HP Introduces Sub-$100 Windows Tablet

jfruh writes While Windows-based tablets haven't exactly set the world on fire, Microsoft hasn't given up on them, and its hardware partners haven't either. HP has announced a series of Windows tablets, with the 7-inch low-end model, the Stream 7, priced at $99. The Stream brand is also being used for low-priced laptops intended to compete with Chromebooks (which HP also sells). All are running Intel chips and full Windows, not Windows RT.

Comments

now that its not $700

[GarretSidzaka]

sort of want

Re:now that its not $700

[Control-Z]

Yeah I would spend $100 to see if I like Windows on a tablet, especially if it is the full version of Windows.

Re: now that its not $700

[iamhassi]

But being $100 it will probably be slow and crappy which will make Windows 8 appear slower and crappier than it already is.

Re: now that its not $700

[GarretSidzaka]

Yeah, but I would plan on immediately getting the upgrade from win8 to win9 I heard they are offering.

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup! Especially considering the Windows OEM license is probably $60, so it's really $40 worth of hardware. It must really, really suck.

Re: now that its not $700

[justthinkit]

Troll much?

Windows 8 is much faster than Windows 7. I love it for its speed of boot-up, and shutdown -- just what I want for a laptop I frequently have to start and stop.

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is free to OEMs for devices with smaller than 9" screens.

Re: now that its not $700

[slazzy]

I wouldn't be surprised if MS is paying HP to be selling these things so cheap...

Re:now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, exactly. I can think of several uses for real Windows on a tablet that I'm willing to pay $150 for, but none for $700.

Re: now that its not $700

[rickb928]

Free as in a free boat.

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll much?

I love it for its speed of boot-up, and shutdown

That is because it goes into hibernation. They cheat because they can't get it to shutdown or boot from a cold start faster than a Chromebook, even on superior hardware.

Re: now that its not $700

[Luckyo]

Except that laptops are hibernated, not shut down in most usage scenarios.

But well shilled.

Re:now that its not $700

[tibit]

It's probably good enough to do software development on. I can't see it being any slower, CPU-wise, than a Core II duo 5 year old MBP, never mind that it has 2 more cores. It seems like it could be a very good deal - hook up to an external monitor and BT keyboard/mouse and it should be a screamer. It's astonishing how good consumer-grade hardware is these days.

Re: now that its not $700

[tepples]

Depends on what kind of boat. If it's a coracle (bowl-shaped 1-person boat intended to be carried on a man's back), and it's in usable condition, I'll take it.

Re: now that its not $700

[schlachter]

a boat without a paddle and up a creek

Re:now that its not $700

[schlachter]

me too, until I realize I could probably pick up a used ipad mini for $200.

Re:now that its not $700

[dbIII]

Me too if it can run win7. For example there's USB camera control software that can't run on Win8 and a tablet makes a nice big viewfinder for a digital camera.

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. First off, Windows 8 is neither slow nor crappy. Second, these run quad core Atom cpu's with 1GB RAM. Microcenter sells a similar tablet for $139, and it's actually pretty damn fast :)

Re: now that its not $700

[ubsjasongw]

Nope. First off, Windows 8 is neither slow nor crappy. Second, these run quad core Atom cpu's with 1GB RAM. Microcenter sells a similar tablet for $139, and it's actually pretty damn fast :)

Re: now that its not $700

[bemymonkey]

I'm running a Windows 8 tablet with a slow ass Clover Trail Atom and 2GB of RAM... for tablet stuff, it's fine. I highly doubt the Hp $99 version will be any slower (which pisses me off a little, considering I paid 700€ for mine :p)...

Re: now that its not $700

[bemymonkey]

People who know what they're doing use standby or at least hibernate. The rest boot... seriously, 90% of the people I know with Windows 8 laptops praise them for their fast boot times, because even with XP and 7 they used to perform a full boot every time they wanted to use their device. Years of conditioning ("Windows only runs properly when it's freshly rebooted!"), I suppose :(

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows is free to OEMs for devices with smaller than 9" screens.

Its also free to people with smaller than 9" dicks .... or so a friend tells me.

Re: now that its not $700

[Anonymous Coward]

I would plan on immediately getting the upgrade from win8 to win9 I heard they are offering.

If it's x86, with an unlocked bootloader, I'd plan to upgrade immediately to Linux.

These sound like awesome machines to run KDE Plasma Active on.

Re: now that its not $700

[Luckyo]

I find that most people nowadays already hibernate. Could be because I show people once that "you only need to reboot when you see a problem, otherwise look at this much faster way to shut down your machine which actually saves all your progress".

They never want to go back. And besides, the "faster boot time" on eight is absolutely marginal compared to 7, and slower than XP on comparable hardware once you count time until machine is usable rather than the artificial "time until you can sign in" that windows shills pass as a benchmark.

Will it run Linux?

[wirefarm]

I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.

Re:Will it run Linux?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I would be interested, if I didn't have to run Windows on it.

You might want to be a bit careful, some of the ultra-cheap Windows devices are UEFI only; but 32 bit, which freaks most Linux installers out; but these are not Windows RT machines, so they will not be cryptographically locked out.

Time, and experimentation, will tell how good compatibility actually is; but it should be markedly easier than any Windows RT device, and honestly quite probably easier than doing a Linux port to a lot of common Android devices(yes, bodging a headless debian userland or something onto an Android system is easy; but getting X, using a mainline kernel, or not using bionic, less so...)

Re:Will it run Linux?

[Michalson]

As long as you can get drivers you should be able to. It's an x86 rather then ARM based so Microsoft does require the BIOS to support both secure and unsecure booting. If HP hasn't provided a special button press to get into the BIOS during startup (like holding down F1 or DEL, or Volume + like on the Surface) you can get there from Windows now. Boot into Windows 8 and then use Recovery from the start menu to reboot the system into Advanced Recovery mode (sort of a graphical version of the old text menu where you could choose from options like command prompt or boot in safe mode). From the new graphical recovery console you'll need to go into the advanced options under trouble shooting and select UEFI Firmware Settings. That will get you into the tablet's BIOS where you can disable secure boot (several distros do support secure boot but honestly it's just easier to disable it so you can throw on anything). The same recovery console can also be used to override the boot device if you have any issues getting the tablet to boot from a USB stick or external DVD drive.

