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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.
In other news, I think a dishwasher is a good idea, but won't be using one to wash my clothes any time soon.
Tablet PCs are simply not designed for gaming, so saying you would not use one for gaming is a bit superfluous.
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Tablet PCs are sort of like a large pda... At least that's where I see their usefulness. Ipaqs are cool, but the screen is too small to be useful, IMO.
A tablet PC, especially the kind that can unfold to into a laptop, is what I've been wanting for a very long time.
But the price is just crazy, $2600? I'd consider paying $1000. $2600 Could by a pretty slick laptop that cleans the floor with a typical tablet pc.
Tablet PCs are cool and just about everyone who plays with one wants one. Then they look at the price and decide to get a laptop with more memory and a faster processor for less...
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The people who absolutely must have the latest gadgets bought them during the first few months; the rest of us haven't had any reason to buy them.
Next year, there will probably be better operating system and application support, and at that point tablets will actually be useful; but until then the only market which exists is already saturated.
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Regardless of how technically sound tablet PCs are, the market for them isn't going to spring into existence overnight.
The idea doesn't improve significantly enough on my good Rhino to have me making a purchase.
Now, when I see RMS running Emacs on one of these things, then, maybe THEN, I'll plunk down some frogskins...
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A friend of mine has the Toshiba Tablet PC. It's pen has a tremendous feel and its excellent for sketching, and typing since it folds out to be a full flegded laptop.
Is it worth $2000+ when I can get a laptop for $1000+ that can basicially do the same thing except Now I can't use a pen? No way. That's the problem with them. they are nowhere near price competitive to traditional laptops. If they were then would be selling like hotcacks.
Its a cool technology that prices itself out of the market. pure and simple.
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Lets add $15 worth of hardware, $3 worth of software and charge an additional $600 for our laptops. THAT'LL boost sales!
Seriously, you wouldn't buy a slow laptop for $1800 because is came with a funky mouse, drivers for that mouse, and a few utilities that used the extra buttons on that mouse, would you?
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At my office (which is Windows only, none of that Linux stuff here), we use Tablet PC's because they make sense. Doctors and nurses can review charts, make notes, change scripts and do what needs to be done on the spot without having to open a laptop up and start typing or waiting to get back to their desks (and remember everything they wanted to do/say).
No, tablet PC's are not the solution to everyone, but they are for the medical industry. And Microsoft already has deep roots in the medical industry.
Does anyone know of a tablet PC that both boots Linux and has documented interfaces?
if they gave those thing CPUs that topped the 1.7GHz mark instead of 800-1GHz range they'd sell more :P
As many people have said, one one the big reasons TabletPCs aren't doing well is price. What they aren't saying is that most of that extra price comes from the expensive LCD touchscreen, which is necessary for pointing with a stylus and handwriting recognition.
And it's that latter feature that's killing adoption. People just don't want handwriting recognition, especially the kind of power users likey to be eraly adopters of new technology. Why? Simply because handwriting recognition at this stage is still pretty buggy, and even if it wasn't, HANDWRITING ISN'T AS FAST AS TYPING. As I suspect most power users are fairly good typists, handwriting recognition is of little value to them.
And as a "new generation" of users that have grown up with computers matures, there will be even less incentive for handwring recognition. Anyone notice the trend in PDAs has been towards keyboards and away from recognition? This isn't a coincidence, it's the maturing market base.
I, as many others, repeat my argument: if these things were pressure sensitive, they would have been a hell of a drawing tool, but as they're not, they're just some sort of computers which are in some cases even more limited than normal ones.
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I think the answer lies in Bluetooth. Give me a Bluetooth phone, my Palm Tungsten T, and a Bluetooth headset and I'll be happy.
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They're positioning the TabletPC as a laptop you can write on. I think that's the big mistake -- trying to make this a laptop, when they can't possibly compete with laptops for the price. You end up with something that's too big, too heavy, runs too hot, eats batteries too fast, and is too damned slow to be as useful as it could be.
What I want is, essentially, a letter-sized PDA. Something I can take notes on, browse the web via 802.11 or whatever, read email, and that's about it. If I want to do CAD/CAM, or gaming, or write a 200-page document, then I'll use a desktop. No Windows, no Linux even -- Palm OS would be ideal.
