Wacom may have only made their new Bamboo tablet range official yesterday, but eagle-eyed early adopters have been picking them up in stores for over a week now. BestTabletReview have been putting the Bamboo Pen & Touch Fun – which has both an active digitizer stylus for precise control and artwork, and a multitouch layer for recognizing finger-touch and gestures – through its paces, compared to Wacom’s well-considered Graphite tablet.
Wacom have finally got around to officially announcing [pdf link] their Bamboo Touch multitouch tablet, a week after at least one person was able to pick one up from their local Best Buy. The Wacom Bamboo Touch is one of the company’s second generation of the Bamboo line, which also includes the Bamboo Pen & Touch, which responds both to a pen stylus (for accuracy) as well as fingers. The tablet automatically switches between the two modes, depending on whether the user has touched the surface with their finger or if the stylus nib is near.
Having heard the rumors earlier this week about Microsoft’s supposed tablet project, imagine our surprise to see this, the Microsoft Courier. Gizmodo grabbed the details on the dual-touchscreen tablet, which folds along its center spine and can be used with either a pen stylus for handwriting recognition or with fingertips complete with multitouch gestures. Each panel is believed to be roughly 7-inches, and the whole project is apparently in “late prototype” stage of development.
Video demo after the cut
The Microsoft “Project Pink” smartphone and personal tablet rumors have had a reboot this week, with both 9to5Mac and ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley each commenting on what snippets of insider news they’ve heard. According to the normally Mac-centric site, Microsoft will be showing off two versions of their Pink self-branded smartphone, codenamed “Turtle” and “Pure”, with the former having a squared-circle shape and the latter being a more traditional candybar format. Each will have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and be manufactured by Sharp.
We’re still not sure how they’ve managed it, but ai.rs have acquired a pre-production HTC Leo – the company’s upcoming 1GHz Snapdragon smartphone – and have sat it down for a serious photoshoot and screengrab session. Top of our list of questions was the Leo’s screen type, and sure enough HTC have used a 4.3-inch multitouch-capable capacitive panel for the Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone.
Wacom’s upcoming Bamboo Touch multitouch tablet has not only been spotted in the wild, but prematurely bought, unboxed and reviewed, all with no official word from Wacom themselves. Meanwhile, Wacom’s corporate site has confirmed that [pdf link] they’ve begun mass production of a Windows 7 compatible multitouch panels for notebooks, which can be combined with the company’s pen sensor.
Video unboxing and review after the cut
While this may simply look like someone trying to catch a small fish next to a Windows Mobile phone, you might be more interested if we told you that the phone is in fact HTC’s mysterious, unannounced Leo and the fish-pinching is actually a multitouch demo. Over at PocketPT.net someone managed to score a Leo prototype, and shot a brief video demonstrating its new touchscreen skills.
Video demo after the cut
Lenovo isn’t the only manufacturer with multitouch on their mind; Fujitsu have just announced an update to their LifeBook T5010 that adds two-finger touch sensitivity to the convertible notebook. The LifeBook T5010’s 13.3-inch display will now support pinch-zoom, rotate and other two-finger gestures in Windows 7, as well as more traditional pen-input using an active digitizer.
Lenovo have announced two new ThinkPads, each with multitouch-capable touchscreens. The ThinkPad T400s and ThinkPad X200 Tablet can recognize four and two finger touches respectively, and come with Lenovo’s new SimpleTap control panel that offers chunky, fingertip access to volume, system settings, applications and bookmarks.
If you needed another reason to look beyond Maemo 5 to its successor, Maemo 6, set to be released in around twelve months time, then how about multitouch and gesture-based input? Nokia have confirmed that Qt 4.6 will be optimized for Maemo 6 but also see a port to the upcoming Symbian 4, as well as bringing with it improvements to the WebKit browser and a reduction in the need for widgets.
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