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Odd Laptop-Tablet Hybrids Show PC Makers' Panic
jfruh writes "Taipei's Computex trade show has seen an array of strange devices on sale that are somewhere between PCs and tablets: laptops with screens you can twist in every direction, tablets with detachable keyboards, all-in-one PCs with detachable monitors. Some have Intel chips, some ARM chips; some run Windows 8, some Android. They all exist because of the cheap components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."
My cousin has had an HP that did this before the iPad was a thing. It runs WinXP for Tablets.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Of course we need Steve Jobs to tell us what we need, the consumers can't choose for themselves based on the choices in the market which is always bad. We need only one or two form factors.
These two should be banned from the market by fiat. for not conforming to Jobs' dictates and taste It's not like anyone would find it right for themselves right?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6jnrRRAcZc
http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/05/25/microsoft-sell-80-inch-windows-8-tablet/
This space for rent.
I had my first x86 Windows 'tablet' (Back when the term meant one of these things) back in 2005, it cost a fortune, and I'm sure a lots of other slashdotters could beat me on that time years before that. Now days we also have the low-end ones that seemed to be called 'netvertibles'. Either way, the concept is neither new nor odd for anyone who has a clue and isn't using these devices as toys, the summary is just written by someone who can't see beyond 3 years ago and blinded by marketing that espouses real 'innovation'.
PC makers show chimeras in tradeshows because that is what the trade shows are meant for.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If you don't know what to do, throw lots of shit against a wall and see what sticks.
Innovation it ain't, but it can pay off.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Companies follow the market, news at 11!
Seriously though the market IS in transition as mobile starts to take over from traditional PCs, and companies know that's happening and want to be on that train. It doesn't mean they will all succeed. Some will look pretty stupid in trying, but they know that they must try, or become dinosaurs and go the way of all those mainframe companies that were so successful in the 1960's.
The only constant of the world is change.
i like my iphone and ipad because of the cool apps. today i found one called eventster. it tells me all upcoming events around me. sure i can do this on a laptop by googling, but its automatic on my phone and ipad.
same with lots of other apps i have
selling some mutant laptop/tablet isnt going to make people run out and buy it. hyping paper specs will get a few people to buy it. having actual software that takes advantage of the form factor as well as how and when people use the device is what is going to drive sales
Since when is innovating "freaking out". There is a long standing tradition of trying many different form factors and designs. Well at least for companies not named Apple. It's exciting to see all these possibilities. Time to move behind the frankly terrible interface of a capacitive touchscrean only.
I want a LARGE tablet. My laptop screen is about 8in by 14in. So, what I want, is a table the size of this screen with a keyboard that has a touchpad I can attach for serious typing. I want it to have all of the ports I usually use, at a minimum this is HDMI and 2 USB ports. It should also have a headphone jack and speakers. It should run Win7, and eventually Win9 because all the software I use is windows based. The processor should be capable of handling Matlab, Mathematica and some light Solidworks. Or, for the rest of us, decent video playback in at least 720 HD.
I would be willing to pay up to 1K for this, assuming that it will last me 3 years.
I do NOT want a toy to play angry birds on. I do NOT want a 7 inch screen. I do NOT want a locked in App store. I do NOT need iOS animation. I do NOT want locked in Android distros with their crappy app offerings. I want something that I can use for work and read on in bed. I want a productivity tool.
Here's the thing: this has been going on for laptop and cell phone manufacturers since... forever. These people don't know where the technology is going, they don't have a plan, and they arguably don't know how to make a good product. Given the technical capabilities of computers these days, it's amazing how poor a job manufacturers are doing of actually solving problems or giving people what they want.
Tablets will get their own clientele, and will never kill off laptop/PC sales, simply because they can't get powerful enough. Each class of devices has its pros and cons, and therefore, their own market segment.
PC-s are the heavy artillery of computing: extremely powerful, but immobile. Quad-core graphics chips or no, you probably won't see someone rendering 3D models on a tablet, simply because they are not powerful enough to do what a PC's borbdingnagian graphics cards and n-core CPUs can do in a flash.
