Major Tablet PC Running Into Problems? 347
An anonymous reader writes "As Digitimes says :
Global sales of Tablet PCs have not been as strong as expected, and major Tablet PC vendors like Acer and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have even experienced declining sales of the products, sources said.
Acer, which claims it sold about 35,000 Tablet PCs worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2002, saw sales of the product plunge by over 50% in the first quarter of this year. " I actually saw/held my first Tablet PC last week - it was one of Fujitsu series machines, and I was pretty impressed by it. It'd make a good business/school machine, but I don't think you'd want it for gaming and the like.
Gaming? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, I think a dishwasher is a good idea, but won't be using one to wash my clothes any time soon.
Tablet PCs are simply not designed for gaming, so saying you would not use one for gaming is a bit superfluous.
Re:Gaming? (Score:5, Funny)
No, but you can cook a salmon rather well in a dishwasher.
Rob.
Re:Gaming? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gaming? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Gaming? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gaming? (Score:2)
Re:Gaming? (Score:5, Funny)
I gotten my fastest time on minesweeper using a tablet PC. I find it much easier using the stylus rather then the mouse.
So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gaming? (Score:5, Interesting)
They could even be good for low power games (think GameBoy with a much bigger screen) if there were a joypad style mouse button and the buttons were positioned properly.
The other problem is that these things tend to cost as much as a laptop. If they could get them into the upper range of PDA prices while retaining their PC-like features then they'd kick ass. The ProGears were a great hacking bargain once they went out of business and were available for $400 each.
Re:Gaming? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the kind I'd get, and if I were hunting for a laptop I'd probably get one which is "tabletable".
If that's what you get then it's worth the price. Those that are a "big PalmPC" are however generally way too expensive for the bang. As you say, you don't want to get a big PalmPC for the price of a laptop.
Re:Gaming? (Score:2)
Let's see, two grand toy you hold in crook of arm. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a billionaire who doesn't need to care about dropping a few grand of electronics on the floor every so often, this is a killer toy. No surprise who the poster boy was. But likewise it's no surpise they're not taking the market by storm.
Re:Let's see, two grand toy you hold in crook of a (Score:2)
bang for the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
A tablet PC, especially the kind that can unfold to into a laptop, is what I've been wanting for a very long time.
But the price is just crazy, $2600? I'd consider paying $1000. $2600 Could by a pretty slick laptop that cleans the floor with a typical tablet pc.
Re:bang for the buck (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree there, and considering that I have not seen a tablet PC in a store, yet, I'm not surprised to see that sales haven't been very good (htf am I supposed to buy one if I can't mess with them in the store?).
As for your complaints about price, I understand to a degree, but realistically a $1000 laptop would be a pretty useless machine by most standards.
Re:bang for the buck (Score:2)
$799 for a 2 Ghz celeron w/ CD-RW, 128 megs RAM, 20 gig HDD, and XP home From Dell [dell.com]
They are cheaper and faster than ever now, and that is far from useless!!
Re:bang for the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
$2600 buys a decent $1000-1500 laptop with enough left over to buy a 3GHz desktop gaming machine.
I would pay 2600 (Score:2)
Re:bang for the buck (Score:3, Insightful)
I would never buy a tablet PC simply because I consider the keyboard an efficient, indispensable way to get data
Re:bang for the buck (Score:3, Insightful)
The other type is called a Slate type tablet PC. no keyboard.
Personally, I'd like the swivel type, but it looks very breakable... might be to costly to make a robust version. I've horsed around with the demo TPCs, and for the most part, the pen input suc
Re:bang for the buck (Score:5, Informative)
The Acer is a bit pricer but uses a more powerful *and* more energy efficient Pentium M whereas the compaq uses a ULV Pentium III. They're called convertables and appear to be fairly resilient from the reviews i've read.
The biggest beef with tablet pc's i've seen are that their screens (with the exception of one very expensive toshiba slate) are not too viewable outside. i'd buy one of those acers right now if it had any kind of decent outdoor performance. i may anyway -- i haven't decided how much direct sunlight it's likely to get.
