The HP Compaq L2105tm is quite unique. The 21.5-inch 1080p LCD monitor offers multitouch! The L2105tm is Microsoft Windows 7 certified and that means it will work right out of the box and connected to a Windows 7 computer. HP is touting that its L2105tm is the first Windows 7 certified monitor. The multitouch monitor is geared toward consumers and the SOHO markets.
The LCD was specified to run 24/7 and has a rated 50,000 hours to half-brightness. The backlight is of the CCFL variety. I had the pleasure of talking to Darryl Valdes, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for the Displays Commercial Business Segment, and he noted that HP is investigating transitioning toward a LED backlight solution in the future. With a monitor that can run all the time, target markets include: retail POS, vending solution, retail information & interactive, wayfinder applications, etc.
The multitouch technology implemented in the L2105tm is an optical touch solution and includes two cameras, an infrared light and sensor combined with a reflective film to create a light field. When a finger or almost any object creates a shadow as it approaches the display the sensor detects it and relays the information via USB to provide a multitouch experience. The advantage of this type of touch technology is that it is very rugged and you can use a variety of input methods including a gloved finger. Another benefit is good brightness. According to Valdes, the L2105tm has a rated brightness of 250 cd/m2. He also noted that HP is being somewhat conservative with the rating and the actual brightness can reach a typical 270 cd/m2.
Other specs include: 5ms response time, 170/160 viewing angles, 72% NTSC color gamut, 1000:1 contrast ratio, TCO 5.0 Displays compliance, VGA, DVI-D with HDCP connections. A stylus is included.
RIM: The BlackBerry Storm2 is the company’s second attempt at a QWERTY keyboard-free all touch smartphone. The first attempt, the Storm, sold quite a few but we all know that it failed. The Storm failed on two levels: first, the typing mechanism was weird. When you typed the entire screen moved. Where did RIM get the idea that that was good? Second, it failed to live up to its name (didn’t quite generate a storm in the full screen smartphone space) and failed to topple the best full screen touch smartphone, Apple’s iPhone, by a long shot.
Now the Storm2 has made its debut. The Storm2 will be free on Vodafone contracts of £35 and up monthly payments. The smartphone features a 3.5-mm headset jack, a 3.2 megapixel digital camera with auto-focus, flash and video recording capabilities, a built-in GPS and Bluetooth 2.1. The 1400mAh battery lasts for about 5 1/2 to 6 hours of talk time. The press release states that internal storage is 2GB but read on and you’ll find that it could be quite a bit more. You can pre-order the Storm2 on Vodafone now.
Overall, I found the Storm2 worked well in my tests.
The Storm2 is round two and it sports a 3.25-inch capacitive touch LCD with a 480×360 (landscape) resolution. That resolution is a bit better than the iPhone’s 480×320. The touch technology is called SurePress and it is new and improved, according to Mossberg. There is now an electronic tactile feedback instead of the mechanical one so the entire screen doesn’t move about when you’re just hitting a key. Mossberg says that, “This allows for faster, smoother typing.” Let’s hope so.
Like the iPhone, now you can use a full virtual keyboard in portrait mode; it was limited to that two characters per key nonsense in the original Storm. The browsing experience wasn’t as good as the Pre or iPhone. Expect the Storm2 to have WiFi BG, 18GB of storage, and a ship date of November with a price of US$200 on Verizon.
You can also hop on over to RIM to see a detailed comparison chart of the Storm2 to its predecessor.
Google announced the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0. a.k.a Eclaire. Here are the main updates to Android 2.0:
I like the very last bullet where different resolutions can be rendered equally well on Android smartphones. This feature does not require multiple versions of an application and utilizes the Android UI Toolkit. A single binary can support multiple display sizes and resolutions. Maybe this will foster competition and bring about higher resolution phones for other platforms as well.
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Ruggedized Anything portable has a high probability that it will break, thanks to human error. A lot of us like to sip on something (coffee, tea, Coke, etc.) when we work or play. A few of us have had the unpleasant experience of spilling some of that unto our computers. Heck, many of us have spilled the actual PC onto the floor! Not only that, we all know what happens with our fragile computers when our kids (and their friends) who love to play with the keyboard and touch the screen. Dell‘s Latitude XT2 XFR might have had Verizon Wireless field engineers or the military in mind, but I think a lot of moms and dads would appreciate a ruggedized multitouch tablet PC. (more…)
Weak Pixels Lenovo‘s IdeaPad U150 is a 11.6-inch notebook powered by Intel’s 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo SU4100 ULV CPU and features 2GB RAM, 250GB hard disk, a multitouch trackpad running Windows 7. The glossy 11.6-inch LCD sports a 1366 x 768 resolution and is LED backlit: that’s a lot of pixels in such a small LCD. Integrated graphics is a bit disappointing with Intel’s GMA 4500MHD, but it should be good enough for most simple graphics tasks; just don’t expect it to give you high FPS (Frames Per Second) on your favorite FPS (First Person Shooter) games. You can output video via HDMI or VGA.
Diet? Interestingly the maximum RAM is quite high at 8GB and it is of the faster DDR3 type. There is an integrated 1.3MP webcam, WiFi N, Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, three USB ports (with one shared with eSATA) and a multicard reader. The 6-cell battery is good for 7 hours and the U150 weighs 3.3 pounds (1.5kg). It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison but the larger 13.3-inch MacBook Air (which lacks most of the connectivity options mentioned on the U150) weighs just 3 pounds, but doesn’t last as long at about 5 hours.
