Android tablet on the cheap: Acer Iconia A500 is the XOOM "Light"

Acer’s Iconia A500 tablet features the same exact hardware specifications as Motorola’s XOOM, but with half the flash storage and $150 cheaper.

Back in early March, I proposed that Motorola create a new SKU for their XOOM tablet with a slightly reduced feature set, which I tentatively called the “XOOM Light”.

If you don’t remember the piece, here’s the crux of the argument:

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If iSuppli’s BOM is to be believed to be within striking range of actual component costs, then Motorola can shave anywhere between 50 and 60 dollars off their manufacturing cost on the XOOM by slicing the flash storage in half to 16GB and going with less expensive camera parts, putting it closer on par with Apple’s iPad 2. This would allow the XOOM to retail for about $50-$80 less than the entry-level iPad 2, depending on how close the company wants to cut their margins.

The only way XOOM is going to be a repeat hit for Motorola Mobility in the same way the Droid was for their handset business is to undercut the iPad 2 on price. With a lower price and a similar feature set to the iPad 2, a large segment of consumers might be willing to overlook some of the shortcomings on Android 3’s current tablet app gap.

While this plea seems to be falling on deaf ears at Motorola, apparently this idea resonated with one of its competitors, the Taiwanese-based PC giant Acer, Inc.

Today the company along with channel partner Best Buy announced pre-orders for its Android 3-based iPad competitor, the Iconia A500, which has nearly identical specifications to the Wi-Fi only version of the Motorola XOOM.

See: Motorola XOOM Specifications

See: Acer Iconia A500 Specifications

The only significant difference? 16GB of flash memory instead of 32GB which lines up with the entry-level Wi-Fi iPad quite nicely. At $450.00, the 10.1″ tablet device costs $50 less than the entry-level iPad 2, and is $140-$150 less than the XOOM.

It seems that Acer didn’t even need to sacrifice the camera capabilities to make up for component costs on the BOM in order to compete with the iPad 2. It also has identically-specced 2MP front-facing and 5MP, LED flash rear-facing cameras as the XOOM.

In addition to identical SoC and PoP, memory, RAM, GPU, screen, cameras and ports, the device is also the same thickness of the XOOM, at 12.9mm, roughly half an inch.

Note to all Android and other would-be tablet manufacturers: The bar for 10.1″ full size, 16GB devices that are not carrier locked has now been lowered to $450.00. That means anything in the tablet market that is not Apple needs to cost this much or less, with similar specifications.

Oh and HP, regarding your WebOS 3 TouchPad, I’m also talking to you.

Today I pre-ordered one of the Iconia A500 devices, sight unseen. If it’s anywhere near as good a device as the XOOM as far as build quality is concerned, I’m willing to put up with some of the current shortcomings in Android 3 in order to keep a test Honeycomb device in house.

I’m not advocating that most consumers look at this device in lieu of the superior application ecosystem on the iPad 2, but this price point was enough for me to take action to meet my immediate requirements. For the same reason, Android developers will probably jump at the opportunity to buy one of these devices as well.

The question now remains of how Android 3 devices can actually differentiate at the $450.00 price point, and if it’s even possible to lower that price bar any further. I think the price bar can be lowered, but there’s only one company who I believe can accomplish this: Amazon.

As I mentioned in my November 2010 piece “Kindle’s Secret Sibling: Amazon’s Android Tablet” it is my belief that the online retailer and bookseller has a definitive plan to release such a device.

What the exact specs for this device are is left to the imagination and may be pure speculation, but certainly if you eliminate the need for Google licensing of the Android OS and the Android Market along with Google’s apps, replacing them with Amazon monetizing equivalents, the price of a similarly-specced tablet could easily be reduced another $50-$80.

An Amazon Android tablet using the Open Source, unlicensed version of Honeycomb, combined with Amazon Appstore for Android, Kindle for Android, the Amazon MP3 service as well as Amazon Video and Amazon Cloud Player makes for a near-complete tablet OS and application stack, which would allow the company to monetize their properties on the device and take the “Give away the razor but sell the blades” approach.

All of this is dependent, of course, on Google actually releasing the source code to Honeycomb outside of their approved vendors list, a delay which currently has the Open Source community absolutely livid.

The only thing that would actually be missing from such a theoretical device is a native Android mail client to talk to GMail, Hotmail and other services including corporate Exchange email, along with the appropriate calendar sync services, mapping and integrated search engine apps.

Presumably the missing pieces could be coded in-house by Amazon, or purchased/licensed from a 3rd-party. I could certainly see Amazon partnering with someone like Microsoft to provide Bing search and mapping in lieu of Google, as well as a full license of Activesync and native Exchange client.

