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Transmeta Needs Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Faced with dwindling sales, it looks like Transmeta
needs Microsoft's new tablet PC to survive." Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
The best tablets, came from Sumeria.
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
Are you sure these aren't acid tablets? Looking at how M$ Screwed Nvidia with the xbox revisions I don't see why Transemta would want to hop into bed with them.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Why does everyone pretend they need MS?
If your business model needs MS, then you're already done.
Dance with the Devil and you'll get burned.
Isn't it ironic that the company Linus works for needs M$?
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
And if Transmeta makes the chips, then that is double cool.
I personally don't care WHO makes the damn things, as long as someone makes them, and gets them out there for reasonable prices!
Supply and demand....but where's the demand?
They're so far behing on mfg technology that they're screwed. AMD or Intel can take a .13 micron part, underclock it, under-volt it and spank em silly (while getting many more chips per wafer).
Crusoe processor is slow. Code Morphing (TM) just desn't do the job fast enought and nobody is willing to pay for a slow 800 Mhz processor.
and I pronounce "Microsoft" "Microsoft".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Fueling the frenzy was one of its lead software engineers, Linus Torvalds, who was already famous for developing the core of the Linux operating system
Linus was one of the lead software engineers for this company, and yet it needs Microsoft to keep it from flopping? Perhaps MS can do the hardware and Linus the software, which might actually make a good product.
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
But someone make a good tablet and soon, I don't want a keyboard built in. I want maybe a scroll wheel, and just a loving touchable LCD screen that I can surf with wirelessly at work, or around the house. Please someone make my mobile pr0n dream come true.
Linus needs Transmeta, and Transmeta needs Microsoft.....eep! Im scared!
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The early pioneers of the coolest ideas frequently go broke just as their ideas catch on. Is it in time for Transmeta?
It makes me pretty nervous; I work for a start up trying to create our own market.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
They have Linus working for them. Why not get something that runs a linux distro on it? Would it be that hard to NOT use M$?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Transmeta to create "profit morphing" technology to turn an unprofitable business plan into to a profitable one.
They will roll out newly patented "micro profit opcodes" to soak up Microsoft money at the molecular level.
Looks like the MS bashing train gets off here. I love those trans meta chips. Especially in the Sony Picture books, it has reduced the amount of heat generated by them by at least half. So if it means that I gotta Kiss MS A$$ to continue to see these, then here goes: Screw that...... APPLE ALL THE WAY BABY!!!!!
That headline is a misnomer. Microsoft is not the only company producing operating system software that could run a tablet PC. Transmeta needs Microsoft? The article didn't say that-- it said Transmeta needs customers.
Transmeta should have realized a long time ago that they couldn't break into the laptop market (which is where they seem to have been trying to go). What Intel doesn't monopolize, AMD jumps on with greater resources than Transmeta could hope for (Hammer notwithstanding).
The MS Tablet PC could be the best thing to happen to Transmeta. MS isn't exactly happy with the major box brands offering *nix, and inside rumours say debate over whether security should be hardware or software have put a good dent in MS/Intel relations. By going Transmeta, MS can get a good price on a suitable processor (not megapowered like the portable P4's, but perfect for the job), which means more tablets running MS software, they get a bigger say in the design of the tablet, and the poke Intel in the ass and say "Don't push your luck, big guy, we don't need you as much as you want to believe."
And in the end, the result is just as good for open source on the tablet platform, because cheap tablets with a big company behind them will get a strong push into the marketplace, give OpenSource developers a reason to write for the tablet.
I say, Go Transmeta!
(hey, wasn't that a catchphrase from an 80's kids show?)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I wonder if that has much to do with the US way of life - we see almost exact same trend in automobile and home appliance industries. People in the States like to drive muscle cars, SUVs, full sized cars, who guzzle gas like crazy. In Europe, the trend is reverse, smaller, more economic cars running on electricity or natural gas and well esablished. Here in the US, they all seem to be either developing very slow or even failing.
Same thing with the dryers and washers. Europe in Japan goes for making them more energy efficient and smaller (due to space constraints, mainly), where here in the US we dont see much of a move away from the full sized washers.
Because of that, I would think the quoted statement could very true.
...consumers are deciding they don't really need or want tablet PC's. Just a thought.
It hurts when I pee.
Not a chance, they might aswell put beos on it. bit like that zaruas "thing". toys At least there having a go at survival like cyrix have done and reinventing. The problem Transmeta faced is that they are trying to offer better battery life at the expense of performance in a country were the people drive v6 4 litre gas guzzlers and dont really give a stuff about the environment.
Anyone remember the Epson HX-20? Or Tandy 100? Funny how they never became mainstream, as cool as I thought they were at the time...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Several hundred thousand chips a quarter! I don't think that they are going to be able to do that with linux devices.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
As long as they agree to stop pushing Linux. IF not they may just buy transmeta...
...just might be the perfect playground for Transmeta. Enough said, you speculate the rest :)
It looks like Transmeta had no trouble entering asian markets but alot of trouble entering the US market. I wonder if they were "blocked" in the same way that BeOS was "blocked" in entering the OS market.
Does anyone know if/how Intel did/could block them from finding someone to produce and sell their chips?
The tablet form factor is very usefull for people working in a stand-up position: nurses, repair people, etc..
For all the other use, a laptop or a desktop is better.
You can type better(less error) and faster with a keyboard than with writing with a pen, even with the best handwriting recognition software of tomorrow.
The PC industry is desesperately trying to find new ways to sell more PC, so they came up with the tablet PC, but let's not be fooled by the hype..
