Hasta La Gadget!

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.

Sony VAIO Duo 11 hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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 IdeaTab A2109 and A2107 hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Wearable displays have jumped in attention over the past twelve months, with the arrival of Google’s Glass driving interest, but Sony continues to push virtual big-screen entertainment rather than augmented reality. The HMZ-T2 Personal 3D Viewer was a quiet surprise at IFA, replacing last year’s T1 with a more compact, lightweight version using a pair of 720p HD OLED screens to create a virtually vast individual screen. Read on for our hands-on first impressions.

Where wearables like Google Glass focus on overlaying digital data on top of the virtual world, Sony’s headset hopes to take you away from it. The two OLEDs are enclosed in a white and black plastic visor – you can see your feet below you, but nothing ahead of you – and though they’re each only 0.7-inches diagonal, the effect is of watching a considerably larger screen at a distance of several feet.

The first struggle is getting it to fit. Perhaps I have an unfeasibly large head, but getting the adjustable strap – which pulls on like a baseball cap, from back to front – to sit snugly but still allow the visor to sit in my eye-line proved tricky. You also need headphones, either a set of in-ear buds plugging into the HMZ-T2 itself, or a separate pair of cans that you put on secondly. There’s a padded piece that rests against your forehead, and while we were able to ignore it initially, we could imagine it might get uncomfortable after watching a full feature film.

Once you’ve actually got it on, though, the result is impressive. The screens may be 720p not 1080p, but you don’t notice at that distance: the overall effect is of crisp visuals that are bright enough to be clear but not so much as to hurt your eyes. Meanwhile the 3D effect is excellent: none of the shimmer or shudder that you can suffer using regular 3D TVs.

Controls are hidden on the lower side of the headset, though they’re quite small and – since you can’t actually see them when you’re pressing them – could do with being larger for more straightforward navigation. A dual display switcher, meanwhile, allows for two players to game on the same console, one using the TV as normal and the other seeing their own personal view through the HMZ-T2.

Sony HMZ-T2 hands-on:

Sony isn’t talking price yet for the T2, though its predecessor came in at around $800. That gets you a big TV for home viewing or a couple of tablets for on the move, though the latter are never really going to provide the same visual experience as the former. The HMZ-T2, however, might well prove a sufficient alternative, and that’s before you get into the possibility of hooking up computers or other devices to take advantage. Expect it to hit shelves later in 2012.

Sony HMZ-T2 hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Dell’s XPS Duo 12 has some lineage, but it’s not really the sort of ancestry you’d want to talk about too loudly. The original Inspiron Duo was a case of good in theory, poor in practice: a notebook with a rotating touchscreen that could turn it into a slate, let down by an underperforming CPU, clunky build and Windows 7′s lack of finger-friendliness. Now, with the XPS Duo 12, Dell has brought some of its ultrabook knowledge to the concept, and from what we’ve seen today it’s with good result.

Dell isn’t allowing people to properly play with the XPS Duo 12, and in fact the convertible ultrabook spent most of its time behind glass. Nonetheless, we’ve seen enough to be impressed by the industrial design. Gone is the cheap, thick bezel; gone is the fat chassis that made the original Duo so unconvincing as a slate.

They’re replaced by crisply finished metal, and the end result is a machine that looks great: convincing both as a notebook and as a tablet. What’s going on inside won’t be announced until closer to launch, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the performance lives up to the slickness of the exterior.

There’s inevitably a size and weight compromise when you bring a keyboard along with you, but Dell isn’t alone in expecting that Windows 8 tablet users will want traditional QWERTY input more often than not. Most other manufacturers are opting for the detachable keyboard-dock system, which makes for a lighter tablet but means you do end up with a thicker hinge.

In contrast, the XPS Duo 12 is an all-in-one for on-the-go. That distinctiveness, if Dell can price and power it accordingly, may well earn it some attention in what’s likely to be a crowded Windows 8 marketplace.

Dell XPS Duo 12 eyes-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

HTC has a low profile at IFA this year, with only one new smartphone – the HTC Desire X – and a midrange one at that. More compact than the One X and One S (and likely to be cheaper, too), the Desire X resurrects a familiar name with an eye firmly on the mass market. We caught up with HTC to find out whether it strikes the all-important balance between affordability and performance.

It’s not hard to see that it’s an HTC phone. The company’s rather sober styling has stayed a constant in recent years, and the Desire X owes much of its two-tone curves to the One X. It’s a successful design, though whether it will stand out on store shelves amid more eye-catching phones remains to be seen. The white does better there than the black, with its matte silver around the bezel and the matte white backing.

In the hand, it’s solid if not entirely inspiring, though we can see the compact 4-inch screen being an advantage to those who aren’t persuaded by big-display handsets and phablets. Unfortunately that comes at a price – namely resolution – and at WVGA 800 x 480 the Desire X’s pixels are visible. It’s a shame, as the Super LCD itself has decent viewing angles and bright colors, and the laminated screen means there’s no gap between glass and display, so we wish HTC had opted for at least a qHD panel.

HTC Desire X hands-on video:

As for the camera, it’s a good example of why megapixels aren’t everything. HTC’s own research continues to suggest that photographic performance is one of the key factors buyers make when they pick a new phone, and so while the Desire X may only have a 5-megapixel sensor, it’s backside-illuminated for improved low light performance, and paired with an f/2.0, 28mm wide angle lens. We’ll have to wait until review units are available to see how well the Desire X actually uses all that, but based on the track record with the One series devices we’re quietly confident.

Also like the One series is HTC Connect, the company’s media streaming system. That hooks up to certified speakers or receivers over WiFi or WiFi Direct, and can currently squirt across audio from the phone’s music apps. However, HTC plans to expand that to support video streaming in the future, and while so far only Pioneer has signed up, the expectation is that more manufacturers will jump on board soon.

UI is the Sense 4.1 we’re familiar with from the One series, running on top of Ice Cream Sandwich with a 1GHz dualcore Snapdragon S4 keeping things churning with 768MB of RAM. That’s less than we usually like to see in an Android smartphone – 1GB has generally become the standard, with more devices showing up at 2GB in recent months – but we didn’t notice any immediate stuttering or lag. The Desire X is, of course, a phone built with a semi-budget price in mind, so HTC had to save somewhere; the same is visible in internal storage, of which around 2GB of the total 4GB is available to the user. A microSD card slot can be used to add more.

Unlocked, HTC expects the Desire X to come in at under €300 ($377), though contract pricing isn’t finalized. If HTC can work with carriers to significantly undercut other midrange models from Sony, LG, and Samsung when the Desire X hits shelves in Europe and Asia come mid-September 2012, then it could grab a slice of first-time smartphone buyers. So far Phones 4U has revealed one free-on-contract deal, in the UK, from £20.50 per month; that sounds a little high to us, though if you opt for a £26 tariff you get a free set of Beats Solo headphones. Nonetheless the risk, as always, is that bigger and more capable phones are often available for just a little more.

HTC Desire X hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.