Re:Will it run Linux?

[binarylarry]

Internally, this tablet was codenamed the "Desperation."

Re:Will it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Get over it.

ALL systems built later than about 2010 or so are UEFI.

They just have a legacy bios boot compatibility layer installed and in some cases older UEFI systems would only boot that layer, but are UEFI internally. Some of these newer specialty devices, like tablets, no longer have the bios compatibility layer though.

Re:Will it run Linux?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's not the issue: Since virtually all (x86) systems built later than 2010 are 64-bit, the expected case is 64 bit UEFI. Contemporary linux distributions don't even bat an eye at booting on a 64-bit system with 64-bit UEFI (well, there are a lot of ugly details under the surface, probably enough to keep several devs more or less permanently alcoholic; but the user doesn't need to see that).

However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.

There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.

Re:Will it run Linux?

[peterhoeg]

Booting 32 bit UEFI on a 64 bit CPU has been fixed in kernel 3.15. http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux...

Re:Will it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like a problem with Linux not the hardware or Microsoft being evil.

So, now HP sells a tablet

[Anonymous Coward]

For less than TI sells a calculator.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[Tokolosh]

And you can get a very nice RPN calculator app for free.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[JeffOwl]

And it still wouldn't be allowed for tests

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[Nyder]

And it still wouldn't be allowed for tests

In my days we used pencil & paper to do math. We had to *gasp* actually work the problem out.

My days sucked.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[tibit]

My worry has been that kids in grade schools waste a lot of time doing menial arithmetic while they could have been - gasp - actually learning more advanced math instead. Like, you know, shit that one can use later in college. I really wish I didn't need to do all that long division/multiplication etc. - it was really pointless. I used to believe that it was good. I now know better. The whole reason for menial arithmetic was the Victorian-era-called-need for civil servants - back when nobody had a spreadsheet application to run the numbers back then. A civil servant doing manual math these days in a 1st world country would be probably reprimanded for wasting his or her time.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[WrongMonkey]

Its not pointless at all. Long division and multiplication are an exercise in how to take a large calculation and algorithmically break it down into manageable units. This is a fundamental skill for practical math at any level.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[rahvin112]

I also grew up in a time where I had to do things by hand with pencil and paper. I remember learning long division, but I don't think I could do it even if I had hours to try to figure it out. We should teach kids about these old methods and the theories behind them but we shouldn't be wasting time teaching them the method and making them memorize how to do it. They will never do long division by hand in their entire life.

Although it's important to teach theory and the methods behind things, what you talking about isn't that. It was the rote memorization that dominated education for a very long time and thankfully is going away. Much of the criticism that I've seen of the new common core standards in math is much more focused on teaching the theory rather than the rote memorization. Yet even such a significant improvement in how math is taught is being attacked by people that think the old way to teach is the only way to teach. You learn almost nothing memorizing something.

You learn all kinds of cool things when you learn the theory behind it and can take that theory and apply it to other things. About 90% of your average college Engineering school is spent trying to unteach people the rote memorization stuff they were trained to do in primary and secondary education. I don't have a problem with kids using calculators to do simple math when they are being taught the theory and how to use it.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[jma05]

Baloney. I learnt it that way and it was a waste of time. Math should be about learning the splendor of numbers, shapes, change etc... not about learning to be a clerk in a pre-digital age. I recommend you to read "A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart. Don't argue with me. Argue against his arguments.

Re:So, now HP sells a tablet

[tibit]

Breaking down into manageable units shouldn't be conflated with iteration/repetition. Divide and conquer isn't a for loop. Integration by parts isn't a for loop either. The approach for long arithmetics taught in school is quite unproductive, actually, since if you *really* want to multiply and divide quickly by hand, you should be more like Feynman, not like the Japanese abacus guy. By the time I got into high school, I usually was much faster at long arithmetic by doing iterative approximations and trying to extract statements about the properties of the problem. For example, looking at factors, at constraints that must hold for values of some digits, etc. That's what teaches you actual mathematics. Doing long arithmetics, fraction reductions and similar menial stuff for weeks and weeks is a waste of time and I have not read any convincing arguments otherwise. It's a stand-in for unimaginativeness and lack of deep mathematical understanding among the teachers and the curriculum authors. The only reason we do it is because there was a time when it was useful. It's only the lack of historical context that makes people who should know better repeat ad nauseam that "we should do it cuz' it's good". No, it's no good at all. It keeps you back from learning more mathematics.

How does it handle Pinterest?

[MetalliQaZ]

If it can handle media-heavy social websites, then I think this would be a winner for my wife and others like her.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[afidel]

They're likely getting a subsidy from MS paid for by future Office365/OneDrive revenues plus I'm sure this has Bing integration so there's some ad revenue to split.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[BarbaraHudson]

The "recommended consumer price" for someone purchasing a tray of cpus is $107. If you were working on a prototype design or a very limited production run, you'd buy just a tray of 1000, not the craploads that HP is going to buy.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Transformer TA100; Win8 with Atom. It's amazingly responsive, considering. If the tablets have anything similar, I'd bet they run ok.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[theshowmecanuck]

How many zeros is a crapload? 4 or 5?

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[CastrTroy]

This mistake is made time and time again when people do a teardown on something like the latest phone,tablet, or gaming console and try to figure out how much profit the manufacturer is making (or losing) on each device. The reality is that unless you are actually working for the manufacturer or supplier and in charge of arranging the deal about how much things will cost, you have no idea what the price of these components are. You get huge discounts when you order 100,000 of an item. And it doesn't just work like this in the technology industry. It's like that in every industry. It's the same reason you can buy a bike for less than it would cost you to buy the components. It's not because the manufacturer is losing money on every bike. It's because the bike manufacturer got a deal because they are ordering parts for tens of thousands of bikes.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[dj245]

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...

