It seems like every man and his dog is using NVIDIA's new Tegra chip, with Notion Ink and ICD's tablets being just two we've seen recently. The German site NetbookNews has been tipped off on a March launch for the multitouch tablet, which will be either 4-inches or 7-inches in size (or potentially offered as two different models), and will have either 720p or 1080p resolution. It's presumed to be running Android 2.0, or a variant of it anyway, which ASUS should've got around to much earlier than now, as rumors of a smartbook or Android phone have been flying around since last year.

The leak isn't exactly solid, as you can see, but for anyone holding out for an affordable tablet next year, it's a sliver of hope to cling onto. [NetbookNews via Electronista]

The tablet was outed by Engadget's Joshua Topolsky on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and looked pretty responsive, even with that resistive touchscreen. ICD plans on updating it with a capacitive display option before it goes on sale next year, which is pleasing news to our ears, but it's bemusing as to why they don't just ditch the resistive model, unless it can be offered for much less than the far-superior capacitive.

An integrated 3G SIM will keep it perpetually connected, and also hints at the possibility of carriers subsidizing it to keep costs down. Measuring 186 x 158 x 18mm, the screen is 7-inches and will contain either 800 x 480 or 1024 x 600 pixels, dependent on the resistive or capacitive screen.

Internally, there's 4GB of flash storage, but a microSD card slot will allow for expansion. The 512MB RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HDMI-out, accelerometer, ambient light sensor, 3.5mm jack and 1.3-megapixel camera all sound fairly average, and if it's offered at around the same price-point as the Notion Ink tablet we saw last week, ICD might have a battle on their hands. Engadget's pointing at a $249 price-tag, with more details expected at CES in early January. [Engadget via SlashGear]

Unfortunately, yes, which means that this version won't take full advantage of Windows 7's tablet capabilities. Still, UMPC Portal reports a solid 3 hours of battery life, 60GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, and a 1.1Ghz Atom under the hood. Our initial hands-on impressions were generally favorable, and there's nothing really here to contradict that (although $500 is still pretty steep). UMPC will be giving more updates today that we'll keep an eye on. [UMPC Portal via Engadget]

Earlier in the month, Pixel Qi's CEO Mary Lou Jepsen commented that their displays were going to be used in "specialized multi-touch tablet devices," and shown off at CES. It certainly sounds like she was alluding to this Notion Ink "smartpad," which SlashGear has an incredibly detailed low-down on.

For now, they're only showing off renders of the tablet, but it's enough to pique our interest. Crammed in that silver, MacBook Air-like physique is the aforementioned chip (which will give it a purported 48hr standby battery life, even better than first expected), A-GPS, a digital compass, accelerometer and proximity, and curiously ambient light and water sensors. There's even a 3.0-megapixel camera with autofocus, capable of recording video.

It'll be available in 16GB and 32GB SSD options, and will have an SD card slot too.

The transflective Pixel Qi display measures 10.1-inches, and offers 1080p resolution video playback. The rest of the device is 6.3 x 9.8 x 0.6 inches, and weight is listed at 1.7lbs. Connection wise, it has a USB, HDMI, 3.5mm jack and microphone input. With Wi-Fi b/g and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, it's triband on 850/1900/2100 UMTS/HSDPA.

Better wipe that saliva from the corner of your mouth, as we're not likely to hear much more about this Notion Ink creation until early January at CES, when hopefully the pricing will be confirmed too. [SlashGear]

Publisher Bonnier has worked with design agency BERG to come up with the Mag+ tablet, which has the magazine pages run vertically, rather than on the next screen like we've always seen so far. It actually replicates the experience of reading a magazine really well, as pages can be flipped like you would with a normal magazine, and when you encounter an article you'd like to read, you scroll down to view it.

If this is the future for the magazine industry, suddenly I feel a lot more hopeful. [BERG via SlashGear]

Take a gander at the video of BERG talking through the concept here:

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

And video footage of the prototype here:

Mag+ (video prototype footage only) from Bonnier on Vimeo.

"The tablet planned is NOT a kindle as we know it."

