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Dell's 'Dual Personality' Laptop
njkobie writes "Dell was the unlikely star of today's keynote at IDF, unveiling a convertible tablet. While that might sound a bit been there, done that, the Inspiron Duo can be used as a tablet or opened up to offer a keyboard. The screen rotates inside the frame, taking it to the netbook form factor. It runs on an Atom processor and will be available at the end of the year, Dell said."
I know I've seen this design before... the only difference is the Dell's screen (glass part) flips instead of the whole top. I feel that I would prefer the other design since it has a bigger hinge, less likely to break then that Dell's.
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But that is really cool and innovative. This product fulfills a need that is currently not being met. I'm sure that will be copycaters pretty soon.
I like this but...
I wonder how many times you can convert it before it breaks.
Does dirt and stuff get in the mechanism?
The rotating screen is a cool idea but the screen itself looks as thick as an iPad, the upper half looks thicker yet and the bottom half about the same as the top making for one chunky looking device.
Given all the griping about the iPad's weight I wonder how much battery they could pack in with all that extra hardware.
It would probably be better if, instead of the screen flipping inside the frame, they had made it so that if you opened the laptop up completely to 180 degrees, you could then just slide the screen down across the keyboard.
Or is that how it was done before?
Technoli
Well, maybe it's a dual core atom processor
The article does mention Win7, but makes no mention of battery life. You can presumably put other OSes on it if you want. Battery life will probably be better than a typical laptop but worse than a long-life netbook or ultraportable, based on my guesses at how much of its chassis can be battery and the probable power consumption of the parts we know about (10" screen, Atom 550). I'd guess 6-8 hours, but though I'd love to see better I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it's only 5 hours either.
Cost is unknown but if it's more than about $500 it's going to sell pretty poorly. Throw in WiMAX or similar and I'd either pay a bit more or accept a contract in exchange for a price subsidy.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The X41 from IBM did this in 2005 also.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/120592/ibm_turns_its_thinkpad_into_a_tablet_pc.html
We have a couple of these at the office still. They were horribly slow and horribly expensive... a great idea that came way too early for the technology and it never sold well. We'll see if Dell does any better.
So it's a generic convertible tablet PC like we've had for ages, except the screen rotates along the x axis instead of the y axis? Why is this news?
What does this do that my X61t doesn't?
I want to know if it has or can be upgraded to have a Wacom digitizer. Fingerpainting is fine, and reading books with your fingers has an intuitiveness to it, but I've been waiting ages for a nice thin pen-enabled tablet.
When will they realise that it's not the hardware that matters but the software.
I've seen a convertible laptop/tablet before at a customer site. He was trying to use it to take notes. But thanks to Windows it required a reboot as it wouldn't come out of sleep properly. It's a bit annoying when you all have to sit there and wait to start a meeting while a laptop boots.
Anything tablet like needs to be instant on/off. No HDDs, no x86 Intel processors and a keyboard should be totally detachable for those who don't want to use it.
And looks pretty rubbish loved the crappy input latency on the map app and the fact that they're still using mouse emulation for the touchscreen.... I thought Windows 7 had proper support for touch input.
If you don't know any details it's OK to say nothing.
Other than the fact that it's a Dell, and therefore a complete piece of shit, it sounds great.
Proverbs 21:19
Now that my love affair with Netbooks has ended, I have an overwhelming feeling of "what was I thinking".
This Dell toy will probably be just as slow as those X41 from 2005, IMO Intel Atom is a step in the wrong direction, what we need are i7 with great battery life.
Not only does it sound a bit like been there, done that, it was done ... several times ... by several different manufacures.
They all failed. Touch interfaces fucking suck. Apple has a nice one on the iPhone for what its for, but you don't sit around using an iPhone for hours on end to accomplish things.
Touch is good for short, dedicated, standardized input, like picking a phone number out of a list to call.
Touch freaking sucks for any sort of data input, your hands get tired VERY quickly regardless of how big the screen is. Holding a tablet and trying to input data on it sucks, try holding your laptop while standing and entering data while its closed like you were touching a touch screen. Just stand there for 5 minutes holding it in your arm and you'll be exhausted. When its sitting on a desk with the screen open, now you have to hold you hands in the air to touch the screen, again, your arms will be exhausted in short order.
When you get to the size of a tablet, just using the keyboard is far easier. Smaller than a tablet and it starts to get a little different, but thats because you're going to do less overall on the smaller device so the UI can be streamlined and made more useful and less of a chore, and the entire device gets shrunk and form factored to make holding it not a chore. Think about the scanning guns stock boys use in grocery store, tablet would suck to carry around and work on, but a smaller, fewer option, form factor device is actually good to work with.
