It was confirmed by Philip Newton, director of Samsung Australia’s IT division. Newton revealed that the new gadget would have a powerful processor and multiple connectivity options.

According to a report in APC Magazine, Newton pointed out that “I do feel that that slate-type platform has legs but I think the legs need to be far more powerful, for example an Atom-based product which has far greater flexibility, not to mention inputs and outputs. This has more potential than an iPad.”

But the truth is that, in spite of these criticisms from the Korean company, Apple received 120,000 pre-orders during the first day (when the Apple Store allowed users to buy the iPads in advance). In fact,  50,000 units were pre-ordered during the first two hours of that day. Definitively, there is a great expectation. iPad will be officially available in the US on April 3.

The Samsung tablet, on the other hand, would be available in the second half of this year.

As for the displays, there won’t be changes (technologically speaking) because, according to some reports, the new displays will be similar to the 24-inch ones that currently exist in the market, which were introduced in October 2008.

With this, the company would pretend to introduce another additional screen with similar size to the 27-inch iMacs that have had a successful reception. This thinking is really logic, so the introduction of a device with these characteristics to generate some additional money for Jobs and his company is not an unrealistic plan, but rather a reasonable move.

But why now and not before? Well, a possible reason is that Apple would have been waiting for a fall in the high price of LCD panels that support a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels, but apparently, the new products are being developed since a long time ago.

On the other hand, regarding the Mac Pro computers, the updates are related to the use of Intel Xeon Processors: The Xeon 5600 Series (12 cores) will be used in new Mac Pro models, while another version will be using a single processor model, with only six cores and a lower price.

The new Sony Vaio M will hit the European stores at the end of March. That is a new medium-end netbook whose price has not been revealed yet; however, we think that, as usual with the Vaio lines, the price will be higher than the average prices of other netbooks. The launch was confirmed by some British representatives of the company Sony. The Sony Vaio M will be introduced as a computer with a 10.1-inch screen and a battery that will be able to provide energy during about 8 hours before needing a recharge.

Screen will be LED-illuminated (of course!) and, although at this time we don’t know what resolutions it will support, judging by the size of the monitor, it is very possible that the default resolution will be 1024 x 600 pixels. Once again, a Pine Trail chip will be the heart of the processor for this new netbook. Specifically, we are talking about the Intel Atom N450 at 1.66GHz.

As you can imagine, the operating system of the Sony Vaio M will be Windows 7. The storage capacity is defined by the 2.5-inch hard drive that will be installed by default inside the Sony Vaio M; that is to say: 250GB. In addition, those netbooks will have a single RAM module (pre-installed) with a capacity of 1GB (at least it will be the standard feature for the basic version).

Regarding connectors, there is no surprises; just the regular things of a normal computer. This new Sony Vaio M will come with Bluetooth support (a “must-have” feature nowadays), three USB 2.0 ports, and network card compatible with Wi-Fi systems.

For that reason, Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7, the last version of its operating system for smartphones. It is supposed to transform a cell phone in a sort of electronic manager that anticipates the users’ needs. For example, this new OS include tools to consult the contacts network and users’ data automatically in order to find scheduled meetings, photos, and messages from friends; then, this information can be presented in an attractive way with a visual aspect similar to the interface of the Zune music player, instead of the traditional interfaces based on personal computers.

The development of this new OS required the humble recognition on the part of Microsoft (the biggest sotware maker of the world) that the clumsy architecture of Windows Mobile was a failure in the market. This way, the company needed to start from scratch in order to hopefully be able to compete with Apple and the iPhone.

According to Terry Myerson, the VP in charge of Windows Phone engineering, “to be entirely candid, the iPhone opened our eyes as to some things that needed to be done that were not in our plan… Some execution had really gone astray”. It is not clear yet whether the new Microsoft software is really a challenge for Apple, or simply it will end up being just a niche product with a poor result in the industry, just like happened with the Zune and its weak impact compared with the Apple iPod.

To know more about Windows Phone 7 Series, please click here

According to Charlie Kindel, Windows Phone Application Platform & Developer Experience program manager, “to deliver what developers expect in the developer platform we’ve had to change how phone apps were written. One result of this is previous Windows mobile applications will not run on Windows Phone 7 Series”. Kindel wrote this statement in a blog post on Thursday afternoon.

That is because with Windows Phone 7 Microsoft has decided to use Silverlight and XNA as development platforms. Silverlight is a Microsoft multimedia player and a competitor for the well-known Adobe Flash. On the other hand, XNA is a platform to develop games for Xbox 360.

“If you are a Silverlight or XNA developer today you’re gonna be really happy”, Kindel wrote.

That seems to be true, judging by the comments sent during and after a Q&A session on Twitter about this topic with the Windows Phone team at Microsoft.

To know more about this, please click here

The launch of the Apple iPad and several competitors that apparently will catch some attention from the public (for example: the HP Slate) are facts that will shape a wide range of possibilities and introduce the users to a new way to use and enjoy computers.