Some vendors are very clever: they put both a keyboard and a "tactile" screen into their tabletPC so you can have both input mode.
But I think that the early "normal" users after realising that there using 99% of the time the keyboard instead of the pen will think that they are using these tablet PC as some kind of overpriced laptop and will come back to laptop..
OK, perhaps it uses less power than something from AMD or Intel. At first blush, this might be useful for extending battery life in a laptop.
But how much less power for the entire system does this translate to? I'm not an expert on this, but I'll bet that LCD displays use as much or more power than CPUs. In the end, I don't expect that there is much of an impact on battery life, and thus not much of a selling proposition.
Frankly, I've never understood why this company was funded. For that matter, I still don't understand most of the dot coms, including Amazon and Yahoo. I guess I'm just old and cranky.
What exactly is the appeal of a tablet PC? What tasks are they better suited for than a laptop or PDA? Does someone know? This seems like a classic example of cart before the horse innovation. These may be cool gadgets, but if they don't solve a problem better than existing solutions, they will never take off.
This space intentionally left blank.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Transmeta community when IDC confirmed that Transmeta market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Transmeta has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Transmeta is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Tom's Hardware comprehensive CPU test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Transmeta's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Transmeta faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Transmeta because Transmeta is dying. Things are looking very bad for Transmeta. As many of us are already aware, Transmeta continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Crusoe is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Crusoe managers David Ditzel and Matthew Perry only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Crusoe is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Sony leader Hiroshi states that there are 7000 users of VAIO PictureBook. How many users of Thinkpad are there? Let's see. The number of VAIO versus Thinkpad posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Thinkpad users. Tablet PC posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Thinkpad posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Tablet PCs. A recent article put CASIO at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 CASIO users. This is consistent with the number of CASIO Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of IBM, abysmal sales and so on, the Crusoe Thinkpad went out of business and was taken over by Fujitsu who sell another troubled maker. Now Fujitsu is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Transmeta has steadily declined in market share. Transmeta is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Transmeta is to survive at all it will be among hardware dilettante dabblers. Transmeta continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Transmeta is dead.
Fact: Transmeta is dying.
Transmeta's code morphing technology is interesting; they said they could mimic x86 chips as well as other kinds yet they only went with x86, which has a huge market, but by doing so they put themselves in the crosshairs of Intel, a company much larger than them. I was hoping they would this technology to for PPC or MIPS, but alas, no.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
....maybe it's not in the cards?
The posts in the thread already mention that the Carusoe is a niche chip- from what I've seen, it's gone horrifically under-utilized: a chip that could hypothetically be a power pc, mips, sparc, etceteras is nothing other than a super-low power x86?
A tablet PC might be fine for some people- If the input is pressure sensitive, it would be great for the graphics field- but these really don't seem to be much more than big PDAs or totally integrated, one-piece laptops.
What, exactly, is a tablet good for that a PDA or laptop *isn't* ? I need quick access to photoshop and apache practically everywhere I go (freelance web designer with a powerbook)- a PDA is useless for me, and the tablets I've seen don't run my OS of choice or seem to do anything I might need.
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
If people don't need a thing, or can't find a use for it, then the only people that are going to buy the device are gadget hounds- which, in all honesty, don't seem like enough of a market segment to keep a niche industry like this afloat.
Intel can afford to sell chips less expensively than it normally would in order to gain a foothold in a given market--and it has proven its willingness to engage in price wars.
...
This is the crux of the article, predatory pricing: airline seats, xboxs, OSs, etc. Sell the low-margin product at a loss to sell 5 high-grossing products for an AVERAGE price greater than your competitor. Even if the tablet PCs are a hit, they'll get squeezed when Intel wants that market share. So one foot in the grave at this point
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Some people seems to miss the point. Transmeta doesn't need Microsoft for it's OS or software, but for it's marketing powers. Microsoft and Bill Gates are in the process of creating a new buzzword; tablet-pc.
Transmeta is a relatively small, backbone company and cannot market its products properly this is why they need Microsoft, not because of their <flame>marvellous</flame> operating system. As a slightly on-topic sidenote it seems that though Microsoft used to be about making programs they've shifted towards being about marketing and should anyone ever put them out of the software business I guess they could start making commercials.
Look a monkey!
not attempting to be narrow-minded, but why would i want to write, when i can type? my writing is horrible and i type much faster, so while i appreciate the techie part of making a tablet work, i don't see the value.
i could see the value of something like the current ibook, that folded all the way around and looked like a tablet, and enabled with touch sensitivity.
for me, that would be a better solution.
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
I totally agree that this would be good for the market share. However, I don't want to lie to people about my software, so I don't. Microsoft marketing is very successful in that it makes people buy the software, but it's ethically very wrong.
From the very beginning Transmeta did not have a clear market strategy. They grabbed some attention at the time, mostly because of their hidden development and braveness to face Intel. Linus was another marketing trick (quite successful). But to survive in the market a clear business strategy is a must, not just a "nice to have". They tried to use (and open?) a new market niche - the low-power mobile devices, that was not existing. The chance was little and it mostly did not succeed. The company is however popular in Japan, which had always had a market for ultra-little things. So things fall now in place - it is very hard to use a new market segment, where there is none. (Anyone Iridium phones?) The Japan-s are known to value the small things and are ready to pay real cash for the same functionality, just smaller. It is in their culture, so Transmeta was just doomed to succeed there.
