Hasta La Gadget!

This week, Apple gave us minor hardware upgrades, while a little company made a linux tablet. This might leave you wishing for an Apple tablet, but that could be a stupid thing to ask for.

I mean, really, ask yourselves this: How would you use such a thing differently than a laptop? Tablets have typically been great in note taking environments as giant, battery-constrained, heavy digital notepads in the field for pro writers and medical types or soldiers or construction workers.

But for consumers, the most obvious path is the appliance route, making it a simple web browsing machine, with some basic mail and media playback. Things netbooks and laptops can handle and have been handling. I admit, a netbook type tablet is the right form factor for enjoying media casually, away from a desk or livingroom. It fits between — actually — a TV and a Notebook, and is more portable than either. That makes it ideal for reading certain media like electronic magazines (when they’re available) and TV shows, movies, and other video clips in portable places. What does this mean?

It means that a tablet is the perfect machine…for reading websites and movies on the toilet. And yeah, um, my laptop can do that already.

Let’s talk about the UI a bit more. If the machine has a pop up keyboard, like an iPhone, you can also assume it may have a pen, like all recent tablet prototypes and models have. Either, or both.

But both of those ideas kind of suck for people raised on true keyboards.

I was raised on a QWERTY and I’ve almost failed penmanship and aced typing class. And the trend is that more people focus on typing than cursive. And as far as using the pop up keyboard occasionally, I can use these fine. Very quickly in fact. But the majority of the world hates these too and typing all day on one of these could be maddening, even at a greater size, no matter how fluent you might get. Do you place it on the table every time you type so you can use it like a full sized keyboard? Or do you hold it in two hands, like and iPhone, and try to peck away, even though reaching across the layout of the QWERTY would be much harder on a bigger device with a bigger key set? None of the typing logistics really matter if this is mostly a media consumption device. But the net appliance theory doesn’t really work for me.

The cost of such a nice screen and the surrounding hardware is going to be at, oh, I’d guess $500, if not $700 more with Apple tax. That’s too much money for a machine that can’t run all the OS X apps out there on the desktop version, too much for what’s basically a giant ipod touch. It’s also more than a regular old hackintosh’d Dell netbook.

So it has to be a laptop variant, with all the power of an full OS X laptop to make a difference to me. There are two ways this can be done. The old way is to take OS X and slap on those UI components we talked about, the pen and soft keyboard, as well as some OCR software for translating your chicken scratch into text. That’s what Microsoft did, and well, how many Tablet PC users do you know? Not many, I bet!

The new way to make a tablet? Well, I have no idea what the new tablet UI is. And neither does anyone in computing. It’s going to come down to how the UI works and I can’t even imagine what it would be like.
If Apple is going to make a tablet, they’re not going to slap on some UI extensions, they’re going to figure out a way to really use the form factor and make it a remarkable useful and significantly different device that justifies the loss of the efficient hard keyboard and cost of the touchscreen while being competitive in price somehow with the subsidized mini-tablets that fit in your pocket, the iPhones. But somehow, I doubt there’s a paradigm shift here waiting to be unlocked, because again, the tablet isn’t just an old idea, its an ancient idea.

The aspirational design for the tablet is pretty straight forward, and has been around, depending on your definition, since the 1960s or WW2 or the late 1800s, depending on which patents you look at. Or longer if you consider the stone tablet. The idea has been there, and has been flawed when translated to our digital world and weird and not much beyond basically what I called it earlier: an oversized, battery constrained, expensive digital version of a paper notebook. But, with internet video. Not so great!

The Always Innovating Touch Book does something I’ve never seen from a netbook: it has a fully detachable keyboard dock and transforms from a standard looking 8.9-inch netbook, to a stand-alone tablet.

Spearheaded by Gregoire Gentil, the man behind the Zonbu Desktop and Laptop, the Touch Book is his latest project, and a promising one at that. Gentil says the Touch Book’s hardware and software are fully open source and ready for modifications. While the device will come preloaded with a custom Touch Book OS, Gentil says this machine is capable of running mobile operating systems such as Android or Windows CE.

The hardware I saw wasn’t quite complete—the software was demoed on a prototype, and the final hardware above were just empty shells to give an idea of the design—so I cant comment too much on how well the end product performs, but I saw enough to consider this thing more than vaporware.

The Touch Book is the first netbook powered by a 600 MHz TI OMAP3 processor (built around ARM technology), 256 MB RAM, 3-axis accelerometer, an 8-gigabyte microSD card for storage and two batteries providing up to 15 hours of usage between charges. The 8.9-inch screen can display resolutions up to 1024×768 and uses a resistive touch panel.There’s also the usual offerings of 802.11b/g/n wi-fi and Bluetooth.

As a standalone tablet, the Touch Book is roughly 9.5″x7″x1″ and weighs about a pound. When docked to the keyboard, it is about 1.4-inches thick and weighs 2 pounds. All of the Touch Book’s guts, except for one of the batteries, are housed in the tablet portion of the device, so that it’s fully functional while detatched from the keyboard.

The chipset fits on a motherboard about the size of an index card, and is heavily optimized to get the best performance out of the hardware. Part of this involves stacking the RAM directly on top of the processor in a package on package configuration. The lid of the touchbook also pops off, so you have easy access to the hardware and it’s two internal USB ports you can use for dongles you dont want hanging off the side of the tablet.

As far as software goes, the OS is based around the Open Embedded Linux platform, but fully customized for the Touch Book hardware. As such, the Touch Book has the power to handle full screen video, and render OpenGL 3D graphics. Gentil says the Touch Book can run some of the same games found on the iPhone and plans to offer them in the future.

