Courier lives, kinda, with new Toshiba dual-screen portable

Today Toshiba announced the Libretto W100, an ultra-mobile PC sporting a pair of 7" 1024 × 600 multitouch screens, a 1.2GHz Pentium U5400 processor, 2GB RAM, and a 62GB solid state disk. The all-touch device is designed to be used as a conventional laptop, and vertically, like a book.

The W100 includes haptic technology, giving the touchscreens tactile feedback; there's also 802.11b/g/n support, Bluetooth, and a built-in camera. This is all in a slightly bulky—7.95" × 4.84" × 1.2"—but lightweight—1.8 lbs (just a hair more than the iPad)—package. In spite of the size, it is certainly a fully-featured machine.

Toshiba is describing the W100 as a "concept PC," an acknowledgement that it won't be a machine suitable for everyone. It will hit the market in August, with prices starting at $1099, albeit with limited availability. The device was shown as part of Toshiba's celebration of 25 years of laptops; the first clamshell laptop was released by Toshiba some 25 years ago.

The company is positioning the W100 as an Ultra Mobile PC—something highly portable, but still in every sense a PC, with all the functionality that entails. The similarity to Microsoft's Courier concept, however, is striking. Courier paired the dual-screen, book-like form-factor with specialized software that fully exploited the touch capabilities to provide a natural, intuitive interface.

However, as with so many tablet-like devices before, the W100 does not do this. The W100 includes Windows 7 Home Premium, which is a perfectly good operating system, but it is not purpose-built for pure touch machines. The user interface is designed for a mouse and a keyboard, and though Windows 7 does include some concessions to touch (for example, it includes an on-screen keyboard with multitouch support, and it enlarges certain interface elements when used with touch machines), it still falls a long way short of the purpose-built interfaces found in so many cell phones and the iPad.

To fill this gap, the W100 does include some custom software: a "Toshiba Bulletin Board," that provides a touch-friendly, widget-based desktop, and "Toshiba ReelTime," with touch-friendly file management. The device can also be used as a more conventional laptop, with one screen serving as a keyboard. A number of keyboard layouts are supported, including a neat split mode for use with thumbs.

The software problem is a continued issue for Microsoft. Given the hardware specs of the W100, Windows 7 is in some ways a natural fit: this is a piece of hardware that's got the horsepower to run fully fledged desktop apps without a problem (in terms of computational capabilities, it has something like five times the integer performance of the A4 processor in the iPad). Using one screen as a keyboard—a keyboard with tactile feedback, no less—arguably also justifies the use of full Windows 7, as it makes the W100 functionally equivalent to a standard laptop.

But if that's all the device is going to be used for, it might as well abandon the second screen and just use a regular keyboard. The unique value of the W100 is that it can be tilted sideways and held like a book with a pair of screens—only it lacks the software to really make use of this mode.

As such, it's hard to see the point of the W100. A similar device based on, say, Android would make sense with the touchscreens, but would then be (in comparison to other Android devices) immensely overpowered, with the drop in battery life that implies. Sticking with Windows 7 limits the utility of the touchscreens, but justifies the stuff under the hood. Combined with the price, it's not hard to see why Toshiba is labeling this a "concept PC." The W100 is unlikely to emulate the iPad's sales figures, and isn't enough—yet—to herald a new era of portable computing.

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The Fuhrer reacts to Fermi – w/video

Not meaning to take sides or anything, but these two videos are simply hilarious. Thanks to Steve for sending the links…

First the newest one: “Hitler reacts to Nvidia Fermi Benchmarks:”

And here’s the same video with an older caption from the days of the Radeon HD 5000 series launch…

Microsoft Asia prototypes fancy new inductive charging pad

Microsoft has applied for a neat patent for a smart inductive charger (via Being Manan). Inductive charging, used, for example, in the Palm Pre's Touchstone, allows for contactless charging of devices in close proximity.

The charger couples inductive charging with an LCD screen that can be used to show off "weather conditions, sports scores, news headlines, and/or other selected items" through a wireless connection to a PC. More useful, I would think, would be some indication of the charging status of the device.

Apparent pictures of a prototype of the device have emerged. Though we can't be certain that it uses the patented technology, the prototype is all but identical to the design shown in the patent, suggesting that development is quite far advanced. The prototype is shown charging a wireless mouse. This seems a rather mundane use for such a fancy charger, and the thing is rather smaller than might be expected—the mouse covers the LCD screen when it's on the charger, which renders it all a bit useless.

A larger device that could be used to charge a range of devices (mouse, Windows Phone, some future Zune) would seem a lot more compelling—a one-stop charging shop for all your wireless Microsoft gadgets.

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Microsoft patents automatic device pairing system

A recent patent application (via WMPowerUser.com) describes a system devised by Microsoft to enable automatic pairing of devices over short-range wireless connections such as Bluetooth and Wireless USB. After an initial manual pairing, say between a phone and a PC, the system would allow those devices to automatically pair with other related devices, such as a second PC.

The pairing mechanism would act as an alternative to the preexisting pairing mechanisms already built in to these protocols, and would require device support for both sides of the operation. Public key cryptography is used to securely share pairing information among different devices; that information might be transmitted via USB key, network connection or any other convenient method. The described system respects user identities, so merely pairing with a computer would not mean that anyone logged into the machine would be able to use an automatically paired device.

Scenarios in which suitably enabled devices would be useful are not too hard to envision. Having phones automatically paired to all the PCs you own is perhaps the most obvious example of when this would be useful, but more broadly, any peripheral could be used: headsets that you pair with your PC but also work automatically with your phone, mice that work with every PC you own, and so on.

Of course, filing a patent does not mean that this will ever materialize in any shipping product, and there's no indication thus far that this will form a part of Windows Phone 7 Series. That said, phones and PCs are probably the best-suited devices to this kind of technology as, being software-driven, they're the easiest to update to include this kind of extension. Seamless wireless syncing (Zune already performs syncing over WiFi, unlike the iPhone), including seamless wireless pairing, would certainly be another way in which Microsoft could distinguish its phone platform from the iPhone, and would enable the company to promote the more connected, less wired merits of Windows Phone.

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