Lenovo laptop/tablet (left) and the iPad.

As reported back in January, the A4’s central processing unit, or CPU, design, as it stands now, is thought to be based primarily on technology from U.K.-based ARM. Linley Gwennap, who is the president and principal analyst of The Linley Group, believes the A4 uses a fairly common ARM CPU designed by Intrinsity and manufactured by Samsung.

Where Apple, instead, may have chosen to enhance the A4’s capabilities is outside the core CPU, modifying functions such as the 3D graphics engine. Along these lines, last year, Apple picked up former chief technology officer Bob Drebin of the Graphics Products Group at Advanced Micro Devices, who is now listed as a senior director at Apple.

“You pick and choose one or two places where you can invest and do something different from what other people are doing and then you just license the rest,” Gwennap said. “In Apple’s case, they’ve always differentiated based on the user experience, so it may be more valuable to them to control the graphics or the video or the audio or something like that rather than the CPU itself.”

And what is the A4 up against? An overview of Apple’s rivals and their competing technologies reveals a diverse ecosystem for smartphones and tablet/slate devices.

The competition for the Apple A4, iPad:

• Qualcomm Snapdragon: Speed: 1GHz / Design: Qualcomm design using ARM instruction set / Products: Dell Mini 5 slate, Lenovo Skylight smartbook, Lenovo IdeaPad U1 laptop/tablet (see photo above), Google Nexus One
• Texas Instruments OMAP3430: Speed: 550MHz / Design: ARM Cortex A8 / Products: Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, Palm Pre.
• Nvidia Tegra 2: Speed: 1GHz (max) / Design: Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 / Products: Asus Eee Pad, Notion Ink, Viewsonic, T-Mobile UK. (Rumored: Microsoft Courier tablet, Motorola-Verizon device.)
• Marvell Armada 610: Speed: 1.2GHz (max) / Design: Marvell design using ARM instruction set / Products: Now sampling to customers.
• Intel Atom: Speed: 1.83GHz (max) / Design: Pine Trail, Moorestown / Products: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba Netbooks (Pine Trail). LG smartphone and other mobile Internet devices and tablets (Moorestown).

But most of all, you’ve got to ship the dang thing.

So many companies in this industry have got it all except the last one. They create new technology, build an amazing prototype or simulation video and impress everyone with their vision and foresight. Then, nothing.

It’s time for a reckoning. Here are the top 10 major tech products everybody got excited about, but which never materialized.

1. Scrybe

Scrybe is a revolutionary social calendar, to-do list and “ThoughtPad” that was going to kill Google Calendar, render Microsoft Outlook obsolete, and make everybody forget Remember the Milk.

The startup posted dazzling demos on YouTube, and won rave reviews from everybody. InfoWorld said “there’s enough here to make me give up my Microsoft Outlook Calendar and abandon Google Calendar.” WIRED called it “a date book on Web 2.0 steroids.”

Nice! So…where is it?

The Web site is still up. They still claim it’s in “closed beta” (and has been since 2006). The last company blog post update was almost two years ago.

If the people who developed Scrybe are serious, they should open the beta, then ship. If they’re not serious, they should stop stringing fans along and post an announcement on their web site that the product will never exist.

2. iPhone Tethering

Apple announced, and AT&T “confirmed,” that the ability to connect your laptop to your iPhone for Internet access would definitely become available sometime in 2009. (Full disclosure: My wife works for AT&T.)

So where is it? A great many people (including yours truly) avoided pursuing other solutions for laptop mobile broadband connectivity because Apple and AT&T promised us iPhone tethering.

It’s time to stop jerking us around. Either announce when it will become available or tell us that it will never be available.

3. Palm Foleo II

Everybody remembers the Palm Foleo as an ill-fated disaster. The company came out with what we now call a smartbook (a netbook that runs a cell phone operating system), but one that would work exclusively with Palm devices.

But the product seemed under-featured and over-priced. As you may recall, CEO Ed Colligan scraped the Foleo in a famous blog post in September, 2007.

What you may not recall is that he promised to resurrect the Foleo idea later. Colligan wrote: “When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.”

Dude, you got your “core platform and smartphones done” long ago. Where’s Foleo II?

What’s ironic is that Foleo II actually sounds like it could be a really competitive product. Since there may never be tethering on the iPhone, and since smartbooks are going to be really hot this year, a Foleo II might be the best reason ever for people to choose, say, a Palm Pre.

