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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.