EAFT Magic Tile and Compal tablets shown in India, Tegra 2 and Android in tow

We heard earlier this month that half a hundred ARM-based tablets would be launching this year, and it’s pretty safe to say that these will be two of ’em. Shown off recently in Mumbai, India’s own EAFT spurred interest with its Magic Tile, a presumably Billy Mays-endorsed Tegra 2-based tablet that runs on Android. We’re told that it’s equipped with a 7-inch touch panel (1,024 x 600 resolution), a front-mounted 1.3 megapixel webcam for video chats, 1080p video encoding / decoding abilities, optional 3G, a battery good for 8 hours of usage, inbuilt accelerometer, Bluetooth, HDMI output and a USB socket to round things out. All told, it’s a pretty well-specced machine, though we’re certainly hoping that the design gets a little TLC before it’s launched in Q3 for an undisclosed rate. In related news, a Compal tablet was also on display, boasting a similar 7-inch layout, a Tegra 2 chip within, 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 3 megapixel camera and a complete lack of WiFi (gasp!). Head on past the break for a hands-on vid.

Update:
We thought this thing looked familiar. If you had the same feeling, it’s probably because the Magic Tile is actually that ICD Ultra tablet we played with a little while back. Still, “Magic Tile” has a catchy ring to it.

[Thanks, Sriram]

Continue reading EAFT Magic Tile and Compal tablets shown in India, Tegra 2 and Android in tow

EAFT Magic Tile and Compal tablets shown in India, Tegra 2 and Android in tow originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Virtusphere’s virtual reality hamster ball put to the test

For eons we’ve wondered what it would be like to walk around in a bona fide Virtusphere, and at GDC last week we finally got our chance. The large plastic cage can turn and roll in any direction, and once replete with a wireless head-mounted display and fake gun, we were ready to take on some polygonal alien baddies. Getting into the cage is surprisingly easy, but unfortunately once we had a screen strapped to our head our well-honed sense of balance was right out the window, and we found ourselves staggering around a bit as we got used to the motion of the cage. The real military versions have a motion sensing gun controller, but we had to do all our aiming with our head, which didn’t help. After a minute or so we got used to the “momentum” involved in moving the cage, which felt pretty great, but we’d say our favorite part about the experience was just being able to turn in place to confront baddies — there’s something about a few well placed steps that really blows away a left or right tug on our 360 controller’s analog stick. At the end of the day the sheer size, cost, and ultra-dated graphics has us hardly pining for one of these in our living rooms, but with a bit more work on the gaming end (and a working gun pointer) we could see this as the arcade experience to beat. Check out a video of our harrowing experience (from outside and inside) after the break.

Continue reading Virtusphere’s virtual reality hamster ball put to the test

Virtusphere’s virtual reality hamster ball put to the test originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AiLive shows off its LiveMove 2 software for building MotionPlus and PlayStation Move gestures

If you’ve been following closely, there are really two sorts of input available to the PlayStation Move. The one that gets the most love and screen time is the camera-based, 3D meatspace tracking that the PlayStation Eye performs in conjunction with the fancy colored ball at the end of the PlayStation Move wand, but most of the actual gameplay we’ve seen is in truth much more similar to the Wii’s MotionPlus than Sony might want to let on. The MotionPlus and PS Move have very similar configurations of gyroscopes and accelerometers, and actually use the same software from AiLive (co-creators of MotionPlus) for developing the gesture recognition that goes into games. We actually got to see the LiveMove 2 development environment in action, and it’s pretty impressive: basically you tell a computer what gesture you want to perform (like “fist pump,” for instance) and then perform a bunch of examples of that movement. LiveMove then figures out the range of allowable movement, and in playback mode shows you whether you’re hitting the mark. AiLive showed us gestures as complicated as a Graffiti (of Palm OS yore) handwriting recognition in the air, built with just a few example movements from people back at their offices. So, this is great news for developers dealing with the significant complication of all these sensors, but at the same time we can’t help but be a little disappointed. LiveMove 2 doesn’t even use the PlayStation Eye, and as we mentioned in our hands-on impressions of PlayStation Move, we could really sense that a lot of our in-game actions were built from predefined gestures, not us interacting with the 3D environment in any “real” or physics-based way. It’s great tech either way, but hopefully that’s something that can be improved upon by launch or soon after. Check out a demo of LiveMove in action after the break.

Continue reading AiLive shows off its LiveMove 2 software for building MotionPlus and PlayStation Move gestures

AiLive shows off its LiveMove 2 software for building MotionPlus and PlayStation Move gestures originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows Phone 7 Series preview, MIX10 edition

We just spent some quality time with the MIX10 build of Windows Phone 7 Series running on the same prototype hardware sourced from Garmin-Asus that we saw at MWC — and apart from a few Murphy’s Law-style demo hiccups, we loved what we saw. One thing that immediately caught our attention was the fact that lists of items “compress” slightly once you’ve reached their end — something we hadn’t noticed before. In general, it’s pretty impressive how much attention Microsoft is paying to the finer aesthetic points of the platform, from the slight “tilts” of items that you’ve pressed to the 3D effects you encounter as you flip through photos. Another thing we’ve confirmed here is that the test units do have accelerometers, refuting an earlier rumor that had been spreading out in Barcelona — we know this because the display auto-rotated while viewing a photo. Check out the full video — along with a shot of the phone resting alongside its Zune HD cousin — after the break.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 Series preview, MIX10 edition

Windows Phone 7 Series preview, MIX10 edition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Panasonic Touch the Future Tour lets production Full HD 3DTVs hit the public stage

