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Analyzing the Microsoft Tablet PC
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet UK has an amusing - but accurate in my view - review of the Microsoft Tablet PC. It may not be the first, but it is the most incisive because of the way it dissects the many fundamental flaws in Microsoft's latest creation."
A SmartDisplay is Windows CE with Remote Desktop and a Tablet PC is Windows XP.
See more at MS's faq.
From what i read it is a wireless monitor, am i right?
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
I thought Apple's Inkwell handwriting technology was first in this area?
Didn't the newton have hadwriting regognition?
(From the review: Whatever the thinking behind Microsoft's Smart Display technology -- a battery-powered notebook screen without a notebook, linked to a PC by wireless networking and taking stylus input -- it doesn't seem to have included what users actually want. Emphasis added.)
-austin
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
... as has already been pointed out. However more importantly, editors please update the headline to acknowledge the mistake. Lots of people may read the comments, see a single +5 comment pointing out this isn't a Tablet, next to dozens of Anti-MS comments and assume the +5 guy is a crackpot. He is not. This is a Windows Terminal Server device used to control your Windows desktop while walking around the house. It's isn't remotely Tablet PC.
You don't even have to read the parent article once to realize that, as the original poster said, it is not a tablet PC. It's not ANY kind of PC. It's just a remote-display monitor. It doesn't run any programs, it just shows you what your main computer is doing.
Kinda funny seeing major business plans aorund doing remote displaying with all the comments going around on the X-Windows topics saying how remote displaying applications in X is supposedly never used and the root of all slowness in X.
Anyways, just because this isn't a tablet PC doesn't make it not cool. I'd often like to have the power of my desktop machine anywhere in the house.
I'm a college student in Biochemistry. I have an Acer Travelmate 100 Tablet PC. I LOVE it. I can take graphical notes in chemistry class, my entire campus is wirelessly enabled, and I can't imagine going back to my days without it. Tablet PCs aren't bad or useless. They have customers who love them and use them everyday. Get over yourselves and make a Linux Tablet PC for me to use. Secondly- This review ISN'T for a tablet PC. Check your facts, please.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
A Tablet PC might be more useful than this "airplanel V150", but the V150 seems to be targeted to no one. To reiterate his points:
It's priced at £1000 (plus tax) - that's something like $1500, I think (or $1594, accoring to this page). For that much, you can easily buy a cheap laptop, which alone is more than capable of acting as a remote display for a Windows XP Pro box. (Trust me, I know some people who use old Pentium laptops to connect to their Windows XP machines. Not terribly fast, but it works... Total cost was like $100 for laptops + 802.11b cards. Of course, they don't have a stylus, and it's much bulkier.) Of course, with the laptop, you can still use it without the host parent computer.
With a laptop, you can move it anywhere and still use it. With the V150, you have about 30 meteand still use the basirs from the wireless APs until it becomes useless. You can't just take the V150 into the office and use it - it needs to be on the same network as the computer. (Or not - even still, the point probably still stands that effectively it needs to be on the same network to be useful. I'll conceed this point to anyone with real facts.)
When you realize that the V150 is useless without a desktop PC anyway, your total cost comes to the cost of a laptop - unless you're planning on making your existing desktop more portable around the house.
In other words, the "airpanel V150" is an expensive flatscreen monitor that is minimally useful, a pain to set up, and offers nothing better than a laptop would. A real TabletPC would be far more useful than this thing, and probably only be a little more expensive (if the desktop cost were included). I think that was the original poster's point - this thing isn't really that much more useful than a laptop.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
From what i read it is a wireless monitor, am i right?
Not exactly, it's a dumb terminal. It is basically a full-featured WinCE powered system with the sole purpose of mirroring what is on the servers display.
Think of it as doing a remote X display, if you are familiar with X11. Most of the gripes about it come with the first run of a new technology (from Microsofts point of view.) I would certainly love something like this that operates using X instead.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Yeah, I've seen one or two troll posts like that. The ignorance displayed is a work of art. X is not slow. People use X forwarding everyday and it kicks ass. I'm using X forwarding through ssh right now to post this. It's very nice to see Mozilla displayed with good speed through a 10 mbs ethernet onto a 90 MHz Pentium laptop. My wife could export the same program off a dinky 400 MHz K6/2 without much slow down for me. I use Star Office on her machine to get at pesky M$ formats. From the desktop perspective, any of them can share the PCIMCIA adaptor and so look at and store pictures from the compact flash cards I use. One day soon, I'll rig up a wireless card in one of my boxes and I'll be able to cut the ethernet cable.
Thanks for bringing up X, it's a clear example of how free software is much better than nonfree. X was designed to do this kind of thing back in 1993. M$ has decided that they can't tollerate more than one person at a time using their junk so they have never adopted the technology and they never will. They have struck out against VNC, forbiden such use in their EULA, and this is what we can expect from them. Using X, I could care less. As it is, I have the combined power of all of my computers on any of them. Soon enough, someone will port a reasonable OS to those tablets and I'll be able to buy one off ebay for $40. Cool enough for me, it's got a much nicer processor than my laptop does and might be able to run things without much help. You have to wonder why anyone would cripple such a machine with something crappy like WinCE or XP stripped of everything (even the browser? impossible). Crippled, that's the world of closed source software for you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It isn't that hard to tell the difference. Smart Displays are essentially wireless monitors while Tablet PCs are just laptops.
From what I have seen noone uses Smart Displays and Tablet PCs are being received quite well.
I am also disappointed in the lack of diligence demonstrated by the /. editors--usually I'm annoyed by dupes but it is starting to show up in the form of factual inaccuracies as well. However, I digress...
Not only isn't it a tablet PC (it's merely a wireless "intelligent display"), it is a very poorly executed implemetation of what it is.
Firstly, it costs as much as my notebook did nearly two years ago--and it is a full computer. Not only does it not need a host PC--it can also be hooked up to a television and play DVD movies. Why would I pay the same amount for much less? If I want to surf the net untethered I'll throw a wireless PC card in my notbook, thanks.
Second, I am at a loss to figure out why it's so hefty and power hungry. It weights around 2.5kg's (that's over 5 lbs) and the battery life is also comparable to that of smaller sized but fully functional notebooks. Is this merely due to the large touchscreen? I don't get it--basically it looks like this unit is a big screen with the guts of a Pocket PC PDA in it. Why the heck does its WinCE and client software need 64M of RAM? Is the protocol so bloated that 64M is needed as cache to make the thing usable? So much for the "thin client" concept.
All in all, I think the review was overly generous in giving out it's rating--it's a half-baked implementation and thus barely merits a 5 out of 10. The concept is cool though--right now it is about as ready as Windows 1.0 was when it was released. Perhaps 2 versions from now it will be worth considering.