The Apple iPad will charge a monthly fee for mobile broadband access — $30 for unlimited data. With a larger screen device that uses the phone’s main account, a $300 Foleo would pay for itself in ten months. So where is it?

4. Microsoft Surface for Consumers

More than two years ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said his company was “looking to create” a consumer version of its Microsoft Surface table PC.

Now, two years later, all we’re getting from Microsoft is more demos, prototypes and promises. Where’s the beta program? Where’s the developer program?

5. Microsoft Courier

One “leaked” CGI-and-Photoshopped “demo” and everybody started putting the Microsoft Courier project in the same league as the Apple iPad. The difference is that Apple makes mobile computers, and has shown us the actual device and hinted at a ship date.

The Courier demos were faked, even though everyone talked about the CGI as “video,” and the computer-generated still images as “photographs.”

It’s not even a question of “where is it”? How about: Where is the usage model? Where is the market for pen-based consumer devices? Where is the leaked photograph of a non-working prototype?

Answer: The same place the Courier is. Nowhere.

6. JooJoo

The tablet formerly known as the CrunchPad was born out of a “process” of miscommunication, bad alliances, bad faith, broken promises and lawsuits.

They started taking money for JooJoo tablets in December. Later, the company — I think there’s a company behind this — promised to ship by late February. But when late February came round, the ship date was rescheduled for late March.

Uh, huh. I’ll believe it when I see it.

7. A spam filter from Microsoft that “solves” spam

At the 2004 World Economic Forum, Microsoft Chairman (and then CEO) Bill Gates promised that “two years from now, spam will be solved” by Microsoft.

Well, it’s been six years. Is spam solved yet?

8. WiMax

In 2007, Intel proclaimed 2008 as “The Year of WiMax.” Pundits have predicted ever since that WiMax would transform not only the use of mobile devices, but even home and business networking.

What, you’re not using WiMax yet? Now pundits are predicting 2010 will be “The Year of WiMax.” Again.

9. OpenSocial

Back in the Fall of 2007, Google announced a breathtaking new initiative called OpenSocial. The plan centered around a small set of programming interfaces that social networks could use to enable users to connect across not only social networks, but even regular Web sites.

The hype at the time saw the Google OpenSocial movement as so powerful and compelling that any major social network that failed to support OpenSocial (*cough* Facebook! *cough*) would be left on the ash heap of history.

Okay, technically Google actually delivered the “product” on schedule. But two and a half years later, how are you enjoying that open, interoperable social Web?

Well, you’re not, because OpenSocial is the social tsunami that never happened.

10. Duke Nukem Forever

Back in the Dark Ages (1996), we all enjoyed a popular PC game called Duke Nukem 3D. It was so fun, the company started work a year later on a sequel called Duke Nukem Forever.

The “Forever” bit is apparently a reference to the development cycle. The company is still working on it, and still plans to ship it. Will it ship this year? Will it ship this decade? Nobody knows.

Silicon Valley and the extended consumer and business technology industries make world-changing products, and culture-shifting online services. But mostly, they manufacture hype — often for products that never see the light of day.

More information has been gleaned about the Entourage eDGe we had a chance to play with at CES thanks to an interview with the company’s President and CEO as well as the VP of Marketing. Speaking to E-ReaderInfo, President Asghar Mostafa and Doug Atkinson have revealed that their device, which has both an E-Ink screen and a traditional LCD, has a 16-hour battery life when operating with the paper screen itself.

When both the LCD and E-ink screen are used in conjunction, or the LCD itself, battery life is set at 6 hours, Atkinson said. This, and the E-Ink display’s nature, makes reading on the eDGe much easier than of comparable products, such as Apple’s iPad, which exclusively offers an LCD screen.

Atkinson also clarified that the recent delay will have any new orders for the eDGe shipping in March, with those placed by January 12th shipping today.

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rockers. But even as consumers rave about it, the technoscenti are already looking ahead ─ to a product that could make the iPad seem outdated, and, what’s more, is completely Made in India.

India is, of course, regarded as a software superpower but hasn’t really made waves in IT hardware so far. That could soon change, thanks to the Adam tablet PC of Hyderabad-based Notion Ink. Adam has generated enormous buzz on tech websites and gadget blogs ever since an early prototype was first demonstrated at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), the world’s largest consumer tech trade show in January this year. Today, the final product minus the custom user-interface will be showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where the finest minds of geekdom will be congregating to check it out. But first, we persuaded the company to show it to us at the BVRIT Innovation Centre in Hyderabad, where they are based.

Never heard of Notion Ink? Its founders are six IITans and an MBA grad. With an average age of 24, they believe India has what it takes to compete with the most innovative tech companies in the world. “We knew that Indian engineers and designers were doing most of the innovative work at Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. We just needed to take the first step,” says co-founder Rohan Shravan.

“Current PC technology is like a Hummer on a city road,” quips Rohit Rathi, the youngest of the group at 23, and, along with Shravan, one of four co-founders from IIT Kharagpur. Two are from IIT Delhi while Sachin Ralhan, the eldest at 25, is a childhood friend of Shravan and Rathi and an MBA from IIPM. Apart from Ralhan and Rathi, the other five are all aged 24.

What’s so different about their tech? Three years in the making, the Adam tablet is the first device in the world to integrate two breakthrough power saving components – nVidia’s Tegra 2 chip and a PixelQi screen. Together, they help it achieve twice the battery life and performance of the iPad.

“The chip provides an edge over the iPad with its ability to play full high definition videos and Flash on the web browser. It can offer the performance of a computer with the power consumption of a cellphone,” explains Shravan.

Adam’s 10-inch screen integrates many innovations first used in the $100 OLPC (one laptop per child) project. Unlike traditional screens, PixelQI screen has a dual mode, and can be read in bright sunlight like an e-reader. With the backlight off, the company claims that it can increase battery life between charges by a factor of five.

What about the pricing? The company has not yet taken a decision on this crucial aspect, but is clear that Adam will definitely be competitive vis-a-vis Apple’s iPad. It expects to start retail sales, at first in the USA, from July onwards.

Notion Ink worked with National Institute of Design’s R&D development campus in Bangalore to build a unique touch interface that runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system. As a startup, it faced many obstacles in filing patents and finding the right engineering talent. “India doesn’t have people working on Android. And the companies that have, charge Rs 1 lakh per resource per month,” says Rohan. “So we came up with a social solution – We opted to train engineers ourselves.”

The company trained and then recruited over 50 engineers at BVRIT in Bachupally, Hyderabad. “We got the infrastructure at their Innovation Center, and the students as well. We knew the technology in and out and started training them. Within two months it started paying off, and we started developing the professional applications for the product we wanted to design.”

The company is working on an application store platform of its own, where users can find a wide variety of content. “It will offer everything from apps, books, video, audio, to magazines, newspapers and comics,” says co-founder Rajat Sahni.

The company sees more and more users reading newspapers on e-readers and tablets in the near future, and has designed a lightweight product that adapts well to this purpose. They showed us a version of how a digital magazine would look on the Adam. “We’ve taken design inspiration from a 400-year tradition – the user interface of magazines!” chuckles Shravan.

The men behind Adam

Rohan Shravan- IIT- KGP (2008)
Rohit Rathi – IIT- KGP (2008)
Sachin Ralhan – IIPM
Mohit Gupta – IIT- KGP (2008)
Anirudh Gupta –IIT Delhi (2007)
Rajat Sahni – IIT Delhi (2007)
Devanshu Agrawal – IIT- KGP (2008)

This is the definitive Tablet having ability to play videos up to 1080p autonomy than in the iPad. It is expected to launch in the middle of this year and already speaks of the many functions that are expected to be better than the new gadget from Apple.
Adam de Notion Ink comes in different thickness because we know that some people prefer more robust pay and other gadgets that have always been inclined to smallest.
In either case, the Adam will be thinner than the iPad for electronics will indicate that the thickness of 12.9 mm and 11.6 mm when the iPad has 13,4 mm. A further demonstration of this highly anticipated gadget would happen during the Mobile World Congress.  People are  eager to  know the official price and release date – which would be tentatively in June.
Just a few weeks of the announcement of the iPad, some other companies have also decided to put to work to beat in competition, Micro-Star International launches a new tablet and Dell also announced its new Mini 5 during the economic summit in Davos.

Is Dell’s 5-inch Android behemoth too small for you? Do you wish that the iPad had a keyboard? Or Android? Well HP/Compaq may have just the device for you. They’re calling it a “Smartbook”, apparently a portmanteau of “Smartphone” and “Netbook”. The device was shown briefly at CES, but today it was officially announced by HP (in a press release that only Engadget Spanish seems to have gotten their hands on).

Evidently, the device will be launching soon in Europe as part of Telefonica’s mobile broadband family. But it’s been cleared by the FCC with AT&T-friendly 3G bands so expect in the states at some point, whether subsidized by AT&T or not.

