Finally! Some news from Augen.
In Augen Booth at this years CES they demoed 4 working new tablets + an interesting docking station. They are all from the Augen Gentouch series now baring an additional coffee-inspired names.
The first one is called Gentouch Latte and it`s a very similar device to the original Gentouch 78. Well it`s basically the same device with all the same specs but it has received the Android 2.2 update and has an accelerometer + they moved the buttons a bit. Not a huge improvement but its priced at 150$ and possibly lower so it`s still more or less competitive.
Second device demoed is called Gentouch Latte Grande thats again EXACTLY the same as the previously described device BUT with an capacitive touch screen instead of the resistive screen which we all know are quite bad or even awful. The price increase clearly describes the actual cost of the screen itself, the device costs now 269$.
Third device is called Gentouch Espresso that is, as the name suggests, the more powerful device. It carries on the same specs as the Latte Grande but now comes in a sturdier casing and runs on more powerful Cortex ARM A9 1GHz processor plus it has an forward facing video camera and GB of internal (flash) storage. The weird part it that it was told to retail around 270$ which doesn`t really make sense since the less powerful Latte Grande was said to cost about the same…
And lastly we have the most interesting Android tablet of the bunch – The Gentouch Dolce that is an 10 inch tablet with the 1GHz ARM 9 processor, 1024*768 capacitive screen. Sounds good right? But wait there`s more… a LOT more! You can also buy a docking station to go with it called Doppio which acts as an physical keyboard but it also comes with built-in 160GB HDD and an additional battery giving the whole combo a total running time of 15 hours. Now that is actually the first really cool gadget Augen has ever produced and we are looking forward to it. It does need to be mentioned that the last two tablets were not actually functioning units in CES but non-working prototypes but still we have high hopes!
I just hope that with the release of the new tablets, they don’t give up on supporting their already horribly under-supported original tablets. I picked up a Gentouch 78v2 (the white power button version that has a working accelerometer) over Christmas and have been severely underimpressed with the amount of information available on this tablet, both from their official site (which doesn’t even acknowledge the revised tablet exists) or from fansites like this (not your fault).
There’s still a number of serious issues that they could address with the 78 and 78v2 that they haven’t, and I suspect that the release of the new tablets means these models are even DOAier than they already were before. Augen needs to seriously address the lack of any backend support on their behalf before they get these tablets going en masse, because they don’t want their name and brand to become assosciated with vaporsupport.