Today Vizio is making their two new Ultrabooks available for pre-order, this move marks Vizio’s first jump into the PC space. Vizio is a maker of HDTVs first and foremost, but they’ve recently taken a shot at the tablet market and now they’re trying their hand in the PC world. The company is offering an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook which comes in 14″ or 15.6″ variant as well as a full-sized laptop and an all-in-one desktop. We’re of course most interested in the Ultrabooks, step inside for a rundown.

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You may have caught our story the other day about the Iconia Tab A100/101 [tracking page] being available for pre-order from Amazon UK with a launch-date set for May 14th. Unfortunately it looks like Amazon wasn’t dead-on with their release-date info. A recent check-up Amazon’s page for the device has revealed that the reported launch-date has been pushed back more than a month to June 30th for both the WiFi-only (A100) and the 3G equipped (A101) versions of the device. Sad news for anyone interested in this 7 inch Honeycomb tablet, and even more sad for anyone who already pre-ordered it.

But hey, at least the larger Acer Iconia Tab A500 is already available on the market, am I right?

Notion Ink, the company behind the forthcoming Adam tablet [tracking page], has divulged lots of info on it’s official blog today about the company’s first device, including pre-order information.

Pricing and Availability

As mentioned in an earlier post on their blog, Notion Ink has sent out emails to people who have commented on their site in the past, and these people will be able to access pre-orders 6 hours before everyone else. If you aren’t among this group of people, you should be able to pre-order the Adam starting on December 9th at 7:30PM EST, presumably from Notion Ink’s site.

The Adam will be offered starting at $375 for the basic Wi-Fi only version, while the 3G version will run $425. If you opt for the Pixel Qi (transreflective) screen, the Wi-Fi only version will be $499 or $549 for the 3G version. Notion Ink says they have 6 different variants available citing the “900 and 850 series inch which may represent different 3G radios for different networks.

Interface

Notion Ink has also given us a good look at the custom interface that they’ve been working on, which I’ve been excited to take a see. I’ll drop the images below for you to peruse. The first thing I’ve noticed is that their choice of “hand-drawn inch icon style doesn’t seem to fit with their hyper-modern interface (which reminds me much of Mirror’s Edge aesthetics). They’ve previously stated that they didn’t want to follow the current glossy icon style that has been popularized thanks to Apple’s iOS app icons.

Based on images alone, I find Adam’s interface to be graphically very sharp and impressive. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear idea of exactly how it will operate, and intuitiveness and consistency might be an issue (we’ll have to wait and see). I’m happy to see them trying to do something revolutionary though. Android’s app design is more fragmented than the versions of the OS itself. If Notion Ink wants to be able to pull off this app paradigm, their approach will have to be very usable, and they’ll need to publish tight design/usage docs for developers to follow. Otherwise we’ll end up with a messy, confusing, and inconsistent interface which will result in fewer people using the device, and thus fewer developers wanting to develop for the platform. I have at least a little bit of hope as Notion Ink claims to have done lots of user testing in these areas.

The Adam as a Drawing Digitizer?

One of the most interesting points on the afore-linked blog post was that the Adam will include a “digitizer inch and be able to work as a wireless input device for other computers. I wish I had more solid information about this, but their language isn’t very clear. According to Notion Ink, the “Adam comes with an Open Source implementation which converts it into a digitizer inch, and further clarifies by saying “Please note, technically Adam’s way of using the screen as touch input for your computers does not make it fall into traditional digitizer domain, but it’s rather an intelligent implementation and hack in to the system inch. So at this point, it doesn’t sound like were talking about an active digitizer (which is how almost all decent computer drawing pads work). Sounds like an interesting feature, but it might not turn out to be anything more than a VNC implementation.

Mystery Sensor

Notion Ink has been teasing a mystery sensor that will be included with the Adam. In the blog post CEO Rohan Shravan writes:

One of my wish was to design a product where every fortnight you can receive a new update which isn’t just a security bug fix, but a discovery of something which already existed, sort of un-locking a part. This is my first attempt on the same lines!

An interesting concept, but people might take this the wrong way. There’s nothing more annoying than a product shipping with a particular piece of hardware, but having it locked down for no reason. Apple did this with their iPod Touchs, which included Bluetooth radios, but were locked down to only be used with proprietary Nike+ sensors. Eventually Apple opened up the Bluetooth functionality with an update, but it took some time before users were actually able to take advantage of the hardware they paid for.

Today was pre-order day for the iPhone 4 [Portal page] and things went far from smooth. Both Apple and AT&T’s pre-order processes were taken to their knees by the hoard of people attempting to pre-order the iPhone 4. If you were trying to place an iPhone pre-order, you’d be lucky if you actually managed to make that happen.

Apparently, we we’re one of the lucky ones, and we managed to get a pre-order through to the Apple store earlier today. According to Apple, the iPhone 4 will be here on launch day – June 24th, and we’ll be bringing you the usual quality coverage along with a full review after some serious hands-on time with Apple’s latest phone.

Did any readers take the pre-plunge today and order themselves and iPhone 4? Let us know in the comments.

The modestly priced Archos 7 Home Tablet [product page] is now available for pre-order from Amazon for $199. It is the 8GB version, but there will purportedly be a 2GB version as well. Archos has stated that the tablet will ship by end of April.

The Archos 7 Home Tablet (let’s call it the Archos 7 HT) is a WiFi only device (no cellular data) as you’ll recall, so the “Home inch designation is rather fitting. Archos says that you’ll be able to play video on the Archos 7 HT for up to 7 hours on the 800×480 display. Audio playback is good for 44 hours, according to Archos. If you are looking to grab yourself a capable digital companion without dropping a huge chunk of change, the Archos 7 HT may be just the right value at $199. Have a look below at a nice hands on of the device from jkkmobile:

[Engadget] via [Pocketables]

So yesterday was the big iPad pre-order day, and it sounds like lots of folks around the web were eagerly waiting to give Apple their money in advance for the upcoming iPad [Product page]. We we’re in that group of people, though not necessarily just because we like to give Apple money. We wanted to be sure to bring our readers coverage on this device which will inevitably be (and already has been) an influence on the tablet boom that we’re seeing. If you’d like to pre-order your very own iPad, Apple is now ready and willing to take your money. We should be getting ours on April 3rd, so be sure to stop back and check it out.

One new bit of info on the iPad front is that the switch on the side, above the volume rocker — that everyone presumed was a mute switch — is actually an orientation lock. If you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPod Touch in bed or while laying on a couch, you’ll know that it can be annoying if you want to lay sideways and read the page. The screen will auto-rate to landscape view, despite the fact that you want it in portrait. So it’s good to know that Apple added the switch to lock the auto-rotation for these sorts of situations.