After teasing us with a touchscreen phone way back at CES this January, iriver has been decidedly mum on the subject ever since, calling what we saw more of a "proof of concept" than a ready-for-market product. Well, that veil has been lifted and we're finally staring at the iriver wave, a touchphone that iriver plans to start shipping in Korea on March 9th of next year with KT, and with other major carriers to follow. Other than a touchscreen, the phone packs WiFi and the traditional kitchen sink approach of Korean PMPs, with multimedia playback, FM radio, e-books and an electronic dictionary. There's miniSD expansion, access to the Bugs Music Service for online music and we're sure a few other perks hidden under layers of Korean spec sheets. Overall the physical design hasn't really changed much from what we saw at the start of the year (looks like that 3-inch, 480 x 272 touchscreen is quite intact), but the software has certainly been refined, and is devoid of many of its original, erm, iPhone-inspired touches.

[Via Hallyu Tech]

We were expecting to see Fujitsu's U820 break cover this morning, but the company managed to keep another trick up its sleeve: the 16-inch LifeBook N7010, which features a second four-inch touch screen above the keyboard. Interestingly, the touchscreen isn't a SideShow display, but rather appears as a second monitor -- meaning you can replace the default launcher app with any window of your choosing, including full-screen video. Nifty trick -- we'd have been more into it if it had somehow been combined with the gesture-enabled trackpad, but we'll see if this design takes off. Other specs are nicely on the higher-end of things, if familiar: 2.26GHz P8400 Core 2 Duo, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3470 graphics, 4GB RAM, 320GB drive, Blu-ray, 1.3 megapixel webcam, and WiFi / Bluetooth. Not bad at all for $1,499 -- too bad we don't have any availability details.

[Via Slashgear]

Read - Fujitsu N7010 announcement
Read - Laptop hands-on

You know you've made it when your little-laptops-that-could sit atop a market-share big enough to support third-party device-hackery like this. It's "easy," it's "fun," it's a solder-less DIY touch-screen kit made specifically for the Acer Aspire One and Eee PC 900/901 netbooks. The 4-wire, resistive panel display with Mac, Linux, and Windows drivers sure looks easy enough to install. But we'll wait for the reviews to see just how well the $96 panel (a cool 25% of the netbook's price) performs under day-to-day use, thankyouverymuch. We've got our Windows 7 pre-beta ready just in case.

[Thanks, Joe L.]

Determined to make us jealous that our kids' childhood experiences are more marvelous than ours, SMART Technologies will tomorrow unveil the SMART Table, a primary education "interactive learning center" (we'd rather call it Surface Jr.). It'll be available Spring of next year, and will work out of the box with learning applications that can be operated by any number of kids and all their fingers. Other classroom multitouch devices are on the horizon, but most of them are a little further from market than this Canadian contraption, which includes custom lesson plans, gesture support and a (touted but unspecified) wide viewing angle. At $8,000 we're not sure it's an option for public schools whose budgets only have room for essentials, but if you work at a school that's totally loaded with cash and think the kiddos would dig this, feel free to look at SMART's short promotional vid after the break.

We heard the rumor now ASUS' CEO, Jerry Shen, confirms in an interview with Laptop that ASUS will slap a touchscreen and Windows 7 into a new Eee PC sometime in the second half of 2009. A statement likely to make a few project managers at Microsoft uncomfortable as that cuts into the official early 2010 padding built into their Win7 Gantt charts. The touch-enabled Eee PC model(s) could come in the form of a convertible tablet although Shen wouldn't specify -- he only promised more details in Q1, presumably at CES. Unsurprisingly, ASUS has no plans to put Vista onto Eee PCs at all. Also noteworthy is the introduction of "more exciting" Eee PC rigs in Q1 and Q2 in prices ranging from $250 (yes, $250) to $700. Steadily inching closer to that ellusive $199 Eee PC.

Other interesting points from the interview:

• Eee Top all-in-one PC will be released at the end of this month
• EeeStick (and compatible games) is to be released soon as both an Eee PC bundle and as a separate accessory (depending upon country) priced somewhere between $50 and $100
  
• Two new "Eee products" (not Eee PCs if we read this correctly) will be announced in January
  
• Eee PC devices will be limited to 10-inch, and smaller displays -- Shen describes the netbook as a platform to consume content whereas a laptop is for creating content
• ASUS is focused on improving battery life and startup times on future Eee PCs -- adding more power, like dual-core Atoms, is not a priority

They're not much more useful or cost efficient than a second or third regular-sized display, but Korean company Nanovision's soon-to-be-released 7-inch mini-LCDs -- model-named MIMO -- are novel, and probably a bit more convenient to hook up thanks to a USB interface. Two models will hit the streets of Korea in just a couple of days, and they both work in either landscape or portrait mode at 800 x 480. The UM-750 (₩183,000 or $152), has a webcam, touchscreen, and TV tuner, but its feature-challenged brother the UM-710 (₩98,000 or $81) doesn't. Unfortunately, they're only planned for Korea at the moment, so everyone else will have to consider a smaller but considerably less adorable alternative.

