Hasta La Gadget!

Kevin Rose has some Tesla Model S imagery up on his Flickr account, including the first unshrouded pictures of the car, along with a rather wild interior shot. The all-electric sedan is styled beautifully — if rather predictably — but things start to get weird on the inside. In what looks to be a concept car mockup of the interior, there appears to be a large touchscreen taking the place of the entire center console, wrapped irregularly by dashboard padding. The instruments panel also appears to be a screen, though it could just be a mockup at this stage. Concept cars typically have rather strange and unlikely interiors compared to their tame street-legal counterparts, but even so, if this indeed isn’t some sort of cruel Photoshop trickery, we’d say Tesla really outdid itself here. Besides, who needs safe, tactile ways of adjusting climate and audio settings when you’re living life this large?

[Via Autoblog Spanish]

Filed under: Displays, Transportation

Tesla Model S official shots unofficially unveiled originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of our pet peeves with Sony gear has long been the software. Beautiful hardware matched with average to awful software can kill the user experience. Oh sure, there are exceptions in Sony’s broad product portfolio, but interfaces like XMB are bubbles on Sony’s otherwise festering UI sores. Sony knows this, they’ve admitted it with a promise of good things to come — and here’s a good example: Sony’s new X-series Walkman with 3-inch OLED. In the (controlled) promotional video (finally!) found after the break, the X-series Walkman seems to offer a sweet mix of hybrid touchscreen and physical controls conveniently positioned for use. The 3D animations also look fluid without being superfluous. Even Sony’s drag-and-drop Content Transfer Tool (updated to 1.1 last week) for quickly moving audio, video, and pictures onto the player looks dead simple to use. We’ll reserve final judgement until we get a unit in-house for a review. Until then, feel free to jump to your own conclusions in the comments.

[Via SonyInsider]

Continue reading Video: Sony NWZ-X1000 OLED touchscreen Walkman rightly promoted

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Video: Sony NWZ-X1000 OLED touchscreen Walkman rightly promoted originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bothered by all the touching involved with touchscreens? Then you may want to keep an eye out for Mitsubishi’s latest and greatest bit of technology, which promises to detect the distance between a finger and the touch panel to allow for a whole host of new interface options. That’s done with the aid of an array of sensors that can also be used to calculate the speed at which the finger is approaching, and allow for a so-called “mouse-over function,” which would essentially let your finger control a cursor without actually touching the screen — something Mitsubishi says would be ideal for devices with small screens. Of course, it is still just in prototype form (currently a 5.7-inch capacitive VGA display), but Mitsubishi says it’s based on panels that are already on the market, which should help ease development and reduce costs. Not surprisingly, Mitsubishi also says that “it will first be used for our products,” although it naturally didn’t say exactly what those product might be.

Filed under: Displays

Mitsubishi shows off “3D touch panel” display originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It doesn’t take much to make us happy — in fact, just mention the word “capacitive” and you’re already halfway to winning us over. Throw in “multitouch,” and you’ve got us hook, line and sinker. According to an admittedly dodgy DigiTimes report, Taiwan’s own EETI is gearing up to ship laptop-grade 7- and 12-inch capacitive touch panels in the the latter half of this year, and if you’re to believe it, that’s word straight from company president Mei Tsai. EETI has already begun shipping smaller capacitive touch panels, so larger ones for use in netbooks and ultraportables is just a logical extension of the business. Of course, just because these things ship to OEMs doesn’t mean we’ll see them right away in commercialized products, but we feel pretty good about seeing a few near-final units at CES 2010.

[Via Slashgear]

Filed under: Displays

EETI to purportedly ship 7- and 12-inch capacitive touchscreens this year originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Given Nokia Siemens’ commitment to getting the technology rolled out with carrier partners on the double and the fact that Nokia’s tie-up with Qualcomm for S60-optimized HSPA and LTE chipsets will bear fruit in 2010 — not to mention the fact that multiple carriers will be deploying LTE over the next two years — it only stands to reason that Espoo would have LTE devices in the pipe sooner rather than later. Indeed, the company has now gone on record saying that it’ll have “data intensive” LTE gadgets launched next year, though they’ve failed to go into the nitty gritty details of what kind of devices those might be. That could very well be where this new rumor comes into play, though: TheStreet.com is claiming that there’s chatter of a Verizon / Nokia partnership that would see a serious full touchscreen multimedia phone launched to help inaugurate Big Red’s LTE airwaves — and considering that Nokia has ramped up its Verizon-branded product portfolio over the past year and publicly cheered on the carrier for choosing LTE over WiMAX or UMB, it’s not all that difficult to believe. If the rumored device comes in a brown pleather wallet, count us in.

[Via Phone Scoop, thanks papari]

Read – Nokia bringing LTE in 2010
Read – Verizon partnership?

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Wireless

Nokia says it’ll have LTE devices by 2010, Verizon partnership in the works? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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