Incidentally, the reason it seems like a gimmick to you is that you only deal in text. For text, a keyboard is likely to be far quicker than a tablet. In my case, i'm drawn to tablets (no pun intended, i swear) because i would like to be able to make sketches and draw out diagrams naturally. I also hate to have to carry sheafs of paper that deal with the text notes i've got on my laptop... this is convergence of the best kind in my situation. There are a lot of things that are simpler and clearer to work on in a free form way and don't lend themselves to expression in pure text. and don't mention "drawing" with the trackpad... that's apples to elephants.
Re:bang for the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
When tablet Pc's came out in 1988 and when they were re-introduced as the "new thing" the last time in 1995 by microsoft at Comdex with Windows 95 for pen computing... thay also failed miserably in the broad market.
They are not for the general user. the general user hates them after the initial "geee.... ohhhh" period wears off. they are perfect for Insurance adjusters, doctors, supplier's and inventory management. for anything else they are 100% worthless except for the part that they are still a computer.
Microsoft was completely idiotic for trying to push them, HP was blindly stupid for even trying to get into Fujitsu's and Panasonic's world by selling a crap version of a real Tablet PC. (A real Tablet pc can take lots of abuse as they are know to be put in the abuse realm because of their job.)
Tablet Pc's have their use, I use one with my SL-5500 to manage my IT sphere of 3 offices and it's WAN better than anyone else in the huge company I am a part of...(can you say 10,000+ offices) because I can adapt this vertical technology to my uses and adjust my work patters to fit with the tablet PC. asking a home user, or sales person to alter how they work is asking a orange to be an apple.... it ain't gonna happen.
so this news of it's dismal failure is no suprise. Everything that Microsoft has tried to push that is radically different is a massive failure... The auto-pc being one of their largest failures next to BOB...
I am just more suprised that we keep seeing them trot out last decades failures over and over and over again.....
Steve Jobs/Tablets will fail but info needs iPods (Score:5, Interesting)
While I do believe he is correct, I think he may be off base with the PDA. This is one of the only devices that I would like to see be more "all in one". I'd personally like a Sony Ericsson p800 style PDA phone [sonyericsson.com] that had the screen from a Clie NZ90 [sonystyle.com], GPS [garmin.com], iPod sized hard drive [toshiba.com], megapixel camera, the VERY cool remote control center from Sony, 802.11g and Bluetooth + an Mp3 player and DIVX/MPEG4 decoder [rca.com]. While something like this would be in the high end (probably where the NZ90 is = $800 + $100 802.11 card) I still think it'd fly off the shelf, and possibly be subsidized by cell phone companies, at least in part with service agreements.
I still hope Apple is considering such a device or at least with most of the features listed here with a compact flash & SDIO slot.
I know there's a little link overload, just illustrating how easily this could be done right now!
All of this could be squeezed into a current form factor Sony Clie.
Re:Steve Jobs/Tablets will fail but info needs iPo (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, Steve Jobs is justifiably wary about PDAs with the failure of the Newton [techtv.com], which I still think is an awesome device.
The Newton (Score:3, Interesting)
And seriously, about the CDR, WHY NOT put a firewire port on it? WHY NOT make it run full Mac OSX? (Built in disc burning)
Small screen or not, very useful!
Re:The Newton (Score:2, Funny)
Congrats! You've just invented the most expensive PowerBook ever! You want a tiny form factor, that runs a desktop operating system, has a built in camera and cellphone? Anything else? Casual blowjobs on demand maybe? A cure for cancer?
Re:The Newton (Score:2)
You mean like this adult computer toy? [virtualsexmachine.com] Heh, this could be the salvation of male
Newton's Apple (Score:2)
you just need a p800! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine if all the major computer makers had come up with different kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other? Sounds pretty idiotic in retrospect, right? Well, that's what's happening in the industry right now with flash media. SD, MMC, SM, CF, MS, this is not only inconvenient but it's probably confusing as heck to the non-computer literate.
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:2)
They did that. Now there are just two formats left to support in the world: PC (DOS) and Mac. Since Apple stopped shipping floppy drives five years ago, and Mac OS can read and write DOS-formatted disks just fine, DOS won.
