The top screen is a 16:9 format 3,5 inch Sharp parallax barrier display, the touchscreen below will keep the traditional 4:3 format. A convenient slider will allow players to gradually move from 2D to 3D graphics and choose the preferred 3D depth; another control will let you change the camera angle.

3D Games demoed at E3 look impressive. The GPU powering Nintendo 3DS, DMP Pica200 (not an Nvidia Tegra processor), will provide better graphics than the Wii.

3D movie playback features haven’t been shown at E3, but the two rear facing cameras open a revolutionary scenario in which 3D photos and video clips could be published and shared with a Wi-Fi connected 3DS.

A new business model for a Nintendo e-reader

Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata announced that the 3DS will connect automatically to Wi-Fi hotspots and download content, like magazines and newspaper articles.

According to Nintendo executives, the iPhone as a gaming platform is taken seriously and this e-reader feature could threaten a wide range of devices like Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad, however the Nintendo 3DS screen doesn’t seem an ideal solution for reading newspapers and eBooks.

What could make a difference is the business model: Nintendo 3DS could be used as a platform to deliver free content to users and serve immersive and interactive localized ads, in form of 3D clips and mini-games. Will Nintendo monetize this opportunity?

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Toshiba Libretto has a traditional netbook form factor, but with an additional 7 inch 1024×600 multi-touch display instead of a keyboard. The design reminds of Microsoft’s Courier, the revolutionary dual tablet and ebook reader that never went in production.

Libretto W100 instead will enjoy a limited edition distribution aimed at technology enthusiasts. Toshiba is exploring the UMPC niche market between tablets and netbooks and it’s interesting to see whether this truly ultra-portable mobile PC could compete with the iPad.

How does Toshiba Libretto compare to the iPad?

At first sight, the advantages of having two screens instead of one are obvious, and Toshiba’s design looks as magical as Apple’s. There can be no competition in terms of ergonomics, because the Libretto can be placed flat on a table, held like an iPad (weight can be between 700 and 819 gr. depending on battery size) or used as a laptop.

Moreover, Libretto’s virtual keyboard can be arranged in different layouts, enabling thumb typing on one or both screens. Touch typing will be faster and easier thanks to the haptic feedback, a tactile response (slight vibration) that makes you know you have pressed a button when you are typing.

iPad’s battery life is longer, but Toshiba Libretto is multitasking and supports Flash: In fact, it’s a fully featured Windows 7 machine with an Intel ULV processor that can replace a desktop PC for most usages.

In terms of user experience, according to the first hands-on reviews, the Libretto can’t reproduce the iPad’s immediacy and responsiveness. Apple designed the iPad from the custom processor to the operative system in order to ensure an unparalleled user experience that Windows 7 tablets can’t match yet.

Probably a mobile OS on a lighter, single screen 7-9” device could provide a cheaper and faster alternative to Apple’s tablet. The first Android tablets are entering the market and Nokia is rumored to be working on an ARM-based tablet that would benefit from Meego, a touch and mobile friendly operative system developed from the fusion of Moblin and Maemo.

Toshiba Libretto W100 photo by Peter Cartwright

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Many music apps already popular on iPhone have been ported to iPad, taking advantage of its superior hardware. The iPad’s larger touch screen is nothing but a blessing in this usage scenario, and there are already a good number of new apps being released: Seeing them in action will help even the fiercest iPad skeptic admit that Apple’s tablet can be used to create media, and sometimes it can be even an ideal solution.

Rana Sobhany made an impression at iPadDevCamp last month and got interviewed by Robert Scoble. Using two iPads as DJ setup is a brilliant solution, but you can also achieve amazing results just by using an iPad as a midi keyboard with custom Touch OSC (Open Sound Protocol) templates, as Ecken shows in the video below.

When MTV Iggy caught Indian maestro A. R. Rahman with eight iPads, I couldn’t help but think of him as an incarnation of Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and change, representing the creative and destructive aspects of nature. Actually Rahman bought the seven extra iPads for his friends, and seems to be very entertained by playing with Bebot and Proremote.

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Websites on the iPad look good, especially considering the web browsing experience on devices with smaller screens like the iPod Touch and the iPhone, but the touch screen interface causes a different class of problems: Read-tap asymmetry. Unless a site is designed with the iPad in mind, the text is big enough to read, but too small to touch. Inline links and navigational menus often offer small targets that make web browsing uncomfortable.

On the other hand, Apple’s conceptual model for the iPad UI design is based on the absence of hardware buttons, cursors, visual cues and standard navigation support that ensure immersiveness and elegance at the expense of usability. Poor interface areas discoverability is the result: Often users don’t perceive the possible actions that can be performed on an app, and interface design consistency is hard to be found.

In fact apps can differ a lot in this sense, for instance touching a picture in different apps can produce so many unpredictable effects that it’s virtually impossible to transfer skills from one app to the next. When you touch a picture and expect to navigate to another page and nothing happens, or instead of getting an enlarged version of the picture, a picture gallery opens, or a navigation menu pops up, the sense of immersiveness is broken as you don’t know what behavior to expect from the app.

Simple gestures used to continue reading an article on magazine apps can lead to different outcomes, navigating out of the “page” opening another article, actually scrolling down the text or producing no effect at all. Accidental activation of other features can occur when users touch active areas by mistake.

NN/g’s study is a must read for iPad app developers. Only through the establishment of user interface design standards, Apple can provide the immediacy and immersiveness of user experience that make the iPad magical.

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Remember Google Wave? One of Wave’s most useful and impressive features is collaborative live editing: Google Docs lets you co-edit documents in real time. You can discuss with colleagues on the sidebar chat, while you add comments and see what others are typing on your shared documents. Real-time editing and chat in documents and spreadsheets will improve productivity in the enterprise.

Collaboration, performance and chat are not the only improvements in this Google Docs upgrade: Document formatting, margins, tab stops and image layouts have greatly improved on the document editor.

The spreadsheet editor is faster and thanks to the new formula bar for cell editing, drag and drop columns and auto-complete, can be compared to its offline counterparts.

The new drawing editor could become a useful tool to create flow charts, diagrams and schematics.

Watch the new Google Docs features in action in the video below.

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