Engadget - In case you were already snoozin' when Samsung made its announcement late yesterday, the company is here at SIGGRAPH 2013 eager to show off the muscle behind its new chip. Before the exhibitions start officially, we had a chance to nab a look at a reference tablet running the Exynos 5 Octa 5420 SoC alongside ARM's Mali T-628 silicon packing six cores.
In its next major release this summer, Android will finally add a multi-window mode for both tablets and phones. Jide is beating Google to release today with a fully featured version of Remix OS 2.0 for its Ultratablet and the Nexus 9 and 10. ROMs for the two Nexus tablets are available to download now.
"Although Google has already released the factory images for the new Android 5.1 software update online, the OTA has only been sent out to a a handful of Nexus devices. Today, Google has finally started rolling out Android 5.1 OTA to the Nexus 10, so you should check for updates if you haven’t made use of the factory images."
I've never been tempted to buy a large widescreen tablet. They're good at certain things, but they're too wide for everything onscreen to be reachable if you're holding it with both hands. They're too tall for portrait mode to be comfortable for long stretches. One-handed use is generally tolerable at best. Smaller widescreen tablets like the Nexus 7 are nice because they're closer in size and heft to books, but 10-inch-and-up widescreen tablets have always been too gawky for my taste.
I recently bought a Samsung Note Pro 12.2. It has a 16:10 aspect ratio which is much better than 16:9 for large format devices. (Although I wish it was 3:4)
"...It's just that there aren't many reasons to use an Android tablet with a screen this large..."
This is a bizarre claim by the author.
There are a million and one reasons to use a tablet of this size regardless of OS, but for one thing if it's an Android tablet then you can drag and drop your own videos of any format on to it without the restrictions and middlemanning imposed by for example itunes on IOS - and play them natively on the device.
Nexus 10 is 16:10. As is Nexus 7 (both of them). As a matter of fact, apart from a few 4:3 models (like the new Nexus 9), pretty much every Android tablet is 16:10.
Having said that though, I've had a few 10" tablets that were 16:10, and the size combined with the aspect ratio just makes it odd in portrait mode. Can't say I mind at all on a Nexus 7 though, being smaller I feel portrait works well even with 16:10.
I agree with the author, at least when it comes to the settings box and the lack of two columns. Not sure how contacts could look different though.
