When Notion Ink showed off an early prototype of its 10 inch tablet at CES last month, the device was still in the early prototype stages. How early? The case was hand-carved out of wood instead of being made of metal or plastic. But the Adam tablet still got a lot of buzz as one of the most exciting devices on display at CES thanks to two factors. It has a Pixel Qi 3qi display which looks as good outdoors as it does indoors, and which can be flipped from full color mode to a high contrast, low power mode for reading eBooks or web pages. And the tablet uses NVIDIA’s Tegra platform which bundles high quality graphics with a low power processor.

The Notion Ink Adam still isn’t ready to ship yet. But the company sent SlashGear a series of mockup images showing what the finished product could look like. All told, it doesn’t look that different from the device I saw at CES. But the company does have a few new details to share.

First, there could be two different versions of the Adam. One would measure 12.9mm thick, while the other would be just 11.6mm. Both would be thinner than the 13.4mm iPad, although it’s likely that the thinner model would not have a Pixel Qi display.

Notion Ink claims that the Adam might be able to run for 2-3 times longer than the iPad for surfing the web or performing some other tasks. SlashGear reports that the tablet will also launch with partnerships in place with digital magazine, eBook, and comic book content available.

You can check out my hands-on video with the Notion Ink tablet prototype from CES after the break.

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Samsung was showing off one of the coolest pieces of technology I’ve ever seen in real life at CES this year: A laptop with a fully functional semi-transparent OLED display. In other words, you can see what’s on the display, but you can also look right through the screen to see what’s behind it. The technology is kind of useless, to be honest. But man is it cool looking.

Clearly, the device Samsung was demonstrating in January was just a prototype. But it turns out that Samsung is actually working to turn the prototype into a real product. And it could ship within the next 12 months.

I’d be surprised if a laptop with a 14 inch display falls into the budget category. But the sooner this thing comes to market, the faster the prices will drop.

This kind of technology would probably be more useful in other applications. For instance, imagine a GPS system in your car that you could look through to see the street beyond. Or one of those crazy-futuristic windows that doubles as a video player. But you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

You can check out my brief hands-on video with the Samsung prototype from CES after the break.

via Engadget

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MSI announced a handful of new 10 inch netbooks with Intel Atom N450 processors in January. The MSI Wind U160 is probably the most attractive of the bunch. I got a chance to play with one for a few minutes at CES, but Johannes at NewGadgets.de did me one better and he got MSI to send him a pre-production model. You can check out his unboxing video (in English) after the break.

The laptop has a glossy lid, a chiclet-style keyboard, and a textured touchpad with a single mouse button that makes the Wind U150 look an awful lot like the Asus Eee PC 1005PE.

The computer ships with Windows 7 Starter Edition, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, GMA 3150 graphics, and a choice of a 3 or 6 cell battery. There’s also a SIM card slot, indicating that the Wind U160 may be available with a 3G modem.

The 6 cell battery does stick out like a sore thumb at the back of the netbook. One thing that sets the Wind U160 apart from other MSI netbooks is that it has a two-tone color scheme. The lid, keyboard, and base of this particular unit, for instance, are black. But the battery and the area where the keyboard meets the lid are a metallic gray color. I’m not really sure how I feel about this particular color combo, but the models I saw at CES had more of a gold and chrome color combo, which looked a bit better.

You can check out Johannes’s unboxing video and a few hands-on photos I shot at CES after the break.

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I got a chance to check out the recently announced MSI Wind Box DE220 nettop while I was at CES earlier this month. And then I kept forgetting to upload the pictures. So here you go.

The small form factor desktop PC comes with a choice of a single core 1.66GHz Intel Atom D410 or dual ore 1.66GHz Atom D510 processor. Both models are available with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics, up to 4GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of hard disk space. The computer runs Windows 7 Home Premium and comes with an optional 802.11b/g/n WiFi card.

The Wind Box DE220 measures 10.8″ xВ  x 6.7″ x 1.6″.

No word on pricing or a launch date.

You can find more pictures after the break.

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Taiwan’s AMtek has been pumping out tablets and netbooks for a while. At CES the company showed off a few new models in each product category, including the first AMtek 1o inch netbook with an Intel Atom N450 processor and a new line of 12 inch models featuring Intel CULV processors.

The AMtek LI10netbook features a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 Pine Trail processor, a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, and a 3 or 6 cell battery. The laptop 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive andВ  has 3 USB ports, mic, headphone, and D-SUB ports. It weighs 2.6 pounds with a 3 cell battery and measures 9.8″ x 8″ x 1″.

