A company called SmartQ is showing off a new Android tablet that looks like your standard iPad wannabe, complete with a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display. But Netbook News discovered that the SmartQ Ten tablet has one thing the iPad doesn’t: a piezoelectric touch panel.
The technology allows the tablet to support multitouch input from a fingertip or a stylus, offering some of the best characteristics of capacitive and resistive displays. The 9.7 inch IPS display can recognize 10 separate inputs which makes multitouch gestures or 10-finger typing a possibility.
The tablet is powered by a Rockchip ARM Cortex-A9 processor and Mali 400 graphics. It has 8GB of storage and 512MB of RAM and supports WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G wireless.
You can check out a video of the tablet in action after the break. The screen appears to be a bit unresponsive at times, but it’s not clear if that’s just a problem with the demo unit. The SmartQ Ten runs Google Android 2.2.
There’s a typo in the post: piezoelectric (note the z)
Me too… note the headline. The mispelling in the article was just a typo.
In the video, she’s using her fingernail rather than her fingertip, but it’s unclear whether that’s necessary. It looks to me as though the apparent unresponsiveness of the screen mentioned in the article wasn’t unresponsiveness at all: she was just at the end of the group of pictures and there were no more to scroll to.
can anyone find a video or a written review of how well the stylus input works?
Sorry, but way-old news. The Ten has been on sale since April and uses an Amlogic A9 processor, not a Rockchip. The Ten does not feature built-in 3G and GPS, although all the Amlogic boards support the necessary hardware if the manufacturer chooses to add it. There are loads of reviews, discussions, videos, and the odd teardown in Chinese, but but only a few English-language reviews from owners outside China since SmartQ’s distribution (and interest) outside China seems to have waned in the last year or so.