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MWC 2011: Best tablets of Mobile World Congress 2011
Tony Crammond
We take a look at the top 5 tablets from this year's Mobile World Congress 2011
Published on Feb 16, 2011
This time last year, the world was holding its breath in anticipation of the Apple iPad – the first big device to hit the tablet market. Skip forward 12 months, and now we’re almost spoilt for choice with many of the big players in the mobile world having now confirmed tablet devices that’ll be hitting the UK very shortly.
So, without further ado, here are five of the best up and coming tablets that were announced at Mobile World Congress 2011 this week.
HTC Flyer
HTC has come along in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years, taking a huge chunk of the smartphone market for itself.
Its first tablet device, the HTC Flyer, was unveiled on Tuesday, at Mobile World Conference, and features a sleek aluminium design, 7-inch touchscreen, a single-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, without a flash, and a 1.3- megapixel front-facing camera to take care of your video conferencing needs.
It offers great connectivity, via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, GPS and mobile broadband using tri-band 900/1700/2100 HSPA and quad-band GSM/EDGE. The Flyer weighs in at a reasonable 415g (over 250g lighter than the iPad) and HTC promises 6 hours of use from a single charge of the battery.
The only downside with this tablet is that, instead of using the already-feted Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), developed for use with tablets, HTC have chosen to go with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), which could mean that the HTC Flyer will have trouble competing with other, more up-to-date releases – although HTC is planning on a Android 3.0 update.
LG Optimus Pad
LG’s attack on the tablet market is being spearheaded by the Optimus Pad, and it’s been hotly anticipated since information about it was leaked back at the beginning of the year.
Where some manufacturers have chosen to stick to what they know and release devices with middle-of-the-road specs, LG has gone all out to challenge the biggest and best. The Optimus Pad boasts an 8.9-inch screen, with a 15:9 aspect ratio and full HD 1080P decoding, and a 1280×768 WXGA resolution widescreen display.
The manufacturer also claims that the form factor of the Optimus Pad means that it’s possible to use it one-handed, which may be a real draw over some of the bulkier, more cumbersome devices out there.
If the richness of the display wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, we can confirm that the Optimus Pad will be packing a 1GHz nVidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, and will run on the latest iteration of Google’s Android OS, the tablet-centric version 3.0 (Honeycomb), and also includes optics capable of 3D video capture. All we can say for this device is watch out iPad fanbois!
