Well, that was fast. The injunction against the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Tab has — albeit temporarily — been lifted in the European Union (a notable exception is Germany, where the ban is still in place). This news came Tuesday a day after several blogs, such as PC World, pointed out that it looked like Apple might have, shall we say, “tweaked” the evidence a tad.
“But the picture Apple submitted of the Tab is inaccurate and does not match with the real Galaxy Tab 10.1, Webwereld discovered. Further investigations have verified this assessment. The Galaxy Tab due on the European market is taller and more oblong than the iPad 2. However, the shape of what Apple’s claims to be a Tab 10.1 resembles the iPad very closely.
The picture of the alleged Galaxy Tab provided by Apple is cropped and its aspect ratio is distorted. According to Samsung, the Tab measures 256.7 x 175.3 millimeters, which translates to an aspect ratio of 1.46. The Tab pictured in the complaint however has an aspect ratio of 1.36. The bottom is about 8 percent wider than the actual one.
As a result, the aspect ratio of the purported Tab is actually closer to the aspect ratio of the iPad 2, which is 1.30. In short: the shape of the alleged Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Apple’s complaint matches the iPad 2 more closely than it matches the actual Tab.”
Apple’s tweaks seem to have been to make the image “look better”, but that doesn’t exactly fly with court documents. It’s looking like this is one galaxy Apple will have trouble erasing.
Click the picture for more details on what I'm being snarky about.
In non-Apple related news, Viewsonic raised some eyebrows on Monday when they announced the ViewpadPro10. A dual-booting Windows 7/Android tablet, the ViewpadPro10 bucks the general Android-tablet trend by running on an Intel Atom chip instead of an Nvidia Tegra. It also sports two USB slots and a MicroSD slot, making it a fairly expandable tablet. Unfortunately it also only has a front facing camera, and is running Gingerbread instead of Honeycomb. No word on pricing yet, but seems interesting.
Windows 7 may still suck on a tablet, but it's interesting conceptually.
In something that seems more techweird than techciting, CNET, via a survey from Robert W. Baies and Co., are showing that the HP Touchpad apparently comes in second behind Apple in terms of mindshare. The expected 94.5 percent of those surveyed respond that they’re interested in an iPad, with the Touchpad actually scoring a staggering 10 percent of the remainder. The rest of the list is neck-and-neck Android tablets, with our favorite whipping boy, the Blakcberry Playbook, coming in dead last.
That sound you hear is RIM restructuring again.
I’m not sure how well that mindshare segment translates into shares. After all, a month ago, I would’ve said Touchpad over iPad, but I bought an iPad first due to the Touchpad’s price. Considering the current brouhaha about Touchpads not selling, it seems like my anecdotal experience might not be so off.
Not that poor sales is stopping HP. To follow up their silent launch of the Pre3 in Europe yesterday, they’ve also got the 64 GB White Touchpad out as of today, but only in France. Once again, the US gets no love. Considering that three former launch partners for the Pre are no longer carrying any kind of WebOS phone, one has to wonder what kind of ecosystem a WebOS user is supposed to become part of. Considering the recent small-but-there jump in Touchpad sales due to price drops and sales, one has to assume that there are WebOS users out there other than myself, right?
Anyone?
"That's my cue!"
Those who did take the plunge may be feeling kind of stupid if PDAdb turns out to be right about the Touchpad Go coming out in October. A 7” 4G tablet sporting 32 GB of storage, this appears to be the long rumored “Opal”. No official comment from HP on this. I guess they’ll let us know the day after it comes out.
As long as we’re looking to the future, we should check out Asus’s rumored follow-up to the Asus Transformer. Asus leveraged their place as one of the defining forced in the netbook market to build a strong brand, and their hybrid netbook/tablet got some pretty good feedback. It looks like they’re ready to up the ante with the Transformer 2. The delayed tablet is now rumored to be sporting a Tegra3 chip, a.k.a Kal-El. This quad-core chip is an impressive feature to have and being in a unique-yet-proven form-factor from a known brand may help Asus get a bigger piece of the action.
Get it? Kal-El? Action? Yeah? Oh never mind.
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