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Bricklin on Tablet PCs
t482 writes "Dan Bricklin gives his first impressions of the Tablet PC.
'The most important thing to know about the Tablet PC, as far as I'm concerned so far, is that Microsoft did a great job...of naming it.' and then goes on to give a fascinating history of pen computing."
Where exactly is the market demand for these?
The problem with tablet PCs right now is the battery life. The whole advantage of a tablet PC is it lets you use it on the go, but if you have to plug in every two hours to recharge the batteries, that defeats the purpose.
I think there are some applications for tablet PCs now, hospitals, etc., but in order for them to reach mainstream-acceptance, they need to tackle the power/battery issue.the idea of buying a tablet PC during the now-dead Internet Appliance boom. I finally realised the offerings at the time weren't worth the money. A company, Qubit Incorporated (dead link, given for posterity) based out of Denver, Colorado had some very attractive offerings and made a very large splash at Comdex 2000. It would appear Qubit is now defunct. There seems to be very little actual demand for Tablet PCs, and demant will probably remain very low until they become *very* cheap.
Only Bill Gates, of course. No one can match his uncanny vision and technological sense. He is a mastermind, and respect all of his decisions - especially when it comes to marketing.
I really think the tablet PCs would have to be thin clients to conserve battery life. I also don't think that a M$ OS is the way to go. The bloat in OS would just use up so much memory and processor cycles, that the battery life would suffer. A thin client, with just a web browser(intranet, limited internet) and maybe a few small apps, such as a calculator, or life support monitor, etc etc. This is assuming that a sales person or a medical professional is using the device.
/**You forgot my processor, you insensetive clod!*/, the new processors get HOT. Would you really hold a system like this, if it was reaching 150 degrees F? I wouldn't
Anything goes if someone is watching DVDs and running SETI@Home in the background while downloading the latest Harry Potter. I wouldnt expect the battery to last that long at all. Then again, the same goes for normal protables.
Another factor to consider is heat. If the WinXP OS is running all sorts of junk in the background, the system will heat up considerably. Much like thier desktop brothers, the new pentiums and athlons
But then again, this is nothing new. I think I've seen people with devices like this before. Usually, its all proprietary programs. They seem to work well, since its just a thin client with connections to a server somewhere.
What, me Tweet?
He goes on about how there has been no innovation, and even if this is true, there has certainly been progress. He's comparing Tablet PCs to desktop attachments and PDA-style devices. This is the first time we're seeing this quality of hardware at this kind of price with a world-standard OS. Many of these Tablet PCs can even convert back and forth between laptops. Comparing them to an 8088 unit from decades passed or an LCD graphics tablet is a poor comparison.
If I have five notebooks full of notes, can I pull up an application that will search through them in a minute or two to find a particular fact that you want?
So, if an open source project were to arise that did a better job of writing recognition, it could be a "killer app" that gets more of the mainstream PC users interested in Linux desktops.
Caveat: no, I'm not going to do it. My research area is security, not HCI.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
I'm seeing a lot of questions like "Why would anyone want a tablet when you can just buy a laptop"?
The answer is simple: Because laptops SUCK for working in your lap.
Laptops are the most misnamed device ever. They are portable PCs. Useful, but difficult to use in any position other than in front of you -- like a PC.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Can we please bring the MS bashing to a reasonable level? Someone took a quote from the first paragraph of the review and slapped it into a story. If anyone bothered to read the article, they would see that he didn't have *anything* bad to say about the Microsoft part of the product. Of course, he had some suggestions about how to improve the hardware aspect of the product, but I was unable to find one instance where he critized Microsoft.
Let's be reasonable here. If Microsoft does something stupid or evil, let's post it. But if Microsoft puts out a new product, and the hardware manufacturer does a less-than-spectacular job of implementing it, don't blame Microsoft...
Furthermore, with the release of TabletPC, Microsoft has shown again that they simply can't innovate. Microsoft's TabletPC software is the same old stuff we had 10 years ago, only in a more bloated software incarnation. The only thing that has really gotten better is the hardware and processor speed, as well as the quality of real-time graphics those machines support.
Few if any of those patents should hold up if challenged in court, since most of the techniques had been used for quite some time by researchers before that. This is the usual case of a bunch of upstart startups not knowing what has been happening in academia and patenting like mad (Bricklin is aware of this). But that won't stop those patents from causing great harm: the threat of a lawsuit from Microsoft or Compaq/HP is sufficient to scare away investors from startups and to cause bigger players like Palm, Sony, or Apple to avoid certain features or functionality entirely.
While Compaq/HP holds some important patents, they are in bed with Microsoft. That means that Compaq/HP will willingly license their patents to Microsoft. Microsoft will use their patents to force other companies to adopt their TabletPC even if those other companies would have wanted to develop their own pen software. And for companies like Apple, who will likely develop their own software, Microsoft will use the threat of lawsuits to limit functionality and stifle their creativity: "you can only use our patents if you make this part of your software 'compatible' with ours".
Bricklin is concentrating on application development for PenPoint, and winds up giving short shrift to the OS it's self. It really was an innovative operating system, possibly the most unique one in the last 20 years. (OK, I realize that is a bold claim, and will produce a lot of argument, but bear with me...)
PenPoint was the first commercial OS where the user didn't interface with "applications" and "files". The primary interface element was the page. The user started with a blank page, and if she started writing, it would start translating the handwriting into test, like a word processing application. But if she drew a box, it would start graphing. The user could move through pages with a "flicking" gesture; use proof-reading typographical marks to edit. Very clever.
Microsoft borrowed some of the embedding for OLE, but they didn't actually get it. Or maybe they got it too clearly. They saw that an OS that didn't follow the application-launcher paradigm meant smaller sales for their Applications division.
Anyway, I didn't own one of these, so I may have gotten some details wrong. I just remember being impressed by the ideas behind it and was pained to see Microsoft's sorry-ass "Pen Windows" appear, kill PenPoint, then disappear like a serial killer.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb