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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.
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
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!
Not necessarily so. Granted, tablets are almost useless for generating content, except for taking quick notes and such, but they are rather useful for watching a movie on the road, reading an ebook, or giving a presentation to a client. Laptops are too bulky to use comfortably when mobile, and PCs are immobile to start with.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
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.
There's no single design for everyone.
Yes, this is the biggest reason Apple isn't a market share leader in most of its markets. They typically make one form factor and do it very well... and this appeals to a great many people. They do it with the iMac, the iPhone, and the iPad. But eventually manufacturers come in and fill in the gaps for people who don't prefer those form factors. For some reason, most tablets still look like the iPad, with the most notable exception being the Asus Transformer, one of the most popular Android tablets. I think as more tablets deviate from the iPad design, we'll see Apple's tablet market share shrink as others take advantage of the long tail.
I think it's also interesting to note that, in the one space where Apple does dominate, the MP3 player market, they have a variety of models in all shapes and sizes and colors, and at almost every price point. I think if they only ever released the original hard drive iPod, it's dominance would have been short-lived. I remember on year everyone bought up the iPod nano, because they wanted an iPod but didn't have $300. Were there no nano, they would have went with another mfgr for sure. For some reason Apple doesn't do this anymore. Maybe they feel ubiquity dilutes the brand?
Motorola atrix.
In concept it is cool in practice it is still under powered.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If you think Matlab mobile does the same thing as the real Matlab with toolboxes you've never used Matlab. Also with an X220 they can run multiple things at one, like say a screen capture program so the lecture can then by uploaded to Youtube. 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) so whatever they need to show, they can.
Oh and there's the fact that Windows integrates nicely in to being centrally managed, and the iPad does not.
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.
...Compaq Concerto from 1994 running Windows for Pen Computing ?
Matlab mobile is a remote interface for interacting with a session running on another computer.
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.