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Touchscreen Mobiles: Part II

In Part I of this feature I highlighted some 'totally touchscreen' handsets that had no physical keypads at all and relied on virtual keypads (onscreen) instead. In this second installment, let's look at some handsets that offer the best of both worlds by incorporating full-screen touch sensitivity and a physical keypad for those who don’t like to mess up their screen with fingerprints.

Slider Phones
LG KF 700

LG's KF700 slider is equipped with a 3 inch, 240 x 480 pixel resolution TFT touchscreen display. The keypad slides down from behind and yet it appears rather slim at 14.5mm. It has a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera that uses image stabilization for better pictures. Other features include a media player, FM radio, Bluetooth and USB connectivity. For internet connectivity there's 3G with HSDPA and GPRS. It also supports microSD cards for external memory.

QWERTY Sliders
HTC Touch Dual (Rs 26,500)

The HTC touch has always had a great design, but things just got better with a slide-down QWERTY keypad. Unfortunately it seems HTC compromised a little, with the display being reduced to 2.6 inches from the 2.8 inches in the Touch. But that’s no biggie; considering features such as Bluetooth, USB (mini), EDGE, 3G with HSDPA, USB, and Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. It even has a 2 megapixel camera, with a secondary camera for video calling. Like the Touch, the Dual too incorporates HTC's TouchFLO finger swipe navigation

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Although this handset has not yet been released, it’s something to look forward to this year. The Xperia X1 has a 3-inch, 800 x 480 pixel resolution TFT touchscreen display with a superb QWERTY keyboard that slides out. The handset is well designed and lightweight, and will run on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. It incorporates a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera with flash, inbuilt GPS with A-GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP, and USB v2.0 connectivity. It supports Wi-Fi, EDGE and 3G with HSDPA. There's about 400MB of internal memory and support for external memory. I particularly liked the optical navigation pad under the display and motion sensor with UI auto-rotate feature

QWERTY Candy Bar Phones
Sony Ericsson P1i (Rs 16,600)


Though I wasn't hugely turned on by the P1i and its functions, it nevertheless is a good phone with great features such as a 2.6 inch touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard and a scroll wheel on the side. It has a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, Bluetooth with A2DP profile, USB, and Infrared connectivity. External memory is handled via M2 cards. It supports Wi-Fi and 3G. A great feature to have on a business phone like this is the Business Card Scanner. It even a has a media player and an FM radio with RDS.

Treo 750 (Rs 22,500)

The Palm Treo 750 is a comfortable phone to use, with a neat QWERTY keyboard, 5-way navigation pad, and 2.4 inch TFT touchscreen display. It runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 PocketPC but is upgradeable to Windows Mobile 6.0. Features include a 1.3 megapixel camera, miniSD external memory card support, 3GT, EDGE, Bluetooth with A2DP support, and USB connectivity. It also has infrared if you need it.

There you have it: my list of dual input handsets that incorporate touchscreen technology and physical keypads to offer a complete mobile experience. If you have suggestions regarding any more handsets, please leave a comment. Indeed, I shortlisted some of these devices based on recommendations from Tech2’s very own readers. Thanks guys... keep reading!

Touchscreen Mobiles: Part II

In Part I of this feature I highlighted some 'totally touchscreen' handsets that had no physical keypads at all and relied on virtual keypads (onscreen) instead. In this second installment, let's look at some handsets that offer the best of both worlds by incorporating full-screen touch sensitivity and a physical keypad for those who don’t like to mess up their screen with fingerprints.

Apple Macbook Air

Ever since news about the Macbook Air broke (and in typical Apple style left the world open-mouthed) we at Tech2.0 had been waiting eagerly to get our hands on it. Well, the wait is now over, so without further ado or pontification let’s head straight to the heart of the matter – does the slim-and-sexy Macbook Air deliver?

Despite seeing images and videos of the Macbook Air, nothing could have prepared me for the “OMG THAT IS SLIM!!!” reaction I had when I first beheld the laptop. It is that thin. Measuring an incredible 14.2 x 10.5 x 1.9, this is truly the world’s slimmest laptop and will remain so till the competition gets its act together.

Considering how thin it is, quite a few users might have concerns about its sturdiness. Well these doubts can be easily laid to rest. The Macbook Air is constructed on a strong aluminum shell, which has a sober light silver finish. This is a revolutionary clean design and breaks new ground for high performance slim laptops.

However, the slimness has its drawbacks. The usual arrays of ports and the standard optical drive that are ubiquitous on normal laptops are completely absent here. Instead there's just a single USB slot – for any external connectivity one will have to use a variety of external connections that increase the number of items one has to carry. We'll cover this in greater detail later in the article.

