LAS VEGAS – Asus and Nvidia today announced and showed a seven-inch, quad-core Android-powered tablet that will sell for only $249, although they didn't give many more details on the device.
The companies also said they had worked together to bring Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) to the Asus eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. The new OS will be downloadable for free today, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Asus CEO Jerry Shen said.
The Transformer Prime is the first (and so far only) retail tablet to run Ice Cream Sandwich, although I saw a semi-working version of ICS on an inexpensive Viewsonic tablet today.
In an Nvidia press conference that at times seemed to become an Android team rally, Huang also revealed some neat new features of his company's Tegra 3 chipset that will let companies build more responsive tablets that use less battery.
Nvidia's "Prism" technology lets tablets reduce their backlight power without making images appear dim, Huang said. In a demo, he showed how a Tegra 3 tablet changes the colors in an image as it dims the backlight, so the image continues to pop. With LCD backlights eating up much of a tablet's battery, that can really extend battery life, he said.
The company's "Direct Touch" technology, meanwhile, uses the Tegra 3's fifth "companion core" to process touch events, tripling the number of touch events a tablet can process in a second. That makes for much more responsive touch screens and a better Android UI experience, Huang said.
"It's buttery smooth," he said.
Finally, Huang showed Windows 8 running on an Nvidia Tegra 3-based reference tablet. The chipset's low-power companion core can keep Windows 8's lock screen up to date without eating up battery life, he said.
Rah Rah Android! Go Android!
The first half of Nvidia's press conference was an Android cheering session, as Huang walked through various demos of existing app for Honeycomb tablets and made several veiled attacks on the iPad.
Tablet users need "different strokes for different folks," with different sizes, shapes and capabilities of devices, he said. Demoing the Snapseed photo app on an Asus Transformer Prime, he was careful to note several times that this is a very popular iPad app.
The coming of Ice Cream Sandwich will solve the fragmentation problem caused by Google's previous tablet OS, Honeycomb, he said.
"Honeycomb essentially became an ecosystem of its own, and because it wasn't the same as Gingerbread, Honeycomb was out there fending for itself. It was related to Android, not the same as Android … but ICS unites, unifies and turns all of the Android devices into one ecosystem," he said. "It's not longer just going to be Android phones and Android tablets [treated separately], it's now going to be a collection of Android devices."
Huang's energetic defense of Android tablets—everything Huang does in public is energetic—left me wondering where Google is at this CES. Android tablets with Google's UI aren't selling very well. The Android tablets that are selling very well are the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, which have been de-Googleized. Yet Google is not front and center defending its platform and aggressively pushing to change things; apparently, Nvidia is.
Android will survive on tablets because it's the only OS option for many hardware manufacturers that don't have OSes of their own. But I'd like to see Google cheering for its own platform, not just relying on proxies. That might help push Ice Cream Sandwich adoption and help convince developers that Android tablets are really ready for prime time.