Blackberry Playbook – Preview

September 28, 2010 – 12:05 pm

The Blackberry Playbook is the latest addition to the touchscreen laptop market, aimed like it’s sibling smartphones at the professional user with business use in mind.

The Playbook has a 7″ 1024×600 pixel touchscreen with multi-touch functionality and is powered by a dual-core 1 GHz CPU and 1 GHz of RAM packing a sizeable punch and making this a seriously fast tablet. The operating system is Blackberry’s own, no doubt giving them full control over every aspect and contributing to making the Playbook lightning quick.

The Playbook is fitted with two cameras, 5MP front-facing camera and a 3MP user-facing camera which is intended to make video-conferencing simple whilst also giving the Playbook camera-like point and shoot functionality. Video playback will support 1080p HD. Hard-drive size or type is not yet known but is expected to be 16-32GB SSD, giving optimum performance and durability.

As you would expect it was confirmed that the interaction between Blackberry’s smartphones and the Playbook will provide innovative features and will be one of the Playbook’s main selling points.

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Toshiba Portege M780

September 12, 2010 – 1:21 pm

The Toshiba Portege M780 is the latest touchscreen laptop to come under our spotlight.  The M780 is a dual-mode laptop which converts from a touchscreen laptop to a tablet through a swivel of the screen.

The M780-106 comes with a 12.1″ screen, Intel core i3 processor, 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD as standard.   The expected USB ports, DVD drive and memory card reader are there but the M780 does lack an HDMI port.  Logins can be swift and painless thanks to the M780′s fingerprint reader which allows you to opt for password free logins.

The M780′s main selling point is it’s ability to be adapted from laptop to tablet and back again with relative ease, this does make it stand out from the crowd a little however a growing number of laptops are able to do this also.  The screen itself isn’t too hot, image quality could be better and the responsiveness to touch could only be described as adequate.  Part of the package is a stylus, once a must-have with a tablet pc but increasingly being forgotten as manufacturers go for finger touch alone. 

The M780 unfortunately makes pretty bulky tablet in this iPad era and the lack of an accelerometer means that the machine doesn’t know which way up it is being held.  Specs on the M780 are decent though and it moves at a respectable pace, powered by that i3 processor.

Touchscreenlaptops.co.uk Score – 6.5/10

Nice try from Toshiba but it only fills the gap for those who really need to have a dual mode machine and is easily bettered as a tablet and as a laptop by competitors in the same price range.

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Dell Streak handheld tablet

September 11, 2010 – 4:54 pm

The Dell Streak isn’t quite a touchscreen laptop but it is a supercool mini handheld tablet pc. The Streak doesn’t quite know whether it is a phone or a tablet but in our opinion it’s a mini tablet which just happens to be a phone.

The Streak’s 5-inch screen makes it more usable for browsing than the majority of smartphones where the browsing is little more than a gimmick.  The browsing is fast and the touchscreen is responsive making for quick and fluent use.  You won’t be disappointed by the build quality which is up to Dell’s usual high standards.

Internal memory is low at 2GB but this is upgradeable to 32GN through Micro SD cards.  The Streak has a 5MP camera thrown in for good measure and the 3.5mm headphone jack socket means most people will be able to find headphones they want to use without need for an adaptor.

The big question though is on the issue of size, the Streak is going to fill your pockets!

Specs

Processor – Qualcomm SnapDragon 1GHz

On-board Memory – 2048MB

Screen size – 108x64mm

Operating system – Android 1.6

Touchscreenlaptops.co.uk score – 8/10

A useful handheld machine but not a replacement for a full size touchscreen laptop or tablet pc. A sign of the future thinking of Dell and it looks promising.

 

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