Development Kits of Google’s Project Tango Tablet coming to select Countries – Australia isn’t one of them

Google has announced overnight that development kits of its Project Tango Tablet are coming to 12 more countries over the next month.

The countries which have been lucky enough to score themselves access to the Project Tango Dev kits include South Korea and Canada, residents of these countries are able to order these kits right now, with the remaining countries, which include Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom getting access to the kits from August 26.

The kits, which are intended for developers only, have already seen more than 3,000 units of the device shipped since going on-sale. The release also states that so far, there have been hundreds of applications created by developers that enable users to explore the physical space around them, including precise navigation without GPS, windows into virtual 3D worlds, measurement of physical spaces, and games that know where they are in the room and what’s around them.

The Tango Tablet is a high-end device, but also carries a US$512 price tag. The specs however may be good enough to warrant a purchase to power some of the high-end development that Google wants. So, what’s inside a Tango tablet?

• 7.02” 1920×1200
  HD IPS display (323 ppi) with Scratch-resistant Corning® glass
• NVIDIA Tegra K1 with 192 CUDA cores
• 4GB RAM
• 128GB internal storage with MicroSD Card slot
• Dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4GHz/5GHz) WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, NFC
• 1 MP front facing, fixed focus with IR LED and 4 MP 2µm RGB-IR pixel sensor
• USB 3.0 host via dock connector and Nano SIM slot
• Dual stereo speakers and 3.5 mm audio connector
• Sensors:
• Motion tracking camera
• 3D depth sensing
• Accelerometer
• Ambient light
• Barometer
• Compass
• GPS
• Gyroscope
• 119.77×196.33×15.36mm @ 370grams
• Android 4.4.2 (KitKat)
• 4960 mAH cell (2 x 2480 cells)

The tablet is designed to operate at the high-end, and that includes receiving updates to keep it ‘modern’. The Google Developer team states that so far, there have been 13 software updates released for the tablet that make it easier to create Area Learning experiences with new capabilities such as high-accuracy and building-scale ADFs, more accurate re-localisation, indoor navigation, and GPS/maps alignment. Depth Perception improvements have also been included to enable the addition of of real-time textured and Unity meshing. Furthermore, updates have also included improvements in IMU characterisation, performance, thermal management and drift-reduction.

The Tango Dev team have also said that they have some big improvements and announcements coming up in the future and are encouraging potential developers interested in Project Tango and the tablet to sign up to their monthly newsletter and also join in the conversations over on the Project Tango Google+ Community.

The only sad point is that once again, Australia does miss out on getting the chance for our developers here to take partake and get the development kits, but this could change in future, hopefully.