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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."
Yeah, seriously. This is a) nothing new, and b) an example of newer technology making the idea more feasible. It has nothing to do with "freaking out".
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet. Admittedly, one of the major failings of the Tablet PC is being addressed with the Win8 touch interface and app ecosystem.
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
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.
The beauty of capitalism and the free market is the fact that you can have your pony and the other guy can have his tablet.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
From the manufacturer's standpoint they want to make these things like appliances. If you mess with the internal workings and it stops working correctly why should they have to fix it? B If you modify your brand new Ford by installing a new fuel injection system or tweaking the onboard computer, do you expect Ford to support it? You have a right to make changes as you see fit, but I don't think you should expect the manufacturer to be liable for anything that you did. And you don't expect to use the excuse "but it was a small modification". The manufacturer can't know that.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No idea what "The Tablet PC Initiative" is -- sounds like prog rock band or something.
I'm going to assume this was an attempt by Microsoft to innovate the future with a product they couldn't figure out how to sell to anybody? Like the Smart House or all the features in Longhorn which never happened?
If all they were trying to do was jam XP onto a touch screen, no wonder nobody bought them.
That sounds all well and good, until you consider a few extra things. The first person I knew with a tablet had one in 2003; it was a Fujitsu Lifebook. As a result, "no wonder no one bought them" sounds right in 2012, but requires a bit of perspective...
In 2003, Wi-Fi was still relatively new at the consumer level. If you wanted cellular data, you would likely end up with a GPRS connection, or EDGE if you were lucky; it complimented Windows Pocket PC Edition, Palm Treos, and early Blackberry units pretty nicely. Capacitive touch wasn't practical at the consumer level; it was either resistive or the Wacom-on-glass system that they ended up using. iOS didn't exist yet (the second-gen iPod was just getting out of the gate; Apple was looking like they could afford to keep the lights on), broadband had only recently hit critical mass. ARM processors lived in devices running embedded operating systems; they were nowhere near powerful enough to run a general purpose OS. Atom didn't exist.
In *that* world, the primary market for tablets were people taking notes with a pen. For all its faults, Windows Tablet PC Edition did a pretty impressive job of recognizing handwriting, which was good because it was the primary reason to be a tablet. Meanwhile, text entry was still king, and 5 hours of battery life was a pretty reasonable amount of time to be using your tablet.
No one is claiming that the first generation of tablet PCs running Windows XP struck a chord with the general populous; they clearly did not. Their target demographic were students, medical professionals, and other people for whom OneNote was the killer app. There was no iOS, there was no Android, and desktop Linux was still getting its pants on regarding getting a decent desktop distribution out the door. Windows XP was just about the only thing that *could* work on the systems at hand, because Apple was just about the only company who was able to write an OS specifically for tablets and have people look at what they *could* do as opposed to what they *couldn't* do, and even that was highly based upon the fact that there were a few years' worth of iPhone OS builds behind it, during which people had built up some level of software library for that platform.
I might not be the biggest iOS fan in existence, but you'd be hard pressed to find me a company besides Apple that would have been capable of generating demand for a new computing form factor and a new OS for the paradigm at the same time. If Microsoft released WindowsRT back in 2004 and had capacitive touch and 802.11g and an App Store and an unlocked EDGE cellular modem and sold it at $499...it would have bombed then too because the immediate reaction would be "running Office 2003/Quickbooks/AutoCAD/$WINDOWS_SOFTWARE doesn't work!" or similar complaints regarding hitting 16x16 pixel toolbar icons with a finger and being productive.
It's not that people overlooked swivel tablets running XP because iOS was that much better, it's that the target demographic of people who would benefit from handwriting into their laptop was a very small market, and there was no Facebook, Angry Birds, or Netflix streaming to justify a tablet as a consumption device.