Moving on to its features, the LCD panel on the Macbook Air is a 13.3 inch TFT LED panel with a native resolution of 1280 x 800. This glossy screen offers excellent levels of brightness and color/contrast. Thanks to the excellent anti-aliasing available on OSX, text and graphics were very crisp and rich. Watching movies was a real delight. The only hitch was the viewing angle – even a little tilt away from center led to a dramatic loss in clarity. The gloss of the screen did not pose a problem.

The keyboard of the Air seemed a bit off compared to other laptops. It was a little more angled to the left, which at first led to a lot of mis-typing. Once I got used to it, however, it was quite comfortable. The keys are quite slim but offer excellent feedback. They are evenly recessed and well spaced.


The touchpad is huge and occupies a fair bit of area. This is due to the addition of the 'Multi-touch' option first seen in the iPhone. While being able to manipulate images and text in a manner similar to the iPhone sounds good, the actual experience was not that great. At best it was was slow and not very responsive. Barring resizing images or manipulating basic text, I couldn’t find too much use for it.

The large size of the touchpad may cause some problems while typing, as it could inadvertently register as a click/movement and scramble the cursor causing mistypes. This can however be disabled from 'Options', so it's no big deal.

As we observed, the Macbook Air is stingy with port/ODD/connectivity offerings. To compensate, Apple's offered a series of external connectivity options such as an Ethernet port / Micro-DVI connector and a Super Drive. Additionally, a new program called 'Remote Drive' allows you to treat a DVD-ROM drive from another PC/Mac as a local drive, and allow you to install/modify applications natively on the Air. This program supports booting over the network and thus can be used to reinstall the OS if necessary.

The Macbook Air sports an Intel C2D processor running at 1.6 GHz, an 80 GB 4200 RPM drive, 2GB of PC5300 DDR2 RAM, and a 13.3 inch LCD Panel. The CPU is unique as it’s custom-made for Apple and is just about 60 percent size/TDP of a normal mobile CPU. Another unique fact is that instead of the 80GB HDD, one can squeeze in a 64GB SSD as the primary storage.

Keeping in mind the Spartan nature of the laptop, we decided to skip our normal Windows Vista installation and 3D/PCmark benchmark routine. We chose to instead focus on the usability factor of the Air within its native OSX. Performance-wise, the Macbook Air was pretty sluggish. Programs took some time loading and despite the 2GB of RAM it wasn’t a pleasant experience in some places. This can directly be attributed to the slow nature of both the RAM and very slow HDD. I suspect this would improve dramatically with the SSD.

Battery life proved to be top-notch. The laptop claims a battery life of five hours and I found this to be largely accurate. Even with mid-to-heavy use, I was easily averaging these figures.

The Macbook Air is an interesting product. It’s clearly aimed at the well-heeled user and positions itself between the entry-level Macbook and the high-end Macbook Pro range. This is indicated by its price of Rs 96,000 (and upward). While it certainly sets new standards in industrial laptop design, the negatives – such as the absence of USB ports, non user-changeable battery, sluggish system performance – can be overwhelming. Things improve if you put a SSD on this laptop… but then the cost of the machine goes up exponentially.

The tradeoff between system performance and funky design is a tad high, so at the end of the day we'd not recommend this product in its current form. Only someone who is really enamored by Apple will buy this. I suggest you give this generation of the Macbook Air a miss, and wait for a refreshed model that will undoubtedly be out before long.

Toshiba Unveils Laptop With 128 GB SSD

SSD’s are rapidly beginning to show up on mainstream laptop from virtually all manufacturers. Now looking to take this rapidly developing market a step further, Toshiba has unveiled a new 12.1 inch ultraportable that offers a 128 GB SSD as part of its specifications.

The model number of this new laptop Dynabook SS RX1 and it comes with a 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo U7600 Processor, 2GB RAM, 2.1" widescreen LCD with 1280 × 800 (WXGA) resolution and Windows Vista.

The Toshiba Dynabook SS RX1 will be available in the local Japanese market from April for about $3,960.

Apple Announces Safari 3.1

Apple has introduced Safari 3.1, for Mac and Windows PCs.

Available immediately as a free download from here, Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. It also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers

"Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface," said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience."

Safari features an intuitive browsing experience with drag-and-drop bookmarks, easy-to-organize tabs, an integrated Find that shows the number of matches in a page and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information. Safari 3.1 also supports the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and is the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts.

Safari software updates are delivered seamlessly through Apple’s Software Update application, which automatically checks for updates.

Safari 3.1 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard or Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.11, a minimum of 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 3.1 for Windows requires Windows XP or Windows Vista, a minimum of 256 MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor.

Nokia Unveils Black N82

Nokia has unveiled the Nokia N82 in stylish black.

