Hasta La Gadget!

Is 20-inches too much for you? Sony thinks every home doesn’t just need a coffee table tablet, but a tablet scaled more like a coffee table: the Tap 20 takes Windows 8 and touch to all-in-one PC levels. In fact, the 20-inch device sits somewhere in-between AIO and tablet, offering 10-finger multitouch control of Microsoft’s new OS for something targeted at browsing, casual gaming and multimedia.

Up front is a 1600 x 900 display, short of Full HD but still good enough to do duty for video playback in your kitchen or den. You needn’t settle on just one location, either; Sony has equipped the Tap 20 with a rudimentary battery, enough to keep it powered up while you move from room to room.

Ports are arrayed along the edge, including audio in/out and USB, and there’s a front-facing webcam for video calls. Support is from a single metal stand that allows for tilt adjustment, though as you’d expect Sony has had to make it on the stiff side so as to support the chunky upper section.

Sony Tap 20 10-finger Fruit Ninja multitouch demo:

We scoffed at first, but after a while stabbing, slashing, and swiping with all fingers on Fruit Ninja on a huge display, the Tap 20 begins to shine. As it’s a full Windows PC, of course, you can plug in a keyboard and mouse and do “proper” work with it, should you need to.

Sony hasn’t finalized the design yet, so pricing isn’t settled, but that’s likely to be the deciding factor for most homes. If Sony can undercut the smaller all-in-one PCs – think along the lines of ASUS’ Eee Tops from a few years back – then it may not be quite as ridiculous as it first seems.

Sony Tap 20 oversized home tablet hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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.

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 hands-on is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

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.

Lenovo IdeaTab S2110 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.