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Dell's New X18: 5 Pounds, 18 Inches
MojoKid writes "Dell recently combined two trending PC design styles into a single system and called it the XPS 18 Portable All-In-One Desktop. The machine has all the power of an AIO desktop system and some of the portability of a tablet. To be clear, Dell isn't suggesting you'll want to tote this thing across town in ways that you might use an iPad. It's portable in that you can snatch up the 18.4-inch Full HD display from your home office and take it to the living room to switch gears from Google Docs to gaming with the kids, or take it upstairs for some late night surfing before bed. ... The main attraction, however, is that the PC itself is a portable display featuring an 18.4-inch IPS panel with a 1920x1080 resolution and full touch support. Performance-wise the XPS 18 holds its own versus mainstream all-in-one touch PCs, but with added ability to pick the 5 pound system up go virtually anywhere with it on a moment's notice."
Really, its the worst of all worlds.
I'm going to try one out. The home computer form factor is going to change. I have tried the Asus Transformer and like it. The removable keyboard works great but to be a primary home computer it needs to have a larger display and larger keyboard. I was hoping Asus they would release something in the 15-17 inch range in the Transformer series but I don't think that has happened yet. The Dell XPS18 is a bit larger than I was thinking but it is getting decent reviews so I'll give it a shot ... it will be my first shot at Win8 too (sigh). Sure it isn't a lightweight but its no Sony Tap 20 @ 11 Lbs.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
5 pounds, 18 inches baby
apples price for the same thing $1800 base
This seems to be a mediocre, unnecessarily page-broken review of a machine with mediocre hardware specs. Did I miss anything important?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
18" desktop screens are something from a decade or so ago--why go back?
I've always thought it was a bad idea to build the computer into the screen. The problem is that when the computer becomes outdated, you have to dump a perfectly good screen. I have LCD screens that I've used for many years with different computers as I upgrade the hardware.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Umm... no, we haven't. Existing all-in-one desktop PCs, or even 18" (~45cm) laptops, have weighed way more than 5lb (about 2.3kg). Usually more than twice that; 11-20lb (5-9 kg) is more common amon AIOs. Even if they were designed with a carrying handle, they were not designed with portability in mind; the handle was to make it easier to get the from the box to the desk. Additionally, while consumer touchscreen monitors have existed for a while now, they haven't generally been designed for any kind of portability either.
This thing weighs only a little more than my work laptop (which is admittedly a beast, but I carry it around a lot) without its power brick, and a lot less than my old (9lb) 18" "desktop replacement" laptop. Neither of those have touch, either, meaning they need space for a keyboard when in use and it's hard for more than one person to interact with one at any given time.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
We were using the tablet to demo our website, since a solid wifi signal or internet connectivity is not guaranteed at these types of shows, we have to rely on a VM running a LAMP server on the computer. Even with only a CLI version of CentOS running using 1GB of ram, and minimal processing specs, it caused the system to run at a crawl. It was painful and very disappointing. Needless to say, we returned the machine and went with the Lenovo Yoga 13 IdeaPad instead, and it did the job.
It has a touch screen with an OS designed for a touchscreen, a decent weight, decent display quality, decent performance .... not a great price. Theoretically price will come down if it catches on.
Please link to "similar crap" if I have missed something.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
...and its hurting them across the board.
You're talking about the most popular tablet by far.
Ironically the exception was the launch of the original ipad which started at $500 the device closest to this one...and (stupidly) its latest model is still that price.
Of course. Apple typically don't reduce the price of their premium model, they just rev the hardware each year. For example it's double the dpi of the first gen.
But they do sometimes introduce lower priced models. Such as the iPad mini in this case. At $329.
This business model has made them the biggest, highest earning, most successful tech company today. Stupid? No, they know their business far better than you do.
So for the average Slashdotter, that would mean:
Mom's basement->Mom's basement->Mom's basement
I don't see the portability value there.
For me, personally, it would mean more like:
My sofa->My sofa->My sofa
It cuts down on my commuting, so it must be good for the Global Carbon Warming Footprint, or something like that.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Mine is 5lbs 2oz and 19 inches. Oh, wait, they're talking about portable desktops. My bad.
Because lugging a 22" around makes you look like a tool?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Why is some mediocre product launch even news on Slashdot? Maybe I'm jaded on this, but it's not exactly new technology. Haven't tablet pc's running a Windows OS been around since windows XP was new? I can hear 2002 calling, they want their tablet back. I can't see anything remarkable about this. This is not news, this is advertising. What blows my mind is that some people post like they're excited about it. It makes me question giving up Slashdot altogether.
