Hasta La Gadget!

Though there are bigger multitouch screens out there — and ones that can support more simultaneous touch points — 3M’s brand new C3266PW is the company’s largest, said to be suited for industrial-strength installations with multiple simultaneous users (the company is quick to note that the ultra-wide 178-degree viewing angle along both axes is great for that, since folks can crowd around and start touching). They demoed the new unit here at CeBIT in two ways: three of them in a row on a “cascade table” with one high, one slanted, and one low, and another separate unit mounted on a solo kiosk at roughly eye level. The table’s set up as a multi-display Windows box running a tech demo with maps, images, and videos that can be flicked between screens, pinched, and zoomed; the kiosk, meanwhile, is running a rudimentary flight simulator designed to demonstrate all ten points of multitouch capability at once with a finger-based aircraft control scheme (not the way you’d really design a game, but a good demo nonetheless).

3M points out that touch response — the amount of time that it takes the screen to actually recognize that it’s been touched — is an issue in the industry, and it’s not something that we really think about as users; if a gesture is laggy, we just assume the processor isn’t up to the task or the software sucks. The C3266PW is rated at a relatively brisk 12ms recognition time, and while the company has other products with even quicker ratings, we definitely noticed the lack of lag as we played around (of course, the computers powering the displays have plenty to do with that). We’ve come to associate good capacitive displays with glossy glass and resistive with matte, but that’s really not a fair assessment — this one has a non-glare “anti-stiction coating” that, as its name implies, makes your fingers glide like butter. It might not be great for a phone, but it works well for a display of this size that’s probably going to be used in public installations and potentially handled by hundreds of people a day. Follow the break for 3M’s press release and video of both setups!

Continue reading 3M’s 32-inch display with 10-finger multitouch steps out at CeBIT (video)

3M’s 32-inch display with 10-finger multitouch steps out at CeBIT (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 17:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well there you have it folks — the absurdly thin new iPad 2. We just got our hands all over the next greatest tablet from Apple and it’s… very much the same, save for that new body. There’s no question that the industrial design is top notch, and we did notice some speedier behavior when jumping around — but the core OS remains unchanged, so this won’t be a major shock. We’re spending more time with the device and getting impressions, but for now, feast your eyes on the galleries below.

Update: Okay, we’ve had a chance to play around the with iPad 2 some more, and here are our big takeaways from the experience.

• This thing is insanely fast. We’re not joking — it’s blazingly fast. Everything the iPad 2 does feels like it’s on turbo. We’re uploading a video of the some evidence of this, you’ll be appropriately stunned.
• The design feels great in your hands. Sleek, super thin — much nicer to hold than the previous version. Definitely has more of a magazine than book feel. Everything is tight and solid. It is pretty amazing how thin they’ve gotten the device.
• Even software made for the first generation device feels better here. Safari is definitely sped up. Games looked great on-screen, though obviously there are no updates to the resolution of screen technology here.
• This is an evolutionary step, but we definitely don’t feel like it’s lacking for features. People are going to gobble these up when they see the new apps.

Update 2: We’ve got some video after the break!

Update 3: More videos!

Continue reading iPad 2 first hands-on! (update: even more video!)

iPad 2 first hands-on! (update: even more video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 14:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unless you’re eagerly anticipating your IT department handing one of these to you, something tells us the Stylistic Q550 isn’t the tablet you’re looking for. Why’s that? Everything about the experience screams “corporate,” starting with our time at Fujitsu’s booth earlier today where business dealings to deploy the tablet in some corporate environment were literally happening before our very eyes. There was only one unit in the vicinity — and the suits were relentless in trying to get their paws on it — but we spent just long enough with it to figure out that there are far, far better-suited consumer options out there; as far as we can tell, that’s exactly how Fujitsu wants it. That opinion was further reinforced by the presence of a smart card reader on the side (for secure logins), a fingerprint scanner on back, and old-school pen input, which Fujitsu tells us that legacy tablet users (read: medical personnel and field data entry folks) still want. It can take fingers, too, but we felt like the quality of the display is compromised a bit for the dual-mode support. Interestingly, there’s no place to store the pen in the tablet anyway; you’ll need the accessory case for that.

The company is talking about its custom Windows 7 skin as a key differentiator. The build they had on the demo unit was a little buggy, but at any rate, we came away with the impression that it’s basically just a finger-friendly view to launch apps; fortunately, the full Windows experience — which is just as non-touch-optimized as ever — is just a tap away. We were hoping the Oak Trail guts would keep everything snappy, but the pre-release code here was actually lagging pretty badly as we navigated from screen to screen. Don’t get us wrong: we’re sure these are precisely the specs that some enterprise customers are looking for… but as an individual, gadget-loving, tablet-wanting human being, we’re pretty sure they aren’t the specs that you’re looking for.

Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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First, the good news: Xtreamer has its lovely little Ultra HTPC out and hooked up here at CeBIT. Now, the bad: the considerably more beautiful Prodigy streamer is under lock and key, and they won’t be doing any demos. Ah, well — may as well make the best of the situation, right? In brief, the Ultra might be the baddest little HTPC we’ve seen here at the show — Xtreamer seems to have nailed the equation with the small size and the price point. It doesn’t look cheap, either; we imagine it’s a little overbuilt-looking with those faux heat sink fins for some living rooms, but you can plug in an IR extender and bury the actual box in a cabinet if you like. The company’s staying very media platform-agnostic, shipping with Boxee and XBMC among others on a 2GB USB flash drive that houses the entire operating system. And at a shipping price of €200 (about $277), it puts the hurt on the Boxee Box. Look for it in early April.

Turning our attention to the Prodigy, this thing is seriously gorgeous for one reason: a large curved sheet of metal covering the top and sides. Functionality is another matter entirely, though, and as we mentioned before, Xtreamer isn’t demoing it here. On paper, at least, it should take care of business thanks to USB 3.0 and AirPlay support along with an internal 3.5-inch hard drive bay — and the company is currently taking pre-orders for €50 (about $69), which seems dirt cheap for what you’re getting. Like the Ultra, Xtreamer expects to ship it in early April.

Xtreamer Ultra HTPC hands-on — and Prodigy eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Our reader meetup this past Friday in San Francisco was infiltrated by a somewhat unusual assailant, Panasonic’s GF2 Micro Four Thirds shooter. Sporting a new, significantly thinner, pancake lens primed at 14mm with a maximum F2.5 aperture, this eminently portable camera managed to sneak into the building while concealed inside one of our editors’ jacket pockets. As we’ve said before, the major difference between the GF2 and the GF1 for us is that the new model really feels like a compact point-and-shoot, to the point of making us forget that it has a DSLR-sized sensor within it. We’ve put together the following galleries, which were mostly shot in the fully automatic mode, to give you a taste of how Panasonic’s latest handles the challenges of a poorly lit nighttime scene, on the one hand, and a gorgeous sunny day, on the other. Enjoy!

Panasonic GF2 crashes the Engadget reader meetup, collects a gallery of memories / sample images originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Mar 2011 10:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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