By Agam Shah
IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
April 1, 2010

NEW YORK - Acer on Wednesday announced its Aspire Ethos laptops, which incorporate a secondary touch screen that doubles as a touchpad to help navigate multimedia content.

The extra touch screen, placed below the keyboard where a touchpad would normally sit, can display icons that make it easier for users to navigate through movies or music, said Alison Williams, an Acer spokeswoman. The screen will also allow users to do things like adjust the volume or sort through images.

“The media console is now combined with the touchpad, providing a set of commands all managed by a single key and a completely new approach to entertainment control,” Acer said in a statement. The improvements help maintain a clean surface and elegant design, the company said.

Efforts are under way at several companies to snazz up touchpads, also called trackpads. Synaptics is adding gesture functionality to let users quickly perform routine PC tasks. Intel has also suggested that touchpads can be replaced with auxiliary screens displaying widgets to perform quick tasks like typing Twitter messages.

The Ethos laptops run on Intel’s latest Core i5 and Core i7 processors and include an Advanced Micro Devices ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card, allowing playback of full high-definition DVDs. The laptops can also be bought with Blu-ray Disc drives.

Acer included its Arcade Deluxe software for managing multimedia, which it says will help take better advantage of the touchpad controls. It is supposed to make it easy to manage high-definition videos, photos and music, and to share content through sites like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.

The Ethos 8943G comes with an 18.4-inch screen, while the 5943G comes with a 15.6-inch screen. The laptops will provide up to 1.28TB of storage through two 640GB hard drives. Wireless options include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The pricing was not immediately available.

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by John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
August 4, 2009

After capturing the market with its full-touch mobile phone offering at the start of this year, electronics brand Samsung Mobile ups its ante with the launch of Samsung Preston, its latest full-touch mobile phone.

Looking to increase its market share, Samsung on Saturday presented before media and partners at the 16th Samsung Experience store in SM Mall of Asia its new addition to its full-touch mobile phone line, carefully positioning it as a “more affordable” touchscreen phone.

The Prestone, Samsung’s second-cheapest full-touch phone next to the Samsung Star, features a full-touch interface with a responsive haptic feedback, 3G capabilities with HSDPA speeds of up to 7.2mbps, a 2.8” LCD, three-megapixel camera and an accelerometer. The Prestone, however, doesn’t come with WiFi capabilities.

Meanwhile, a distinct feature called Widgets enables small applications to display on the phone’s dashboard during standby. “Businessmen and executives can take advantage of the Inquirer widget we are offering for free to view the latest news on their dashboard,” said Raine Javalera, product manager for mobile phones, Samsung Philippines. She added that widgets are available at the Samsung website free for download.

With this release, Samsung is poised to capture a wider audience in the Philippines as it comes to a close second in the mobile phone race. “We are currently doing well this first half of 2009, so we expect to grow stronger in the next few months as well,” said Javalera.

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