I don't think that tray price has much basis in reality. The "$107" N2840 looks, at least on the face, to be not vastly different from the "$86" 1037U. If Biostar can sell a motherboard + 1037U + heatsink + fan for $79.99, it doesn't take much of a stretch to think maybe these prices are just "list" prices with no basis in reality. Biostar is just selling a bare motherboard so there can't be any Microsoft kickbacks or ad revenue.

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Microsoft subsidized the Windows licenses in return for HP abandoning WebOS. You know, if you believe that sort of thing happens and all...

Re:How does it handle Pinterest?

[citizenr]

Intel managed to spend $2B on bribes^^^^'direct incentives to use Atoms and other low power parts' in first half of this year alone.
Intel is giving out Atom&chipset combo at $5 in china (while comparable Arm SoCs start at $4) just to get ANY footing in that market.

I cant wait for some Chinese antitrust case against Intel (like the AMD one). After all this is Intels direct attack on Chinese Soc manufactures.

Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.

Re:Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere in the world is the person who keeps posting this on Slashdot. Somewhere in a bunker chock full of old and new hardware wired up in to Beowulf clusters of Beowulf clusters that is a Beowulf cluster. Then one day the mother of all Beowulf clusters awakens, " I think we can put our differences behind us... for science..."

Re:Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'll build a Grendel cluster. I don't expect it to win, but it should slow that Beowulf cluster down enough that we can team up and build a dragon cluster to finish it off.

Re: Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

I am. While fapping to Natalie. With hot grits for lube.

Re:Imagine

[CohibaVancouver]

Somewhere in the world is the person who keeps posting this on Slashdot.

In Soviet Russia, Beowulf Cluster build you!

No touchscreen by default

[SoCalChris]

The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen

I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?

Re:No touchscreen by default

[jdschulteis]

The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen

I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?

HP is using the Stream brand for both laptops and tablets.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[fyngyrz]

That's kind of funny, actually. Wonder what genius thought there was a usable market segment for a tablet without a touchscreen?

Re:No touchscreen by default

[__aaclcg7560]

Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?

Mount it on the wall above your desk, plug in a keyboard and mouse, and use it as a cheap PC.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Anonymous Coward]

The LAPTOPS do not have touch screens by default, the tablets are another story!

Re:No touchscreen by default

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Two different product lines: one is cheapy laptops(and since a touchscreen adds a nontrivial hit to the BOM, these don't come with them) and the other is inexpensive 7 and 8 inch tablets (which do have touchscreens, since they don't have keyboards or touchpads).

Re:No touchscreen by default

[puto]

You might want to check your reading skills. The laptop version does not have a touchscreen unless you request it and pay the difference...

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Anonymous Coward]

The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen

I wanted one, until I read this part. Could you really consider it a tablet if you have to plug a mouse in for it to work?

Sounds like its the "Stream laptops" that don't have the touchscreen....

The tablets will have the usual poke and pray smudgeface.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[unity]

That was a bit confusing but I think you are mistaken. The article is talking about them announcing new tablets AND laptops. I think they are just pointing out that the laptops wont have a touch screen, but the tablets the OP is about will have one.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[BaronAaron]

The Stream laptops won't have a touchscreen by default, not the tablets.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Lunix Nutcase]

Why is this considered informative? The sentence you quoted clearly said "laptops" not "tablets".

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Lunix Nutcase]

No one. Their own quote explicitly said "laptops".

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Lunix Nutcase]

Of course they are mistaken. The quote said laptops.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[gstoddart]

Nobody did.

The new Stream laptops by default have no touchscreen, but can be configured with one.

There are Stream tablets, and Stream laptops. The GP even quotes the part which says laptops.

A tablet without a touch screen is basically an etch a sketch. :-P

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Anonymous Coward]

they said the laptops don't have touch screens not the tablets..

Re:No touchscreen by default

[oodaloop]

Reading is hard! Let's go shopping!

Re:No touchscreen by default

[sionus]

Laptop != tablet. They're two separate devices.

Re: No touchscreen by default

[KenHansen]

A tablet without a touchscreen is an Etch-A-Sketch without the knobs... ;^)

Re:No touchscreen by default

[tibit]

It concerns me somewhat that it didn't make you stop, think, re-read and understand. Because I surely did and I find it unthinkable that others wouldn't. Scary, even.

Re:No touchscreen by default

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.. I think you responded to the wrong post.

That's a reasonable price point...

[ndykman]

I guess Microsoft's plan to charge nothing for small screen form factors is having a bit on a effect. Even 20 bucks would be a significant impact on that price. At that price, there'd be enough people to see if you get a Linux distro on it, and it's close enough to cheap android levels.

For me, it's cool, because I'm more versed in Windows development and since it's full Windows, I can easily install whatever the heck I want on it (no developer unlock, etc, etc). Save up, get a few and just have them around the house.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[Anon-Admin]

At that price, there'd be enough people to see if you get a Linux distro on it, and it's close enough to cheap android levels.

What? The last four 7" Android pads I bought were $35 each. $99 is 3x the cost so I am not sure I would call it close to the cheap android levels.

Hell, at $35 I bought one for everyone in the house, plus two floaters to be used in the living room and the kitchen. They are handy to have around. At $99 with windows installed, they can keep them.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[ndykman]

A fair point. I was thinking the Android price point was more around 69-79. Clearly I haven't been shopping extensively.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but those cheap android tablets can't run full Windows applications either. This runs the full x86 version of Windows. That gives you a lot of power you wouldn't get from cheap Android tablets. If it's like most other x86 devices and has HDMI and USB, then you could conceivably just hook it up to an existing monitor+keyboard+mouse and use it like a traditional desktop.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[Anon-Admin]

#1) Windows is crap software so no surprise that it is a system/memory/cpu hog.
#2) The pads have full HDMI, USB, SD Card connectors. Heck I take one with me out to the ranch to check the game cameras via USB.
#3) Why would anyone on the backwater planet want to connect a pad to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and try to use it like a desktop?
  I have a pad for portability and a desktop for power. Just as I use Raspberry Pi systems for single purpose systems such as running a DNS server at the house or XBMC on the TV.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[tepples]

Why would anyone on the backwater planet want to connect a pad to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and try to use it like a desktop?

