I have hopes that the a ROM (eg. UK ROM) with voice support will be released for the North American tab. It is a shame that this feature was removed, but I fear that with the feature, many North American consumers would have criticized the device as being a huge phone, rather than a compact and mobile tablet!
I would imagine that the voice feature is gimped in software rather than in hardware, which if true, would make for a relatively painless flashing to enable the feature. Of course this could be wrong, but I can hope all the same!
In any case, it would appear that the Android3 'gingerbread' release is just around the corner, which should bring many wanted features to the platform!
I'm hoping for GPU accelerated scrolling in apps (especially the browser!!!) and a palm-os-like task switcher (it would be nice. That would be a nice compliment to the system. Something like this.
Here's an interesting tidbit that will work out well for all Android devices. The company behind the software keyboard called BlindType has been purchased by Google.
BlindType, uses approximate type locations to predict the word that was intended. In this way, you don't even have to hit the correct key in order to type accurately! As I can almost type on my N810 without looking at the keypad, I would imagine that this would work really well for me as it would increase the rate at which I typed SIGNIFICANTLY on a soft keyboard.
At the end of the second video, the typist is typing as fast using BlindType as on a hardware keyboard! AMAZING!
This would be great for use on a Galaxy Tab when using the keyboard in portrait or landscape. Being able to type without staring at your fingers was once reserved only for physical keyboard. I'm glad to see that this technology will become incorporated into the Android experience.
I'm really looking forward to Android3! The leap from v1 to v2 was significant, and I bet that the UI focused v3 will bring plenty of new enhancements to the platform!
OK people I bought one. I am still at the mall, so if you have questiond post them here and when home I'll try to answer
Here are some questions (other than the circles to the left/right of the connector -- please let me know, if you know):
1) What are your general out-of-the-box impressions?
2) Do you see this being something that you use frequently or something that you will get bored of?
3) What are your intended uses?
Here's a Java based X server called weird X. It supports many features and may make for an easy port for Android. I say *may* because I have no idea : http://www.jcraft.com/weirdx/
It doesn't seem to be well known, but is an interesting project and is 100% open. I'm curious as to how fast it runs, and what types of resources it requires, but something tells me that it will be far more forgiving than VNC, especially considering the (claimed awesome) Dalvik VM. The codebase is quite small (~500K) FWIW.
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