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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We’ve been hearing reports about Nexus S’ Android 2.3.3 update adding a yellow tint to the screen and even washing out its colors, but according to Google’s Ry Guy, said patch is indeed intended to tweak the display’s color temperature. Here’s the full quote from Google’s support forum:

“With your new OTA complete, you may notice a slight difference in the way colors are displayed on your Nexus S. For Nexus S, we have adjusted the color temperature settings to more accurately reflect darker colors at all brightness levels. The Gingerbread UI being darker, we found that the colors were not as accurate when the device was being used at lower brightness levels. For example, some users reported that the initial color temperature was too high leading to some darker greys having a reddish tone; with the new color temperature this is no longer the case.”

So while this display tweak is well-intentioned, it looks like many commenters on both the forum and XDA-Developers aren’t too happy with this. Being curious geeks that we are, we went ahead and manually updated our own Nexus S (and by the way, be sure to match your build number with the appropriate patch). As you can see in our comparison photos (shot with the same manual camera settings and medium screen brightness), the new overall color temperature is no doubt subtly warmer, although the dimmer brightness settings no longer suffer from the aforementioned red tone. Interestingly, we actually approve this change, and the Super AMOLED display certainly doesn’t look washed out to us, nor do we see any noisy dithering that some have reported. Surely we can’t be alone. Well, there’s only one way to help solve this mystery: if you happen to be a fellow Nexus S owner who’s applied this update, why not chime in below?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Nexus S 2.3.3 update adjusts screen’s color temperature, we go eyes-on originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As crisp and vibrant as AMOLED and Super AMOLED smartphone displays are, they roll off the assembly lines with a pretty big design compromise: most of the components in the marketplace right now make use of a little visual trickery called PenTile whereby green subpixels occur with greater frequency than red and blue. Meanwhile, traditional displays (CRT, LCD, plasma, you name it) typically use one red, one green, and one blue subpixel per pixel, and the end result is that AMOLEDs tend to be a little grainier by comparison at a given resolution. OLED-Info points out that Sammy’s new Super AMOLED Plus displays appear to have solved the PenTile problem, instead using something called Real-Stripe — effectively meaning honest-to-goodness RGB pixels, which explains the company’s claim back at CES of a 50 percent boost in subpixel count. Interestingly, Real-Stripe requires more space per pixel, which could be why the Galaxy S II and Infuse 4G are 4.3 and 4.5 inches, respectively, a pretty healthy hike from the 4-inch mark they’d settled on with last year’s original Galaxy S models. ‘Course, none of this puts us close to the 7 or 10 inches we’d need to make a tablet work — but we know they’re cranking on that already.

Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus displays dispense of maligned PenTile pixel configuration originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the grand scheme of things, one millimeter may not seem like a lot, but in the smartphone arms race toward ever-slimmer devices, measurements like that matter. Synaptics, best known for building laptop touchpads, has ventured into the capacitive touchscreen realm with a new panel that promises to save exactly that much space: 1mm. But that’s only the start. You see, the thinner display profile is the result of Synaptics melding the touch-sensing layer and the display into one, using what it calls in-cell technology, with the result being something roughly comparable to Samsung’s Super AMOLED implementation. The benefit of going with Synaptics, however, is that the company’s tech is compatible with all display types, meaning that everything from garden variety LCDs to high-density IPS panels can be infused with a bit of touch sensitivity. Additional benefits include extra brightness, as there is one fewer layer for light to get through, and significantly higher sensitivity than on most current generation touch panels. You can see a pretty compelling demo of that on video just past the break. The ClearPad 3250 should find its way to shipping devices over the next nine months, with its current iteration capable of being fitted to screens up to five inches in size and a subsequent model scaling all the way out to eight inches.

Continue reading Synaptics ClearPad 3250 capacitive touchscreen hands-on (video)

Synaptics ClearPad 3250 capacitive touchscreen hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Corning, your scratch-free monopoly is coming to an end. No longer will you hold us hostage with your insanely durable and cunningly marketed Gorilla Glass. Asahi Glass is getting in on the game, introducing Dragontrail — a name that doesn’t quite give us the same connotations of incredible strength but, if you watch the video, you’ll see it manages many of the same tricks as Corning’s offering. Poking and prodding? Pass. Huge flexes? Bring it. Whacked with a hammer? Easy. The company indicates it’s been working on the product for years now and expects sales next year to surpass 30 billion yen — that’s $365 million. For glass.

Continue reading Asahi Glass introduces Dragontrail for consumer electronics, puts the Gorilla on notice (video)

Asahi Glass introduces Dragontrail for consumer electronics, puts the Gorilla on notice (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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