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Hardware Makers Unhappy With Tablet Sales
rocketjam writes "According to The Register, hardware manufacturers, tired of continued low sales of the much-hyped tablet PC, are beginning to speak out, complaining that Microsoft has not marketed the platform enough and has over-priced licenses for its Windows XP Tablet Edition. The predicted demand for the devices has not materialized; faced with the tablet's premium pricing, consumers have continued to opt for lower-priced notebooks."
The healthcare company I worked for at the time had a bunch of the original tablet computers from Fujitsu. Microsoft never updated the Pen Windows after Win95, so we were left with a ton of $4500 bricks only months after.
I posted exactly the same message as yours above, a couple of years ago when this marketing hype coming out of Redmond was starting up again for the Tablet PC. I got a ton of replies from the trolls when I posted that the minute the market started going south, you would be stuck with an expensive pen computer w/o drivers. The trolls replies were that "the technology wasn't there in '95" and "now Microsoft was committed to the Tablet PC because the technology is there" and "this was going to be the hottest thing since electronic sliced bread."
Since there are not enough of these devices sold, nobody is going to waste time writing Linux drivers for these M$ abandoned tablets, when there's lots of other things to be done. You will be left with an obsolete brick in just a few years.
2) Too expensive. Even the tablets with keyboards (yes, some of them have keyboards) are much more expensive than a comparable laptop.
3) Short battery life. See point 1, above.
4) Fragility. You're carrying around a color LCD plus digitizer (i.e., $$$). You're writing on it. It's collecting dust and dirt. Pity about that scratch, crack, ding ...
5) False mimicry. The parallax between screen pixels and moving pen point makes it really, really clear that you're not using a pen on paper.
I don't really understand what people are complaining about myself. I have been using one (Motion M1200 now M1300) for 10 months and love it. When I'm sitting at my desk it is using the keyboard mouse. Pick it up and use the pen. The pen takes a little getting used to but it really works for everything other then programming and command line (but you can use it for both of those with a little effort).
:-).
Once I combined mine with a small portable scanner I found the amount of paper clutter in my offices to go down to a bare minimum (almost made me look like a type A person
I think people don't give it a fair try. It may be expectations, price or a combination of both. Any way you cut it though, this style unit does work for a number of people much better then a laptop.
Just try writing on a tablet PC with one hand while holding the damn thing in the other. You can't do it. You'll be searching for a table in no time, and probably have to sit down too, because there's no table high enough to use while standing. And if you try holding it with your elbow, it's at the wrong angle for writing. Clipboards work because they're light enough that they don't require much leverage to hold with a grip.
You need something that fits in the palm of your hand, and that means six inches wide at the most.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
That's a good point... and we've been trying it. We are currently piloting two systems--one that requires vocal training and one that does not. We're doing it this way because most docs will not take the time to do the training.
The only reason that this is a consideration is because even the dictation people miss a bunch of words... so everything dictated as to be re-edited. If voice to text systems get 95%, it might be usable and would save an assload of money.
Digital dictation systems that connect to software for transcription haven't worked well either.
Of course, it doesn't help that we docs were all trained to dictate, scratch something unreadable in the chart, and move on.
Davak