Surfing the internet or watching videos using a laptop or tablet while sitting on the sofa is all well and good, but there are times when we need a larger screen or when we want to share something with our family and friends. Though there are touch-enabled coffee tables available for family and friends to gather around, they are costly. Jigabyte, a British startup has made an entry into the league with the aim of significantly reducing the cost of touchscreen coffee tables.
A New Mexico based company, Ideum, is an excellent example of a company who have been selling interactive coffee tables. The models Pico and Deut comes with 8th Gen Intel Core processors, UHD resolution, lots of RAM, dedicated graphics, and plenty of storage. They are available in 43, 49 and 55-inch sizes.
Jigabyte’s is a lot cheaper than other models available in the market. It has a 32-inch capacitive touch display with 1080p resolution on the top of the blackened wood frame. After every few minutes, the images change automatically until a touch activates the tablet mode. At the same time, two browser windows can be opened which can be rotated at 360 degrees so that animations, videos, games, and info can be shared with people sitting around the table. The audio is thrown out from the built-in speakers, and it also provides support for pinch and zoom.
An in-house application, Table mode, runs on top of Windows 7 and acts as an operating system. The user can easily switch to the original Windows 7 mode so that it can be used like a computer with an on-screen keyboard or with a physical mouse and keyboard. Clive Wrighton says that due to the driver compatibility issues, an outdated OS was chosen to run the device and upon successful tests, soon it will be migrated to Windows 10. The dimensions of the screen are 35.4 x 21.6 x 15.7 inches (900 x 550 x 400 mm). Though the main function of the coffee table is online entertainment, there is no mention of wired or wireless LAN capabilities.
The computer system features 4th Gen Intel chips with up to Core i7 processing brains. The base model has Core i3 brains, which is more than enough to give a smooth graphical experience in browser and tablet mode. It offers 250 GB of HDD storage and has a RAM of 4GB. SSD option is also available.
The Jigabyte coffee table is currently available for US$2500 (about £1,995).
All Images: © Jigabyte
h/t: New Atlas