Buy CPU, RAM and mainboard as a bundle. With hardware prices these days, that's not all too bad - 300€ buys you a nice Ivy Bridge quad core bundle with gobs of RAM. Overkill for most people, of course... there's always a Celeron Dual Core (Sandy Bridge) bundle with 8 gigs for RAM for ~100€ for people with a smaller budget, or AMD (can't really recommend anything specific there though).
If it runs a proper (i.e. not for smartphones) operating system, sure. All those Windows 8 tablets that are coming along will be full-blown PCs - restricted only by their crappy specs (RAM, mainly... 2GB for the Cloverfield Atom SOC based devices and 4GB for the i5 based devices). Still waiting for the announcement of a Windows 8 tablet with i3/i5/i7, 8-16GB of RAM and a 90+Wh battery case... now THAT I would buy.
But yeah, they're all PCs. They'll all run a full-blown desktop OS...
That really should be something you can get taken care of under warranty though - I have tons of MicroUSB devices (including HTC smartphones), and none of them have charging issues like this...
Better, but apparently still nowhere near real-time... IIRC it was something along the lines of 50-100ms, which is too long for real-time audio. There are still threads dedicated to workarounds on XDA-Dev... for JB - the problem is still there.:(
"I am not convinced that a combination of good ear-buds, good microphone(s), and a smartphone interface couldn't totally replace these overpriced solutions."
Your only choice for this is probably iOS, since Android's latencies are still much much higher than is required for real time audio.
There's also the issue of actually getting a decent mic into the system without a custom preamp... and where would mount, say, an off-the-shelf lavalier? On your lapel? Permanently?
Not sure if this is the same thing, but those paper-thin layers of seaweed in the flat plastic bags with spices are pretty tasty too... any idea what they're called?
Agreed... in addition, an SSD adds other benefits:
1. Durability in portable systems - SSDs are pretty much drop-proof... 2. Power consumption - I saw roughly a 15% increase in battery life 3. Size... I love being able to fit an additional SSD in my laptop's mSATA slot. This opens up ultraportables like the Thinkpad X series to dual-drive configurations (mechanical hard drive in the HDD bay for big storage and a fast SSD for the OS in the mSATA slot)...
Apps and features not being availble on certain hardware... actually, that's pretty much the gist of fragmentation.
The fact that in this case, the constraints are arbitrarily applied in order to squeeze more profit out of users, is irrelevant... it still has the same end result and message to users: Give us more money or GTFO...
That's the thing... you're still using a phone, while everyone else has moved on to portable computers... no wonder you're getting better battery life;)
The problem is that buying a laptop (or even desktop - although the problems are usually more pronounced on laptops) with a high-powered graphics card has very negative side-effects:
1. More heat - Fan noise, uncomfortable heat during use, significan reduction in longevity (ever seen a non-plastic-POS Intel based laptop without dedicated graphics overheat? I haven't...) 2. Higher power consumption - the most efficient laptops with dedicated non-switchable graphics draw upwards of 10W idle... many draw 15 or 20W. In comparison, a modern Intel Core i-X based laptop using onboard graphics will draw 4-7W. That's a 2x to 5x increase in battery life... 3. Less driver issues for the non-gaming folk. Intel's drivers suck for gaming, but for basic OS support, they're great... Linux seems to support them all rather well, and even Pentium M generation graphics are still supported in Windows 7.
Laptops with switchable graphics are close to perfect, since they give you the best of both worlds, but if you use them with multiple monitors the dedicated graphics turn on automatically because the external ports are usually hardwired to the dedicated card... Machines with integrated-only stay cool even with two or three external displays attached.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but any modern smartphone will be drained after using it as a 3G/4G hotspot for a few hours... or a few hours of gaming if you're so inclined. Yes, I usually make it home with 50-60% to spare, but on days with heavy use, such as when WiFi is down at whatever place I'm working from, the phone needs to be charged after 4 or 5 hours...
Considering the fact that my phone is permanently online on Skype, MSN, ICQ, GTalk and IRC, always reachable via SIP (which requires a constant connection to the server), and runs location-aware apps that are constantly polling the GPS and WiFi location hardware, I'd actually call the battery life I'm getting "excellent".
I have a Sony Ericsson featurephone I carry around as a second line that lasts about a week or two... but that's useless for anything other than making phone calls.
Laptop displays have been LED backlit for years now - you can't buy a CCFL backlit display except maybe as a standalone monitor in the clearance aisle of your local big box electronics store...
As for AMOLED... that's useless as a laptop display, because it uses 2-5x as much power as a decently efficient LED backlit display when displaying mainly-white content (such as Slashdot or other websites) - not to mention the fact that AMOLED displays at this size (15.6" diagonal in this case, but consider this sentence to be true for roughly 10" diagonals and higher) cost thousands of $. I have had AMOLED displays on my last two smartphones, so I can definitely attest to the fact that the battery life sucks... on the other hand, the high contrast is pretty good, and you can conserve your battery life by using an operating system and apps with a lot of dark colors - hence why Android's UI has gotten darker and darker after their dev phones started being released with AMOLED screens;)
So yeah, the laptop display is LED backlit. Just like every other laptop for the past 2 years or so:p
5W is with the display on roughly half or even 70% brightness, BTW - albeit using the low-res Chimei Innolux WXGA (1366x768) panel that came with the laptop... that thing was wicked efficient and very nicely readable in sunlight because of the huge pixels that made the panel almost transflective. I've since upgraded to a much less efficient panel (the FullHD 95% gamut panel used in the Thinkpad W520/530), and that still runs around 5.6-5.9W at half brightness:)
Not really... If I don't need to carry around a USB charger for my phone and a laptop charger, that's great value for me. Even going with the smallest AC adapters offered by my laptop's manufacturer, the charger and the corresponding power cable easily make up 5-10% of my bag's weight... and if I'm constantly surrounded by furniture with built in charging pads, there's no need for a big heavy battery - this could make leaving the house with a 4-cell or 6-cell battery viable, which shaves another few hundred grams off the weight I need to carry.
It's even more apparent with ultrabooks, where the sleekness of the machine often makes the AC adapter seem even bullkier...
Now if there was a unified charging tip for all portable electronic devices (say MicroUSB) including laptops and tablets, and there was a powered cable lying on every table in every coffee shop, and you had one in every room at home, then yeah - no added value.
Could you post an example of the outlines, technical documentations, websites and diagrams? Which apps are you using for this? Are you creating and editing these exclusively on the iPad? Or are you syncing and editing on a desktop/laptop as well?
I'd be genuinely intererested in seeing some real world examples, because having a single tablet that can do everything has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid...:)
How're you liking the software part in terms of compatibility? Whenever I try to open a previously created Word document (usually reports or specs) on an Android device, the software pretty much kills my formatting, and if I edit and then save on the Android device, I need to go back and fix everything manually the next time I'm on a laptop (which sucks!). That's pretty much killed all my notions of using Android devices for anything productive...
Sounds awesome to me... I'll take half the power consumption, thanks. I wonder if that goes for total idle power consumption... I'm already seeing less than 5W idle (depending on which LCD panel is installed - add a Watt for the enormously inefficient AUOptronics 1080p panel Lenovo uses) on my Sandy Bridge laptop (and that power consumption includes the SSD), so Haswell should hopefully be able to drop that to 3-4W... hopefully that'll also average out to ~2W less in actual use - meaning a 94Wh battery would net 16 hours instead of the ~12 I'm seeing now (I average about 7.5-8W in regular office/web usage with the 1080p panel)...
Now if only Lenovo would kill off the chiclet keyboards so I can move on from Sandy Bridge... otherwise I'll be stuck with this laptop for the next 10-20 years:(
Depends what for, really... Office, web and HD video? Nope, they're pretty good at that - so good, in fact, that I don't buy machines with dedicated graphics cards unless I'm planning on playing games or running applications that specifically require a fast GPU.
Even the HD3000 or HD4000 (Sandy and Ivy Bridge, respectively) graphics included with the last and current generations of Intel Core iX CPUs are overkill for most people - even a 4500MHD (Core 2 Duo 2nd generation) had perfect support for 1080p acceleration and ran Windows 7 at full tilt with all the bells and whistles, if you wanted those. What more do you want from integrated graphics?
The fact that I can even play Starcraft II on low at 1080p on a Core i3 with the integrated HD3000 at acceptable framerates is just icing on the cake...
Oh and have I mentioned the sub-5W total system power consumption on a 15.6" laptop with a standard voltage CPU? THAT is what integrated graphics are for. If you're looking to do gaming or CAD or use the GPU for computationally intensive tasks, you're not in the target audience...
Just use 7-Taskbar-Tweaker... I have the popup previews turned off, middle click closes the program and dragging files to the taskbar opens them with the program they're hovering over instead of pinning... much more usable.
Slashdot Mirror
Buy CPU, RAM and mainboard as a bundle. With hardware prices these days, that's not all too bad - 300€ buys you a nice Ivy Bridge quad core bundle with gobs of RAM. Overkill for most people, of course... there's always a Celeron Dual Core (Sandy Bridge) bundle with 8 gigs for RAM for ~100€ for people with a smaller budget, or AMD (can't really recommend anything specific there though).
