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.
It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a new tablet from Wacom. In the meantime, the company has given us a digital DJ interface, but not what we really crave — a new Bamboo tablet with multi-touch support. So what do we have here? A brave tipster (who wishes to remain anonymous) has turned us onto some blurrycam photos suggesting that such a tablet is indeed coming out. Might the above pictured Bamboo Touch see the light of day with the impending release of Windows 7? Stranger things have happened! More photographic evidence is yours to behold after the break.
Lenovo today announced that it will be adding multi-touch capabilities to its ThinkPad X200 Tablet PC and ThinkPad T400s laptop. The feature was announced in anticipation of Windows 7’s much celebrated multi-touch capabilities.
“We see now as the right time for multitouch screens on PCs,” Sam Dusi, a marketing VP for the company said in a statement issued today. “With touchscreens increasingly becoming part of more devices we use routinely and continued improvement of the technology including the integration of touch in the upcoming Windows 7 operating system, the environment for making touch part of our Tablet PC and ThinkPad T400s laptop experience couldn’t be better. We’ve also extended the touch experience with SimpleTap to make frequent hardware-based functions touch-enabled and simple.”
The T400s and X200 with multi-touch will run $1,999 and $1,654, respectively. Lenovo will offer SimpleTap for download on October 22, also the release date for Windows 7.
The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s looks like your boring tray-table business notebook. But what the flight attendant doesn’t know is that the Windows 7 14.1-inch capacitive touchscreen laptop is the first capable of four finger multitouch and it’s fingertastic!
Four Freakin Fingers
Up until now most notebooks with multitouch have pretty much blown (including the Dell XT2 and the HP Tx2). Most of that was because of the Windows Vista interface and sluggish screen technology. The Windows 7ThinkPad T400s with its capacitive touch screen changes that and almost makes me forget about the all out brawls I once got into with older tablets. However, while the hardware is strong, the success of the T400s depends on it getting good software and applications to run on top of it.
The screen is pure beauty. Like a capacitive touchscreen phone, light taps on the display are responsive and you don’t have to think about positioning your finger in a certain way to open apps or rearrange windows.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can do everything in Windows 7 with your finger, which is why Lenovo put on its own widget style SimpleTap user interface. SimpleTap lets you control the volume or adjust the screen brightness with fat finger like controls. You get to the SimpleTap interface by either double tapping on the screen or selecting the red dot on the top right corner of the screen.
SimpleTap helps, but there is still a crapload that you can’t do with your fingers on the screen. So, the T400 keeps its notebook form factor with the wonderful ThinkPad keyboard, touchpad, and pointing stick in tact.
No one will ever complain that there aren’t enough ways to move the mouse around on the screen.
Unfortunately, these peripheral controls are so integral to the laptop that the T400’s screen doesn’t even rotate—it’s not a convertible as you may have thought. More than once, I just wanted to enjoy a clean tablet design while surfing the web or playing a game, though the screen does tilt all the way back. Which brings me to actually testing the screen with my fingers.
With two fingers you can do the typical mutlitouch stuff you are used to. Pinch to zoom in or out, drag two fingers down the screen to scroll and twist to rotate images. But you can also add another two fingers into the mix. And using Windows 7’s touchpack applications (which are preloaded), you can even have another person’s two fingers on the screen to help edit photos or play a game. This is the kind of thing that is better seen in video so check out the video of me playing a game with a friend and editing photos.
Yeah, it’s more than freaking cool, but what the hell are you really going to use that for? Beyond the picture and games I showed you, the answer is “not much right now.” Lenovo will remind you that there are more programs like Space Claim coming soon, which lets designers use multiple fingers to move around objects (you can see the app in action here). But those programs are going to be few and far between until multitouch starts to take off on PCs.
Performance
Like most ThinkPads, the T400s can handle some pounding. Multitasking (watching a 1080p video, with 7 tabs open in Firefox, while running three IM clients and editing photos in GIMP) was smooth and I wasn’t waiting around for things to load. Also boosting performance is the 128 GB SSD which boots Windows 7 in less than 40 seconds. It also launches Photoshop damn fast.
However, its battery life leaves more to be desired. This thing isn’t going to make it through my flight next week from New York to San Fransisco. On a Wi-Fi battery test (it is the LAPTOPMAG Battery Test) that cycles through the top fifty sites on Firefox the six-cell battery pushed out 4 hours. The battery life isn’t unbearable, though it will be interesting to see what other multitouch laptops provide in terms of juice.
