News Week of December 27, 2009

HTC To Launch Apple iSlate Competitor

Smartphones, tablets and netbooks are set to be high on the agenda at this year�s Consumer Electronics Show as traditional PC vendors look to compete with the new Apple iSlate which is due to be released on the 26th January in the USA. Among those set to take on Apple is HTC (Source: David Richards, SmartHouse)
Posted Thursday, December 31, 2009 by ChrisD
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Packard Bell Debuts Easynote Butterfly Tablet PC

Packard Bell, which is now owned by Acer, has showcased a new netbook which can convert into a tablet PC within seconds and carries the name of Easynote Butterfly Touch edition.

It is based around Intel's CULV platfom running a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 CPU coupled with an Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated chipset.

The rest of the feature set is pretty impressive as well. PB says that the laptop can take up to 4GB RAM and up to a 640GB hard disk drive. (Source: Desire Athow, ITPortal.com)

OLPC unveils slimline tablet PC

The XO-3, as it is known, is a slim-line touchscreen tablet PC.

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) said it would be "available in 2012" and would cost "well below $100".

The new design replaces the proposed XO-2, a foldable e-book that was first shown off in 2008 but has since been scrapped by the organisation.   (Source: Jonathan Fildes, BBC News)

The Apple Tablet will not make the same mistakes as other tablet PCs

Tablets have historically just been laptops with digitizers, and ran operating systems that were only modestly tweaked to encapsulate the functionality the tablet-form factor implies. Apple is not going to make that same mistake: the one thing Apple does better than any other company on the market is releasing new, fully actualized products, with operating systems designed around the possibilities of their device�s form and function. They aren�t going to release a laptop without a keyboard. They are going to release a targeted product that is much more likely to be meant for mobile browsing, reading, gaming and multimedia than writing reports or presentations.

I�m a bit skeptical of the Apple Tablet too, but it would be total stupidity to write off Apple�s device simply because of the mistakes companies like Microsoft and HP have made in the past. Apple will have learned from them, and their Tablet isn�t going to be like anything on the market before. It will fail or succeed, not as a tablet, but as a new class of product. (Source: John Brownlee, Cult of Mac)

11.6� Gateway EC18T Tablet Notebook Passes Through FCC

Back in September we got the first glimpses of the new 11.6� Gateway EC18T tablet notebook and since then it�s been all about the Acer Aspire 1420p /  Timeline 1820pt / 1820ptz and Packard Bell Touch but now the Gateway EC18T is resurfacing again and now it has passed through the FCC (one, two) including pictures of it being taken apart.

This particular EC18T model seems to be a rebranding of the Acer Aspire 1420p as it has similar specs: (Source: Netbooked)