Nuff said, mod me now
Tablet PCs are yet another ill-conceived product that Microsoft's "innovation" is foisting on the marketplace. Anyone who has ever owned or used a PDA will tell you that they are wonderful but for the lack of a keyboard. Some PDAs are even reverting to keyboards: see Zaurus and some Handspring and Palm models.
Tablet PCs are giant PDAs...or standard notebooks with a touchscreen but no attached keyboard. Either way, they are in a perfect middle ground of maximal uselessness. Yes, many will have a wireless keyboard that can be used, but what's the point? Get a notebook.
Transmeta is selling to the OEM's in the consumer electronics market which has essentially stalled and is showing no signs of recoverying anytime soon.
Transmeta has been relegated to this dwindling, competative market, because they were booted from the more competative dwindling server blade market.
I hope the technology lives on, and a deep pocket buyer can be found that's willing to ride out this economy, but my forcast is that Transmeta folds and there's a fire sale by 3rd quarter next year.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."
I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.
I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.
To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.
Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."
Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
microsoft needs transmeta. because transmeta has the ONLY good low-power, customizable processer/chip set. i am a little biased, because i'm typing this on my nearly new fujitsu lifebook 2000 that i love...:) a.p.
and I demand that it be called "GNU/Microsoft"
Hey, wait...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
No it's not. Look at this comparison
And consider that Intel and AMD can't produce a chip that will stay as cool at the same clock rate. They have at least 4 times the transistor count. You will never see an Oqo style PC with AMD or Intel. Because at top speed you can't switch of your transistors or lower your voltage, if you want to keep up performance.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
We Americans (when exactly did the residents of Canada, Central America, and South America yield that moniker to the residents of the United States? I must have missed it) consume so much of the world's resources and gleefully create such a disproportionate amount of waste that the people whose nations are now our toilets are more than willing to fly airplanes into us.
SUVs exist solely to circumvent fuel emissions legislation. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was a fraction of the size everywhere else in the world as it was in the U.S. -- United States consumers didn't like the small one, so Nintendo threw it into a big gray box, and it sold like gangbusters. And, while we're talking about silicon(e), How many tit jobs do you see while walking the streets of Paris? Milan? Tokyo? Lisbon?
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- Transmeta. I have no clue why Transmeta's stuff didn't really fly in the states. Someone should do an expensive study.
Put the gun down! I was only kidding!
... collecting dust in my SeveranceBox(tm) :p
- Not making a small, widely available motherboard that hobbiests and integrators could just go out and buy. VIA came out with this and there's a whole small scene (mini-itx.com, et al) playing with it. This market could have been Transmetas, but they only recently put out a motherboard for developers that costs ~$600.
.13u production issues. This cost them *a lot* of momentum.
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their
Problem is, when Microsoft takes an interest in what you do and decides to try it themselves, or just as bad, determines they don't need you anymore and dumps your product for another vendor's.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
'Nuff said 'bout that.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
One of the reasons im so unsatisfied with the tablet pc is that it uses a moving,mechanical,hardrive.
. html
With a delicate HD in it, the tablet pc really does not deliver much value over a laptop.
Unfortunately, palms are far too low powered (in many aspects), and have far too small screens to be usefull.
Still, given the type of day to day lifestyle I lead, I'd currently choose a well configured asian (since they really have better palmlike devices over there) see http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077
since its soemthing that I can cary around without treating it like a fragile baby.
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
My attraction is I can and do use it when I'm on trhe road and at a hotel bar for example or just on the can. Its the size that sold me, I expected a big differnce from the IBM T series ( which I use for "real" work. But the sony picture book fits in my hand.
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yeah, but who the hell wants a tablet PC with a 2 hour battery life? Crusoes kick ass for power consumption and heat output, which makes it last longer and weigh less. If I wanted a full-speed, full-feature portable computer, I'd get a laptop. Tablets aren't meant to be that (yet).
If I wasn't having trouble accessing the site, I'd give you some hard numbers, but I'm quite sure that the last time I checked a Crusoe was roughly the same price as desktop Celerons or Durons. I do recall from THG that portable P4 2.2 Gigs go for over $500 when bought in bulk.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Well, I have Lifebooks owner that are very disapointed by the performance of their processor. They say that 800 Mhz sounds more like 233 on real system. Clockspeed is reducing to save energy...
Amen!
While I can understand the usefulness of a tablet in certain specific applications (like retail), I just fail to see how great or useful it is for most people.
I grew up keying--I literally think into a keyboard. On the other hand, my handwriting is not only illegible, but ridiculously slower than my typing.
I love PDAs, and I love new gadgets, to get any serious work done, it's gotta have a keyboard!
Transmeta: Microsoft, I need you. I'm sooo sorry. Please I won't try and hurt you again.
Microsoft: I don't know if it can work anymore. These are tuff times baby.
Transmeta: Please, oh Please!
Microsoft: You still with Linux?
Transmeta: Ohh noo I was just using Linux to my advantage, I really love you.
Microsoft: Well, ok. We'll try and make it work.
I'm writing to share a tragic little story.
My compnay has a processor that my friends and I are trying to market. One night, I was tallying up sales on it, when all of a sudden I went berserk, we were losing money, money, money. All of it. And it was a good design! I had...........
My name is Linus Torvald, and I made a deal with the devil.
The number of humans that can outcode GCC is vanishingly small, and even smaller when you have to do keep track of all sorts of parallel dependencies and such. If I had to guess, I would say their problem is that they don't have the necessary capital to do the software development they would need to make this idea really fly. This seems like more of a research project than a business plan, maybe if they enlisted more support from the community by openning things up GPL style, it might have a chance.
