Month: March 2010

Lenovo Says “No” to Slate PCs following launch of X201

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source –thinkpads.com by John Hobbes

lenovo_thinkpad_x200_tablet_outdoor_screen_slate-display

Lenovo recently discussed with CNET that their experience shows businesses and even many private customers don’t want a slate only PC with no physical keyboard. The informal interview coincides with the recent launch of their ThinkPad X201 Tablet convertible notebook and is certainly fueled by the attention on Apple’s slick new iPad.

Lenovo has shown enterprise customers mock-ups of slate devices that would be business-appropriate, but no one was interested due to the lack of physical keyboard. They even went as far as to ask high school kids:

Majapuro said Lenovo even got feedback from high school kids. “These were 14-year-old kids, who, I thought, would be most willing to try a virtual keyboard but they said no, we want the physical (built-in) keyboard.”

Although, somehow I doubt they asked high school kids if they wanted a super slim, stylish device that “has an App for everything” and will automatically elevate you to cult status, free with every purchase.

You can have a convertible netbook, a dual-screened giant workstation, a true convertible tablet and even a 14-15 inch multitouch laptop, but no slate (from Lenovo) for you.

Source: [CNET]

Scratched,damaged iPhone restored with sandpaper

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source – lifehacker.com by Kevin Purdy

iPhone are scratch-resistant, but life throws some tough stuff at our phones. One MacRumors user, owning a phone that looks pretty beat, demonstrates the full process of restoring his phone with sandpaper and a new LCD kit.

The poster makes a point of noting that on most phones, you’ll only want to use a rougher sandpaper to tray and remove 90 percent of the scratches, not get to a completely clean and polished look—with the scratch-resistant coating completely removed—as shown at the full post. For those looking to completely refinish their phone, there’s a very informative post on the technique of wet sanding, along with tips on taping up your controls and glass and polishing off the finished result. For those with cracked or deeply scratched glass, there’s a replacement guide included, too.

It’s a cheap process and not too much time, especially if you don’t plan on upgrading to a new model any time soon (ha!). While you’re at it, you can also try giving your bezel a brushed look.

Photo Friday’s Monitor Calibration Tool Tweaks Your Monitor to be Easier on Your Eyes

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source – lifehacker.com by Jason Fitzpatrick

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to adjust your monitors without a lot of fussing with multi-step processes the calibration tool at Photo Friday can help you tweak your monitor.

Nothing is a true substitute for hardware calibration but if you’re not working in the print industry or as a professional photographer you don’t need to calibrate your monitor to the physical world you need to calibrate it so that contrast is correct and you can use the monitor without straining your eyes.

Over at the photography site Photo Friday they have a simple calibration image you can use to adjust the brightness and contrast on your monitor to an optimum level. Visit the link below and follow the simple instructions to tweak your screen.

If you like your calibration tools to have a few more sliders, bells, and whistles, check outpreviously reviewed Online Monitor Test. Have a favorite software or hardware tool for monitor calibration? Share them at lifehacker.com.

Photo Friday Monitor Calibration Tool [via MakeUseOf]

Acer frameless laptop touchscreen keyboard

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source – engadget.com By Thomas Ricker

Would you believe that Acer is working on a frameless laptop with touchscreen keyboard? As far-fetched as the idea might be, it’s certainly plausible, expected even. The idea, as rumored by DigiTimes, involves doing away with the display’s frame by printing colors directly onto the back of the display’s reinforced glass substrate from Corning (a la Gorilla Glass presumably). Coupled with a touchscreen keyboard, the rumored device should be impossibly thin by traditional laptop comparisons. Keep in mind that we’ve already seen this Frame Zero concept pictured above from Fujitsu and Acer’s arch-rival ASUS has been showing off its dual-display laptop prototype with touchscreen keyboard for months. Even the OLPC XO-3 plans to eschew the clickity keyboard in favor of a touchscreen version. And anyone who has ever seen a scifi movie knows that tactile keyboards and display bezels have no role to play in our computing future anyway, so we might as well get things started now — or in the second half of 2010 according to DigiTimes‘ sources.

Fujitsu’s LifeBook UH900 flaws

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source – engadget.com By Darren Murph

There’s no question that Fujitsu’s LifeBook UH900 is a niche device; much like Sony’s VAIO P, there’s just not a lot of demand for an expensive clamshell with an extremely high resolution and an exceptionally cramped keyboard. That said, there’s a curious seduction surrounding this thing, and critics over at Pocketables seemed to agree. After spending some long days (and nights, don’tcha know?) with the Japanese version of this here device, they came away with a huge mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, the snappy performance and excellent portability made it difficult to put down, but the downright dreadful 2 – 2.5 hours of battery life more or less forced them to. There’s also more gentle gripes about the screen color, the “toy-like” build quality and “useless multitouch.” For us, that’s probably one flaw too many to accept, but the forgiving among us should definitely check out the full skinny before making a final call.

Pixel Qi DIY kits will be out in Q2, slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb

Posted by ts On 08.03.2010

source – engadget.com By Paul Miller

We’re going to assume that Mary Lou’s bravado-filled “It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb” is in reference to working with OLPC. In fact, in Mary Lou Jepsen’s most recent Pixel Qi blog post she makes quick reference of the fact that there will be DIY kits for replacing your own laptop screen (most likely a 10-inch module) with the sunlight-friendly, switchable magic of Pixel Qi, but she spends the rest of the post talking about how in Nigeria some schoolgirls started up a laptop hospital where they’d repair their XOs by swapping out parts or reseating cables. We doubt most of our laptops will be so resilient when it comes to ripping off the bezel and swapping in the Pixel Qi part, but we’re dying to void our warranty and find out.

