Hasta La Gadget!

The Apple rumor that keeps on giving — the touchscreen iMac — has just been given another shot of monger juice. DigiTimes (who else) cites industry sources who claim again that Sintek Photonics is shipping Apple touchpanels to sample for use in a future 20-plus-inch iMac. Specifically, the panels are of the projected capacitance type (same as iPhone/iPod touch/iPad) and integrate the touch sensor with the glass cover for reduced thickness and weight while exhibiting “good” viewing angles and brightness. While the image above, extracted from an Apple patent, gives us a clue as to how a touchscreen iMac might be used, we remain unconvinced of its advantages (drawing stylus, anyone?). Then again, we’re sure Apple has lots of whacky products in house for R&D so why not one more.

Apple touchscreen iMac rumor just won’t die originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Image via SonyStyle.com

Are you intrigued by touchscreen, tablet-style media players, but don’t want to give up anything — and I mean anything — from your desktop PC? The refreshed high-end Sony Vaio L is pricey and heavy, but it’s packed to the gills.

Yesterday, Sony announced its holiday-season refresh of the Vaio line of notebook computers (barring the 8″ notebook-not-a-netbook Vaio P, which was updated in May).

The 24″ let’s-call-it-an-all-in-one-notebook-’cause-even-my-lap-isn’t-that-big Vaio L is packing a quad-core Intel processor, a 2TB hard drive, a capacitative touchscreen with true HD resolution, a webcam (well, yeah), an NVidia graphics card with 1GB video-dedicated RAM (on top of the 8GB of regular memory), and (most significantly) a Blu-ray read/write drive.

It’s got Sony’s own touch-friendly media management and editing suite, and also comes with Windows 7 Home Premium, a wireless keyboard and mouse, and a remote control. The whole thing costs $2200 (already on backorder), and the part with the screen weighs 27.6 lbs — about the same as an old 24″ iMac.

So it’s a portable computer, in the sense that you can pick it up and move it from one part of the house to another, but you can’t exactly hold it in your hands. But if your complaint about Apple, Android, or Windows 7 touchscreen tablets has been that “they don’t even have ____,” this Sony is your answer.

If you don’t want all that, you can also get an entry-level Vaio L with “only” a half-TB of storage and no Blu-Ray on clearance for less than $1300. But that might feel a little like driving a Lexus without power windows.

See Also:

• Sony Vaio P Gets Accelerometer, Touchpads, 3G
• Sony Vaio TZ150
• Sony Vaio SZ Premium Model
• Sony Launches 'World's Lightest' 8-Inch Notebook (Not a Netbook …
• Touchscreen PCs Prompt Interface Innovations
• Report: Google Working With Intel, Sony on TV Project

Image by VirginAmerica.com

I flew Virgin America for the first and only time in December 2008, from New York to San Francisco. When I used its interactive back-of-the-headrest food-and-media menu, the first button I pressed, naturally, was Books. “Coming soon,” it said. Two years later, when you use the menu, books are still “coming soon.”

EBookNewser’s Dianna Dilworth recently had the same experience, and wondered whether Virgin might be on the verge of brokering some content agreements to finally bring reading into the picture:

There are a number of ways that it could work. Perhaps you could sign in to an existing Amazon or Barnes & Noble account and access your digital bookshelf directly. Or perhaps the airline could sell bestsellers or short stories directly. Think Atlantic Fiction’s monthly short stories in the Kindle store.

It could also be a great place for publishers to market their books and give away sample chapters. I like to catch up on new music videos on Virgin’s entertainment system, so why not read a couple of chapters from a few new bestsellers to decide which ones I might actually like to buy and read.

Some objections and counterarguments: Don’t people already bring their own books and magazines onto planes? Why would you want to buy one from Virgin? True: But airplanes and airports do a brisk business selling at a markup plenty of things you could consume more cheaply at home or on the ground. Books would be no different. You’re paying for convenience — or, looked at another way, as penance for your poor planning.

Don’t e-readers, tablets, laptops and online Wi-Fi make this moot? People won’t read from the back of a headrest — they’ll read on the devices they own already. Also true. But don’t discount the power of free, ad-subsidized, or exclusive reading materials. Some of the fun of using these screens is the entertainment/video-game aspect of it: Let me goof around with this and see if I can find anything good. And Virgin already lets their first-class and business-class (excuse me, “Main Cabin select”) customers enjoy all the entertainment they want. If Dilworth is right, publishers could use sample chapters or whole books like music labels use music videos — as promotional material targeted for an affluent, tech-savvy audience that literally can’t get out of their seats.

Obviously, in the future, this won’t be limited to Virgin, or even to airplanes: You could imagine similar screens being deployed on trains or intercity buses, performing the same multimedia functions. As these tiny screens become more ubiquitous and we become more accustomed to reading from them, the more likely it becomes that we’ll do more and more reading of all kinds on screens anywhere and everywhere. But as Dilworth says, there’s something about reading books on airplanes that just makes sense.

