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."

Comments

The tablet is amazing

[saskboy]

They had a tablet for demonstration at the MS student tour across Canada. I was at one of the demonstrations where they showed an "informational video of a survey conducted by students at MIT, not an ad," as the presenter tried to claim as we chuckled at the attempted brainwashing.

Despite MS evil intentions to force yet another PDA device into our lives, these looked actually useful, because of the advanced handwriting recongnition software. You can literally handwrite your notes, and either save them as plain text, small picture files, or move them to another PC. You can even do a text search through handwritten files. The angle you write at doesn't always stop the words from being found even. Truely an innovation in PDAs.

despite the article....

[rilister]

Am I being Offtopic for discussing TabletPC, but that was what the headline said....?

anyway - having seen Tablet PC, it is the most half-assed bit of design I've seen in ages. One thing struck me right off. Considering the tablet concept is intended to be used in portrait mode, why do precisely zero of the UI elements reflect this? The task menu is a tiny strip along the bottom of the screen and it's proposterously hard to hit with the stylus.

of course, the handwriting recognition is abysmal, but that goes without saying.....

Re:despite the article....

[platos_beard]

of course, the handwriting recognition is abysmal, but that goes without saying.....

Now I don't claim this was an extensive test, but I was blown away by the handwriting recognition. No, its not perfect, but I was writing some short phrases as fast as I could in cursive writing and having a hard time getting it to fail.

Re:Microsoft.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Cuando tiene usar algo de Microsoft, todo sabe muy mal."

I'm a little surprised this clever bit of satire was modded as troll. It's a reflection of the anti-MS crap that flies around here. What's clever about it is when you translate this into literal english, it sounds like "When he uses something of Microsoft, everybody knows it's very bad." That's what Cmndr Taco sounded like in this flamebait article.

Re:mod parent "Re:Mod Parent Down" down

[evilviper]

X-Windows topics saying how remote displaying applications in X is supposedly never used

True, but there is a big difference. RDP/Citrix are far less bandwidth intensive, more responsive, and just generally better. If remote X (or VNC) was as smooth as Citrix, it would get MUCH more use.