ThN82 enables people to "geotag" the images they capture - allowing them to not only be saved by date, but by location as well. This adds to a line-up of photography features, including a 5 megapixel camera, Carl Zeiss optics and a Xenon flash and advanced connectivity features that makes it easy for consumers to share their discoveries, journeys and locations.

The Nokia N82 in black is expected to start shipping within weeks, with an estimated retail price of approximately 400 euros, before taxes and subsidies.

"The Nokia N82 is made for storytelling," says Juha Kokkonen, Director for Nokia Nseries devices. "As one of Nokia's leading-edge connected camera, the Nokia N82 in black captures people's journeys and discoveries. With built-in A-GPS it even helps people to find new places by pairing 'contextual' information with a wide array of connectivity features such as Wi-Fi and HSDPA. We make it easy for consumers to quickly share those moments as they happen."

Taking advantage of its integrated A-GPS functionality and high resolution camera, the Nokia N82 automatically tags images with capture location metadata, making it possible to view the capture location on a map either on the Internet or on the device itself. Users can upload their pictures or videos directly from their Nokia N82 to services like Share on Ovi, Flickr or YouTube. By installing Nokia's exclusive and free Sports Tracker application, consumers can share their whereabouts and travel route with others on the Sports Tracker website - including the capture locations of images.

The Nokia Sports Tracker is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on Nokia smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored in the application, and can be shared with others.

To showcase this application, several explorers took off across the globe, each with a GPS-enabled Nokia N82 as their travel companion. On www.nseries.com/urbanistadiaries, people around the world could follow these intrepid travelers, and share the experience in near real-time through images captured on each explorers' device. The Sports Tracker widget tracked the explorers' location and marked the spot where each image was taken on a constantly updated map. The widget has now been embedded in many blogs and social networking sites.

The Sports Tracker mobile widget will soon be made available with many new and existing S60-based converged mobile devices.

Call of Duty 4 to Re-release on The 360

Activision's all set to re-release their last year’s hit – Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare – on the Xbox 360 in April. The 'Game of the Year' edition will include tokens to download the new upcoming Map Pack for free.

If you haven't bought the game already, I suggest you pounce on this offer as soon as its released, as CoD 4 offers great value for money with its amazing single player campaign, and ever better multiplayer modes that will keep you hooked for a long, long time.

Palm Launches The Centro in India

Palm has introduced the glacier white Palm Centro smartphone in India, with voice, text, email, web, contact and calendar capabilities, a full-color touch screen and full keyboard.

"The combination of keyboard, touch screen and Palm's trademark ease of use makes Centro intuitive and easy to use for staying in touch," said Olivier Rozay, Palm's regional director for Asia Pacific. "Consumers who are thinking about stepping up to a smartphone will find Centro the perfect first choice – it's rich in features but also comes in a small, cool design."

With a new compact design, Centro is the smallest and lightest Palm phone to date, comes with Palm OS by ACCESS, and offers all the organizer functionalities that Palm offers.

The Centro features a touch screen and full QWERTY keyboard, with key features such as one-touch speakerphone, conference calling and Bluetooth connectivity. It keeps all conversations in a chat-style view, just like Instant Messaging, so users can see the entire conversation unfold. Personal email, such as Gmail and Yahoo!, is simple to access right out of the box, while Microsoft Direct Push Technology gives users access to their corporate email.

In addition to usual smartphone capabilities, Centro is highly customizable with thousands of applications available.

The full keyboard and touch screen provide quick access to online information and allow users to directly feed their personal blogs. Pocket Tunes on Centro lets users "sideload" songs and manage music, audio books and videos easily. Users can also shoot pictures or videos with the built-in digital camera and share them with friends.

The Palm Centro smartphone is available now at a recommended retail price of Rs. 13,990 (inclusive of tax) and will be distributed through Brightstar Telecom India Pvt Ltd., the national distributor.

Centro will be available in IT retail stores in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Calcutta, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Pune and Chandigarh.

BenQ Introduces V2400W Premium LCD

Ben has launched its V2400W "premium" LCD display with the claim that it's the world's slimmest 24-inch widescreen monitor. The V2400W, only 2.44-inches at its thickest point, is well equipped with a 4000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, full 1080p HD support, touch controls and sports an overall mirror-black finish.

The monitor combines "unexpected asymmetry and the aerodynamic curves of the B-2 stealth bomber" and is the first in a new "Kinergy" design range from BenQ.

Manfred Wang, director (Lifestyle Design Center) of BenQ, says, "The V2400W is inspired by the B2 stealth bomber, evoking a sense of mystery, awe, and the elite. In addition, the display's asymmetry exemplifies our new design philosophy."

The V2400W will be available at the end of March in China and Asia and available April in Europe and America.