Posts Tagged ‘Tablets’
BBC iPlayer for Android adds support for 10-inch tablets, improved user interface
Author: James Cliff
It’s simple: the numbers don’t lie. Clearly aware of the many, many hours viewers are squeezing out of their tablets, the BBC has, for the better, made its iPlayer for Android more friendly with 10-inch models. What this means is folks using the app will no longer have to rely on a shortcut to the website, with the BBC iPlayer now offering native support for those larger Android slates. The changelog also notes that there are some (undisclosed) tweaks to the UI on handsets and 7-inch tablets, but mum’s the word on what the changes were exactly. Either way, we’re sure owners of, say, a Nexus 10 will be happy to hear they’ll now need less steps while trying to catch their favorite shows.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Tablets, Software
Via: Android Police
Source: Google Play
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HTC Windows RT Tablets and Android 4.3
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Rumor Roundup: HTC Windows RT Tablets and Android 4.3 Give Netflix a try for 30 days: http://www.netflix.com/buffalo Jon R is back to tackle the biggest tech…
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Mobile PC Market To More Than Double On Demand For Tablets And Touch PCs, According To Report
Author: Janet Odell
The mobile PC market isn’t doing great, but that’s only if you look at it independently of tablet device sales. NPD DisplaySearch now says that over the next five years, however, the mobile PC market will more than double, growing from 367.6 million units in 2012 to 762.7 million by 2017.
The growth is being driven by a sea change in PC computing, as tablet PCs continually replace your standard notebook form factors, and touch gets built in to more and more laptop devices. Almost every manufacturer now has at least one touch-capable model, which is actually required for Windows 8 certification, and which helps explain ambitious devices like the Asus Aspire R7.
In the near-term, NPD DisplaySearch expects tablet shipments to rise 67 percent year-over-year in 2013, reaching 256.5 million on their own. Notebook shipments are expected to slow in general, down to 183.3 million in 2017, from 203.3 million in 2013. NPD predicts growth for certain categories, including touch-enabled devices, and even projects that devices like the MacBook Air and Ultrabooks will adopt touch in the coming years.
NPD doesn’t see Windows 8 actually driving touch adoption, despite the requirement by Microsoft for certification. That’s probably because of reportedly lackluster sales performance by Microsoft’s latest OS so far, but still the category will grow as OEMs look to invest more in hybrid devices, sliders and tablet-style form factors that could potentially resonate better with where consumers seem to be spending their computing dollars these days.
Despite the generally rosy outlook NPD DisplaySearch paints, the fact remains that now, Apple is the company that stands to gain the most from an upsurge in tablet popularity. It sold around 19.5 million iPads during Q2 2013, representing 65 percent year over year growth, and so far no one has been able to come close to that. Others are slowly making inroads, however, including Asus, which reported its Q1 2013 earnings today, including 3 million tablet sales that offset notebook and PC component losses to the tune of $ 202 million in profit.
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Asus to release smaller, lower priced Windows 8 tablets this year
Author: Matthew Wilson
After months of rumors that smaller, cheaper Windows 8 tablets are on the way, Asus will reportedly release such a tablet later this year. Jerry Shen, Asus’ CEO, also told the Wall Street Journal that he believes prices for Windows 8 tablets will drop to an average of $ 300 before the year’s end. Currently, most Windows 8 tablets are priced around $ 400 to $ 500, with displays of about 10-inches, so a cheaper option would give Windows a chance to compete more directly with the likes of Apple’s iPad Mini and Google’s Nexus 7.
Microsoft knows all this, and knows that it needs to get into the mini tablet game. So far, Asus appears to only be joined by Acer with plans to create a smaller Windows 8 tablet. On Friday, we saw an an 8.1-inch Acer…
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Asus to release smaller, lower priced Windows 8 tablets this year
Author: Matthew Wilson
After months of rumors that smaller, cheaper Windows 8 tablets are on the way, Asus will reportedly release such a tablet later this year. Jerry Shen, Asus’ CEO, also told the Wall Street Journal that he believes prices for Windows 8 tablets will drop to an average of $ 300 before the year’s end. Currently, most Windows 8 tablets are priced around $ 400 to $ 500, with displays of about 10-inches, so a cheaper option would give Windows a chance to compete more directly with the likes of Apple’s iPad Mini and Google’s Nexus 7.
Microsoft knows all this, and knows that it needs to get into the mini tablet game. So far, Asus appears to only be joined by Acer with plans to create a smaller Windows 8 tablet. On Friday, we saw an an 8.1-inch Acer…
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Asus to release smaller, lower priced Windows 8 tablets this year
Author: Matthew Wilson
After months of rumors that smaller, cheaper Windows 8 tablets are on the way, Asus will reportedly release such a tablet later this year. Jerry Shen, Asus’ CEO, also told the Wall Street Journal that he believes prices for Windows 8 tablets will drop to an average of $ 300 before the year’s end. Currently, most Windows 8 tablets are priced around $ 400 to $ 500, with displays of about 10-inches, so a cheaper option would give Windows a chance to compete more directly with the likes of Apple’s iPad Mini and Google’s Nexus 7.
