Wikipad slated for June 11th US launch at $250, worldwide 'to follow this summer' Mobile

The 7-inch Android tablet with a game controller cradle -- the Wikipad -- launches in the United States on June 11th for $250, with a worldwide launch following later this summer. As for the initially announced 10.1-inch variation, that remains unclear -- it's not even mentioned in Wikipad's press release from today. The same can be said for Gaikai / PlayStation Cloud support, though it's possible we'll hear more when Sony's ready to unveil its streaming plans; Wikipad's in a weird place in that relationship, having worked with Gaikai on streaming ahead of Sony's purchase of the company. We've been repeatedly promised by Wikipad representatives that the functionality is still on the way.

The device is perhaps the largest outside of Sony internal products to carry PlayStation Mobile support, which gives owners access to a variety of classic PlayStation titles (think Crash Bandicoot, Jet Moto). Of course, at $250, the Wikipad costs the same as Sony's own PlayStation Vita, which packs an arguably much nicer (though smaller) OLED screen and access to a much larger library of PlayStation games. The choice will be in consumers hands come June 11th.

HTC sees big revenue increase in May, almost back to 2012 levels

The first sign that HTC has reversed its downward spiral was the unconfirmed info that the HTC One hadsold 5 million units not long after its end-of-March launch. Now we get something more official from HTC's monthly financial info, which shows a 48% increase in revenue for May compared to April.

The total revenue for May were $969.6 million, just 3.35% down compared to the same month last year. That's quite the reversal, considering HTC was seeing nearly 50% year on year decrease in revenue in the previous months.

The revenue for the January-May period is $3.06 billion, about $1.4 billion from Q1 and $1.6 billion for April and May. HTC should be able to hit its Q2 projection of $2.3 billion in revenue and even surpass it if the increase in sales holds up in June.

Android in May 2013: JB rise continues, GB still leads

While Jelly Bean and ICS combine for almost 60% of the Android landscape, it's still Android 2.3 Gingerbread that accounts for roughly 36.4% of all Android handsets used in May.

While the gap between Jelly Bean and Gingerbread has narrowed over the last month (4.6 percent point increase and 2 percent point decrease, respectively), it's clear that Gingerbread devices will be around for quite a while. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich has gone down by close to 2 percent point as well, likely losing some of its share to Android Jelly Bean upgrades - a trend which should continue in the coming months.

It's important to note that starting last month, Android usage calculations are based on the number of devices which manually access the Google Play store, rather than background activations through the Google servers, which arguably is a more accurate reflection of the Android landscape

Intel introduces new quad-core Atom with built-in LTE

Intel introduced the first major upgrade to its Atom line of mobile chipsets with the Bay Trail-T SoC, which features a new microarchitecture and Intel's brand new LTE modem.

The new microarchitecture is called Silvermont and is built on a 22nm process, matching Intel's new Haswell chips. It promises either a 3x performance increase or a 5x energy saving over the current Atoms, depending on what's needed.

The performance increase will come in the form of better single-threaded performance and up to 8 CPU cores, though the first chipset will be quad-core.

The Bay Trail chips will be used in tablets (both Android and Windows 8.1) including 2-in-1 tablets that will launch this holiday season at $399, but also entry level laptops and even desktops. The mobile solutions target 8+ hours of battery life on a 30Wh battery and a 10.1" screen (measured by playing a 1080p@30fps video).

Speaking of video, Intel's chips have support for 4K video decoding and promise great performance for 3D games, but there's no info on the GPU itself.

Smartphones are also in the cards with the Merrifield platform, which is also built on a 22nm process. Intel showcased a reference platform at Computex 2013 but gave no timeline for when such smartphones will hit the market.

The new XMM 7160 modem will be built into some Bay Trail chipsets for global LTE roaming at low power usage. That challenges Qualcomm's dominance in the field, though the Snapdragon maker isn’t standing still either.