touchscreen

Hands-on with the Asus Eee Slate EP121 Windows 7 tablet

We've been testing and reviewing Windows tablets for many years, the latest being the new Acer Iconia Tab W500P, but have typically found them lacking--both in comparison with more powerful Windows laptops, and with other tablets, such as Apple's popular iPad.

One Windows tablet that we've been eager to check out after seeing it at CES 2011 is the Asus Eee Slate EP121, a high-end touch-screen tablet with a separate Bluetooth keyboard. Asus is, for the uninitiated, most responsible for the (now faded) popularity of low-cost Netbooks, and the company is now pushing the boundaries of what … Read more

Acer Iconia W500 Windows tablet (hands-on)

Tablets are big news, but that usually means Apple's iPad, Android tablets, or even the BlackBerry Playbook. Windows, by far the largest operating system on consumer PCs, has been largely left out in the cold.

It's ironic, as Windows tablets have been around for years, in the form of slates and convertible laptops with touch-screen lids that rotate and fold down over the keyboard. To date, none of these has been terribly successful, largely because they failed on both the software and hardware fronts. The Windows OS is simply not designed for fingertip (or even stylus) input, and the CPUs used to power most Windows tablets have been so underpowered as to make these devices mostly useless.

Stepping into the ring following the launch Apple's second-generation iPad is the Acer Iconia W500. Similar to Lenovo's (still MIA U1) Hybrid and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, the 10.1-inch W500 consists of a touch-screen slate and a separate keyboard dock. When combined, the two halves form something close to a traditional laptop. The W500 is $549 with Windows 7 Home Premium, or $619 with Windows 7 Professional. Both versions have 2GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD. Acer also has a dockless Android version, called the A500. … Read more

Apple adds touch-screen manufacturer to alleviate iPad 2 supply issues

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple has signed on Chimei Innolux Corp. to assist with touch-screen production to help meet the overwhelming demand for the iPad 2.

Chimei Innolux will begin supplying the components next month, said the people, who declined to be identified because the details aren't public. Taiwan's TPK Holding Corp. and Wintek Corp. (2384) remain Apple's key suppliers of the sensors that help the iPad tablet computer recognize finger movements, the people said.

Current shipping times from Apple for all models of the iPad 2 are two to three weeks, though with the addition of … Read more

Kyocera Echo; Sandy Bridge fixed

Links from Tuesday's episode of Loaded:

Kyocera sees double

Facebook is replacing Craigslist for prostitute recruitment and matchmaking

Fixed Sandy Bridge chipsets will ship in mid-February

Win $10,000 in this Internet video safety contest

White House proposes new copying rules

Facebook firing case will settle

Kodak EasyShare Touch announced

Every manufacturer should really have a touch-screen pocket camera in its 2011 lineup and Kodak's is the EasyShare Touch. It's a 14-megapixel ultracompact with a 3-inch touch screen and a 28mm-equivalent wide-angle lens with a 5x optical zoom.

Beyond those basic specs you get 720p HD video capture with a one-touch record button, so no fumbling with switching modes; HDMI output; automatic photo organization that sorts by people, date, keywords, and videos; artistic effects for photos and videos; and, of course, Kodak's Share button for quickly tagging your shots to be sent off to e-mail addresses or … Read more

Computers and hardware preview

While CES isn't always a hotbed of computer news and product announcements, there's always enough new stuff to keep our attention, especially as the competition between traditional laptops and tablets heats up. These are some of the trends and stories we expect you'll be hearing much more about in January.

New laptop and desktop CPUs Unfortunately, some of the products we were most excited about from CES 2010 never actually saw the light of day, leading us to be a bit more skeptical about laptops that look too good to be true (we're looking at you, … Read more

Microsoft eyes shape-shifting touch screen

Microsoft could be looking to give touch screens more of a tactile feel.

A patent filed by the software giant in 2009 and published last week details a light-induced shape-memory polymer display screen. In a nutshell, that means a touch screen that has a real texture and tactile feedback to it, making people feel as if they're touching an actual object.

Invented by Erez Kikin-Gil, the screen would be coated with polymers that could change or hold their shape when different wavelengths of ultraviolet light hit the pixels from underneath, according to an article in New Scientist.

The screen … Read more

Futuristic touch screen puts the desk in desktop

editor's notebook The future just keeps getting closer and closer these days. Not only do we have iPhones with FaceTime--which, when combined with the iPod Nano (as I'm sure they will be before too long) will come pretty close to creating a mass-market version of Dick Tracy's two-way wrist TV--we've also got robot cars and, ahem, robot journalists (which I'm trying to keep at bay by way of this terribly sophisticated and never-ending sentence--apparently the roboscribes have trouble with such Proustian gymnastics: Quick! They're coming for our jobs! Hand me another semicolon and an … Read more

Nokia makes giant, cold touch screen from ice

Check it out. Nokia did something cool with a touch screen. I did not see that coming.

We're not sure why researchers from the phone maker would do what they did (other than that they were probably going stir crazy during the long Nordic winter), but they did. So this exists: possibly the world's biggest touch screen, which is made of ice.

The Fins stacked ice blocks together and fused them with a heat gun to make an ice wall. That itself isn't that awesome, but then they added a projector behind it that shot the back of the ice wall with infrared light.

When people touch the wall--which is about 6.5 feet long, 5 feet tall, and 10 inches thick--their hands reflect the infrared light back, and a sensor feeds the data into a computer, which in turns projects visible light in response to the users' touches. Thus it becomes a giant touch screen.

Right now all the chilly ice screen does is make an interactive light display, which is fun. But I want to play Angry Birds on a wall. Nokia, can we make that happen? Check out the New Scientist video below.… Read more