Panasonic has never needed to wait for a new studio album before putting together another major tour, the latest of which it’s dubbed Touch the Future. Trading in the traveling truck exhibition for a more intimate indoor setting, the real production Full HD 3D televisions are available and on display, along with glasses, Blu-ray players plus a few other products for good measure. We took a look as soon as the doors opened in NYC (the display runs through today at the Penn Plaza Pavilion and other locations in Chicago and Los Angeles, check the schedule for 12 more cities on deck) and got an eye full of the same 50-inch plasma 3DTVs on sale at Best Buy stores around the country. One major new look for this demo was an NVIDIA PC running the 3DTV Play solution, as you can see from the pics even New York’s finest enjoyed turning a lap or two of Need for Speed: Shift in 3D. The action was smooth and easy compatibility with 3D gaming on the PC should provide plenty of content while we wait for more true 3D games to hit consoles (which should ramp up after the PS3 update this summer) while checking out Blu-ray demos on a 50-inch television proved every bit as engaging this time as it did on the 152-inch CES display.

Continue reading Panasonic Touch the Future Tour lets production Full HD 3DTVs hit the public stage

Panasonic Touch the Future Tour lets production Full HD 3DTVs hit the public stage originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo

Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the “make a virtual representation of a gaming space” idea might seem ripped straight from Sony’s Home, there aren’t really any actual similarities — outside of the fact they’re both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom “level” of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We’re sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it’s a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there’s a “rewind” function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It’s perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.

Continue reading Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo

Microsoft’s Game Room for Xbox ‘rewinds’ the hits in our hands-on demo originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cowon V5 review

Cowon‘s V5 has been out and about in South Korea for just over two months now, but thankfully for the Yanks who are downright flustered with the existing PMP options here in the States, the company has decided to bring this beaut stateside. Boasting a 4.8-inch resistive touchscreen (800 x 480 resolution), a Windows CE 6.0 underlying OS, HDMI / USB sockets (via adapters from a proprietary socket), a voice recorder, integrated speaker, 3.5mm headphone jack, 8/16/32GB of internal storage, an SDHC expansion slot, a battery good for 45 hours of music playback (or 10 hours with video) and a format support list that would drive you batty to read, there’s a lot (lot!) to love about this thing on paper. We were fortunate enough to get our hands on one of the first units to ship to America, so hop on past the break for our two pennies.

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Cowon V5 review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell introduces $339 G2410H 24-inch 1080p LCD monitor, we go hands-on

Just over a year ago, Dell pushed out its latest and greatest 24-incher, the energy-sipping G2410. Today, the Round Rock powerhouse has introduced that very unit’s successor (complete with a height adjustable stand), the G2410H. Still sized at 24-inches, this 1080p LCD monitor sports a variety of eco-modes, 5 millisecond response time, 160-degree (horizontal) / 170-degree (vertical) viewing angles, a native 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, ambient light sensor, 250 nits of brightness, a 1,000:1 contrast ratio and DVI / VGA inputs. We’ve had one in-house for around a week now, and for $339, it’s not a bad replacement to that 21-inch CRT that’s still weighing heavily on your desk. It’s not as sharp and brilliant as the (admittedly more expensive) UltraSharp U2711, but it was certainly clear enough for the average home user. It’s shipping now if you just can’t resist.

Dell introduces $339 G2410H 24-inch 1080p LCD monitor, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on

It’s almost too much to take in all at once. Sure, the $1,999 Cintiq 21UX pen display is priced out of reach for most of us mere mortals who “don’t draw good,” but the pure lustworthiness of this unit sure makes us try to forget that inconvenient fact. The expanded movability of Wacom’s latest is commendable, the pen input is naturally great, the screen is beautiful, and even those new rear-mounted touchpads seem helpful. It would take someone much more familiar with professional draw-ist-ing to really speak to the more specific merits of the 21UX, but from a mere standpoint of inspiring irrational desire in our hearts, Wacom seems to have done a pretty good job this time out. Check out a video of the screen in action after the break.

Continue reading Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on

Wacom Cintiq 21UX hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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InstantAction streams full games to any web browser, gives indie developers a business model (video)

Look out, OnLive — you’ve got company. InstantAction is having their coming out party at GDC, and we stopped by for a lengthy chat about the technology, its future and the hopes / dreams of the company. Put simply (or as simply as possible), IA has developed a browser-based plug-in that allows full games to be played on any web browser so long as said browser is on a machine capable of handling the game. In other words, you’ll still need a beast of a machine to play games like Crysis, but the fact that you can play them on a web browser opens up a new world of possibilities for casual gamers and independent developers. You’ll also be notified before your download starts if your machine and / or OS can handle things, with recommendations given on what it would take to make your system capable.

Oh, and speaking of operating systems — games will only be played back if they’re supported on a given OS, so you won’t be able to play a Windows only title within a browser on OS X or Linux. Rather than taking the typical streaming approach, these guys are highlighting “chunking.” In essence, a fraction of the game’s total file size has to be downloaded locally onto your machine, and once that occurs, you can begin playing. As an example, we were playing The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition — which is the sole title announced for the platform so far, though Assassin’s Creed was demoed — within minutes, and since you’re curious, that’s a 2.5GB game, and we were on a connection that wasn’t much faster than a typical broadband line.

More after the break…

Continue reading InstantAction streams full games to any web browser, gives indie developers a business model (video)

InstantAction streams full games to any web browser, gives indie developers a business model (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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