GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The folks at Boy Genius Report got to spend ten minutes with RIM’s Julian Dolce, who gave them a thorough demo of the new BlackBerry PlayBook in action. It’s pretty damn sweet. Take a look:

The tablet looks very responsive, just like the iPad. The first really neat, I-love-it feature is the “docking” mode, which lets you minimize open apps into a Cover Flow-esque row of icons. This is a much nicer way to browse open apps than the tiny iOS multitasking dock at the bottom of the iPad’s screen, and video even carries on playing in the background (you can switch this off to save battery life).

Another way to switch apps is to actually swipe on the bezel around the screen. This could be neat or confusing, depending on implementation: swiping from the top bezel into the screen can bring down a menu, for example.

The PlayBook clearly takes its home-screen UI cues from iOS, but then departs, and adds in a lot of nice extras: notifications can be displayed in the menubar, for example. I’m actually pretty impressed, especially by device that is still months away from launch.

One thing, though, is conspicuously absent from the demo. Adobe Flash. Could it be that it doesn’t work so well, or was it just that the demo-room has no internet connection?

BlackBerry PlayBook hands-on video demo [Boy Genius]

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Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

If you think Intel chips are just for PCs, take a look at this touchscreen kiosk that the company has created for retailers.

The hulk of metal, plastic and glass looks like a Star Trek prop but it promises to replace the traditional CRT monitors with green-tinted screens that are still at the check out point in most stores.

The kiosk tries to bring the best features of online shopping, such as recommendations, history and easy check-out to retail stores, says Ryan Parker, director of marketing and architecture. We first wrote about this last year but Intel had a polished and slicker-than-ever demo ready Wednesday.

When a customer swipes a card or slides their purchase across the horizontal screen, the display will show the price and payment options –which include the option to pay by cellphone. As you scan the items, the kiosk also makes recommendations on what else you can buy and gives you a quick snapshot of it.

The entire kiosk is powered by Intel’s Core2Duo processors and it uses a solid state drive that helps the overall system work faster and consume less power than existing registers. The chips also include Intel’s vPro technology, a virtualization technology that Intel builds into the chip itself, to make it secure and easy to manage.

The whole set-up is pretty neat, especially when you compare it to the self-check out counters at a Safeway or Lowes. But I can also see something like this potentially slowing down the check out process and longer lines at exit are not something consumers want.

Intel says it retailers don’t have to buy this whole idea as it is. They can pick the pieces they want and integrate it into their existing stores.

Photo: Stefan Armijo/Wired.com

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews