Fully Charged: New Lenovo tablets, Android Wear’s tiny new chip and a huge treat for map fans

Lenovo launches A-series Android tablets

Lenovo has pulled the wraps off four new Android tablets, all of which are affordably priced. The A7-30 and A7-50 (from £100) are 7in models, the A8 (from £140 and pictured above) has an 8in screen and the A10 (from £170) sports a 10.1in screen. All have quad-core processors and will be on sale soon.

Here’s the tiny chip that might be powering your Android Wear smartwatch

Imagination Technologies has unveiled its latest system-on-chip, and claims it’s the size of an SD Card. The Newton platform is based on Imagination’s MIPS architecture and built by its partner Ingenic, and features a highly efficient 1GHz CPU that could give wearables 30-plus hours of battery life. Newton also includes support for various handy things like 720p video, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, NFC, healthcare sensors, USB and up to 3GB of RAM. And one key pointer? Imagination is one of Google’s Android Wear hardware partners, suggesting that Newton could very well be heading for future Wear devices.

[Source: Engadget]

READ MORE: 8 things you need to know about Android Wear

New York Public Library makes 20,000 historic hi-res maps available for free

Are you a map fan? A cartographreak? Then you should get yourself over to the New York Public Library’s new Map Warper, an archive of over 20,000 historical maps that the library has spent the past 15 or so years painstakingly digitising from the originals. The maps aren’t just available for viewing, either: you can download them in high resolution and do almost anything you want with them, because they’re distributed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (you’ll need to create an account). Many of the maps can be easily overlaid onto Google Earth and other programs.

As you’d imagine, most of the maps cover the New York area (both the state and the city), but there are also over 700 topographic maps of the Austro-Hungarian empire from between 1877 and 1914 and 1,100 covering the Mid-Atlantic United States between the 16th and 19th centuries. The map pictured above, which depicts what is now Manhattan’s financial district, dates from 1775 – when New York was still a possession of the British Crown.

[Source: NYPL.org]

Xbox One update transforms your phone into a universal remote

Microsoft has revealed details of the next update for the Xbox One – and a highlight is its improvements to SmartGlass, the console’s companion app for smartphones and tablets. The update will bring OneGuide to SmartGlass, as well as allow it to control devices other than the Xbox One, such as a set-top box and TV.

The update will be rolled out to every Xbox One user in the future, but for now will be beta trialled to selected Live members in the US, Canada and Europe. These trial will be invite only, and will see Europe-based users finally get TV listings on OneGuide and Kinect voice commands for AV equipment. These features are already available to all US-based users.

[Source: CVG]

READ MORE: Microsoft Xbox One review