Actually Good Speakers
The ThinkPad T400s nails both touch and performance, but it also makes a decent phone and music player. Apparently the model has been super popular for making VoIP calls so Lenovo upped the quality of the webcam and the speakers. The speakers are actually excellent for a business class notebook; Black Eyed Pea’s “Ive Got a Feeling” sounded seriously full on the speakers that straddle the keyboard.
Price
$2,479 (as configured with a multitouch display, 2.53 Intel GHz core 2 Duo P600 processor, 4GB RAM, 128 GB Toshiba SSD)
Verdict
The ThinkPad T400s has always been a solid notebook, and now it’s the world’s first to have a screen capable of recognizing four fingers at once. But in my mind, the T400s’ screen is a lot like the Etch A Sketch I got when I was six: it’s fun to play with, but you aren’t going to use it all that much (at least until we have more compelling applications). And keep in mind, $2,000+ is a lot to pay for a Etch A Sketch.
Seriously responsive capacitive display
Recognizes not two, or three, but four fingers on the display
Superfast solid state drive that opens programs quickly
So, we’ve got some good news and bad news. The good news is that Nokia‘s already offering up its Booklet 3G netbook for pre-order over in Italy, which is becoming an all-too-familiar scene for Nokia wares. The bad news is that the posted price is, um, absurd. During a keynote at Nokia World 09, listeners were told that the Windows 7-powered machine would ring up at “just” €570, yet Nokia’s own Italian e-store has it listed for €699. That’s just over a grand in Greenbacks, though we get the feeling it’ll be selling for substantially less once the feel-good emotions fade and cold, hard economics take their toll.
Update: As pointed out in the comments, the announced €570 price was likely pre-tax and pre-carrier subsidy as is typical for Nokia’s European announcements. The €699 price is thus VAT inclusive.
We can say for sure that our own Windows 7 upgrade experience didn’t take, oh say, a whole day, but according to Microsoft, your own just might. The boys and girls in Redmond set out with a goal of seeing the Vista to Windows 7 upgrade accomplished around five percent faster than an upgrade to Vista, and while it seems that they succeeded, the staggeringly wide range in install times has us a wee bit concerned. A variety of testing situations were put in place, and nearly every profile was tested on low-, mid- and high-end hardware. A clean install of Windows 7 on mid-to-high-end hardware took just a half-hour, but a 32-bit upgrade on a mid-range machine with 650GB of data and 40 applications took an astounding 1,220 minutes, or just under 21 hours. The wild part here is that it’s not all that uncommon for a power user / all-around nerd to have a half-terabyte of information and two score programs, and in anticipation of one install actually taking over a day, the team didn’t even bother testing this path on a low-end rig. Good thing our imaginations are in check, huh?
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.
There’s nothing we like better than putting on Europe’s The Final Countdown and listening to it over and over and yes, over again. The 80’s “rock” anthem is so damn catchy and just happens to be the theme music behind Microsoft’s (first?) Windows 7 television commercial. The bit brings back Kylie who has cast aside Vista and other childish things for Microsoft’s latest OS. It’s “snappy and re-pon-ki-ser,” says the 5 year old. Aww, shucks. Let the cute wash over you in the videos (new and old) after the break.
We’ve seen a couple of netbooks that we’d actually consider to be mildly quick, but given that locating an Ion-based netbook is about as easy as entering North Korea with a US passport, we haven’t had much of a chance to really love on ’em. Today, Acer is extending its boutique Ferrari lineup with the Ferrari One, an 11.6-inch machine that is among the first to rely on AMD’s newly announced Congo platform. Packed within the chassis is a dual-core 1.2GHz Athlon X2 L310 CPU, ATI’s Radeon 3200 graphics, an XPG port for connecting an external graphics solution, a 1,366 x 768 panel, WiFi, Bluetooth, optional WWAN and a 6-cell battery. You’ll also notice AMD Vision and Windows 7 badges alongside the obligatory prancing pony, but you can bet you’ll be paying dearly for this when it ships on (surprise, surprise) October 22nd. How dearly? Try £435 ($724), or roughly the cost of a single lug nut on an F430.
No the Windows 7 version of the Netflix Watch Instantly still isn’t going to work on Extenders for Media Center, but it will include a more seamless experience than the Vista version does, like the movie info image above. Microsoft really wasn’t ready to share any more details with us, but we suspect the search is improved. The fact that they were so tight lipped leads us to believe that Microsoft is still holding back on some Windows 7 details — at least in regards to internet content and Windows 7. At this point it appears we might have to wait until the official release of Windows 7 to truly figure out if all that work to bring internet content to Windows 7 pays off.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Seriously responsive capacitive display
Meh, battery life
