Motorola is currently working on at least two new Android tablets to launch on the Verizon 4G network before the end of the year, according to information obtained by CNET. The devices would be the first two tablets from Motorola since it launched its flagship slate, the Xoom, in February. Dubbed the “Xyboard,” the new tablet will come in both 8- and 10-inch versions, and will be stamped with Verizon’s famed “Droid” branding.
Samsung’s new Bada flagship has just docked into our illustrative French port. Announced back in the summer, the Wave 3 arrives on the refreshed Bada 2.0 OS, powered by a 1.4GHz processor and packing a four-inch 800 x 480 Super AMOLED display. Storage matches the watery iteration, with 3GB of memory baked-in, with expansion possible through microSD. Meanwhile, an auto-focus five megapixel shooter will do its best to fill all that space. Not content with France (where Bada-powered handsets have established a niche fanbase), the HSPA-connected smartphone is also penned to hit Germany, Russia and Italy before the end of the year.
Continue reading Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores
Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
For all the grousing about the minimal changes from the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S, Apple’s fastest smartphone incorporates sweeping shifts compared to what the company did with its iPod line. From keeping the waning iPod classic in the lineup to leaving the still-potent iPod touch untouched save for a blanching and price reduction, the venerable digital media player line seemed all but ignored at a time of year when Apple once primed the holiday pump for MP3 players.
Yet, while the iPod touch may not have received the processor boost or Siri-ousness of the iPhone 4S, it at least continues to remain vibrant via access to Apple’s app store. That’s not the case for the nano, once the flagship of the line. While Apple’s smallest touchscreen device gained new software that enlarged the main icons and brought new clock faces, these improvements are also being offered to owners of the last-generation iPod nano via a software update.
Continue reading Switched On: Next for the nano
Switched On: Next for the nano originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Professional photographers know the drill: every few years, Canon or Nikon announces a game-changing DSLR, often prompting top photogs to unload their complete kits and switch to another system in a never-ending attempt to shoot with the best. This time, Canon is first out of the gate, with its flagship EOS-1D X — the latest in a series that dates back to 2001 with the EOS-1D. As you’ve probably noticed, the company’s new top model looks virtually identical to its decade-old ancestor, but is otherwise a far cry from that four megapixel CCD sensor-sporting dinosaur. We’ve been anxiously awaiting an opportunity to check out Canon’s new ,800 18.1 megapixel full-frame model since first getting word of the beastly camera last week, and just had a chance to go hands-on during the company’s Pro Solutions event in London. Jump past the break for our impressions and a video walkthrough.
Gallery: Canon EOS-1D X hands-on
Continue reading Canon EOS-1D X first hands-on (video)
Canon EOS-1D X first hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Oracle has acquired Endeca, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that analyzes and provides business intelligence for unstructured data. Endeca, which has been around since 2001, represents an expansion of the big data focus Oracle unveiled at its OpenWorld conference earlier this month.
I spoke with Endeca Chief Strategist Paul Sondregger about a month ago, and he explained that Endeca’s flagship Latitude product is like “BI beyond the data warehouse,” in that it takes into account a wide variety of unstructured sources and lets users derive insights from it even if they don’t know what questions to ask.
Endeca’s technology doesn’t rely on algorithms to detect patterns, but tries to enable a “dialogue” between the user and the data. Sondregger used the analogy of looking for something in a Home Depot brick-and-mortar store versus searching for something on the company’s site. Whereas the store is like a collection of unstructured data that requires customers to know what they’re looking for, and then do lots of wandering and asking questions of employees to find what they want, the web site lets them start with a broad category and drill down.
For Oracle, Endeca will be more valuable as a component of an interconnected big data suite rather than as just a standalone product. Earlier this month, Oracle announced forthcoming appliances focused on analyzing unstructured data, including via Hadoop and a NoSQL database. Endeca’s product could mesh well with that broader strategy, or maybe could help Oracle do large-scale enterprise search. In fact, Sondregger told me that several intelligence-industry customers are running Endeca on top of Hadoop, one of them in an environment containing 24 billion records.
With one acquisiton under its belt just a few weeks after officially getting into the big data space, one has to wonder what else Oracle has planned. If it wants to go “all in” on big data, there is no shortage of interesting companies out there that could bring real value to Oracle’s strategy.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Chika.
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