10 Inch Tablet Convertible Netbooks Compared – Viliv S10 Wins

Posted by ts On 07.03.2010

source – netbooked.net

Sascha from Netbooknews takes a look at the latest generation of 10-inch Pinetrail tablet convertible netbooks, the Gigabyte T1000, Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t and the Viliv S10 Blade. All pretty much unique in their own way, with their own strong points but when it comes to looks, size and weight, the Viliv S10 Blade is clearly ahead of the other two.

Both the T1000 and S10 have 1366 x 768 displays. The S10-3t and T100 are available with Atom N470 processors, the S10 has either an Atom Z530 or Z550 processor. No accelerometers on any of them. S10 has a resistive 3-point display vs capacitive 2-point on the S10-3t (don’t know if T1000 is resistive or capacitive). With a decent configuration the S10 will be the most expensive.

Video below:

Viliv S10 Blade Tablet Netbook

Posted by ts On 06.03.2010

source – netbooked.net

Chippy from UMPC Portal has got in an early production sample of the upcoming Viliv S10 Blade convertible tablet netbook which sports a 10.1” 1366 x 768 display with resistive multi-touch. His particular model came with the Atom Z530 (1.66GHz) processor. Underneath reveals a removable li-poly battery supposedly good for up to 10 hours and an access panel for the 1.8” storage device.

The touch screen gets a workout as Chippy tests out 3 point touch, handwriting, virtual key typing and zooming in out and of webpages whilst pointing out the lack of palm rejection. It’s not looking too much different in terms of functionality and speed from my ASUS Eee PC T91MT.

The Viliv S10 Blade will be priced at $699 and should be available to preorder from Dynamism very soon. All the configurations are available to check out. Video below:

Archos 7 cheap tablet previewed during CeBIT 2010

Posted by ts On 06.03.2010

source – alltouchtablet.com author – G

As promised, Archos has launched at Cebit his so called home tablets, Archos 7 and Archos 8, which distinctive price characteristics that puts them in the affordable range. Of course there ware compromises to be made, so some of you could be disappointed because they perform pretty slow (cheap CPUs), but it all depends on how you balance price and performance in your own value system.

Archos 7 Home Tablet is a 7 inch 800×480 screen tablet, running Android powered by 600MHz ARM9-based Rockchip 2808CPU and 128MB RAM. It is incredibly thin (0.5 inch) and lightweight (0.8 lbs) and, when talking about the connectivity, Archos 7 comes with Wi-Fi and USB connections, thus making it appropriate for web-surfing, watching videos from Youtube or from a flash drive or external HDD. There’s no 3G but you can live without that.

Archos 7 looks like a real tablet: cheap and multimedia oriented

The resistive touch screen responds very well, a light pressure being adequate for the tablet to work properly. In addition, the quite huge keyboard makes typing really easy, so you can use the tablet for taking notes or composing emails very well.

Other features offered by the Archos 7 are the build in stereo speakers offering a good sound quality for this type of gadget, 2 GB flash memory, microSD support, video out connector and the most import is that it has a 7 hours battery life for video playing and 44 hours for listening to music. There’s even an integrated desk stand that comes up from the back and allows you to use the Archos 7 on a table just like a digital photo frame.

After all, we found the quality-price ratio really attractive, considering that the price of Archos 7 Home Tablet is expected to raise to $179 for the 2GB version and around $250 for the 8GB model. Both version should be available in a few months and hopefully we can do a hands on review with them by that time.

Source: Jkkmobile, Crunchgear

Entourage eDGe review – 9.7 inch eInk screen and 10.1 color LCD, powered by Android OS

Posted by ts On 05.03.2010

source – alltouchtablet.com author – John Pope

Entourage eDGe: nice to get as a gift

Covering CES 2010 early this year I was surprised by the amount of dual screen netbooks and hybrid devices small producers tried to push into market to see customer’s reaction. Entrourage eDGe is one such product featuring a dual screen design, one 9.7 inch eInk screen and 10.1 color LCD, both powered by Android OS and an 1.2 GHz CPU.
Laptopmag is the first to post an early review of the Entourage eDGe and shared their opinions with all of us, so here’s what you can expect from this nice concept. Even if 1.2 GHz seems a lot for a mobile CPU, in practice the device is overall slower than the Motorola Droid, which has a 550 MHz CPU. Also things are not getting too far with the battery life, which is not helped by the Power Management software that seems not to be able to close the screen once you fold the device.

The nice part is the ability to focus attention on just one screen by folding the Entourage eDGe back on back and flip the device to face the screen you want. Unfortunately the resistive touchscreen layer on the LCD screen is hard to press some times and has shallow viewing angles, while the eInk screen can be used with a special stylus made for the digitized screen that allows the user to take notes on the eBooks he reads. The only problem is that a page with annotations takes 4 seconds to turn.

The virtual keyboard is not that responsive but gets the job done

Even if it uses Android, Entourage eDGe doesn’t have access to Android Market so there aren’t many apps you can install and the book library only has 250.000 books and I’m not talking about bestsellers here. Add to that over one million of Google Books and I guess you can be satisfied, but no newspapers and magazines are available.
For now the 499 $ dual screen tablet is a nice concept but there’s much to be improved and hopefully there will be a second generation of Entourage eDGe.

read entire article with video review at alltouchtablet.com

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