FlatPad 10" Android 2.1 Tablet now available in US for $285

[givmedew]

at first I saw the resistive screen and frowned then I saw the picture of the nurse or doctor using the tablet. It seems they want this to be compatible with medical fields and using a pen makes sense for a lot of things. Using an expensive ipod/ipad style stylus is usually not an option for businesses as small pen like objects, wireless mice, small gadgets often disappear. We had to ghetto tape and string all the our styli to our scanners which by then half of them were treo 650 styli even though the scanner all came with 3 very nice large yellow styli. LOL

Anyways makes sense they wanted styli to work and if it is very very sensitive it will still be nice. I have seen several windows mobile device with super sensitive screen I almost thought they where not resistive.

Anyone use this thing yet? How does dragging your finger across the pad feel? Honestly I am a iPad and Macbook Pro owner and for $215 difference wouldn't really recommend one of these unless that difference was enough to say wether or not you could buy one. But for businesses $215x50 is a big difference and a small company like this may be able to offer better bulk prices than apple. I am holding out to see what a $500 Android or WebOS tablet does. Hacked Palm Pre's are fairly interesting devices!

 

[EgooEspada]

Surprised no one asked this yet:

How do you use this Android Tablet without a Back Button or Menu Button? It doesn't need a search button really, but what about the others? lol

 

[Rhyyke]

i saw these about three or four months ago (estimate, it was about 2 weeks after the ipad came out in america). there were pictures and an introduction in a chinese language newspaper. it's basically an ipad clone that they put android on. the one i saw had an apple logo blatantly on it as well, and i think it was called the "apad" at the time. they sold in china for what converted out to be about $120 USD. the article didnt mention specs but said it wasn't "good quality" so this one is probably a better quality one for a western clientele. the company that carries it here probably imports them from china and rebrand/boxes them.

i used to be into airsoft guns, and you saw this kind of things a lot. Japanese company designs and sells one, Chinese company clones it, removes the japanese company markings and sells it at 1/3 the price or less and sells it, American company imports, checks quality, re-boxes and sells it.

 

[Rhyyke]

found a link!

Introducing the aPad – cheap shanzhai iPad hits Chinese marketplace | Lost Laowai China Blog

 

[gadgetrants]

Though hardly a supporter of 'resistive' displays, especially on surfaces this large, for a grand total the US $351.58 (with the extended warranty) I just paid, I'm going to try this out and see how it compares to my iPad 64gb/Wifi-3g.

We'll See...

Hold on. You own an iPad 64Gb and just bought one of these? Can I please come to your house for Christmas?!??!?!

-Matt

 

[NCREDIBLE DROID]

I wonder if we can root it.....hmmm

 

[jsh1120]

I think the question of where a tablet fits in the device landscape is a good one. Here's my 2 cents: I had a netbook (Asus 1000HA) for a year and loved it to death. Ultimately, though, I outgrew it. I could deal with the keyboard, but the 1024 x 600 screen drove me crazy (I had to kill all the window-dressing in Firefox) and more importantly, with an Atom CPU it really COULDN'T multiprocess. If I ran Firefox, Word, and Powerpoint (I teach!) at the same time, it just ran too slow.

For me, I know I'd end up wanting to use a tablet in the same way I used my netbook: 2-3 programs at a time, consuming AND producing content. That's the rub...while there's no argument that a tablet is perfect for consuming, I can't imagine that it would do any better a job at creating stuff (e.g., image processing, word processing, etc.) than a netbook.

If you ONLY wanted it for movies, music, games, email....then I could see it making more sense.

-Matt

You make some cogent points. I have an HP Mini311 netbook that has more or less replaced by 15" laptop when I travel. The screen is better than the ASUS and with 2 gigs of memory it runs Windows7 acceptably.

Ultimately, though, you're right that it cannot really replace a fully configured system for creating content. I don't find the problem to be performance, though. It's simply that even with more pixels and a slightly larger screen (11+"), the screen itself is simply not large enough (with print I can read) to use multiple applications easily. To some extent I'm spoiled by a desktop system with dual monitors but even if I weren't I find the 11 inch screen to be too small for serious content creation.

