Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not the mythical pinch-to-zoom patent, but the USPTO just granted a fairly broad Apple patent on capacitive multitouch displays. US Patent #7,663,607 describes a “transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches” by way of two sandwiched layers of conductive lines hooked up to an appropriate circuit, and also covers a specific type of multitouch display with a similar two-layer capacitive sensor made of glass. Now, there are certainly other types of capacitive sensors out there, so this isn’t a total lockdown, but it’s certainly one more arrow in Apple’s patent quiver, and at the very least it should spur some interesting developments as competitors try to design around it. We’ll see how it shakes down.

Apple granted patent on capacitive multitouch displays originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Toshiba spits out K01 QWERTY slider at MWC

Toshiba spits out K01 QWERTY slider at MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 06:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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HP’s mobile computing unit appears to have decided that the term smartbook refers to putting a smartphone’s components inside a netbook’s body — which kind of makes sense — so they’ve built their Airlife 100 atop an Android OS platform, underpinned by a Snapdragon CPU (unconfirmed, but highly likely), a 16GB SSD, 3G and WiFi connectivity, and a 10.1-inch touchscreen display. We really can find no cause for complaint — in fact this is the most excitement a Compaq-branded product has caused us… ever. HP touts a rock solid 12-hour battery life for the Airlife, which stretches out to a mighty 10 days of standby, in case you’re one of those folks who hate to switch their electronics off. Announced in partnership with Telefonica, this smartbook will be offered as a subsidized part of mobile broadband service plans in Europe and Latin America. It may well find itself renamed under the HP Mini branding when it rolls around to the US, but for now head on over to Engadget Spanish for the full PR.

Compaq Airlife 100 puts Android OS, Snapdragon CPU, and an SSD behind 10.1-inch touchscreen originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Convertible tablets are a dime a dozen in the laptop space, but very, very few of them can save your life. Toshiba’s Viamo is the one that could — when used by someone who knows how to control it, that is. It’s a portable ultrasound device that has some tactile knobs and buttons for the old-school practitioners, but can be entirely controlled by that touchscreen, which folds flat. Sure, it isn’t as portable as other ultrasound machines we’ve seen before, but it certainly looks quite a bit more advanced, and this one mounts on a pole for easy wheeling around your busy ER — important when helicopters crash into your roof, ambulances explode out front, and two doctors madly in love need to make a little room. Viamo is newly approved by the FDA and so is now available in the US at a cost that we wouldn’t hazard to guess at.

Toshiba’s Viamo is the tablet your doctor has been dreaming of originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple might have finally released the iPad, but the rumor mill is already on to prognosticating about the next rev — and as usual, Apple’s patents and patent applications are everyone’s favorite place to start. (And for good reason, really — that very first design patent we inititally noticed way back in 2004 is exactly what the iPad looks like, down to the bezel and Dock connector.) The latest tidbit is a patent granted earlier this week on an intelligent touch-sensitive bezel, which would essentially extend the touchpanel beyoned the edges of the screen to create an entire border of context-specific soft buttons — the iPod app might have playback controls at the bottom, while Safari could put the navigation bar down there and Pages could do formatting stuff at the top. It’s sort of interesting — Palm similarly extends the touch area beyond the screen on the Pre and the Pixi, but not quite like this — but we can’t see how touching the bezel next to an on-screen label is much better than just pressing the screen. Of course, there’s no guaranteeing Apple’s actually going to use any of this in any future products whatsoever, but we’re sure that won’t stop some analyst from waving their magic analyst wand and saying their “supply checks” have indicated a major ODM is already producing these. It’s nice that the world is so predictable sometimes, isn’t it?

Apple gets a patent on smart screen bezels originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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