Hasta La Gadget!

It’s definitely not the first LifeBook to boast a multitouch panel, but given just how popular the original T5010 proved to be, we’re pleasantly pleased to see the outfit bless that very convertible tablet with a touchscreen. The new dual digitizer option gives the 13.3-inch machine a whole new purpose in life, as it now supports two-finger touch (for rotating, pinching, zooming, groping, etc.) within Windows 7. Oddly enough, Fujitsu’s choosing to ship this with Vista until October 22nd rolls around, so we’d advise you to hold tight for another month and change if at all possible. Everything else about the rig remains mostly the same, though the $1,759 (active digitizer) / $1,859 (dual digitizer) starting tags are actually lower than the MSRP given to the first T5010 in early 2008.

Filed under: Laptops

Fujitsu gifts LifeBook T5010 convertible tablet with multitouch LCD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From the outside, the new Lenovo T400s touch doesn’t look all that exciting — unless you’re the sort to get excited over ThinkPads, in which case you’re probably quite stoked that it looks exactly like the non-touch T400s. But it’s actually a pretty crazy product — it’s a regular laptop with a high-end four-finger capacitive touchscreen. Not a tablet, not a convertible, just a laptop. And a ThinkPad, so you’ve already got both a touchpad and a TrackPoint to get around. It’s a little puzzling until you use it, and realize that just casually reaching out and touching the display sort of makes a lot of sense. Sort of — there aren’t a lot of apps that take advantage of multitouch right now, and while Lenovo’s SimpleTap app launcher / control panel system is a cool demo, it’s more of a nifty feature than a killer app. Still, it’s nice to see a responsive capacitive touchscreen make the touch features of Windows 7 much more fun to use, and while we didn’t end up trying to touch our regular laptop screens when we were done with the T400s touch, we’d certainly spring for the option if we were in the market. Check a little video after the break.

Continue reading Lenovo T400s touch hands-on and impressions

Filed under: Laptops

Lenovo T400s touch hands-on and impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t see too many multitouch displays for desktop systems in these parts, but if Packard Bell has its way that’s likely to change tout de suite. Not only has the company just announced its oneTwo line of all-in-one PCs with touchscreen displays at CEDIA, but now its back with the Viseo 200T Touch Edition — a 20-inch multitouch monitor featuring built-in stereo speakers, a 16:9 aspect ratio, 50,000:1 contrast ratio, 5ms response time, and VGA and DVI input. When this thing hits Merry Olde England in mid-October, you can expect to pay roughly £200 (about $330) to take advantage of all that Windows 7 multitouch magic. And, believe us, it is truly magical.

Filed under: Displays

Packard Bell’s Viseo 200T display gets multi-touchy-feely next month originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know how it is — you were an early adopter of the netbook craze sweeping every nation from Austria to Australia, but now that 11-inches is looking like the new de facto standard, your old 7-incher just isn’t cutting the mustard anymore. So what do you do? You mod that sucker into a kitchen cabinet door, of course. You’ll need a 7-inch USB touchscreen to layer atop an EeePC 701, along with a few other bits and bobs, but the most important thing to remember is a spectacularly loony soundtrack. Or so the video after the break seems to instruct us.

[Via JKK Mobile]

Continue reading Video: EeePC modded into a WalleeePC

Filed under: Household

Video: EeePC modded into a WalleeePC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For full-touch mobile use, capacitive touchscreens are the best solution we’ve got — and it has absolutely nothing to do with the iPhone, it has to do with the incremental improvement in usability brought about by near-100 percent touch registration. That’s a big deal, because even a 5 percent loss of registration on an on-screen QWERTY keyboard would represent roughly one letter missed every five words (assuming an average word length in the English language of just over 5 letters). Resistive screens have many, many totally valid applications, but put simply, phones aren’t one of them; they’ve been outmoded by a different technology that’s more appropriate for the size and use that the average handset sees. Registration issues aside, fingers are larger than styli, and when a resistive display is registering an unweighted pinpoint coordinate, you end up ironically losing accuracy — a benefit touted by resistive that’s really only realized if you’re using a stylus full-time. No one’s claiming that capacitive screens are the magic elixir to make human digits achieve superhuman accuracy on a tiny screen, but… you know, step one is making sure the phone knows you pressed something.

Anyhow, HTC’s now claiming that the just-announced Tattoo has gone resistive because its 2.8-inch screen is simply too small “to be accurate with” as a capacitive. The company’s tweet goes on to say that resistive “ends up registering fewer miss-clicks,” which could be argued — maybe — were users expected to use styli. Android is not and was never designed as a stylus-driven platform, and unless HTC’s driving in that dubious direction, the claim is bunk. More realistically, the resistive display is probably a cost sacrifice the company made to keep sticker shock to a minimum, which is fair enough — HTC’s trying to cover many market segments with Android, as it should — but we wish they’d been upfront about it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

HTC claims Tattoo’s screen is too small for capacitive to work well originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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