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

This is not a Tablet PC!!!

[stevel]

I've seen lots of posts complaining that the Slashdot editors aren't paying attention to what they post, and for the most part I just laugh and move on. But here's an egregious example - the web page referenced is indeed a review of the ViewSonic V150 AirPanel, but a Microsoft Tablet PC it is not. Rather, this is a "Mira" remote display device that requires a separate Windows XP system that actually runs the programs.

The anonymous contributor can perhaps be forgiven for making the error, but the editors should know better. Perhaps the editors need to first count to ten (or a hundred) the next time they want to post a "Microsoft is lame" article?

Re:This is not a Tablet PC!!!

[macalmaclan]

You're quite correct. This is not a Tablet PC. Read the review... It's a *suppository* PC :)
I think ZD's reviewer may have started something with that name...

Re:This is not a Tablet PC!!!

[CerebusUS]

This is horrible. Taco, edit the hell out of the original listing or just remove it all together. The review is NOT about a tablet pc.

Thats a MS Smart Display not a Tablet PC

[DemianJ]

A SmartDisplay is Windows CE with Remote Desktop and a Tablet PC is Windows XP.

See more at MS's faq.

Who is the target consumer for this P.O.S. ?

[MrCaseyB]

After reading the review, this thing sounds like a nightmare.

I don't get it, it costs more then a basic laptop, its much more difficult to setup, it has a very slow processor compare to a lappy, and it doesnt do nearly as much as a laptop.

This reminds me of those portable personal DVD players. They cost about $1000 for a 7" screen and all it does is play DVDs, for the same price you could buy a notebook computer with a 14" screen that plays DVDs and does a whole lot more.

This isnt some easy to use Internet Appliance like the i-opener, it is not priced like one, so just who is this targeted towards?

I would love a tablet PC, I hope they get better and better and cheaper. This appears to be pretty worthless though.

Re:Who is the target consumer for this P.O.S. ?

[_xeno_]

Actually, I think the grand-parent poster - er, the one who you were replying to - knew exactly what he was talking about, but got the "Table PC" mixed in there due to the incorrect use of the term in the headline.

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.

Re:Mod Parent Down

[aziegler]

Parent is the idiot who can't read the review; this is most certainly about the Mira Smart Display, not the Tablet PC. IMO, the Mira has always been stupid because of MS's stupid multi-user licensing policies. The Tablet PC is a much better idea, if not as skillfully executed as it could be (it's still pretty damned good, though).

(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

This is not a tablet PC

[coupland]

... 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.

Not a Tablet PC

[jkichline]

I think this review is VERY biased. For one, its not even a Tablet PC as defined by Microsoft. A tablet PC is a fully functional computer, period. In fact, I just got a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC and use it frequently in tablet mode (it converts to laptop mode for all the wienies that cry about using a pen). Its handwriting recognition is second to none, able to read cursive and messy hand writing. Voice recognition is really good as well, though I am sure there are better products available.

It has builtin WiFi and Bluetooth, 1.4 Gb P3, %12 Mb RAM, and a 40 Gb hard drive. Its a computer and very well adapted to the medical and sales professions.

In all, my experience has been very good with tablet pcs and I wonder when the open source community is going to think about developing such a product. If the open source community does not begin innovating instead of playing catchup to microsoft, it will never succeed. Here is something (the tablet pc) completely new that everyone I show asks "where do I sign to get one"? All of the features are there but the price is still a bit steep. But you have to recoop R+D.

In my opinion these panel things are gay. Tablet PCs rock. Where are the voice recognition and handwriting recognition in the open source community? Are there any efforts? Are we going to let microsoft reinvent the pc while we sit back and simply say... ah... they'll pull it in a year. BTW, they spent millions in R+D and they are not going to simply kill it. They may thorw millions into marketing though which they haven't yet.

Do your homework before advocating decisions for the open source community.

Re:I think tablet PCs will be great

[amembrane]

I'll wait until 15 inches become popular / cost effective.

Anyone with 15 inches is gonna be popular, and according to spam, is becoming increasingly cost effective.

The worst...

[grub]

The worst bit about this terrible submission is that Taco will dupe the post in about 3 hours.

mod parent "Re:Mod Parent Down" down

[XaXXon]

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.

Gads, the trouble MS has to go through

[wowbagger]

Reading the lengths to which you must go to get a remote display on your Windows machine amazes me.

Give me the same basic hardware, but rip WinCE out and put a lightweight X server into it, and I could remote the display on my workstation without any software changes on it at all (except perhaps for adding a line to my X0.hosts file).

AND if the table spoke SSH, I wouldn't even have to do that.

AND the fact that I could also redirect the displays of my SGI, my other server, my service monitor, and anything else that spoke X Windows system protocol.

For all you naysayers who poop-poo the need for network transparency in your GUI, I say:

BEHOLD

I CAN FILL IN THE MISSING STEP!

[liquidsin]

2) Sell ad space to Microsoft

The Best Line in the Review

[Nova Express]

"Tablet is the wrong medicinal analogy: suppository more adequately describes the Smart Display experience."

Look on the bright side

[poot_rootbeer]

At least CmdrTaco spelled "Tablet PC" correctly...

James T. Kirk?

[TheRaven64]

From the article:

Perhaps it was the sight of Captain James T Kirk scribbling away on his executive starship tablet...

I remember we actually got a look at that tablet in one of the episodes. About 20% of the space on one side was dedicated to a light labeled 'System Failure' (which was not on at the time). That's right, about 10% of the total potential screen space was dedicated to a light telling you it was broken, implying that this is a 'feature' that is required often. Looking back, I wonder if this is what MS used as a prototype...

Hold the Phone!

[telstar]

"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."

• I thought that was Slashdot's job...

Re:The tablet is amazing

[American AC in Paris]

I thought Apple's Inkwell handwriting technology was first in this area?

Didn't the newton have hadwriting regognition?

Yes it dud, mole or lease.

Hasty

[reelbk]

In their haste to bash Microsoft, both the anonymous submitter and the slashdot editor failed to notice that the article doesn't even review a tablet pc. This is what slashdot has come to...

"most incisive" == "most anti-MS"

[GCP]

Not only did he label it a review of the Tablet PC, but he certainly must have read it closely because he declared it the "most incisive" review so far.

Of course, since it's not even a review of the Tablet PC at all, incisiveness must simply be a synonym for "critical of MS", as in "Slashdot posts are almost uniformly incisive."