With the Airlife 100, HP is leveraging the increasing power of smartphone processing combined with features only found on a netbook to create a very unique device. Instead of the typical Intel Atom found in netbooks, the Airlife uses a 1GHz Snapdragon. Because it uses Android, it has an instant on feature (which really just means that when you close the lid, it goes into standby mode, like your smartphone).

Making a cross between a netbook and a smartphone is nothing new. The ill-fated Palm Foleo sounded pretty similar to this device on paper. However, the Foleo (aside from being full of fail of its own) had the misfortune of being conceived of before netbooks had taken the world by storm, and Android had gained traction.

With the Airlife, however, it appears that HP has gotten many things right. By combining the best elements of two devices, they’ve come up with something that is better in many ways than either device by itself.

The first thing that jumps out at you is battery life. Because of the more power-efficient smartphone internals, the Airlife states a battery life of 12 hours of usage, and a staggering 10 days of standby. That’s something no smartphone or netbook can do.

The Airlife also bests other devices for flexible input. The 10.1″ screen is touch sensitive, allowing you to use Android’s more finger-friendly features intuitively, coupled with a near-full-size keyboard for text input. For a more traditional notebook experience, it also includes a decent sized trackpad with an interesting button layout. A click button is to the left of the trackpad, with the home and back buttons on the right.

Drawing from the netbook side of things, the Airlife will also have a 16GB SSD, an SD card slot, and a VGA webcam, something we’ve yet to see on a smartphone in the US. Combined with 3G, a webcam could make the Airlife the most viable Skype (or Google Talk) video chat device we’ve seen yet.

No word on what version of Android it’s running, though the pictures make it look like a customized version of Android 1.6. All in all, the HP/Compaq Airlife 100 is a unique and very versatile device that may be headed to AT&T sometime this summer, or possibly sooner. More than just promising to be a great device, however, the Airlife could create a whole new segment of devices, and may blur the lines of “Smartbook” and “Netbook.” Android, being free, is a very attractive option compared with Windows 7, and allows for lower prices to the consumer. And Android is getting more fully-featured by the day, it seems.

We already know that Android is capable of running the full desktop version of Firefox. As Android grows, this kind of device could begin to compete, and eventually overtake the netbook market, not to mention providing a robust alternative to another, completely over-hyped device. With a touchscreen, several browser choices, including full Firefox and Opera Mini with the ability to run Flash content, an Android netbook sounds a lot like “the best way to experience the web”. Et tu, iPad?

(Head over to Engadget for more pictures)

These emerging types of mobile computers, which the report predicts will feature ubiquitous 3G/LTE connectivity because of user demand, will also spur growth of PC mobile broadband and handset-centric mobile Internet subscriptions. The report forecasts subscriptions will reach 295 million and 1.3 billion, respectively.

3G/LTE capable netbooks shipments should also rise, experiencing a 124% compound annual growth rate while reaching 34 million units in 2014.

According to the report’s author, the lack of a lightweight OS capable of performing multiple tasks is the only real smartbook roadblock. “As a result of limited upward mobility of non-captive Smartphone OS, smartbooks are currently lacking an ‘anchor’ web-centric, multitasking and lightweight OS capable of fully exploiting the ARM-based applications processors,” claimed Satish Menon, Senior Analyst for Forward Concepts. “It is unlikely that Microsoft will be porting Windows 7 to ARM platforms, but Maemo, Android, and Chrome are among early OS candidates for smartbooks, whether they be based on ARM Processors or on X86 platforms, like Intel’s upcoming Moorestown.”

The AigoPad is just another example that 2010 will be the year of tablet computers. Not much is known about the slate just yet. All we really know is that the Chinese manufacturer states that Android will power the device and that’s good enough for us. Hopefully it will end up looking something like the concept shown here and less like the fugly iPad.

The AigoPad is likely just part of the first wave of Android-powered tablet computers we’ll see this year. Manufacturers are probably using all the positive, but mostly negative, reactions to the Apple iPad to carve out their own tablet computers. Android is the most obvious choice to power these computer too due to its low hardware requirements and already proven touch interface. Expect to see many more tablets just like this one the next few months and even years. [Zol.com via PMP Today]

Apple may have snagged first-mover advantage in this year’s tablet renaissance, and we have scant few details on things like pricing and release date for some of its upcoming competitors. Still, it’s worth a look at what other tablet contenders are going to be emerging with in the near near future. It might be worth reigning in that Steve Jobs-induced credit card trigger finger for a bit.