Microsoft knows all this, and knows that it needs to get into the mini tablet game. So far, Asus appears to only be joined by Acer with plans to create a smaller Windows 8 tablet. On Friday, we saw an an 8.1-inch Acer…
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Adobe Debuts “Project Mighty” Smart Stylus For Tablets And “Napoleon,” A Digital Ruler And Guide
Author: Brandon Zimmerman
Adobe surprised everyone by showing off a new hardware effort today at its annual MAX conference, including Project Mighty and Napoleon. Mighty is a pressure-sensitive digital pen that works with tablets and stores a wide variety of settings and preferences in the cloud. Adobe showed it off working on an iPad, and it looked similar to what we’ve seen from existing pressure-sensitive input devices from other companies, but with tighter integration into Adobe products.
It can pull in stored Kuler color palette themes from Creative Cloud, for instance, as well as brush settings and a cloud clipboard that stores assets you’ve created previously for use in new drawings. Moving from tablet to tablet preserves the settings associated with your pen, which makes it possible to take everything from tablet to tablet.
Napoleon looks a little like a modern Apple remote, but allows you to easily draw straight lines and arcs via snap tools combined with digital pens like Mighty. It’s almost like having traditional drafting tools including squares and triangles, but better suited to digital media. For precise drafting and more serious, demanding graphics work, these two tools in tandem should help push creativity on mobile devices quite a bit further than what we have available today.
The Mighty pen itself looks similar to something like the Jot Touch 4 pressure sensitive pen, but with full access to Adobe’s Creative Cloud services behind it. It’s a little like an entire artist’s box in a single device, judging by what Adobe has shown us on stage today. It also takes advantage of non-stylus touch, too, in a way that looks novel, allowing users to do things like erase with their free hand. But when paired with Napoleon, it becomes much more powerful than what we’ve already seen, which should really push the envelope on mobile creativity.
This is still essentially a project in the R&D phase, Adobe noted, but we will definitely see it materialize down the road as a real product, they said. The real question will be how this can compare to for-purpose devices like the Wacom series of tablets, which are much better than anything else out there in terms of pressure sensitivity, latency and overall ability to mimic the experience of working with traditional artists’ materials.
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Acer still planning Windows RT tablets, but sees ‘no value’ in current version
Author: Christen Arquette
Acer is clearly and closely aligned with Windows, but there’s one part of Microsoft’s strategy it’s not buying into just yet. At an event on Friday in New York — in the middle of a sea of newly-announced Windows products — company President Jim Wong told PCWorld that Acer won’t build a Windows RT tablet until Windows RT 8.1 comes out. “To be honest, there’s no value doing the current version of RT,” he said. We may not have to wait long, though: Wong also alluded to Windows RT 8.1 coming in the second half of this year.
Acer has a fairly turbulent history with Windows RT, but has repeatedly said it’s committed to building products with Microsoft’s low-powered OS. And with Windows RT 8.1, which promises to bring a number of…
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KALQ Is A New Split-Screen Keyboard Layout Designed To Speed Up Thumb Typing On Tablets & Big Phones
Author: Dave Adams
After the success of gesture-based keyboards such as Swype, the next obvious disruption to keyboard technology is optimisation of the legacy Qwerty layout that’s persisted since the typewriter era. Not that people haven’t tried alternatives to Qwerty already (e.g. Dvorak et al.) – and generally failed to make them stick. But that’s not stopping a group of academic researchers — including the co-inventor of the gesture IP behind Swype — from devising a new touchscreen keyboard layout in the hope that people can finally be persuaded to shift their typing habits.
KALQ, which is named, like Qwerty, after a string of its keys, is designed to speed up thumb typing on tablets and phablets (aka big phones). Its creators, who are from the University of St Andrews, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Montana Tech, claim that once users have accustomed themselves to the non-Qwerty layout — with about eight hours practice required to be as fast as Qwerty and 13-19 hours to surpass your Qwerty typing speed — typing performance can be about a third (34 percent) more efficient than thumb typing on split-screen Qwerty layouts.
They are planning to release KALQ as a free Android app for tablets and phablets, which will also work on smaller screen smartphones but stress their research and performance claims relate specifically to larger devices, rather than phones. They are also not directly comparing the performance of the new layout against any of the gesture keyboard input methods (Swype, SwiftKey’s Flow etc) — their performance data is based on a direct comparison with thumb typing on a split Qwerty.
