Nvidia has announced its own technology entrant into the tablet market. As part of a series of interviews with Mashable they have revealed a host of capabilities and features. Not dissimilar to the HP’s Slate, Nvidia’s ‘Tegra’ processor is capable of running games, playing movies, watching flash video, reading ebooks and browsing the web.
On of the more interesting points of the clearly informal interview was the explanation of how Nvidia have succeeded in including Flash in their demo offering. Within any given device their are two components involved in processing the graphics and javascript of a webpage, the CPU, which is responsible for loading everything from videos to images, right through to running full applications on the desktop. However when it comes to graphics there is also the GPU, which handles the display of images, control of screens and so on.
The way Nvidia have achieved what Steve Jobs claimed to be impossible, without killing a device’s battery life, support of Flash, is by shifting the playing of the Flash content from the resource intensive CPU over to the far less demanding GPU. The result seems to be a tablet that has both a slick interface and supports the full web and with the Android operating system is capable of everything you would want from a tablet device.
Nvidia however have not stopped at the single device. In fact they have produced a whole line of prototype devices based upon their new processor, all with the Android operating system. Originally developed for mobile phones and screens sizes ranging from the standard touch phone 5″, up to 11″, it provides an option for nearly anyone. Exactly how many of these will reach market however is unsure.
Out of all the tablets that have been released, announced or rumored over the past few months, this is by far one of the most promising, with the potential to overcome the iPad’s faults and steering clear of the clunky Windows interface of the HP Slate and Dell Tablet. Nvidia have even developed working prototypes, well ahead of Microsoft and Google, who have both been rumored to be developing their own offering. It seems Nvidia are on the right course to become a major player in the tablet market, despite the fact this is simply a prototype to demonstrate the power of their new processors it is certainly one of the more impressive devices we have seen so far, in fact the competition may have just hotted up for the major tablet manufacturers.
