Japan seems to really like Windows 7-powered tablets: this time, it’s Toshiba, which has announced [JP] the so-called WT301/D for the local market. Just like so many Windows tablets, this model is specifically designed for use in enterprises.

These are the main specs:

• 10.1-inch TFT display with 1,366×768 resolution and LED back light
• Windows 7 Professional 32 bit as the OS
• Microsoft Home and Business 2010 pre-installed
• “next-generation” Atom processor
• 64GB SSD
• 2GB memory
• Bluetooth 3.0+HS
• Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g/n
• USB slot, microHDMI interface
• 1.3MP cam, 0.3MP inner cam
• stereo speakers

Toshiba plans to launch the tablet on the Japanese market next month (the price hasn’t been fixed yet).

Windows 7 is now the most prevalent – if not most popular – desktop OS with Gartner estimating that 42% of current PCs will run the OS while 94% of new machines will run Win7.

In comparison, OS X got 4% of the pie while Linux is firmly at 2%. Even IT departments are starting massive roll-outs of Win7 to their desktops, a move that has pushed the fairly new OS into the catbird seat. However, Gartner expects this to be the last time a standalone OS image is installed on business PCs as IT departments move towards hosted computing and virtualization.

Not everything is sunshine and roses, however:

“Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the U.S. and Asia/Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from 4Q10,” said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. “However, the economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions.”

You can check out the report here if you’re a subscriber but generally Windows is still strong even in the face of OS X and mobile popularity.

The most interesting statistic I think will be how fast Chrome OS overtakes Windows in the low end of the PC/laptop world. I also wonder how much WinXP is still floating around out there, let alone how many WinCE and NT implementations still exist.

It turns out the leak we blogged last month is true: Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo today officially introduced the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C as part of its summer line-up, and the device actually does dual-boot to Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone). Hardware-wise, the LOOX is pretty interesting, too.

Here are the main specs:

• Windows 7 Home Premium, 32-bit Japanese edition and Symbian double OS
• Microsoft Office Personal 2010
• slide-out QWERTY keyboard with trackball
• 4-inch LCD with 1,024×600 resolution
• 5MP CMOS camera
• 1GB memory
• 32GB eMMC
• 1.2GHz Intel Atom CPU
• 802.11b/g/n WiFi
• microSDHC slot (32GB max.)
• battery life in Windows 7 mode: 2 hours (after that, the device switches to Symbian mode automatically to save battery)
• size: 125mm×61mm×19.8mm, weight: 218g

Docomo will start distributing the LOOX F-07C in Japan this summer, but don’t expect the device to hit other markets anytime soon.

The VersaPro Type VT will run on Windows 7 Pro 32bit, with NEC promising a “high level of security”, just like on conventional Windows PCs (obviously, the device is primarily aimed at businesses, as are many of the other Windows tablets).

It will have an Intel Z670 CPU (1.50 GHz), 64GB SSD, DDR2-SDRAM 2GB, IEEE802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a replaceable battery.

NEC plans to start selling the VersaPro Type VT in Japan in September (price not yet fixed). The picture doesn’t necessarily show the final design by the way.

Another day, another new tablet: this times it’s actually two tablets [JP] coming from Japanese maker Onkyo (they aren’t the company’s first ones). Both devices, the TW317A7PH (pictured) and the TW117A6PH, run on Windows 7 Professional and are primarily aimed at businesses.

Both tablets share the following features:

• Atom N450 (1.66GHz) CPU
• 2GB RAM
• IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• one SD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports
• 1.3MP web cam

The TW317A7PH comes with an 11.6-inch LCD with 1,366×768 resolution and a 32GB SSD (price: $980). The TW117A6PH features a 10.1-inch LCD with 1,024×600 resolution and a 160GB HDD (price: $736).

Onkyo plans to start selling both tablets in Japan next month.

Take this with a grain of salt: Japanese tech blog Juggly is reporting [JP] that Fujitsu is working on a cell phone with both the Symbian and Windows 7 OS (not Windows Phone) on board. According to the article, the handset will be released by Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo as part of its summer line up.

Juggly even claims to know the name of the phone, LOOX F-07c, and also posts some specs:

• switch between Symbian / Windows 7 modes with the push of a button
• 32GB SSD
• 4 inch screen with 1,024×600 resolution
• Intel Atom CPU
• dimensions: 125mm×61mm×19.8mm
• optional USB/HDMI cradle

Again, the existence of the phone is not confirmed by Fujitsu or Docomo (which means the pic can be real or fake – my feeling is it’s real). As always, we will cover Docomo’s entire lineup when the company presents it.

