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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 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.
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.