[Via Technabob; Thanks, Tom M]

With HP's touchscreen laptop looming on the horizon, out come the leaks of an ASUS touchscreen lappie scheduled for launch in the first half of 2009. Touchscreen Eee PCs too (finally, right?) if DigiTimes' sources at panel makers are correct (which they tend to be with regard to ASUS). According to the Taiwanese industry rag, ASUS will likely use either a 12.1-inch or 11.6-inch touchscreen panel developed by AU Optronics (AUO) or Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO). What's odd here is the claim by sources that the touch-panel notebooks "are expected to take advantage of Windows 7" and presumably the new Microsoft OS's multi-touch capabilities. Strange, since Windows 7 isn't officially expected until sometime in early 2010 -- a date looking more and more like a publicly padded goal to avoid the bashing Microsoft received for its Vista delays. The whispers certainly add a bit more credence to rumors of a 2009 release as expressed by Bill Gates himself, or more specifically June 3rd, 2009 as allegedly marked in the internal Microsoft calendar.

We already know that HP has its sights on touchscreen technology as it re-invents its product portfolio over the next 18 16 months or so. HP has already demonstrated a flair for touchscreen PCs with its TouchSmart desktops. It's now being reported by The Wall Street Journal that HP plans to have a consumer oriented, touch-screen laptop (not just another convertible tablet, apparently) ready by the end of the year according to the WSJ's ever omniscient "people familiar with the matter." HP's said to be getting help from the uber-boutique design-house, Frog Design, to help develop the new software (which certainly needs some tweaking) and hardware. Sources also claim that HP is on track to release a touch-screen cellphone into Europe (through US carriers sometime "next year or so") and new 10-inch netbook before the end of the year. Maybe then HP can stop riding ASUS so hard, eh?

Hey, it's not like you really expected Nokia to ride the coattails of its N95 / N96 forever without adding in a dash of innovation, right? At a recent Nokia event held in New Delhi, Devinder Kishore (the director of marketing for Nokia India) was quoted as saying that "We will have lots of touchscreen phones coming up, including an N-series device very soon." Granted, it's not at all shocking to hear that the engineers in Espoo are already conjuring up touch-friendly N-series handsets, but at least you know there's a fingertip-lovin' Nokia coming for you if the XpressMusic 5800 just ain't rubbing you the right way.

We've seen tons of Eees modded with touchscreens, and it looks like ASUS is taking the hint -- it's saying that it expects to launch touch-enabled Eee PCs next year, as long rumored. It's not clear whether the new models will run XP or a special Linux build, but we'll find out soon enough, since the company plans to show them off at CES in January. Unsurprisingly, we should also be seeing dual-core Atom 330 chips make their way into the Eee line as soon as they're available in quantity, but the best piece of news is probably that ASUS will be getting aggressive on price with a sub-$300 Eee. Now just wrap all that up in the S101's case and we're all set -- that would be just about perfect.

[Via Electronista]

A fellow named Stuart Lowe installed Leopard on his Gigabyte M912X netbook / tablet hybrid, and we like the results. Though this isn't the first Mac tablet hack, it's a tightly wrapped little package: the interface seems smooth with either fingers or a stylus, and Inkwell's onscreen keyboard allows complete functionality when the computer is folded into its slate configuration. Much of the necessary software functionality existed in Leopard already, and since installing OS X on something other than a Mac isn't the challenge it used to be, we're envisioning a pretty smooth ride for other would-be-hackers. We've embedded a video on the other side of the jump -- take a look, and then cast your vote on what to call this niche category of netbook-like tablets.

[Via Slashgear]

She's arrived at last, the 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia's tardy entry into the (modern) touchscreen phone space, and we've gotten some quality face time with the device. Appropriately nicknamed the Tube, the device has a number of Nokia peculiarities that could appeal to certain sensibilities, but probably won't be taking a big bite out of existing touchphone market share -- at least in the S60-phobic United States. Let's dig in, shall we?

Got touchscreen envy but don't have the pair of Benjamins required to get yourself into a celly without a keypad? LG has a solution: the KP500, a nearly button-less and stylus-bearing handset that sounds rather like another recent cheap smartphone. LG's not giving many details about this one beyond its 3-inch display, a 3 megapixel camera, motion sensor, and availability in black, brown, silver, or gold (though based on the pic above we'd stay away from that last one). There's a short video of the TouchFLO-like UI to whet your appetite just below, but that's all we have to share until this phone hits Europe in a month, with a worldwide release to come afterward.

[Via Unwired View]