The line is the software. Full blown Linux, Windows or OS X? PC. Android, iOS or similar? Toy.
And i say this as an absolute die hard Android fan who owns an Android phone with HDMI out and bluetooth input devices, and uses them regularly...
"So a tablet with a hdmi port and usb is a PC?"
If it runs a proper (i.e. not for smartphones) operating system, sure. All those Windows 8 tablets that are coming along will be full-blown PCs - restricted only by their crappy specs (RAM, mainly... 2GB for the Cloverfield Atom SOC based devices and 4GB for the i5 based devices). Still waiting for the announcement of a Windows 8 tablet with i3/i5/i7, 8-16GB of RAM and a 90+Wh battery case... now THAT I would buy.
But yeah, they're all PCs. They'll all run a full-blown desktop OS...
That really should be something you can get taken care of under warranty though - I have tons of MicroUSB devices (including HTC smartphones), and none of them have charging issues like this...
WTF, seriously? When did this happen?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1777261&highlight=latency
Better, but apparently still nowhere near real-time... IIRC it was something along the lines of 50-100ms, which is too long for real-time audio. There are still threads dedicated to workarounds on XDA-Dev... for JB - the problem is still there. :(
"I am not convinced that a combination of good ear-buds, good microphone(s), and a smartphone interface couldn't totally replace these overpriced solutions."
Your only choice for this is probably iOS, since Android's latencies are still much much higher than is required for real time audio.
There's also the issue of actually getting a decent mic into the system without a custom preamp... and where would mount, say, an off-the-shelf lavalier? On your lapel? Permanently?
Oh thanks, I thought Nori was reserved for the stuff you use to wrap Sushi (i.e. unseasoned) :)
Not sure if this is the same thing, but those paper-thin layers of seaweed in the flat plastic bags with spices are pretty tasty too... any idea what they're called?
Agreed... in addition, an SSD adds other benefits:
1. Durability in portable systems - SSDs are pretty much drop-proof...
2. Power consumption - I saw roughly a 15% increase in battery life
3. Size... I love being able to fit an additional SSD in my laptop's mSATA slot. This opens up ultraportables like the Thinkpad X series to dual-drive configurations (mechanical hard drive in the HDD bay for big storage and a fast SSD for the OS in the mSATA slot)...
Choice? Not really. It's more a case of arbitrary restrictions (Apple) vs. nasty side-effects of bad planning (Android)...
Apps and features not being availble on certain hardware... actually, that's pretty much the gist of fragmentation.
The fact that in this case, the constraints are arbitrarily applied in order to squeeze more profit out of users, is irrelevant... it still has the same end result and message to users: Give us more money or GTFO...
That's the thing... you're still using a phone, while everyone else has moved on to portable computers... no wonder you're getting better battery life ;)
AWESOME. I hope to $Deity that you're right... thanks for the info!
The problem is that buying a laptop (or even desktop - although the problems are usually more pronounced on laptops) with a high-powered graphics card has very negative side-effects:
1. More heat - Fan noise, uncomfortable heat during use, significan reduction in longevity (ever seen a non-plastic-POS Intel based laptop without dedicated graphics overheat? I haven't...)
2. Higher power consumption - the most efficient laptops with dedicated non-switchable graphics draw upwards of 10W idle... many draw 15 or 20W. In comparison, a modern Intel Core i-X based laptop using onboard graphics will draw 4-7W. That's a 2x to 5x increase in battery life...
3. Less driver issues for the non-gaming folk. Intel's drivers suck for gaming, but for basic OS support, they're great... Linux seems to support them all rather well, and even Pentium M generation graphics are still supported in Windows 7.
Laptops with switchable graphics are close to perfect, since they give you the best of both worlds, but if you use them with multiple monitors the dedicated graphics turn on automatically because the external ports are usually hardwired to the dedicated card... Machines with integrated-only stay cool even with two or three external displays attached.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but any modern smartphone will be drained after using it as a 3G/4G hotspot for a few hours... or a few hours of gaming if you're so inclined. Yes, I usually make it home with 50-60% to spare, but on days with heavy use, such as when WiFi is down at whatever place I'm working from, the phone needs to be charged after 4 or 5 hours...
Considering the fact that my phone is permanently online on Skype, MSN, ICQ, GTalk and IRC, always reachable via SIP (which requires a constant connection to the server), and runs location-aware apps that are constantly polling the GPS and WiFi location hardware, I'd actually call the battery life I'm getting "excellent".
I have a Sony Ericsson featurephone I carry around as a second line that lasts about a week or two... but that's useless for anything other than making phone calls.
Laptop displays have been LED backlit for years now - you can't buy a CCFL backlit display except maybe as a standalone monitor in the clearance aisle of your local big box electronics store...