The Tweet followed two other posts that also dealt with tablets ("interactive, full color" she says). They're kind of cryptic, but if she's anything like the New York Times or Conde Nast then she might be talking with a certain company or companies about magical newspaper/magazine-saving tablets too. No surprise. Here are the other two:

"Would like more comments on reading colorful magazines on a tablet reader- new improved, very interactive. will you use such a device??" AND "Serious question: how many of you will read magazines on an electronic tablet(interactive-full color) within two years? three years?"

Martha, Martha. What have you seen and when do we get instructions on how to knit handmade protective sleeves for it? [Martha Stewart - Thanks, Johnsie]

It's Cool But Makes No Business: Unlike the impending Apple Tablet, the Crunchpad was supposed to be low margin, subsidized by soft revenue from content providers and it still turned out to be $500. That's possibly too much for a tablet that only surfs the web when netbooks can do it for half that price. At this point in time, to make a web tablet a fair value, you'd almost have to give it away for nothing. But like so many of Google's side projects, the tablet doesn't have to have immediate or direct paths to monetization — Google simply likes to engage users first as Eric Schmidt said at the Google Navigation launch for Maps, a product equivalent of what Tom Tom charges over a hundred sollars for, which they launched for free.

Correction: It Makes No Business Sense Unless You Are Google: Oh wait! Google simply makes more money when more people go online, thanks to adsense. Whoa, what a coincidence! The only thing a web tablet would do is get people online! That's not too dissimilar to Google's free software model for Android, where Microsoft has to charge licensing fees to manufacturers because they don't have enough revenue from online services or ads to make up for the cost.

The Most Direct Way To Get People Online is the Physical Manifestation of a Browser: And if Google wants more people on the web, a low cost, ad subsidized web tablet is probably the least complicated way to do it from a hardware, software and business partner standpoint. There's no competing operating system with native apps competing for attention with Google's web services, and there's not necessarily a need for a contract or carrier as on smartphones. This web tablet is a straight shot to the web. (I know its cheaper to let other hardware makers solve this puzzle, but android is just as confusing of a model.)

Software Is the Issue, and They've Already Got It Figured Out: Chrome OS is the perfect operating system for a web tablet. It's a fast operating system that's completely browser centric. While Tablet hardware is somewhat a commodity (Exception: touchscreens of the size used in JooJoo aren't super cheap yet), the big issue is software. And Chrome OS is ripe for a web surfing tablet.

They're Already Supposed to Be Fishing Around In Hardware: The rumors and a source of ours says Google is already working on a hardware phone, based on an advanced version of Android. However little sense that makes, that's what we've heard. And once you're in the hardware game, what's one more piece of gear with off the shelf ion/atom netbook hardware and a capacitive touchscreen?

Let me be clear: There are no sources or tips that inspired this piece. This article is in no way anything other than a pipedream to have the richest web and user focused tech company today build a cool device that probably wouldn't make them any money, and lets face it, it wouldn't need to make them any money because, again, they're so rich they can basically give these things away for nothing. I mean, Google can give away over half a million of these things at $300 a pop and not even put a 10% dent into their profits from last quarter. If you stare at the numbers long enough, I almost think they should give us each one for Christmas. How about it, Google? I promise to click around on a lot of ads!

Specs

Here are some new facts I gathered from the meeting. First, the device runs a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The guys at JooJoo said they weren't ready to reveal specs yet, but I saw the bootup sequence—a standard BIOS setup that displayed what it was booting to—and saw the specs. Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage, says that the demo hardware was basically the final hardware, so it's easy to put two and two together.

As for the graphics card + CPU combination, it's probably an Nvidia Ion chipset. They claim that it handles 1080p YouTube video fine—we only got to see a few seconds of 720p and 1080p HD YouTube video because the internet connection was acting up—so it's probably an Ion. But the HD video we tested looked just fine on its 12-inch, 1366x768 resolution screen. Again, the Ion chipset is just an educated guess, but there are few other hardware options that can handle 1080p video smoothly, and an Atom CPU by itself (which we did see) can't do it on its own.

There is a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, a charging port and a USB slot. The external card slot present in the prototype isn't going to make it to the final version, but they are thinking of making it available to put a 3G card in there in the future. No TV out/HDMI out yet, but they are thinking about that. There are built-in speakers for playing back audio without headphones, and they're decent enough that you can actually listen to them, but you'll want to plug them in to speakers for any kind of extended video consumption.

