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Android Honeycomb based tablets are beginning to feel like they're a dime a dozen. 10.1-inch slates are coming out of the woodwork from a bunch of major players, and for all intents and purposes, they're built upon very similar base platforms with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 processor powering them. Capacitive touch displays, integrated 802.11 WiFi, 8 - 32GB of ROM storage, 1GB of RAM, accelerometers, gyroscopes, front and rear facing cameras and Android 3.1 -- you know the drill. Fortunately, beyond the cookie-cutter reference platform, some manufacturers are building tablets that stand out from the crowd.  Asus stepped out early with an innovative approach to expanding...

*********************************EXCERPT********************************************In the time since NVIDIA’s CES 2010 announcement, the company has shifted resources and focused its entire Tegra team on a single OS: Android. Choosing Android isn’t a hard decision to understand, of all of the available smartphone OS options it has the most momentum behind it. NVIDIA views the smartphone space like a condensed evolution of what happened in the PC industry. In fact, NVIDIA believes that within the next decade, mainstream PCs will actually be smartphones. You’ll simply connect your smartphone to a wireless display and keyboard/mouse when you’re at your desk, and just take it with you...

H.264,WMV9 VC1, DivX and more We told you that we managed to see some cool Tegra 2 documentation and we can tell you that when it comes to HD video decoding, Tegra 2 can cope with numerous standards. First of them is H.264 with sub standards Baseline Profile (B frames) — 1080p/20Mbps, Main Profile (B Frames, CAVLC) — 1080p, Main Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction) — 720p/6Mbps and High Profile (B Frames, CABAC, no weighted prediction).

Google OS tablet reference design? Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2 will run on Nvidia's Tegra 2. So says Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung, by way of Barron's, who last week told investors that Samsung has “placed a sizeable order with Nvidia for Tegra 2 chips in the first half of 2011, geared for both tablets and smartphones”. Yeung went on to claim that the Nvidia ARM-based system on a chip - which was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) almost a year ago - forms the basis for the reference platform Google is testing Honeycomb - aka Android 3.0 - against....

Prices start at US $375 Notion Ink's Adam tablet has been filling the press lines for quite some time and it looks like that the wait is finally over as Slashgear is reporting that the device is finally ready for pre-order. The initial pre-order will be reserved for those that have been registered commenters on Notion Ink's blog and these will be the first ones to get the link, while others will have to wait a bit more.  In case you somehow managed to miss Notion Ink's Adam we are talking about a 10.1-inch LCD or Pixel Qi (1024x600) multi-touch screen...

The slate computing market is about to explode, with a literal flood of new tablets releasing over the coming months. Many of them will be Android based, running Nvidia’s Tegra 2 SoC. Nvidia made a big deal about Tegra 2 back at CES 2010, but for some reason, it’s taken quite a bit of time for anything running the platform to hit the market. Finally, we have one - the Viewsonic G Tablet. The Tegra 2-based Viewsonic G Tablet showing the Tap UI homescreen The specs are pretty straightforward; we’ve got a 10” WSVGA display with LED backlighting, Android 2.2...