Notion Ink’s first attempt with the Adam tablet to gain ground in the tablet market turned out to be a very painful experience for the company, as well as for many users. They are hoping to do better this time around and have announced their upcoming Adam II tablet; though earlier they have said that the successor to the Adam will be called “Eve”.

The new device is in its planning stages and it will arrive with a chip from Texas Instruments’ OMAP44xx range. As you might remember, the original tablet featured an NVIDIA Tegra. According to the company, the new chip will improve performance, multimedia playback and more. The Adam 2 will be running Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich OS and will also feature TI’s Wi-Link 7.0 (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and FM transmit/receive in a single chipset) and Phoenix Audio Power Amplifiers, along with PowerVR SGX5xx GPU.

No word on what type of display it will feature. But they have also announced that the tablet is coming with “Modular Based Software Architecture” which apparently enables drag-and-drop application development. This, according to the company, will allow non-programmers to develop custom apps and games.

More specs and hints on pricing and availability should be available soon. We will keep you updated. In the meantime you can share your thoughts about the upcoming tablet. Do you think that it will turn out to be a threat to the iPad?

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Designed for the iPhone 4 (though it will presumably work with the iPhone 4S too), the Pocket Projector looks basically like a bulky case for the smartphone that happens to pack a DLP pico projector inside. The native resolution is just 640×360 pixels, but it can project an image of up to 50-inches from a distance of eight feet. That shouldn’t be too shabby for a short video or brief presentation.

It’s not the brightest thing in the world at 15 lumens (LED lamp), nor will it be particularly loud with its 0.5-watt speaker, but at least it’s something. The 2100mAh internal battery on the Pocket Projector doubles as a backup battery for your iPhone too. And yes, it’ll work with any app that supports a dock connector-style video-out protocol. It ships in two weeks for $230.

The post Brookstone Issues iPhone 4 Pocket Projector Accessory appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

There may be other pico projectors that are brighter, but they’d require an external power source. With the P4 from AAXA, you can do it off a battery and have your PowerPoint presentation ready to go anywhere you are. Just bring along the laptop.

The AAXA P4 Pico Projector is powered by a 750MHz Windows CE mobile processor, but how bright is bright? Well, it gets an 80 lumen high-contrast optical engine by way of Texas Instruments’ DLP. This works in tandem with AAXA’s Vibrant Color tech, utilizing 15,000 hour LEDs and an image of up to 80-inches (but only in low light conditions).

Rounding out the specs are 2GB memory, included tripod, 1280×800 VGA input, microSD slot, composite video input, 1-watt speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack, 720p video support, and support for 3rd party apps like Office Mobile, Adobe PDF viewer, and other Windows CE apps. The rechargeable lithium-ion battery is good for 75+ minutes. MSRP is set at $399, but that’s been reduced to $339 for current pre-orders.

The post AAXA Tech P4 is world’s brightest battery-powered pico projector appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Remember when the first 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chips hit the scene and we amazed by having a “G” in the mobile CPU’s clock speed? And now NVIDIA Tegra2 is winning many hearts with its dual core wonders? Not to be outdone, the upcoming TI OMAP5 chips are going to boast four cores of processing.

“But the NVIDIA Tegra3 beat them to the punch!

True. The Tegra3 will do the quad-core thing, but “only” at up to 1.5GHz. The new OMAP5 platform will offer four cores going nutso at up to 2GHz. That’s supposed to offer up to 3x the processing power of the OMAP4 (which will power the BlackBerry PlayBook) while improving power consumption by 60%.

What’s interesting is that the four cores aren’t the same. You get two ARM Cortex-A15 cores (up to 2GHz) and two ARM Cortex-M4 cores. Combined, OMAP5 is said to support up to three QSXGA (2560×2048) displays at the same time.

Sure, that all sounds good on paper, but will it work in practice? That’s the bad news. Samples aren’t going to get shipped out to manufacturers until late 2011 with actual OMAP5-powered devices following in mid-2012. By then, Tim might have already Franken-welded four Tegra2 chips together for more power. (Grunts notwithstanding.)

[PhoneScoop]

The post TI goes crazy, announces OMAP5 quad-core 2GHz mobile processors appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Wireless charging isn’t exactly a new thing, but it also hasn’t taken off as much as we would have expected. You can waltz into any number of electronics retail stores and find that they are selling Powermat or some other variation on the inductive charging thing. The problem is that you have to buy a special adapter or case for every device you want to charge.

Texas Instruments is apparently trying to change that with the bqTESLA kit. This is the industry’s first Qi-certified wireless power development kit and it should be able to work with smartphones, digital cameras, and all sorts of other portable devices. Unlike Powermat, this solution is designed so that the receiver is already built into the target device.

No need for proprietary adapters for charging. By working with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), the Qi certification on this TI development could work to promote standardization among wireless power systems. The charger takes electricity and converts it to a wireless signal. The receiver gets this wireless signal and converts it back to electricity.

The bqTESLA development kit is avaialble now from Texas Instruments, offering up to 5 watts of power at a time. TI says that you don’t need any additional software to make it work. If you’re feeling like MacGyver’ing together your own wireless solution, you can pick up one of these kits for a cool $500.

The post Wireless charging to become integrated in devices thanks to Texas Instruments bqTESLA kit appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Blaze Tablet Mobile Development Platform

Get ready for another monumental leap in mobile performance. Texas Instruments has formally announced that it will be working on a new line of chips known as the “Eagle” line that will make use of the next-generation of ARM Cortex-A processors. This makes TI the first partner and licensee of these processors. TI is no stranger to ARM architecture. The current TI OMAP 3 platform is based on the ARM Cortex-A8 core and it can be found in such products as the Motorola Droid (OMAP 3430,550MHz) and the Motorola Droid X (OMAP 3640, 1GHz).

The OMAP 4 platform makes use of the dual-core Cortex-A9, but we haven’t seen any products make use of this platform aside from development samples and prototypes. Even so, this is said to offer a 150% improvement in performance over OMAP 3.

The new “Eagle” chips will effectively be a part of the OMAP 5 family, so to speak, and we likely won’t see any smartphones and tablets with this architecture until 2012.

Texas Instruments Embraces Next-Gen Mobile Processor [Wired]

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