Similar to the explosion of products that were announced after Asus launched its first netbook (or ultraportable), which was well received around the world, 2010 is perceived now as “The Year of the Tablets”.

ARM, a company that is well-known for making processors used in portable devices, predicts that 50 or more tablets will be introduced throughout this year. Even, ARM confirmed that the 10 most important telecommunication companies of the world are planning to launch different tablets with data plans in several countries around the world.

When? According to Roy Chen, ARM’s worldwide mobile computing ODM manager, although they will begin to appear in the market as a “plague”, the true explosion will happen in the third quarter of the year.

There is an interesting nonofficial announcement coming from Japan: Several journalist have made public that Sony is planning to develop a smartphone where users will be able to play PSP games. In addition, apparently, Sony would be creating a device with a wide range of features, so it would not be easy to define it as a netbook, or an e-reader, or a handheld console (like PSP); actually, it would be a combination of all of them.

These projects are the reaction of Sony to Apple strategies, particularly regarding the iPad and iPhone. So, this is an interesting competition that, hopefully, will benefit the end users. But, at the same time, it could be interpreted as an obvious and meaningful evolution of the PSP, a console that has had strong competitors since it was launched commercially.

As you can imagine, the new smartphone that would be able to play PSP games won’t include slots to insert game cartridges. Instead, they could be connected to the online shop “PlayStation Store” (which is currently accessible by using a PlayStation 3 or PSP console) to download games developed for PSP. Sony Ericsson is working on this smartphone and, most likely, it will impact the mobile market in a strong way. However, it is not clear yet whether the whole PSP catalog will be supported, or only a reduced number of games. Apparently, the original games developed by Sony will be totally supported, but maybe third-party games could have some limitations, at least initially.

For the moment, the only thing we can do is to wait for official announcements and watch for the way how these projects move forward, since Sony is constantly surprising us with innovations and unexpected products. After the launch of the PSPGo, which has had very little success, the company needs a new product with a “wow” factor: That would be an opportunity to recover fans and increase earnings.

Shigeto Kanda, Canon representative and CFA chairman of the board (by the way, the CompactFlash Association website is a really really basic and old-fashioned site), pointed out that “the higher capacity and higher performance of CF cards enabled by the 48-bit addressing feature in the CF5.0 specification will further increase the value of DSLR cameras. The Video Performance Guarantee feature of the CF5.0 specification will help CF cards to expand into new markets such as high-speed movie equipment like professional video camcorders.”

As was pointed out in the official announcement, the new benefits of the 5.0 specification are mainly supported by the new range of 48-bit addresses, which allows to overcome the previous limitation that established a maximal storage capacity of 137 Gbytes for a CompactFlash card. Again, it will be very complicated the production of  144-petabyte cards in the short term, but of course, the new feature adds a margin of evolution to the industry.

Besides the theoretical increase of the capacity, additional improvements for the ATA standard have been added, as well as a better execution control and the so-called “Video Performance Guarantee Profiles” (recording guarantees for storing video), which is a field where CompactFlash cards had lost ground (at least temporally) with other formats such as SDHC that is currently more popular among the DSLR (Digital-SLR) and digital video camera makers.

A new enhanced product in this category is Aviator-2. It is an external SSD drive with a faster transfer speed and an improved performance, thanks to its USB 3.0 port. In fact, a new major feature of the USB 3.0 specification is the SuperSpeed bus that can provide a transfer mode at 4.8 Gbit/s.

The maker Active Media Products has introduced the first product of this new generation:  An external SSD drive that, initially, will be available in 64GB and 128GB versions. Besides, this drive is supposed to support transfer rates of up to 4Gbits/sec (10 times faster than the USB 2.0 specification).

Also, this external SSD drive comes in sizes that are smaller than usual sizes. Specifically, the dimensions are 5.3 x 3.3 x 0.6 inches (135 x 84 x 15 mm); actually, it could be carried in a pocket of a regular jacket. The price of the Aviator-2 is about US$ 260 (190 EUR) for the 64GB version and US$ 453 (333 EUR) for the other version with a storage capacity of up to 128GB.

HP introduced a new netbook that allows users to use online resources in a novel way when they need to access and use web sites, e-mail, social networks, instant messaging, photos, music and more.

The Compaq AirLife 100 includes a 10.1-inch bright screen, Android operating system (full multitasking support), and a customized touch interface.

Definitely, HP is taking advantage of its legacy and innovation in the touch technology. This way, the customized touch interface offers a new touch navigation experience, an easy system to make zoom in and out on web pages in the browser and a set of additional touch resources and shortcuts menu.

This new netbook also reinforces the strategic agreement signed on November 2009 between HP and the European telecommunications company Telefonica to define a partnership that provides mobile broadband services to markets located in Europe and Latin America. According to the companies, HP and Telefonica have created this association in order to offer an unsurpassable online experience for customers.