And don't get me started on all the ways you can format a hard drive [win.tue.nl]...
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:5, Interesting)
It may have come from Microsoft, but it's an extremely stable and robust filesystem that is very well understood, and will probably be the de-facto standard for many years.
As for Mac and PC format floppies, this is not really the issue I was getting it. Macs and PC's used different filesystems on floppies, but the media itself was exactly the same. This is not the case with the multitude of flash memory formats out there.
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:2)
But really they all support each other (Score:2)
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:2)
kinds of floppy disk in the early 90's, all incompatible with each other?"
Didn't they?
Not the floppy disk, necessarily (although there's, what, 4 or 5
sizes of the 3.5"), but in the 100Mb+ space there was a heaping pile
'o different formats. Zip, obviously, was the big one, but there was
quite a few other high density cartridge formats introduced during
that period. Many tape formats, too.
The same thing appears to be happening with writable
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:2)
This is one of the reasons floppy disks were so ubiquitous for so long; even though they only held 1.4MB, everyone had one. If flash media weren't so varied, maybe it would be ubiquitous now too.
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:you just need a p800! (Score:2)
I don't seem to remember anything other than 5.25" and 3.5" floppies in the mainstream computing world. I know there were some weird formats, but weren't they all used by niche players? (Apple Lisa, those silly word processors, etc.)
Re:Steve Jobs/Tablets will fail but info needs iPo (Score:2)
And a pony.
Re:Steve Jobs/Tablets will fail but info needs iPo (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the answer lies in Bluetooth. Give me a Bluetooth phone, my Palm Tungsten T, and a Bluetooth headset and I'll be happy.
Re:Steve Jobs/Tablets will fail but info needs iPo (Score:3, Funny)
All of this could be squeezed into a current form factor Sony Clie.
No, no it couldn't. You've just linked to half a dozen different very expensive products in that form factor. The resulting combined product would be about six times larger, cost more than your house, and have a battery life of about thirty seconds. And nobody would buy it because they'd rather spend all that money on some of whatever it is
It's the price (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's the price (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't afford to pay the premium for the very features that make tablets(laptops) cool, then you probably don't need a tablet(laptop) in the first place.
Re:It's the price (Score:2)
Re:It's the price (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's the price (Score:2)
At $2,500, plus annual updates does MS expect that CEOs would drool over this stuff and take notes? They'd hire smart secretaries instead. Wrong market analysis, IMO.
Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Next year, there will probably be better operating system and application support, and at that point tablets will actually be useful; but until then the only market which exists is already saturated.
Gaming PC (Score:5, Interesting)
But you see, that's the whole point. A tablet PC isn't effective if you can't hold it in your hands and write on it, and that means it's got to be tiny. If you're going to get a laptop, you're either going to get a small laptop that's not so fast, or a bulky laptop that is blazin'.
It's not much fun sportin' a 7 pound tablet, I mean common we've been out of the stone ages for awhile
Re:Gaming PC (Score:2)
How is this better than... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How is this better than... (Score:2)
Re:How is this better than... (Score:5, Informative)
It is the journal program and the full paper size that means it can really replace paper for note taking and the trick editing keeps helps deal with lecatures who change their mind about stuff on their white board. I can take notes from my third year engineering maths course better that I could on paper. I have a PocketPC and have used both it
The bottom line is the Tablet PC is the most natural interface I have used and I love every over priced cent of it. Most people won't need the features but if you do it's great.
Cultural (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea doesn't improve significantly enough on my good Rhino to have me making a purchase.
Now, when I see RMS running Emacs on one of these things, then, maybe THEN, I'll plunk down some frogskins...
I'm not surprised (Score:5, Interesting)
The software isn't all that great either. The connected handwriting recognition system is actually not too bad in terms of raw recognition performance, but its integration and user interface is awful. Speech recognition is laughable. Your best bet is the on-screen keyboard or the PDA-like recognizer.
I think a compact tablet with a high resolution 1024x768 screen, long battery life, but without a harddisk and with a low-power processor, would likely be more successful--provided it ran something better than Tablet PC. In fact, even PocketPC would probably be better than TabletPC.
