"Papyrus 2 brings many exciting new features, including: Search View for PIM item searching; Advanced filters management; Automatic attendees notifications, Popup selection effect for optimized display and much more! Papyrus 2 back-end engine was re-designing from the beginning and delivers the fastest experience for the pro user!"
Rumors are about that Verizon and Sprint will be offering the HTC Touch Diamond and HTC Touch Pro. Plus, there’s a great video on YouTube of the amazing Touch Pro interface. This week we’ll also note a few reviews of the new HP iPAQ 910 and leaked information about the Treo 850.
HP intends to have a notebook with a touchscreen display on the market within the next 18 months, the company has told the Wall Street Journal. The company was one of the first to introduce a mainstream, touchscreen desktop in the TouchSmart series but now says that it sees enough interest in the format to be one of the first with a portable PC offering a heavily touch-driven interface. The company has already introduced a tablet PC for the mainstream through the tx series but still depends on a stylus inside a conventional interface and would like to change the interface to a more natural one for future devices.
“We see touch as the almost preferred method for nontechnical users,” says HP’s Personal Systems Group CTO Phil McKinney.
The company has already hinted these plans but has now set a timetable that would put the release of the future notebook design before 2010, confirming that HP will use a custom interface rather than wait for the release of Microsoft’s Windows 7, which will make touch input a standard feature.
Apple is believed to have helped spur this interest in touchscreen devices through the iPhone but itself has remained silent on a touch interface for its computers, choosing instead to use multi-touch trackpads with more complex gestures.
First came touchscreens. We all loved them on PDAs, and they found widespread use in vertical markets. For may years, they remained relatively unchanged, improving in accuracy, but essentially providing a very static user experience.
When Apple brought multitouch to the masses, it was heralded as one of the greatest innovations in years. Everyone is racing to catch Apple, and its ability to provide intuitive, simple user interfaces relying on touch. However, once you get over the gloss and shine, all Apple really did was build a very good interface… multitouch was only icing on the cake, but certainly not the secret ingredient.
The iPhone has only just recently celebrated its first birthday, but already the progress on the “next big thing” is racing ahead in full gear. Take a look at the following take on a “Minority Report” type interface… makes the iPhone look darn right antique!
The HP Touchsmart IQ500 is a new experience in computing and home entertainment. Instead of dragging your mouse around, you can directly interact with the computer screen.
You only need to plug in one power cable, leaving your desktop nice and tidy and making it look more like a television than a computer. You still have option to a regular mouse but don’t think you will want to use it after watching the video clip below.
The full potential of this computer will not be usable until the Windows 7 operating system is released. However this is still one amazing machine for those who are looking for a computer and home entertainment system rolled into one.
Due to me putting my back out yesterday I wasn’t able to unbox the TouchSmart last night so today I had some help and managed to get the unit unboxed. I IMG_0998recorded an unboxing / first impressions video but to be honest its not until I put it in the living room tonight and started using it that I realised how good the machine is. There is two areas to focus on: The all in one hardware which is packaged in a very sleep design and the HP TouchSmart software which is amazingly tactile and had the whole family eager to play with it
First a quick look at the spec:
* Intel Core 2 Duo T5850 * 4GB Ram * 64bit Windows Vista Home Premium * 465GB hard disk * DVD burner * TV Tuner * 22″ Touch Display * Wifi and Bluetooth * Webcam * Wireless keyboard and mouse * All in one design
The TouchSmart software is beautiful,it looks great, it responds to flicks and presses and I love how the faster you swipe the faster it goes. It can play music, videos, and display pictures, there is a touch based web browser, RSS reader and weather apps. This is something I can only really show off in the video but a measure of it’s success is that my wife said “wow can we keep it” rather than the normal “oh no not another box”. It invites you to touch and play with it. My plan was to buy a new Media Center machine and hide it away but I now can see me going for something like this and have it in the living room (still working as a server for my Extenders as well)
ASUS has touted the multi-touch trackpads of its Eee PCs, but every time I have gone to test the multi-touch controls on the pad I can’t do much more than zoom in on a picture by pinching the pad. I are happy to report that finally Eee PC users are able to do more with their fingers.
Its nothing like the N-Trig multi-touch drivers for the Dell XT, but ElanTech, the company responsible for the smartpad on the Eee PCs, has updated the drivers for the touchpad to enable more multi-touch gestures (you can find the drivers here). Thanks to JKKMobile for tipping us off on the new drivers.
I downloaded the drivers to the Eee PC 1000H running Windows Vista and they worked right away (they should work for XP as well; there is no Linux driver version). In the mouse properties window, an extra ElanTech tab allows for tweaking the different multi-touch gestures.
I was then able to create commands that go along with different gestures. For instance, I configured a two finger tap on the trackpad to launch Firefox. Swiping three fingers down will bring up an ALT+Tab command that allows for moving through windows. Swiping three fingers up will launch My Computer.
You can also do more in a photo gallery program. In Windows Photo Gallery, I was able to pinch to zoom, but also able to rotate the picture with a swipe. It is all very MacBook Air like.
I like the gestures the best in the browser. A three finger swipe will move forward or backward between Web pages and two fingers up and down will scroll through the page.
We’ve recently redesigned our web site, and I’m impressed. It must be among the best Windows Mobile/Smartphone sites on the Internet. This week we’ll also note a video review of the Samsung and other device news, as well as a new version of Google Maps for Windows Mobile.
Hewlett-Packard wants to put you in touch with its latest computers. Quite literally.
The company’s handsome new line of all-in-one TouchSmart PCs makes liberal use of a mouse-keyboard alternative you always have with you: your fingers. You can launch applications, play music, crop photos and handle other tasks, just by pressing against the screen.
The machines went on sale in retail stores last week. HP says early sales are trending above forecasts. The $1,499 TouchSmart IQ506 that I’ve been testing - the more expensive of two new models - may already be difficult to come by, says Vickram Bedi, HP’s product management director for worldwide consumer PCs.
As an all-in-one computer, the entire guts of the machine are stuffed underneath the display. TouchSmart belongs in the company of the Dell XPS One, Gateway One and Apple iMac. But none of the others boasts a touch experience.
Touch computing is not a new concept. It just has never really gone mainstream. HP is one of many manufacturers, for example, making tablet PCs that use a pen in lieu of a mouse or keyboard. They aren’t exactly best sellers. Apple is helping boost the visibility of touch through the iPhone.
Entries (RSS)