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Examining a Tablet PC
Mister Buttons writes "There really haven't been any real technical reviews of the new Tablet PC operating
system from Microsoft yet. Those marketing stories published on CNET and the like
do little more than whet the appetite. Luckily it looks like someone finally took
a close look at the Tablet PC. The folks over at AnandTech have a good tablet PC review up which includes information on both the hardware
and software that the tablet PCs use. Maybe it's time to break open that piggy
bank..."
Scroll down to: Drawing on a Tablet PC
Scroll down to Alias Sketchbook comment
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And that means that there is no reason for people like me (who make up most of the 'blow lots of money on new toy' market) to buy these things.
Well, I am one person (IT guy) at a small-mid size company. I have a small budget to see if it is useful. If it is, then I will be purchasing 45 of them. We have 4 gamers in the company, if all four of them buy one they will come close to my sample budget. I think the math escapes you or you use cheat codes with your statistics.
I understand that the Tablet PC operating system is essentially a modified version of XP.
.NET framework component of the OS Components to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.
I use XP. Just two mintues ago the automatic update application advised me to install two critical updates, one of the being to the Java Virtual Machine. In order to install them I had to click through a EULA that included the following paragraph:
You may not disclose the results of any benchmark test of the
So in other words, in order to install a critical security patch for an operating system that I have paid good money for, I have to agree that I won't publish figures that be show one of Microsoft's other products in a bad light.
I find this stunning. Anyone who thinks that Microsoft has changed because of all the recent legal action needs to think again.
I found the stylus (pen) interface extremely good - the mouse will follow the stylus even if the stylus is not physically touching the screen up to a height of about 1.5 inches. This makes things a lot easier than having to drag the stylus physically across the screen when moving, say, a folder. A single click is acheived by just touching the stylus to the screen for most applications. The stylus on this machine was apparently "active", requiring one AAAA battery - I did not take it apart to verify this, and have no idea how long the battery would last, but it must be a fair while.
The "lazy susan" type keyboard (note: not full docking) station is extremely space efficient, and the key feel is (for me) not too bad for the form factor. The tablet is "smart" enough to know when it has been plugged in to the keyboard base, and rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode automatically. I was sold - it would be a great setup to take on the road, as it would actually be quite usable in an aircraft, on your lap etc.
Apparently there is a full docking station available (with CD/DVD ROM etc), but we did not have access to it. Under most circumstances, given the inbuilt WLAN interface, the keyboard station would be sufficient.
For those wanting to support Transmeta, this device contains the new 1Ghz Crusoe TM5800 processor. Battery life was claimed "up to five hours", realistically about 3.5-4hr max. Not stunning, but quite good considering the form factor. Speed was not lightning fast, but probably acceptable for most tasks you would envisage for this type of device. ZDNet bagged it in this review, but I did not find it as bad as they make out
I hardly used the digital ink features, so cannot comment on them, but others in my section who tried the journal feature seemed to like it.
When I first saw this device, I pretty much blew it off as a "toy" laptop with a detachable screen, but they really are a bit more than that. After using it for a short while I had to revise my initial hasty opinion, and by the end I did not want to give it back. I would use it in place of a "full" laptop without hesitation.
Naturally for a new product the price is a bit steep for what you get, and since as far as I know no Linux geeks have had a chance to check it out, its Linux readiness is unknown - it is a given that Linux probably cannot support the software augmented hardware features such as the digital ink/journal etc - but even if the device supported a standard linux install with X, and the mouse and wireless card worked, these would be a great portable. workstation.
If I can get my hands on one for a bit longer I will try a Linux install, but will need to be carefult to not blow away the OS if possible - it did not look easy to reinstall the base OS, given the lack of inbuilt CDROM device. Comments from anyone who has tried (even at this early stage) to install Linux are welcome.
Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that we just finished tweaking the servers by adding another 3mbps to the image server. The site should be faster now (meaning it will actually load in most cases).
Enjoy the review,
Matthew Witheiler
Senior Hardware Editor
AnandTech.com
There's already a full ruggedized version. The iX104-TPC from Xplore Technologies (iX104 Page) which is built to Military Environmental Test Standards [MIL-STD 810F] so I think it could handle a dock worker. Especially since Xplore already builds for that market and understands what's needed.
