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IBM Tablet Announced
Ahkorishaan writes "We heard from an earlier report here on Slashdot that IBM(Lenovo) had filed a patent on a TabletPC, and now they have officially announced the product. Our friends at Laptop Logic have a short review."
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i love how IBM's thinkpads still look nearly the same as they did 15 years ago and they still look cool.
I hope IBM will make Tablet PCs useful for college students, for the education market and for artists.
Current Tablets are not very attractive because of
- short battery life (if you're going to use your tablet for classes, you need more than 2 hours--anything over 4 hours would be best)
- high price tags
Tablets are currently targeted at executives, but there are surely a lot of students, graphics freelancers etc. around who would possibly buy a Tablet if it were useful and affordable.where's all that Karma?
Let's get it right: IBM got OUT of the PC business and sold off everything to Lenovo. Don't keep confusing the consumer by saying "IBM(Lenovo)". It's "Lenovo", a chinese company that uses wage slaves and makes insanely crappy hardware. You think phone support is bad now with the indian outsourcing, you just wait.
I've had a Toshiba M200 for almost a year. Its a very popular tablet. It weighs a bit more than this new Lenovo, but has a higher screen res (1400x1050) and a faster CPU and probably hard disk (mine is a 60GB 7200 RPM drive). It also has a tilt sensing accelerometer, but I'm not aware of any cool applications for that. :)
Just to swipe at a few fallacies:
1. As a tablet, its a decently powerful machine. Pentium M @1600 mhz is a nice chip, and it supports up to 2 GB RAM. I used to disdain notebooks and always go for custom built desktops, but its been my full time workstation since I got it.
2. It was more expensive, but not much more than a comparable good quality notebook. Certainly not cheap though.
3. Battery life is up to four hours.
4. Getting Linux to run on it is a pain, but that has more to do with laptop power management functions and other non Tablet details. Several people (who have more dedication/knowledge than me) have gotten theirs running fully, including pen input.
For my *nix needs, I currently use CoLinux; I can run a CoLinux instance (which is running X, Gnome, and server stuff like Apache and Mysql), Eclipse on the Windows side, a bunch of Firefox browsers on both sides (which use the most memory), VNC @ 1400x1050x16 into the Linux side, and assorted shells and its still comfortably usable for dev with 1 GB of RAM.
5. I almost never use the pen for text input, but the convertible form factor is very handy (for example, when on a train/plane or reading on the couch) and using the pen is a nice alternative to the mouse/trackpad (I do wish it had a trackpoint).
6. All the Journal/Onenote stuff seems interesting, but I haven't really checked it out since it doesn't have much to do with my main work and I don't feel particularly inclined to commit to anything from one vendor.
The speech integration is cool, and after MS did an update I notice it responds to some words especially well (it favours pronounciation of "United Nations").
7. It has a dedicated button to take you to Windows Task Manager (where you view and kill processes). The button icon represents a toilet plunger. Very apropos. This is probably to cover for the fact that there has been a memory leak problem with the MS tablet software 'tcserver' for some time that MS has refused to fix. After a week or so of operation it gobbles up a bunch of RAM. Go Microsoft.
Note I'm talking about a convertible, not a true tablet, which don't have an attached keyboard and are lighter. If any of the above sounds good to you or you just like trying new stuff, you might want to consider a similar device.