The Touch Book UI design depends on what configuration the hardware is in. When docked to the keyboard, the Touch Book uses a standard, cursor-based UI that looks like other Linux desktops. However, when in tablet mode, it uses a custom-designed, touch-based UI. The touch UI is based around spherical icons that rotate in a circular fashion as you swipe to the next one. Content is divided into three categories: web, apps and settings.

On the apps side, Touch Book will ship with both Firefox and Fennec (Mobile Firefox), games that will make use of the accelerometer, plus various sorts of web and productivity apps, such as word processor and spreadsheet-type programs.

Always Innovating plans to start shipping the Touch Book in late May or early June, priced at $300 for the tablet alone, or $400 for the tablet and keyboard dock combination. Pre-ordering will begin next week, and you can order the Touch Book in either red or dark grey colors. Gentil says he would also like to release future iterations that include support for GPS and 3G mobile broadband. [Always Innovating]

NEW TOUCHBOOK COMBINES NETBOOK AND TOUCHSCREEN TABLET; PROVIDES THREE TIMES THE BATTERY LIFE AT UNDER TWO POUNDS

PALM DESERT, Calif. March 2, 2009: Always Innovating today unveiled the Touch Book, a versatile new device that works as both a netbook and a tablet thanks to a detachable keyboard and a 3D touchscreen user interface. The Touch Book, previewed at DEMO 09, weighs less than two pounds as a netbook and has a battery life of 10 to 15 hours – three times longer than most netbooks.

“The Touch Book is perfect for these tough economic times because you can use it in so many ways,” said Gregoire Gentil, founder of Always Innovating and creator of the Touch Book. “You can use it as a netbook computer, a hand-held game device, or a video player. You can even reverse the keyboard to prop it up on a table in an inverted ‘V’. Finally, because it is magnetic, you can remove the keyboard and put the tablet on the fridge to serve as a kitchen computer or digital frame.”

The Touch Book combines the best of open source software and open hardware with a sleek industrial design by designer Fred Bould. The innovative design includes internal USB plugs. “I hate having dongles hanging from my laptop – I often end up disconnecting them accidentally – so we opted to put the USB inside,” said Gentil.

The Touch Book is the first netbook featuring an ARM processor from Texas Instruments, resulting in outstanding battery life, and a fan less, heat-and-noise-free system.

According to Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conferences, the Touch Book’s innovative architecture and industrial design earned it a spot on the DEMO conference stage. “The longer battery life is a boon to netbook users. But the Touch Book’s versatility – its ability to function as a netbook as well as a standalone touchscreen tablet – makes it a breakthrough product,” said Shipley

The Touch Book is expected to ship in late spring and will start at $299. Advance orders can be placed at http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/store/.

Converting a notebook into a tablet is one of the toughest — and most impressive — mods out there. Over in Mobile01forums are some pictures (above) of a 7-inch Asus Eee PC 701 netbook turned into a tablet, and it looks pretty sweet.

Keep in mind that this type of mod requires installing a touchscreen, cramming all the guts into a different case and then figuring out how to tweak the software to work like a true tablet. This one even has buttons on the side for launching applications and controlling the cursor.

See Also:

• Cheap, Easy-to-Mod NetBooks Are a Hacker’s Paradise
• Tablet Hackintosh on Dell Netbook

Mobile01 Forums [via Liliputing]

Photo: Mobile01 Forums

LAS VEGAS — Other computer manufacturers might think the Tablet PC is dead, but Asus has its own ideas.

At a press conference here at CES 2009, Asus showed a prototype version of the EeePC T91, a convertible tablet-style notebook. Its 8.9-inch swiveling screen folds up to expose a keyboard, like any other notebook or netbook — but it can rotate around and folds back over the keys, turning the device into a tablet.

You know you want one.

Unlike other tablets, it is touch-sensitive, meaning you can use your
finger (or fingers) to tap on icons, select text, and perform other
mouse actions. You can also use an included stylus, if you prefer.

Also unlike other tablets, the T91 will weigh just 2.1 pounds. It will
run on Intel’s Atom Z520 processor, which means that the T91 will be
relatively underpowered, like other netbooks.

It will likely be running a version of Linux, like other Eee PCs, and pricing will be low — in line with other netbooks, Asus representatives are saying.

Bonus features include a TV tuner and GPS.

A related model, the T101, will have similar features (minus the TV tuner and GPS) but a larger, 10.1" swivel screen.

The T91 will be available around March 2009, and the T101 will follow shortly thereafter.

The company, which singlehandedly invented the ultra-cheap, ultra-light
netbook category with the Eee PC, is betting on multitouch as the next
big thing. And why not? Apple’s iPhone has shown that a well-executed
touch-screen interface can do a lot to make a computer so fun and easy
to use that people cease to think of it as a computer.

In addition to its multitouch-capable tablets, Asus also showed off a prototype of a strange, two-brained computer with a secondary, 4.3-inch display embedded just below the keyboard.

In this prototype (no actual product is planned yet, Asus says), the mini display is also the computer’s touchpad. And it has its own processor, which you can use without booting up the main computer — so you can listen to music, check your calendar or check your email, all from this tiny, parasitic iPhone-like display embedded in the base of your notebook. The advantage that offers is that it will be instantly on (no boot time required) and it won’t use much power.

The touchscreen computer can also be used to select a movie from your hard drive or DVD drive and then display it on the big screen, again without using the computer’s main processor or going through a lengthy boot process.

Whether anyone will actually go for these strange hybrids is another question. But one thing’s clear: Asus is not afraid of mixing things up a little.

Photos: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com