Laptops are a sort of heavy in-betweeners: increasingly mobile but ultimately constrained by their batteries and trading processing power for uptime, increasingly powerful, but unable to match PCs due to power, heat dissipation and other constraints. They can be used for heavy lifting on the go, but should only be used thus if no better options are available.
Tablets are the light in-betweeners: mainly fit for viewing content, not for creating it, they are ideal for sales people who can present media-rich demos to their clients, and top managers, who can use them to tie together various information sources on the go to make their decisions.
Smartphones are the Swiss army knives: they can do anything in a pinch, but if there's a specialized tool, better use that. They are highly mobile computing platforms, almost exclusively for viewing content due to their small screens not leaving room for a virtual keyboard, but due to their always-on Internet connections, they can be used to look up information and communicate with other systems/devices on the go.
I expect that soon, as the novelty of the iPad and other tablets wears off, and youngsters recognize that these devices are not the end-all to their computing (playing Angry Birds) problems, each platform will find their own user strata, with laptops and smartphones once again becoming the most prolific, with PCs taking sort of a back row, and tablets being mainly relegated to consumption roles instead of general purpose use or content generation.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
This is how tablets were envisioned before and frankly it is better. The iPad allows a remote keyboard, we have one. Some vendors make keyboards for the iPad that snap on. Frankly, this is what I want in a device. I use a real keyboard for input most of the time and it is far faster than the onscreen keyboard. Being able to combine a touch screen with a keyboard is ideal. At the desk or in one's lap one has a notebook computer's advantages. While walking around with it in the crook of your arm, reading at the table or in bed one has the advantages of just the screen. (Sure, there are other things to do in bed but how many times a night?)
I Like
OMG I want a PC I can carry around easily and have a keyboard when I want it. I must be a total freak to what such an odd device. I mean PCs have ALWAYS been laptops and only laptops right? Forever! Desktops never existed. And Tablets have always just been a screen right? For all of human history these devices have been split into the defined types and not one would ever think to try to break those molds....anyone who is even thinking about it should be dragged out into the streets and beaten.
Nobody who actually knows how to use a computer prefers tablets. You can't do anything meaningful on a tablet as easily as you can on a regular PC. For people who think "hacking" consists of posting Instagram pictures to Facebook, tablets are the rage. For people who are coding, using Photoshop to edit pictures from actual cameras, word processing, managing servers, doing database work, etc., tablets are shit.
Some professors use them to lecture on. That way they can write notes on what they are showing. However it is a real laptop so it can do all the things a real computer can (like run Matlab in the case of where I work).
Is it for everyone? No certainly not. I have no interest, I just ordered a new laptop with no tablet abilities for me, and it isn't the kind of thing someone who wants something extremely thin, light, and cheap would want. However there's a market for it. Some people want a more powerful computer that is still a tablet. Some want one that converts in to a laptop too (the X220 is a convertible).
There's no single design for everyone.
'Nuff said
Most of the people I know with an iPad keep it in a case with a bluetooth keyboard. When I see them surfing and working, it's always in the propped up position and they're typing on the physical keyboard. These are all people who probably would consider something like a Windows 8 tablet with a slide out keyboard. These OEMs probably are just responding to seeing that kind of demand. As someone who codes, I know I personally would like something like this over a soft-keyboard-only iPad. (Notwithstanding the fact that you can't actually code on an iPad whereas I can run VS or any other IDE on Windows 8)
I've got the ARM version of the Transformer, and it's exactly that. A tablet, but you can plug it into a foldable keyboard dock that turns it into a netbook.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
The other day at Starbucks I noticed that on a line of about eight tables (usually one person per table) there were zero tables, one Asus notebook, one Asus netbook (mine) and six Apple notebooks. It seems likely to me that the PC makers should be frightened about the Ipads because they lead people to consider Mac notebooks of one flavor or another, people who would have bought Windows notebooks in the past. So all of these funny hybrids are not going to stick. People will look at Ipads, decide not to buy them, look at the Mac notebooks right next to them, and buy.