If you are going to make chips, you should concentrate your investment on designing and making the chips, not the software. I'm sure they could do another design cycle in more modern fab technology and get much more speed (or lower power if that is the priority).
Also, my impression is that they aren't sharing a lot of board level IP either. There are lots of applications that are getting StrongArm and other low power processors that would be an ideal market for them, but these are all small companies without a lot of bucks to risk with new designs. OTOH, if you give them a basic design that uses your chips, and sell cheap prototyping parts and support gear, your going to get a lot more inquiries. Would this be enough to turn it around for them? I don't know, but would you bet your company on Billy G. deciding to endorse tablets? Even if they are successful, the danger is that Intel can swoop in and steal the market. You're much better off staying small and concentrating on the emerging niches. Specifically, the embedded market where Linux is already a good fit and doing well.
Too bad, though, it was a good idea, but the timing was bad. They still have some investment money that hasn't been spent, but it would be difficult to change direction now.
You should be able to set limits for longrun to determine at what levels the CPU is supposed to operate. There is a tool for Linux. Don't know about Windows.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
"Significant performance lag" is relative. If you want to game on your tablet, then yeah, it's not the best. If you're like most people, it's just a supercharged PDA with wireless net access and a really big screen. Given that that's the most likely target demographic, extra long battery life and lighter weight are well worth a performance lag that most users won't notice.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I had a conversation with a friend today (yes, I have friends, and some of them are real) about Microsoft, tablet PCs, MSN 8 (with it's low-profit DSL) and Vivato's new phase-array antenna for 802.11b.
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they installed these antennas in large cities, offering MSN 8 and their tablet PC. They could leapfrog many of the broadband provider without having to aquire the "last mile".
Offer the tablet PC with Windows XP, bundling it with MSN 8, and then selling Office XP to all those people.
After all, if the tablet PC thing takes off, it's a new market that Microsoft has to dominate or their whole house of cards falls down.
There will be no point in buying Vivato during the IPO - the shares will go sky high, but what about buying stock in a company down the line, like Microsoft? That's a deal with the devil.
And to make this somewhat on-topic, it could be good for Transmeta if Tablet PCs take off.
1. benefiting from Microsoft isn't actually a bad issue. After all, if it wasn't for M$ we wouldn't have such cheap PCs, nor Linux installed on them. This may seem a weak point, but I think that it could help to simplify the issue. The real point, now, is that Microsoft is in such a position that they can force Transmeta not to support Linux on their CPU.
2. Maybe Transmeta should have waited few more years, and jump out with a brand new processor when all other Bigs would be "forced" to build Palladium- CPUs.
Just few thoughts.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
My wife did a course on Unix at UC-Berkeley. AOL, PC, MS Office were required for that course. This is the success story of AOL-Intel-MS which managed to sell themselves to a Unix student at UCB. Transmeta is just not big enough to sell themselves in a crowded market all by itself. Linux will not help them. They will need Microsoft support (who else can help them in x86 market). Most likely, even MS will not help them. They will exploit Transmeta to force Intel and AMD to come up with low-cost technology for tablet-pc that they won't to push through consumer's throat.
my handwriting is horrible, and typing is very good. yet I would like the ability to quickly alternate between typing and sketching something, like some drawings with annotations. may be something like tablet PC with attached keyboard and the ability to quickly alternate between either mode.
I dug up an interesting and related story about transmeta, that actually has quite a bit to do with the idea of the tablet PC being a niche market. You can read it on yahoo. Basically the cheap 2-cent summary is that they are looking to market the tablet PC to the third world, seeing as there is a high level of illiterate people there, and the tablet PC lends itself to a more visual and pictoral display since there is no keyboard by default. Similar to India's plan on the new pocket PC which will use a lot of pictures and voice to contribute ideas.
I think this is a nice wake up call for all the American's who take the ability to read for granted. A lot of people can't, why not bring them some tools that don't require literacy?
Do you not remember how is the owner of transmeta.?
That is the funny thing at all.....
OverLord
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
Actually, there are a number of markets where ideally a tablet PC would be perfect for. Markets like medicine, the remote sensing industry, or even the university student market. However, I have yet to see a tablet that actually works. I could go on for some time, but a small assortment of complaints include: There is not enough resistance in the way the pen moves over the surface, tablet PC's I have worked with to date do not include pressure sensitivity, and the rendering engine leaves much to be desired along with the navigability of the user interface and the connectivity technology also has not been up to snuff.
Now, all that said, the technology exists to remedy all of these faults. I personally would like to see Apple create a tablet with a cut down version of OS X with it's Quartz/.pdf rendering engine, Bluetooth, and 802.11. Apple is probably the only company around that can actually show folks how to make the tablet concept work and actually did point the way to the current tablets with the Newton some years ago.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
That being said, the idea that the "tablet revolution" is long overdue is complete BS. I haven't seen so much hype in at least five years when by now we were all suppose to be using thin client java terminals, and all content would use "push technology." Tablets are going to be great for specialized industrial applications but they are not going to replace laptops. People who think otherwise are the same people who think the Segway will be replacing the bicycle in five years.