Via Asiajin

[via Engadget]

Let’s start our post-WrestleMania Monday with a fun video of what could be. Here we see a gentleman, from Evoluce, controlling Windows 7 using Kinect. Minority Report, etc.

Incidentally, this is exactly what I talked about on After Dark With Bryan Alvarez a few weeks ago, people coming up with new and exciting uses for all this motion control business.

Neat in the abstract, sure, but I’m not sure how much easier a computer would be to control with a Kinect than with a proper mouse and keyboard.

We shall see, I suppose.

A quick heads-up for the Windows 7 users in the crowd. Microsoft will publish Windows 7 SP1 later today. It’s primarily a giant bugfix (though Windows Server 2008 sees some new features), so don’t expect anything mind-blowing.

Keep an eye on your Windows Update. Or, smarter, wait a few days to see if any weird compatibility issues develop. You don’t want to update then find out that one of your applications can a weird issue or whatever.

Opera Software on Monday teased a preview of Opera for Tablets, a custom browser for hybrid touch devices, which it said would be debuting at CES this week.

In a video, embedded below, the company briefly showed the product in action on an Android tablet, a Samsung Galaxy Tab to be more specific.

TechCrunch has now learned that the company will also show off some Windows 7 tablets and netbooks running its latest browser at CES – we’ll see if the CrunchGear team can shoot some videos of those at the annual show.

Unlike Opera’s other mobile browsers, which are custom-built for smartphone devices (including Android phones), Opera for Tablets seems to be more fit for larger touch screens, including the ability to smoothly scroll and zoom Web pages.

Opera has confirmed to us that the touch browser will also by shown running on Windows 7 notebooks at CES, but says it will only demonstrate a public preview, and that a public download release will be something for the future. Same goes for the Android version.

Don’t hold your breath for the browser to come to the iPad; although many expected never to witness Apple approve Opera Mini for the iPhone either, of course, so who knows?

Whether or not Windows 7 has a place on tablets or not, it isn’t stopping some brave companies from releasing consumer-oriented slate computers running Redmond’s latest operating system. Today, IN MEDIA announced the release of the uncreatively named “Windows 7 Tablet PC”.

Powered by a 1.66GHZ Intel Atom processor, the tablet sports an HDMI interface, a forward-facing camera, an 11 1⁄4 by 6 inch LCD screen, built-in eReader functionality and a 160GB hard drive.

IN Media CEO Nick Karnik in a press statement touted the device’s ability to play Flash videos, too.

IN MEDIA’s Windows 7 Tablet PC is scheduled for shipment in Q1 2011 and will roll out in Asia and the United States with at a suggested retail price of $399.

Don’t look for this one to give the iPad a run for its money just yet.

No pictures, videos or hand drawn cartoons of the tablet were made available.

Remember the Sony Clie PDA line? Yeah, the big flip-style ones. These were the HP Slates of the first half of the decade. Let me explain.

PDAs were the hot gadget item before smartphones. They instantly earned the owner geek credibility points and models were coming from nearly every manufacturer between 2000 and 2004. HP had the Jornada, and later the iPAQ after buying Compaq. There was the Dell Axim, the Linux-powered Sharp Zaurus, and of course the top-dog Palm Pilots.

Sony picked up on the trend and outed the Clie line that went toe-to-toe with Palm. These PDAs started out pretty much as premium Palm alternatives. They were more solid, came with a rich multimedia suite built into the Palm OS, but of course commanded a higher price. Over time Sony evolved the form factor while sticking with the Palm OS, although they hid the core OS with their own skin developed to better match the natural hardware controls.

Then out of the bowels of Nippon, the Palm OS 5-powered Sony Clie NX line dropped and nearly instantly, every 40-year old engineer feel in love. This massive beast took the PDA to its limits. It was like a Motorola RAZR, only five times larger, but — and this is big — it did a lot of things right. It featured a nearly usable chiclet keyboard that could be hidden by swiveling the large screen. There was a VGA still and motion camera along with a host of other features that are commonplace today, but were top-tier in 2002.

Awesome, right? Well, yeah, it was. But they didn’t sell in the states and Sony quickly made them exclusive to the Japanese market. But people didn’t buy them for the same reason the HP Slate isn’t headed for the consumer market: It was irrelevant.

I’ve said that Windows simply isn’t meant for tablets about a thousand and half times here. No matter how you slice it, it’s not. The interface was designed for mouse and keyboard input and no amount of touch enhancements can change that. However, the HP Slate, like the Sony NX line, is a necessary step forward.

