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OLPC shows off absurdly thin XO-3 concept tablet for 2012 (update: XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 coming first)

By Paul Miller posted Dec 22nd 2009 11:49PM

Still have a bit of faith left for the OLPC project? Good, you’re gonna need it: designer Yves Behar has unveiled his latest concept design for the now-aiming-for-$75 vision, and it’s all screen. Keeping with the newfound trend toward tablets, the XO-3 is an 8.5 x 11 touchscreen, coupled with a little folding ring in the corner for grip and a camera in the back. To keep things minimal the plan is to use Palm Pre-style induction charging, and less than a watt of power to keep an "8 gigaherz [sic]" (800MHz?) processor and a Pixel Qi screen powered. At half the thickness of an iPhone, this vision is obviously banking heavily on presumed technology advances by 2012 (the projected release date), but it’s not too hard to see somebody making this form factor happen by then-ish. Nick Neg isn’t all hubris, however: "Sure, if I were a commercial entity coming to you for investment, and I’d made the projections I had in the past, you wouldn’t invest again, but we’re not a commercial operation. If we only achieve half of what we’re setting out to do, it could have very big consequences."

Update: According to our man Nicholas Negroponte, who took time out of his busy schedule to email us with the info, there are two other variations of the XO headed our way before we see the XO-3. Nick says we’ll see the XO-1.5 appear in January for around $200 — an update to the current version. As we’d heard before, the 1.5 iteration will swap a VIA CPU for the current AMD one, and will double the speed as well as quadruple both the DRAM and Flash memory of the current version. Furthermore, he says that in early 2011 the XO-1.75 (replacing that psychotically awesome 2.0 dual screen model) will make its appearance, and will sport rubber bumpers on the outer casing, an 8.9-inch touchscreen display inside, and will run atop a Marvell ARM processor which will enable two times the speed at a quarter of the power usage. That version will sell for somewhere in the $175 range. Then, no 2.0… straight on to the XO-3.0!

OLPC XO3 Gallery

Spring Design Alex: dual-screen Android-based e-reader (Update: not for Barnes & Noble)

Whoa, what have we here? It’s Alex, the dual-screen e-book reader from Spring Design looking very much like the Barnes and Noble device rumored for a Tuesday launch. It features a 6-inch E-ink EPD (electronic paper display) and 3.5-inch LCD running Google’s Android OS for browsing the web or viewing video, audio, photos, and notes. It also packs a removeable SD card, speaker, headphone jack, and WiFi or 3G EVDO/CDMA and GSM radios. An interesting Duet Navigator feature even lets you toggle content captured on the LCD and present it back to the EPD to save on battery life. The device is planned for release sometime this year without any details on who might be involved in that exercise.

Update: We just heard from Spring Design’s PR person, Pat Meier Johnson. We were told that the Alex device above is not the rumored dual-screen Barnes & Noble reader, "this is an entirely different device." Judging by the hastily prepared web site coincidentally appearing on the eve of the B&N device launch, and the domain’s registrar, Albert Teng, who has numerous patent applications (not patents granted) covering "electronic devices having complementary dual-displays," we’d say this announcement is quite possibly a desperate attempt to lay claim on intellectual property rights instead of a real product with real manufacturers and real content partners. We’ll see when, or if, it launches.

 

vidoe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dtgHfAMP5I

 

 

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Talking about Leyio’s UWB-touting personal sharing device unboxed, handled on video#continued#continued

by Ross Miller, posted Apr 17th 2009 at 11:59PM

We first caught a glimpse of Leyio‘s Ultra-wideband-pushing personal sharing device back in January, and while UWB is still teetering near mostly dead and slightly alive, Le Journal du Geek has acquired a pair for some fun unboxing action and video hands-on accompanied by lovely French narrative. The reviewer predicts most people will be discouraged by the 179 euro (US $233) price tag, and with wireless filesharing here limited pretty much to just other Leyios at the moment, we can’t say we disagree. Check out the video for yourself after the break — if you’re not a native French speaker or your babel fish is on the fritz, you should still be able to figure out what’s going on.

Samsung Q1EX UMPC reviewed, dismissed

 

by Thomas Ricker, posted Mar 12th 2009 at 8:46AM

Rats. Just when we thought that someone had figured out how to make a winning UMPC configuration for consumers, out comes a review to pan it. While the Samsung Q1EX sounds good on paper with its 7-inch resistive touchpanel with 1,024 x 600 resolution, 1.2GHz VIA Nano processor, 4.5-hour battery, and $775 price tag; Laptop Mag was unimpressed when it came to go-time. Unfortunately, Laptop found text entry to be too much of a chore thanks to the loss of the thumbpad used on previous Q1-series UMPCs and the lack of a digitizer that severely impacts the unit’s ability to accurately recognize handwriting under XP Tablet Edition. Boot times were slow and battery life was poor at just two hours compared to the 4.5 hours stated. Sure, you can add a dock with keyboard (pictured) and optional 6-cell battery (bringing the price to $977), but at that point, you’d be wise to look at the latest in wee netbooks offering bigger screens, the same power, and longer battery life at half the price.

The new iPod shuffle, explained.

by Nilay
Patel, posted Mar 11th 2009 at 5:22PM

HTC says Touch Pro2 will be “broadly available,” North America included

 

by Darren Murph, posted Feb 22nd 2009 at 2:26PM

In October of last year, HTC informed us that the Touch HD would sadly not be coming to the States via its Twitter feed. Shortly after Mobile World Congress, that same feed has delivered much, much better news in regard to the Touch Pro2. Directly from HTC: "And to answer the big question on everyone’s minds, the Touch Pro2 will be broadly available in all major markets, including North America." A followup tweet affirmed that a launch date and country wasn’t yet set in stone, but that the phone would begin shipping out in "late Q2." Oh, where art thou, May through July time frame?

VAIO P in-depth impressions

 

by Paul Miller, posted Jan 10th 2009 at 4:11PM

Yeah, we saw this when it first hit the FCC, nabbed blurrycam spyshots before the debut, got the drive-by snaps of the laptop at launch, and pitted this thing against an assortment of laptops the other night, but now that we’ve finally gotten some quality time with the thing, we’ve got a better idea of what the VAIO P is — and isn’t — capable of, outside of inspiring deep, deep gadget lust and nerdy debates about netbook terminology. Check out our thoughts and some video after the break.

Lenovo W700ds laptop with 10.6-inch secondary display announced

,Dec 19th 2008 by Chris Davies

Details of a Lenovo laptop with integrated dual displays have emerged. The W700ds has both the 17-inch CCFL-backlit 1920 x 1200 display from the W700 but adds a second, 10.6-inch LED-backlit 768 x 1280 panel in portrait orientation. Lenovo are billing this as a productivity booster, with an extra 39-percent of space on offer. As with the original W700, the w700ds has an onboard 128 x 80 cm palmrest digitizer, optional RAID and up to an Intel Core 2 Quad Core Extreme QX9300 2.53GHz processor with 12MB of L2 cache.