See Also:

• Airline 2.0: Virgin America Geek Plane Takes Off
• Virgin America Admits It's a Dirty Bird
• Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
• The Future Of Reading
• Stephen Fry and Our Transmedia Reading Future

Yeah, you made me feel, shiny and new… We digress. That’s jkkmobile‘s finger in the photo above, testing out Microsoft Surface Globe on the Dell Inspiron Duo convertible’s swiveling 10-inch screen — a rite of passage that you can watch after the break in all its low-res glory. We’re seriously jealous of this dude right now, but thankful that he discovered a few more facts about the device: for one, that swivel only spins in one direction, and for another, we’re looking at a capacitive multitouch screen. We still don’t know what those sensors are on the left side of the netbook’s clamshell frame nor what resolution that webcam shoots at, but we do see a set of flaps on the left-hand side presumably concealing some ports, and what could be a flat removable battery pack on the bottom of the cherry-red unit. Video after the break.

Continue reading Dell Inspiron Duo touched for the very first time

Dell Inspiron Duo touched for the very first time originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony 350 with Cover from Sony Style

Sony doesn’t get as much attention for its e-book readers as Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble, but it remains a serious competitor. Its newest and prettiest model will be available stateside this week, and is definitely worth a closer look.

Sony will release three new e-reader models this fall: the Pocket, Touch and Daily Edition, all featuring E Ink displays with optical touchscreens. According to Sony Style USA, the silver Pocket Reader is available for order now and will ship tomorrow (Sept. 14); the pink version can be preordered and should ship Thursday (Sept. 16).

When Gadget Lab looked at Sony’s models earlier this month, they discussed their strategy in the market. “The bottom line is we didn’t want to compete on price,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division. “We wanted to build quality and overall experience. We want to give consumers the feel of buying an e-reader, not a toy.”

The most attention-grabbing feature of the new Sony is the fact that its E Ink screen responds to touch input. The touch sensors aren’t actually in the screen, but are triggered by infrared sensors all around the screen’s edges. Invisible beams respond when your finger breaks the plane of the screen — just like security devices in a spy movie. You don’t even have to actually physically touch the screen for the sensors to respond, just get within the sensor’s threshold.

The Sony PRS-350 has the same Pearl high-contrast E Ink screen as the Kindle, but in a slightly smaller form factor (5 inches instead of 6 inches). According to iReader Review (and as you can see from the gallery after the jump below), this knocks the image and text quality of the old Sony Readers out of the park. And because the new Pocket Reader doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, the whole device is only 5 3/4 inches by 4 1/8 inches, and just a shade over 1/3-inch thick.

Like all Sony Readers, it supports both ePub and PDF with or without DRM. The body design is gorgeous, and the build quality is reportedly top-notch.

So we have a tiny, touchscreen E Ink reading machine that might even display images and tiny fonts better than the new Kindle. Did Sony just make the long-awaited “paperback e-reader” to move the whole show?

No, unfortunately, they didn’t. Here’s why.

The Sony Pocket reader has no internet capability at all. No Wi-Fi, no 3G. Nothing.

This means that while it’s terrific for reading books, you can’t use it to read anything else. No checking e-mail, no using Instapaper, no Google Reader.

Speaking of Instapaper and RSS readers — there’s also the specter of the Amazon App Store, which promises to add a lot more functionality to the Kindle. Functionality that’s likely to be dependent in no small part on web access. Even if Sony starts thinking seriously about casual gaming on their e-Readers — and frankly, I think moving in the other direction and putting e-Books on PSPs is a lot more likely — they’re still moving uphill.

In a follow-up review, iReader Review notes that actually loading books onto the Pocket Reader is a giant pain. “It’s not just that you can’t get books to Sony 350 wirelessly in 60 seconds. You can’t get books to it in 60 seconds period…. Sony proves that it’s a hardware company and not a software company.” He notes several other user-experience problems with the device, too, including an imagined vignette where Sony asks its software design team to take this magical device and completely screw up the UI.

Finally, it costs $179. That’s $10 less than the 3G Kindle (which gets you free 3G forever), and $40 more than the Wi-Fi-only Kindle ($30 more than the Wi-Fi Nook), both of which still get you Wi-Fi. A 20-25 percent markup is a lot to pay for a touchscreen.

Face it — two months ago, the Sony Pocket Reader would have been a cannonball in the world of e-readers. It would have been cheaper and more capable than nearly anything on the market. But the Kindle 3, with its improved screen and WebKit browser, is actually turning into something more than a repository for e-books.

Sony’s made a gorgeous one, and I think it will appeal to many, many people. Seriously — it’s appealing to me. But it doesn’t look like the future.

P.S. Whatever you do, don’t try to find this e-reader by searching for “Sony 350.” Sony makes a kajillion products from cameras to DVD players that all have “350″ somewhere in their official handle. It’s a nightmare. Why they don’t just call the thing “Pocket Reader” is completely beyond me.

All images courtesy of iReader Review.

See Also:

• Simple Tip Turns Kindle into Ultimate News Reader
• Amazon Kindle Third Generation With 3G + Wi-Fi
• Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader
• Sony's E-Book Reader Adds Touchscreen, Wireless Downloads
• Despite Reports, B&N Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You
• Wi-Fi Only Nook for $150 in Best Buy