O2 and Vodafone have announced their data plans for the iPad and, unsurprisingly, they’re both pretty much the same; save for a few cents here and there.

The cold numbers for O2 go as follows: Continue Reading

Since the launch of the iPad, any other tablet device has pretty much run aground upon release or just been scrapped altogether (come back Microsoft Courier, we thought you looked awesome), however there was high hopes for HP’s upcoming Android tablet device.

I’m using the past tense there as it appears that this particular slate won’t be coming to stores near you, me, or anyone else for that matter for some time, if indeed at all. Continue Reading

Strong, silent and indestructible, nope it’s not a mute-version of Superman (actually that would’ve been a good idea in ‘Superman 4’), it’s Brando’s all new Flexible Bluetooth Mini Keyboard, which is lightweight, water resistant and able to connect to devices such as the iPad or iPhone.

Brando’s Flexible Bluetooth Mini Keyboard.

The foldable portable peripheral (say that ten times on the trot) costs $40 with a $3 charge for delivery to these shores, all working out at €34 by today’s exchange rates. The official company blurb goes something like this: Continue Reading

Disney has acquired startup iPhone app developer Tapulous, as the company continues its push into mobile games. Some of you may know Tapulous from the music game ‘Tap Tap Revenge’ which was an early hit for the iPhone.

One of Disney Interactive Media Group’s bigger upcoming releases is ‘Tron Evolution’.

Tapulous says it has more than 35 million users, and ‘Tap Tap Revenge’ has been played more than 1 billion times, while the company also makes games for the iPad. Terms of the deal were not disclosed though. Continue Reading

Targeted squarely at business users, Cisco is set to launch its own tablet PC, coming complete with Google Android, a seven-inch high resolution screen and a promise that it will include Cisco’s collaboration software that integrates virtual desktop applications with high-definition video.

Is Cisco trying to create the BlackBerry of the tablet PC market?

Plans for the Cisco Cius, as it will be called, were announced during the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “We haven’t thought about a big consumer play at all here,” said Barry O’Sullivan, the senior vice president in Cisco’s voice technology group. “This is a mobile video device for corporate users.” Continue Reading

Apple is running into some legal issues in Germany with the nation’s Justice Minister demanding that customer data recorded by the company be disclosed. The minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said, “The users of [the] iPhone and other GPS-enabled devices must be clear what information is collected about them.”

German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger.

Adding that the company must “immediately make clear” what information they have about the movements of German citizens Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said she expected Apple to “open its databases to German data protection authorities” and clarify what data it was collecting and how long it was saving the data. Continue Reading

Hoping to grab the attention of potential iPad and Kindle customers who want something that little bit different, Toshiba has launched a dual-screened mini notebook PC that can be used as an e-book reader.

The Libretto W100 certainly looks the part anyway.

Introduced to the public at a lavish event in Tokyo over the weekend, the Libretto W100 can be used like a conventional clam-style notebook PC with a software keyboard, or turned 90 degrees for use as an e-book reader. It will go on sale in Japan in late August and later in Europe, the United States and other markets (with Ireland likely to see it at the end of September) Continue Reading

Conscious of not losing more ground to Apple’s touch-screen devices over the coming year, Research In Motion, is said to be readying “a slate of new devices and software”, including a touchscreen smartphone with a slide-out keyboard.

Somebody from RIM's offices has been getting chatty with the Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street Journal quotes people “familiar with the device” who say that the BlackBerry makers have high hopes for the smartphone which runs on a new version of the BlackBerry operating system (OS 6.0, due in September) and works much like an iPhone. “It also has a universal search bar that lets users scour all the phone’s data and some data online as well,” according to the WSJ sources.

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The FBI has opened a probe into the iPad security breach that was all over the news yesterday which exposed personal information of AT&T customers, including those of several high-ranking government officials.

“The FBI is aware of these possible computer intrusions and has opened an investigation to address the potential cyber threat,” FBI spokesman Jason Pack said. According to Reuters, AT&T, which has exclusive US rights to carry the iPad and iPhone, has acknowledged the security breach but said it had corrected the flaw and that only email addresses were exposed to hackers who identified a security weakness. Continue Reading

Korean electronics giant Samung has shown off its own effort at an Android-based tablet device for the first time, showing an image on its South African Twitter account that was fairly quickly removed.

It's certainly a very... iPad arrangement

SamsungHub is reporting that, for the moment, we don’t know an awful lot about the device, but what we do know does lead to some fairly interesting inferences. The first is that the device is running Google’s Android OS, good news for those who are of the opinion that tablet hardware, as it stands just doesn’t work as well with desktop operating systems. The second is that the device boasts the “phone” icon for an app in its bottom row, which would seem to indicate that, unlike Apple’s iPad, the device is actually capable of making and receiving calls and sending texts, but that’s not where the implications end.

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Apple’s CEO, the infamously secretive Steve Jobs, has been a little more tractable than usual in a recent interview at the opening of D8, commenting on the stolen iPhone prototype, as well as Apple’s relationship with Google and Adobe.

Steve Jobs has come a long way since the early days...

Among the most interesting things that Jobs commented on at during the interview was the lost iPhone prototype. For those not up to date, an Apple engineer recently lost (or had stolen, as the implication from Apple seems to be) a prototype of Apple’s next-generation smartphone. The founder then sold the device to tech blog Gizmodo, which promptly tore the device apart and published a series of articles about it. Apple has since been pursuing legal action against Gizmodo’s Jason Chen, who acquired the device.

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Asus has demonstrated its new EEE tablet at Computex, showing off a device that takes input from a stylus, something that’s increasingly rare in the tablet market.

The new device is a far cry from some of the concept images...

For the moment, there’s relatively little information about the whole affair, but what we do know is very interesting indeed. According to the folks at TrustedReviews, the EEE tablet has a touch resolution 2450 DPI display and should give users the ability to take notes on top of anything they happen to be reading. Of course, the big let-down for many will be the fact that the device boasts an E-ink display, rather than a full-colour affair, making it something of a cross between an ebook reader and a full-on tablet.

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