GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

The Axon Haptic is a tabula rasa of a tablet. It comes as an empty, OS-less shell, waiting for you to install your choice of operating-system. The hardware of this ten-inch tablet is designed to work with almost any OS, from various Linux flavors through Windows to OS X. Yes, this little baby is hackintosh-ready.

The trick is the EFI bootloader, which is what lets the machine boot into a Darwin OS (of which OS X is the best known example). This is the tricky part of any hackintosh installation, and it essentially tricks the Mac OS into thinking it is running on Apple hardware.

The machine itself is pretty much a stock netbook, only with a resistive touch-screen and in a tablet form-factor. It packs a 1.6-GHz Atom N270 processor, the ten-inch screen, a 320GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a webcam, optional Bluetooth and yes a stylus. The is also an optional “3G CDMA Verizon SIM slot”, which is odd because CDMA doesn’t use SIMS.

It’s an interesting take, and will presumably fall outside of Apple’s legal reaches if it actually makes it into stores. Then again, maybe there’s no market for this kind of thing. Remember the Psystar “Mac”? That was hardly a runaway success.

The Haptic is available for pre-order now, for an optimistic $750.

Axon Haptic [Axon Logic via CrunchGear]

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

The beauty of the Intel incarnation of the Macintosh is that, if Apple doesn’t make the Mac you want, you can hack your own. It takes some work, but in theory it is possible to run OS X on any modern Intel x86 machine. Here we see a Mac tablet, put together by YouTuber stulowe2006.

This particular Hackintosh is based on a Dell Gigabyte M912. Internally, it’s just another netbook, with a 1.6GHz Atom processor. Outside, it has a Touchscreen and a flimsy hinge to allow the machine to be folded into a tablet PC. Stulowe2006 has obviously got the touch screen drivers to let the Mac OS recognize the input.

What this video shows us, apart from a rather masterly piece of OSx86 hacking, is that the current Mac OS is pitifully inadequate for tablet use. Even with the Dell stylus it seems difficult to hit the right spot on the screen, and Stulowe2006 is also stuck using the on-screen keyboard to type. The Mac does have “Ink”, a handwriting recognition engine, but it is truly awful.

Still, you can use the real keyboard if you have to. And for couch-based IMDB browsing, this looks just about perfect.

Touch Screen Mac OS X on a GigaByte M912 [GottaBeMobile]
Hands-On with the Gigabyte M912 [Laptop Mag]

Posted under Gadget Reviews