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Matthew Lentini

New HP WebOS Tablet Hits Oz, But Can It Challenge Android & Apple?

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HP will sell their new WebOS tablet via an exclusive deal with Harvey Norman, selling at $599 for a 16GB version and $699 for a 32 GB model.The 9.7 inch device that runs on a unique operating system called WebOS has been confirmed for availability to Australian consumers from August 15.

The new slate sets out to be “significantly different” from the other ‘me too’ Android devices that have saturated the newfound tablet market with its unique operating system, according to HP’s vice president for the Asia Pacific region, Anthony McMahon.

Unique features found on the new tablet include HP Synergy which populates the tablet with information pulled from a user’s web accounts including Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It interfaces emails, calendar entries, contacts and images.

Owners will also be able to use a new “Just Type” service which is like a universal search capability that allows one to search emails, tweets, web history and certain words or phrases.

The ‘window’ or ‘page’ layout of opened documents and apps has an almost uncanny resemblance to Research In Motion’s (RIM) offering with the BlackBerry PlayBook, give or take a few features.

The app porting ability for developers also resonates with a similar tune heard from RIM, where HP has touted the ability for developers to simply port applications from other operating systems onto its WebOS. The same hope from RIM has yet to garner much headway against the app stores of Android and Apple.

McMahon describes the interface as a ‘workspace,’ presented more like a typical PC or Mac desktop but in tablet-optimised form that keeps everything simple and the controls intuitive.

The two models are Wi-Fi only rather than 3G, with no current plans for a 3G model any time soon. And removable storage is absent with no SD card port, instead opting for a lone micro-USB connector.

While they can’t simply throw in update for that, HP has been considerate of reviewer criticism from the US release and is set to release the Australian version of the TouchPad with the latest firmware to fix 90 percent of the problems raised, according to McMahon.

Also in the works is AirPlay support, though this isn’t expected for the August 15 release.

The unit also houses a single button ala the iPad, hidden flush against the bezel of the screen. Atop the screen is a 1.3MP camera – yet no rear facing cam.

HP is selling exclusively through Harvey Norman in a bid to separate the TouchPad from the ‘me too’ tablet products available. The TouchPad will also be available online from the Toshiba online store.

HP is currently in talks with its larger enterprise customers in delivering enterprise-specific integration, and will otherwise sell to bigger business through its direct sales staff.

Coming with the launch is an $89 inductive charger that lets users prop their TouchPad onto a stand to charge without any connections.

Fuji Xerox Training Overhaul Pushes For New SMB Printing Customers In The Channel

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Fuji Xerox Printers plans to start training its channel partners to deliver new managed print services (MPS) to customers to bring more customers from the SMB market into the service.MPS programs like those of Fuji’s involve a cost-per-page print program that is managed by the retailer, aiding customers in managing printing costs across their businesses.

The aim there is to provide channel partners with an ongoing revenue stream from these customers while reducing these customers’ costs on the back of centralised management of their printing.

Fuji Xerox is aiming to push its exclusive ‘PagePack’ MPS program through the channel to coincide with a predicted 40 percent upcoming growth in the MPS market this year, according to Fuji Xerox general manager, David Borg.

“Our aim is to empower our partners and ensure they are in the best position to take advantage of this market growth, by providing them with complete, hands-on training across all PagePack sales tools,” said Borg.

” Investing and supporting channel partners with practical training programs is a vital part of our strategic direction.”

The company will be giving technical hands-on training workshops to its participating partners to train and upskill employees with sales tools for bringing new customers to the plate.

Review: Budget Huawei Sonic Phone For Sub-Sonic Price

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Huawei’s X1 took the budget Android to new levels by sealing a beautifully simple package into a sub-$100 price. The Huawei Sonic works on that legacy but this time for the mid-range phone market without compromising on price value.The Sonic is typical Android smartphone fodder with a few elegant additives to make the user interface a little more crisp, while retaining the typical smartphone design that’s hard to offend. It sports a single 600MHz core backed by 256 MB RAM – enough grunt to push the Sonic to at least sub-sonic speeds and run smoothly.

The 3.5 inch screen has a resolution of 320 x 480 (or half VGA) which is adequate for day-to-day use but nothing to brag about. Edges aren’t as defined as on better screens and small text when web browsing will need to be zoomed on, but otherwise it’s adequate for a mid-range phone. The brightness is also fair and adjustable.

The standard Android keyboard hasn’t been played with, so in its base form it isn’t the best out there, especially when compared to competing Android offerings that are customised with bigger, easier-to-select keys.

While there aren’t really any real-world applications in Australia for Near Field Communications (NFC) yet, the Sonic has an optional NFC chip in-built – so it’s slightly future proofed.

 

The real beauty of this cheap mid-ranger comes in the slight alterations to the typical Android 2.3 interface. It’s not the Sense-style overhaul of HTC phones, but it’s managed to simplify an already-simple system without overburdening it with proprietary software additives.

The panel below the screen houses the typical four touch-sensitive buttons from home, settings, back and search. Atop this sits the 3.5 inch screen that is made up of five customisable home screens that scroll across in a cube-like rotation that lets users flip through screens infinitely in one direction (rather than getting to the rightmost page then having to swipe back left). The same home screen interface is used on the lower-end models like the X1, though the 600MHz processor makes the Sonic run features like this seamlessly rather than with slight bits of lag.

These home pages are preloaded with a range of useful apps apart from the default like the Smart Traffic manager for setting limits to data usage per month (to avoid unwanted bill surprises), backup utilities and one-touch settings for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS, for instance. The full app list is also revamped to make it easier to customise and view in a page system similar to the home screen.

The mid-range Huawei Sonic runs at an RRP of $248 through Big W, Dick Smith and Woolworths, and for the price and hardware combination, it’s a top buy. The recently release X1 is the best value smartphone you’ll find with its sub-$100 price tag, but if you want a cheap Android phone with more than the bare-minimum in power, the Sonic is an impressive underdog.

NEC Future-Proofs Its Commercial Grade Value Displays

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NEC Australia has upped its commercial-grade V Series of displays with the addition of a new 65 inch model.The V651 takes its place as part of a range of digital signage solutions but with a few future-proof advantages over older models.

The 65 inch panel sports an expansion slot to accommodate NEC and 3rd party accessories and components as well as OPS-based products.

“The addition of the expansion slot future-proofs the display and offers a solution for current technologies like a single-board computer,” said NEC’s National Sales Manager for Displays, Daniel Hancox.

“Customers will appreciate the added features in this new model, as well as the increase in size to accommodate larger areas and audiences.”

The Full HD screen also houses 10W speakers in the low profile build for high sound and picture quality in a low-profile build.

 

On the connectivity end, it supports DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI-D, while its TileMatrix technology can tie together up to 100 displays.

For the energy conscious, the display tracks its carbon footprint on a meter. Coupled with the ability to schedule the TVs on/off times and warm up times to ensure optimum colour, the V651 can also save on power.

The V651 is out now for an RRP of $9,470.

Kensington Looks To Replace The Mobile Mouse With The Wireless Trackball

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Kensington has thrown its mouse alternative into the accessories ring with the upcoming, customisable Orbit Wireless Trackball.The ambidextrous trackball is a stationary unit that sits firm on the desktop, with a protruding ball on the top end that works like a multidirectional scroll-wheel.

The Orbit is built for mobility to suit laptops as well as desktop computers, with 2.4GHz wireless connectivity and a removable, mid-size ball that’s easy to clean. As a plus one for mobile users, there are no extra drivers to install, but an added USB dongle is required.

Customisable features are thrown into the multi-button device on the back of an update to Kensington’s TrackballWorks software. Keyboard shortcuts and general functions can be assigned to various buttons on the trackball, while ‘chording’ allows whole key combinations to similarly be assigned to different keys.

Other updates to the free software include inertial scrolling that allows users to flick through a document intuitively like when using a tablet, rather than stop-start every time the ball is released.

The trackball is slated for an August 22 release at $69.99, behind the US$59.99 price point.

The latest Orbit Trackball comes from a 20 year heritage of trackballs from Kensington, up against other trackball-makers like Logitech.

Acer Releases New Ultra-Compacts Into Widening Portable Projector Pool

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Acer has released a new portable projector that pushes mobility on a sub-$300 price tag for the active business presenter on a budget.
3D and Full HD content may be pushing projector sales, but portable projectors for businesses on the go are becoming a massive market of their own. Acer has thrown its name into the hat with its own $299 pico projector offering.

It follows the earlier Acer C20 hand-held projector released back in March for $349, though this new model is directed at notebook users rather than offering the complete mobile experience of running media of flash drives and SD cards.

Acer’s C110 portable projector comes in slim at 175 grams and sitting at a petite 110 x 85 x 25 mm.