Whatever the outcome, it’s clear that Acer has just brought prices for iPad 2 competitors down to much more realistic and acceptable levels. Whether it will plunge any further in the immediate future remains to be seen.

Has Acer re-defined the pricing for the full-sized Android tablet space? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

An Event That Promises To Address Start-up Concerns

If your start-up is located in Miami, then it's time to take note of Startup Saturday (SS), a platform that can help you address all the teething issues that are part and parcel of running a start-up.

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Startup Saturday, the Headstart Network's monthly initiative to address entrepreneurial concerns related to starting up takes place every second Saturday of every month in all the five cities mentioned above. The forthcoming edition, to be held on 12 September 2009, also has a lot to offer.

Many veterans from the technology world, venture capitalists and other domain experts will be present across locations, to counsel, share and advise young entrepreneurs on how they can deal with issues related to funding, taxation, IP (intellectual property), corporate governance, etc.

This month's theme for Bengaluru and Delhi is "Start-up Laws". Topics like 10 legal 'must-knows' for a start-up, Legal issues while starting up, et al, will be discussed. Kolkata edition will address subjects like 'The IT/ITeS Industry and the ecosystem of Kolkata and its near future'. While the Mumbai edition will focus on funding options (angel/VC/incubators), the Hyderabad edition will have a discussion on the factors that make Hyderabad a perfect destination for product start-ups.

Another highlight of the event is the product showcase element that allows innovative start-ups to present their offering to other start-ups, investors and the media. Many young entrepreneurs take this opportunity to reach out to other peers in the eco-system and share best practices, which they have formulated over time, out of their experiences.

So, a lot is in the offing!

For more, either head towards any of the SS venues or keep watching this space!

Google's Andy Rubin tells Android critics to chill

Android pioneer Andy Rubin has a message for developers carping about Android fragmentation: Calm down.

Posting on Google's Android Developers blog, Rubin said that Android owed much of its success to the fact that it could be modified by device manufacturers and thus isn't a "one size fits all" platform along the lines of Apple's iPhone operating system.

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ANALYSIS: Android 3.0: Five key features

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Android pioneer Andy Rubin has a message for developers carping about Android fragmentation: Calm down.

Posting on Google's Android Developers blog, Rubin said that Android owed much of its success to the fact that it could be modified by device manufacturers and thus isn't a "one size fits all" platform along the lines of Apple's iPhone operating system.

ANALYSIS: Android 3.0: Five key features

"What amazes me is that the even though the quantity and breadth of Android products being built has grown tremendously, it's clear that quality and consistency continue to be top priorities," wrote Rubin, the former Android CEO who became Google's vice president of engineering when the company purchased Android in 2005. "Miraculously, we are seeing the platform take on new use cases, features and form factors as it's being introduced in new categories and regions while still remaining consistent and compatible for third-party applications."

Fragmentation of the Android platform has become an increasingly important issue for developers in recent months as Google has released multiple versions of the platform that get pushed out to different devices at different times. A recent survey conducted by the Baird wealth management firm found developers are having difficulty with this since they don't know if their apps will work optimally on different Android versions that are even further modified by manufacturers. For example, a developer who created an application designed to utilize Near-Field Communications (NFC) would not be able to run it on Android devices that have not been equipped with the Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") platform released late last year.

Rubin's remarks on Android fragmentation came just a week after Business Week ran an article saying that Google had started to crack down on mobile carriers and device manufacturers that were modifying Android in ways that Google disliked. According to the article, which relied on interviews with "about a dozen executives working at key companies in the Android ecosystem," Google told companies they would now have to approve changes made to the platform directly with Google if they wanted to get "early access to Google's most up-to-date software."

Fragmentation issues aren't the only complaint about Google's recent Android actions, as some developers have also expressed frustration that Google has yet to release the source code for the new Android 3.0 ("Honeycomb") version of the platform that has been designed specifically for tablet computers. Rubin assured developers that Google planned to release the source code in the near future and emphasized that delays in opening up Honeycomb to the public were not due to a change in the company's attitude toward open-source platforms.

"The Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones," Rubin wrote. "As soon as this work is completed, we'll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy. We remain firmly committed to providing Android as an open source platform across many device types."

Honeycomb got its first public showing in February when it debuted on Motorola's Xoom tablet. Initial reviews of the operating system expressed disappointment at the lack of tablet-specific Android applications available on the market.

Report: Apple Sold 2.6 Million iPad 2s in March

Apple sold up to 2.6 million iPad 2s in its first month, according to upstream touch panel suppliers quoted by Taiwanese newspaper DigiTimes.

The report suggests Apple could have sold more if it had not been constrained by the supply of cover lenses for touch-panel modules.