How do they hold up? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How do they hold up? (Score:2, Informative)
It had a much better feel that a PDA's Pen, In fact an artist I know played on it and drew a picture on it. It was hard to tell if he penciled in on paper and scanned it or drew it on the laptop. The pickup was that good. Of course it better be for $2000+ and if you lose the pen your screwed though.
Re:How do they hold up? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tablet PC screens are not touch-sensitive and thus do not have the layer of flexible, scratchable plastic film that PDAs do. Tablets require the use of their own pen which emits a small magnetic field sensed by the Tablet. Thus the Tablet screen knows when the pen is close. At that point it activates the cursor which you move around with the pen near, but not touching, the screen. Then when the pen actually touches the screen the Tablet activates the on-screen "ink" mode. Since Tablet PCs have much larger screens than a PDA you are likely to have your hand resting on the screen. They are designed for that and your wrist would not affect it.
Re:How do they hold up? (Score:3, Interesting)
Promotion, perchance? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I'm sure if Major Tablet PC got promoted to Lieutenant Colonel Tablet PC, he could pull rank and avoid doing the damn obstacle course where he keeps running into things. :P
The Problem is the price (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it worth $2000+ when I can get a laptop for $1000+ that can basicially do the same thing except Now I can't use a pen? No way. That's the problem with them. they are nowhere near price competitive to traditional laptops. If they were then would be selling like hotcacks.
Its a cool technology that prices itself out of the market. pure and simple.
Re:The Problem is the price (Score:2)
Agreed. Also, haven't I seen those Wacom drawing/CAD tablets on eBay for about $100USD, for those odd times when you need to draw or write? I would expect a dedicated drawing tablet would be more tactile and more rugged than drawing directly on the screen. Plus, having the drawing tablet and output screen separate makes writing easier for us southpaws...
Try working in the BioMed industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, tablet PC's are not the solution to everyone, but they are for the medical industry. And Microsoft already has deep roots in the medical industry.
Re:Try working in the BioMed industry... (Score:2)
Microsoft is somtimes used for invoicing in smaller offices, and once in a while you can find it in a Shitty-Patient-Tracking-Access-Pusdo-Database. Complete with huge buttons, and crappy background bitmaps.
But for actually research, diagnosis, and appliation - nobody uses a desktop OS for that, let alone XP.
Protien folding with an XP box - that'd be funny.
Niche market = no volume = high prices (Score:2)
No doubt it's possible to sustain a healthy business segment in a niche product. I can see tablets being purchased by those who REALLY NEED them, and are therefore willing to pay enough of a premium to sustain a low-volume product.
But this isn't terribly interesting to the rest of us.
The question that interests most of us is whether tablets are a compelli
Re:Try working in the BioMed industry... (Score:2)
This worries me tremendously.
How long until something deep within the hastily-written and poorly-tested tens of millions of lines of code in Windows burbs, and a patient gets injured or dies.
When will people realize that Windows is the least appropriate operating system for medical and military applications, where lives are literally on the line.
Seeing Microsoft products in these applications makes me sick.
Perhaps... (Score:2, Insightful)
drawing tablet (Score:2, Interesting)
To be truly sellable to the mass population, the tablet shall have the following attributes:
The focus then becomes an artists drawing pad.
Better title choices... (Score:2)
or
Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC edition running into major problems.
or
Majority of top-shot CEOs refuse to buy Tablets
or
Viagra tablets sell faster than PC tablets
or
Tablets giving headaches to HPaq, Acer, Microsft
or
etc...
Go the lightweight route (Score:3, Interesting)
For serious computing I'd still want a desktop, but a tablet PC would indeed be perfect for browsing, even if it were a bit underpowered.
My 2 cents anyway...
Lower The Price, Sell 'em to Students (Score:5, Interesting)
The tablet PC is fantastic for taking notes during lectures. It's unobtrusive, and you can turn the handwriting recognition off while you're maddly scribbling notes and drawing diagrams. Plug in a mic, and you've got a recording of the lecture for future reference.
Later on you could run the recognition software, reorganize your notes, highlight, e-mail, print, etc. etc. Plug in a keyboard and a mouse, and suddenly you've got a "normal" computer for browsing the 'net, writing papers, and, erm, acquiring music.