Ultimately, finding the sweet spot for the various devices is an elusive target for manufacturers, especially for consumers who want a single device that combines portability with content creation features. I'm now looking at a Lenovo X201 tablet that combines a serious laptop with a tablet interface. We'll see.

One thing is certain, though, I won't be trying to use a phone for this purpose. Though I have Docs2Go on my droid, I can't imagine trying to use it for anything more than an occasional review and minor editing of documents and spreadsheets.

 

[Shadez]

Augen’s GenTouch78 (K-Mart Tablet) Getting CyanogenMod 6

The GenTouch78 by Augen garnered an amazing amount of interest from the Android community when K-Mart revealed it in one of their circulars for a few days ago.

The tablet debuted at $150 and had a good amount of you scrambling about to see if you can find one in your local K-Mart stores. Even with it not being the most capable tablet we’ve seen, the community’s excited about it and it clearly shows that demand for Android tablets is real and the market for them could explode any day now.

​

Cyanogen and his team that never sleeps have shown an immense amount of interest, as well, as they’re bringing CM6 to the tablet (the first tablet to receive such an honor). Specifically, popular developer TheDude has been the one tinkering with the device for the past few days and has gotten the FroYo-laden CM6 running on it and is working on tweaking it for that nice 7-inch screen.

Cyanogen’s humorous “tips” widget is shown between the search and music widgets, with the bottom-most row holding 8 icons horizontally (from the looks of things, the launcher is an 8 wide x 6 tall grid).

Be sure to follow TheDude on Twitter if his developments interest you and if you’re thinking of picking one of these up for yourself.


[via AndroidSpin]
via phandroid

 

[lschmitt]

Is this for real? Wow!! Talk about an ipad ripoff, lol. Hopefully someone comes out with a worthy tablet here soon, stuff like this is a laugh. Resistive touch screen? Really? I mean its frickn 2010. This is a.joke, imo. Now the blackberry pad that's coming out, that might be worthy of a real look.

 

[nyijedi]

Resistive touch screen? Yeah.....I'll pass....absolutely terrible.

 

[crazy talk]

Can some explain the resistive screen as opposed to a Droid?

for resistive you need to apply pressure (sometimes A LOT of pressure) for the screen to recognize input... as opposed to capacitive, which senses heat (and doesn't require pressure)

you should do some research into how capacitive screens work before making stuff up.

 

[NewDroidOrder]

Looks nice and all, but he 256MB RAM has to be a deal breaker for me. thats just not enough. other than that, it looks sweeeet!

 

[wuyanks]

CM running on the Augen... man, this is getting much more tempting

 

[wuyanks]

Can some explain the resistive screen as opposed to a Droid?

for resistive you need to apply pressure (sometimes A LOT of pressure) for the screen to recognize input... as opposed to capacitive, which senses heat (and doesn't require pressure)

you should do some research into how capacitive screens work before making stuff up.

okay sorry, not necessarily heat, but it recognizes changes in capacity.... but the general idea is still the same. capacitive screens require little to no pressure for input.

 

[RW-1]

Can some explain the resistive screen as opposed to a Droid?

for resistive you need to apply pressure (sometimes A LOT of pressure) for the screen to recognize input... as opposed to capacitive, which senses heat (and doesn't require pressure)

Heat has nothing to do with capacitivity based TS's.

No offense, but if part of the news team, please check your sources.

I'll lay both out for the FunN4Lo:

A resistive touchscreen panel is composed of several layers, the most important of which are two thin, metallic, electrically conductive layers separated by a narrow gap. When an object, such as a finger, presses down on a point on the panel's outer surface the two metallic layers become connected at that point: the panel then behaves as a pair of voltage dividers with connected outputs. This causes a change in the electrical current, which is registered as a touch event and sent to the controller for processing.

A capacitive touchscreen panel consists of an insulator such as glass, coated with a transparent conductor such as indium tin oxide (ITO). As the human body is also a conductor, touching the surface of the screen results in a distortion of the body's electrostatic field, measurable as a change in capacitance. Different technologies may be used to determine the location of the touch. The location is then sent to the controller for processing.