HANNOVER, Germany—Fujitsu will be offering an iPad competitor that includes the features that nearly everyone wants in a tablet, plus features that business IT departments wish were already available in tablets today.
The new tablet, dubbed the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550, will run Windows 7 Professional, but will offer a radically different interface that allows full touch-screen capability, multitouch operations, multimedia, and necessities such as WiFi and Bluetooth. But in addition to these tablet features, the Q550 includes a smartcard reader slot, a fingerprint reader, advanced theft protection and a trusted platform module.
A Fujitsu executive demonstrated a prototype of the new tablet for eWEEK during a visit to the company's booth at CeBIT, in advance of the public announcement that will take place on March 1 when the show officially opens. The new tablet is similar to the Apple iPad in appearance, but the screen, at 10.3 inches, is slightly larger. It's about the same weight and thickness of the iPad. The tablet is designed to be integrated into a company's existing enterprise IT infrastructure, according to Fujitsu.
The 10.3-inch screen has an anti-glare finish and, in the harsh lighting of the pre-trade-show construction phase, this appeared to be the case. The Q550 is unique in offering both a pen interface and a touch interface. The device is able to detect when the pen is being used, and will automatically change to pen input, while at the same time turning on handwriting recognition to convert the stylus input to text. When users switch to finger inputs, the device instantly switches to a touch-screen interface.
The Q550 offers two user interface formats, one of which resembles the typical Windows interface, but at a touch it can switch to a screen with colored icons on a black background like the interfaces displayed by the iPad and its competitors. In the brief tests we were allowed, the screen appeared to work well in both modes of operations.
For more, read the eWeek article: Fujitsu to Offer Business-Class Security in New Stylistic Q550 Tablet.
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