The "perfect" tablet for this market would have a lightweight OS, 10GB HD, wifi, low power CPU (Crusoe?) and dimensions roughly the same as an A4 or 8x10 pad of paper (12.1" screen, ~1/2" thick).
How many students would buy one if they were under $1000? What's your personal price point?
Unattractive to early adopters (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's that latter feature that's killing adoption. People just don't want handwriting recognition, especially the kind of power users likey to be eraly adopters of new technology. Why? Simply because handwriting recognition at this stage is still pretty buggy, and even if it wasn't, HANDWRITING ISN'T AS FAST AS TYPING. As I suspect most power users are fairly good typists, handwriting recognition is of little value to them.
And as a "new generation" of users that have grown up with computers matures, there will be even less incentive for handwring recognition. Anyone notice the trend in PDAs has been towards keyboards and away from recognition? This isn't a coincidence, it's the maturing market base.
pressure sensitivity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:pressure sensitivity (and issues / commentary) (Score:2)
Take a look at:
http://www.wacom.com/tabletpc/index.cfm
There's link to a download which enables pressure sensitivity for graphics apps (Download enhanced driver for Tablet PC).
Other comments in no particular order:
- there are convertible machines with keyboards (Toshiba's Portege)
- building a Tablet PC is a lot more complex than just removing the keyboard from a laptop and adding a digitizer---cf. Fujitsu's Stylis
My experience ..... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not too surprised to see this product being hacked to death on
Re:My experience ..... (Score:2)
Missing the point... (Score:3, Interesting)
Tablet PC's - at least the majority of them - are nothing but convertible laptop computers. Nothing more, nothing less. I couldn't play games on my laptop - it's not powerful enough - but my wife sure could on hers. Stick a swivel touch-screen on our computers and bam, they're both tablet PC's. The point being, there's nothing whatsoever about the fact that a PC is a tablet PC that rules it in or out for gaming or any other computing task.
The hype for these things has gone beyond what the actual product is, and I don't think it's served the product well. I'd love to have a tablet PC - it's a laptop with a useful extra feature (especially for design work, which I do occasionally). If you want a laptop, why don't you want a laptop with this extra feature? It's like putting built-in wi-fi into a laptop (which I think is a much bigger innovation, honestly) and then giving those laptops their own product category and specialized launch. It's just a feature, and one that a lot of people would like if they actually got to use it. There's no reason to not want a laptop with this feature if you already want a laptop... maybe you don't want to pay the extra $100 or whatever (that's really about all the premium is), but eventually that won't even be a factor.
btw, I think the word "vendors" was left off the headline of this story - I read the headline and thought that a particular model of tablet PC had developed a defect. I expected to read a story about a recall based on the headline.
Tablets (Score:3, Interesting)
The notebook market has too slim a margin... (Score:2, Interesting)
As long as you can buy a $899 1.6GHz namebrand pentium notebook at Best Buy, few specialty PC makers can survive.
A tablet PC, which needs to be sold for ~$2000 (since it is still a specialty item), but has no better specs than such a $899 machine is just not enticing for most consumers.
Another example is the AlphaSmart Dana, a notebook built with the Palm OS and designed for schools:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID = 43 78
Is anyone suprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The Viewsonic Tablet PC is an excellent way to pay twice as much for a laptop by removing the keyboard, CD-ROM drive and Floppy."
Let's face it, Tablet PCs are essentially expensive stripped down laptops. While they might have some very handy specific uses, for the vast majority of people a laptop is a much better solution, i.e., cheaper with more value.
Microsoft's push for the Tablet PC is an attempt to get people who don't know how to type to buy computers. There are many people who never typed before and are frustrated by computers. The paper/pen metaphor is supposed to appease those people. Unfortunately, anyone who has avoided computers up to now clearly has NO USE for a computer. Especially one that costs SO much!
It's the price (Score:2)
Wrong features (Score:3, Insightful)
What I want is, essentially, a letter-sized PDA. Something I can take notes on, browse the web via 802.11 or whatever, read email, and that's about it. If I want to do CAD/CAM, or gaming, or write a 200-page document, then I'll use a desktop. No Windows, no Linux even -- Palm OS would be ideal.