I had a dell laptop with a rotating "touch" (stylus) screen nearly a decade ago. Its not new.
it can do all the things a real computer can (like run Matlab in the case of where I work).
Well why not use an iPad for that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Old laptops and desktops are more powerful than most need, that is why the PC market is slow. We need a reason for the higher performance, it isn't there, even in gaming. (my 2009 box runs just about everything with wide open settings).
I know way more people that won't part with their laptops and netbooks, than people who use exclusively their tablets. A survey of my colleagues at the research institute where I work shows that tablet use is mostly sporadic or none at all. Even for casual browsing, the number of people using netbooks at least rivals, if not outnumbers, those using tablets.
And finally, at least a fifth if not more of my tablet-using friends hate it: they bought it on hype and are now disappointed by the lack of a keyboard and (meaningful) internal storage. The whole "app" paradigm seems to make them puke rather than rejoice.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Every tablet I looked at before purchasing my new netbook said not designed for business use, designd to allow streaming media on the go. I want a PC not a TV!
How is it that tablets are replacing PCs?
.
Let's get the facts, historically.
1) Microsoft and others made tablets, no one cared about it.
2) Apple released a tablet, it sold very well..
3) Android-based tablets also did well..
4) Netbook sales are down , while tablet sales grow, this makes some sense, as both were meant as accessory devices.
5) Notebook sales also down, but is it really because of tablets or because current hardware is good enough?.
6) Microsoft releases Windows 7, a 100% Desktop OS, people is happy with it..
7) Gnome 3, Ubutunu decide to ditch traditional desktop paradigm.
8) Despite the success of Windows 7, Microsoft decides to deprecate desktop paradigm and move to tablet-like in Windows 8..
9) Apple announces their OS is called "Lion", potentially meaning a big change is near, next one is Mountain Lion though..
So, all of sudden, the entire tech world has decided that tablets are the future and desktop & mobile UIs will converge, even though historically it is the fact that they ended up being fundamentally different what made them succeed..
I must be stupid, but I truly and honestly still don't see why this wll happen, so I'd very much appreciate someone more tech-literate than me to explain the future.
you probably won't see someone rendering 3D models on a tablet
What do you think happens 20 to 60 times a second in any tablet game? Tablet graphics aren't in the N64/DS days with a limit of 2000 triangles per scene anymore.
PC makers realize that the true value of the tablet functionality is not necessarily being a pure tablet, but that having the capability to interface with peripherals and *gasps* keyboards is something users actually want!
Seriously, I have no problem using a tablet as my primary device, for email, programming, novel writing, etc. But I need a keyboard to do that, and the ability to hook up a larger monitor at times would be useful.
So no, it's not an act of desparation (except the part about putting Windows on them, which is Microsoft's desparation, not OEMs), but responding to what the market wants.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
"blah blah blah the PC is dead blah blah blah".
Funniest thing is when I see someone trying to force productivity on something like an iPad. I'm not talking about a consumer of content. Not talking about someone that is doing work on an iPad using an app specifically designed for it. In these cases, the iPad is great.
I'm talking about when someone is remoted into a terminal server via Citrix on their iPad, trying to manipulate a spreadsheet in Excel on a touchscreen. In fact, forget Excel. Substitute your favorite enterprisy custom line-of-business app with a nice enterprisy GUI.
I'm talking about when I see someone walk in with a laptop bag. Okay. They pull out an iPad. Okay. They pull out a keyboard. Then a mouse. Hmm. Then some sort of convoluted stand to prop the iPad up. Then they put this shit together into something that would look like a joke 10 years ago. That's funny. It reminds me of that scene from Tin Cup where Costner is wearing a whole bunch of golf aids all at once when his swing went all to shit (sorry, I couldn't find a screenshot).
It's as if people are forcing themselves to work on the device in order to justify a purchase that wasn't well thought out.
