Hasta La Gadget!

Well, the first bit of news here is immediately apparent — the heretofore untitled tablet device coming out of India has now been given the name of Adam. After ruffling a few feathers a week ago with its extremely ambitious battery life projections and admittedly mouthwatering Tegra plus Pixel Qi combo, Notion Ink is back with more details on the project. We understand the company is now discussing 3G testing with Indian and US operators (its 3G bands are compatible with AT&T’s networks), and there’s also a planned landing date in June. Can’t say we’re too excited about a launch six months from now — other Pixel Qi devices may well beat the Adam to market — but there’s also the pleasantly small matter of the price, which in this case is projected to be an aggressively low 15,000 rupees (about $321). CrunchPad part deux? Only time will tell.

[Thanks, bala]

Notion Ink’s Adam gets a name, June 2010 release originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fujitsu LifeBook UH900 spotted in the wild, courtesy of shouting speech bubbles originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Touchscreens have become a big hit among cellphone users. But what’s next after tap to click and the two-finger pinch and zoom?

Synaptics’ Fuse experimental phone shows a device that you can interact with by squeezing, gripping, flexing and tilting the phone. The device melds multiple technologies such as multi-touch capacitive sensing, haptic feedback, 3-D graphics and proximity sensing.

“It’s not a product but a prototype that showcases a lot of key input technologies,” says Robyn Palmer, marketing specialist for Synaptics. “Our focus was on how to make mobile phones mobile again.”

Fuse tackles the difficulty of single-handed usage and the need to constantly look at the screen, two big challenges that users face today with current generation touchscreen devices, says Synaptics.

With Fuse, touch sensors at the back of the phone means users can poke it to receive or initiate calls. Force and capacitive touch sensors on the sides of the phone also allow you to squeeze the phone to select icons from the phone’s menu. Incorporating the accelerometers into the user interface also means you can tilt the phone to scroll and grip the phone tight to stop.

Synaptics’ silent video demos some of these ideas.

Fuse uses Synaptics multi-touch touchscreen, capacitive scroll strips, a Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 processor, three accelerometers, force sensors on the sides of the phone, a 480 x 800 high-resolution AMOLED display and a 3.7-inch screen.

The phone–which was created in partnership with Texas Instruments, Immersion and U.K. design firm The Alloy, among others–won’t make it to market as a product. But Synaptics plans to license parts of it to handset makers that are looking to take user interface on mobile phones to the next level.

The Fuse concept phone will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show  in Las Vegas next month.

Photo: Fuse/Synaptics

The 5230 has only recently made its way out to stores, but that hasn’t stopped Nokia from fashioning a KIRFy sort of successor for it. Meet the Nokia 5235, a spec for spec copy of its elder brother, including the same 3.2-inch touchscreen, 2 megapixel camera, and Symbian S60 5th edition. We thought we could spot a tiny difference in the materials being used, but otherwise you really are looking at the exact same handset. Your wallet would tell the difference, though, as the 5235 has a pre-tax and pre-subsidy price of €145 ($214), which is more than €100 cheaper than the previously noted 5230 CWM variant — in other words, Nokia is renaming its CWM model and chopping the price nicely. Why, we don’t know, but when is the first quarter of 2010.

Nokia 5235 Comes With Music and a low price in Q1 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There are PMPs in every shape and color, and while we’ve never been particularly fond of Haier’s contributions to the segment, its latest might just find a home in that all-important lower-end of the spectrum. It packs a three-inch capacitive touchscreen of undisclosed resolution, an FM tuner, voice recorder, support for plenty of audio formats, a rather more spartan list of video formats (apparently just AVI and MPEG4), and comes in either four or eight GB sizes. Earth-shattering? No, but at prices of $89 and $99 it’s a good value — well, the bigger of the two is, anyway. Who wouldn’t drop another $10 for twice the capacity?

Haier’s Theater PMP sports a 3-inch touchscreen, recession-friendly price originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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