Of Sony’s trio of Xperia phones announced yesterday at IFA 2012, we’ve now seen the smallest and most budget-friendly model — the Xperia J — make it through the mounds of red tape and federal approval. Fortunately for us, Sony didn’t bother requesting confidentiality on the various teardown photos that typically are kept away from prying public eyes. As always, it’s important to withhold any assumptions that this particular device will make it to any US carrier; FCC approvals never offer any guarantee, and the J’s lack of LTE isn’t going to help matters. Still, this seems like an ideal device for a prepaid operator to pick up, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed. In the meantime, gaze upon the full teardown in the gallery below.
Sony likes to do things differently, and the VAIO Duo 11 is its unusual entrant to the Windows 8 tablet market. Billed as a “hybrid sliding PC” the Duo 11 looks, at first glance, like a chunky tablet, but pull up just above the front-facing webcam and the touchscreen slides back and up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. It’s an approach we’ve seen before, from the ASUS Eee Pad Slider, but here running Microsoft’s full Windows platform and with a digital stylus for handwriting and sketching.
VAIO notebooks generally look the part, especially the more expensive ones, and the Duo 11 follows in those footsteps with an angular black casing that’s a nice diversion from the usual round-cornered fare. The glossy plastic is a fingerprint magnet, of course, and Sony’s non-final hardware showed some flex when you pull the screen open, but once upright and in place – in a single, non-adjustable angle – it stuck fast no matter how roughly we jabbed at it.
Sony has chased connectivity not headline grabbing dimensions, and so while the Duo 11 isn’t the fattest tablet we’ve ever seen, nor does it rival recent Samsung and Apple slates for waifish form-factors. Instead, you get HDMI and USB connections, along with – in what seems to be a bizarre accommodation of legacy business users – a full-sized VGA connection. Things get even thicker if you bolt on the extended battery slice, doubling runtimes at the cost of significantly increasing width.
Sony VAIO Duo 11 hands-on video:
Unfortunately, adding that extended battery is seemingly the only way to accommodate the pen when you’re not using it – it slots into a cutaway underneath – which is a shame since stylus input works well in general. OneNote, Microsoft’s unfairly overlooked notetaking app (which will sync its notes with its cut-down counterpart on Windows Phones), receives digital ink with aplomb, the pressure sensitivity of what we’re guessing to be a Wacom-sourced digitizer paying dividends for quick sketches and handwritten notes.
As for the keyboard, it’s more compact than a regular notebook, but still very usable for typing. There’s a trackpoint-style navigation nub in the middle of the ‘board, though rather than physically moving it uses an optical sensor to map the movement of your fingertip. Still, we found ourselves using the touchscreen more often than not, as reaching forward felt more natural.
Unlike some Windows 8 tablets, Sony hasn’t compromised on raw grunt. There’s Intel’s Core i7-3517U paired with 4Gb or 8GB of RAM, and up to 256GB of SSD storage; the 1080p 11.6-inch display is incredibly crisp and bright. The underlying message is yes, you can use this as your main PC, but you’re probably going to have to pay handsomely for it. Sony will announce numbers closer to the VAIO Duo 11′s official release in late October.
Huawei didn’t have any new hardware to show during its packed press conference, but it did have an early version of its Emotion UI skin for Android devices. Aiming to make its smartphone experience a little gentler for first-timers, while offering up a slightly different flavor of Google’s OS, Huawei’s been polling its customers, running user experience salons and meeting regular groups of between 40 – 70 consumers to understand what was working — and what was definitely not. To this end, the company’s “driven [itself] crazy” by keeping to a tight schedule and releasing iterative updates every two weeks (at least for beta) and monthly for stable builds.
It’s alive! We spotted a powered-off version of LG’s latest monitor earlier in the week, but now it’s loaded up with content and ready to make its formal debut. LG’s gone big — very big — with some of the showings at its IFA booth. But in addition to the massive 84-inch UD 3D TV and the 55-inch OLED HD TV, it’s also showcasing some more modest displays. The company announced its 21:9 aspect ratio monitor, the 29-inch EA93, just prior to IFA. The IPS monitor boasts a WQHD resolution (2,560 x 1,080 pixels) and supports four-way split-screen view. The wide-screen aspect ratio is the same you’ll find at a movie theater, making it an ideal choice for viewing Blu-ray flicks, and LG’s framing the EA93 as a choice setup for photographers and other multimedia pros, too.
