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Linux Based Tablets Are Coming
CrypticSpawn writes "Read some good news on Diracian; there will be a Linux tablet coming out running Lycoris's Linux distribution, Lycoris Desktop/LX Tablet Edition. What's great is the tablet is the Protege by Toshiba, so you get a laptop and a tablet wrapped up into one. I guess I am a gadget fanatic, I love my Zaurus, now I want this. They even have pictures of it here. Also found another reference of this tablet on PC World, without the pics."
I disagree. The laptop/tablet combination is really a neat idea. You have a keyboard with a touchpad or nipple for mouse movement, but also a touch screen and stylus. The LCD rotates 180 degrees so you can have it in a laptop form factor (LCD and keyboard at 90 degrees), or in a tablet form (like a closed laptop, but with the LCD screen facing outwards). That way, you can carry it around like a notepad and write on it in tablet form, but then sit down, swing it around into a laptop, and use it for typing in a meeting.
I've been thinking about selling my current laptop and buying a tablet to replace it, but prices need to come down a bit more before I do that.
Didn't notice if this has been mentioned yet but this tablet is an exact clone of a Toshiba model that has been available for quite some time now. The Protege 3500 runs on the PIII-M as well, only it comes with Windows XP. The price for the Toshiba version with Windows is around $300 cheaper in retail stores.
Speak for yourself -- don't be so quick to determine what "people" want. I have personally owned a Fujitsu Stylistic slate-style tablet PC, a Toshiba Portege 3500 Hybrid style tablet PC, and of course various standard laptop computers. The style I would choose? The hybrid. There is simply no loss of "convenience" as you put it. There is the obvious ADDED convenience of having ONE device instead of TWO.
Um, you do realize that Centrino is just the brand name for a particular bundle of hardware, right? Intel requires a low power proc, wireless ethernet and a couple of other things for a notebook to be certified Centrino. Most of the Centrino notebooks I've seen have had Pentium M processors, which is *gasp!* a PIII! Why? It's more efficient clock-for-clock than the P4 and draws less power. So why the rebranding? For people like yourself who think P4 > P3 without really understanding why they're using the "old" architechture.
Of course you can type on it. If you had bothered to read the article, you'd see right there in the image at the top that it has a normal laptop keyboard when used in laptop mode. Sheesh!
"and I understand that Microsoft made a deal with one of the manufacturers (I forget which one) that bundles the handwriting recognition software free with the OS while everyone else has to shell out for both. That's gotta be pissing the rest of 'em off."
Just to correct you slightly. Handwriting recognition comes with all XP Tablet PCs as standard. The application in question is Microsoft's OneNote - a note taking and brainstorming application. It's a killer app for the tablet PC, and Toshiba have licensed it to be included with all their tablets (and laptops I think).
Personally, this is going to be a shot in the foot for tablet PCs. The Toshiba is nice, but it's not the best in all circumstances. OneNote has enough sway to probably have the wrong people buying the Toshiba, consequently appeal for tablets will drop. People fall in love with the tablet concept and develop an idealist attitude towards it, but falling in love with the hardware becomes difficult when it fails to live up to those expectations.
The PC World article says that there is no handwriting recognition included. I would have thought that using X-Stroke would be the best idea. I use it on my iPaq (flashed with Familiar and GPE) all the time!
Pentium M is not just a PIII, it's a mcuh improved PIII with many features borrowed from P4, like a faster front side bus and sse2. ...also, why a tablet would need a lot of cpu power, pentium m is comparable to p4m running at much higher clockspeeds, so i would not say it's underpowered. Oh, and almost forgot: 1 MB L2 cache.
Wacom's graphics tablets are fully supported by Linux using these drivers. If a tablet PC manufacturer isn't arrogant enough to adopt a Not Invented Here attitude and instead uses the Wacom protocol, their products can work with Linux, today.
All that's needed is some handwriting-input software.
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This all comes in the form of Intel's Centrino chipset. So when you look at the specs, you say, "gee, this Tablet has all three of those features", but it doesn't get the Centrino name because it didn't use Intel's chipset.
However, if it looks like a Centrino, and smells like a Centrino.... then it acts like a Centrino.
You can have my one-button mouse when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Not the first one. Check http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6733
It's less expensive, works with existing zaurus apps, and ships *now* with handwriting recognition.
HUGE misinformed flamebait! Don't you believe it. We just migrated from enterprise Novell servers that were barely keeping up with DNS to linux that totally rocks. We hammer those machines, and they barely notice, AND they just plain work better. For being an Enterprise NOS, Novell's DNS implimentation sucks rocks. I've also replaced IIS servers with Apache on identical hardware, Apache blows IIS away, even with non mod-perl scripts replacing ASP pages. I'm now in a predominantly M$ shop, and believe me, M$ is VERY restrictive. And, I'm sure SMP was in 2.4.9... Oh, and even back then reizer was the choice for robust file systems. Now, EXT3 seems solid. My IBM servers run JFS, unfortunately IBM was a day late porting it to Linux. I will say, though, that Win2k is probably the best Windows release to date. We still have a boat load of problems with it, and the weekly patches eat up time like crazy, and half the time the patches break other stuff.... And it still doesn't perform like linux for network services like DNS or web serving. I just wish more commercial software vendors supported it. I'm starting to see some, our enterprise online radiology imaging package is available on Linux vs. Sun now. Now, back to topic... Linux is pretty awsome on a laptop, as long as the hardware support is there. The support for my Toshiba notebook is only marginal, it takes a day or two of tweaking to get Redhat working on it. Hopfully Toshiba will do a good job of using Linux supported hardware on this thing.
Here's a review by pcworld: First Linux Tablet PC I realize it's not as optimistic as most of us would like to think, but we need to remember that the average buyer is the PCWorld technologist or lower.
Given some time and a bunch of developers really motivated to get an awesome linux tablet, I would consider this do-able, but unfortunatley, I don't think that is the case right now.