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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.
While I do believe he is correct, I think he may be off base with the PDA. This is one of the only devices that I would like to see be more "all in one". I'd personally like a Sony Ericsson p800 style PDA phone that had the screen from a Clie NZ90, GPS, iPod sized hard drive, megapixel camera, the VERY cool remote control center from Sony, 802.11g and Bluetooth + an Mp3 player and DIVX/MPEG4 decoder. While something like this would be in the high end (probably where the NZ90 is = $800 + $100 802.11 card) I still think it'd fly off the shelf, and possibly be subsidized by cell phone companies, at least in part with service agreements.
I still hope Apple is considering such a device or at least with most of the features listed here with a compact flash & SDIO slot.
I know there's a little link overload, just illustrating how easily this could be done right now!
All of this could be squeezed into a current form factor Sony Clie.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
It'd make a good business/school machine, but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like
:)
But you see, that's the whole point. A tablet PC isn't effective if you can't hold it in your hands and write on it, and that means it's got to be tiny. If you're going to get a laptop, you're either going to get a small laptop that's not so fast, or a bulky laptop that is blazin'.
It's not much fun sportin' a 7 pound tablet, I mean common we've been out of the stone ages for awhile
- tristan
Tack on a CDR, and you've just made yourself a laptop with a tiny screen.
Although, Steve Jobs is justifiably wary about PDAs with the failure of the Newton, which I still think is an awesome device.
Vonal Declosion
Tablet PCs are physically too large and heavy. Much of that is driven by the requirements of running Windows XP: you need a harddisk and a powerful processor.
The software isn't all that great either. The connected handwriting recognition system is actually not too bad in terms of raw recognition performance, but its integration and user interface is awful. Speech recognition is laughable. Your best bet is the on-screen keyboard or the PDA-like recognizer.
I think a compact tablet with a high resolution 1024x768 screen, long battery life, but without a harddisk and with a low-power processor, would likely be more successful--provided it ran something better than Tablet PC. In fact, even PocketPC would probably be better than TabletPC.
I think that pointing out that a factor against a tablet pc might be that it is a specialized device with a limited market, as opposed to a computer. Pretty much everyone who can afford it gets a computer. Not everyone gets (or wants) a tablet pc.
Uggh. This is why I hate the state of the mobile device industry right there. There are four major kinds of flash media, all incompatible with each other. Rather than come up with innovative devices that all use the same media (compactflash would have been a good choice since it was the first, and arguably the most open), the companies decided to all come up with their own formats and compete in this space.
Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other? Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right? Well, that's what's happening in the industry right now with flash media. SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, this is not only inconvenient but it's probably confusing as heck to the non-computer literate.
I've worked with a few tablet PCs, and I have to say that that there is a huge market for them from college students ... if the price is right.
The tablet PC is fantastic for taking notes during lectures. It's unobtrusive, and you can turn the handwriting recognition off while you're maddly scribbling notes and drawing diagrams. Plug in a mic, and you've got a recording of the lecture for future reference.
Later on you could run the recognition software, reorganize your notes, highlight, e-mail, print, etc. etc. Plug in a keyboard and a mouse, and suddenly you've got a "normal" computer for browsing the 'net, writing papers, and, erm, acquiring music.
The "perfect" tablet for this market would have a lightweight OS, 10GB HD, wifi, low power CPU (Crusoe?) and dimensions roughly the same as an A4 or 8x10 pad of paper (12.1" screen, ~1/2" thick).
How many students would buy one if they were under $1000? What's your personal price point?
The problem is that most people aren't really sure what to use tablets for. They are great for business use where your staff needs to be able to work with information as they walk and a PDA is to cramped or lowpowered. They are okay for lugging around the house for Net use or even for watching ripped movies. I like to plug a Happy Hacker keyboard in and use one as a laptop to code on (I find it more convient being able to remove the keyboard when not needed).
:)
They could even be good for low power games (think GameBoy with a much bigger screen) if there were a joypad style mouse button and the buttons were positioned properly.
The other problem is that these things tend to cost as much as a laptop. If they could get them into the upper range of PDA prices while retaining their PC-like features then they'd kick ass. The ProGears were a great hacking bargain once they went out of business and were available for $400 each.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Tablet PC screens are not touch-sensitive and thus do not have the layer of flexible, scratchable plastic film that PDAs do. Tablets require the use of their own pen which emits a small magnetic field sensed by the Tablet. Thus the Tablet screen knows when the pen is close. At that point it activates the cursor which you move around with the pen near, but not touching, the screen. Then when the pen actually touches the screen the Tablet activates the on-screen "ink" mode. Since Tablet PCs have much larger screens than a PDA you are likely to have your hand resting on the screen. They are designed for that and your wrist would not affect it.
As slashnot.com stated:
"The Viewsonic Tablet PC is an excellent way to pay twice as much for a laptop by removing the keyboard, CD-ROM drive and Floppy."
Let's face it, Tablet PCs are essentially expensive stripped down laptops. While they might have some very handy specific uses, for the vast majority of people a laptop is a much better solution, i.e., cheaper with more value.
Microsoft's push for the Tablet PC is an attempt to get people who don't know how to type to buy computers. There are many people who never typed before and are frustrated by computers. The paper/pen metaphor is supposed to appease those people. Unfortunately, anyone who has avoided computers up to now clearly has NO USE for a computer. Especially one that costs SO much!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It may have come from Microsoft, but it's an extremely stable and robust filesystem that is very well understood, and will probably be the de-facto standard for many years.
As for Mac and PC format floppies, this is not really the issue I was getting it. Macs and PC's used different filesystems on floppies, but the media itself was exactly the same. This is not the case with the multitude of flash memory formats out there.