So that you can continue to work on the same project between the tablet-like environment and the desktop-like environment without having to bounce everything off Dropbox and eat into your monthly cap.

Re:That's a reasonable price point...

[mlk]

Where did you get the $35 Android tablets from? The lowest I've seen is in the $50 (£30) range.

99 is not sub $100

[ThorGod]

It's even less accurate when you know the price is 99.99.

It's a very old marketing ploy and I expect better from a /. summary...Yes, it's very cheap, but urg

Re:99 is not sub $100

[Anonymous Coward]

99 is not sub $100

Do you use some sort of alternate number line and an alternate version of English?

Re:99 is not sub $100

[oodaloop]

Is 99 more than 100?

Re:99 is not sub $100

[Anon-Admin]

$99.99 is not sub $100, with %8.25 tax, or $5 shipping and handling, or any add on to the cost. :P

It is 1 penny less than $100 so most smart people round up.

I wonder if there are other ways to make the $99.99 into $100 hmmm

Re:99 is not sub $100

[jetkust]

Who modded a post that fails at elementary school math informative?

Re:99 is not sub $100

[ThorGod]

In a world where people throw away pennies or leave them lying on the street 99.99 is 100.

Re:99 is not sub $100

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in Canada if you were to pay cash (and ignore taxes) this would be rounded up to $100 at the store for you.

Re:99 is not sub $100

[Anonymous Coward]

What about 99.98? 99.97? 99.00? I agree that pricing something at X99.99 is a psychology-based marketing decision, but that doesn't make the claim of "sub-100" false.

Of course, I've generally considered "sub-100" to mean "at or below", not strictly "below".

Re:99 is not sub $100

[tepples]

No, $99 is less than $100, but the fact that $99 is less than $100 is irrelevant. The tablet advertised as $99 is not $99 because prices in the United States are typically quoted excluding shipping and sales tax.

Re:99 is not sub $100

[shutdown -p now]

You can always buy it in Oregon.

Re:99 is not sub $100

[drew870mitchell]

Not to mention almost nobody ever will actually have one of these for less than $100 new and not closeout/clearance. Taxes, shipping, or both. As a question of language I would be happy with $100. I agree that $99 is a distasteful marketing gimmick although I probably wouldn't have bothered to raise the standard for non-psychologically-misleading pricing like you have.

Screens too small for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Microsoft completely kills the desktop on tablets, these devices will be far too small to use Windows. I got to work on a guy's Surface tablet a couple days ago. While it was nice and very fast, every time I had to do something on the desktop, it was like trying to read the fine print on a TV commercial. And that was on a 10.6" screen, much bigger than these 7" and 8" screens on the HP Stream.

The HP Stream might be OK if you just want to run Metro apps. But I also think that by now people have realized that they have other, better options besides Windows.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

But it potentially COULD be perfect for a single app -- think nurses in hospitals tracking meds and blood pressures, people doing inventories, etc. One of these days, the right hardware is going to come out and people are going to start standardizing on it for simple data entry and checklist type operations.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[0123456]

If you just want to run a single touchscreen app on a cheap tablet, why would you want Windows?

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[BarbaraHudson]

Ever tried to use a touch screen while wearing those blue Nitrile surgical gloves? The ones that make your hands stink?

Not only is the screen not exactly responsive any more, but you have to disinfect it after every use. Not just at the end of a shift, but between every patient you come into contact with.

I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room. So I left it out, and tried using it with gloves, figuring I'd disinfect it later. Hint - touch screens don't work so well with gloves, but at least it let me see who was texting/calling, and disinfecting it before I left wasn't that big a deal.

Hospitals are a huge source of infections, despite efforts to disinfect everything in sight.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[omnichad]

That's because Capacitive touch screens require a capacitive surface to work. You could use a stylus with a special tip for these rare circumstances.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Immerman]

Perhaps because you already have the windows program that does what you need, and it's a lot easier to update the interface than port it to Android?

Or perhaps because if you dock it with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor you suddenly transform it into a low-power desktop system without having to do any inter-device coordination? (My own intended use-case, though I'll admit I currently have no reason to believe these tablets will include an HDMI port, which is kind of essential to the vision.)

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Immerman]

>Hospitals are a huge source of infections, despite efforts to disinfect everything in sight.

Arguably to some extent because of efforts to disinfect everything in sight. The result being that any infection you pick up has a good chance of being drug resistant. The problem with multiple drug resistant (i.e. virtually untreatable) infections was getting so bad in some hospitals in... the Netherlands I think it was... that they decided to stop disinfecting entirely. Instead they went back to the old fashioned approach of *cleaning* things thoroughly - remove the germs from the environment and it doesn't matter if they're dead or not. Those hospitals are now the safest in the world when it comes to infections. Infection rates are down, and there is no longer any trace of the drug resistant strains so if you do pick up an infection it's easily treatable.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[BarbaraHudson]

So now you have yet another thing to carry around and disinfect.

Easier to just put a keyboard and screen in every room. Keyboards are easy to use, and there are keyboard protectors that can be easily disinfected. The screens are larger, so it's a lot easier to see all the necessary data, including what precautions to take, special requirements such as "do not give liquids orally", the patient's schedule if they are seeing specialists for physio or a checkup, etc.

Changing gloves between patients is already the norm. Having to disinfect a tablet and stylus between patients is going add more time lost between patients, raising costs and lowering effectiveness. Not every problem is suited for a tablet.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Rob Y.]