Tables fail because, contrary to the current belief, using touch interfaces fucking suck. I was using touch interfaces 20 years ago, they still have the exact same problem, its still a shitty input interface for anything more than a tiny subset of functionality.
Touch tablets are an invention without a use. Touch is great for kiosks that users use for 20-60 seconds max, after that, its a hassle.
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Here's exactly what so many posters on Slashdot complain that they want - a full PC they can install anything on in a tablet form.
I wonder if it will even be around a year from now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This video says it has a dual core atom processor and Windows 7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_JU0sYCpRs
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Wait, you mean I can't play my Super-CDRom2 discs on this Dell?
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A dual personality seems fitting:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/06/29/1618205/Dell-Selling-Faulty-PCs
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...the chip is different but for whatever reason the Windows platform performance is extremely sluggish...
Behold its majesty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadem_Clio
I really wanted one when it came out, precisely because of the form factor. Given that it runs Wince 2.1 (Sorry, WinCE 2.1), I was probably better off.
But a clever design.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
The whole idea is to move away from ridiculous contraptions with moving parts that add weight!
It would be cooler if you just closed the lid and BAM there was your screen on the outside of the lid. OLEDs would be good for that. Thinner/lighter so two wouldn't add as much weight as two traditional LCD panels.
No sig for you!!
It can do a lot a things as a netbook, but won't be able to as many things as a tablet or as well as a dedicated tablet.
That's the problem with the Windows Tablet (and has been for years) not all the programs available will take advantage of the tablet. Programs that do take advantage of the tablet, do it so poorly that you prefer to run it as a netbook. Thus all you end up with is a netbook with a neat gimmick.
There is something to be said about devices that are dedicated tablets. If it runs in Windows then I'm tempted to make a program that can use a keyboard so I can take advantage of an already large audience. There isn't as much temptation with iOS or Android because even though both have access to a keyboard (iOS via bluetooth) the devices do not have a ready made market of legacy devices that were keyboard centric.
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Have you looked at the HP tm2t? I bought one recently to use for grad school and it has a Wacom digitizer. It's only about an inch and ahalf thick, around 5 hours battery life, and is pretty snappy with the low end 1.2 GHz Core i3. They're not exactly cheap, mine was about $900 after a $200 discount, but it's significantly cheaper than other similar tablets.
I wrote this post on my tm2t.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Wrong. If you want use just your fingers, then yes, they're not too hot - but if you use a pen, then Windows 7 is great on a tablet. Even the default handwriting recognition is pretty damn accurate (you can train it to better fit your writing style). Don't bash it until you try it.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I was thinking more along the lines of the ultra thin, ultra light form factor variety...4.5pds doesn't quite cut it:) I've got my old m200 for now.
Well if you want to wait 10 years for technology to advance that far, that's up to you. I was just informing you of options that exist outside of Star Trek.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I still have a Powerbook Duo 270c.
But I know what you mean.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Yup. From when I got my first 6x9 Wacom tablet, back in early 90's, have wanted a tablet display on it. At the time, I wasn't too concerned if it had to be hooked in to a parent machine but after seeing what the iPad and similar systems can do with size and weight, am really hoping for a real Wacom tablet.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Or, use the technology that's available now , throw in a 3mm digitizer and write down "I will not use snarky sarcasm when dealing with subjects of which I understand little."
Even the default handwriting recognition is pretty damn accurate (you can train it to better fit your writing style).
I was actually astonished at how accurate it was -- and surprisingly, it's actually better at cursive than print. XP was pretty poor when it came to non-words (e.g. URLs), but Vista and 7 improve that as well. I forget whether it was introduced in Vista or 7, but if the application supports it, the pen input panel can actually do some pretty neat stuff. (E.g. compare the URL bar in Firefox and IE using that input panel on Win 7.)
I dual boot that machine with Kubuntu (actually triple boot -- XP, 7, and Kubuntu), and unfortunately there's nothing close I've found.
That said... what I found personally is that the main thing it is good for was taking notes with OneNote. There you're not using the input panel mostly only if you're flipping back and forth to Firefox or something. For times when I wasn't OneNote-ing it up, it stayed in laptop mode. (It's also somewhat amusing to play StarCraft in tablet mode. No hotkeys is hard...) If you don't use it for that purpose much, the tablet doesn't buy you much, even with a pen. Why would I write something when I can type faster?
The technology doesn't exist now - it may be close, but to have the kind of device you want (and I want too), it's going to be several more years.
