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Major Tablet PC Running Into Problems?
An anonymous reader writes "As Digitimes says :
Global sales of Tablet PCs have not been as strong as expected, and major Tablet PC vendors like Acer and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have even experienced declining sales of the products, sources said.
Acer, which claims it sold about 35,000 Tablet PCs worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2002, saw sales of the product plunge by over 50% in the first quarter of this year. " I actually saw/held my first Tablet PC last week - it was one of Fujitsu series machines, and I was pretty impressed by it. It'd make a good business/school machine, but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like.
With tablet PCs has generally been positive. We've tried out two different models, the Toshiba 3505 and Compaq TC 1000. Both have their shortcomings but both are incredibly useful as well. I purchased the Toshiba for our CEO who uses it constantly for presentations, notetaking, and normal ultra portable laptop use. The Toshiba itself is, IMO, the absolute best of all the tablets. It was certainly built to a higher standard. The Compaq is pretty well built too (a surprise to me). I was very impressed with the way you can detach the slate (screen) from the keyboard. We're using it as the basis of one of our future products. My only real gripe with Compaq is the Crusoe processor which is woefully underpowered. Good battery life or not, it takes way to long to boot and start background apps. However, for our, less processor intensive projects (it will be running some web based apps) it is just fine. The Toshiba with it's 1.3PIII isn't nearly as bad. It has plenty of power for a business laptop. I was surprised by the gaming comment in the original article since not one of these machines were ever intended for such use. Go buy a Dell Insprion 8500 if you want that (an excellent machine in its own right). The biggest gripe I would have is the price. Tablet PCs are dreadfully overpriced IMO.
/. This product was never meant for Nerds and Geeks. This is a business machine that will find it's niche with Sales, Marketing, and Management departments, not IT. It is pretty darn decent at doing the job it was built to do.
I'm not too surprised to see this product being hacked to death on
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
For many people the answer will be nothing. In my case I am using a Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet PC for business meetings and for a couple of papers I am doing at university. It is great. I dock it to a larger monitor and USB I/O for development work and have it dual booting Red Hat 9 as a reasonable Linux laptop but I have to give credit to MS (as much as I hate them) for the journal program. ,and the Palm, daily for several years. There is no way they could match a half my paper writing speed and I couldn't draw full blown equations, graphs or diagrams.
It is the journal program and the full paper size that means it can really replace paper for note taking and the trick editing keeps helps deal with lecatures who change their mind about stuff on their white board. I can take notes from my third year engineering maths course better that I could on paper. I have a PocketPC and have used both it
The bottom line is the Tablet PC is the most natural interface I have used and I love every over priced cent of it. Most people won't need the features but if you do it's great.
".. can you run one before you need to recharge?"
My HP/Compaq TC1000 runs for around 2.5 hours with the built in WiFi turned off. Once enabled, depending on my connection rate, I get about 1.5 - 1.75 hours. NOT enough for a day of meetings without a power plug nearby. I'm very disappointed with the battery life on this unit.
The battery is removable, so I'll be purchasing a spare.
My friend has the Fujitsu that allows a higher capacity battery, and he routinely sees 3-3.5 hours with WiFi.
I agree with kmosen on this. Several years ago there were three types of printers: dot matrix, inkjet, and laser. I know, there are others (daisy wheel), but I'm not going back that far. Everyone bought dot matrix because they were cheap and good enough. But everyone also drooled over the inkjet printers because they were much quieter than dot matrix, and almost as good as laser printers. But nobody bought them. Why? The price was too high. How do I know? Because HP's Deskjet 500 was one of those printers. At $600 it was too expensive. HP decided to get out of the inkjet market since they weren't selling well. So this discontinued the Deskjet 500 and cut the price to $350. That was about the same price as a decent dot matrix printer. They cleared out the warehouses in record time; people bought them as fast as they could. In fact, HP reconsidered their tactics and reopened the plants that were making the Deskjets. Of couse, they kept the price at $350, and they kept selling.
Soon Canon, Epson and others were getting killed by HP, so they lowered their prices too. The result is that today we have a fantastic market in inkjet printers. I think the Newton fell victim to this as well, but there was no alternative at the time, and so the market dried up, until Palm came around and reintroduced the idea smaller and cheaper, albeit not as high-powered as the Newton. This is what will happen to the tablet PC's as well, if they don't wise up and lower the prices.
these do exist. Acer makes one called the C110 and there's an HP/COMPAQ model named the TC1000.
The Acer is a bit pricer but uses a more powerful *and* more energy efficient Pentium M whereas the compaq uses a ULV Pentium III. They're called convertables and appear to be fairly resilient from the reviews i've read.
The biggest beef with tablet pc's i've seen are that their screens (with the exception of one very expensive toshiba slate) are not too viewable outside. i'd buy one of those acers right now if it had any kind of decent outdoor performance. i may anyway -- i haven't decided how much direct sunlight it's likely to get.
Incidentally, the reason it seems like a gimmick to you is that you only deal in text. For text, a keyboard is likely to be far quicker than a tablet. In my case, i'm drawn to tablets (no pun intended, i swear) because i would like to be able to make sketches and draw out diagrams naturally. I also hate to have to carry sheafs of paper that deal with the text notes i've got on my laptop... this is convergence of the best kind in my situation. There are a lot of things that are simpler and clearer to work on in a free form way and don't lend themselves to expression in pure text. and don't mention "drawing" with the trackpad... that's apples to elephants.
vendors like Acer and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have even experienced declining sales of the products
Therein lies the key. Notice that Toshiba isn't mentioned. This is because Toshiba is cleaning their clock! The 3500/3505 has the right mix of features -- mainly processor speed -- and consumers/businesses have figured this out.
Someone above said a Tablet PC is like a big PDA. Exactly. It replaces your PDA which makes a whole lot more sense than trying to replace your cell phone. I pity anyone who carries all three...