I just voted on one... maybe they can off-load all their tablets to the states for voting purposes (or porpuses)
I'd say if it was overdue then there is actually a need/desire for tablet PC's ??? I can't say as I've ever encountered it or someone who could point out a burning need that could not easily be fulfilled with the existing technology, ie a laptop or pda. It is the same problem that the PC market is seeing, why upgrade ?? beyond a couple of games, a 600 Mhz cpu does everything just fine. Until the new 'killer app' arrives and needs massive cpu power things are not going anywhere fast. CPU's far outpace the rest of the architecture now. While the geek factor might drive some sales, it certainly isn't going to make the industry retool at enormousn cost for VERY LIMITED BENEFIT.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
There won't be any tablet PC with a P4. The fastest Intel tablets will have a PIII 800 MHz which is speed stepped down during battery use. Here is a comparison of tablet PCs. The Compaq/HP tablet is by far my favorit.Unfortunately they removed the specs.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
I handled a Transmeta-powered HP tablet running XP. 'My Computer' properties showed it was a 700 MHz Transmeta with some odd amount of RAM, like 236 MB or something really strange. (I guess it had some odd amount shared for video.) Overall, it seemed rather pokey, like w2k on a 233 with 128 MB. Basic boxes, like My Computer's properties or Display Properties took a few seconds to show up, as opposed to <1 second on my w2k/PIII-733 I have sitting here next to me. However, it had enough juice to play an AVI back full-screen without dropping frames, which is all I really care about from any device. :-) Plus, it was really, really cool, and the handwriting recognition was a good system and accurate. I can't wait for them to come out and drop about 2/3 of the price--I was told the one I handled would be about $2000+ when it hit the market. Thank God for St. Moore and his fabulous law.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Plus front loading washers take longer to finish the cycle.
And actually, the models we have in my apartment building use more power but less water.
As for "kitchen supplies that will last forever", some of us don't want to become too attached to our posessions. If I lose my cheap dishes to a move or a fire, or if I want to get rid of it all and travel, or if somebody goes nuts at a party, no big deal.
That's not to say I'm using plastic cutlery though. I'm conscious of the amount of waste buying replaceable things generates.
Hands in my pocket
cmon. those are only 3d game benchmarks. was the crusoe built for gaming? hardly..
It seems to me that if people that it might be over due because it's not due at all. Perhaps no one really wants or needs them right now if ever? Market dictates certain things such as these, and if the market dictates no such want or need, then companies based on these ideas that are not wanted or needed will either adapt or fail.
Derek Greene
The LCD is the key here.
When cheap 1024x768 LCDs are around, the Tablet PCs will become mainstream. Right now, they're hard to find, and too expensive.
PDAs are nice, but you can't use them for serious e-mail, and forget about web browsing on a 320x200 screen.
Laptops are nice, but they are not mobile. Every time I take the plane, bus or train, the battery dies on me. And in a Taxi, it's too combersome to get the laptop from your backpack, boot, use it, then shutdown and repack.
Right now, I carry my cell phone, PDA, and Laptop, and it pisses me off.
Give me a decent TabletPC under $1000 with 128 megs or Ram, hard drive, PCMCIA, and that I can run my OS of choice, and I shell out my credit card immediately.
... hate to see them fail. They have some *really* interesting stuff...
;)
MS or not
--iie1195
Transmeta is being led by Chandler Bing?!?
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And efficient low voltage CPU means nothing if you monitor and HD eat a high share of your batteries. The agregate "power saving" of using a crusoe instead of a low die underclocked pentium is negligible.
If any other company could deliver a really low power display, and a really low power bus/memory then things would be completely different.
If a miracle happens and very low power displays and storage is achived, transmeta could make a real difference. The bad thing is that in this case, probably a low power pentium could also deliver what the consumer wants (ie: if you can have your tablet on for 2 days with pantium and 4 with a crusoe, both good be prety usefull. Who needs the 2 extra days).
They are doomed, they should focus on teaming with whoever is trying to lower power consumption of the other devices, and focus on the flexibility of the crusoe in the meantime.
unfinished: (adj.)
--here's a thought, how about the 500$ brand new laptop with an all day battery, instead of a "tablet". Much better idea, IMO. It would sell like a 500$ brand new laptop! Most people aren't doing weather modeling, you really don't need all the horsepower of most new chips except for games and extreme industry niches, and those folks would always get the most expensive top of the line anyway, what we need is the opposite economic strata "just works" laptop, consumer entry level, and not at 1000$, either.
Transmeta indeed needs a sub-notebook market, but how is it related to Microsoft, the company that doesn't make PCs, and consistently makes OS suitable exclusively for desktops? Whoever will make hardware for Microsoft will either make it a desktop/laptop PC (=> Intel or AMD), and make something for "average Joe", or make a "palmtop" with Windows CE (=> ARM or MIPS) and make a toy for an overpaid executive. "Tablets" made for Microsoft will be just small but overpowered laptops, therefore Intel.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Someone pointed out that Intel or AMD could underclock one of their chips and beat Transmeta's offerings to dead. Well, why go that far? A simple 600MHz IBM PowerPC 750CX processor delivers as much battery time while being a far more powerful processor. Today. Granted, it won't run Windows but, hey, it would be able to power a TabletMac (Unix on a table, what a concept), say, something like a Powerbook Duo with 10.3. What the heck, I bet an iBook running Virtual PC with a good amount of RAM would beat the pants out of a Transmeta.
The truth here is that, unfortunately (?) Transmeta chips have _not_ delivered on their promise. Lots of hot air, but no goods delivered.
Mr. Torvalds would be better getting a job at IBM, Sun or, heh, even Apple.
is the interface. Face it. A pen is not the easiest interface to a computer. Adding a keyboard takes up too much room, and using a virtual on-screen keyboard uses up too much desktop space.