Unfortunately, it's not easy to 'update the interface' of an existing Windows program to make it work on a touchscreen device as a Metro app. That's more or less a total rewrite - and that's where Microsoft went off the rails with Windows 8. They wanted a 'clean' touchscreen OS, so they essentially started from scratch with the application layer. But then they tried to sell it as 'the Windows you know and love'. But you need desktop mode for it to be that. Desktop mode stinks on tablets, tablet mode stinks on the Desktop, and they were too late to market to get their tablet API's established. So you're stuck with full Windows (tablet + desktop) on a 7" device where desktop will be more or less unusable, and tablet won't have any apps. But it's cheap.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[omnichad]

Or just use resistive touch screens instead of capacitive. They can have screen covers just as easily as a keyboard, or even made to be fully waterproof for easier cleaning.

But that belongs with a full-size touch screen rather than a tablet if there's a lot of data to present. Keyboards are no more easy to disinfect.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[BarbaraHudson]

The hospital cleans everything - floors washed multiple times a day, surfaces wiped down on a regular basis, etc. Infections are going to spread because that's what they do. If the patient is contaminated, they're contaminated. If it's a bug that's transmitted by contact, everything they come into contact with has to be assumed to be contaminated. They have a separate pressure cuff and stethoscope reserved for their exclusive use, etc. But still bugs get transmitted. It happens when you put a large amount of sick people, many of them weakened or immuno-compromised, together. And many of those bugs are already out in the wild, not just confined to hospitals.

Some things, like electronic devices, you can't just throw in the laundry or wash down. They need disinfecting.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room.

You also can just not answer your phone right away.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[BarbaraHudson]

I hated it every time when my smartphone would ring and I was visiting a relative in isolation. Step out of isolation, take off the gloves and gown, disinfect my hands, take out the phone, see the text, put the phone back in the pocket, new gloves and gown, back in the room.

You also can just not answer your phone right away.

Kind of hard to do when the rest of the family wants to be kept up to date on what's happening to someone who in the space of a month had a quintuple bypass, two strokes that left them paralyzed on one side, cognitive problems, etc., and you want to give the patient feedback from them that everyone's rooting for them, and is there anything they need?

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Immerman]

The evidence in the Netherlands (?) suggests otherwise. When using disinfecting agents the cleaning tends to be much less thorough, because doctors, nurses, custodians, etc. "know" that any germs that don't get washed away will be killed anyway. Which is of course true, for 99.999% of the germs. The problem is the thousands of germs remaining behind, which were immune to the disinfectant and are likely to pass that immunity to their descendants.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Immerman]

So what? It's still got desktop mode, and if you're only running the one program you won't actually be using the desktop. Just run your one program full screen and update its desktop-API based interface to be more touch-friendly. Problem solved.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[deroby]

It all depends on your application off course, but I'm going to be dare-devil and claim that the GUI is at most half the program.
So, even though you may need to convert the GUI from 'PC' to 'Tablet'; if things are decently written you can still re-use quite a bit of the underlying code/layers and it all is handled nicely in the same dev. environment you're already used to. I do think it has a lot of things going for it.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Luckyo]

There are phones with resistive screens for people like you. Those work fine with any object that can exert pressure on the screen, gloves or not.

You just have to look out for one.

Full disclosure: I still use an old Nokia with resistive screen myself, one of the reasons being that I like being able to use it outside in winter without having my fingers freeze from taking off gloves and without having to use special gloves with capacitive coating on fingertips. Other being that like most older Nokias, it's a fucking tank that still work well, about 5 years after purchase date.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Rob Y.]

Maybe it's possible to make an existing win32 desktop app more 'touch-friendly', but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help. And the press glommed on to some "desktop is legacy - metro is the future" line, as though everyone were going to automatically do rewrites. Maybe that's what Microsoft was hoping for, and maybe the press is just dumb. But that's certainly not what is happening. What's really happening is "desktop is legacy - web is the future', and any rewrites that are being done are targeting html5/javascript. Whether that's the best future or not, that's what's happening.

Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[shutdown -p now]

I got to work on a guy's Surface tablet a couple days ago. While it was nice and very fast, every time I had to do something on the desktop, it was like trying to read the fine print on a TV commercial.

Since Win8, Windows has DPI scaling on the desktop that actually works (actually it was mostly working in Win7 already, but 8 and 8.1 polished it further).

Surface, in particular, scales everything to 150% by default, if I remember correctly. The text on mine is about the same size as on the desktop. Of course, this means that not quite as many things fit, so some people manually change the setting back to 100%, making everything tiny, but fitting more onto the screen. That guy whom you know must have done that.

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[Immerman]

> ...but Microsoft sure didn't go out of their way to help
And if we were discussing writing a new program from scratch, or even having to port an old one to a new API anyway, that might matter. But we're not, we're discussing making a tablet version of an existing, mature application that is probably still going to be used in a desktop form factor as well (not everyone is going to move to tablets simultaneously, nor will they necessarily stay on them - there's no guarantee that tablets will actually be a good form factor for the purpose). So the options are tweaking the existing GUI for a mature program that is still also be used on desktop systems, versus porting the damn thing to a whole new API.

As for the media, sure, they mostly all jumped on the bandwagon - what does that have to do with real people making business decisions on a limited budget? Anyone who makes business decisions based only on supplier marketing and media buzz deserves to have their business spiral into the ground.

Finally, maybe you're not aware of this, but you can do a lot of "touch friendly" tweaks to the Windows desktop already, such as increasing the button and font size to make controls designed for a mouse cursor considerably easier to manipulate things with a large, bulky fingertip. It doesn't work for everything, but so long as it works for your "killer app" then that let's *you* make the necessary modifications, today, instead of waiting for your supplier to get around to releasing an update - potentially a very major consideration. Especially if the product has been discontinued or the supplier has no plans to tabletify it.

