There is a rumor floating around that Samsung may be debuting a new next-gen tablet at Mobile World Congress in February. Samsung has made it clear that they will not be showing off the SGS3 at MWC yet, but they promised "interesting stuff". This new "stuff" could be a tablet with a dual-core 2GHz Exynos 5250 processor, a larger than 10-inch display with WXQGA (2560 x 1600 pixels) resolution and Ice Cream Sandwich.

The rumor was spawned because supposedly, someone spotted a prototype of the tablet at CES. Supposedly, this new Exynos 5250 "chip should produce twice the computing power, increased memory bandwidth, and five times the graphics horsepower as the current generation of CPUs, as well as all-day battery life". If this is not vaporware, and if Sammy can sell it at a competitive price point, then then we could be in for a treat next month.

Source: BGR
Image Source: FoneHome.co.uk

Not long ago Valve launched a third party Android app for their Steam service. Now, the gaming company has made it official and put a new Steam app for Android on the Android Market. The app has some pretty great features. Of course you can look at the latest great deals on new games, but you can also browse profiles and community groups and check out some of the latest gaming news The best part has to be the new built-in chat feature, which they didn't have before. Other than some of their DRM issues, Steam is a pretty great service for gamers on the PC. It will be interesting to see how this app evolves.

Update: It looks like this is now a closed beta, not the final version. Sorry we didn't catch that. The Android Market didn't make that clear at all.

Source: Phandroid and The Android Market - Steam App

If you follow tech-news at all, and even if you aren't a fan of the company, you probably heard yesterday how Apple had a ridiculously good financial (as in... shattered a ton of records) earnings call from last quarter. While this is undoubtedly great news for Apple, the marketing research firm, Strategy Analytics, found some other numbers that could spell bad news for Apple in the future. Apparently, Android tablets have gained some additional ground at the expense of Apple's iPad products. While Apple still holds the lead with the iPad and iPad 2 at 57.6% of the global market, this is actually a drop from the same quarter last year where they had 68.2% of the world market. During this same quarter, Android tablets jumped up 10 percentage points to 39.1% from 29.0% just a year ago, and global Android tablet shipments tripled annually to 10.5 Million units.

Despite Apple's great quarter it must be disheartening to see their market-share eroding in an industry that they effectively pioneered/jump-started. Still, even Strategy Analytics cautioned that it is too early to rely on these numbers too much as a sign of things to come. Here is a quote from Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics,

Dozens of Android models distributed across multiple countries by numerous brands such as Amazon, Samsung, Asus and others have been driving volumes. Android is so far proving relatively popular with tablet manufacturers despite nagging concerns about fragmentation of Android’s operating system, user-interface and app store ecosystem.

And Peter King, Director at Strategy Analytics, had this to say,

Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android models this quarter.”

What are your predictions on the tablet wars for this year? Will Android be able to overtake Apple, or will it take until 2013 to pull that off?

Source: SlashGear

How does a dual-core tablet for only $100 bucks sound? Some of its other specs are pretty too-notch too, so the ZTE Optik which is soon coming to Sprint for only $99.99 on contract, could be worth a good hard look. Sure, ZTE may be a little known third party company, but that price is ultra-competitive. The tablet will be available for in-store purchases on March 11th, but you can pre-order it and have it shipped to you on February 5th. Here's a breakdown of specs:

• 7-inch display
• 1.2GHz dual-core processor
• 16GB internal memory
• 1GB of RAM
• 4,000 mAh battery
• 5-megapixel primary camera
• 2-megapixel front facing camera
• Mobile hotspot for up to 5 devices (3G)
• Stereo speakers
• bluetooth
• Android 3.2

At that price it is practically disposable. Share your thoughts.

Source: TalkAndroid

Here is some exciting news via a Tweet from Asus. They plan to release the unlock tool they have hinted at for the Transformer Prime very soon. In fact, they indicated in would be out sometime in February. Interestingly, the first Tweet to share the info accidentally said, "root tool", but later they sent out an updated Tweet that corrected that to mean "unlock tool." You can see them both above and below. This is awesome news for us tinkerers!

Source: TransformerForums.com via TalkAndroid

According to a new article in the Korea Herald, previous reports across the web that Apple was now targeting the Galaxy Nexus with a "slide-to-unlock" lawsuit were inaccurate. Originally, Florian Mueller's FOSS Patents blog reported on January 20th that a new lawsuit from Apple against Samsung was targeting this feature and included the Galaxy Nexus as one of the offending devices. An unnamed Samsung representative recently refuted that. Here is his statement,

“We’re aware that there was a hearing involving Apple’s slide-to-unlock feature after our patent infringement case last Friday and a series of products in the Galaxy lineup were accused there, but what we’ve discovered is that the Galaxy Nexus wasn’t one of them."

It is important to be clear that there still is a new lawsuit from Apple targeting several unnamed (publicly) Samsung devices for their "slide-to-unlock" features, but apparently from this new information, the Galaxy Nexus was simply not among those devices named in the lawsuit. This makes a lot more sense, especially since Google seemed to go out of their way to make the new unlock mechanism completely different on Ice Cream Sandwich than it was before on previous versions of Android.

While it may make more sense that Apple isn't suing Samsung for the Galaxy Nexus, it doesn't really change the fact that their lawsuits against the Samsung "slide-to-unlock" usage seem ridiculous anyway. Of course, it's crazy that Apple was granted a patent for that to begin with. Perhaps someone should file for a patent on the motion used to open a door... It just seems ludicrous, doesn't it?

As an interesting aside to this story, there have been a couple of new developments in the lawsuits from Samsung. We didn't report them immediately because we don't want to become the "all Apple lawsuits... all the time" news site. At any rate, now that there has been some more movement we can share everything together.

The first interesting bit is a new report we covered earlier sharing that Apple has spent over $100 Million dollars suing HTC, but the only slim victory they had was easily fixed/bypassed by HTC, thus Apple didn't really get anything worth-while for their efforts. Of course, it's easy to argue that they helped to waste some of HTC's resources trying to fight back against the juggernaut that is Apple. $100 Million bucks to slow down the competition is a drop in the bucket to a company sitting on almost $100 Billion in cash (Apple's new quarterly results bear this number out).

The second bit of news on the Apple lawsuit front is that Samsung had a decent victory against Apple just recently. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple lost their appeal to try and block Samsung... [Read More]

Sony claims that its distinctive Android tablets are leading the race to dominate sales in a crowded market. A company spokesman said that Sony’s products accounted for 26 per cent of the UK market in October, the most recent period for which independent data is available. Sony also claims it has had a successful Christmas, but conceded that it was likely to have been beaten on tablet sales by aggressively priced BlackBerry Playbooks.

By Matt Warman
Continue Reading @ Sony claims Android tablet lead - Telegraph

Pantech has just launched two of their newest 4G LTE devices on AT&T, the Burst Smartphone and the Element Tablet. The Pantech Burst is a smartphone with some decent mid-range specs that will be available on a two-year contract for $49.99. Here's some specs:

• 4-inch Super AMOLED screen (800 x 480-pixel resolution)
• 1.2GHz dual-core processor
• 5-megapixel camera - 720p HD video
• 2-megapixel front-facing camera
• 16GB of storage

The Pantech Element is AT&T's new 4G LTE tablet, available for $299 with a new two-year AT&T contract. Here is a feature breakdown for it:

• 8-inch display with a 1024 x 768-pixel resolution
• 16GB of storage
• 1.5GHz dual-core processor and Android 3.2 (Honeycomb)

There is no word if/when they will put ICS on the tablet, but we will let you know as we find more.

Source: BGR