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.

Comments

Re:Unattractive to early adopters -fixed answer

[Lumpy]

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. -- correction from my damned keyboard pasting the wrong contents... sorry about the repost

that's a bold amount of mis-information....

The LCD is nothing different than any other LCD.. the piece of glass that has the capacitive film sandwitched with a piece of mylar that has the same (some are resistive) is the "touchscreen" and contrary to what they want you to believe is relatively cheap as well as the hardware to turn that into a standard mouseing input for a trackpoint pad kind of driver.

every time I hear that argument I shoot them down... It's pure bullcrap, they know it. the touchscreen add's $25.00 to the cost of building the unit.. Hell I can get single quantity the glass plate ,connectors and hardware to retro an Iopener to touchscreen for $100.00 which is 10 times the price a manufacturer will pay.

so you are flat out wrong... it does NOT add to the price to warrant a doubling of the selling price... add $100 to the price yes... double it? not in any way possible.