Mobile Computing News

Photo: Samsung

The official Twitter account of Samsung’s South African blog has revealed Samsung is building its own tablet computer. Known loosely as the S-Pad, the Samsung Galaxy S tablet looks, honestly, like an oversized Galaxy S phone meets another rather famous tablet.

What we know

The Google Android powered S-Pad looks strikingly like the Apple tablet, the iPad. That might be down to the ‘innovator’ setting the standard, much like nigh-on every netbook looked identical for some time, the resemblance is jarring, no less. The tablet will be measure  seven inches with a 3.5mm headphone jack atop. Strangely, in response to a question, the @SamsungBlogSA Twitter account responded saying the device had a ‘high-res TFT screen’. This info is conflicting, because we’ve been led to believe that the Samsung Galaxy S Tablet will actually have a SUPER AMOLED screen.

Ooh, that’s odd

Another thing readers have been noticing is the very unusual phone icon on the tablet’s TouchWiz UI built on top of Google Android. Does this mean you’ll be able to make calls with the tablet? And these calls, will they be limited to just video, or voice as well? Because, if pure GSM-based voice calls are an option, we shudder to think how ridiculous people will look holding a 7-inch touchscreen to their face or even talking to it while holding it flat down.

The ensuing tablet wars

Photo: Asus

If Computex didn’t make it official, it is official now, there is an all-out tablet war ensuing with the Apple tablet being everybody’s benchmark. The WePad was once pipped as the next best thing, with our beloved Microsoft Courier project being canned. The HP Slate is now being powered by webOS instead of Windows 7 and Asus has unveiled its decidedly underwhelming Asus Eee pad.

It’s all an arms race and everybody from Apple, to Google Android, Microsoft and now even Samsung want a piece of the action. Hopefully Samsung will formally reveal the S-Pad soon.