The Android Developers team held an “office hours” hangout on Google+ this afternoon, and one of them popped up a white 7″ looking tablet that we would love to know more about. It looks similar to the Kindle Fire in size and form, but it’s clearly running Ice Cream Sandwich, hence the black bar along the bottom. Unfortunately for all of us, the video isn’t of the highest quality, so we can’t see anything else really on it. He sure isn’t shy about showing it off, that’s for sure. Any chance that this could be the Google or “Nexus” tablet?

Update:  I jumped up to the 43:00 mark and they talk about the tablet. They say that it is not a “Nexus or a Google designed device” and that is third party. Seems weird that they would jump straight to denying that it is a Nexus tablet before we even had a chance to suggest that it was, but hey, we’ll have to take their word for it.

Thoughts?  (Hit the 14:00 mark in the video below to see it.) 

Any guesses on what this tablet may be? The crew at PocketNow discovered the images above and thinks that it may end up as the long rumored tablet to be Google branded aka the “Nexus tablet.” Their reasoning? Well, the fact that it lacks any OEM or carrier branding and has only stock Google app icons on the front. Is that enough to make this conclusive? Probably not.

First, the icon set is pre-Play store. As you all know, Google has decided to make Play front and center, however, there is a chance that these renders were created before all of that weirdness happened. Can’t completely flag it for that misstep. Second, that sure looks like a micro SD slot. For two straight Nexus devices, Google has taken away expandable storage, so if this is indeed the “Nexus” of tablets, it would surprise us to see this option.

But what the hell else could it be? With Asus usually attached to Google tablet rumors, we can’t help but notice that this actually looks like a Samsung product or even one of Toshiba’s new offerings. Any chance that Samsung swooped in and is now the front runner for Google’s first branded tablet? Or maybe this is simply an old render of a device that we will never see? You tell us.

Via:  PocketNow

As talk of a $199 Android tablet heats up, details on how manufacturers plan to reach this price point are also starting to surface. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang mentioned this week that they would need to cut out around $150 in premium parts to get the price down so low. He mentioned “expensive memory” particularly, which could mean RAM or storage depending on who you ask, but the point is, that pieces are being cut. In the comments of that story, we noticed many of our readers throwing out other specs that they wish would be downgraded or cut instead, which has led us to today’s poll.

What would you rather a manufacturer cut from a tablet in order to drive the price down? Would you like to see a lesser display or the cameras removed? The Kindle Fire has by all accounts been a success, and it doesn’t necessarily have any premium parts that a tech geek would brag about.

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Do your friends make fun of the size of your Galaxy Nexus? Saying that 4.65″ is enough screen space for a tablet? Well you can show them and show off Android’s flexibility with this new list of flashable zips. Once flashed, this will force the ROM that you are running to display in a tablet orientation instead of the condensed phone version. This means the action bar across the bottom of the phone at all times among other things.

Some of the biggest ICS ROMs out there are supported already: Gummy 0.8.2, CM9, AOKP Milestone 4 and RootzBoat 8.1. Installation is nothing more than flashing the corresponding zip for your ROM through recovery and then a few tweaks to make it readable afterwards. If you are feeling like changing things up on your phone head on over to RootzWiki for instructions.

Via: RootzWiki

As you know, Ice Cream Sandwich is supposed to be the Android release that merges the tablet and phone experiences. The OS was built to be able to scale no matter what the screen size and hopefully help end the ridiculous “fragmentation” argument that competitors cannot seem to let go of. In fact, if you go into the Android SDK and start messing with resolutions, you can view both the tablet and phone versions of ICS to see what I’m talking about.

One ROM developer by the name patrick decided to work with that multi-screensize idea of Android 4.0 and see kind of magic he could create. His goal was to create a tablet version for the Galaxy Nexus. Guess what? He did it. And no, this isn’t just a build.prop edit as some have tried in the past.

The actual phone.apk is struggling to work (you can’t make calls), but everything else apparently works just fine. With help from the community, I’m sure they will get the voice issues sorted out at some point. For now though, feel free to take it for a spin and see what your phone would look like as tablet. Make a backup! 

We are approaching the 1-year mark for Android tablets, that is if you don’t count that silly 7″ thing that Samsung released in December 2010. As far as official tablet operating system tablets go though, the XOOM was the first and it dropped towards the end of last February. That puts us right around a full year for Android tablets.

So over the last 12 months, we have seen almost every tech manufacturer on the planet pump out some sort of tablet. Most of them have dual-core processors, the screens seem to be getting better, cameras are improving, and so on and so forth. Over the next year, we will see quad-core chips, full HD screens, cameras at the level of our smartphones, and prices dropping into far reasonable zones. It could be an exciting year for tablets, even with most looking at 2011 as somewhat of a flop if you weren’t an iPad.

As the curious crew that we are, we want to know two things for this poll. Do you already own a tablet? If you do or don’t, are you still considering one (maybe a new one) going into 2012?

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For the past week I’ve been spending some quality time with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. While I like the hardware for the most part and I don’t mind TouchWiz, I’ve been struggling to find a place for the device in my life. While a large part of it is simply that I’m not entirely convinced that a tablet is the best form factor, I keep finding myself disappointed with the app selection and quality. There are some great apps available for Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich, but overall I’ve been disappointed time and time again.