>Perhaps if Microsoft had built a platform-independent API instead of just another me-too proprietary tablet API, they could've really started something.
True. And if zebras ate meat lions might be scared. When has Microsoft *ever* shown the slightest inclination to create anything other than me-too proprietary solutions?

Re:Screens too small for Windows

[wvmarle]

What I've heard about those multi-resistant strains is that they can only survive in the squeaky clean environments hospitals provide.

So it seems all you have to do is make hospitals a little less clean, and those multi-resistant strains can't survive there any more and only the more environmentally robust bacteria and viruses remain.

Wonder why they don't use this idea to actually treat those infections. Regular drugs don't work, but a change in environment does... that's an interesting notion, I'd say. Now how to translate this to actual treatment, I wouldn't know, I'm not a doctor.

New tablet price point

[Animats]

Why not? There have been $30 Android tablets available in Shentzen for a year or two.

Re:New tablet price point

[Anon-Admin]

Lol, $35 at Fry's electronics down the street from my house. So no need to go to china for them.

Re:New tablet price point

[Control-Z]

Yeah but the Windows tablets have a full version of Windows 8.1 and can presumably run most every Windows desktop app. Windows 8.1 itself is $106 at Amazon so HP must be getting a hell of a discount from MS.

Re:New tablet price point

[unity]

MS is making windows available at no cost for these small screen sizes.

Re: New tablet price point

[iamhassi]

Yeah but those $35 android tablets are truly awful. Single core, 256mb ram, 8gb storage, bad touchscreen, can't run any games because it's too slow. Spend $150+ and you get quad core, 2gb, 32gb and a much better touchscreen.

Re: New tablet price point

[Anon-Admin]

The $35 ones I bought were dual core, 1024mb ram, 2g internal storage, 10 point capacitive touch, with a micro-SD slot that will take up to a 32gig card.

So far they play all the games and run just about anything we care to put on them. Though We use them for browsing and as the remote control for the OpenElec XBMC/Raspberry Pi units.

Re: New tablet price point

[mlk]

Do they run You Tube, Skype (or Google video chat) and a web browser?

If so, I'm sold. Please tell me where I can get a sub 30 GBP tablet.

Re: New tablet price point

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are these $35 dual core 1gb tablets? I don't see them anywhere

Should be free

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as how MS Office is now a subscription based web model (a continual revenue stream for M$), they should be giving the tablets away if they really want the masses to adopt.

Re:Should be free

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

When oh when is Microsoft going to get it through their heads that people DO NOT WANT to run Office on tablets, plug-in keyboard or no.

Re:Should be free

[pr0fessor]

There is no shortage of jerks with GIANT 5.1 inch smart phones wanting to open office attachments on them what makes you think that a 7 or 8 inch tablet would be any different?

"Hey, the 80s called they want their GIANT PHONE back."

Re:Should be free

[omnichad]

They might want to run a reader app (similar to Adobe Reader) that would format 100% correctly.

I don't even want to buy Office for a desktop if they're going to keep going with subscription service.

Re:Should be free

[Richard_at_work]

Why? Works fine on my Surface 2 RT.

Re:Should be free

[CastrTroy]

I have a Surface 2 RT as well, and although I don't open many office documents with it, I find that it's much nicer than any tablet I've used before. Just the fact that you can plug in USB drives, or access network drives natively from any app is a big plus. The browser actually quite good. And the onscreen keyboard is one of the best touch screen keyboards I've had the pleasure of using. There aren't a ton of apps for it, but it has enough apps so I can do the stuff I want to do on a tablet. Plus it's got a really big screen. There are very few 10+ inch tablets out there. And most of them are around the same price as the Surface 2.

Re:Should be free

[Anonymous Coward]

The 80s can fuck right off, I'm keeping my giant PDA thank you.

Like I kept my PDA + phone in the late 90s, early naughtys, and my mid sized PDA/phone in the mid to late naughtys and now my lovely lovely big PDA/Phone.

It must be horrid to be you, completely failing to see that other people have different needs and wants than you. I'd hate to be your partner.

sub-100$ ?!?

[feufeu]

Could we please, at least on this site where people are supposed to have at least little better clue of mathematics than the average population, round prices intelligently and not fall for that bloody '99$ is not 100 !" ?!?

I don't think that anyone would use the exact price tag for a laptop of, say, 699$ rather than 700$...

So, this is a 100$ tablet for all practical purposes and now get off my lawn you stupid advertisement goons !

Re:sub-100$ ?!?

[feufeu]

Bugger, ThorGod did beat me to this...

Re:sub-100$ ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs 99 dollars, so your change is 1.

Re:sub-100$ ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's $99.99 so unless you're buying 100 tablets you won't get $1 in change

Re:sub-100$ ?!?

[omnichad]

Sub $100.01 doesn't have quite the same ring to it. The point is, it's at or near the threshold and not well above.

PiPO tablet

[jones_supa]

There's also a $81 tablet coming from PiPO.

"Pipo" means "beanie" in Finnish, by the way, hehheh.

Re:PiPO tablet

[eulernet]

And "pipeau" (pronounced as "pipo") means "lie" in french.

There are 10 types of people

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who know binary and those who don't.

Neat:

[Anonymous Coward]

But i thought they were into low-cost tablets. Bought my Mustang last christmas season for $69, at the local wallyworld. Sure, it was anderoid, but still it "streams" to the adapter for movies on the go, Hulu, and even the TWC runs excellently on it. What more could I ask for? Just a forward facing camera, And it would have been perfect for the home user.

Battery life?

[gstoddart]

All are running Intel chips and full Windows

A full windows install with Intel chips isn't exactly tuned for mobile battery performance.

So will these things have an exceedingly short battery life?

And I'm betting they will have so little memory as to be unusable -- because Windows with anything less than 4G is a complete dog in my experience.