Windows 8 was NOT "designed for a touchscreen". It is Windows 7, a non-touchscreen OS, partially updated to be touch-enabled. The first layer or two has been revamped to work reasonably well for touch, to the detriment of 'regular' mouse/keyboard use, but lots of it hasn't been redesigned to be used with touch, keeping existing small controls which are designed to be easily [for most people] to interact with using a mouse, but much more difficult to properly select using your finger.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
In theory, subpixel rendering triples horizontal resolution, boosting 1920 pixels across to 5760. In practice, because of the low-pass filtering needed to avoid color fringing, it boosts perceived horizontal resolution by 50%, giving the equivalent of 2880x1080 for a 1080p monitor. It's analogous to how 480i is blurrier than 480p because of the filtering needed to avoid interline twitter. Because the vertical dimension has no subpixels (at least in monitors that don't pivot), it doesn't make smaller point sizes readable and thus doesn't help the user fit more text onto a monitor. Furthermore, a lot of frameworks appear to apply subpixel rendering only to text, not to bitmaps or vectors. Or has this changed on recent operating systems?
My office was on the pre-launch wait list and we got some of the first XPS 18's Dell shipped. For your average person, with average computer needs, it's actually a really nice solution. First off, this really isn't meant to be used like a typical tablet, and is more of a "lap computer". The foldout legs allow it to work beautifully as a presentation piece (I've been using it to do R&D demos), and when reversed it actually makes a very nice tabletop touchscreen.
Is it the most powerful computer in the world? No. Mine is the i5 with 8Gb and it's performance is about average for a modern desktop computer. You're not going to run the latest games with everything cranked all the way up (the lack of discreet graphics puts an end to that), but my son plays SW:ToR and it averages about 40fps with everything turned up. That's nothing amazing, but it's really not bad either. You have to remember that the XPS 18 isn't meant to compete with powerful desktops...it's an Ultrabook in a tablet form factor, and it delivers Ultrabook level performance. When viewed through that lens, the performance is just fine. On the Windows partition, I've run everything from Office to Visual Studio with no real complaints.
The battery life on mine has been fairly good. From a full charge, it will do about 4.5-5 hours of light duty work (web browsing, etc) with the screen brightness turned down a bit. When my son was playing SW:TOR, he got about two hours out of it with the brightness all the way up. That's not the greatest, but you have to remember that we're talking about an 18" 1080 screen.
The portability is actually better than you would expect as well. You're not going to be walking around using it in your hand like an iPad, but it's very well balanced and much easier to handle than it looks. I purchased the messenger bag style case for mine, and usually carry it around like a laptop. When I'm moving around the room, I just tuck it under my arm, where it feels much lighter than its advertised 5lb weight. The back of the XPS 18 is metal, there's a heavy rubber bumper all the way around, and the "gator glass" screen is slightly flexible, which make it fairly durable. Mine has already taken a few falls without any marks or damage.
There are a couple of things I'm less than thrilled about. The power button is poorly placed and is exceptionally easy to accidentally press by hand. I had to reconfigure it in both Win8 and Xubuntu (yes, it dual boots just fine) to ignore inputs from the power button entirely. The foldout legs are well built and seem like they'll last a while, but Dell's folding mechanism uses a poorly designed magnetic holder. Basically they placed magnets on the back of the legs and then placed the regulatory stickers over the top of them to hold them in place. It took two weeks for the stickers on one to peel loose, after which the leg began flopping out on me. It was an easy fix with a bit of superglue, but it was a disappointing to see them cheap out on such a simple detail. Like others, I'm also disappointed in their choice to use a 5400RPM hard drive over a SSD, or even a 7200. The HDD is probably the biggest performance killer in the design. Finally, I'm irritated that, even after a month of tweaking, I haven't managed to get the touchscreen working in Xubuntu 12 LTS. I don't know what Dell did with the drivers for this thing, but none of the standard Linux touchscreen drivers work at all. Because of that, you can only use Linux on it when it's sitting at its base station with the physical keyboard and mouse. It makes a fine Xubuntu workstation when sitting on the base, but I'd really like to get the touchscreen working on it so I can use it as a tablet.
All in all though, I'm fairly satisfied with it. I'm not going to use it to replace my desktop, but since getting it a month ago I've nearly stopped using my previous tablet (Xoom) and have completely stopped carrying my Ultrabook around. My Apple wielding co-workers have largely reported the same. If Dell would offer this in a 15" version a
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.