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Review of the 8 Hour Tablet: Electrovaya Scribbler
Lisa Gade, the chief geek over at MobileTechReview.com, reports that they've
just published an in-depth review of the Electrovaya
Scribbler SC2200. "It's a
Windows XP Tablet Edition with lots of the features you'd expect on a high end
slate machine like a 12.1" screen you can write on, a Dothan 1.4GHz processor
and WiFi. But its real claim to fame is the huge capacity 10,200 mAh SuperPolymer
battery which will get you through a work day without a charge."
While this looks like a step in the right direction for tablet PCs, the docking style keyboard looks like a recipe for trouble, it looks like it's dangerously easy to break (snapping off because of the upright screen design) or at least damage the contacts from constant plugging and unplugging.
The burden then relies on XP Tablet edition to get good enough to rarely need a keyboard... something I don't think is likely to happen any time soon. So good in theory, but not quite the magic form needed to bring tablet PCs into the mainstream.
Yawn.
Sales of tablet PCs are sliding downwards, let's stop focussing on a hybrid of PDAs and laptops that nobody wants, and focus on getting 2 120 gig hard drives, and x800s in laptops, and getting microdrives and better-than-VGA screens in PDAs and standardize CIR in PDAs. Hybrids share some of the benefits of both technologies, but are really just watered down versions of both. I guess I just don't see the use, I can understand some situations, an engineer or whatever, but how well would autocad or something similar run on this boy anyways?
I haven't had an 8 hour work day since I was a child laborer. Of course, the only people I see using Tablet PCs typically do about 20 minutes of work per day anyways, so this is overkill for them. Good thing Windows Solitaire isn't a big battery hog.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
I can't help but think that, for that pricing and performance, one would be better off getting a more conventional laptop or tablet and keeping an extra battery or two around. It's nice to see a notebook that actually acts like a portable, but sadly the battery life is about the only thing that this tablet has going for it.
Honestly, am I missing something? I don't mean to troll, but what is the huge advantage of being able to write on a pc screen with crappy recognition software? I don't understand where the market for this kind of device is. I would much rather have a skinny VAIO laptop or a new powerbook. Do that many people need to use a computer standing up? Perhaps it's for taking notes? I still can type much faster than my fastest shorthand scrawl...
I understand the need for PDA devices where a full sized keyboard isn't practical, but if the device is going to be laptop sized anyway...
Just wondering.
--
Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
Just how many days will it get you through, before its capacity degrades below 8 hours?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Many Dothans died to bring us this processor.
It's kind of heavy for a tablet. I'm not sure if battery life is more important than having to hand hold an additional kg.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Many Dothans died to bring us this information.
Do not touch -Willie
How does it compare to this?
0 3099MM//ref=pm_dp_ln_e_1/104-3745312-9136713?v=gla nce&s=electronics&me=standard
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
and it had a guy in the stairwell writing something on his tablet. The tagline of the ad was something like "For those times when inspiration occurs between floors". The gist of it was that with a tablet PC you are not limited to using a PC at your desk, or some other such stationary place.
What it left me wondering, though, was why not whip out a note pad or sticky note?
The tablet PC has yet to prove itself as a device that is truly useful and practical--moreso than any notebook computer, that is. It may function just fine, and it may be a fine product, but it still seems to have very little actual purpose.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
That's a joke, right?
I highly doubt this tablet was designed with heavy computing in mind. 1.4 GHz Intel chip is more than enough to do word processing, email, watch video, paint, even play many popular games.
I don't know anyone who would get a tablet for heavy processing.
-Derick
Man, my plastic fuck doll is made of the same thing. And I have never gotten 10 hours from her.
Sorry to have to break this to you on SlashDot. She definitely lasts 10 hours, its just someone
else (i.e. the Milkman) is getting a couple of hours of her time every day (if you know what I mean).
http://jesus.everdense.com/
Because of the way the Dothan (a.k.a. Pentium M) is designed and wired with the rest of the Centrino chipset, it can do more per cycle. In fact, a good rule of thumb for Pentium-M (and Dothans, likewise) is to add one GHz or so and thats the equivalently-rated Pentium 4 speed. There's a good article on Wikipedia with more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M#Dothan
Keep using your laptop with a three hour battery. It may take me five more seconds to open up MS Excel each time, but that five seconds will be meaningless when your machine has run out of battery power.
- I have cycled through about 6 laptops in the past 4 years and
- I still travel once in a while.
However, I did hear that the charge runs out pretty quickly (i wonder if I'd get as much as 3 hours from that pad these days), and the external batteries can be annoying (warm, and extra gadget to pack).... but some of my coworkers swear by their 2nd or 3rd spare battery for the long haul trip.I wonder if buying the external battery might be a better investment than this new tablet?
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Given that a tablet is probably meant to be written on while held in one arm... are there hotspots on these things that slowly cook your arm?
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
You look at your needs and you takes your choices. I have a 1.1Ghz Compaq/HP TC 1100 and for most tasks (even including, surprisingly enough, Photoshop), it works quite well.
Yeah, but there's no bluetooth. Isn't the point of these things to give me more freedom? Well, I hate wires.
Since most corporate desktops are rarely 3.2GHz gaming machines with 1 Gig of RAM (in fact, most of the corporate desktops I use are barely more powerful than your laptop), I would first guess that you are running on a wireless network or cable modem. A cable modem is not a T1 line, after all. And, since it is not a T1 line, it takes much longer to compile.
I totally agree with you... after all this is clearly targetted at real-time 3D modelling (what else would you use a portable battery-operated device for?), so we do need something with quad 3.7GHz Xeons.
