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Hands-On Demo Shows Asus E-Reader Tablet In Action
MojoKid writes "Mobile computing is making its mark at Computex 2010, with tablet PCs and e-readers of all sorts coming out for the first time as rivals to Apple's iPad. After announcing its Eee Pad tablet PC, Asus offered some hands-on time with its new e-Reader/e-Writer, designed for students and mobile business professionals. The little slate's features include 10-hour battery life, 2,450 dpi resolution touch screen, pen writing and input controls, 2MP camera, USB port, and a MicroSD slot. In addition, Asus also has strong ties with Amazon, so it wouldn't be a reach to see some sort of partnership between Asus and Amazon with the Kindle bookstore as a content provider."
Not interested in gray scale.
The screen does *not* have a 2450dpi resolution (which would be ridiculous). The dpi metric refers to the input sensitivity. The screen is a 8" 1024x600 panel.
The panel is obviously not e-ink...is this old school monochrome LCD, then? If the viewing angles are OK, I don't see why not.
Does it?
The digitizer has 2450 dpi resolution. The screen is 1024x786 with 64 grey levels.
It look like a concept I could use. For lab journals etc - snap an image, write a note.
2450 dpi?
Is something wrong with math here, or I missed few years of consumer development?
What I would like is to use such a thing as a terminal. Use it as a screen / digitizer combination at work or at home, and to be able to use it as a separate PC when on the train. As I don't do no flash, I cannot see what OS it has and if software can be installed on it, but it could make a great, finally ergonomic, X terminal.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
WTF is the point of a digicam with a grayscale screen? I remember pictures taken with an old QuickTake 100 with fondness, but not enough to pay $199 to recreate its capabilities.
Give me 8.5" by 11" or A4 size screen with the resolution to replicate a FULL PAGE OF TEXT.
Why cant these tablet makers get it through their heads? 1200X600 = too small I want to see a full page and annotate it. Otherwise it is another leisure toy and not a real tool for education or work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He never touched the screen with his hand while using the pen. So probably no active digitizer. Also doesnt seem to have an eraser end on the pen. Sigh.
... of paper on my desktop, the one under my notebook. I write in shades of gray (or blue) so it would be functionally equivalent to paper and much better for long term storage of my notes (which I can afford to lose). But it must start up *quickly*. Paper starts up in zero time.
Furthermore I can hopefully put pdf files in it with a SD card :-)
It's called the T91, and it beat the iPad to market by a year. Full color LCD touchscreen, plus it runs Windows XP so that the user isn't tied to any app store. Install whatever the heck you want on it. And when I bought mine when it first came out, it cost the same as an iPad.
Unfortunately, it has a keyboard, so they had to market it as a netbook instead of a tablet. Really this shows the genius of Apple's marketing. They can sell a toy like an iPad at the same price as a real computer like the T91 that does everything the iPad does and more, and people will still buy it.
Asus should just remove the keyboard from the T91 and call it a tablet. They could probably charge $200.00 more for it.
Am I out of line by whining that we all should be well over the use of monochrome displays in these devices? When I see an eReader using a monochrome display I think "that looks so last decade...", and the strange thing to me is that it takes Apple and its iPad to deliver full color output? Like its some huge friggin' technological effort to create a tablet device with color; so they get to charge almost $1000 a pop? I don't get it. Am I missing the incredible technological leap that has been made with the iPad?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Why all these devices have MicroSD ports instead of simple SD ports? Dont tell me it's about size, my palm zire 72 launched in 2004 have one.
I'd find this thing very useful if it could easily grab a good-quality photo of a document. 2MP doesn't seem enough, although if it's prepared for that it could be. I have a 3.2 MP camera in my mobile phone, and it doesn't do a very good job of grabbing a document's photo. Now, if this thing did a better job of it, (by for example taking a fast sequence of photos and software-joining them to get better quality), and if the document's classification system doesn't suck, well, I'd like one. Provided, of course, that the pencil annotations' format is an open one, because, you know Asus, I like you, but I'm not the type to marry.
Any word on the openness of the annotations' format?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
it looks like a large palm3. $200, its not color, or eink, It's going to be tied to amazon? Come on. E-Readers need to either be CHEAPER or BETTER than books. Right now they are neither. So their only purpose at the moment is geek bling at the local starbucks. Call me when they're $25 and not tethered to amazon and they might be worth my interest.
Greyscale screen, stylus input, reading/writing emphasis, perfect size (about the same as the original Apple Newton, only thinner), fast refresh, AWESOME.
If it's as nice as it looks, this may be my ideal reading/writing device, depending on included apps and connectivity. Much more interesting to me as a dedicated reader/writer than the iPad, which has the wrong sort of display, no stylus input, and is slightly the wrong shape (more like a 4:3 display, less like a flip notebook).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I am one of the "note takers," essentially a professional one. I don't use color. I don't WANT color. Color destroys readability.
Right now I use a LiveScribe Pulse pen.
1) No immediate feedback.
2) Clumsy applications.
3) Limited memory.
4) Must be synchronized to a PC.
5) No close handwriting recognition integration.
6) VERY limited user interface.
I would LOVE to be using a tablet of some kind so that I can actually see what I'm doing. So why am I using an ink-based pen? Because there is NO alternative for taking many hours worth of handwritten notes on battery power with very low weight right now. Back in the day there was the Newton 2x00 and it was, so far as I'm concerned, the Greatest Device Ever Created for my purposes and I would still be using it (I have three, two were backups) if not for the fact that the NCU (sync software) wasn't updated beyond Windows 95 / Mac OS 8 compatibility, so synchronizing is now impossible.
For a good 10 years I've been crossing my fingers hoping against hope that someone would come up with a Newton-like replacement: similar form factor, similar display, similar high-resolution stylus-based digitizer, etc. This looks damned close in terms of size and input method.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
But this will definitely put the last nail in the Apple Newton's coffin.
include $sig;
1;
You mean media provider.
The content, if any, of the works is provided by the authors, artists, photographers, and so on who created them.
...what happened to their older prototype that had an e-ink display on one side and an LCD panel on the other in a fold out case? Be nice to have a few more specs for it as well, but at least they're using a greyscale screen which means that it should be, mostly, useable in bright sunlight.
Sounds/looks promising, especially if they include handwritten character recognition into it, something which I just cannot believe that Apple skipped after they spent all that money on the technology for the Newton and which worked out fairly well in the end if you properly trained the recognizer. It used to do a pretty darned good job on my admittedly, horrible, handwriting. I used to use Paragraph's (IIRC) version for wince(and I do) too, where it worked fairly well, but not quite as nicely as the truly integrated Newton variety.