You might remember Le Pan’s tablets from CES this year, of which only one was truly ready at the time. The company is now ready to hit the US in earnest, but you’ll have to forget the company name along with the earlier designs: it’s now Matsunichi, and it’s planning to kick off its US-ready makeover through the MarquisPad MP977. The tablet shares the 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 display of the Le Pan II, but it’s now running a slightly speedier dual-core, 1.2GHz TI chip (likely the same OMAP 4430 as in the Droid Xyboard ), ships with Android 4.0 out of the gate and comes in a sleeker — not to mention browner — shell
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Matsunichi’s MarquisPad MP977 tablet tempts us with $249, dual-core Android 4.0
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On , a column about consumer technology. This recent announcement that Dell would not be pursuing new smartphones for the time being following the retirement of its Venue Windows Phone devices raised the spotlight on PC companies — at least those other than Apple — and why they have struggled so mightily in the US smartphone market. Virtually every major PC company, including HP , Dell , Acer , Lenovo , Toshiba and ASUS , has either passed completely on entering the domestic market or released only a handful of models without much carrier support behind them
The year was 1999. I was pondering all too carefully what kind of threads I’d be wearing come the new school year. But all I could really think about was exactly how much of my styling budget would be blown on some antediluvian piece of technology that — in my mind — was no longer necessary due to the invention of the internet. 
This is the Miselu Neiro, a “portable, net-enabled social music device” which was announced this weekend at SXSW . We were able see and handle the first-ever prototype fresh off the lab bench at the SoundCloud Open House in Austin. The app-based, Android-powered synth features a two octave velocity and pressure-sensitive keyboard, a capacitive multitouch widescreen, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and even a webcam
iRobot , the Massachusetts-based maker of consumer and battlefield ‘bots, announced a team up with TI this week. The partnership, sadly, doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing an army of autotuned DJ Roombas — we will, however, likely be getting a slew of “intelligent and practical” robots packing Texas Instruments’ multi-core OMAP technology. Remember those words the next time you hurl one through a window or get it to mop up the tiles around your toilet. 
Well, if our hands-on at CES didn’t sell you on TI’s next-gen OMAP 5 platform, perhaps some more specs revealed recently at MWC 2012 will. We’ve known about its dual Cortex-A15 and Cortex-M4 architecture since this time last year , but we didn’t know that those M4 cores are there to handle real-time processing of multimedia — like video encoding and decoding — which TI claims can provide up to ten percent power savings. 
All of these wrist-mounted fitness gizmos are pretty nifty , but we always wonder how they get those rigid circuit boards into such an unsuitable form-factor. Well, thanks to those scalpel-happy boffins at the FCC’s underground bunker, wonder no more. Nike’s FuelBand was wheeled in on a trolley and torn (quite literally) to pieces, and we felt we just had to share the pictures with you. 
If you heard that Engadget would be scoring some one on one time here on stage with TI, you would be right. 
3D had its way with CES 2011, and despite throngs of consumers who could not possibly care less, it looks as if the third dimension will be doing its best to seem important at this year’s gala, too. MasterImage 3D has just announced that it’ll be showcasing a pair of new panels here in Las Vegas, with both relying on cell-matrix parallax barrier technology to pull off the “glasses-free” effect
Neonode’s name isn’t plastered on your spate of gizmos, but if you’ve purchased a touchscreen-based device in the past year or so, there’s a better-than-average chance that it’s technology is tucked within. In the run-up to CES, the outfit is introducing the world’s first ultra-low power single-chip optical touch controller, NN1001. This guy was developed in cooperation with Texas Instruments, specifically designed to shave costs and increase performance / functionality for smartphones, tablets, e-readers and automotive applications. 