The same unnamed sources gave Digitimes a "conservative" estimate of about 4.3 million iPad 2s sold per month for the rest of the year if suppliers can keep up.

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And then, interestingly, the report goes on to say: "Taiwan-based TPK Touch Solutions and G-Tech Optoelectronics are eagerly expanding their capacities for cover lenses currently." Other Taiwanese suppliers, like HannStar Display, Chunghwa Picture Tubes (CPT), and Wintek, are also reportedly planning to increase cover lens output.

According to iSuppli, supplies of the iPad 2's touch-screen overlay glass is one of five critical components that may have been affected by the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake. ISuppli speculates the overlay is currently supplied by Asahi Glass.

Apple hasn't released official figures on iPad 2 sales, but is expected to do so during its Q2 earnings call scheduled for April 20. In a pre-earthquake report, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicted that Apple will reach sales of 1 million iPad 2s before the 28 days it took the first-generation iPad. During its first sales weekend, the wait time for an iPad 2 went up to five weeks. The tablet also reportedly sold out within a day of its overseas launch.

7 hard-to-find add-ons for Internet Explorer 9

These handy add-ons do everything from automatic spell-checking to easy image cropping and resizing

Hard-to-find IE9 enhancers
Microsoft's just released IE9 offers many improvements, particularly in the area of security. On the other hand, none of the new features blew us away. One unfortunate thing about Internet Explorer is that it has never had the robust community of developers that you find with Firefox or Chrome. Nevertheless, we searched far and wide and did find seven useful add-ons for IE9.

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Xmarks
This is the first add-on we'd suggest plugging into IE9, if you haven't already been using it. Xmarks keeps your list of bookmarks (or, as Microsoft prefers to call them: "favorites") automatically synchronized across the Web browsers you use on other computers -- and this service is cross-compatible. Xmarks also has versions for Firefox and Chrome, which means it can download and update your bookmarks on any of these three browsers, keeping the list among them identical.

Xmarks requires that you sign up for a user account, but the basic version of the service is free.

Speckie
Speckie provides a feature that Microsoft's developers failed to put into IE9, which has been in Chrome for a long while now and which users have come to find very helpful when composing their Webmails, reader comment rants, and Facebook status updates: an automatic spell-checker, which flags your writing for possible mistakes as you type. You can look up the spelling of a word by right-clicking on it to search for it on Wikipedia or Merriam Webster, and change the spell-check dictionary to another language within this right-click context menu, too.

ZoomInto
ZoomInto enables you to zoom in on almost any image on a Web page. This add-on can be handy if you want to download a large picture displayed on a page but want to crop it first. When you mouse-over an image, a magnifying glass icon appears on the upper-left of it. Click this icon (or you can also right-click on the image in question, and choose ZoomInto from the context menu) and a new smaller browser window pops open showing you the image and tools to crop it or magnify it. You can save the altered image to your local hard drive, or print or email it to someone.

Mouse Gestures
This add-on gives IE9 a mouse-gesture user interface, which lets you use the mouse (or touchpad) to "draw" shapes or perform other motions with it to control functions of the Web browser. For example, you activate mouse-gesture control (by clicking on the right mouse button) and move the mouse in a circular motion to make the Web browser load up your designated start page. Mouse Gestures comes with a default set of pre-programmed gestures that control various aspects of IE9, and you can customize these or program your own.

WOT
WOT (for Web of Trust) is a service where a community of users rate Web sites, and the ratings (separated into the categories "trustworthiness," "vendor reliability," "privacy," and "child safety") for the current site you are visiting are readily accessed by clicking the WOT icon. The WOT add-on will also alert you if you click a link to a site that a majority of the community has deemed as possibly unsafe, yet still letting you pass through to it if you are willing to take the chance.

Enterra Download Manager
IE9's download manager is much better than IE8's, but you can still install a better one. There are several alternative download managers for IE, but we have come to like Enterra's. Its download status window is set along the bottom of the IE browser page, listing the URL from where a file is downloading, its file name, size, download progress, elapsed time, time remaining, download speed -- in other words, all the stats to keep those of us who love to watch such details (and all of them neatly laid out) while we wait for our downloads to complete. Enterra Download Manager also lets you download from FTP servers.

Advanced IE History Bar
This really handy add-on gives you a side panel set to the left side of the IE 9 browser window which lists the history of sites you've visited. You can sort the list by URL, title, date visited and number of times you've viewed the link. There's also a search box to help you find that specific link to the page you regret not having bookmarked.

8 radical ways to cut data center power costs I

Today's data center managers are struggling to juggle the business demands of a more competitive marketplace with budget limitations imposed by a soft economy. They seek ways to reduce opex (operating expenses), and one of the fastest growing -- and often biggest -- data center operation expenses is power, consumed largely by servers and coolers.

