Joining scores of other vendors, Sony has just announced its very own ultrabook / tablet effort with the VAIO Duo 11, and it certainly packs in some decent hardware to help kick its way into this increasingly-competitive market. When Microsoft first announced the Surface, it was praised as an innovative median between notebook and tablet, and since, a string of manufacturers have joined the potential gravy train.
Microsoft unveiled Windows 8's new tablet-specific user interface on Wednesday. On that same day, at Computex 2011 in Taipei, Foxconn, Wistron and Quanta all unveiled new prototype hardware that's designed to work with Microsoft's new touch-friendly operating system.
I was going through YouTube this morning when I came across this video showing a comparison between a Windows 7 based Slate PC and an Apple iPad. What was surprising for me was how in some places the Windows 7 based “Hanvon” Slate did better job than its iPad counterpart - Internet Explorer 8 was faster to load pages than Mobile Safari, the YouTube web app on Windows 7 was certainly loading videos much faster than the native YouTube app on iPad and so on.
It looks like Microsoft is set to launch a new multitouch capable mouse which will take advantage of touch gestures in Windows 7 to take on its Mac counterpart the Apple Magic Mouse. Microsoft enthusiast Long Zheng of iStartedSomething is reporting on this new upcoming product which according to him could be announced as soon as Tomorrow.
Now things are taking a U-turn again, or sort of anyway. If you thought that Microsoft has buried the Courier project somewhere in their labs, you might be wrong, as it now looks like that some parts of that ambitious Courier project may return in the upcoming Tablets from Microsoft. Recently, Bill Gates in an interview said that Microsoft is working on Tablets which would use a pen-based input method (as opposed to finger-only mechanism in Apple iPad) which would go mainstream in students.
According to the sources at TechCrunch, HP has dropped Windows 7 + Intel based hardware for its ambitious tablet project because “It’s too power hungry”. This news, which is yet to be confirmed by HP comes only a few hours after it was confirmed that Microsoft Courier Tablet wont see the light of day.
A trusted source has informed Engadget about the upcoming Microsoft's Courier tablet/e-book device which was first surfaced back in September last year. With just under an inch thickness and weighing a little over a pound, Courier is designed to function as a "Digital Journal". It is going to feature a dual 7-inch multitouch capable screen which will be designed to work with both multiple fingers-input and stylus.
Human-computer interaction has now stretched far beyond keyboards and mouse into a whole new world where in some cases we are using multiple fingers for interaction, or just motion in other technologies like Project Natal. Thanks to the trendsetter iPhone, today, almost all consumer electronic items like smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and even bigger screen monitors are opting for touch or multitouch displays because that is what most of us want. Now just imagine how amazing it would be if you could simply convert your existing display into a an interactive touchscreen simply by sticking a thin polymer film.
Mobience of Korea has announced a new portable physical keyboard named “smallQWERTY” for almost all kinds of touchscreen devices like tablets PCs, iPhone and iPads. The company thinks that soon when every other device will transform into a touchscreen as a standard for input mechanism, there maybe a revolt and folks would like a change. According to the company officials, their “smallQWERTY” physical keyboard solution will then come to the rescue.
Wow! I didn't saw this coming from Apple!. According to the latest reports from Chinese Commercial Times, Apple is planning to launch 22-inches capacitive touchscreen iMac’s sometime this year. We all know that HP already has all-in-one TouchSmart PCs for a while now, with multitouch capable capacitive screens, and an OS like Windows 7 which fully supports those gestures.
