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.
Acer UK announced on October 14, the company’s Liquid A1, an Android (1.6, “Donut”) smartphone powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. The speedy Qualcomm chipset should allow for some 3D goodness and a snappy UI, which will have “easy access to entertainment and web bookmarks”. The capacitive-touch LCD, size yet unknown, sports a 800 x 480 resolution. All those pixels will be thoroughly used thanks to the 5 megapixel camera that will have geo-tagging, auto-focus, ISO control, and a self-timer. The Liquid is 3G/3G+ (HSPA) capable and its address book will integrate with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa and Flickr. The first Android smartphone to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon will come in red, white and black.
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Samsung‘s flexible OLED is extremely durable. As you can see from the video, a traditional LCD is completely demolished when the hammer strikes down. The 2.8-inch OLED with a thickness of just 20 micrometer? Multiple strikes don’t affect it at all and neither do bends. Can you image an OLED smartphone where the display almost never breaks? I’m hoping for the moon, but maybe we can get to whole devices that almost never breaks.
Source: “Please hammer, don’t hurt Samsung’s flexible OLED prototype (video)” – Engadget
McLaren Supercar I’m sitting at a Barnes and Noble’s reading EVO (issue 136). I like cars, sports cars, and reading about them. Unfortunately, reading is about all I will be doing when it comes to sports cars. For quite some time. The feature of EVO is the new supercar from McLaren, the MP4-12C. The MP4 part of the name comes from the chassis designation for all McLaren Formula 1 cars since 1981. The 12 represents an internal vehicle performance index taking into consideration power, weight, emissions, aerodynamic efficiency, etc.: 12 = extreme performance. The C stands for carbon–the carbon fiber ‘MonoCell’ tub, specifically. No official performance numbers have been announced but the 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 good for 600bhp and 442lb-ft of torque is expected to reach 60mph in about 3 seconds, 100mph in 6 seconds with a top speed of over 200mph. But what does the MP4-12 have to do with displays?
Close Together Remember the carbon fiber MonoCell tub? It has incredible strength, stiffness but weighs just 80kg. McLaren designed the MonoCell with the driver and passenger positioned closer to the center of the car for several reasons: good visibility so the driver sees directly over the center line of the front wheels and because, “The closer you are to the center of the car, the better the perception you have of the extremities,” according to Antony Sheriff, managing director of McLaren Automotive.
Portrait LCD Because of the closeness between driver and passenger, the center console is rather narrow. So McLaren fitted a 7-inch LCD in an unique position: portrait. But that brings up some questions:
I’m sure someone at McLaren thought of all of these questions and worked with a LCD manufacturer to develop an exceptional portrait-only McLaren-only 7-inch touch LCD that provides the right type of information. If any of you know more details about the exact 7-inch LCD that McLaren is using, let me know.
Entertainment Power HP‘s Pavilion dv8 is billed as an “entertainment notebook” by the company and sports a huge 18.4-inch TFT LCD with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. The dv8 is powered by Intel’s Core i7 CPU and supported by 4GB RAM (8GB max), two 320GB hard drives while graphics duties are doled out by NVIDIA’s GeForce GT230 GPU with 1GB of VRAM. HP got it right by integrating a TV tuner and a Blu-ray drive. HDTV content from the TV tuner will certainly make good use of the 1920 x 1080 resolution. Blu-ray content will too but most will end up generating some unwanted black bars: you can get rid of them by using full display mode but scaled video won’t look as good.
Long Life All that processing capabilities will require a lot of power and that’s where HP’s Long Life battery comes in. The battery technology makes use of Boston Power’s Sonata cells that offer three to five times longer battery life compared to regular Li-Ion batteries. I’m guessing that battery life will end up being about the same as regular non-entertainment notebooks at around 3 to 4 hours–still quite good. Just a guess. The dv8 will be available on October 22 for £1,300.
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Take a user who’s used to a 15-inch notebook and then give him a 10-inch netbook. He’ll say, “Oh, this is so cool, it’s so lightweight.” Then 36 hours later he’ll say the screen’s not big enough, give me my 15-inch back.