Performance

The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There's an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations.

The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn't seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet.

In short, it's an actual web browsing tablet that you'd be perfectly fine using.

The software

The entire system is basically a gateway to your browser, which is based off WebKit, the same code that powers Safari and Google's Chrome. It's fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn't get to see that. But, you can't zoom into text. That's partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don't need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size.

JooJoo's keyboard looks like this, and takes up only a portion of the screen. It's usable, but you don't want to use it to bang out a blog post; this is mainly for consuming media.

Fusion Garage's concept for the product is that the "internet is the application", which means you can't save photos or files locally and you can't access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. The most you can dictate is how much each internet application (e.g. Gmail or Google Wave) can have for a local cache.

It does support Flash as usual, except when you play HD Flash it'll force you into fullscreen mode to render better/faster. And if you want to read PDFs, it'll force you into Google's web-based PDF doc reader. So it handles PDFs, but not "natively".

Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature.

As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you're watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it's up to websites to support them.

How good is it?

Despite its weird birth issues this past week with all the Arrington trouble, the JooJoo is surprisingly solid. You can tell Fusion Garage spent a good deal of time polishing the hardware, by the fact that they managed to include a 12-inch screen that's decent enough to not have lousy viewing angles, plus support 1080p HD video playback.

The only trouble right now is software, which is only about 75% done. Fusion Garage plans to ship devices about 8-10 weeks after preorders, which start this friday. If FG can manage to finish the software and get it to a point where it's transparent to the user who just wants to get online, $500 isn't too outrageous a price to pay. Decent netbooks are around that price, and it's about the price you'd expect Apple to charge for their tablet, if not even more. We'd of course be very happy if it were down at $300 or $400, but it's basically a new device in a new market, and you'll have to hand over a little extra for being an early adopter.

So right now we're at a wait and see status. The JooJoo seems good, from our time with it, but it really needs to be taken home and thoroughly tested with different webapps, watching a lot of HD video and streaming music. At the very least, we'll see how much of that 5-hour battery life stands up to constant use. You can pre-order it yourself this Friday, but, since there's some legal troubles on the horizon, you probably want to wait until the whole thing clears up first before putting any money down. [JooJoo]

The system runs Android 1.5 through its 7-Inch (800×480) glass touchscreen display, plus you get Wi-Fi (b/g), GPS , microSD reader, 2MP camera, .3MP webcam and a USB port that can always add 3G (though, the whole idea becomes sort of silly at that point).

Plus, a built-in stand on the back means it can double as a picture frame. Yes!!
My only concern is the bit of lag you notice in this video. If the final production models have that issue ironed out, this could be an attractive little tablet. [Camangi WebStation via Gearlog]

That's more than we could say in early November, when we reported that the Crunchpad's development arc was more akin to Duke Nukem Forever than a real, live product. Pricing was all over the place, moving slowly up the chain from $200, to $300, and finally to $400. That was back in July, then August, and finally this fine month, at which point the price tag had ballooned to $400.

Well it's all hogwash says Arrington, thank you very much, and he has no idea where the high price rumors came from, since manufacturing costs have continued to come down. Maybe he's holding out until we all have replicators in our homes, and can just buy the schematics and software from him on the cheap?

In a video Friday (above, 39:00 mark) from the Gillmore Gang, Arrington said sponsorships akin to Firefox's Google search box could spiral costs down even further. In a Steve Jobsian twist he added that his team will continue to work on the tablet until it's "perfect." Great. I'll go warm up the replicator. [YouTube via Engadget]

I hadn't heard of ICD before, either: they're actually based in the UK and Seattle. They say the Vega tablets are intended to be low cost, so it looks like some carrier subsidies may be in store, too.

The largest model has a 15.6-inch resistive screen (grr) that supports a resolution of 1366 x 768. It'll have a Tegra processor, 512MB DDR DRAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi (no N), and Bluetooth 2.1. The built-in 512MB NAND Flash storage can be expanded via MicroSD cards. It's expected this mode will weigh about 45 ounces and have a battery life of around 4 hours.