Sony kept moving forward with their oversized clamshell PDA form factor for several generations. It was one of the first devices to show that the Palm OS was dated and not able to handle advanced tasks. Sony only made it worse by laying a complex skin overtop of it, which often caused the earlier models to lock up. Sony had the right idea, but the processing power and software platform wasn’t up to the task yet.

Look at Windows 7. It’s a less of a hog than Vista, but it’s still an OS designed to be run on a desktop OS. But there’s a very limited application library outside of Windows and so makers like HP will keep Windows around — application support was one of the chief reasons Sony stayed with Palm OS. Other tablets such as the ExoPC will skin Windows, but that’s only a temporary solution. Eventually Windows, like the Palm OS, will hit a point where it will no longer offer that many advantages over a proper mobile OS.

HP knows this. That’s why the company’s consumer tablet will run webOS. The average consumer doesn’t need a tablet to run Photoshop, some random inventory software, or Remote Desktop Connection. Nope, most people’s computer experience is almost entirely based around the web browser. A recent survey of iPad users show that 32% of owners have never even downloaded an app.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for a Windows 7 tablet though. Nope, but where Sony kept their clamshell CLIEs around just for nerdy dads, HP is selling the HP Slate 500 exclusively to the enterprise market. That’s where the money is anyway. These folks don’t buy units individually, they buy them by the pallet. The same nerdy dads will still probably be able to buy a Slate 500 from various online sites, but they won’t be available from the usual retailers like Best Buy and Amazon.

The Sony CLIE clamshell line wasn’t the first of a generation. No, it was the last true evolution of the Palm OS platform even more so than the Treo smartphone that stuck around for a bit longer. This is where the HP Slate 500 sits. It’s the beginning of the end for Windows tablets.

Windows, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system, sits firmly in place.

One year after launch, licenses for the successor of Windows Vista, Windows 7, have gone over the counter no less than 240 million times.

As Microsoft points out, that makes it the fastest selling operating system in history, which is not super surprising when you consider how many were clamoring to upgrade from Vista, and XP for that matter.

Still, that’s nearly a quarter billion licenses, folks.

Microsoft says that, as of September 2010, Windows 7 was running on 93% of new consumer PCs, although we’re left guessing as to what constitutes a “new consumer PC” here.

In contrast, Windows 7 ‘only’ boasts 17% global OS market share (according to Net Applications), which means a lot of computers are still running XP and Vista.

On the bright side, growth seems to be accelerating. Last June, Microsoft announced that they had sold 150 million copies of Windows 7, so that translates to sales of about 90 million licenses in the past 5 months. A lot would have to go wrong for Microsoft not to hit 300 million copies sold by year’s end.

On a personal note, 99% of my online activities, work and play, are done on a Windows 7 PC.

It’s a genuine pleasure to use, period.

Straight from the unicorn department: what you can see on these pictures are two tablet concepts Fujitsu is currently showing at CEATEC 2010 in Japan. The hardware looks quite nice in both cases, but the “devices” were not only hidden behind plexi-glass boxes but also not really working – not at all, actually. Fujitsu just used printed glossy paper for the screens.

What’s known is that the final versions will run on Windows 7 and that Fujitsu is “currently working” on finalizing the tablets, whatever that may mean. When asked, the Fujitsu employees at the booth were not able to give more details.

Their social teddy bear robots and especially the dual touchscreen cell phone are much cooler anyway.

There’s three different models of course, two with 10.1 inch displays, and one with a 11.6 inch screen. The TW11A4 has a 10.1 inch screen, 160GB hard drive, and a 1.66 GHz CPU with a GMA 3150 graphics chipset. The TW217A5 has a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 CPU, Intel GMA 500 graphics, and a 32GB SSD. This model weighs in at a mere 1.9 pounds. Finally, the TW317A5 has a 11.6 inch screen, an Atom N450 CPU, and Intel’s GMA 3150 graphic chipset. This model also has a 32GB SSD, and 1GB of RAM.

No word on pricing on any of these models, and again, we have no idea if or when they’ll ever show up in the US. I suspect they might be based on another company’s design, and we might see them with a different brand name. You can see the press release here, but it’s in Japanese.

[via Liliputing and SlashGear]

• 9″ multi-touch resistive screen
• Comes with Windows 7 or no OS installed
• Full complement of ports
• MSRP: $1024 (as configured), $599 (base) (10% off with our code, see below)

Pros:

• A compact, functional Windows 7 device
• Plenty of ports and expandability
• Display is bright, colorful, and relatively sharp

Cons:

• Windows 7 really still isn’t that touch-enabled
• Resistive touchscreen necessitates stylus for precision
• There’s nothing particularly special about it

Full review:

Windows-based tablets are nothing new, but with the iPad spurring sales and raising interest in every sector, and Windows 7 including many considerations for touch interaction, a lot of OEMs are going to be coming out with devices aimed at the enterprise/pro market. The Nav9 is one of these, making it to market long before the delayed HP slate and offering a more straightforward, netbook-like experience.