With such a tablet, I could leave it sitting on my coffee table. We're watching a movie, and someone asks "what else was he in?" I hit pause, pick up the tablet, tap "on", and it instantly comes on, just like a Palm. I hit the web browser, go to IMDB, write in my query, and answer the question. Then I set it down and resume the movie. Total time, from question to answer and back to movie: 60 seconds.
Do that with a tablet PC, running *any* OS.
Keep a little cradle on the side that it can charge from, hook that via Cat-5 to the network, have some kind of synchronization software running on some server, and you've now got the ability to hot-sync, with no computer in your family room. Pick the thing up when you go to work and read all the news, while on the subway, that got synch'd to it overnight. Go to starbucks on your lunch hour and catch up on personal email. Whatever.
Anything you can do with a PDA, you should be able to do just as easily with a tablet. It's a logical extension of the PDA to a larger form-factor for reading full-sized documents, web surfing, collaboration around a coffee table, etc. But it doesn't need to be a full-out laptop.
Really, this seems to me a no-brainer, and it should be trivially easy for a hardware maker to implement. Just take the guts from one of the newer Palm models (with the 400 MHz XScale processor), add 64 MB of flash RAM, a CF slot (bundled with a 64 MB card, obviously the end user can expand that) for long-term storage, stick in bluetooth and 802.11, and build it all into a lightweight 1024x768 portable display. Add recharchable batteries, stir, and put out a press release. Sell it for $700, and I'll buy one tomorrow.
The ones I've seen typically cost more than notebooks. What surprises me is that they had such good sales last year.
If you're a billionaire who doesn't need to care about dropping a few grand of electronics on the floor every so often, this is a killer toy. No surprise who the poster boy was. But likewise it's no surpise they're not taking the market by storm.
The problem with the Tablet PC (and the reason that I never expected it to sell well) is that it's the sort of device that a lot of geeks say is, "cool," but it is NOT the sort of device that solves problems for most people. It's one of those things that many people might take for free (just because the concept seems cool), but the minor benefits of the machine aren't enough to outweigh the cost or the other negatives (for the vast majority).
There might be a few markets where the benefits outweigh the costs (vertical medical applications, maybe?), but I can't think of many where they are truly cost-effective. After trying to use laptops and PDAs for notes and schedules and such, I still find that the easiest thing for ME to use for most of my needs like that is still a piece of paper. The cost ($2 vs. $2,600) and "user interface" of a cheap paper notebook still make it superior for a lot of things, even if it DOES seem cool to geeks to be able to write on a screen with a stylus.
I don't expect Tablet PCs to take off any time soon, and I still think that PDAs as we know them are dying, too. (I thought Steve Jobs was wrong about PDAs in the beginning, but I know fewer and fewer non-geeks who use them.) A Tablet PC is interesting technology, but it doesn't solve a problem that people really want solved.
My conclusion: A TabletPC is a luxury, but heavy PDA replacement and isn't very usefull as a replacement for a real laptop. Most of the software needs a complete rethinking and the hardware is feeble. So i bought a brand new Apple Powerbook and I'm happy now.
My detailed experiences with TabletPC Software were: Microsoft XP TabletXP Edition was quite unstable (2 crashes a day), Microsoft Journal works fine, Microsoft OneNote Beta was absolutely not usable (imho wrong concept for a notetaking application), Covey TabletPlanner is ok, but you wouldn't need another Outlook (it works fine on a TabletPC). The absolute KilleApp in the note-taking area is from my point of view Mindjets Mindmanager for TabletPC (good concept, consequent implementation, high value).
My experiences with Compaq hardware: The TabletPC's connection between main unit and keyboard is very unstable and could be damaged easily. The built-in WLAN connection is very weak, I needed a extra Orinocco WLAN Adapter to get in working in our office. The missing bluetooth adapter is very unconveniend and I see no reason for that (the price couldn't be an argument).
Good grief, why do you slashbots always get into this mentality of one size fits all. Tablet PC's are failing because not everybody wants one?
Good grief. The computing market is huge, there is room for a variety of ideas because there are a large variety of problems to solve. Tablet PC makes sense for certain problems, just like a laptop does.
I just don't get this mentality.