Dr Per Ola Kristensson, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, who is one of the academics involved in the research, told TechCrunch they tested KALQ on a Galaxy Tab 7.7, adding that while the keyboard may also offer speed improvements on smartphones it’s not a claim they have tested. Kristensson is no stranger to keyboard disruption, being the man who wrote the pattern recognition algorithm underlying Swype, and co-founder of ShapeWriter, the startup that commercialised the gesture keyboard system in 2007 — before being acquired by Nuance in 2010 (the company that now owns Swype).
Kristensson said the KALQ researchers used a subset of publicly available emails from the Enron trial that were tagged ‘Sent from my BlackBerry’ as their data pool, analysing the mobile users’ use of language to figure out the best positions for the keys. As well as using computational optimisation techniques and looking at how devices behave when users are touch typing, they also modelled thumb movements with the aim of making a fast yet comfortable keyboard. KALQ is an English-language optimised letter layout, but the process that came up with its layout is “general,” said Kristensson: “You can feed it whatever language you want. So the layout may change, depending on your country.”
There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed… The problem with a lot of them is they are not fast enough.
For English speakers, KALQ’s split-screen layout repositions the alphabet into two unequal blocks of letters, with consonants in the left block (plus Y which can be classed as either) and vowels plus the remaining consonants (including K, L and Q) in the right. A space key is included towards the edge of each block for easy reach with either thumb. The letter order is specifically designed to minimise typing long sentences with just one thumb — which is cumbersome and slows touchscreen typists down — and also places frequently used letter keys centrally close to each other to minimise thumb movements. In addition, the layout generally aims to encourage typing on alternating sides of the keyboard — which Kristensson said is a more ergonomic and comfortable way to type.
As well as learning the new letter layout, KALQ typists need to learn to move both thumbs at once to get the fastest speeds. “Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: while one thumb is selecting a particular key, the other thumb is approaching its next target. From these insights we derived a predictive behavioural model we could use to optimise the keyboard,” noted Dr Antti Oulasvirta, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute, in a statement.
The researchers said trained KALQ users were able to reach speeds of 37 words per minute — which they said is the highest ever reported entry rate for two-thumb typing on touchscreen devices, and “significantly higher” than the approximately 20 words per minute entry rate users can normally reach on a regular split Qwerty layout. The group will be presenting its research next month at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris. The Android KALQ app will be available for download in due course.
Persuading users to adopt a new keyboard layout is likely to be a tough ask but Kristensson said the problem with most of the Qwerty layout challengers to-date has been that they are not disruptive enough — in terms of the performance bump they offer users who have to go through the pain of learning how to type quickly again.
“If you want to get people to change their layout you basically have to get people to invest, you have to get them to give up the assigned cost, their previous investment in Qwerty typing. And then we have to invest new time in learning KALQ,” he said. “There’s been lots of crazy text input technologies proposed. Actually hundreds of them. Most of them have failed. I would say probably 99% of them have filed but the problem with a lot of them is actually they are not fast enough so why would people reinvest in learning a new text entry method if it doesn’t provide a substantial performance advantage so I think [KALQ] is one of the few keyboards that can provide that. So I’m hopeful.”
Asked whether the group might look to commercialise the research, he said the priority is to try to encourage people to adjust their typing behaviour and accept a Qwerty alternative but added that the group may look to monetise their algorithms in other ways — by, for example, using them to optimise other menu-based user interfaces.
“What I’m hoping here is that we will have impact,” he told TechCrunch. “I wanted to get people away from thinking about the Qwerty keyboard. And I think impact here may mean that we will release [KALQ] for free — but remember we are the ones who have all the algorithms to come up with optimal keyboards so we learn a lot about how to optimise user interfaces in general. My co-investigator, Antti Oulasvirta, he’s completely passionate about optimising any sort of user interface. So the process we use here can also be used to optimise other user interfaces like menu structures for example so there is lots of potential for the underlying technology. This is just one instantiation of that. But I think trying to sell a new keyboard — that’s a risky proposition. I’m not sure a venture capitalist would go for it.”
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Cox TV Connect for Android launches, brings live TV streaming to ‘select’ tablets
Author: Gabe Hall
We’re still waiting to see Cox’s next generation cable TV-to-mobile streaming app, but right now it’s released a version of its existing Cox TV Connect app for Android. Available on iPads since the end of 2011 and on iPhone / iPod touch since the end of last year, it’s finally made the trek to a “select” group of Android tablets, consisting of the Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy 2 / Galaxy Note slates. A support document also mentions Amazon’s Kindle Fire family, however the app isn’t in its store as of this posting. For those not familiar, it’s a free app for subscribers that lets them watch a selection of live TV channels while connected to their home wireless network, and view listings anywhere. We’ll be interested to see if the list of compatible (Android 4.0+) hardware grows quickly, or if users will need to wait for a port of the new app which adds personalization features tied into Cox’s Trio DVR platform.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Tablets, HD
Source: Google Play, Cox TV Communications (Twitter)
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