The C110 pico-projector runs straight off a connected laptop via USB, though it may require a second USB for power as it sucks up a max 7.5 volts while typical USB ports output 5 volts.

Rather than rummaging through output options on your laptop, the C110 automatically displays the connected screen in less than five seconds when plugged in.

The screen size can push up to 254cm at 16:9 format, though the quality maxes out at a native resolution of only 854×480 with a brightness of 50 lumens or up to 1,280×800 through WXGA.

Like Acer’s previous releases, the C110 has a 25-inch foldable screen sold separately.

Portable projectors having been picking up steam as competitive models have shrunk to fit mobile applications (as small as handheld from companies like 3M, BenQ and Acer), increased connectivity and ramped up energy efficiency.

“Mobility and energy efficiency are two main trends in the projector market,” said Roger Chien, projectors product manager at ViewSonic in the US yesterday as the vision company released a slate of new LED projectors.

Spruiking ViewSonic’s new line-up, Chien added that “the PLED series transforms the projector from a cumbersome gadget to an incredibly lightweight, compact device that can be carried anywhere to meet all your projection needs. With a mercury-free LED light source and power consumption of less than 50 watts, these pico projectors are as eco-friendly as they are portable, making for powerhouse business solutions.”

Flick over the page to see the full spec list for Acer’s new projector including noise levels, refresh rates and projection distances.

AMD Announces Graphics-Fused Answer To Intel Sandy Bridge

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AMD has just announced a new range of high-performance, multi-core processors dubbed AMD Fusion A-Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) for Australian PCs and notebooks.The new chips come optimised for power saving and graphics integration and are already cropping onto new notebook releases beginning as early as August from the likes of Samsung and Toshiba. The chips are expected to appear in over 150 notebooks and desktops from the second quarter of 2011 and onward.

The new APUs come between in dual and quad core varieties and feature DirectX 11-capable discrete-level graphics chips.

These APUs combine discrete-class graphics with the additional external graphics card of the computer it sits in to create ‘dual graphics’ technology, improving graphics performance.

“We know the future of microprocessors will not be just traditional CPUs, or even the combination of CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs), but instead will consist of all sorts of “heterogeneous” processor cores working together,” said AMD’s Software Product Marketing Mananger, Sasa Marinkovic in the AMD blog late last month.

The chips are expected to give nearly 3 hours of battery life to active laptops with 6 cell batteries, and up to 10 hours while idle.

AMD is blending software and hardware with the AMD Vision Engine that ups the picture quality of videos, games and photos.

 

With power saving on the agenda, AMD is mimicking Intel’s latest ‘Sandy Bridge’ processors’ Turbo Boost function that boosts performance during peak usage and conserves power for the rest of the time.

AMD’s Turbo Core Technology does this job, dynamically boosting the performance of the CPU and GPU during demanding applications and turning power-efficient while resting or during low-demand applications.

Huawei Reshapes Ideos, Shaves Pricetag Under $100 For Optus

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Chinese phone manufacturer Huawei is furthering its no-frills range of cheap smartphones with its latest offering that’s set to sell for less than $100.The compact Android 2.2-run Ideos X1 sports a 2.8 touch screen display with a limited 320×240 pixel resolution and is backed with a 3.2 megapixel camera.

On the inside, this 100 gram mobile holds a 512M ROM and 256MB of RAM. The specs and the screen quality are identical to that of the earlier Ideos model that launched late last year for $100 more than the new price.

This model has adopted a sleeker look and less physical buttons though, with a single main button and three touch buttons on the screen. Where most Android phones with this format house a back, settings, home and search button, the X1 abandons the ‘home’ button.

The Huawei Ideos X1 will be available this Friday, July 1 from Optus with a launch RRP of $99.

LG Smart Mouse With In-Built Scanner: Gimmick Or Genius?

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LG will be schooling the peripheral world at this year’s IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin, which kicks off this Friday, September 2, with a new preview of its upcoming scanner mouse.

First previewed at this year’s CES, the LSM-100 doubles as a mouse and a scanner, with smart but simple software for cropping, editing and copying text from scans straight into Microsoft Word as editable content.

A recent Korean preview video shows the mouse scrolling over images and text, pulling together a full image from its credit card-sized scanning bed on the underside of the mouse.