Lithium ion is far superior to Li-polymer, Electrovaya's polymer is well known for only getting 200-300 cycles, only a year of use for business... Li-ion typically gets 500 to 1000 cycles with a nicer fade over the life cycle.
I vote for the Toshiba Portege M200 though. Much higher resolution (12.1" XVGA+ 1400x1050 pixels), faster Centrino (1.5GHz on mine, 1.6GHz on newer versions), SD card reader, PC Card slot, USB 2.0. And a very cool built-in accelerometer that is underused, but there's a demo application available called WinGimcana.
The battery life we got with Scribblers was closer to about 6 hours than eight, but it's still pretty good.
The irritating thing about them is that you have to manually turn the wireless connection on every time you boot the tablet. You can't make it automatic. Very irritating.
In addition, we did a review on one model scribbler, which met our needs (2050, I believe). By the time we got around to ordering them, they had discontinued that model and gave us newer ones (2150, I believe) Every single one of the newer ones has had major issues remaining connected to the wireless network. They are constantly dropping packets. It's possible they fixed this in the 2250, but I'd be careful before buying one.
Judgeing by your comment I wonder if you realize that Tablet PCs are fundamentally pen-based computers. And the pen functionality is VERY slick indeed. I have a Toshiba M200 and its I never get tired of whipping it out in class and using it to take notes. Its really helped my to improve my note taking.
Aahh, disinformation. Guess who makes just about every tablet's (except the, iirc, HPaq TC-1k) digitiser? Wacom.
Try Corewar @ www.koth.org - rec.games.corewar
yup, i am gonna spend 2000 dollars on a 12.1 inch TOUCHSCREEN so i can run LINUX IN TEXT MODE.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think it means option 3 on this link. The Poster was complaining about the amount of time it took to "compile". I was pointing out that there are multiple reasons why it takes apps a long time to compile, not just chip speed.
The eight hour battery life sounds impressive. But what I want to know is, why can't we get that kind of long lasting power out of boring old regular laptops? I don't need exotic features, but it seems that every time I go shopping for a working laptop power is at the bottom of the list, but there are tons of impressive power hogging features that are bundled with the product that I usually don't want or need.
When I'm on the road, typically the only thing I need a laptop for is MS office (writing documents, working with spreadsheets), and occasionally working with some other third party apps like Primavera's Suretrak (which, incidentally, I hate).
I can think of a number power hungry features that I don't want or need, that takes away my battery life:
High-power graphics: I don't play 3d games on the laptop. I have a desktop at home for playing games, and if I'm bored on the road, my phone has enough entertainment titles installed on it to placate me. I don't do professional quality graphic arts work on the laptop. In reality, a 800x600 screen with 16 bit color would be aptly handle my work. So a power hungry graphics accelerator isn't needed, or any advanced graphics features. Also, I often find myself in well lit areas, and it would be nice to be able to easily turn off the backlight on the LCD display to save on juice, but I've yet to see that implemented.
CPU hogging apps: Why is it every time I unpack a laptop, there seem to be dozens of background applications pre-installed? I don't need them, and I don't want them, and I always end up having to spend lots of time uninstalling them. I get this with desktops, too. Windows appears to love including all sorts of unnecessary bloat which gobbles up CPU cycles. If there was some way to get rid of all this crud, I could easily get by with slower (and less power hungry) CPU. I don't follow mobile technology closely, but if I remember the whole hub-bub surrounding Transmeta's Crusoe chip (other then Torvald's name being attached) was that it could husband the cpu's power requirements based on needs of the OS. Something like that would work great for me, since most of the time I'm just typing into a MS Word document which shouldn't require that much in terms of CPU cycles.
Sound: Does anyone really need stereo sound on a laptop? I hardly need sound to begin with, and I certainly don't need to be driving two speakers on my laptop. I'm somewhat of an audiophile, and I like good sound from my home stereo and portable music devices. But from my laptop computer it's more or less wasted. Granted, I can always (and usually do) mute the sound on my laptop to save energy, but it seems that a lot of power is being driven towards something that really only serves the purpose of giving warning bells and beeps. Sure, some people like to use their laptops as portable DVD players while on flights, but for me that's really not a necessity.
Peripherals: I've never used or needed the CD-Rom burner on my laptops. Lately when I need to quickly transfer data from one machine to another, I'll use a USB thumb drive (a technology which I've learned to love!) In fact, I've never used any removable storage drives on my computer while mobile. Yet when I turn the laptop on, I can hear the drives spinning up, sucking power away. On my old laptop I had a secondary battery I could put in the slot where the CD-Rom goes, but I still had to carry around the drive in my laptop bag. That's not to say that I'd never need a CD-Rom drive, but it would be nice if I could easily just turn it off (as opposed to yanking it out of the laptop).
Networking: Wifi is great. There are times when I can and do use wired or wireless networking when the laptop isn't plugged in. But I don't see why the integrated 802.11x device in my laptop needs to be on and taking up power while I'm in flight, or when I'm on the side of the road just trying to finish up a report. From what I understand, the wifi device is always running in the back
The Internet is generally stupid
Unless your just planning on using spreadsheet and word I would see most sales in the near future going toward those who want the entire multimedia deal, I would use it as my computer of choice given the oppertunity to trick it out, and of course, run Suse 9.1. New battery technology will help make more then just this lameass product run for long periods, it will help fuel the convergence so I can make a call, organize my stocks and play Doom 3 while riding the A train at the same time. Good deal on the battery but the product its self just issint impressive enough to buy.