As for AMOLED... that's useless as a laptop display, because it uses 2-5x as much power as a decently efficient LED backlit display when displaying mainly-white content (such as Slashdot or other websites) - not to mention the fact that AMOLED displays at this size (15.6" diagonal in this case, but consider this sentence to be true for roughly 10" diagonals and higher) cost thousands of $. I have had AMOLED displays on my last two smartphones, so I can definitely attest to the fact that the battery life sucks... on the other hand, the high contrast is pretty good, and you can conserve your battery life by using an operating system and apps with a lot of dark colors - hence why Android's UI has gotten darker and darker after their dev phones started being released with AMOLED screens ;)
So yeah, the laptop display is LED backlit. Just like every other laptop for the past 2 years or so :p
5W is with the display on roughly half or even 70% brightness, BTW - albeit using the low-res Chimei Innolux WXGA (1366x768) panel that came with the laptop... that thing was wicked efficient and very nicely readable in sunlight because of the huge pixels that made the panel almost transflective. I've since upgraded to a much less efficient panel (the FullHD 95% gamut panel used in the Thinkpad W520/530), and that still runs around 5.6-5.9W at half brightness :)
"its only value is the "coolness" factor"
Not really... If I don't need to carry around a USB charger for my phone and a laptop charger, that's great value for me. Even going with the smallest AC adapters offered by my laptop's manufacturer, the charger and the corresponding power cable easily make up 5-10% of my bag's weight... and if I'm constantly surrounded by furniture with built in charging pads, there's no need for a big heavy battery - this could make leaving the house with a 4-cell or 6-cell battery viable, which shaves another few hundred grams off the weight I need to carry.
It's even more apparent with ultrabooks, where the sleekness of the machine often makes the AC adapter seem even bullkier...
Now if there was a unified charging tip for all portable electronic devices (say MicroUSB) including laptops and tablets, and there was a powered cable lying on every table in every coffee shop, and you had one in every room at home, then yeah - no added value.
So you do use a (physical) keyboard though, right?
As for your comments on the trackpoint: Anything but praise for the almighty pointing stick borders on blasphemy! :D
Could you post an example of the outlines, technical documentations, websites and diagrams? Which apps are you using for this? Are you creating and editing these exclusively on the iPad? Or are you syncing and editing on a desktop/laptop as well?
I'd be genuinely intererested in seeing some real world examples, because having a single tablet that can do everything has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid... :)
How're you liking the software part in terms of compatibility? Whenever I try to open a previously created Word document (usually reports or specs) on an Android device, the software pretty much kills my formatting, and if I edit and then save on the Android device, I need to go back and fix everything manually the next time I'm on a laptop (which sucks!). That's pretty much killed all my notions of using Android devices for anything productive...
Sounds awesome to me... I'll take half the power consumption, thanks. I wonder if that goes for total idle power consumption... I'm already seeing less than 5W idle (depending on which LCD panel is installed - add a Watt for the enormously inefficient AUOptronics 1080p panel Lenovo uses) on my Sandy Bridge laptop (and that power consumption includes the SSD), so Haswell should hopefully be able to drop that to 3-4W... hopefully that'll also average out to ~2W less in actual use - meaning a 94Wh battery would net 16 hours instead of the ~12 I'm seeing now (I average about 7.5-8W in regular office/web usage with the 1080p panel)...
Now if only Lenovo would kill off the chiclet keyboards so I can move on from Sandy Bridge... otherwise I'll be stuck with this laptop for the next 10-20 years :(
"The integrated graphics are still crap."
Depends what for, really... Office, web and HD video? Nope, they're pretty good at that - so good, in fact, that I don't buy machines with dedicated graphics cards unless I'm planning on playing games or running applications that specifically require a fast GPU.
Even the HD3000 or HD4000 (Sandy and Ivy Bridge, respectively) graphics included with the last and current generations of Intel Core iX CPUs are overkill for most people - even a 4500MHD (Core 2 Duo 2nd generation) had perfect support for 1080p acceleration and ran Windows 7 at full tilt with all the bells and whistles, if you wanted those. What more do you want from integrated graphics?
The fact that I can even play Starcraft II on low at 1080p on a Core i3 with the integrated HD3000 at acceptable framerates is just icing on the cake...
Oh and have I mentioned the sub-5W total system power consumption on a 15.6" laptop with a standard voltage CPU? THAT is what integrated graphics are for. If you're looking to do gaming or CAD or use the GPU for computationally intensive tasks, you're not in the target audience...
Just use 7-Taskbar-Tweaker... I have the popup previews turned off, middle click closes the program and dragging files to the taskbar opens them with the program they're hovering over instead of pinning... much more usable.