With such a tablet, I could leave it sitting on my coffee table. We're watching a movie, and someone asks "what else was he in?" I hit pause, pick up the tablet, tap "on", and it instantly comes on, just like a Palm. I hit the web browser, go to IMDB, write in my query, and answer the question. Then I set it down and resume the movie. Total time, from question to answer and back to movie: 60 seconds.
Do that with a tablet PC, running *any* OS.
Keep a little cradle on the side that it can charge from, hook that via Cat-5 to the network, have some kind of synchronization software running on some server, and you've now got the ability to hot-sync, with no computer in your family room. Pick the thing up when you go to work and read all the news, while on the subway, that got synch'd to it overnight. Go to starbucks on your lunch hour and catch up on personal email. Whatever.
Anything you can do with a PDA, you should be able to do just as easily with a tablet. It's a logical extension of the PDA to a larger form-factor for reading full-sized documents, web surfing, collaboration around a coffee table, etc. But it doesn't need to be a full-out laptop.
Really, this seems to me a no-brainer, and it should be trivially easy for a hardware maker to implement. Just take the guts from one of the newer Palm models (with the 400 MHz XScale processor), add 64 MB of flash RAM, a CF slot (bundled with a 64 MB card, obviously the end user can expand that) for long-term storage, stick in bluetooth and 802.11, and build it all into a lightweight 1024x768 portable display. Add recharchable batteries, stir, and put out a press release. Sell it for $700, and I'll buy one tomorrow.
Re:Wrong features (Score:2, Interesting)
Your family already has a fast, new pc? This would make a great companion, eliminate fights between who gets to use the computer.
There is also a significant number of folks out there running very old machines at home. They have probably been thinking about upgrading for a while. Heck, there are still people that don't even have a
Not a laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not a laptop (Score:2)
The other 1/2 of the quote (Score:2)
So a new, faster, less power draining processor, has INCREASED sales?
Still does not make up fo price, but it is nice to see that while a small market, it is not stagnant.
Fujitsu (Score:2, Informative)
I've had to send mine back TWICE for a failed NIC. The first time they replaced the systemboard, and it worked for about a month. It just went back for the second failure. Wireless works great, and the handwriting recognition kicks ass, even with my shoddy penmanship.
The Toshiba is a close second, although it is more of a laptop with a pen than a tablet. The weight difference between it and the Fujitsi is noticable. And even tho
tablet pcs fail in the marketplace (Score:2)
Ive got a ia1 w/ Lignux in my living room, very underpowered and a badish screen just dying to get repalced w/ an 802.11/touchscreen tablet...
Bring on the DISCONTINUED-DISCOUNTED tigerdirect deals!
Motion M1200 is worth a look (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some points though that I would like to make in response to a whole lot of messages above.
1) The screen is 12" and 1024x768, but I regularly use the VGA port when at my desk to run dual desktops on a monitor running 1280x1024. With the tablet in portrait mode next to it it works very well.
2) The pen interface is more natural then a keyboard. You just start marking up documents, or jotting down notes. This doesn't replace the keyboard (not by a long shot for some tasks), but more accuratly it replaces paper.
3) These boxes have more then enough umpf for everything except your high end games. With the 1GHz Centrinos coming out I expect that even the games will be OK, but is that really a buying criteria for an office/work machine?
4) Having searching of handwritten notes is invaluable, and makes paper replacement not only viable but desirable.
Alright, given the price and specs they aren't for everyone, but neither is any other machine available. This product fits a large niche, and as the upgrade cycles occur in companies and governments I expect them to be adopted about at the rate PCs were in the mid 80's. That is nothing to sneeze at.
Given how there advertised..... (Score:2)
Every ad that I've seen shows something like a guy drawing on his hand or somesuch to take an important note, and comparing it with him taking the same note on a tablet PC.
If you're going to lug a tablet PC around with you, I don't think it's unreasonable to figure that you could probably remember to carry a good old fashioned notepad. You know. The kind with paper and a pen.
