A handful of tech journalists and bloggers have been given iPads to try out and the first reviews have appeared. They are overwhelmingly positive.
Most reviewers praised the iPad’s speed. That’s understandable considering it has a much faster CPU than any generation of the iPhone or iPod Touch, while most of the apps available for it now were actually designed with those devices in mind.
The user interface also got its share of kudos. The Houston Chronicle’s Bob LeVitus calls the on screen keyboard “eminently usable,” adding that in landscape mode he can almost touch type on it.
Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times called the iPad “a computer that’s designed for speed, mobility, and tactile interaction above all other considerations.”
But that leaves us to think about what other considerations might be important. Perhaps the biggest is what consumers will expect from a device priced about the same as a budget laptop.
As all the reviewers make clear, the iPad is no substitute for a laptop.
Everyone was quite pleased with its multimedia playback and e-book reader capabilities. But they were equally unanimous about its unsuitability for things like working with word processing or creating spreadsheets.
And then there’s the content. If you’re looking for e-books there will be plenty available, including not just commercial titles from big publishers, but also a number of public domain books from Project Gutenberg.
One potentially huge problem on the e-book front is the insistence by major publishers on controlling the price so as not to compete with their physical products. We’ve seen this strategy before with record labels.
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Toshiba UK announced the new Qosmio X500 intended to be used by gamers. The Qosmio X500 offers high performance processing power, combined with the latest graphics capabilities, to deliver a great mobile gaming experience. It is powered by Intel’s latest Quad Core processors and the latest nVIDIA GeForce graphics, and sports a large 18.4-inch TruBrite Full HD LCD screen with 16:9 aspect ratio at a resolution of 1920×1080.
It includes stereo speakers made by audio specialists Harman Kardon. The Qosmio X500 also features a rewritable Blu-ray drive (BD-RE) and Toshiba’s Resolution+ upscaling technology, enabling the standard definition DVDs and video files to be upconverted to near high definition quality. It also features an HD web camera, allowing users to record HD video and webchat in wide screen 16:9 format.
For quick and convenient logon, the Qosmio X500 comes with a finger print reader and Face Recognition via the embedded HD web cam.
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Sharp has introduced the 20-inch AQUOS DX LCD this week, the first HDTV at that size to include a built-in Blu-ray burner.
The TV also has a built-in digital TV tuner that allows users to record episodes and burn them to BD-R/R DL and BD-RE/RE DL discs. The company says up to 30 hours of HD video can be recorded to BD-50 discs, and the data can be burnt at up 7x speed.
Users can also play media stored on DVD-R, including MPEG-4 and AVC high definition video files.
The TV itself, is 720p resolution and has a 1,500:1 contrast ratio with 450cd/m2 brightness. For inputs, there are two HDMI ports, a VGA, a D4, and S-video and RCA. There is also an Ethernet port for Internet connectivity.
The TV will hit Japan on June 20th, and will cost $1590 USD.
