Microsoft Corp unveiled two new Windows devices — a tablet-laptop hybrid and a seven-inch tablet — at this year’s Computex in Taipei yesterday.
Tapping in to the “two-in-one” trend for laptops with detachable keyboards, which is a dominant theme at this year’s Computex, the HP Pro X2 612 has a stylus, cameras at the front and back, and comes with dual batteries in the tablet and keyboard.
A seven-inch Toshiba tablet to be launched in the next few months was also unveiled yesterday.
“It’s a really nice device, thin, light with a textured finish in champagne gold... this is Windows in your pocket at an incredibly exciting aggressively competitive price,” said Nick Parker, corporate vice president for device partnerships at Microsoft.
He showed the new machines during a keynote speech on the second day of the trade show in Taipei, which runs until Saturday.
Microsoft also announced a partnership with leading free-to-play games developer Kabam Inc, whose games are to be made available on Windows smartphones and tablets, and that the company’s smartphone personal assistant “Cortana” would arrive in China and the UK in customized versions “in the coming months.”
As part of its future vision, Parker and the firm’s speech recognition specialist, Hon Hsiao-wuen (洪小文), emphasized the importance of its real-time translation services, showing a film of a Skype conversation where both callers were being interpreted live as they spoke. One was speaking English, the other in German.
Microsoft first demonstrated the new Skype Translator at the Code Conference in California last week.
The company is also rumored to be developing a smartwatch, but Parker did not mention the company’s intentions on wearable devices.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
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