LG had a half dozen of the displays on hand at its IFA 2012 booth playing content in a loop. One station demonstrated cinema playback with a trio of recent film trailers, while other demos included a stock-tracking layout, side-by-side browser windows and the Windows 8 screen you see above. Speaking of that latest Microsoft OS, the EA93 is perfectly suited for viewing extended layouts, giving you direct access to even more tiles simultaneously. We couldn’t accurately judge sharpness, as the pre-recorded screens didn’t appear at full resolution, though colors did appear bright and accurate. The chrome stand complemented the black finish nicely, while a multitude of ports on the back enabled USB 3.0, HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI connectivity. You can grab an up-close look at both sides of the 21:9 monitor in our gallery below.
Lenovo’s ThinkPad Tablet 2 isn’t new – the company announced it officially earlier this month – but we had our first time to get up close and personal with the Windows 8 business-focused slate at IFA. Unlike Lenovo’s Android models, the ThinkPad Tablet 2 is Lenovo very much on form: it’s clearly from the ThinkPad stable, for instance, and is filled with details that suggest the company was thinking about their business users first and foremost.
The choice of full Windows 8 rather than Windows RT is a good start – the Tablet 2 will slot neatly into any existing enterprise setup, and run all the same apps – and the ThinkPad keyboard dock, which is obviously removable, has similar feel to the company’s laptop ‘boards. Both slate and dock were non-final hardware, however, so we’ll have to wait for final builds to know exactly how well they match.
Then there’s full sized USB, that old favorite the TrackPoint, and the option for integrated 3G/4G for road warriors. Pull out the stylus – as long as you’ve specified the active digitizer option – and you can use handwriting recognition and sketch in OneNote. We do wish Lenovo had gone for a bigger pen, however, as Lenovo’s barrel is a little thinner than we’d like.
Lenovo isn’t specifying which Intel Atom processor is powering things, and nor is it talking about pricing. That’s likely to be the biggest deciding factor for business users, though Lenovo is potentially waiting to see how Microsoft prices the Surface Pro. Speaking of which, Lenovo EMEA chief Gianfranco Lanci claims the company isn’t concerned about Microsoft wading into the hardware business:
“It’s very welcome if other people – including Microsoft – come with [a] Windows 8 tablet, I think it’s good for Windows 8. I see it from a positive point of view and not a negative point of view, unlike a lot of people, because they think that Windows 8 can be a player in the tablet market. It’s also a good advert for us … we’re not negative at all about this movement”
We’ll know more when the ThinkPad Tablet 2 goes on sale, alongside Windows 8 on October 26.
We first saw LG’s 55-inch OLED TV at last year’s CES, where it drew a fair share of oohs and ahhs at the company’s press event. In May, the tentative pricing info for the European market was released, but this set’s future in the US remained TBD. Fast forward to IFA 2012, and we’re in front of this giant again — but this time, it’s sporting 3D. True, at 55 inches, it’s no goliath compared to the 84-inch TVs we’ve seen this week from Sony, Toshiba and even LG, but the company claims this 55-inch model is the largest OLED HDTV available, and its carbon fiber backing and ultra-thin 4mm profile are certainly the markings of a high-end setup.
During LG’s booth tour today, we had a chance to sneak a peek at the now 3D-capable set, which otherwise looks quite similar to the version we saw at CES, albeit with a bit more polish. In order to achieve a 4-millimeter profile, the set packs all of its connectivity in the base module. There’s also an Invisible Connection module on order, which hooks up to the TV through a proprietary optical connector and transparent cable, should you wish to mount the display on your wall. Naturally, 3D content wasn’t as sharp as its 2D counterpart, but the OLED looked great regardless. With its ultra-thin design, it’s surely meant for consumers who care about aesthetics perhaps even more than image quality, but if you can stomach the €9,000 price tag, this is one fine get. Take a closer look in our gallery just below.
Follow all of our IFA 2012 coverage by heading to our event hub!
