Not too long ago, I found out -- courtesy of Fuad Abazovic of Fudzilla -- some alleged details about Motorola's upcoming Android tablet. Now it seems that we know a little more about it ... including its name!
A good place to look for info
What's a good way to keep apprised of a tech company's next moves? Watch what Internet domains it registers. And according to J.B. of Fusible, Motorola just registered five separate domains with "Kore" in their names, including MotorolaKore.com and Moto-Kore.com. J.B.'s article has links to the WhoIs page for each domain name, which shows that each domain name is registered by Motorola Trademark Holdings, LLC.
Why the name, though, and not something like "Xoom 2?" Well, unlike, say, the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the Asus Transformer, the Motorola Xoom didn't do too well on the market. I know, it's surprising, right? I mean, it totally wasn't the iPad, and that's all you need in order to sell a tablet. At least, that's what Motorola seemed to think, to look at the Xoom's ads.
So what will the Kore bring to the tablet table?
Assuming that this Kore is Motorola's upcoming next-generation Android tablet -- and not, say, a new Android smartphone -- it's supposedly going to have a quad-core processor. The Kore's four, well, cores should make it a lot more powerful than today's tablets with dual-core processors. It'll also have extremely powerful graphics, putting it way beyond today's Android tablets' gaming potential.
Why does anything need that kind of processing power? Because the Kore is supposedly going to have an iPhone 4 "Retina Display" style screen, with a pixel density so great that the human eye can't discern individual pixels. Again, these rumors are unsubstantiated, but people have been hoping that Apple would release a Retina Display iPad for some time now. Motorola released a dual-core tablet before Apple did, so why not a high-res tablet too?
The software under the hood
The least controversial, or at least the least speculative, aspect of the Kore's supposed specs is that it's said it'll be running Ice Cream Sandwich. This is the version of Android that Google's working on, that'll bridge the smartphone and tablet worlds (somehow) and fix the bugs introduced in Honeycomb. It's also supposedly going to be open-source, so that others can use it without needing to ask Google's permission, the way that they do with Honeycomb.
Motorola clearly had no trouble getting Google's okay for the original Xoom, and it's not likely that it will for anything else that it works on. But the Xoom was very buggy, and the thought that its successor won't be is a welcome change of pace. Now if only there were some more actual games and apps to run on it.
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