Gateway has announced a "Connected Touch Pad" device for home users that will be brought to market in partnership with America Online.
Starting in late November, Gateway's new Connected Touch Pad home Internet appliance is slated to make its debut in the US. The new embedded Linux based consumer webpad device is but one aspect of a broad initiative known as the "Gateway Connected Home." The intent is to provide an easy way interconnect PCs and other devices within the home at broadband speeds (more on this later), and through a partnership with America Online to provide a broad range of capabilities and services that make the Internet a more central feature of consumers' daily lives.
The following list provides a glimpse of the capabilities and services that Gateway and AOL are planning to offer . . .
- Accessing the Internet from a variety of devices in addition to the PC, extending the medium's convenience into every part of home life;
- Taking advantage of a new customised, "instant-on" version of the AOL service that connects the consumer to AOL as they turn on the device, designed to be used with new appliances that can be located in parts of the home where a PC typically is not;
- Accessing family members' common calendars, address books, and other information across multiple devices;
- Instantly accessing personalised information like news, investment updates, and weather forecasts from any room in the house;
- Creating a centralised, digital music library that's accessible from any room in the house through multiple devices.
The Gateway Connected Touch Pad is a non-portable touch-screen webpad with a 600x800 pixel 10.4" color (DSTN) LCD. The device is preconfigured to offer instant-on access to a suite of AOL services including email, instant messaging, calendar, address book, chat, and full Internet access. The AOL service will also provide easy access to content of particular interest to users in the kitchen or family room -- for example: recipes, grocery and gift ideas, TV and movie listings, online music, etc.
Unlike many other consumer webpads, the Connected Touch Pad is not battery-operated and portable, and therefore can't be conveniently carried about and used from the comfort of an easy chair. Rather, it must be placed on a desk or countertop, or can alternately be mounted beneath a kitchen cabinet. It can be operated in two ways: using a stylus and its touch screen, or with a wireless keyboard (which has convenient function keys for common functions like reading email, listening to music, accessing the calendar, etc.). The device also has a handy scroll wheel, positioned beside its LCD screen, which provides a convenient vertical scrolling mechanism for viewing pages that are longer than the 800x600 pixel display area.