Let’s have a look at what alternatives to the iPad are likely literally just around the corner.

1. HP Slate

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off this HP tablet prototype very briefly at CES this year. It wasn’t the Apple iPad () thunder-stealing moment predicted by the media, but it is one of many indications that the tablet form-factor is about to become practically ubiquitous.

This particular HP slate will run Windows () 7, setting it apart from the field of tablets running Android () you’ll be seeing on the rest of this list. More details about the device were recently revealed by HP in the video below.

2. Dell Streak

During its CES 2010 keynote, Dell talked about working on multiple “upcoming slates,” including one prototype it showed off, which is currently called the Streak. This particular model is only 5-inches, though, which puts it less in the direct path of the iPad and makes it more akin to the existing line of mobile internet devices (MIDs) like the Archos series of Internet tablets. Not much else is known yet about the Streak, or what other kinds of tablets Dell might be cooking up, but Engadget did snag some hands-on photos of the device.

3. Asus Eee Tablet

Asus is the company responsible for kicking off the entire netbook craze. They were also showing off a prototype of a 9-inch tablet at CES this year. The device has four control buttons reminiscent of the favored layout for an Android-powered phone, leading to the logical speculation that the Asus tablet might well run Google’s () mobile operating system.

JKK Mobile snagged a video of the prototype, embedded below.

4. Compal Tablet

This working prototype was shown off at CES 2010. Made by Compal, the 7-inch Android 2.0 tablet runs on the new, high-powered next-generation Tegra 2 processor NVIDIA announced at CES. With this chip, a device can support 1080p video playback, yet retain startlingly good battery life. NVIDIA says it already has several partners lined up to make Tegra 2-based tablets, so expect more of this type of device in the near near future.

5. Notion Ink Adam

Another tablet running Android and powered by the Tegra 2 chip is the Adam, a 10-inch tablet from Indian startup Notion Ink. It uses a screen technology from Pixel Qi that combines the best of a full color multi-touch LCD display with a low-power reflective mode that’s readable in direct sunlight.

Notion Ink says the Adam should come to market in the second quarter of this year, with a target price somewhere between $300 and $800. Slashgear got a lengthy video demo (embedded below) and oodles of pics of the device.

6. MSI

Wait for it: It’s another tablet prototype running Android and powered by the Tegra 2, this time from MSI. Engadget found it “a bit thicker and heavier than we’d like,” but on the plus side its 10-inch screen is “plenty responsive.”

7. Quanta

One last prototype running Android on the Tegra 2 chip: the Quanta tablet got some early dings in terms of usability. Still, it is only a prototype, so the Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled tablet device could still be a contender in the about-to-be-crowded tablet space.

8. ICD Vega

Seattle-based startup Innovative Converged Devices announced its Vega tablet back in November 2009, and now the device is officially headed to T-Mobile UK sometime before the end of 2010. Yet another tablet based on Android, the Vega will have a large amount of screen real-estate at 15.6-inches. Check out the full spec list and a hands-on demo video embedded below.

9. Google and HTC

[Mockup image courtesy of Gizmodo]

This one is sadly of the purely rumor variety, but it’s worth mentioning for its potentially game-changing effects. Like it did with the Nexus One, if Google were to take a direct hand in developing a tablet computing device with a trusted partner, it could be a serious contender in the newly emerging tablet wars.

The cited report says the Google Tablet has already been in development for the past 19 months. HTC is a plausible logical choice for the trusted partner as well, given its existing relationship with Google and the Android operating system. Still, with nothing yet official on the books, the Google Tablet is the most speculative entrant on this list for now.

ASUS wants to transform itself into ‘another Apple’ and has a device in the works to help it along, company CEO Jonney Shih said Wednesday. He hopes his Taiwan firm will be put on the Mac maker’s level but serve as an open-source alternative that uses Android and Chrome OS, not just closed options like Windows.

Shih also teased that ASUS will have a “killer product” in June that could help towards this goal. He hasn’t provided any details of his own but is known to be referring to the Eee Pad, a small tablet that is now ostensibly set to compete against the iPad. Most details are still indefinite, but it’s likely to cost below $500 and to use NVIDIA’s Tegra 250 as well as Android. With a screen between 4 and 7 inches across, it’s more likely to be a large MID (mobile Internet device) than a full tablet computer.

News of the company’s ambitions arrives just as it has formalized the spin-off of Pegatron as a separate manufacturing company and has entered into previously untapped Asian countries like Indonesia, where it hopes to boost its market share.