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Pacebook Tablet PC
IAmBlakeM writes "Looks like a new PC design has been released by the guys at PaceBlade. Reviewed at Anandtech, the new PaceBlade, touted as a 3in1 PC, features a Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 CPU at 600Mhz, up to 256MB of RAM, a 12.1" XGA LCD that can do 1024x768, and an "any key". Always nice to see some new designs and technology throwing curves at the norms."
This is what I call "the ultimate geek toy". Well, this is for the guys who think PDAs just are not powerful enough.
Actually; the Pacebook has been announced 1 1/2 years ago and released at the last Cebit. I have been trying to get my hands on one for all this time, but unfortunately they still don't sell to us Euros :(
Which OS is supported on the PaceBook?
:-)
All Windows OS' are supported including Windows Me, 2000 and XP. We will emphasize Windows XP since the functionality is much more suitable for the PaceBook than Windows Me and 2000. Also, we read Jerry Kaplan's book and didn't want to make the same mistake of pissing off Bill so he'd dust off Pen Windows and crush us under his boot heel like GO Corp-- so no proprietary, better-suited, pen-based OSes here. Just the same old bloat you've come to love from Microsoft.
Okay, those last two sentences aren't really in there...
~Philly
PaceBlade gave it the name "any key" because it solved the problem of having to hit a key during a blue screen. The screen, which sometimes reads "Hit any key to continue" can only be removed by hitting a key on a keyboard, which is difficult to do on a keyboard-less tablet PC. The "any key" button solves that problem.
I thought the "any key" was going to be a gimmicky conversation piece, but after reading the article it appears to simply be in anticipation of Win XP.
I had to wait this long, to be able to "Press Any Key". W00t!
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
dammit. it won't let me post this short a message. damn lameness filter
Buttsex.
remember reading it awhile back, was posted on a forum. 'when instructed to hit any key to continue' hit any key on the keyboard. or somthing to that effect. this new 'any key' will probably confuse some of those aol kiddies LOL
Brilliant! That should cut my support calls in half!
I bet they are going to patent the any key and claim that no one else can use it. But maybe only dumb people will be able to use the any key on other platforms without royalty, after all the prior art is from them, these people that were truly looking for it.
Does anyone know how the Transmeta @ 600mhz compares to say a Mobile Pentium @ 1.5 ghz?
I have a tablet pc that I network with my palmtop at school for discrete programing. While I run everything on linux, it is interesting to not that windows doesn't include drivers for the devices pen interface. Linux seems to work just perfectly.
:)
Now I wonder if we could beowulf the tablets that this article is about, a backpack full with bluetooth cards for every student. Too bad TN schools are too cheap to pay for such a thing.
Great looking design, but...
It seems they are missing the boat with some of the design decisions they made (ie, no Wi-Fi, no handwriting or voice recognition software). The product's usefulness is seriously limited without these two capabilities. Where's the advantage of having a tablet in your hand if you can't use handwriting or if you can't access your data?
I think they left these things out to make a more affordable product. It also made the product less desirable.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
I was all excited when I saw this article yesterday. Then, I started reading it, and my mood just got worse and worse. The lack of native handwriting SW was a major insult. What exactly is a tablet PC for if you can't use pen based input? That, coupled with little possibility for RAM upgrade, a relatively slow processor, proprietary USB and VGA ports, supercheapo integrated video, and having menu and pivot functionality tied to WinXP sw only kinda ruined it for me. The "powered' 4-pin firewire was also a compromise in my opinion. Why use two cables to do the job of one? Especially on a laptop where cableclutter is not only frustrating and unsightly, but dangerous to the light hardware it's attached to, and the ports which tend to break easily on portables. Personally, I thought the "any key" was another slap in the face. Integrating a hardware element to deal with BSOD's (i.e. a sucky OS) is like putting a reset button on your mouse. It's not PaceBlade's fault that windows is so full of holes, but it hurts when their HW reflects that, too.
As a really minor last note, they talked about using this down the road as an LCD display/TV, but neglected to put either a TV tuner or video in onboard.