The 15-inch Vega also looks pretty similar to the stylish reference Tegra tablet that we spotted Nvidia's chief with earlier in the week. The good news is we'll be able to get a closer look at it come CES time in January. [Innovative Converged Devices]

Engadget says a credible tipster suggests it currently runs Windows CE and has a resistive touchscreen, but Android and capacitive upgrades (and different screen sizes) are likely. A March 2010 arrival is rumored, as is T-Mobile's involvement. Interesting, but definitely still an undercooked rumor at this point. We'll let you know when we hear more. [Engadget]

An accelerometer tied to a touchscreen. Why not, right? Seems like a logical progression after we saw this tiny tot of a netbook hacked to serve as a stylus-driven tablet.

It's no Courier, certainly, but as far as cheap, functional touchscreen tablets go, it's not half bad.

Update: Apologies to the creator, Brian, who wrote us with the original link for this post. I've since updated with the correct link, so go check it out! - j.l. [My Dell Mini Forums via Gadget Mix]

Here's what we know: Not much. The leaked sheet contains no image, no real specs and no launch date. The tablet speculation only arrives once you consider Cowon's MO, paired with Atom. Yeah, definitely a stretch, but an interesting one to consider on this lazy, post-Halloween Sunday afternoon. [DAP Review via Engadget]

At 1.5 inches thick, it's the thinnest 12.1-inch rugged convertible tablet—um, even with that massive qualifier in there, that's as thin as hardcore machinery gets. It's designed for law enforcement and other emergency services life-or-death people.

Of course, it uses a SSD for impact tolerance, in addition to running Core 2 Duos and up to 5GB of DDR3 RAM. It's also got hot-swappable modules for gear like GPS and webcams, and will see some appropriately hardass mounts and docks soon. It starts at $3600 for the base package for small businesses, 'cause the ability to stop a tankshell ain't cheap. And hey, multitouch!

DELL DELIVERS SMALLEST 12.1-INCH RUGGED CONVERTIBLE TABLET PC, FIRST WITH MULTI-TOUCH TECHNOLOGY

· Latitude XT2 XFR is Purpose-Built to Meet Unique Requirements of Field Service Workers, Military, Law Enforcement and First Responders

· Thinnest 12.1-Inch Rugged, Convertible Tablet PC

ROUND ROCK, Texas, Oct. 27, 2009 – Dell today unveiled the industry's smallest 12.1-inch rugged convertible tablet PC that is the first with a multi-touch display, the Latitude XT2 XFR. The system is designed to meet the unique and demanding needs of customers in the military, police, border patrol, field service organizations, factory fulfillment and first responders.

The Latitude XT2 XFR adds to Dell's Rugged Mobility Solution offering that includes the fully rugged Latitude E6400 XFR and the semi-rugged Latitude E6400 ATG laptops. It also joins purpose-engineered products like the Latitude Z, Latitude 2100 netbook for education and Dell Precision™ M6400 mobile workstation as another step in Dell's strategy to develop differentiated form factors and solutions that meet specific customer usage needs.

The News:

· Inspired by discussions with the defense, law enforcement, homeland security communities, field service departments and utility companies, Dell developed a convertible tablet that can adapt to changing mission requirements and withstand harsh environments. Features of the Latitude XT2 XFR include:

o At 1.5 inches (38.1 millimeters) it is the thinnest 12.1-inch rugged convertible tablet and starts at 5.4 pounds (2.45 kilograms) with four-cell battery and solid state drive[i], it is engineered and independently tested to meet MIL-810G standards for operation in harsh environments.

o Compression-sealed and rugged I/O doors, LCD, and keyboard, provide an IP54 level of Ingress Protection, or resistance to moisture and dust.