AMTek’s 10 and 12.1 inch tablets have 1024 x 768 pixel displays (no, I don’t know why the company didn’t go with 1280 x 800В  or 1366 x 768) and Intel CULV processors. Some models feature a 1.2GHz Celeron 723 processor, which I think is improperly labeled in the spec sheets as a Core 2 Duo chip. Others have faster 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo SL9400 chips.

No word on pricing or availability of any of these new models, but you can check out the spec sheets below.

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Chinese electronics maker HOTT brought a new 7 inch tablet with an ARM-based processor to CES last week. Charbax from ARMdevices caught up with the company and shot a brief video which you can check out below.

The HOTT M700 runs Windows CE 6.0 and has about 8 hours of battery life for web browsing or about 3 hours of video playback. Oh yeah, and it can handle 1080p HD video and even has an HDMI port for pumping out video to your HDTV.

HOTT says a Google Android version will also be coming later this year.

Like many of the companies showing off products in the International Gateway at CES, HOTT isn’t selling its products directly to consumers. So the $120 price tag that the guy mentions in the video probably isn’t the price that retail customers would pay. Rather, it’s the price that a distributor would pay to purchase several hundred or thousand devices to resell in the US. Still, even after the price is marked up, it seems feasible that we could see this little tablet come to market for $200 to $250.

Video after the break.
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In case you hadn’t noticed yet, tablets were one of the big three trends at CES this year (the other two being 3D TV and eBook readers). While I got a chance to check out a few interesting tablets, I barely scratched the surface. But fortunately jkkmobile got to spend some time with a few models that I missed.

One of the more interesting prototypes was a 10 inch tablet from Hanvon, with a slim design, a camera on the back, and Windows 7 Starter Edition. I have no idea why anyone would put out a tablet with the version of Windows 7 that doesn’t include touchscreen features. I suppose it would help keep the price down, but if you’re going to show a prototype at a huge consumer electronics show, wouldn’t you at least want to show that it can run Windows 7 Home Premium?

Jkk also got some hands-on time with a few tablets from LonMID, as well as a handheld device with a keyboard and touchscreen (and a secondary screen on the back of the display, which you can use to make phone calls.

Finally, he checked out a few Tegra 2-powered tablets from Compal.

You can check out his videos after the break.

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About 10 years ago I picked up my first SD card. It was the size of a postage stamp, and it could store 16MB of data. That was enough room for 4 songs! Yeah, it was tough to get excited about it even a decade ago. But flash storage has come a long way since then, and now I’ve got a few 4GB and 8GB SD cards littering my office and I don’t think twice about how much data you can store on something so small.

But I got that feeling all over again last week when the folks at Samsung handed me a microSDHC card and SD card adapter on the way out of a press conference. While an SD card is about the size of a postage stamp, it’s hard to find anything small enough to compare a microSDHC card to. It’s maybe tiny bit fatter than the eraser on a pencil. And it can store 4GB of Data… that’s almost as much as a DVD! See, seems a bit more exciting when it’s really tiny and capable of storing some real data.

OK, so microSDHC cards aren’t brand spanking new, and they come in even higher capacities. But this is still the first one I’ve held, and it’s pretty nifty.

Still, as cool as this little memory card is, I don’t need it. And I try not to make a habit of taking gifts from the companies I cover here at Liliputing (believe it or not, I actually return most products after I review them). So I’m going to give this MicroSDHC card away.

Here’s how to enter. Just leave a comment below. That’s it.

Only one entry per person, please. And while, I’ll ship the prize anywhere in the world, don’t expect me to overnight it. It’ll get there when it gets there. If you’re a friend, family member, or someone I’ve worked with at a current or previous job, please don’t enter.

I’ll randomly select a winner after the contest closes tomorrow morning at 10:00AM Eastern.

Shenzhen Firstview Electronics is a Hong Kong-based company that makes a pretty wide line of netbooks, phones, MP3 players and other devices. At CES last week, the company was showing off a number of new netbooks.

Most of the netbooks on display were little 7 inch jobs with Xburst or ARM-based processors. One mdoel that did catch my eye was a 10 inch netbook with a rather unusual chrome trim around the edges.

This model is the Firstview PC810T. it has a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display and an 800MHz ARM11 CPU. The mini-laptop runs Windows CE and has 2GB of flash storage and 512MB of RAM. The computer has 802.11b/g WiFi, 2 USB ports, a rather unusual VGA adapter, and an HDMI output, which surprised me. It also has a SIM card slot and support for WCDMA mobile broadband connections.

The Firstview catalog I picked up also has listings for a number of ARM-based tablets with 7 to 10 inch touchscreen displays and Windows CE or Linux. It’s not clear if any of these netbooks or tablets will make it to the US anytime soon. But I’ve posted some more photos to tease you anyway. You can check them out after the break.

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