Go ahead and flame away. But in my defense, I was really excited and wanted to be blown away by this product, but couldn't find any reason this was better than one of those slim Viao offerings
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
to make their website blink??
Signatures are a waste of bandwidth
Let me get this straight: You release a combo tablet pc that isn't really good in any of three forms, has no voice or handwriting software and has an "any key" in anticipation of BSODs. Yes, sign me up for this reliable, easy to use gem!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
There are some other options out there:
The AquaPAD from FICA starts at $650.
You can get it running Midori Linux or WinCE. I've played with both and support for WiFi cards is good with either version.
The SonicBLUE ProGear can also be ordered with Linux as the OS, but it's WAY pricey - like over $3000. And the version running Windows98 runs hot. Burn your lap off and runs sluggish. But it has a built in 802.11b card. No drivers to load for this one.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
When Windows goes to a blue screen and says "Press any key to continue" you can press the any-key.(emphasis mine)
Something is wrong when a new device is produced and they have to advertize a "feature" that allows the device to be recovered when it crashes, not if it crashes.
Sure, most devices have this feature, but when you look at palm's site, do you see a big bulleted "And there is a reset button on the back to fix it when it breaks!"... No, it's listed on the site, but it isn't a big deal.
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Hey dudes, yuo xcant suoprt teh tablet pechee because of M$ windows lunix is teh far superior oserasibng system
i bet yuo fags have ms mouses and xboxen two. personly i don run any windows blot i even wiped my aibo clean and install netbsd.
!
Given the people here, it seems very amusing that it has apparently become standard practice to post all of the interesting news from ntcompatible.com here a couple days later. It could just be a big coincidence - perhaps many sites are carrying the same stories - but it is every few news items, and it is always delayed from when ntcompatible.com posts them by a day or two. Never earlier, and never much later.
It strongly appears that one or a few people are monitoring them to find out what the news is...
- Rob
They do not mention encryption, however. Without that, wouldn't this also mean that you could then snoop on those other channels, even without a wireless keyboard of your own? Me no like.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
take a look at the Product->Solutions page, under Realty.
the brunette is pantless
stunning!
I'm sorry, but it is overpriced, and the Aquapad runs Linux with handwriting recognition from Penpower. A screen that large will kill the battery life, and with a MS desktop OS you won't find handwriting recognition, so what is the point unless you have a browser based app that you only need to click buttons with?
I have a Toshiba Libretto L3 with the Transmeta Crusoe 600MHz CPU. Performance is not blinding fast, but it is more than adequate for most tasks.
I guess my point is that this is intended to be a portable device, not a supercomputer.
Putting moderation advice in your
I am curious why they decided to ship on top of Windows XP Home and rely on Office XP
for handwriting recognition instead of waiting another few months for the release of
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (there's a mouthful).
I attended a presentation on the Microsoft TabletPC's a few months back and the handwriting
recognition in the OS was by far the most accurate I had seen to date on CE or Palm devices.
On top of that, with the WinXP TPCE, the handwriting recognition support is exposed via a set
of APIs and could be bolted onto any existing app. Not sure what the pricing for new OS will be,
but it seems like a much better way to go than taking dependency on Office and after $400 still not
being able to use pen input in other apps.
does that mean we have to hit the anykey? or can we still hit just any key on the keybaord?
I'll just wait for Apple's version to come out. Say what you will about them, their hardware is always first-rate.
(No, Apple hasn't publicly anounced a tablet yet.)
The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
Maybe they figured most users would not be selling their souls for an OS?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The PaceBlade seems very similar in design to the Compaq Concerto from about a decade ago. A faster screen and higher resolution screen may make it more popular, though.
They seem to be using old-timer touch screen technology. Microsoft Tablet PC (AFAIK) will use the tablet, similar to wacom tablets, placed under the screen. So you won't need to touch your freakin' screen and scratch it (unless you really want to), and you won't have to adjust positioning all the time. Hell, you'll be able to write on the screen as you write on paper (AT LAST!) and search handwritten text (and specify what you want to find in handwriting too). I've seen their demo. You just move your stylus over the screen and mouse pointer follows it.
