Andromium‘s Superbook (LDM Product Roundup – Vol 23 No 19) – the laptop ‘shell’ powered by a smartphone – is now live on Kickstarter. Prices start at $85. It was funded within 10 minutes, and had raised more than three times its goal within an hour.
Dell has announced that it will stop producing Android tablets. The vendor says that tablets suffer from low margins and long replacement cycles. Instead, it will put its focus on hybrid, convertible devices.
Lenovo went quiet on its OLED hybrid, the X1 Yoga, since showing it at CES (Lenovo Deluge Led by OLED Notebook). However, it has now posted the unit for sale on its website. Prices start at $1,550 for an IPS-LCD model, or $1,870 for the OLED version. Lenovo is currently running a promotional discount, putting these prices at $1,160 and $1,400, respectively.
Lenovo has also started to sell its Moto Z Droid and Moto Z Force Droid, as well as the Moto Mod addons (Lenovo Has Simpler Concept to Challenge Ara), through Verizon in the USA. The Droid costs $625 and the Force costs $720. Prices have also been revealed for several of the Mods: the JBL SoundBoost Speaker ($80); Insta-Share Projector ($300); Power Packs ($60 – $90) and personalised back plates ($15).
(I have been waiting for the Lenovo T460S so that I can upgrade my PC, but wanted the model that was announced that would have a discrete Nvidia GPU. Although there have been reports that it might arrive since April, there is no sign. I suspect that it will never arrive – the current T460S has been criticised for a less than stellar battery life and the Nvidia option is likely to make this worse. Man. Ed.)
The VR Goggles product from Merge VR is now available at Best Buy stores in North America. The headset uses a smartphone as the display.