Until there is an effective, easy to use interface, tablet PC's will never be more than niche items. I've seen them put to good use in warehouses, and retail stores, but Symbol is already a giant when it comes to those markets.
Except for a few limited fields, tablet PC's are really not ideal. They are well suited to any field where you need some portability, and expect to be doing more data viewing than entry. The field that is most obviously well suited to this is the medical field. There you have X-rays, tests, etc, that can all be loaded from a central server and you only need to make small annotations. You need some portability, but not much.
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
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Americans are very much interested in ultrathin tiny pcs.. if they are either a) cheap or b) really fast.
The problem is, they tend to be a fair bit more expensive than the average normal notebook, and not as fast or feature rich, and not all that much smaller.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Why do americans have this dream that the rest of the world is just like them ? most countries in the third world would be happy withy having enough food to feed theior populations and basic health care and literacy let alone handheld PC's
And what government funding ? if a government cannot get money to paty for health, education and even food hows it going to fund $2000 PC's ? most of these countries have virtually no ele electrical infrastructure or telecoms systems at all.
This computers for the third world bull is getting tired - if people want to help these countries may i suggest joining a volunteer group and actually going there - you might find that access to a computer is about the last thing on peoples minds in countries like this.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Ok, lets assume Transmeta goes down. Where would Linus land? I heard he is a millionnaire, so he actually does not need to work. But if such is not the case, where would you see him go?
For a big corporation? IBM? Sun? A small one? RedHat? Lets start the rumors.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tablets will only be successful in vertical markets. Sure, they may sell some at first because of the GeeWhiz factor, but writing on the screen is simply less efficient than typing. If Transmeta and/or Microsoft is/are pinning their futures on tablets, then a rough future it/they will have.
The IEEE Spectrum carried an article that provided more detailed information on Microsoft's Tablet PC specification. It also addressed some other form factors that were being independently advanced.
... like a hole in the head.
Transmeta, if you can hear me, don't do it!
Signing a deal with an illegal monopoly will *not* help your business.
Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that everything they do is in answer to the question, "how will this benefit our stranglehold on technology?".
They will swallow you up without a second thought and then mysterously release the "MS Tablet" a year or so down the track.
Oh dear, there goes my karma.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I can't see any reason why the average customer will be wooed by tablet PC's.
"So I can take this thing anywhere? And write on it? And then accidently drop it in the toliet?"
Unless they come in somehow way under the price of your cheap desktop or at around the same price. I don't see anyone but tablet loving geeks adopt these.
(Special applications not withstanding: Hospitals, Lawyers, some businesses might find them useful. Then again they got PocketPC's for that.)
-- taking over the world, we are.
Does Transmeta plan to have DRM in their chips? If not, they could be a good alternative for regular desktops... Hopefully they'll make a nice DRM-less 32/64-bit x86-compatible CPU for us to use in the future.
Luke-Jr
The reason Transmeta failed in the laptop market is the reason they will fail again in the tablet market. For the average user, CPU is not the major power consumer. The screen and HDD are... unless researchers come up with better battery technologies (fuel cells?) and power conserving screen (with same brightness), Transmeta will be doomed.
They need a product that is going to sell hundreds of thousands of units, or even millions of units to make production worthwhile. There's no Linux based product that's even remotely close to that.
Welcome to No Linux Based Product Dot Com.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think Transmeta probably would have succeeded a bit better if they had been able to produce a version of Crusoe that had the equivalent performance of the Tualatin-core Intel Celeron CPU running at 1,200 MHz. This level of performance plus the naturally-low power consumption of the Crusoe CPU would have made it possible for laptops running even Windows XP Professional that are fast enough for laptop users. Of course, such a CPU would be perfect for the Tablet CPU, too.
But in reality, Transmeta really could not compete against the technological might of Intel. Remember, Intel not long after the Crusoe CPU was announced rapidly developed low-powered versions of the Celeron and Pentium III CPU's that didn't use that much more power than the Crusoe CPU, which really affected Crusoe sales.
It works just fine here on my ProGear from SonicBlue. I'll be rebulding the OS and window manager sometime soon so that I have more applications.
We doan need no steenkin' Microsoft.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Living in a portable, and unplugged environment day in day out -- it perplexes me how something that can go 10+ hours unplugged is not rolling in more money than one can imagine. By far our biggest issue is battery life. All of our devices are currentlly hardened -- can withstand a drop from a car onto concrete, withstand temps of -30 and +120, etc... etc.. etc.. and guess what I talk to the vendors and tech reps from all of these companies and guess what -- they have hardly even heard of the crusoe, let alone are they investigating anything that does not start with I and end in TEL....talk about thinking outside the box. Why do so many (seemingly) killer products end up never breaking through?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Hey there lovely lady, what's your name?
Transmeta.
I'm Bill.
And thus another tragic sad story ensues.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Handwriting recognition has been one of the big things holding tablets back. I've played with the TabletPCs a bit, and I think MS may have just got that problem solved, though... still, while they have the details right, they're still missing something in the form department. It should look more like a PocketPC than WinXP, IMHO.
I'm still waiting to see an OQO PC.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Apple has the eye candy, but they don't have the basic research into voice, handwriting recognition and other UI topics that others (such as Microsoft) have spent millions on over the years.
Excuse me?!!? Is this a troll? Well, I guess I will bite. Despite Microsofts spending over the years, they STILL have not come to where Apple has been for years. I submit that I used voice recognition back in MacOS 8.1 including the ability for scripting of voice recognition. As far as handwriting recognition, I have a Newton 120 that had much better handwriting recognition than the latest Microsoft Tablet PC prototype that I played with two weeks ago. And I got the Newton 120 back in 1994!