Where's the any key? I see alt, esk, citarol, but I don't see any any key! Ooo, a tab!
There are many tablet PCs already on the market. Microsoft has yet again tried to claim they invented something that has been used by the industry for years. What is really sad is that this one has nothing over the others in terms of usability other then being transmeta based (which should benefit the power usage). Microsoft's standards HINT and what a Tablet UI should be to be usable but it will need substantial changes to get market buy in.
,reading in full page portrait layout. But try to use these things for any input beyond point and click and you quickly see that your finger is not a mouse pointer. it's a big blunt object. using stylus on large screens is inherently iffy for targeting small little GUI widgets.
...correct...correct, and try to continue. it's maddening and a waste of time. Grafetti at least reduces the number of errors by changing the operator's input, not using cycles to compute what it thought you wrote.
I've been writing software for a year now for an in-house psych/neuropsych testing package and have had to evaluate many tablets for this project. Most are used for specific applications like data entry in the field or map/contextual content. None are overly better then others but we ended up choosing the all but defunct QBE tablet because of the most mitigating factor: cost. new tablets are over $2500 and QBE's can be picked up for $800. Since they can double as a PC when not being used as an idiot proof data collection tool, they have great value for a small office/lab setting. But not when they cost $2500 a pop.
having lived with a tablet as a dev-platform and using it as notepad for meetings, I now understand why tablets haven't caught the public's attention. they suck for getting work done. I love lying in bed surfing with my finger
After a week of testing we changed our program's UI to use a minimum of 80x80 pixel widgets just to avoid incorrect input. On a 1024x768 screen, this really limits what you can fit on the screen. Suddenly all fonts must be over 24 pt if you plan on selecting text. Radio buttons have to be replaced with "SONY My First Button" like nobs, and handwriting with a styles consumes the entire screen just to write a few words...then you wait for the coversion to text, correct
And let's not even get into using voice recog for input..it's just not going to happen for a few more years. A 90% recognition rate means a lot of mistakes that have to be corrected, and this only becomes efficient when you are streaming your words like dictation, most people speak in fragments
...a notebook that doubles as a tablet, ala the pivoting reversible screen is a good start, allowing scribbles when you want to jot down diagrams and simple notes and a normal keyboard when you want to really get work done
All windows apps rely on fitting large amounts of GUI items on the screen. Developers will first need to take on the Palm GUI theme to provide public access...just a few items for reduced chance of incorrect input and apps that accomplish a specific task.
Go pick one up and try it. you'll return it in a week and get your money back. unless you only surf.
if it ran linux i'd get it in a second! (or if i found someone who owned one who said all the fuctions worked well in linux)
Just for the record - The pivoting to Portrait/Landscape function is provided by Portrait Displays, Inc. The Anandtech review incorrectly claims that the pivoting function is provided by the Lynx hardware. And yes, I should know.
That's true.
When the Libretto's working hard for a while it will issue a puff of hot plastic-smelling air from the little vent on the left side, kind of like it's breathing.
I'm hoping the smell goes away with time. Unfortunately the manual's in Japanese so I don't know if that's normal or not.
Putting moderation advice in your
Dear Slashdot readers,
By the time we shipped the unit to Anandtech our own handwritig recognition software was not yet ready, however we are pleased to inform that we are now Beta testing it to our customers. We will release an end-user beta by the end of this month and expect final code in early June.
We would love to bundle Office XP since it's handwriting is excellent, however the OEM bundle from MS doesn't include PowerPoint, which we think is vital for office productivity. Also if you buy the OEM version you cannot upgrade to PowerPoint, meaning that you need to pay for Office twice!!!
We made the tough decision not to bundle Office XP for this reason, however the user manual is very detailed and shows how to enable the handwriting etc.