I predict a terrible product on this one.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

yup.

reminds of those fucking awful netbook pieces of shit.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

The recent Intel chips have been better at battery life, this device will probably have 5-9 hours

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got the Asus transformerbook T100. It's a tablet that runs full fat windows 8.1 No fans. Charges USB. I get 8-10 hours of use out of it between charges. (Comes with a detachable keyboard/trackpad which is nice. Also has HDMI out)

It's not as nice as, say, an ipad but it's a full windows machine and it costs half what an ipad does. Since Intel introduced the baytrail Atom they really have been able to make machines that operate in a no-bullshit tablet power enevlope.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we stop with the "Windows on less than X amount of RAM is unusable" rhetoric? It's been going on since at least Windows XP (which was "unusable" on 128 MB, then 256 MB, then 512 MB). It wasn't true then and with multicore processors and SSDs, it's even less true now.

Re: Battery life?

[KenHansen]

Since Intel introduced the baytrail Atom they really have been able to make machines that operate in a no-bullshit tablet power enevlope.

My Dell Venue 8 Pro has full Windows 8.1 on it and runs a quad-core Atom with 2 Gigs of RAM quite nicely... A dual-core Celeron would be similar/better IMHO.

Re:Battery life?

[gstoddart]

Can we stop with the "Windows on less than X amount of RAM is unusable" rhetoric?

Rhetoric??? Really??

Sorry, but in my experience recent versions of Windows are using almost 2GB of RAM on system startup. My wife's work laptop had (until recently) 4GB of RAM ... and by the time it booted and had one program running on it, it was already thrashing. It was slow to the point of being painful.

My mother owns a laptop with Vista and 1GB of RAM on it .. and doing anything on it is pathetic.

It wasn't true then and with multicore processors and SSDs, it's even less true now.

The speed of your processor is completely irrelevant if all it's doing it paging to VM.

I've said for years, if you want to get the most longevity and usefulness out of a computer, don't worry about buying a faster CPU, buy a truck load more memory -- because over time everything wants more damned memory.

When my wife's work laptop got upgraded from 4GB to 12GB, the speed and the utility of the machine changed drastically ... as in, actual multi-tasking worked because the machine wasn't thrashing. It went from "it's still booting, I can't start task manager" to "it's still booting, but I can start task manager, launch Outlook, AND fire up a VM". Because it's no longer wasting all of it's time paging.

It has been true since Windows 3 that if you run Windows with the minimum Microsoft suggested, you'd have a useless machine which did everything slowly. And this was when computers came with more like 4MB of RAM.

When Vista came out, it was pretty much unusable with anything less than what seemed like a vast amount of memory at the time, certainly more than was in most systems at the time.

If you think saying Windows with not enough RAM is rhetoric, either you don't use computers much, or you're entirely too willing to put up with a machine which is too damned slow.

Put a full version of Windows onto a tablet with a small amount of RAM, and you most certainly will end up with a slow and useless device.

Rhetoric my ass. It was true then, and it's true now. Windows with insufficient RAM is a dog.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you have no experience with the platform. I've owned an Acer and Asus T100 both running full win8 on a tablet, both with x86 atom chips. Both had over 7 hours battery life in real world usage conditions, and did as well on standby as my iPad.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh? My parents recently retired their old eeepc because the panel was flickering every once in a while, and they didn't want to have it go bad on them while traveling. I put arch and KDE on it, works really nice. I am honestly surprised at how responsive it is. Great for watching porn on too.

Re:Battery life?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEi8Rz6rZ0s

Re:Battery life?

[Ravaldy]

4GB of ram isn't a long shot anymore but Windows 8 runs fine on much less than that. Netbooks have the OS using only 480MB. The cold boot time was 22 seconds which is very reasonable. With version 8.1 it is suppose to be even less memory hungry with a similar boot time.

Re:Battery life?

[tibit]

And to think that my friend was using a 2009 macbook with 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD until a few months ago. Now it has 4GB of RAM, and while doing development work (Eclipse and another copy of JVM running) and having two accounts logged in, both with Safari open, the swap sits unused, and there's a few pageouts but not too many (a couple thousand per hour)... And this is on Mavericks, which has higher resource needs compared to Snow Leopard.

My kid uses a MBP of similar vintage with 8GB of RAM. It works great even though I'm can't seem to bother to replace the mechanical hard drive with an SSD. On Mavericks you essentially either need an SSD or lots of RAM to cache the underperforming hard drive. Mavericks seems to access the hard drive in such a way that makes mechanical drives seem very sluggish. Minecraft, multiple instances of youtube, etc. -- all work great.

Re:Battery life?

[erp_consultant]

I've got an old iMac (about 6 years old) that has the same Core2Duo w/4GB of RAM. RAM is maxed out. I upgraded the HD to an SSD (not for the faint of heart). I dual booted it so that it runs both OSX and Windows 8. W8, with the SSD, runs really nice. Mavericks, on the same machine, is sluggish compared to W8.

On my MBP (same vintage, about a year newer) I have 8GB of RAM with an SSD and Mavericks runs quite nicely. So, from my experience, Mavericks likes to have 8GB of RAM to run well.

You should consider the SSD upgrade for the MBP. It will make a world of difference.

Re:Battery life?

[drinkypoo]

If there is a decent navigation app available then they will make a dandy automotive platform, at a hundred bucks. That reminds me, I need to leave a bug report about Viago being a piece of shit.

Re:Battery life?

[shutdown -p now]

This has not been true since Clover Trail.

Re:Battery life?

[Bing Tsher E]

The reason it's rhetoric is you seem to be describing Vista and older oses. Also it sounds like you have zero experience with current Windows on a tablet.

Re:Battery life?

[bemymonkey]

That's actually not true. I'm typing this from a Win8 tablet that gets 10+ hours out of a 30Wh battery... not shoddy by any means.

Of course, if you're running an i5 with active cooling in your tablet a la Surface Pro, you'll see significantly lower battery life. The HP tablets are likely to have very low power parts though.

