Boom.

Unity 3D has been released for Android! Many, many, many games are coming!

http://unity3d.com/unity/publishing/android

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrG9AEq1PCU

In this video, you get to see the XOOM running a 3D platformer. I'm extremely impressed with the performance! The Tab 2 should perform similarly, as should the Tab.

It looks as though Android may soon be a contender to iOS for gaming! Exciting times for all.

I've got a tingling in my nether regions..

The Galaxy S has received an official Gingerbread upgrade from Samsung, but strangely, there has been no mention of the Tab.

I predict that during CTIA, the Tab will be announced to receive Honeycomb, as well as the announcement of the 8.9" version.


The marketing material would seem to suggest a 'unification' of Tabs, and a similar UX would only make sense.

Just 3 more weeks to find out!

Here's a really cool app for stargazers.

Star Chart. Take a look:



https://market.android.com/details?i...=search_result
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OArxZhh9W3s

Here is a 720p capture from the Galaxy Tab 10.1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDLhr3pSHN0

Most impressive. The video is crisp and fluid (no wobbles). Apparently, it can shoot 1080p!

If Samsung had the production capability, I would have *loved* to see the Exynos 4210 w/ Mali 400 MP in the new Tab. Something tells me it would have given the T20 a run for its money.

Here's a video of it pushing 1080p at 60fps! It also will do this in stereo.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/03/s...dc-2011-video/

That's CRAZY. Not too long ago, this type of performance wasn't possible with desktop GPUs. Now, mobile GPUs are doing this with ease.

I would love to see how the Mali 400 MP fairs with a more conservative resolution and increased shaders/polys. I wonder how closely it falls to the PVR SGX543 (which is a beast of a GPU). According to imagination, the Mali 400 MP looks as though it is around on-par with with the SGX543 at Low Power! It may be more than capable of surpassing it at higher clocks! I'm flabbergasted!

Here's more information on the Mali 400 MP GPU and the SGX543:
http://www.arm.com/products/multimed...ali-400-mp.php
http://www.imgtec.com/news/Release/index.asp?NewsID=428

The spec sheet lists 30M tri's achievable at 275MHz (LP), which is damn impressive . At higher clocks, this number should increase. Also, apparently 4xAA is possible with barely a performance hit! Wow. Lofty claims.

The one thing that the SGX543 seems to have over the Mail 400 MP is OpenCL support, hinted to in the previous link using the USSE2 shader engine. This could be a tremendous advantage for computationally heavy applications, and truly bring desktop-esque performance to this generation of mobile devices. The bottleneck is, at this point, the software to utilize such features. I expect this will be a larger selling point in a year or so, but it's exciting that mobile GPUs are including it.

Interestingly, if Apple's A5 includes the SGX543 as speculated, I suspect developers will have a greater ability to take advantage of this feature, due to the very unified platform. For example, the iPad 'photobooth' looks to use shaders for the realtime manipulation of images taken with the front-facing camera. Could this be simply USSE2 (ie. a shader program), or OpenCL?

So after a little more research, it seems the the Mali 400 MP is capable of running in LP (Low Power) and GP (General Purpose) modes. This means that in LP it is better suited for small devices (eg. phones), though GP should see large performance improvements through a higher clock, and is suitable for larger devices (eg. tablets). In LP, the Mali 400MP runs @ 240MHz and in GP @ 375MHz! What remains to be seen is if the clock and voltage can be dynamically scaled, or if the frequency is somehow baked into the package. I'm guessing the former.

Another thing worth noting is that the Mali uses tile-based deferred rendering, just like the PowerVR architecture. This improves memory bandwidth requirements in scenes with heavy overdraw. With scenes with about 2.5x overdraw, the system should have remarkable framerates. This may give it an advantage over 'brute force' GPUs like the Tegra 2's GeForce ULV that do not implement these features and render unseen pixels. In tegra's defense, they have a technique called 'Early Z' which looks to approach the speed advantages of a tile-based renderer by throwing away unseen pixels rather than writing them to memory.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4144/l...e-smartphone/5

It seems that the Mali 400 MP is a true modern GPU capable of contending with the best. No doubt, the current crop of GPUs should be capable of PS2/XBox level graphics. With Unity 3D, and the Unreal Engine 3 making its way to Android, expect that these devices will be powerhouse performers, with some truly impressive spectacles.

Get it while it's hot! Google Maps 5.2 has been released for Android!

http://www.xda-developers.com/androi...ndroid-is-out/

APPBRAIN: http://www.appbrain.com/app/google-m...oid.apps.maps#

Ruh, Roh! It seems that Samsung is proactively modifying its strategy based on the iPad2!

http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/tech...09300320F.HTML

FTA:
AND:
Does this mean that Samsung is going to slim down the Tab 10.1, and reduce the price? This just got very interesting...

Doubtful, that's a product redesign. Next version, definitely.

Absolutely. If they're going over on weight, they have to come in under on price.

I'm not so sure about that. So for example, the Tab 2 has a 'textured grip' on that back that adds around 1mm (estimate based on what I've seen), which could likely be made flush with the surface to eek out a little more thinness.




As it stands, the device is 10.9mm.

But I agree that it doesn't leave a whole lot of time. Samsung knows that this is a hugely important product, so I expect that they're not going to take this lightly.



As it stands, the Tab2 is lighter than the iPad 2, but I suppose that the mindshare value of 'thinness' is something that has Samsung worried. In fact thinness is one of the major marketing points of the Galaxy S2.

Samsung should really upsell some of the hardware/software features that differentiate it from the iPad:

• Honeycomb
• 8MP rear camera / 0.7MP iPad2
• 2MP front camera / 0.3MP iPad2
• higher resolution display
• larger display
• separated speakers / single-grill iPad2
• smaller (though thicker) form factor.

It would also have been better not to mention this at all, and just made the device thinner in secret!

Here's something that should be posted:

The upcoming Playstation Suite, Playstation games will be able to be simultaneously developed for Playstation portable devices and Android devices!

Here's the entire keynote. It's the first major announcement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJP5S...eature=related

I don't think this includes NGP, but for PSOne or PSP development.

This is SIGNIFICANT for Android gaming in general and implies some great titles will be released for the system. This is a compelling development environment for game developers and goes head-to-head with the likes of Unity3D and Unreal Engine 3 environments.

Sony will sell these games through the playstation store, and I expect the Xperia Play to be their flagship mobile.