Here’s yet another 84-inch 4K TV, this time from LG. The company’s 84LM9600 was announced last week and has already started shipping in Korea, but it’s here at IFA and poised to hit the market worldwide. Priced at about $22,105, this display is big in every way. You get a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 — four times the resolution of existing full HD panels — and what LG calls “3D sound” thanks to 2.2 integrated channel speakers. 3D is courtesy of the company’s passive glasses technology. So how does that all look?
We spotted the set during LG’s booth tour today. At first it seemed like “just another” 84-inch 4K TV (the form-factor seems to have exploded within the last week), but this flavor is rigged for three-dimensional viewing as well. You’ll need to view 2D content in order to take advantage of the full resolution, and the picture in this mode seemed to be on par with the competition, based on our quick peek at IFA. And how about 3D? The passive picture was consistent with the company’s other sets, just, well, much much larger. Will you be making room for this massive set in your living room? You might want to take a closer look in our hands-on photos below before pulling out that credit card.
Follow all of our IFA 2012 coverage by heading to our event hub!
Designed for more realistic living quarters, LG’s unleashed its Personal Smart TV to the IFA crowds. With a 27-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 IPS display, you’ll also find the typical stable of connectivity options, including two HDMI, three USB, component, LAN and SCART connections. The screen seemed well-lit with the IPS panel offering suitably reliable views from most angles. It’s a pretty stylish-looking TV too, with a rough metallic finish to the bezel, which while not jaw-dropping, is still suitably narrow. The Smart TV functions were also navigable through LG’s Smart Remote, offering a WiiMote-ish approach to media browsing. Our demo model was already packed with German media content — in both 2D and 3D — ready for when it launches here next month. It’ll be appearing in shops across Europe around the same time, although there’s no word on the set landing on US shores. Check out our quick hands-on video after the break.
Follow all of our IFA 2012 coverage by heading to our event hub!
It’s a tough world for a cheap Android tablet. Lenovo’s budget Ice Cream Sandwich pair, the IdeaTab A2109 and A2107, arrive not only in the usual shadow of the iPad, but of Google’s $199 Nexus 7. Of the two, the A2107 takes on the official Google-slate most directly with its 7-inch 720p screen, though it’s comparatively underpowered with an unspecified A9 processor.
That shows its limitations when you’re paging through Android – 4.0, of course, not Jelly Bean 4.1 as on the Nexus 7 – which shows a little jerkiness and lag. That could be improved with software updates, we’re guessing, but right now it doesn’t exactly make the A2107 feel like a premium product.
That’s a shame, because physically the IdeaTab A2107 feels great. The soft-touch rear cover is tactile and easily gripped, in contrast to the smoother A2109. That has a 9-inch screen and a Tegra 3 processor, and the quadcore’s turn of speed shows its worth by keeping Ice Cream Sandwich running noticeably smoother than its smaller sibling.
With little to make either model stand out, buying decisions are likely to come down to price alone. $299 will get you the 9-inch A2109, while Lenovo is yet to confirm numbers for the A2109.
Lenovo had a trio of Android tablets for IFA 2012, with the most interesting being its IdeaTab S2110. Like many Ice Cream Sandwich slates we’ve seen in recent days, the S2110 comes with a useful keyboard dock that turns the tablet into a mini-notebook; unlike most, that dock also includes a battery for prolonging runtime. We snatched some hands-on time to see how it shapes up.
The specs are par for the course for Android tablets: Qualcomm S4 dualcore processor, a 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 touchscreen, and twin cameras. Lenovo has gone for a decent IPS LCD, which has wide viewing angles and looks good in both portrait and landscape orientation, and a more structured hinge than rivals like Samsung have gone for.
That leaves the S2110 looking clunkier than other docking tablets we’ve seen recently, and the chrome-effect looks better in Lenovo’s renders than it does in the plastic. The ‘board itself wasn’t functional, though we were able to get a feel for how thick the pair would be when joined up.
In short? It’s pretty thick, a long way away from the slimline world of Samsung and Dell, even when you take into account the 10hrs of extra battery, full sized SD card slot, and two USB ports.
Still, Lenovo’s model is up for sale today, while Samsung and Dell haven’t confirmed when we’ll be able to buy their docking slates, so that’s a big advantage for the IdeaPad S2110 if you’re in desperate need of a tablet today. It’s priced at $399 slate-alone or $499 with the keyboard thrown in.
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