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
Let me try to replay all of your issues:
1. Handwriting is a free upgrade, available end of this month in beta and early next in production.
2. We can do up to 640MB of RAM, many of our customers use this configuration
3. We have two standard USB ports, one of them is round (but becomes standard with a dongle). This is one of the dtronger things on the PaceBook since the round USB is very easy to use, it doesn't have direction problem as the normal USB. We use this natively for 360degree cameras, FIR adapters, Bluetooth adapter. It's ideal for vertical markets that need to attach either a GPS or Barcode scanner very quickly, instead of fiddling around with the USB port.
4. VGA port is a drawback, there was simply no space for a standard VGA port, however most slim notebooks today, including Apple new iMAC all use proprietary connectors with a dongle. Sometimes space is precious.
5. SMI VGA is actually almost double the price compared to a GeForce desktop chip (so it's not cheap). It's not super-fast for 3D (which is not our aim for this version of the PaceBook (we hae others coming...) but it's got very low power consumption which is our number one concern, that with 8MB for DualView, DualApp etc.
6. Pivot and Menu works in Windows XP and 2000, it will not work in DOS, we are working on Linux drivers now, see our www.pacebook.com website for Linux support and drivers.
7. Anandtech got that a little wrong... 6-pin powered Firewire can only supply 1.2A, we need 2A for the DVD and CD-RW drives. We supply a 5V 2A on the power out. We got ONE cable for firewire and power, so it's in fact the worlds first portable computer with an external DVD that can be used in mobile environments (neither PC Card nor USB supply enough power, USB is not fast enough). MS tablets cannot use DVD more than in docking station. We also use the 5V DC out for port replicator, USB hub, and recharging of mobile phones!!!
8. Anykey will be used to switch handwriting on/off. For your information MS Tablet new requirements is a Ctrl+Alt+Del button on the unit...
9. Sure, TV Tuner is coming, but defienetly not integrated due to size, cost and weight. It will be a mobile accessory (with this we mean that you can use it while being mobile and not near a wall outlet as all other TV tuners). It will supply a consumer quality picture (means no jerky USB low quality stuff). It will be available early Q4 this year.
We appreciate your comments and you are more than welcome to talk directly to us in PaceBlade, we loe to satisfy people like you.
Regards,
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
Yes, it's definetely encrypted, if you happen to have the same ID as someone else you will only see garbage characters on your screen.
To set the ID is very easy, takes a couple of seconds.
For more than 255 people in a room we will have a USB/IR keyboard coming up, simply plug in the cable and you are fine.
We have many customers that use either one PaceBook with many keyboards (conference, whiteboard applications). One keyboard, many PaceBooks (testing, MIS, teachers).
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
The Tablet XP edition has been delayed several timesn and it's very hard for anyone to really know when it will come out.
Our product was ready and we had customers worldwide screaming for it, why should we let them wait another 6 months???
I think that Office XP handwriting is as good as the Tablet XP handwriting, I've tested both and get about 99% accuracy on both of them.
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
PaceBlade never made any claim ot be the first Tablet PC, we have seen about 30 or so from the first Grid came out back in 1988.
The Qbe was too heavy, too slow, too short battery life and it was a tablet only.
We designed the PaceBook to be used as whatever you want whereever you are:
Use it as a notebook on a train, a desktop in the office and a tablet when you are in meeting or walk around.
It's impossible for any tablet to take these three functions, that's why we created our concept with the 3IN1.
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
We have no aspiration to replace your PDA. A PDA is a device you put in your pocket and use for informmation retreival.
The PaceBook is a full blown computer, use it either as a tablet, a notebook or a desktop!
We don't see it as a "geek-toy", we see it as the next generation of computers, something that will make computers more portable, easier to use and more robust than current tablets and notebooks (we don't call desktops for portables yet).
Per Lyngemark
VP R&D PaceBlade
Academic in my case, I know the exchequer won't stand for one of these anytime soon (sigh...)
We supply PaceBlade systems with both handwriting and speech input. With our version of the PaceBlade you can touch, talk, type or write - whichever is best for you and your application. We offer both NaturallySpeaking And ViaVoice. Give me a call at (800-905-7080) or email me at chatterbox@3n.net. Harry Nielsen ChatterBox Systems, Inc.