The beauty comes in the clever software that is depicted pulling together all of the swiping scans of a two page magazine spread  as though painting in all of the detail with a brush. The mouse detects where it is on the surface of an image in real time and is thus able to turn all the user’s scanning into a single image on-screen.

The scanner takes images as large as A3, saving in a wide variety of file types include png, jpeg, tiff, bmp, pdf, xmls and doc. What is yet to be released is the dpi on the scanner or of the mouse sensor, so the quality of scans and sensitivity of the mouse is yet to be judged.

Review: Laser’s EB700 Is A Budget E-Reader With An Edge, But Is It Too Flimsy Up Against Kobo & Kindle?

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Get a tablet, or just an eBook? If you’re a bookworm who’s keen on a read on a budget, the EB700 delivers and then some, even if it isn’t the sexiest, sleekest device on the market.By today’s standard of tablet PCs taking on the book-sized form factor with eBook capabilities amongst a sea of functionality, the idea of buying an eBook reader seems ever more pointless. But if you’re a bookworm who’s keen on a read on a budget, the EB700 delivers and then some, even if it isn’t the sexiest, sleekest device on the market.

Where this Laser device skimps on fancy design and higher performance, it adds in extra functions and wider file format support to compensate.

For just under $100, the EB700 delivers video and music playback with a few esoteric extras like subtitle and karaoke-style lyric support, while throwing in 200 pre-loaded eBooks into the package.

You could alternatively go for a WiFi-enabled Amazon Kindle for $139, with the extra $40 getting you a better build, battery life (with its e-ink screen) and wireless connectivity but taking away music, video and portable storage capabilities.

The price tag suits this unit up to be a kind of ‘no frills’ device on the physical side. The lightweight device features a seven inch TFT colour screen with an underwhelming 800×480 resolution that makes text unclear at far zoom and doesn’t do much to compliment image quality.

 

The buttons feels tacked on and are awkwardly placed under the screen in a criss-cross fashion between deceivingly similar squares that aren’t buttons. Adding to the frustration is the button lettering marked in light grey atop the slightly darker grey buttons, turning invisible in dimmer light.

The user interface isn’t the prettiest thing, but it’s easy to navigate and a Browser History tab is especially handy for finding exactly where you were last up to in multiple books and files at a time. It tracks last viewed page numbers of books with dates of viewing in tow.

EBooks are easy on the eyes despite the colour screen, and the variable font size that can be viewed in landscape or portrait helps too. While I’ve given the buttons some flack, the directional buttons that sit next to the thumbs while you hold the device in portrait mode make navigation simple.

The added bonus with the EB700 is the music and video playback. While it’ll slow down on larger video files and if you fast forward a little too much, it otherwise runs video well over a good range of formats including rm, rmvb, avi, 3gp, flv, mp4, vob, dat and mpeg.

Music can be played back while reading eBooks for those looking to set a mood, with supported file types including music: mp3, flac, wav, ogg, ape, aac and wma. The in-built speaker isn’t the best quality, nor is it very loud, so your best bet is bringing your own earphones or using the ones supplied.

There’s also image view that supports jpeg, bmp and gif files.

 

On the most important aspect – eBook reading – the EB700 supports files chained down by DRM and is compatible with Adobe’s Digital Editions. It also supports range of similar files including txt, pdf, htm, rtf, fb2, epub, mobi, and small docs.

Uploading content onto the reader is as easy as drag and drop like a USB stick. When you plug the unit into the computer via the coupled USB connector (which you also use for charging), the device opens like any other external storage (also an added plus). While there is a folder structure, you can generally dump files anywhere and access them on the reader thanks to its ‘Explorer’ tab that views all your files together.

It sports a 4GB capacity, though can take an extra 16GB via microSD card.

It’s not all smooth sailing though – the hardware is lacking for what it offers. With reading being the prime function, slow loading times for individual pages (sometimes a few seconds) and sporadic errors on some pages of the pre-loaded eBooks degrade the appeal of the unit. Even turning the unit on requires users to hold the on button down for about three seconds.

The battery life is decent, though could be better, with 15 hours of music playback, 5.5 hours of video and 7 hours of eBook reading time.

It isn’t the flashiest device on the market, but it’s one of the cheapest with the most functionality in its league. If you’re just looking for something to read books on, you might want to look to some of the bigger names. But if you’re on a budget or want something that goes a few steps further, the EB700 offers great added value.

The Laser EB700 eBook reader is available at Big W stores around Australia and Bing Lee stores in NSW, with an RRP of $99.95.