Before we get started, here are the specs on the unit I used:

• 1.66GHz Atom N280
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
• 32GB SSD (16-64GB available, 128GB coming soon)
• 3G modem (supply your own SIM)
• 9″ 1024×600 resistive touchscreen (supports two-finger gestures)
• 3xUSB, SD slot (includes 8GB card), combo RJ-45/VGA slot (includes adapter)
• Forward-facing webcam

I don’t want to drag out this review with a pointless description of Windows 7′s strengths and shortcomings in the tablet form. If you’re interested in a consumer tablet made just for email, internet, and basic media playback, it’s probably enough to say that a Windows 7 tablet is not for you, and you’ll be better off with an iPad or one of the numerous platforms that will surely be coming out later this year and in early 2011.

The best comparison is probably your average netbook, to which the Nav9 is pretty much equivalent hardware-wise (as opposed to the also-obvious iPad, with which the Nav9 really shares less). While you won’t be running any serious 3D or rendering video on this thing, it handles Windows 7 extremely well; applications opened as quickly as you would expect on an Atom, and VLC played back 720p content perfectly well with no stutters or delay. Startup time is relatively long, but it wakes up from sleep instantly, as it should. Battery life is similar to a netbook; 3 hours would be a good estimate, but 3G and heavy video usage will of course drop that.

As far as customization goes, only the hard drive and RAM can be upgraded; 2GB is really a good idea, but 32GB of space should be enough given the SD card slot and USB ports. You can open up the back, but it’ll void the warranty; Netbook Navigator does let you send it in to them for a quick-turnaround upgrade for these components.

A vanilla Windows 7 netbook or tablet is pretty boring to begin with, though a personalized unit with multiple desktops, all the touch settings tweaked right, and so on could definitely be a nice work environment. Check out the video demonstrating the capabilities of this little guy:

Sure, it’s sped up, and most of this stuff is just baked into Windows now, but still. If you take the time to put your system together (I’ve been improving this XP install for eight years now) it can be pretty nice. I didn’t have time to personalize the tablet, so I’m not going to ding them for a rather plain experience out of the box.

I found the resistive touchscreen to be accurate and responsive to both finger and stylus, though of course for the (astonishingly accurate) handwriting recognition you’ll need to use the stylus. The display itself is bright and sharp, but the viewing angle is really pretty bad. Left and right angles were fine, but tilting the screen up or down resulted in serious color shifting after only perhaps 20 degrees. Video looked great, and text was sharp.

Build quality struck me as very solid; lots of plastic, but thick plastic. The screen, when seen with glare, had a distressing irregularity to its coating, especially on the bezel, but it wasn’t visible when the display was on. The ports are on the sides: 2x USB, audio, power, and combo on the left side; the last USB and SD slot are on the right. Power button is up top, and the user-accessible insides are naturally accessed through the base plate. It’s got a bunch of status LEDs that kind of blast you in the face if you’re in the dark.

There is a fan, but it’s very quiet. The SSD keeps things cool, quick, and silent, and it never felt too warm in my hand. Speaking of which, it’s not exactly light at 2lbs, but not exactly heavy either. And while the 0.8″ thickness may look a little bulbous, it actually feels good to grip something about this size, especially if you’re going to be writing or tapping on it with the other hand. Needs to be meaty.

Conclusion

The questions that needs to be answered, of course, are “is a Windows 7 tablet right for you?” and “what does this tablet offer that others don’t?” To the first, I would would say probably not; a 7 tablet is more aimed at enterprise and IT, and while it’s a full PC in your hand, with all the benefits that provides, it’s also pretty poorly optimized for touch at the moment. You’d have to put some work into it. As for whether the Nav9 provides anything special, I’d also have to say probably not, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile machine. It’s a netbook with a resistive touchscreen, and that pretty much tells the whole story. If that’s what you need, and you don’t want to wait until early 2011 for the big companies’ versions of this form factor and OS, then the Nav9 is a worthwhile investment.

Bonus! If you feel like ordering one of these guys, use the coupon code CRUNCHGEAR10 at checkout for 10% off your order.

Product page: Nav9 tablet PC

The demo was at the Intel Developer Forum, and this design uses a 10″ screen. One trouble: lots and lots of bezel. Seems like they might want to slim that down a bit. But seriously, Dell, that’s nice. Now give me my choice of OS when I order it!

[image credit and via: CNET]