Touchpad

[Tokolosh]

I bought a very nice 32GB, 10" HP Touchpad for $150 three years ago. It runs the latest Android and is my daily driver, does everything I want - email, browsing, Netflix, good battery, etc. Bluetooth keyboard if you want it.

Give me micro HDMI !

[redelm]

I'll buy (may swtich to Linux) if it has a micro HDMI output so I can dock the thing at a real monitor (1960*1200 min). I've been looking around to tablets as desktop replacements and found relatively few x86 with HDMI out.

I am a huge Linux guy but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I will take windows tablets over Android anyday. Why?

Because I can deploy my own choice of software on windows tablets! I don't even have to use metro if I don't want to.|

Android I feel constricted to a paradigm that, while useful, isn't the only way to have a tablet workflow.

Additionally, if I can't run Linux directly on the tablet, I can always run it in a VM (assuming intel not win RT). Still much more than what Android can do.

Yes, but will it bend?

[gewalker]

Yes, but will it bend? Certainly this must be the stupid meme for all new tablet / phone announcements.

Re:Yes, but will it bend?

[Bing Tsher E]

It isn't an Apple product, so it wasn't designed by a team that fetishizes thinness (thin is the ' one button mouse' of the present day)

Remote desktop appliance

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds good as a remote desktop appliance for my engineering workstation, especially if it has HDMI or some other kind of video output.

lol

[sootman]

"HP... wants to offer a range of products to meet different needs..."

Understatement of the century. I think HP has more SKUs than customers.

Re:lol

[iggymanz]

yeah four years ago had client who was miffed I didn't know which disk he should order for his HP3000 (that's right runs MPE operating system) off the top of my head.

Then I pulled up 1,200 HP disk SKUs and said, you know they sell just a few different disks.

Good for them!

[sootman]

Last time they had a $99 tablet they sold like mad. This should work out well. :D

Don't believe it until you can buy it.

[walterbyrd]

Microsoft has a long history of over-promising, and under-delivering.

This has been going on for decades: "don't buy our competitor's product! We are just about to release something that completely blows it out of the water!" Then Microsoft starts pushing back the delivery date, changing prices, dropping features, and so on.

Re:Don't believe it until you can buy it.

[Nyder]

Microsoft has a long history of over-promising, and under-delivering.

This has been going on for decades: "don't buy our competitor's product! We are just about to release something that completely blows it out of the water!" Then Microsoft starts pushing back the delivery date, changing prices, dropping features, and so on.

But this is HP...

I'd buy one if...

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be upgraded to Windows XP.
Seriously.

So it's a phone w/o the phone

[gelfling]

7" is more or less what a $300 phablet is. Of course w/o the phone part. Bum some free WiFi and go to town. Facebook and twitter should give these out for FREE. Of course $99 to run Windows isn't going to be functional for much else but who cares?

Marketing: Include a 7!

[briancox2]

Putting a 7 on a Windows product is now the key to a successful marketing campaign. I suspect this will be a huge success.

netbooks are dead, long live Stream(?)

[neurocutie]

I'm so glad the netbook concept is dead. Who wants a cheap Windows laptop anyways? (smirk) I suppose these neo-netbooks (nee Stream) will run also-Windows 8.1, probably with a non-settable background image or some other lame-ass mildly crippled feature...

Re:netbooks are dead, long live Stream(?)

[shutdown -p now]

So far as I can see, the Stream laptop is a netbook by any definition of the word.

Re:netbooks are dead, long live Stream(?)

[neurocutie]

BTW (smirk) means that my whole post was sarcastic... tongue in cheek... for those that couldn't figure that out...

Intel based sub 100 dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a subsidised development. Intel trying to muscle into a new market, it's certainly not getting a 60% margin on those Atoms

Can I run Steam on Stream?

[Radical Moderate]

That would be a dream!


Or maybe not.

Re:Can I run Steam on Stream?

[shutdown -p now]

I run Steam on my 8-inch Asus VivoTab, which has similar hardware. Obviously you won't be playing Crysis on those, but there are plenty of indie or old games that run great. I play Age of Wonders (the original one from 1999) on mine - works surprisingly well with the stylus.

But will it run CounterStrike 1.6?

[Meyaht]

If it can I'll buy 6 just to have highschool flashback game nights!

Transformer Book

[tepples]

I'm so glad the netbook concept is dead.

I disagree.

Who wants a cheap Windows laptop anyways?

I do. I carry a 10" laptop while I commute to and from work on the bus because it fits in a bag that doesn't scream "steal me" the way a full-size laptop bag does. It's a four-year-old Dell Inspiron mini 1012 with 1-core 2-thread Atom N450 CPU and 1 GB RAM that runs Xubuntu. But once its second battery pack loses its ability to hold a reasonable charge, I'm looking at replacing it with an ASUS Transformer Book (quad-core Atom, 2 GB RAM) running Windows 8.1 + Classic Shell.

Quit trying to make Windows tablets happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care much about Windows 8 on a tablet, but the 199 laptop in blue seems like a decent travel computer for writing documents and keeping up with email. Cheap and cheerful. I imagine the gaming is terrible and the quality of that trackpad and keyboard have to be slightly suspect.

SSD

[schlachter]

the SSD is the equalizer. crap specs are fine, as long as you have an SSD in the mix, performance will be decent. amazing, right?

Daylight viewable display?

[WillAdams]

I spent too much time fiddling w/ a passive stylus on a Fujitsu Point PT-510 --- not that interested in repeating it, but if it had a daylight viewable display so that it could:

  - function as a map reader when travelling
  - work as a controller for my CNC machine when using it outside (as good as the dust collection is, Ipê gets cut outside)

But I'm not seeing any machines w/ daylight viewable displays available for less than several grand....

Sub-$100 Android tablets are already old news

[DickBreath]

Over a year ago I could pick up sub $100 Android tablets at my local Walmart. And there are actual third party applications that are available for Android. Sub $100 Android tablets make good children's toys.