That’s according to Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, when asked about the popularity about netbooks during a Silicon Valley dinner sponsored by the Churchill Club. Michael Dell continued to add that a lot of customers are not satisfied with the underpowered netbooks with tiny screens. But he expects Windows 7 to lead to “a very powerful refresh cycle.” But only if you pair Windows 7 to “the latest processor technology” and Office 2010 will you “love your PC again.” Love? I’m not sure if the word ‘love’ can be easily associated with PCs unless you’re talking about Macs where there is a fairly large base of fans who would actually acknowledge love for their machines.
Update 2009.10.14 3:38PM PDT John Jacobs, Director of Notebook PC Market Research at DisplaySearch, puts Dell’s share of the netbook market around 8% based on the company’s Q3’09 Advanced Quarterly Notebook PC Shipment and Forecast Report. Netbooks are certainly not intended to replace your main PC box, whether it be a desktop or a notebook. And it is true that netbooks are underpowered but only if you want to do things on it that you should be doing on your main box. Netbooks should primarily be used as a secondary portable device to check email and occasionally browse the Internet. Of course with new netbooks that are slightly larger and more powerful the line between netbooks and full-blown notebooks is getting blurry. So what does Jacobs think about Michael Dell’s comment? Was Dell putting down netbooks? Jacobs thinks that Dell was simply saying, “…know your computing needs and buy the PC that fits those needs,” and considers it, “Good advice.” The video above is fairly long lasting 1 hour 17 minutes. It took a while but I found when the netbook conversation takes place: 34:24.
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Android Netbook Acer‘s Aspire One D250 is a netbook but can dual-boot* into Android and Windows 7. The company launched the dual-boot D250 today. But the one weird omission on the Android netbook is that the LCD is not touch-capable. Does Android work well without touch? Well, yes: you can use the trackpad or an attached mouse. But is that how you want to work on an Android netbook? Certainly not. You want to interact with it as you would a smartphone: with your finger. *You can’t boot into Windows 7 and you’ll need to select “Switch OS” from Android’s slide-out menu and wait for Windows 7 to boot up. (more…)
Beautiful MyRacer’s Lisse Q10 is retro, simple, elegant, and is one of the sexiest PMPs I’ve ever seen. But the volume knob is a bit weird as it protrudes out from the edge of the chassis–there’s potential for accidental turning especially inside your pocket or purse. I’m just a wannabe product designer so take this with a grain of salt: What could have worked better is a knob that you press for it to pop up. After it pops up you can turn the knob to your liking and push it back in.
Tech specs are as follows: a touch-enabled 3-inch LCD with a 400 x 240 resolution, 8GB of storage, microSD slot, video (AVI, Xvid, DivX, WMV, ASF, RM, RMVB, DAT, MPG, MP4, VOB, 3GP with MPEG1/2/4, Xvid, WMV 7/8/9, RM/RMVB, H.264 codec support) and audio playback (AAC, FLAC, MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA), FM tuner and transmitter, voice recorder, a USB port, 900mAh battery, TV-out, stereo mic in, image viewing (JPEG, BMP, GIF). The Q10 works with Windows machines with no mention of Mac support. MyRacer could have upped the sexy quotient to another level by incorporating a much larger display of around 3.5-inch, increasing the resolution to 800 x 480 and using AMOLED technology.
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The management committee of Guangzhou Development District has announced that LG Display has decided to invest US$4 billion to build its G8.5 LCD fabrication plant in the district. The fab will be jointly constructed by the Guangzhou Development District and LG Display. Construction is slated to begin in 2010 and production is expected to start in 2012. The G8.5 fab will be able to handle 2200 x 2500mm glass substrates. Initial capacity will be 60,000 glass substrates per month with the potential to increase to 120,000. LG Display has another G8.5 fab in Paju and so the experience will be invaluable and ensuring the Guangzhou-based fab will have a high possibility of success.
Source: China Tech News
Sony’s VAIO X is a very thin (0.55-inch), light (1.5-lbs) and sexy netbook. During China’s press event for the VAIO X, Sony introduced a special version: a transparent VAIO X.
Source: ”Transparent Sony VAIO X amazingly captured on camera” – Engadget
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