This is why I think tablets are a semi-fad. They aren't going away. There are a great many uses for them. And they are very useful for *specific* jobs in the workplace. But this notion that you can do typical office work on an tablet is going to pass.
And I know about the Arstechnica article you're thinking of. The fact that the editors and moderators of that site so vehemently defended the woman that wrote that fluff piece kind of illustrates my point, in a way. People know it sucks to try to do "work" on a tablet, but they are still in denial.
I actually stopped visiting Arstechnica after they went ape shit on their readers' because there was so much disagreement over the article. Pretty fucking childish.
It's the opposite of "stagnation".
When Microsoft launched the TabletPC initiative, there were quite a few different configurations available, for different uses. As that initiative lost steam, most of that "biodiversity" was lost and we were left with just a bunch of laptops with swivel screens and a few ruggedised slates: the survival of the fittest for that technological environment.
Now the environment has changed, there's been new DNA injected into the laptop/tablet market (from Apple and Google), and we're seeing an outbreak of new species emerging. That's a positive development, not just a sign of doom. I'm more excited about the potential of the tablet market than I have been in years.
What I'm hoping for is that in the process of all this, someone will finally bring out something suitable for serious artistic use. I've been getting by, doing digital illustration on an underpowered old 10" HP slate and more recently a clunky 12" Fujitsu convertible, but what would really get my dollars would be a slate in the 15" range with Wacom stylus support, solid state storage, and the ability to run off-the-shelf Windows (or in my dreams, OS X) software. More briefly: a bigger iPad with a proper stylus, running Photoshop.
But that's just for me (and the many other digital artists like me). What seems like an obvious set of features to me must seem "odd" to someone more accustomed to web-surfing tablets or word-processing laptops, and I'm sure I'd find someone else's ideal a bit odd myself. So far, neither the surviving TabletPC dinosaurs nor the furry first-generation tablets are quite what I'm looking for, and if a "panic" is what it takes to finally get them crossbred into a "hybrid" that can survive (and maybe even thrive) in a new niche, then let the panic ensue!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm not so sure I accept the premise that the variety of new portable computing platforms which combine the power of a traditional laptop with the convenience and intuitive interface of a tablet is an example of PC makers "freaking out". Why shouldn't we celebrate the new variety in approaches to portable computing?
So who benefits from describing this rich new portable ecosystem as "freaking out"? Who benefits from characterizing a rich variety of portable computers with touch screens and choices of OS & hardware? My guess is a particular well-known California company that specializes in limiting consumers' choices when it comes to hardware/OS configurations.
Not everyone wants exactly the same thing, you know, despite their best efforts to turn personal computing into a proprietary platform for consuming instead of a platform for computing, creating, doing.
This article is textbook FUD. "Freaking out", indeed.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you think Matlab mobile does the same thing as the real Matlab with toolboxes you've never used Matlab.
Actually I used Matlab quite heavily for a year or so in school. But I have not used it for a while, it could be as you say that it's more limited, but why do you think so? Have you used it?
I see no reason it should not be as powerful given how it is built.
Also, what with being a normal Windows laptop it'll run any other software we happen to use in engineering (like Cadence, HFSS, ADS, and so on)
How many people would really run those things on a tiny PCTablet?
Oh and there's the fact that Windows integrates nicely in to being centrally managed, and the iPad does not.
Why not? iOS devices have quite a lot of ability to be managed centrally, you can define profiles that control how the devices work to a large extent. That's why they have made a lot of inroads for enterprise use.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Having used hundreds of computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones and all the strange beasts in between, I keep going back to the desktop when I need to actually get some real work done.
For Techno-masturbation each to their own, but I don’t see the desktop going away anytime soon for the real work.
Hell I have gone back to using paper and pencil for most of my design/draft work as I find the interface easy to use. On the second draft I use the desktop tools to finish off what I need.
Frankly dealing with all the touch interfaces, pinching, swiping, licking, whatever is a hindrance to productivity and puts them in the “play” category for the time being.
He means rendering something like in Blender or Maya.