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i7 LG announced its XNOTE R590, i7-powered notebook. I’m sure sooner or later, all high-end notebooks from all the major brands will be sporting an i7. The R590 sports a 15.6-inch LCD with LED backlight, 4GB RAM and NVIDIA’s GeForce CT 230M with 1GB. Note that the 15.6-inch LCD features a nicely divisible but otherwise useless 1600 x 900 resolution. Other specs include a 500GB hard disk, WiFi ABGN running Windows 7 Home Premium.
Off Center I’m not a fan of off-centered keyboards and would without hesitation sacrifice the numeric keyboard for one that is centered. And since we’re on the subject of the keyboard, I would think that a high-end model like the R590 would sport some high-end features like a chiclet-style keyboard. Backlit? Probably not. The trackpad is old school too: a non-button-integrated two-button style.
Gaming The 15.6-inch LCD with LED backlight is nice and it seems LG is gearing the R590 for consumers that game from time to time. If that is true, what is with the awkward 1600 x 900 resolution? I’m sure there are significantly more games that support 1680 x 1050. And if high-end is your game, wouldn’t it be nice to have 1920 x 1200? But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe LG is focusing on the HD viewing capabilities of its R590. But even then what good is 1600 x 900? 720p content will be scaled up and 1080p content will be scaled down. Either way you’re losing quality. But I don’t think it has a Blu-ray drive… (more…)
Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) announced third quarter results on October 26, 2009. Net sales for TFT LCDs increased 27.3% Q/Q to NT$89,439 million. Gross margin was 12.4%, a substantial improvement over -3.5% in the second quarter. Operating margin in Q3’09 was 7.4%, a reversal of fortunes from -10.6% in Q2’09. Net income turned positive to NT$5,149 million from a net loss of NT$8,780 million in Q2’09. CMO shipped 21.7M large-area TFT LCD panels in Q3’09, up 13.2% Q/Q. Blended ASP also increased 13% Q/Q to US$120.
Source: CMO
Samsung is touting that its 40-inch LCD TV panel is the world’s thinnest at just 3.9-mm. Samsung will almost always have the thinnest 40-inch LCD TV panel because it is the only LCD manufacturer that makes 40-inch panels. I think. But there is still merit: LG Display’s 5.9-mm 42-inch and 47-inch LCD TV panels are slightly bigger in diagonal size but also quite a bit thicker. Now if Samsung came out with a 46-inch LCD TV panel that was just 3.9-mm, that would be something. Other specs include: edge-lit LED backlight, 120Hz fequency, and 5000:1 contrast ratio. I wonder how thin these LCD TV panels can get…
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Dr. Raymond Soneira, President of DisplayMate Technologies, in collaboration with Insight Media took some high-end HDTVs for a spin to figure out what technology offers the best TV-viewing experience. There was one plasma TVs, three LCD TVs and one CRT Sony Professional HD Trinitron Studio Monitor that was used as the reference standard.
Here is the list of models:
Dynamic Off One quick observation was that these HDTVs “delivered their best picture quality with all of their much-hyped advanced features… turned off.” Any function that dynamically processed images were disabled including: dynamic backlight, dynamic contrast, dynamic black, dynamic white, dynamic color. Ugly image artifacts were introduced when these features were used. Also, the specifications that you see are are “actually marketing tools rather than a set of scientifically objective tests and measurements.”
Setup Identical 1080p signals were piped through digital HDMI connections into the HDTVs. All calibrations were completed with DisplayMate Multimedia Edition test patterns. Photometry and colorimetry measurements were conducted via a Konica Minolta CS-200 Spectroradiometer.
Worst Let’s start from the bottom. Sharp: “… including the reference Studio Monitor, it looked significantly worse than all of the other units. The colors, hues, saturations, and intensity scales were way off and there were lots of noticeable ugly artifacts.” (more…)
Wishy Washy: That’s what seems to be happening with the FireWire port on the white MacBook. The latest unibody white MacBook has lost the FireWire port. Again. And again it will annoy a lot of potential customers of the most affordable MacBook, starting at just US$999. The FireWire port allows for the MacBook to act simply as an external FireWire drive and makes troubleshooting significantly easier. Do you have a camcorder with FireWire and want to record directly into the MacBook? You’re out of luck. The audio-out port has been eliminated too in favor of an integrated port with audio-out and mic-in. Not such a terrible idea since you can use the iPhone earphone/mic for communicating via Skype. Of course, if you’re a musician and require both audio-out and mic-in, you might have to get one of those USB microphones. Oh, and no SD slot.
Unibody The unibody design certainly reduces complexity and helps to increase rigidity. It also means that the battery is integrated and no longer easily replaceable. But you do get more battery life: Apple rates it at 7 hours. Engadget took delivery of the new MacBook and found the unibody design led to a much more solid feel: “there’s zero flex when you pick it up by a corner, and the keyboard is nicely rigid.” The white bezel is still there–no edge-to-edge cover glass for the white MacBook. The LED backlit LCD is still the glossy kind with a 1280 x 800 resolution. According to Engadget, the LCD is brighter than the prior version. iFixit confirmed that the display looks really nice (more below). The glass trackpad swallows the buttons and the entire surface can be used as a button, just like the new MacBook Pro‘s trackpad. CPU power has been slightly increased from 2.13GHz to 2.26GHz. Other features include:
The base of the MacBook makes use of a soft-touch, non-slip surface treatment so it doesn’t slide around. There are no rubber feet. Another interesting omission is the lack of an IR port: the remote won’t work with this MacBook. Battery indicator? Nope. Teardown after the jump. (more…)
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.