August 13, 2010
by Ronald O Carlson
 Rumors regarding Axon’s affordable hackintosh tablet have been surfacing since spring began. A unique implementation of mostly plain vanilla PC hardware that’s designed to be compatible with any Darwin OS, meaning it’s Mac OS X ready. It’s essentially a netbook with a touchpad glommed on and there are plenty of questions about how usable it will be in practice.
CrunchGear brings us news of Axon Logic and their soon to be released Axon Haptic tablet, which features the guts of a netbook with a resistive (not capacitative) touchscreen. It will go on sale in about a week in beta form for $750 and thereafter for $800 in final form.
As Axon mentions on its website, the new tablet gives you the choice of OS. Which of course translates into, it gives you the choice of Pure Darwin. Apple’s Snow Leopard could work quite as well, perhaps even better, but the company warns that the EULA specifically prohibits installation on a “non-Apple-branded” computer. This clearly makes the Axon Haptic a hackintosh (a computer that wasn’t manufactured by Apple yet designed to run Mac OS X, for those who were wondering where the term comes from).
• 1.6GHz Atom N270 (other trims will be available)
• 10-inch 1024×600 LED-backlit LCD
• Resistive touchscreen w/ built-in stylus
• 2 X 200-pin SO-DIMM slots (2GB standard)
• 2.5″ HDD bay (320GB standard)
• 1.3MP webcam
• Wi-Fi (A/B/G/N)
— Optional 3G package is promised, though not for the beta launch
• 3G SIM slot (AT&T or Verizon)
• Built-in speaker
• [3] X USB, Headphone, mic, ethernet, VGA ports, card reader
• On-screen keyboard and handwriting recognition
• Removable battery (3000mAh, ~3hrs)
• 0.9kg (just under 2lb)
Aside from the price, the resistive touchscreen (i.e. touch and pen input) and the fact that OS X isn’t a touch operating system both present problems. The Mac operating system hasn’t been optimized for touch and to my knowledge there’s no support for stylus-based input.
Further, Axon Logic isn’t selling the Haptic tablet with the operating system installed — they say it’s OS X ready while adding they don’t encourage users to install it. There’s no mention of software or system extensions to make touch and stylus input useable.
If you already have a MacBook, Axiotron will convert it into a fully optimized pen-based tablet (Modbook) with a lot device-specific software for $850. Similarly, if you just want a portable computer in the same range, Apple Certified Factory Refurbished MacBooks can be had for the same amount.
For my money, the iPad already does (almost) everything I need a tablet to do and cost a lot less even with a Wi-Fi keyboard and case.
The Axon Haptic, at least conceptually, sounds pretty cool. However, I question how useable it will actually be…
What’s your take? |
