Oops, I’ll try to remember what my original post said.
I’m a dedicated Mac user, so I don’t think I’ll be running out to get one, but I wondered what the Windows world thinks about the newest thing from Microsoft.
Does anyone crave one? It looks like a somewhat awkward hybrid of handheld and laptop to me. Does the screen/pen input option make a big difference? Or could you not care less?
Anything that depends on current handwriting recognition technology for primary input is going to have a tough time of it IMO. Even PDAs are going back to keyboards.
If handwriting and voice recognition can become powerful enough to be utilitzed without extensive training that scenario may change, but both technologies are still not ready for prime time in terms of true ease of use. Tablets have been the “next big thing” for the last 10 years. I’m guessing it’s going to be another 5-10 years before the hardware/software is available to make powerful handwriting and interactive voice recognition and reponse an everyday thing.
Although that’s just rationalization. I signed up to go to the Tablet PC “kickoff” in Boston yesterday, but forgot to go.:smack:
I went to the Tablet PC kickoff yesterday. My company is currently selling these devices, and I’m tech support here, so I actually got to take one home last night for testing out.
I’ve gotta say they really did their homework in regards to handwriting recognition. The voice recognition is also kinda cool.
As far as the tablet itself, it was a convertible, so you could use it either as a laptop or as a tablet. The device was also very lightweight (4.1 lbs.) and the screen was very clear.
Microsoft is hoping the tablet PC will revolutionize the industry, but it may take a while. I found the handwriting recognition nifty, but it is yet to be seen what kind of applications it that could be used for. Even Microsoft is sorta wondering.
I am a huge doubter about this one. I just don’t see the market.
I am a huge doubter about this one. I just don’t see the market.
If I had the money I’d get one, but alas I dont.
I think this is going to be one of those cases where invention is the mother of neccesity.
Tablets are not new. They’ve been rolled out by several companies over the last couple of years and went nowhere. They are widely viewed as substantially less than revolutionary. MS sunk a bunch of money into and are obligated to hold a press conference and roll it out, but it’s in the same category as “Bob”.
Remember, people don’t buy hardware, they buy software. What is the killer app for tablets? Just handwriting recog. isn’t going to do it. Remember, in computer marketing, if you don’t sell 10s of millions, they’re not going to be reasonably priced.
Seems to be a strong entry in the “I’d buy it if I had far more disposable income than I do now” category. Are they selling them at a unit cost that makes a profit, or are they trying to pull an X-Box with them? If the former, it should survive as a good gadget for a few years hence whenever there’s another economic boombubble.
I have heard that it may do better in Asian markets, as pen-entering even simpler forms of Chinese ideograms and such is going to be preferable to fighting the keyboard for them.
I really really want one. They have been the dream of every freehand artist I know, to be able to draw directly on the screen of a portable computer. However, I don’t know if I want to buy the first rollout of a product, I may wait and hope prices go down and availiable mhz and screen size goes up. I’ve been eyeing the Portege 1.33mhz with 1 gig memory for about $2800, but my financial situation is such that I don’t think I should pay 1k more for a computer that is half the speed of the desktop I have been planning to get (and really need).
But I really really really want one.
There is a convergence of technology now that is going to make these things a success, either this time around or very soon:
[ul]
[li]Battery Technology - you can now make them small enough to be easy to carry, with a reasonable battery life.[/li][li]Wireless Networks - This is the biggie. Having a wireless network means you can surf the net from the couch. Or walk around the office and access your files. Or doctors can go from bed to bed and keep their charts with them. It also becomes easy to synchronize your documents. Walk into the office in the morning, and your tablet automatically compares the files in your briefcase and synchronizes them. When you walk into the house at the end of the day, it synchronizes to your home PC. Your work and personal documents can always be with you.[/li][li]Screen technology - Affordable touch screens that are bright, have wide viewing angles, high resolution, and reasonable size.[/li][li]The Internet - many people use their computers almost entirely for web surfing and E-mail. And web surfing doesn’t generally require much in the way of a keyboard, unless you are posting to a message base like this. My keyboard is in a slide-out tray under my desk, and sometimes I can go for an hour or two without even having to slide it out. For browsing news, you don’t need a keyboard. And handwriting recognition is good enough for doing simple things like entering a search term at Google.[/li][/ul]
I don’t know if this precise iteration will be the successful one - they are still too expensive, too big, and too heavy.
What I want is a tablet PC that weighs no more than 2 lbs, is about the size of a hardcover book but only 1 inch thick, and has a 10" display with 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi. I want this thing to have built-in wireless networking, MP3 and video playback, and a little slot for cheap, throwaway RAM cards that can be used to distribute things like records and E-books. And I want it to cost under $1000.
We’re probably 5 years away from that machine. But it will be hugely successful when it finally arrives. And once something like that is available, you’ll start to see a real growth in things like E-books.