But I guess wishing the future was here now and being a dick to people who offer you alternatives that already exist works better for you.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
on how many of them will be returned with the screen hinges busted after the first three months.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Yup. Onenote is exactly why I bought a tablet (since I just started grad school). The Windows Journal app works great too.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I shouldn't feed the troll but...
A) the alternative you gave me was no better than what I use now.
B) your response to me starting that fact was childish
C) take an ipad or android tablet, shove 3mm worth of digitizer pcb below the lcd. How was that star trek level future tech?
Actually, just a ThinkPad X41 Tablet, but you swivel the screen, and presto, tablet. I bought it used, cheap, so it's fun.
It needs a Wacom style pen, but it's a tablet, just not touchisensitive.
And even accounting for the pen, it's not all that.
And this kludge by Dell looks equal parts flimsy and flaky. I give it a C- on sight.
Now the Lenovo S10-3t was interesting. And the U1 was very cool looking. Can I find one?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So, a tablet with a wireless "base" that has a DVD drive, keyboard, and touchpad, and which the tablet snaps into to protect the screen when not in use, seems the logical way to go. The main point is co-locate the screen and processor so you don't have the video signal sent through the hinge.
Check out the Always Innovating Touchbook to see what your idea looks like in practice. It has its own issues, mainly that the weight distribution is very unlike that of a laptop, producing a top heavy device which tends to fall over if opened at a nice reading angle. Yes, they've mitigated the problem it by modifying the base, and eventually we might see lighter circuitry (or heavier batteries) remove the issue.
It is a shame that they seem to be mismanaging their opportunity away. They've ran into issues that leave Feb. orders unfilled today. They've also stated that they will not produce more product due to the commitments in developing their "new" version.
Dell's dual personality laptop. Is it a piece of shit or a piece of crap?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
So, you're basically saying that they made a huge smartphone with an Ix86 processor? (HTC Touch Pro 2 has a full QWERTY keyboard, and a touch screen. When you open the keyboard, you can even tilt it so it gives you the laptop form factor. Why does this qualify as "breaking news"? The tech to do this has existed for at least 5 years in the pocket PC market. My cell phone is still smaller, and has just as much capabilities as one of these crap-tastic huge smartphones. Hell, I can even print from my phone it I wanted to.
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a lenovo x60 has a wacom
pretty thick, though
with the Lenovo S10-3t tablet/netbook convertible. The Lenovo hardware is for the most part excellent; the Atom processor is a bit slow for some tasks, but the battery life makes that a reasonable trade-off for me. Around the time of the iPad launch, some people were saying the S10-3t might prove to be an iPad killer. It might not have been a killer, but it could have been a contender, but for its Achilles heel: the Windows tablet functionality is so bad that the device is almost non-functional as a tablet. This was true even after I upgraded to Windows 7 Home Premium, which certainly alleviated some of the problems with touch control.
The biggest problem with the device the Windows interface, which wasn't designed for finger input. You can't see window decorations like the close button, because they're under your finger. Controls near the screen edge are hard to work. The Windows solution to this is a kind bizarre ghost mouse that you can configure to appear when you touch the screen. As with a real mouse, it is offset from the cursor, which moves as you drag it along. This kind of works, although the behavior is awkward when you approach the right side of the screen, but it is not configured on by default, probably because it would be too confusing.
The virtual keyboard is unreliable, not always popping when you need it. The solution to that is to have a kind of hotspot at the edge of the screen where it looks like the edge of the keyboard peeps into the frame. You click on the hotspot and the keyboard pops. This hotspot is only a couple of pixels wide, and very hard to activate on a capacitive touchscreen using your finger.
The touchscreen interface to Windows 7 is beyond clunky. It is practically unusable for general purposes... at least with fingertip input. Overall I'd say that anyone who wants Windows 7 on a tablet should opt for a resistive touchscreen with a stylus, which is much closer to the traditional mouse control Windows was designed for. While you lose multi-touch, this set-up has advantage for tasks like drawing or jotting notes longhand.
I like the Lenovo S10-3T overall as a netbook. I frequently use it when I need netbook-like properties (long battery life and compact size), but I almost never use it in tablet configuration, even though that takes only a quck twist of the screen hinge. It would also be possible to design applications for this device that exploit the touchscreen interface although manipulating windows and Windows menus though the Windows interface is not practical.
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"While that might sound a bit been there, done that, the Inspiron Duo can be used as a tablet or opened up to offer a keyboard."
So...like multiple other tablet/laptops already on the market. Thanks for the Dell commercial.