Here at the hospital i work at, we've been using remote p.c. appliances for some time. The great advantage here is that (on our spinal cord unit), nursing and physician staff can walk into a patient's room, check the patient's chart, vitals, lab results, medications, imaging, etc... right there in the patient's room. We can also write orders, fill prescriptions (with the help of a bar coder reader attached to the unit) with a much lower error rate. Given the volume of information to which you want and need access, PDA's just don't cut it. And yes, you can put a laptop on a cart and wheel the cart around, but tablets make things much more efficient. I know this is a niche industry, but in medicine, units like this really help productivity and quality of care.
I went to a local CompUSA store with a co-worker who was very interested in buying a tablet PC. He currently lugs his laptop to meetings every day and he wants something a little more horizontal.
There was one tablet on display, but no stylus to operate it. I tried using my PDA stylus to no avail. A salesperson eventually wandered over to help and said he'd have to go get the special pen they keep under lock and key. When he came back after a couple of minutes I asked why they didn't have it on some sort of chain so people could use it, he told me that the pens for the tablet PCs they stock sell for between $150 and $300 each depending upon the brand (they appear to be interchangable as we used a Toshiba pen on a non-Toshiba tablet) and they had already had two grow legs and walk away.
As someone who has lost at least 3 PDA styli in the past few years (yes, I was one of those kind of geeks who bought a Pilot the first week it was released) I know it's just a matter of time before I would lose the tablet's pen, and there is no way in hell I'm going to tie myself to a PC that is useless without a $300 pen that can be lost that easily.
After leaving, I got to wondering if the tablets could be used with the same kind of stylus that a graphics tablet uses, as those can be purchased for far less than $150. I'll need to remember to take my Wacom pen with me next time I go shopping...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Wacom doesn't have a TabletPC, they developed the Pen input for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition (hardware and software).
I used to work at a computing cluster & cybercafe, which operated under the paradigm of collaborative computing. We had all the fun toys there, like tablet PCs, palmtops, high end 3D graphic stations, and everything in between. The lesson I learned about computers while working there is this: Due to the personal computer revolution, people typically conceptualize and use computers as one of two things: glorified typewriters or interactive televisions, depending upon their funtional goals. Both of these functional goals are rather sedintary in their usage.
Tablet PCs are a major stepping stone in regards to mobile computing and collaborative computing. I don't mean to tell you what you do or do not like, but I suspect that you "really prefer your keyboard over a pen and screen combo" because you are doing a lot of typing, and not necessarily much else. If you were doing photo archiving, collaborative computing, pharmaceutical design, diagnostic imaging (MRI), or forensics work, a PC Tablet would be orders of magnitudes more efficient, ergonomic, and usefull than a keyboard.
In environments where you have to be walking around a lot, such as in a hospital, a clinic, a research laboratory, or a research center, Tablet PCs are becoming the rage for good reason. The Hype is because they can be really, really usefull. One has to view tablets as 'compute and run' devices for them to be conceptually usefull.
What will your company use them for? I'm curious about real-world use of these, since handwriting would seem to hurt productivity too much for any non-field application. A PDA would seem much better for any roaming application such as environmental monitoring, package tracking, etc.
The idea may be old and obvious, but the software and hardware necessary to make this kind of thing truly usable has only developed in recent years. There's a lot of Hard Problems(TM) with respect to user-interaction (good handwriting recognition, for one) that needed to be solved before they can be generally useful, and of course the hardware necessary to run the software.
Unix had a tablet pc based remote desktop 30 years ago?
Windows has also hade remote desktop services built in and available as add on software (PC Anywhere) for as long as windows has been existance. This is not about remote desktops as a posibility, this is about a complete hardware unit that allows you to take your remote desktop with you wirelessly for short distances from your computer. It is less, but also about using a pen to it's fullest (so far) as a UI tool instead of a mouse or keyboard.
Unix did not have THIS 30 years ago.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I watched some of MS's propoganda for it, and seemed like they were selling it to office people, not Joe Sixpack.
(Their propoganda worked on me, by the way. Any university student can easily see the benefit of one of these things.)
What can a tablet PC for me do that a regular PC cannot?
For me, that's simple to answer: I can't take notes with a regular PC, desktop or notebook.