There's also a difference between Blender's ray-tracing renderer and its OpenGL renderer. The OpenGL renderer is used in the modeler and in the game engine. I've made (fairly simple) 3D models using Blender's modeler on a netbook with an Atom CPU and Intel "Graphics My Ass" IGP with no problem. The differences between a tablet and a nebook lie more in the input devices (multitouch screen vs. mouse and keyboard) and in the restrictions that the hardware manufacturer imposes on applications' capabilities than on processing power.
as a PC gamer I say tablet graphics are waaaaaay back in the N64/PS1 days.
The PSP is half a decade older than the iPad and PSP graphics were already much more detailed than N64/PS1/DS graphics. I'd say tablets are comparable to PS2/GameCube more than N64/PS1/DS.
I had better anti-aliasing on a Voodoo card.
The sixth-generation consoles (PS2 and GameCube) didn't have edge AA either.
They all exist because of the cheap components now available, and because Windows 8 will make touch interfaces possible — but mostly they exist because PC makes are starting to freak out about being left behind by the tablet revolution."
What is being left behind is the device that'll allow all the rest from big to small, local and cloud, to all work together in a unified manner, without drawing attention to itself.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
...Compaq Concerto from 1994 running Windows for Pen Computing ?
That's what it takes to run Siri. Sure, Apple could put the speech recognition part of Siri into the iPad, but that's only part of the whole system. The rest is the artificial intelligence to decipher what you actually *mean*. That uses a lot of computing power and storage, and relies on what millions of other people are saying in order to help tune the system with a sort of crowd-sourcing.
So, given that Apple has to ship your speech off to the servers to be analyzed anyway, might as well offload the speech processing too and just ship the audio to the cloud. This also allows them to tweak and refine it without software updates to your device.
Matlab mobile is a remote interface for interacting with a session running on another computer.
Exactly why I asked why it would be limited in capability compared to a desktop version.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This iteration of the tablet fad is half over. In a couple of years you'll see iPads at yard sales and in college dorms wedged under the laundry room door.
In the meantime the big slow companies are panicking, thinking they missed the Next Big Thing (and in a sense, they did) and now they're going to flood the market with tablety things just in time to lose their shirts as the fad dies for the third time.
None of the above intended as any insult to Apple or the blessed Steve, please Apple Cultists don't send your flying monkeys after me for blasphemy. Obviously Apple wins this round for being the first to notice the market was ready for another round of tabletry.
The PSP is a dedicated gaming console, isn't it?
Only because 1. its input device is such (buttons not multitouch), and 2. it's cryptographically locked down to be such. There was no public $99/year developer program for the PSP like there is for the Xbox 360 and iOS devices. But neither the input device nor developer selectivity is relevant to graphical output. The PSP and the iPhone 3GS both have screen resolutions close to 480x300 pixels. Can you demonstrate a difference in maximum graphical complexity between the 3GS and the PSP?
On the other hand, let's try watching a movie on a PSP without our eyes watering from the tiny screen.
Or on an iPhone or iPod touch. Their screens are even tinier than the PSP's.
Can we call these "somewhere between PCs and tablets" machines "lap-tabs"? It's just snappy.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
This article is ridiculous. This is the same BS that everyone said about netbooks before everyone realized they suck. There's no difference between tablets and netbooks. A 1 year lifespan battery, extreme fragility, a pathetically inadequate processor for Windows or a pathetically limited OS (android), no optical drive, low lifetime and extremely limited flash memory. But wait, there's more! It's a netbook...without a keyboard. Without being able to type rapidly, any device slows to a crawl. It takes me under 1 second to type in any custom URL. On a touchscreen device, we're talking closer to 10 seconds. That's just unacceptable. Tablets are going to fail just as horribly as netbooks. I could see people getting one as a 2nd device instead of a 2nd PC for portability and space but never, ever replacing them. Microsoft is wrong, all the manufacturers are wrong, and they're all going to lose their asses just like what happened with netbooks.
http://www.asus.com/Eee/Eee_Pad/Eee_Slate_EP121/