You appear to be buying into Microsoft's marketing dis-information by allowing them to lead you to believe that all the money they spend on R&D makes them true innovators. Did you know that marketing $$'s come out of the Microsoft R&D budget?
Like it or not, if you look at innovation in the personal computing market, Apple has introduced most of the real advances. True they did not invent everything, but they were the first computer company with the balls to integrate many of these technologies. Lets go back to the CD-ROM. Apple was the first computer company to install CD-ROM drives in PC's and paid the price by getting sued by Apple records for their trouble. Do you remember installing big programs like Office before the CD? How about plug and play computing? You only have to look at the NUBUS protocol that eliminated all of the futzing about with DIP switches and such to get say a video card to work in your computer. How about Firewire? USB? The GUI? Drag and Drop software installation? Built in networking? Built in color for the video? Multiple monitor support? I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea.
As a microsoft shareholder, I am not happy with the way they are doing their accounting and I believe that they are using a large amount of R&D expenditures as tax write offs rather than performing real R&D. Furthermore, this is a company with $40 billion in the bank and they STILL have yet to pay a dividend.
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What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.
Actually, I'm aware of the whole swiveling LCD trick of Tablet PCs. It's quite spiffy, but I still don't buy the idea that people are going to want to shell out the extra bucks for it. In particular, the writing tablet might be good for taking notes. But I still don't think people will see note-taking ability as a reason to buy an entirely new piece of hardware.
The Franklin Planner crowd will love it, but most people are simply not interested in being that organized, particularly when you know even the most sophisticated handwriting recognition software Microsoft can come up with will leave you with some misspelled and unreadable words in your notes.
Seriously. Look at the people you live and work with and tell me that they'd all love to fork out several hundred bucks for a machine that would let them do some of what their laptop does, with the *oh goody!* added bonus of being able to take notes. It won't fly.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Plaintalk and the Newton. End of story.
:)
I could give my iMac voice commands in 1998, and the software had existed for several OS revisions prior to that. Shipped default install, no less.
The Newton... is another subject entirely. Light years ahead of its time, with handwriting recognition that still spanks the Palm resoundly- I much prefer writing in my own hand instead of learning Grafitti, thank you.
Do some research, you'll get body-checked less often.
It's horrid to see what could easily be the swiss army knife of multi-platform software development be used in something that's buzzword compliant.
:(
So much for thinking outside the box, eh? Hell, I'd LOVE a rack of these on a PCI board to accellerate photoshop, After Effects, etceteras.... the company that made the board would could have it be ppc on the mac and x86 on the PC.
I could *use* Transmeta chips.... but I have no use for a tablet PC or a PC laptop.
....USB is an intel spec. :)
However, you're spot on with your point that while Apple doesn't invent a lot of this stuff (Firewire, yes. But the rest? Well, poke around...)- but they ARE the first to actually weild it and get people into it. If it hadn't been for the iMac, USB would still be a niche technology.
Apple has the power to totally push the technology- through virtue of being able to move faster than the rest of the market, due to their smaller size and much more satisfied consumer base. (I have eleven Macs at home....).
most countries consider defence to be important - sure it might not seem it to us but still there is an argument. Oh and most third world countries are not dictatorships.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Rasterman is probably one of the better examples of a skilled to-the-metal coder you're going to find. If gcc is generating comparable code, I'm into that.
gcc is supposed to be really good these days. I still think that it has *awful* C++ *compilation times*, but in terms of generated code...MSVC used to beat the crap out of it, but today I think it may generates some of the best, if not the best (and this includes icc), code of any compiler you can get your hands on for the x86. Not sure how good the SPARC/PPC/etc backends are -- I hear much more complaining about them.
I haven't seen any ultra recent benchmarks (if anyone's up to doing some benchmarks, please post 'em to Slashdot).
I think gcc is probably about as fast as you can push a C compiler -- to run any faster, we need more restricted languages to give the optimizer more guarantees about what's going on.
May we never see th
The problem is that existing apps aren't really done up for them.
But there is potential.
* e-books (the obvious, really big market).
* web browsing (maybe, *just maybe*, tablets will help move us back to a saner age without all this Flash and Javascript crap)
* some games, like board-style with the system sitting between the players. I remember handing a PDA back and forth to play chess -- something like this
May we never see th
MS needs a market for XP embedded/CE.
May we never see th
I may end up having to eat my words if the Tablet PC takes off in the next two or three years. You'll of course be able to track me down and tell me you told me so. :-) Of course, since you're an Anonymous Coward, I can't do the same if they fail. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I wonder. Would Transmeta fire Linus in order to please Microsoft.
I mean could Microsoft say "We'll buy your CPU, but only if you dump the Linux guy". Of cause they could say that, but would Transmeta do it ? Or would Linus leave the company to help it ?
I normally refrain from replying to anonymous cowards, but here goes:
Ya but compared to other third party systems on Windows or even OS2 the bundled Mac app was piss poor.
Well, it seemed to work pretty well as I could navigate quite nicely without having to touch the keyboard. And as for third party products, Ya, but where were they when MacOS 8.1 was out? Did you see Microsoft integrating any of that technology at the time? Hell no, Win95 was just coming out.
As for handwriting recognition true the Newton was and still quite possibly is the best natural writting recognition system yet things like Palm's Grafitti system have become dominant.
For reasons entirely independant of the handwriting recognition technology. So what is your point here?
Remeber if over 80% of the masses don't use or see your tech, they won't care.
Ahhhh, but I maintain they DO see the technology because Microsoft and other Wintel manufacturers copy it. (Often badly at that)
(although the switch campaign was pretty poor)
That is an opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.....
Finally if you really are concerned as as you seem about acconting at MS why not place your money into Apple?
You assume a lot. Who says it is not?
I rest my case.
And What case is that? I see no facts here.
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The problem with the Tablet PC is two-fold:
/. is a lot closer to what I think people are going to ultimately want to use. Higher resolution screen, horizontal 4:3 aspect ratio, a usable keyboard and a swivel design so you can switch back and forth from tablet/pda mode to subnotebook. (They are also going to need a wee bit more speed than SA1100 so that video will play better.)
a) the pricepoint for these things is outrageous. We're talking about laptop pricing here. As long as that's the case, "joe sixpack" will never buy one of these things to kick around the house as a home web appliance sort of thing. I know I would not waste $1000+ on a tabletPC. I'd rather get a used laptop with the keyboard and all the trimmings.
b) since it runs full blown windows, it needs more resources than PDAs. It can't get by with just Flash memory. So getting decent battery life and keeping it light is a big challenge.
I think the next "big thing" in the evolution of the PC is the rise of the budget (commodity) subnotebook. Something with most of the power of laptops, but a fraction of the price. You could think of it like a PDA on steroids. Something like this is unlikely to be running windows for the reasons I stated. It's going to take advantage of larger capacity flash memory and new display technologies (maybe eventually OLED/OLEP) and built-in wireless connectivity.
The problem in the PDA field is that PDA screens are too damn small and the vertical orientation makes reading webpages a chore. It's okay for calendars and other simple apps that PDAs were invented for, but it SUCKS for the kinds of things people now want to use them for. There is too much bad ergonomics in the traditional PDA design that just doesn't want to go away.
I think the new Zaurus design that was posted on
The trick is to be able to sell something like that for under $500. It's great that Palm can offer PDAs for $99 and all, but Moore's law has to catch up to the point where you can get notebook performance from PDA hardware (hence PDA pricepoints). Desktop PC prices have tumbled, and it's time to see this happen in the notebook/PDA space.
As long as the hardware manufacturers keep chasing the "Enterprise" markets and nothing else, these devices will never penetrate the mainstream.
Blogs... Instant messaging... Have you seen how much of on-line interaction these days circles around things that require substantial text input to use. Sure, I might occasionally just go out and surf, but is anybody really willing to go and blow another $1000 on computer equipment to do that?
The funny thing is that the people who are most likely to be willing to blow $1000 on a whiz bang gadget are the ones least likely to find a tablet PC useful. Tech savvy consumers, are the ones who are more likely to be blogging and IM'ing people which would be a pain in the butt to do with a tablet PC.
Furthermore, if I want to surf while sitting on the couch, a laptop is an excellent form factor frankly. I tried using a tablet (yes, I have one) on the couch and it's a pain because I have to prop it up somehow so that I can read it. This means sitting at strange angles and I can't shift around very much. On the other hand, a laptop, I just plop it on my lap, flip up the screen and I can sit anyway I want.
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So exactly why would Microsoft not support Transmeta?
Amd and Intel may well have a slight lead in some manufacturing processes, but transmeta are using .13 micron for their chips and there is no way that you could get an Athlon or Celeron using 0.4-1.3 watts.
Can you think of anything people would want to do with a laptop that needs more than a 500Mhz pentium?
Most people don't play quake on a laptop, serious users of Maya tend to use Linux clusters I believe - not laptops, and 500Mhz is perfectly good for playing DVDs.
What I want from a laptop is:
enough speed to run enlightenment comfortably - 350mhz PII copes ok
128Mb + RAM
a big screen with decent resolution to get two e-terms next to each other
enough battery life to last all day
a usable internet connection.
the The Fujitsu® LifeBook(TM) P Series
has 933Mhz processor - fast enough for dvd/any other non-gaming/rendering use, has a 1280 wide screen more than big enough for two terminals next to each other, 128Mb ram, and over 10 hrs battery life (with the dual battery option).
-only thing lacking is the internet connection, but no-one does broadband acess more than a few hundred metres from a base station, so I'd have to make do with a mobile, yes I have surfed at 9600 and a terminal is certainly usable at that speed, and no I'm not setting up my own satellite link, that isn't portable yet (mobile but not portable).
Give me one example of an AMD/Intel powered product that 'spanks' this laptop and a rational explanation of the selection criteria. (excluding games and running a portable server).
This surely does all that is normally wanted from a laptop and far more without turning its users into stircrazed power junkies madly searching for their next AC fix.
All Transmeta need is more publicity and to find a supplier that stops spreading the myth tha Mhz is everything, (unfortunately the PC resale industry is built on this myth, to get people to upgrade). - it would also be nice to find somewhere to buy one without windows preinstalled.
Over the years there have been tablet computers anf they never dod go over well. The last one I looked at was the AST product of a number of years ago. This is an old idea that is always on the verge of being the next big thing.
Sort of like diskless workstations in the early 80s. Then we had X Terminals (diskless workstations revisited) in the late 80s. In the 90s it was the web station 9or what ever they called the last version of the diskless workstation).
Now, I like tablets but I get the distinct impression that, like diskless workstations of whatever technology is hot, they actually have a limited but real audience. you willnotice that even though there is the potential to replace desktop machines with some crunchy laptops this just does not happen en mass.
I begin to suspect that this is another revolution that will rise again and again with a whimper.
td