Are you in the market for a new Android tablet? Do you want something bigger than the 7-inch display on the Nexus 7 and do you need to have wireless data connectivity? A pretty great deal has popped up on the Internet for the Motorola Xoom. It’s unlocked and ready to do the 3G thing with your GSM carrier of choice and, better yet, it’s selling for just a touch over half price!

You might remember my review of the Motorola Xoom Android tablet last year. It’s a seriously solid Android Honeycomb tablet which can be updated to ICS. This version comes with both Wi-Fi and 3G to go along with its 10.1-inch display and 32GB of internal storage. Power comes by way of a dual-core 1GHz Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 processor, 1GB DRAM, and integrated NVIDIA graphics.

When you consider that this 3G-enabled tablet originally listed for $699.99, the current sale price of $379.99 sounds pretty darn good. That’s $320 (47%) off the list price and it comes with free super saver shipping too. Having it unlocked certainly helps too, especially if you plan on doing any sort of international traveling.

The post Unlocked 3G-Enabled Motorola Xoom Android Tablet for Half-Price appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The “confirmation” of the release date comes by way of the Best Buy, Grand Rapids location Facebook page. This isn’t really coming from Best Buy HQ or from Motorola, so you might want to take that date with a grain of salt. Then again, it’s well within the date range that we were expecting.

We’ve seen release dates “confirmed” by Best Buy in the past, only to discover that these dates are placeholders and then the product gets delayed ad infinium. Even so, I’m hopeful that we’ll finally get an official retail taste of Honeycomb soon enough.

In case you’re interested, the same Grand Rapids Best Buy has also confirmed release dates for the (Verizon?) iPhone 4, HTC Thunderbolt, and Samsung Presto, all of which are supposedly launching this month.

[Droid Life via Giz]

The post Best Buy to start selling Motorola XOOM tablet this month appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It has been almost one whole year since we last heard of the Lenovo U1 and it’s only now that a real “hands-on” is being provided? Yes, I was able to fondle the alpha-level device at CES 2010, but it wasn’t exactly market ready.

Well, it turns out that Lenovo has not yet abandoned this contraption just yet and some real “first impressions” are being posted on the Internet. For starters, the standalone tablet portion is being dubbed LePad and the docking part is being called the U1 dock. Combined, you get the Lenovo U1 Hybrid.

The interesting thing is that a lot has changed since we saw this product at CES last year. The “new” 10.1-inch LePad gets a capacitive display, Google Android 2.2 (instead of the Linux-based Skylight), and the LePhone skin for colorful navigation. The guess is that Snapdragon has also been ditched in favor of NVIDIA Tegra 2, possibly as a pre-maneuver for Honeycomb support, but we can’t say for sure. And yes, it has dual cameras.

As far as the Lenovo U1 Hybrid dock is concerned, it seems to function in much the same way as we saw before, offering a full chiclet keyboard, a beefed up processor, and Windows 7. The unit available for the “hands on” was non-functional, though.

[Engadget]

The post Hands-on with Lenovo LePad and U1 Hybrid dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

In case you haven’t already noticed, the naming of Android versions have not only been all sweet dessert-type words, but they’ve also been in alphabetical order. We got Cupcake (1.5), Donut (1.6), Eclair (2.1), Froyo (2.2), and Gingerbread (3.0).

It makes sense that the next Android, likely a 3.1 rather than a 4.0, would once again be named after some delectable food and that it would start with the letter H. I suppose Honeycomb isn’t so bad. The only other sweet thing I can think of is hot chocolate. Android 3.1 HoChoc, anyone?

With this in mind, who wants to have some fun naming the next half dozen Android versions? Start with I (or H, if you want) and go from there! Ice Cream? Jelly? Karamel ;)

Next version of Android to be called Honeycomb? [BGR]

The post It’s sweet, it’s a treat, it’s Android Honeycomb appeared first on Mobile Magazine.