Google exec shows off Android powered Motorola tablet

Google’s Vice President of Engineering, Andy Rubin, had a surprise up his sleeve at an interview which took place at the D: Dive into Mobile event in San Francisco yesterday.

He pulled out not just the Nexus S, successor to Google’s Nexus One smartphone, but also an unnamed Motorola prototype tablet running Honeycomb, the next version of Android which is designed to be more tablet friendly.

Acer Revo 100 multimedia PC launched

Acer has launched a multimedia box which it claims brings together “sleek contemporary design” with “powerful multimedia capabilities”.
The Acer Revo 100 boasts clear.fi, an application which runs your home network automatically, searching and finding all devices within the home, from laptops to smartphones, making it as easy as possible to locate and share any multimedia content.
The Revo 100 box itself is apparently slim and elegant, with a contemporary matte black finish. It’s powered by an AMD Athlon II Neo dual-core processor and Nvidia Ion graphics, along with up to 4GB of memory and a hard disk with a capacity of up to 750GB.

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 imminent

EVGA is readying for the launch of its GTX 570 graphics card, the slightly tamer version of the power-horse GTX 580.

It’s still a very chunky and impressively specced card, however, featuring 480 processing cores and 1280MB of GDDR5 running at 3.8GHz.

iPad 2 will ship from Foxconn in February

The latest buzz on the iPad sequel is that units are expected to start shipping from manufacturer Foxconn next February.

In fact, according to DigiTimes, Foxconn has been given an order to the tune of 500,000 iPad 2s to be readied for shipping before the end of February 2011.

This makes the April 2011 launch date more of a likelihood, especially as it’s the one year anniversary of the launch of the original iPad. Or potentially, the launch could come slightly sooner than April, and we might only have a couple of months to wait before it all kicks off. In the US, that is, we’ll doubtless have to wait the usual month or so longer.

Google announces Chrome operating system plans

Google has announced its plans for the Chrome operating system, designed for netbooks with a keyboard (as opposed to the Android OS, which is focused on touch devices, namely tablets and smartphones).

On the official Google blog, Linus Upson, VP Engineering, and Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, made a joint post discussing Google’s plans for the Chrome OS.

The company notes that it now needs feedback from actual users in the field, so is launching a pilot program to get test notebooks out to developers, businesses and “qualified users”.

Two cameras looking likely for iPad 2

So, the iPad 2 speculation continues, and according to one source Reuters cites, the iPad 2 is going to be sporting two cameras when it arrives.

The lack of a camera on the iPad has been one of the bigger sticking points for some consumers who aren’t tempted by Apple‘s tablet, and have perhaps plumped for twin camera bearing slates such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab instead.

Two of Reuters’ sources familiar with iPad matters have said that the manufacturing plants which supply the components for Apple’s hardware are ramping up in preparation for a second version of the iPad. However, only one said that it would come with twin cameras, one on the front for video chatting, and a main camera on the rear.