Sony is giving it their best effort to take on Apple’s iPad and the array of other Android tablet’s inching for a #2 spot in the tablet work. Sony’s tablets, code named S1 and S2 consist of a single screen 9.4-inch tablet and a dual 5.5-inch screened tablet, both sporting 3G/4G and WiFi and will run on Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablet-optimized OS.

Sony knows about dual screens, with the Nintendo DS, so it’s no big surprise to see them entering the dual-screen tablet world. Apps would have to be optimized for dual-screen viewing on the S2, but that wouldn’t be anything too difficult for developers if the hardware is popular enough to support it. The lower screen could be an area for navigation, or a virtual keyboard, while the top screen for displaying your content.

The single screen S1 9.4-inch tablet is shaped like a wedge, making the majority of the weight “off center” to give it a more stable center of gravity. Good idea Sony.

You can expect them in Q3 of 2011, no firm date of release is set yet, but this should put Sony in view for the shopping season.

[Sony JP]

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Student-aimed tablet startup Kno, who has already raised about $56 million to design and manufacture their textbook- and notebook-replacing clamshell tablets for college students, is reportedly in talks to sell off its entire hardware division to focus on software.

The company originally wanted to follow Apple’s lead by designing and manufacturing a seamless combination of both hardware and software under the same mark, a claim few other companies can make. But now, after selling only “several hundred” of their devices, Kno allegedly wants the freedom to design their university-focussed platform for the iPad, as well as upcoming Android devices.

Their dual 14″ touchscreen tablets, complete with fine-tipped styli, eight-hour batteries and Nvidia Tegra T200 CPU and dual-core ARM Cortex A9 MPCore processors are specifically designed for the cause and undoubtedly played a large part in garnering the vast amount of both investment money and partnerships with various colleges and universities country-wide. But sources close to the situation say a focus on the OS as a platform and its content delivery for those using the wide variety of other tablets would be a better use of the money they’ve raised, allowing students to use the next-gen textbook on their own devices.

But the Kno’s screens are sized the way they are to fit an entire textbook page on each screen without scrolling or scaling, and that’s been a very strong selling point for the company so far. Trying to fit the pages on an iPad screen would be a struggle in itself as that’s only about half the size of one screen on the Kno. And that’s not even bringing into account the multitude of 7″ tablets expected over the next several months.

Whether the deal goes through or not, it does definitely show that Kno is more about redefining the student arsenal than anything else, making digital notebooks and textbooks the new norm and in the process, dropping the weight of backpacks from the usual 20 lb average.

There’s no word on which two companies are in talks with Kno, though it is known that they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement with one of them.

[All Things D via Kno]

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Designed to run independent applications that can run at the same time, at first glance the Cloud Communicator looks and sounds interesting. On the inside it’s powered by an ARM Cortex A8 processor which should provide somewhere in the neighbourhood of 1GHz of processing power. It also comes with the standard user-facing camera and a trio of wireless connectivity options.

Now with everything going right on the hardware we can’t figure out how NEC fumbled the screen so poorly. Rather than deliver multi-touch displays that are the new norm in this technology, the Cloud Communicator display is based on resistive technology coupled with stylus input.

The OS is courtesy of Android but details are vague as to which version it’s running, we expect Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)  but will wait to hear more on this front. NEC provides access through the device to their own Android application market known as andronavi which is interesting but hardly a game-changer.

Lastly, battery life clocks in at a paltry 5 hours which seems ridiculous but when you factor in dual 7” screens it’s slightly more understandable. There is a single-screen Android tablet that was also launched by NEC at CES, the LT-S Cloud Communicator, which has somewhat better battery life but is still delivered with that disappointing resistive touchscreen.

Oh, and if you thought the inclusion of the word “cloud” in the product name might include some cloud-based advantages to these devices like Chrome, NEC failed to mention anything in that vein so don’t hold your breath.

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