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HP TouchPad not doing too well

A recent report from Business Insider stated the fact that there are 200,000 units of HP TouchPad sitting at Best Buy warehouses. They are threaten to return those back to HP,but HP are trying to persuade them otherwise. In total, 270,000 units were shipped to Best Buy, only 25,000 were sold. Also, this is not just happening to Best Buy, other major electronic outlets are facing the same predicament.

ARM plans to tackle the PC microprocessor market

ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines. A UK company that have been around since the 1990s. You wouldn’t have heard about them a few years ago, unless you were in the industry. Today, they are in everything from IPods to Tablet PCs. ARM is an architecture of microprocessors that is for specific use and implementation. It consumes little power, simple, and cheap enough to be put into every possible consumer electronic product.

The business is mainly to license the ARM core IP to developers and they would make a chip that would be suited their needs. Many players such as Texas Instruments, Marvell, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple, Freescale, and Samsung have their own ARM processors for use in their own or partner products. Apple A4 and A5 processors was supposedly developed and manufactured by Samsung.

The Intel x86 architecture is in mainly all PCs today, but it will be seeing a strong uptake from ARM which will be seen in 22.9% of all notebook PCs by 2015. The target segment will be specifically netbooks and with the next Windows 8 being an ARM-enabled OS. ARM will see the benefits from a strong backing in software support. IHS iSuppli forecast a ten-fold increase in shipments with ARM processors from 2012 to 2015.

The Tablet PC market now has seen a sweep of ARM processors in their products. Intel is trying to catch up with another release of the ‘Atom’ line. However, being ARM is much cheaper to produce and performance does not lack behind Intel. I can only imagine ARM will be in the market for a long time to come.

Google’s annual shareholder meeting (2011)

Today, they held the annual shareholders meeting at offices of Google. I’m not a shareholder of Google, but one shareholder raised an interesting question about Android and why didn’t Google monetize it ?

You can watch the whole 90 minute video above, but focusing on the question at hand. Google replied with a long term strategy with Android, and first adoption and market share are important to Google as this moment than monetizing it right now. Android does have great amount of market share and it is growing fast, and as Mr. Larry Page stated in the meeting that there are always opportunities to monetize from Android at a later time. Hence, Android Honeycomb, which is not open source and only available to large tablet PC manufactures.

Asus Transformer tablet hit the 400,000 mark

Asus announced that they have hit a 400,000 units mark of their Eee Pad Transformer tablet so far and have gone on their way to 2 Million units by end of 2011.

The ‘Transformer’ tablet powered by a Tegra 2 chipset. You can purchase an add-on keyboard that will plug at the bottom of the tablet , much similar to a docking station.

Full specs can be viewed here.

Apple will take on another contract manufacture

‘Think different‘ was the slogan from 1997 Apple’s ad campaign.

That approach had embarked a sleuth of products from Iphones, Ipads, and Imacs. Now, we all know Apple manufactures their products in Taiwan or China. Contracting the giant in technology manufacturing; Foxconn Technology Group. In the past few years, there has been problems at those plants in China involving lethal labor protests and recently, the explosion at one of its Ipad plants that killed three workers.

Finally, Apple has stepped up with a (albeit late) strategy to combat this increase in risk with their manufactures overseas. That is of course, to diverse the risk by contracting another manufacture to handle the demand and work. We not sure if Apple has signed any exclusive agreements with Foxconn, but I think this should have been done in the beginning as a fail-safe approach in globalization. The top two contenders to win the contract are Quanta Computer and Pegatron Technology, both from Taiwan.

We believe Pegatron Technology will most likely receive the award being they are supposedly the Iphone 5 manufacture.

More tablets for your choosing !

This chart above shows the supply of all major players in the tablet industry. We have Apple with Ipads releasing by 14 to 15 Millions by 3rd quarter of this year and follow suit is the new Amazon ‘unknown’ 10″ and 7″ tablets coming out later this year. Amazon being one of the largest online retailers releasing tablets under their own brand is certainly unexpected. However, they do have the cash, distribution, and infrastructure to make it happen. We’ll just have to see what shall they bring to us.

Archos G9 Series Tablets

Archos, a french consumer electronics company just released a series of tablets that is meant to compete heavily with the models coming from Asus, Motorola, and HP. Their predecessor series named Archos 70 and 101 ‘Internet Tablets’ released about a year ago had gained momentum, but believed to have failed to conceive any stronghold on the market. My personal 101 was returned due to a defective power connector and would not re-charge. Anyhow, judging from some promotion pictures and videos that Archos has released, these new tablets could wipe that slate clean and regain some ground. The specifications are pretty impressive, a OMAP4 1.5Ghz SoC from Texas Instruments (claiming to be 50% faster than Tegra 2), possible 512Mb of memory or more, an optional 32Gb flash drive or 250Gb hard drive, insert-able 3G dongle, 8″ or 10″ capacitive screen showing some impressive viewing angles, and finally, embedded with Android 3.1 “Honeycomb”.

The release date has been slated for September of this year which is kind of late in the game as some or similar spec’d tablets are already entering the market. Maybe, a few diehard Archos fans will still hold out for this well-round tablet. I sure will be interested to do a full review on it when I get my hands on one. For now, take a look at some of the videos that have surface:

Korean government will spend $2 Billion on tablets

Korean primary to elementary education system just became more high-tech than ever. The government has decided to invest $2 Billion (USD) on digitize tablets with textbook materials embedded by 2015. The question is which manufacture will they go with, whether it’ll be a homegrown Samsung custom tablet or the next versions of the Ipad. This is interesting to see what kind of hardware and software shall the Koreans innovate. Well, they do have most of the world’s mobile electronics manufactures in house.

Schanno S9000 Tablet

Schanno S9000 tablet from China is the latest that will sport Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). The specifications are quite impressive, much like the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The specs are as follows:

Samsung S5PC110 1Ghz CPU (Cortex A8)

7″ 1024×600 Capacitive Screen

Bluetooth 3.0

WIFI

GPS

Micro USB

Rear 5.0 MP Autofocus Camera

Front 3.0 MP Camera

Polished white plastic backing

Android 2.3 currently, but will soon be upgraded to Android 3.0
This is a very robust tablet for what it is, no idea on the actual quality, but as a direct competitor to Samsung Galaxy Tab, I’d say it is very promising piece of equipment.

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