Since the only way they market themselves is basically a $2000 pad of paper,
Gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I do think that the tablet could work for RTS games like starcraft, where your mousing accuracy would no longer be a limiting factor.
If you took it a step further, I bet you could make a bunch of neat strategy style games that a pen interface would be better for. Imagine being able to give your troops walking directions by drawing on the screen.
I'm interested in picking up a tablet and seeing what I could make with it, but the cost is just too prohibitive to do it just for kicks.
Tablet PC is solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
There might be a few markets where the benefits outweigh the costs (vertical medical applications, maybe?), but I can't think of many where they are truly cost-effective. After trying to use laptops and PDAs for notes and schedules and such, I still find that the easiest thing for ME to use for most of my needs like that is still a piece of paper. The cost ($2 vs. $2,600) and "user interface" of a cheap paper notebook still make it superior for a lot of things, even if it DOES seem cool to geeks to be able to write on a screen with a stylus.
I don't expect Tablet PCs to take off any time soon, and I still think that PDAs as we know them are dying, too. (I thought Steve Jobs was wrong about PDAs in the beginning, but I know fewer and fewer non-geeks who use them.) A Tablet PC is interesting technology, but it doesn't solve a problem that people really want solved.
Acer Tablet PC w/ WiFi, etc. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just scrapped my TabletPC (Score:5, Insightful)
My conclusion: A TabletPC is a luxury, but heavy PDA replacement and isn't very usefull as a replacement for a real laptop. Most of the software needs a complete rethinking and the hardware is feeble. So i bought a brand new Apple Powerbook and I'm happy now.
My detailed experiences with TabletPC Software were: Microsoft XP TabletXP Edition was quite unstable (2 crashes a day), Microsoft Journal works fine, Microsoft OneNote Beta was absolutely not usable (imho wrong concept for a notetaking application), Covey TabletPlanner is ok, but you wouldn't need another Outlook (it works fine on a TabletPC). The absolute KilleApp in the note-taking area is from my point of view Mindjets Mindmanager for TabletPC (good concept, consequent implementation, high value).
My experiences with Compaq hardware: The TabletPC's connection between main unit and keyboard is very unstable and could be damaged easily. The built-in WLAN connection is very weak, I needed a extra Orinocco WLAN Adapter to get in working in our office. The missing bluetooth adapter is very unconveniend and I see no reason for that (the price couldn't be an argument).
Toshiba's sales are fine (Score:4, Informative)
Therein lies the key. Notice that Toshiba isn't mentioned. This is because Toshiba is cleaning their clock! The 3500/3505 has the right mix of features -- mainly processor speed -- and consumers/businesses have figured this out.
Someone above said a Tablet PC is like a big PDA. Exactly. It replaces your PDA which makes a whole lot more sense than trying to replace your cell phone. I pity anyone who carries all three...
What's wrong with having options? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good grief. The computing market is huge, there is room for a variety of ideas because there are a large variety of problems to solve. Tablet PC makes sense for certain problems, just like a laptop does.
I just don't get this mentality.
Re:Can you install Debian on it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can you install Debian on it? (Score:2)
Are features like the stylus and touch-sensitive screen supported?
Some touch screens are supported in X. It depends. The fancy stylus features would probably need some code written. I know of no FOSS handwriting recognition. Proprietary handwriting recognition may exist. Who knows.
What about the power management features?
Those are almost certainly ACPI. 2.4 series kernels have some support. 2.6 should work just fine.
Will ap
Re:How long.. (Score:4, Informative)
My HP/Compaq TC1000 runs for around 2.5 hours with the built in WiFi turned off. Once enabled, depending on my connection rate, I get about 1.5 - 1.75 hours. NOT enough for a day of meetings without a power plug nearby. I'm very disappointed with the battery life on this unit.
The battery is removable, so I'll be purchasing a spare.
My friend has the Fujitsu that allows a higher capacity battery, and he routinely sees 3-3.5 hours with WiFi.
Re:Daft, I say! (Score:2)
Re:Here's my deal (Score:3, Interesting)
Madness! Sheer folly! The entire POINT of a tablet PC is that it's small, light, and requires NO periphe