OpticalTrackpad
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Meizu MX resurfaces, home button gets a nip-and-tuck, turns into optical trackpad?
It's been a while since we've seen the Meizu MX, but these latest shots from Mr. Blurrycam reveal that the phone could see a substantial tweak to its main home button. These photos are likely to be of a work-in-progress handset, with plenty of bizarre cutaways presumably obscuring details of the mole. In the leaked drawings, Meizu's upcoming smartphone looked an awful lot like its M9 predecessor, albeit with a bigger screen, running on a superior A9 Cortex processor. The main button apparently doubles as an optical trackpad, with the two flanking capacitive buttons rotating depending on orientation. While it still remains uncertain whether this nub will replace the squarish button found on the MX mock-up earlier this year, hopefully CEO Jack Wong will still manage to meet the December launch date -- if only for the sake of all those loyal Mei-yo. Fans of severely obscured photography can catch another glimpse after the break.
MSI's Brazos-powered WindPad 110w tablet officially up for pre-order, ships August 1st
It happened once before, but now it's in stone: MSI has just come clean with its WindPad 110w pre-order, with $599.99 grabbing you a place in line. For those who've forgotten, that price premium nets you a 10-inch panel (1280 x 800), 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 32GB solid state drive, a pair of full-size USB ports, a mini-HDMI socket, Windows 7 and AMD's Brazos processor platform. Make no mistake -- this ain't your average tablet, which may (or may not) explain the $100-above-average MSRP. Hit the links below if you'd like to make the best impulse buy of your week, but make sure you're prepared to wait on an August 1st ship date.
MSI WindPad 110w listed for $599 pre-order, is brown
Looks like ASUS isn't the only popular netbook maker finally releasing more of its tablets into the wild. We've had various encounters with MSI's 10-inch WindPad 110w this year, but pricing and availability details on the Windows 7 tablet -- and its Android slate-mates -- had remained secret. That's now slightly changed courtesy of J&R's website, where a pre-order listing for the 110w has surfaced displaying a $600 street price and a full specification rundown. Highlights from under the hood include a dual-core AMD Brazo (as expected), a 32GB SSD, and 4GB of DDR3 RAM along with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity; around the outside are two cameras, a plethora of ports including mini HDMI, USB 2.0 and an SD card slot. Not too shabby, although it appears you'll have to settle for brown (and loss of all dignity at checkout).
Fujitsu's TH40/D convertible tablet slides into Japan, packs Atom Z670 and Windows 7
A slide-out tablet running on Windows 7, you say? Not to be confused with the Samsung Sliding PC, what we have here is the Fujitsu LifeBook TH40/D that's just been announced for the Japanese market. Inside this 2.4-pound convertible laptop you'll find a 1.5GHz Oak Trail Atom Z670, 1GB of non-expandable DDR2 RAM, a 10.1-inch 1,024 x 600 touchscreen, a 120GB 4200rpm hard drive, and a battery life of around 6 hours. Other tidbits include 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, a couple of USB 2.0 ports, HDMI-out, an SD card slot, and a teeny optical trackpad placed next to the short space bar. Can't say we're digging some of the limitations on this TH40/D, but if you still want one, then be ready to fork out about ¥80,000 ($990) at the end of June.
RIM's optical trackpads: they weren't joking about the 'optical' part
Thinking about how your phone's touchscreen operates, you might assume that the so-called optical pads that have been making appearances on recent BlackBerrys (among other devices) operate in a similar fashion -- but you'd be wrong. RIM's official BlackBerry blog is chiming in today to drop some knowledge on us dullards, and it turns out that "optical" isn't just a cute nickname -- the pads do actually operate in much the same way as modern desktop mice, using a low-res infrared camera to capture movement across the surface and translate it into movement. In practical terms, what this means is that you don't need a conductive surface to operate the pad -- you can use pretty much anything that the sensor can see, so a gloved hand (for instance) is theoretically good to go. That being said, don't expect to be snapping photos with your "camera" any time soon -- we're literally talking about a handful of grayscale pixels here, which should make it only marginally better than the Droid's cam.