· The Latitude XT2 XFR can be installed in police or first-responder vehicles where critical information can be accessed with one hand. The Latitude XT2 XFR is also ideal for field-service and industrial manufacturing workforces who need an easy to carry, rugged system that can stand up to drops, spills and temperature extremes

· The Latitude XT2 XFR is available with Dell's optional remote management capabilities and next business day service and support.[ii]

· The rugged tablet shares common images and components with the Dell Latitude XT2 tablet for easy integration into existing environments. The Latitude XT2 XFR also includes:

o Intel Core 2 Duo processors with up to 5GB[iii] of DDR3 1066 MHz memory.[iv]

o QuadCool Thermal Management System enables excellent performance, even in extreme temperatures from minus 10 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

o Four-, six- and nine-cell battery options.

o Standard data security features that include Dell ControlVault and Dell ControlPoint, as well as optional solid state and spinning disk drives with full disk encryption.

o Impact resistant, sunlight viewable, 12.1-inch wide LED display with capacitive multi-touch gestures-enabled or optional resistive touch screen.

o Optional hot-swappable modules including GPS (in the coming weeks) and webcam.

o Optional expansion sliver provides camera/light, serial, and RJ11 inputs.

o An extensive range of optional accessories and services that include mobile rugged docking and mounting solutions in the coming weeks.

o A full complement of wireless connectivity options including wireless LAN 802.11 a/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and mobile broadband.

· The XT2 XFR will be available in the U.S., Canada, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany and Italy online and via Dell's PartnerDirect program. It starts at £2271 and more information is available here.

[Dell]

To quickly summarize, it's lack of proper manufacturer commitment, the lack of hardware and software, the lack of proper input systems, the high price and the inability to find a proper operating system to run on them. Looking at the rumors of the Apple Tablet, plus what everyone's already familiar with with the iPhone/iPod Touch OS, many of these ditches might be able to be filled quite soon. [NYTimes]

Starting today, four Vooks are available for $7 a pop. They're essentially part-book, part-video stories and instructional texts that can link you to social networking sites should you want to fanboy out to your awesome Vook.

While the idea is sound, the product looks no better than a mid-90s encyclopedia on CD.

And it really makes us realize, mixing medias—especially enhancing text for fiction—is tricky beyond the mere subject of taste. We're used to watching both news and fart-related video clips on a blog, but embedded flash video is just corny when placed next to a murder mystery.

Part of the challenge is format. UI needs to be updated to something we haven't really seen before—or maybe even imagined. Jumping across media should be a natural, passive experience. That part seems doable, though extremely difficult, with touch, camera and even voice interfaces. For instance, you could track a reader's eyes to a certain word and activate a sound. You could make a page turn naturally to a full screen video as opposed to relegating clips to an awkward 480x360 box.

But when hybridizing media, the part that could be even tougher is one of budgetary constraints. As soon as a book includes video, a publishing house becomes a production house and a writer becomes a director/editor. Stephen King's prose might send chills up your spine, but the local cable commercial quality video blurb sitting beside it won't have the budgetary love of a Hollywood flick, at least, not unless Stephen King or somebody else is going to take a paycut (or sell a LOT more books).

Advertising books costs money. Printing and distributing books costs money. But writing a book? That part's basically free.

So whatever Apple and publishing houses are cooking up, we hope it's beyond what we've seen in Vooks. No offense, Vook—someone had to do it (wrong) first. [Vook via NYT]

The 7-inch (800x480) tablet runs Ubuntu and a browser based upon WebKit. The light footprint software allows its 667MHz ARM processor with 128MB of RAM (ick!), 1GB of RAM storage to browse the internet, Facebook and Twitter. (Given that we're talking Ubuntu, there's a world of other software you could run, too...if you can find the space))

But where the software/hardware shines is a one-button text-to-speech updates on social networking sites. Just hold the button and say things like "Today, I stepped in a pile of dog crap. The crap flicked off my shoe into my mouth. Then, out of nowhere, the girl I've had a crush on since first grade decided to kiss me for the first time. It happens that's she was not only disgusted but also deathly allergic to canine feces. I no longer have a date to the prom, and now my dad is making me go hunting instead. FML." Then they'll show up on Facebook or Twitter. You can also speak URLs rather than typing them in.

The SQ7 weighs slightly more than a pound and runs for a modest 5 hours per charge. But at just $250 this October, it's lower risk than it could be. We'll try to get our hands on one to test it out. You can also watch a demo here. [AdelaVoice via besttabletreview via ubergizmo]

The prototype was shown at the Intel Developer's Forum last week, so it probably has an Atom processor of some description. That'll explain why it's a little sluggish. As you'll also see in the video, it has two USB ports, audio in/out and an SD card slot. Hopefully the final version will be cheaper than the roughly $500 Archos 9. [GottaBeMobile via Slashgear]