Video: Lenovo's Ideapad U8 MID teases with Intel's Atom
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Apr 2nd 2008 5:16AM
posted Apr 2nd 2008 5:16AM
[Via UMPC Portal]
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Are you sure that Lenovo has anything to do with this? That video had terrible animation on the screen... you would think with all the engineers who work there, that it would have been caught by SOMEONE and been fixed
I like to think that this is Lenovo, and ocf the GUI of the screen could change in the future. Lenovo is a great company and i don't think that they will screw this one up. Their laptops for example are the bests around imo.
How about stuffing in a cellphone module and call it a day, eh??
When it comes to the ugly Lenovo comes hard or doesn't come at all
HA HA comes
your not wrong, i just exceeded my downloadl imit so im rollin dial up speeds, and as the picture was loading i saw the top bit and thought it looked alright, then i came back to it after it had loaded and thought EWW.
haha came
I'm a big fan of Lenovo (in fact I own an IdeaPad Y510 and love it), but I just don't see the point of this. I mean what is this, a compromised version of every gadget I already own with a Linux OS? No thanks.
Whatever MID gets my money, it'll definitely have a full-size keyboard. I like to write emails and, you know, comments on blogs.
liked the optical mouse feature, finally something a little bit different :)
indeed! as for the keyboard, well, it's touchscreen, so, I think I can do with a virtual keyboard, as I did with my Axim
I certainly would like to see this on some of the other small devices that's coming out these days, like that cloudbook or whatever it's called with the large gap between the screen and base
Whats the point in the optical mouse, and whats the use for it, the finger is the best pointer in the world, why not just touch screen and make the device smaller
Because, as was said. "For one handed usage"
It's merely a optical mouse laser that you run your thumb over to move the pointer around on the screen.
I think that's very useful since using touch screen with only one hand isn't that easy when holding in the horizontal position.
Wasn't Lenovo supposed to come out with the IdeaPad U110 by now?
im waiting for that u110 too!
So where exactly did you get that "hand writing recognition" from?
AFAIK, if this thing does run Linux, it will have no useful HWR at all, because it doesn't exist for Linux.
1.17 into the video. Perhaps "recognition" is the wrong word since it doesn't actually state that it converts your handwritten notes to text. Will update post.
Thomas
if it comes out here itll probably have ubuntu mobile on it which ubuntu and intel are working specially for mids. im guessing hand writing recognition will be standard since half of these mids dont have a keyboard.
Again: What handwriting recognition? I've been using Nokia Itablets for several years and tried Linux on several full-sized tablets and nothing in the Linuxverse comes even close to PenOffice, which itself is basically the ten year old Newton ParaGraph HWR engine, ported to Windows (albeit with an extremely kewl graphical macro engine bolted onto it).
Nokia's own HWR is a joke and the only thing Linux has ATM is Cellwriter, which is a character recognizer, in Graffiti style. The reason everybody seems to want keyboards -- make that "thumbboards", or even dumbboards! -- on their UMPC/MID/Itablet/whatever is that there simply is no decent effort done in creating a usable HWR solution.
But, and contrary to the popular hubbub, the venerable Newtons had near-perfect cursive HWR on the latest (and, thanks to the Satan Jobs, last) iteration of NewtOS. It actually worked better than a keyboard in most cases, other than static use on a desk, but CalliGrapher/PenOffice and Inkwell still use that very same, now decade-old technology.
I realize people are already queueing up to tell me that keyboards works sooo much faster than stupid handwriting, and they're basically correct, provided you're sitting at a normal desk, typing on a standard keyboard with ten fingers (or possibly more, if you're from the American Mid-West). Let me tell you this: Jabbing with your thumbs at a minuscule keypad, unable to keep your eyes on the screen while typing, you're never going to achieve the speed a frakking stylus is going to give you (don't forget that handwriting is the only means of text input that'll allow you to see both what your hand is doing and the result of it on the screen). Fullscreen input HWR is the perfect way of getting text stuff into a pocket-sized tablet computing device and it's not because Jobs hates HWR (and only so because Scully came up with it), that he's also right.
its a new linux especially made for mids , its not released yet.
also , i think thumboards , when done right beat handwriting recognition hands down. it takes a lot longer to write a letter than to just tap it, not to mention you have to write and then correct it.
That only says I can write on the screen. Big deal, I can do that in MS Paint as well. Where is the mention of handwriting recognition?
"U8" is a terrible name.
From a usability perspective, buttons shouldn't be that thin.
The side 'stretched' buttons look straight from one of those fancy 1989 Casio home calculators. Someone call Doc Brown! Lenovo's been using a time machine to steal 20 year old designs and parts.
Awesome :D
I'd like one of those and play some doom, on the tram
You could just get a DS Lite and play Doom on that. Or, y'know, pretty much any other mobile device from the last few years that has any kind of homebrew following.
Would't be half as cool :P
Lenovo, what are you waiting to realease the u110???? We're in April already!
"One handed web-surfing, for all your porn surfing needs"
Reminds me of my Nokia n800. Doubt it will cost $200 though.
I'm curious how much oomph Atom is gonna have and whether it will be enough for playing back DVD rips at full speed.
DO NOT WANT! I thinks its ugly. When will these people find out that successful products need balance and proportion. just another piece of moderately impractical garbage. but linux is fun. i still think win2k would be epic on one of these MID/UMPC type devices... but thats just me. And where's the U110? That thing looked pretty slick @ CES but has been hiding from me ever since.
I like. The interface looks very GTK, especially the icons in the top right of the screen. It's a big speculation, but linux based + gtk = openmoko?
(0:58) "Email-, Calendar-, Office fully support" :)
This is getting far from the old IBM's attention to detail...
I don't like odd shapes (why does it have to deviate from the rectangular?) and I don't like the look of those skinny buttons, but if this thing has wifi and is priced competitively, it could be a Nokia N8xx killer.
Nobody mentioned a word about Android. Not one person.