Hands on: NEC’s Intel Classmate PC

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

The BETT education technology show at London’s Olympia was heaving today, suggesting that education may be one of the few sectors of the IT industry that isn’t yet suffering as a result of the economic meltdown.

Few stands, however, were attracting as much attention as the ones sporting Intel’s new Classmate PCs. NEC’s version of the Classmate is called the Otomo, and we managed to get our hands on the device for a few minutes on the BETT showfloor.

As we reported yesterday, the child-friendly laptop sports a new design that allows you to swivel the screen from the traditional laptop configuration into a tablet PC. A built-in accelerometer rotates the screen depending on which up way the tablet is being held – whether that be landscape or portrait – although it was certainly a little temperamental on  the pre-release version that we had our hands on.

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