Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Newest and Coolest Gadgets in 2011


Lenovo IdeaPad U1

When closed the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid looks like a regular laptop, and with a rounded aesthetic and a red shimmery paint job it's a nice looking one. Under the lid there's chiclet-style keyboard surrounded by a fun rubberized palmrest with integrated touchpad. When docked, the U1 looks and feels like any other snazzed-up laptop, with an Intel CULV processor and a 128GB SSD running Windows 7 Home Premium. You actually wouldn't know there's a slate hiding in there -- until you pull it out and watch it switch to Lenovo's Skylight UI, a process that was smooth and quick for us. Lenovo says the goal is for the full switch to occur in under 3 seconds, and the U1 delivered, as far as we could tell.

The slate itself is essentially a touchscreen version of the Skylight smartbook: it runs the same Skylight OS on a similar Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, and it seems to be pretty quick, though there's a bit of lag in between switching windows. (To be fair, we were playing with a super-early pre-production unit.) The GUI is slightly different than the Skylight -- it's built around a six-panel interface, which can be customized with email, calendar, RSS, and social media widgets, and there's a second four-panel screen with image, music, video, and e-reader widgets that's especially finger friendly. The tablet also turns into a pretty good e-reader; we flipped to portrait it to read a preloaded PDF and the accelerometer kicked right in.

Sony 3D TV

By using high-frame rate LCDs with a "frame sequential display", Sony makes it possible to watch Full HD 3D quality video on 3D compatible "BRAVIA" LCD TVs. This technology involves alternately transmitting images for the left eye and right eye to the screen. When viewed through the "active shutter glasses", the two separate images on the shutter glasses are synchronized with the onscreen image with their Full HD quality intact, and precisely transmitted to the viewer's eyes.
The high-quality super-fine Full 3D HD images deliver unprecedented reality and presence.

An alternate 3D display technology for TVs is Line-by-Line method, which uses polarizing filters to alter the direction of alternate lines of pixels on the TV, so that alternate lines of the image are displayed for the left eye and right eye respectively. 
The TV is to be viewed with 3D glasses in which the polarization of the lenses is oriented for the different directions transmitted, so that the image information for each eye is only recognized by the respective eye. However, this technology reduces the native resolution of the display by half, because only half of the display information is available for each eye. As a result, it is difficult to reproduce precise clear images.

No comments:

Post a Comment