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ViewSonic AirPanel v150 Review at Ars Technica
Haxby writes "Ars Technica has a pretty thorough review of the ViewSonic AirPanel (15 inch model). You might recall that this device/design won 'Best of Comdex' in 2002, but as the review clearly shows, it's not really all that great, and it's way overpriced. The biggest problem is video performance: it sucks. Poor resolution and hideous rendering times (partly Microsoft's RDC's fault) make it next to useless. Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?"
I've only just started looking at LCDs and need to know if anyone else sees them ALL looking like trash? I'm rarely up on new hardware tech, 3D stuff doesn't impress me and the ancient 17" CRT I have has done me well. However looking at several brands of LCDs I'm wondering whether I just see them different to other people, or if they truly only have one advantage, clarity. I've taken a look at the screens on Dell, Acer and Apple laptops, 15 & 17" screens from Dell Samsung and BenQ, and a few Apple Cinema Displays. I can only say I see the BEST of them as under a quarter the quality of even an average CRT. I couldn't see any reason to pay even HALF the price of a CRT for one, let alone MORE. Anyone else see LCDs like this, or are my eyes just plaine fucked?
This is where tablet pc's should be heading. You get all the power of your desktop, in a thin and light form factor you can carry around anywhere within a decent range. I hope R&D continues on these things. Maybe even build a very basic laptop into it so you can use it to take notes when outside of the range, and get full power and sync all your data automatically when you get back within range.
The strength of these Smart Displays is that they can have the capability to be a detachable monitor: when docked, they can act just like a normal DVI display, with full video speed, acceleration, etc etc, but when you want to get up, you just pick it up and it automatically goes into "remote" mode. Bring it back and put it in the dock, and *poof* you're back in normal monitor mode.
The problem is most manufacturers haven't implemented that capability. I'm pretty sure that Viewsonic hasn't, but others (such as the Philips DesXcape) have.
Not that I've seen it in action, so who knows how well it actually works.
I've been hoping for something like this for a long time: a tablet that I can take somewhere like out on my porch or to school or wherever, and it mimics or uses my computer at home and all of it's programs. Basically, just a screen with USB ports that can connect (not sync, actually connect) with my home computer to enable me to have a moveable workspace. :)
Keyboard, mouse, Screen, and BAM protable workstation that's EXACTLY like the one I'm used to using. I'd be willing to have some sort of trade-off of performance, i.e. for more complicated things such as video editing or Photoshop, it would have the main computer (the desktop) do the work and just send the results when done to the tablet, all I need it for is basically a fancy display that allows remote control over my main computer and a place to plug in a keyboard
I use an iBook with RDC to my WinXP desktop. I get a good-sized keyboard, very good battery life, and acceptable WiFi performance. Granted, video plays poorly via RDC, but cut-and-paste works betweent RDC (I use RDC in a window) and Mac OS X, so if I have to pull up a video URL, I don't have too many problems.
The iBook is very reasonably priced for this purpose; at $1100-$1200 to set up, it makes working wirelessly on a desktop a lot more fun (and then you can start thinking about getting rid of your desktop monitor and keyboard, and sticking the CPU in a more unobtrusive place . . . and opening port 3389 on your firewall at home, so you can use your home fixed IP to access the machine via RDC . . . )
What is video like on RDC? From some posts here, it sounds like RDC is very nice and fast- except for with video and perhaps flash animation.
I've never used RDC for any real work. Although a co-worker at one of my jobs uses it often. When he is working, he is just using his desktop via RDC. He'll listen to MP3s, web browse and do work in dreamweaver with no problems- I thought it looked pretty damn fast. IIRC it's only a 10 Mbps network too, going from where we work on campus (the helpdesk, woot) to his dorm room. A lot faster than TightVNC or X11 is at home for me, even on a 100 Mbps network.
What do I know about speed- I use a 400 MHz XScale machine as my primary box. I have a linux/win2k file server (can't fit all the MP3s on memory cards!) and occasionally use VNC or X11 to admin/get to some app I can't run on WinCE.
Can I do RDC/terminal services on Win2k without having to find some copy of Win2k terminal server? I know on XP you cna just turn it on, no? What about on 2k?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I have an old Dell 233MHz Celeron-based laptop running Windows XP Pro and with a 802.11g card. For roughly half the price of the airpad (used at half.com), I still use RDP to connect to my desktop most of the time, but I get 5x the network speed (54Mbps) and a perfectly-capable (if somewhat outdated) independent machine that I travel with. Since I'm not *required* to use RDP, I can also pop open Mozilla in the living room if my wife is already on the desktop in the office (XP doesn't allow simultaneous console and RDP sessions).
Personally, I thought the review's take on RDP was a little harsh. It's light-years ahead of VNC (which I'm also a fan of but only for cross-platform situations), etc., transparently connects your local printers, USB devices, etc. to the remote machine, and is perfectly usable even over a dialup connection. There's even a freeware third-party utility to transfer small files w/o resorting to FTP, etc. Anyone expecting top-notch multimedia performance over a remote control via wireless is a friggin' moron. You either have to send uncompressed streams (BIG), aggressively recompress (as RDP does, leading to lag and quality loss), or implement fully-functional media playback at the local end (with all of the same codecs, etc.).
Anyway, I use RDP daily, and for general coding and browsing, I often forget that I'm running remotely.
The Achilles Heel for this device, IMHO, is price (I have a beautiful 19" Samsung LCD that was cheaper) and lack of VGA/DVI input (can't use it as a regular monitor). If I'm going to pay that much, I want a fully-functional tablet PC, not just a wirelessly-tethered LCD screen.