK and other European markets, AT&T US is also launching both the black and white Notes next month.

Read more »