One of the beauties of the open and free nature of Android is that it allows the creation of very affordable devices. The Chinese manufacturer MIPS technology seized this opportunity and created the NOVO7 – a 7″ Ice Cream Sandwich slate that only costs $99.

With its 1GHz single-core CPU and 444 MHz GPU (of unknown kind), the NOVO7 will hardly be a benchmark champion, but that’s hardly its purpose. What matters is that it comes with a capacitive touchscreen (most ultra-cheap slates still use resistive screens), and can play all kinds of video formats up to 1080p resolution. Read more »

Touch smartphones and tablets are all the rage these days, but there’s no denying the fact that working with them intensively makes a real mess out of their fromnt glass panels. Some manufacturer apply some kind of smudge-resistant coating to their screens to make cleaning easier, but it’s not a perfect solution.

Scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz have stepped up with a claim that they have developed a new smudge repellent coating that could eradicate the problem altogether. Read more »

Apple had filed for a preliminary injunction against Samsung in the US court to block the sales of the Galaxy devices. Unfortunately for Apple, the court has declined to grant the said injunction, which means Samsung can continue to sell their devices in the US. However, the legal war between the two companies is far from over and Apple could still swing this to their advantage.

As it happens, the reason Apple failed to get an injunction against Samsung is that Apple could not prove to the court that Samsung infringing on their patents could cost them irreparable damages. Read more »

As if we didn’t have enough benchmarks on Android to begin with, here comes another one. Futuremark, makers of the popular 3DMark benchmark for PCs, have announced that they will be making a version for Android.

According to the press release, it seems 3DMark for Android will be targeted mostly towards the Android tablets and will help gauge their gaming performance. Read more »

Apple may not be successful at banning the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but it surely made Samsung’s job really hard. While the Australian court has just lifted the ban for the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Apple has filed a motion for banning the new modified Galaxy Tab 10.1N in Germany.

The news coming from Australia is good, but there is a catch – the ban will be lifted this Friday, eventually. This means Apple could appeal the court’s decision and maintain the tablet’s ban for a while. Read more »

If you’ve been keeping a close eye on Twitter for the past few days you’d know that a trio of hackers claimed to have come up with a tool that lets you get root access on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Now they have a video to back up those claims.

Carrying the wildly inappropriate name Dingleberry, the tool is said to be compatible with both v1.x and v2.x of the PlayBook OS. Either RIM didn’t close the exploit that the hackers use in the upcoming release of the platform or it’s a hardware exploit. Read more »

Apple has just released the first beta version of the latest edition of their iOS mobile platform to all registered developers. Available for the iPhone 4S, 4 and 3GS, the iPad and iPad 2 as well as the third and fourth-generation iPod touch devices, this is hardly the most major of updates.

iOS 5.1 focuses mostly on giving developers more APIs to work with and bugfixes. What might be more interesting to you than the update itself is the code of the new iOS release, which references three new iDevices. Read more »

Among all the non-sense product videos that come out these days, the new video for the upcoming Acer Iconia Tab A200 comes as a breath of fresh air.

Instead of shooting it through a cake, taking a dig at the competition or doing some other weird stuff, the video shows people doing things with the tablet that they usually do. Such as watching videos or images on the device or by connecting it to a display, reading ebooks, video calling, etc. Read more »

Google has brought a key update to the Android Market website, making it compatible with all devices that have the app installed. That means that from now on you can push apps to your Nook Color, Kindle Fire or whatever other smartphone and tablet with side-loaded Android Market you have.

The move falls nicely in line with the Android open nature and, in fact, one can’t help but wonder what took them so long. But anyway, the support is all there now and it looks like a win-win move for Google. Read more »

The unique-looking Sony Tablet P was announced way back in April along with its bigger brother, the Tablet S. The latter went on sale a while back but those hoping to get their hands on the Tablet P have been put on hold.

Not any more, at least in the UK, where the device has just appeared for pre-order on Sony’s online store for a whopping £499 ($771). Even by UK’s generally high prices that is quite a lot. In fact it is even more than the bigger Tablet S, which costs £349 (and $499.99 in the US). Read more »

RIM has just released a software update for their PlayBook tablet. The release dubbed v1.0.8.4985 brings new versions of the Adobe Flash Player 11.1 and Adobe Air to the PlayBook.

The update is also said to tweak the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth drivers to improve connectivity and improve syncing when storing applications with BlackBerry Desktop Software. The last change it brings concerns daylight savings time for time zones in the regions of Latin America, Australia and Central America. Read more »

At the BlackBerry Innovation Forum, RIM showcased a the much awaited update for their PlayBook tablet. It will add three new system apps – an email client, a calendar and a phonebook.

In case you weren’t aware, the BlackBerry PlayBook launched without those apps over half an year ago but they are coming – better late than never. Read more »

Gather around, HTC fans! The Taiwanese company just released a cool video about the smartphone evolution over the past 13 years and it’s really a joy for the geek’s eyes.

The Taiwanese company talks about the important events (in its own view) that lead to the smartphone as we know it today. It’s really amazing to see just how little time it took for stuff like touchscreen, 3G and GPS to go from zero to standard equipment. Read more »

Eager to have a piece of the quad-core Tegra 3 tablet action, are we? In that case you’d be glad to know that you can book your Asus Transformer Prime by pre-ordering it through the company’s website right now.

The offer only applies to residents of Canada and US, for now as the pre-orders aren’t recorded by Asus themselves, but by some of their sales partners. Prices start at $499, which buys you a 32GB version of the slate. Read more »

Samsung is ready to have a second go at updating the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to Android 3.2 this time everything should go smoothly. The original update that went out last week left some people without Wi-Fi (pretty bad if you have the Wi-Fi only model) and had other issues too. Installing this through Samsung Kies should fix the problem.

People who still have Internet connectivity should be getting notifications that the Over-The-Air update is available. Read more »