Hasta La Gadget!

Synaptics, the designer of many of the touchpads used in notebooks and other devices, has used the Computex show in Taiwan to launch ClickPad, a technology that allows the touchpad to also serve as a button that can be clicked.

The idea, according to the company, is that by eliminating the additional buttons, OEMs can create more compact devices, such as ultraportables or netbooks. The standard range of gestures, including three-finger gestures, can be used on the ClickPads.

Synaptics also said that its DualMode TouchPad is now available to support “under plastic” designs , allowing OEMs to build in a plastic overlay. The DualMode allows users to tap to switch the touchpad over to a “multimedia controller,” and the plastic overlay allows those OEMs to highlight multimedia features which can be accessed via the touchpad itself.

The final bit of news? That the company’s entire SGS 9.1-enabled TouchPad family is Microsoft Windows 7 ready. Phew!

Synaptics has shipped 350 million touchpads since 1995.

This article was written on November 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

Windows Vista is less than two-weeks away from being released to businesses but the consumer release is still over 2-months away. That leaves Microsoft plenty of time to promote individual features and aspects of the new operating system in hopes of building hype and excitement.

A recent post by Jim Allchin is certainly a hype builder because it boasts the 19,500 drivers that come on the Windows Vista DVD by default. I can certainly vouch for the quality of drivers because it is a significant improvement over the Vista Beta 2 released earlier this year.  Despite the nightmare of included drivers in Beta 2 all of my devices on both my desktop and laptop were recognized when Vista RC1 was released. Well, my built-in memory card reader wasn’t recognized but Windows Update downloaded the drivers for that. Also, I still had to install the XP driver for my Synaptic mouse because I wanted to disable the tap-to-click feature, which is something the generic mouse drivers don’t let you do in Windows.

When Windows XP was shipped there were 10,000 drivers included so the number has nearly doubled with the release of Vista. Is that surprising? Not really because there has been a long period between the days of XP and Vista so the number of new devices have increased tremendously. I remember when I installed Windows XP for the first time it was so nice not having to download the drivers for my PC. The same thing can be said for Vista…right now that is. In a year when I purchase a new computer I’ll be in the same boat where I’ll need to download all of the drivers if I want something to work properly. Hopefully, as Jim says in the post, Microsoft will contiually do a god job adding third-party drivers to Windows Update so that you shouldn’t have to hunt down the drivers if they aren’t included on the Vista DVD.

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Just as it did with the Z-Drive at CeBIT, OCZ Technology has delivered a few surprises across the way at Computex. Kicking things off the 17-inch DIY gaming laptop, which takes a note from the DIY-styled Neutrino, but gets a much bigger form factor. It’s one of the few laptops that actually arrive sans a CPU, hard drive and RAM, but it’ll support Core 2 Duo / Core 2 Extreme chips, as many as two 2.5-inch hard drives and plenty of DDR3 memory. Other specs include a 17-inch WXGA panel, NVIDIA’s Hybrid GeForce 9600GTS graphics, an optional Blu-ray drive, ExpressCard slot and a full accompaniment of connectors. The 7.9 pound machine ships with an 8-cell battery, though there’s no word yet on pricing or availability.

Moving on, we’ve got the Ion-based HTPC, which is outfitted with a 1.6GHz Atom 230 CPU, Vista Ultimate (64-bit), 4GB of DDR2-667 RAM, an OCZ 120GB SSD, Blu-ray drive, gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, HDMI output and a multicard reader. Finally, there’s an all-new Neutrino, which is being introduced just weeks after the original shipped here in the US. This new character packs a little more color and a lot more oomph, with NVIDIA’s nForce Ion graphics, a 1.6GHz Atom 230 CPU, 10.1-inch display (1,024 x 600), room for 2GB of DDR2 RAM (ships with none), a 2.5-inch HDD / SSD slot (ships with none), WiFi, a 1.3 megapixel webcam, Ethernet, HDMI, two USB 2.0 sockets and audio in / out jacks. As with the 17-incher, there’s no word yet on pricing or availability, but we’re hoping to hear more on those tidbits soon.

Filed under: Laptops

OCZ intros 17-inch DIY laptop, Ion-based HTPC / Neutrino netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We had a hunch that Computex would be a massive show for NVIDIA, and while we already caught a glimpse of what the GPU manufacturer had in store, we had no idea it’d come out with guns this big a-blazin’. Showing absolutely no mercy for those other integrated graphics sets of the world, NV’s today unveiled 21 new Ion-based products in Taiwan, with all but a handful being completely unheard of. Of course, there’s the AspireRevo, Ion 330 and IdeaPad S12, but outside of that select few, everything else is all new. Asus is introducing its C2N7A-I motherboard and all-in-one Eee Top ET2002, Colorful is busting out its iHTPC, ECS is pushing out a new desktop and MSI is showcasing its Windtop AE201. And that’s just to name a few. Hop on past the break for the full spill, and don’t stray too far — we’ll be out and about grabbing hands-on time with as many of these as we can track down.

Continue reading NVIDIA strikes gold with Ion: 21 new products at Computex

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

NVIDIA strikes gold with Ion: 21 new products at Computex originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Jun 2009 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After a brief digression into the topic of barefoot running, the evolution of humans as long-distance runners, and the bizarre-looking foot-gloves called Vibram Five Fingers, the Gadget Lab crew launches into a brief discussion of the Maker Faire, which happened this weekend in San Mateo.

We then detail the new HTC Magic — Google’s brand-new Google Ion phone, which sports the latest version of Android, aka Android 1.5, aka Cupcake. This is the keyboard-less successor to the HTC-built T-Mobile G1, and there’s a good chance it will be coming to T-Mobile later this year.

We also tackle the new Microsoft Zune HD, which, despite the name, doesn’t actually have an HD screen: Instead, it can play HD radio, and it has an optional connector so you can send HD video to an external display.

And finally we review MSI’s impressive X340, which matches the Macbook Air feature-for-feature (in every respect except the operating system) yet costs just half the price: Only $900. We like!

This week’s podcast features Danny Dumas, Priya Ganapati and Dylan Tweney, with superb audio engineering, as usual, by Fernando Cardoso.

If the embedded player above doesn’t work, you can download the Gadget Lab podcast #7 MP3 file.

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