Toshiba tablet snaps leak out
Landscape orientation
Italian website Notebook Italia has posted pics of what it claims is Toshiba's upcoming Android-based media tablet. Basically, it looks like an iPad.
But there's one key difference: it's designed to be used in landscape mode.
The iPad will happily auto-rotate from portrait to landscape and back again, and we're sure the Toshiba tablet will too. But it's webcam is along the longer side, as is its equivalent of the dock connector.
Unless they too rotate somehow, the four control keys are placed - and their icons oriented - for landscape viewing. ®
COMMENTS
the iPad...
actually does have an orientation lock switch.
In fact, when i first got my hands on one, I thought that accelerometer was broken, until I found the rocker, and clicked it back into neutral.
When AutoRotate doesn't...
Having got my hands on an iPad in a Mac store recently and found that "AutoRotate/AutoOrientate", in common with most devices with such technology, 90% of the time doesn't (Auto anything I mean), I would much rather they dispense with "AutoRotate" and instead put a simple "Rotate" button on the panel frame.
Apart from anything else that would avoid the awkward hand-over jiggle that seems to be unavoidable when you have something you want someone else to take a look at, so you hand the pad over, and along the way the device get's DISoriented as to which way is up, and winds up in the other persons hands upside down or rotated counterfaceaboutclockwise.
The other person then has to try to coerce the device into finding "UP" - the instinctive act is to try to rotate the device in their own hands, which - again 90% of the time - just seems to make matters worse.
It would also mean that when I turn the device I could force it the right orientation by simply pressing a button rather than having to waggle and wave the thing about in front of me until it figures it out for itself.
