ARCHOS 9 UMPC Appears- Has “Light Touch” Resistive Digitizer
Image courtesy Crave
The folks at Crave got a few hours to play with the upcoming ARCHOS 9 UMPC recently. The ARCHOS 9 is a slate UMPC with a 9-inch screen that will be the first UMPC type device released with Windows 7 under the hood. The Crave hands-on test found that the touchscreen, while now known to be the resistive type, was light-touch enough to fool them into thinking it was the expensive capacitive type like that on the iPhone.
This is newsworthy for a couple of reasons. Most resistive digitizers used in UMPCs require a heavier touch to operate than the capacitive type, and that is not a bad thing, as it means that the ARCHOS 9 can be operated with a stylus. This would make the ARCHOS 9 a little Tablet, as inking could be done in addition to operating the interface with the fingers. Windows 7 includes all of the Tablet bits (most versions), so this could be a real slate tablet when used with a stylus. Of course, the super-light touch nature of this digitizer might preclude that possibility, as a 9-inch screen would likely require resting the palm on the screen to ink. This would result in vectoring and likely make inking very difficult to do.
The other interesting deduction to be gleaned about the use of a resistive digitizer is that most likely, multi-touch would not work. Windows 7 includes special touch optimizations for devices that are touch\-certified by Microsoft that provide additional interface benefits, but these usually wouldn’t be activated for resistive digitizers.
Any way you slice it, the ARCHOS 9 is looking to be a very capable UMPC, and Windows 7 should make this thing a real joy to use. Pricing may still not final, but the 9 is expected to retail for £450 to £500 in the UK.
slick looking
but looks huge
James, there are allready some resistive touch screens that will support full tablet stuff.. and resistive multitouch ones too..
ie, resistive alone is not taking away w7 features or multitouch.
“Light touch” means vectoring when inking, I’m assuming… alas.
I’m with Jonathan Cohen above. “Light touch” doesn’t sound like what I’d want in a UMPC, anymore than I’d want, like the Nokia E97, resistive on a phone.
Can you ink on capacitive screens? If you can’t then I can understand why they’re limited to toys.
Capacitive screens don’t recognize the stylus tip so no.
There are special styli which will work with capacitative screens, but they don’t seem to be promoted for them, for some reason. Check out http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=208606415&listingid=33565572&dcaid=17902
I’m assuming something with a thinner point would work on Windows 7, since it’s built to accept stylus input.
If (big if)no vectoring–it could be the long awaited replacement for the Motion LS800. Probably vectoring though.
I am still waiting for the 7-9 inch slate you can write on. Hoping the tabletkiosk i7300 with dual mode will be out soon and not too highly priced.
I’ll bet if they had let James or Kevin have that thing for 5 minutes, we would know whether the inking worked decently, whether it had palm rejection, and how it compared in these respects to the Fujitsu p1630 (which I’m sad to say will likely not be WACOM next time round).
Im really worried about the resistive touchscreen but I’m happy to see Windows 7 on something this small. I’d like to see an Android version too
http://farview.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/archos-9-windows-7-pctablet-launch-fail/