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Alas, some of the most effective energy-saving techniques require considerable upfront investment, with paybacks measured in years. But some oft-overlooked techniques cost next to nothing -- they're bypassed because they seem impractical or too radical. The eight power savings approaches here have all been tried and tested in actual data center environments, with demonstrated effectiveness. Some you can put to work immediately with little investment; others may require capital expenditures but offer faster payback than traditional IT capex (capital expenses) ROI.

[ Unlearn the untrue and outdated data center practices in Logan G. Harbough's "10 power-saving myths debunked." | Use server virtualization to get highly reliable failover at a fraction of the usual cost. Find out how in InfoWorld's High Availability Virtualization Deep Dive PDF special report. ]
Server Virtualization Deep Dive

The holy grail of data center energy efficiency metrics is the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUI) rating, in which lower numbers are better and 1.0 is an ideal objective. PUI compares total data center electrical consumption to the amount converted into useful computing tasks. A not-uncommon value of 2.0 means two watts coming into the data center falls to one watt by the time it reaches a server -- the loss is power turned into heat, which in turn requires power to get rid of via traditional data center cooling systems.

As with all simple metrics, you must take PUI for what it is: a measure of electrical efficiency. It doesn't consider other energy sources, such as ambient environmental, geothermal, or hydrogen fuel cells, many of which can be exploited to lower total power costs. The techniques that follow may or may not lower your measurable PUI, but you can evaluate their effectiveness more simply by checking your monthly utility bill. That's where it'll really matter anyhow.

You won't find solar, wind, or hydrogen power in the bag of tricks presented here. These alternative energy sources require considerable investment in advanced technologies, which delays cost savings too much for the current financial crisis. By contrast, none of the following eight techniques requires any technology more complex than fans, ducts, and tubing.

The eight methods are:

1. Crank up the heat
2. Power down servers that aren't in use
3. Use "free" outside-air cooling
4. Use data center heat to warm office spaces
5. Use SSDs for highly active read-only data sets
6. Use direct current in the data center
7. Bury heat in the earth
8. Move heat to the sea via pipes

Radical energy savings method 1: Crank up the heat
The simplest path to power savings is one you can implement this afternoon: Turn up the data center thermostat. Conventional wisdom calls for data center temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit or below, the logic being that these temperatures extend equipment life and give you more time to react in the event of a cooling system failure.

Experience does show that server component failures, particularly for hard disks, do increase with higher operating temperatures. But in recent years, IT economics crossed an important threshold: Server operating costs now generally exceed acquisition costs. This may make hardware preservation a lower priority than cutting operating costs.

At last year's GreenNet conference, Google energy czar Bill Weihl cited Google's experience with raising data center temperatures, stating that 80 degrees Fahrenheit can be safely used as a new setpoint, provided a simple prerequisite is met in your data center: separating hot- and cold-air flows as much as possible, using curtains or solid barriers if needed.

Although 80 degrees Fahrenheit is a "safe" temperature upgrade, Microsoft's experience shows you could go higher. Its Dublin, Ireland, data center operates in "chiller-less" mode, using free outside-air cooling, with server inlet temperatures as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit. But note there is a point of diminishing returns as you raise the temperature, owing to the higher server fan velocities needed that themselves increase power consumption.

IBM's New Software Platform To Help Create Intelligent Products

IBM's New Software Platform To Help Create Intelligent Products
IBM's new software platform and related services will help manufacturers create more intelligent products at low cost.

To help manufacturers and designers create products that enable people to live and work in a smarter manner, IBM has launched a new software platform.

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To help manufacturers and designers create products that enable people to live and work in a smarter manner, IBM has launched a new software platform. The software, with related services, will provide capabilities that support collaboration, and help reduce the cost and risk of bringing more intelligent, instrumented and interconnected products to market, the company claims.

It will provide a fully integrated software delivery platform that addresses requirements, design, development and management -- across electrical, mechanical and software technologies.

The platforms and services launched include:

* IBM Rational Team Webtop -- the integrated user front-end to increase communication and productivity

* IBM Rational DOORS -- that enables an expanded set of stakeholders to review, analyse and modify requirements

* IBM Rational Change and IBM Rational Synergy -- that help companies improve application quality

* IBM Rational Team Concert -- that provides new levels of scalability and security to enable collaborative and agile development among distributed product teams, and

* IBM Rational Rhapsody -- that helps identify and correct potential design flaws as early as possible.

All these platforms and services will allow manufacturers to bring out low-cost but intelligent products.

(For more on the platforms and tools keep watching this space!)