I want to be able to walk up to a vending machine, drop in a buck, and get a little ram chip the size of a stick of gum, which contains a couple of songs, today’s newspaper, or a magazine. I want that magazine to be a full color, 300dpi digitized version of the print magazine.
Oh, and I don’t want publishers to screw around with my digital rights. I had better be able to copy that magazine into my permanent storage system at home so I can read it again in ten years.
Aeons ago, Alan Kay - one of the visionaries of computing - proposed his idea of Dynabook. They are still trying to build it.
I am going to agree with the “nay” crowd and say this is not it. The TabletPC is merely a solution looking for a problem. It is less capable than a Notebook, but more expensive than a PDA, so it falls right through the crack.
From NCR, bundled with Windows 3.2 and WinConnect(the deluxe model had a floppy drive. Mine does not. I can’t get WinConnect to work either). I can give you more specs tommorow. If I take it out now, I’ll spend the rest of the night trying to get it running and get no sleep at all.
IIRC though
286
16 mb of ram
I predict that the recently unveiled tablet pc’s will be just as successful.
BTW-If any Doper can help me get my tablet fully operational, I would be extremely thankful
The convergence is here. This first rollout may not be the killer, but it is damn good. Everyone I know who has been involved in the beta testing and used these things for a few months all say that after a week they would never go back to a regular laptop.
The killer app is that the handwriting, graphs, charts, etc has gotten to a practical level. You no longer need to take notes and then transcribe them, but can just write your notes and convert them into several different and usable formats. It’s huge for anyone that does a lot of meetings. Think doctors, insurance claim adjustors, inspectors of anything.
At $2k, they are a little pricy but not excessively priced for business. For the nay sayers, wait until Sony releases their version.
Gaudere said it: this thing can be a hyper-sketchbook. Just add Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Internet (or their open-source equivalents).
Every cartoonist should be able to get one.
Why doesn’t someone just make a Tricorder? I’d get one if they did. This just seems like a glorified etchasketch.
I think a tablet-style computer would be very useful, but I’m skeptical that Microsoft can design a good one. I’ve used MS Windows CE, their PDA operating system, and found it to be very clumsy. It tries to have all the functionality of a PC which just isn’t feasible. So it ends up being a severely underpowered and feature-poor PC. Compare that to a Palm which has no pretention of being a full-blown computer. It’s not a dumbed-down PC, but a completely different kind of device suited for different tasks. Bringing up today’s schedule on a 133-MHz WinCE PDA took several button presses and about 5 seconds. On my 40MHz Palm I just press one button and wait half a second.
If Microsoft tries to cram a full laptop into a tablet, I think they’ll end up with something similar to a WinCE PDA - a device that can do everything a PC can do but at slower speed, and nothing more. Instead they need to focus on what exactly the device is for, and if necessary, develop a propriatory operating system and/or software for it. If it’s for data entry and web browsing it doesn’t need a 1GHz P-4 processor, it needs a low-power CPU (say, a 300MHz Crusoe or even a StrongARM processor) and a set of simple software.
I work at a computer company, and this is my take on it: A tablet PC is just as cumbersome and hard to use as a PDA, only much LARGER and HEAVIER. In short, Microsoft envisions people carrying it around like a paper pad to jot notes down on, when really it’s a $2-3,000 machine they’ll only take where they absolutely need to.
Considering weight, heat, size–basically take a notebook computer and replace the keyboard with an LCD screen, and you’ve got the general idea.
Like previous posters have said, the big thing here isn’t that it’s a new concept (it’s OLD), it’s that Microsoft has developed a “new” OS for it called Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which is just Windows XP Pro with some extensions built in (like handwriting and voice reco). It’s slow. Users will still have to wait for it to wake from Standby to “jot something down.” Again, it’s just like a PDA, only much larger and heavier. And if you’re serious about writing anything, you’ll have to use an external keyboard (if it isn’t a convertible tablet design), and you still have to hook it up to a power adapter to charge the battery, and on and on.
Oh, but if you get one, by all means get one that uses Wacom pen digitizer technology. The touchscreens on those are pressure-sensitive, so in graphics apps like Photoshop, pushing harder on the pen will create a thicker (or darker) paintbrush stroke, just like in real life. Cool, eh?
I think the full-size tablet PC will find a niche, but really as a sort of replacement for the clipboard; ruggedised versions might be useful for delivery drivers etc (although there are already innumerable ruggedised mobile computing platforms).
I tend to think the future is brighter for devices of this type:
http://www.antelopetech.com/op.html
http://www.oqo.com/
-I mentioned this in another thread (before I’d seen either of the above) - I think the convergence of PC and PDA is what will happen; the unit will function as a very powerful desktop PC (with full size screen, keyboard etc) when docked, but will also be a kickass PDA when you grab it and walk away; no need for hotsyncs - the same data is available in the office and on the move