marypcbuk | Entries tagged with tablet pc

I was hoping that the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 might be it: I need more time with it to decide. This is a good size, with good battery life but how good is the new Atom and how good is the combined active pen and touch screen from N-Trig?

Hands on with the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550: http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/hands-on-fujitsu-stylistic-q550-review-980280

From increasing the DPI to tweaking the delete gesture to something proofreaders will recognise. I'm amazed OEMs don't do most of these as standard on touch tablets, although what Windows 7 really needs is a pen and touch combo screen. If you can't afford that, or you're using a touch only screen until the Asus Eee tablet turns up, check out my tips at Tom's Guide.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Microsoft-Windows-7-Tablets,review-1629.html

At least, not according to this history of multitouch from Bill Buxton. Yes, he does work at Microsoft Research - which means he knows what Microsoft has done and what a lot of researchers have done over the years. To quote the site:

Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984 (Lee, Buxton & Smith, 1985), the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee:
Westerman, Wayne (1999). Hand Tracking,Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface. U of Delaware PhD Dissertation: http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf
In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."

It's hard to tell Toshiba's new Tecra and Satellite Pro models apart; that's actually quite deliberate. But it's the Reel Time document history you get on the notebooks that could be the most interesting feature. Find out why in my first take over on ZDNet UK...

There have been some game-changing devices, and some that should have changed the game but came out too soon. The OmniBook 300 was the first netbook, back in about 1994 - booted in seconds from flash (ROM), ran Windows, had a pop-out mouse on a stick and I used to connect a Motorola StarTac and go online on the train to get email. HP's TC1000 and TC1100 convertible slate/tablets - with a proper notebook-style clip on keyboard but everything in the screen - were wonderful machines, but a little too pricey and a little too underpowered (the TC100 designer once apologised to me for believe what Transmeta promised about their chip and the Celeron TC1100 improved performance without adding extra battery life). HP canned it, which frustrated the head of marketing at HP when he arrived from Apple ready to promote the heck out of a product so iconic that everyone thought mine was designed by Apple and for years I asked if it would return, until I was politely requested to STOP ASKING ABOUT THE TABLET, MKAY?

Then, of his own accord, at CES last week, while we were reminiscing about HP's touch heritage all the way back to the OmniGo PDA, Phil McKinney said, as he always used to when I asked, that the TC1100 was the machine everyone asked for. But this time he didn't say that it was too complicated or too expensive or addressed a niche market. Instead he said "The TC1100 and the OmniBook 300 are the most popular products we get requests for. And we listen to our customers". So, watch this space!

It makes me want to dig out my TC1000 and see if it will run Windows 7; now that would be compatibility!

The quickest way to get traffic is to talk about the Apple 'tablet' - which can be the perfect device of your dreams, at least as long as nobody knows what it is, and possibly even when it's announced (Fake Steve says it so well: "True fanpersons are always ready to buy whatever we make, without question, because they know the object will give meaning to their lives.") The CrunchPad fiasco and the Joo Joo bait and switch (they're making pre-sales and sending out review units without having the actual product they're going to sell even designed yet) are also good headline fodder. But Toshiba are actually out there shipping a tablet (I'm ignoring the fact that tablet PCs have been around for years and that I've been using one since 2002, because this is part of the current interest in things that aren't PCs, in the (I think) mistaken belief that a less powerful operating system will automatically be less complicated, but I will note that I've seen all this before when Web pads launched and failed a few years back (Tulip anyone?)).

The JournE Touch has a 7" screen. It has Facebook. It has YouTube and Flickr and IM and a browser... But as I say on TechRadar, I don't think Toshiba is quite sure yet who or what it's for.

Courier isn't real, but Microsoft's tablet plans are: the Courier 'prototype' dual-screen tablet that's been making waves since Gizmodo released the video of it isn't an actual product.What you see in the video is an animation, rather than a physical prototype. But if it was real, here's how they would build it...

Longhorn isn't real either; so much of the original vision got lsot by the wayside. In my other big piece on TechRadar this week, I look at why the death of DreamScenes is the last gasp of the Longhorn vision...

My first thought about the mini-v was; the battery looks a bit big. My second was, ooh look a button marked Launcher and a button marked Shutter. When I started using it I thought, the calibration's off and I can't hit the Start button. Then I ran through the utilities, fixed the calibration* and noticed the battery life was well over five hours with Wi-Fi on. I tried typing and discovered that the bezelled keys let me touch type, unlike the Asus Eee PC. Then I stuck it in my bag and noticed it was light, pulled it out at the airport and enjoyed playing Spider Solitaire with a finger rather than a pen and decide that for £600-odd it's far more my kind of machine than the Eee. Check out the details of why I say it's more than just a sub-notebook on Tom's Hardware.

BT has the XP version with a Geode preocessor for £590, or bundled with a mouse and USB TV stick for £630,, though it's £800 for the 800MHz Vista version I tested . US pricing is better at $1199 with Vista/XP or $1099 for bring your own OS.

*I know the original Japanese model had a calibration issue and that the Linux drivers may not help you enough here. If I'm using a touchscreen I want Vista for the touch support.

I don't really do unboxing posts and this is pretty much - take the little notebook out of the box. No sliding drawers or pop-up hands or anything. But without actually turning it on, typing on it or anything like that, the mini-v seems pretty sweet. I swivel the screen to tablet mode and think 'ah, this is what the Eee PC is trying to be'. Must check the price before making comparisons: £700-900 depending on spec. Not in the Eee PC ballpark but not out of the ballpark, especially once you consider how much the extras you need to beef up the Eee add up to as

autopope was just saying.

But the real reason for posting is to share the joy brought to me by the screen having two little buttons, side by side, labelled Launcher and Shutter.

(Yes, I know - shutter as in take a picture with the built-in Webcam, but it amuses me to think of an app launcher and an app shutter, for all those people who thought Start was the wrong place to look for the shutdown command).

My review of this is up at Tom's Hardware.The latest ultramobile PC from OQO really is ultramobile rather than just ultraportable. Not only does it pack a decent processor, 1GB of memory, an 80 or 120GB hard drive and a 5” screen into a 1 pound form factor, the OQO model e2 also has built-in HSDPA connectivity as well as 802.11a, b and g versions of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Differences in HSDPA - and the difficulty of getting devices approved for connection to U.S. cellular networks - means the e2 is only available in Europe and Asia at the moment. Yet, the device offers a tantalizing hint of mobile PCs to come.

In short, pricey but nice if you need the portability. There are some questions on the review page and I can't seem to post a reply there at the moment, so here are some extra details for those readers. Also, the final edit suggests the e2 is smaller than an HTC TyTan - that should read "half as big again as a chunky Windows Mobile device like the HTC TyTan" or 1 e2 = 1.5 TyTans.

There were questions about how the e2 and Eee PC compare. I'm answering those, but I'll also explain why they're not comparable - and it's not just price.

I've looked at both the OQO model 2e and the Asus Eee PC and the e2's performance, screen quality and usability when surfing are all far superior to the Eee PC. As I said in the review, the screen quality is superb. Vista performance is no problem with enough memory in* and this machine was able to deliver enough power for image editing plus running five or six business applications at the same time without noticing any slowdown at all. Watching video with Sling or decoding DiVX video files are both quite demanding and the e2 performed excellently at both. That's about the limit of what it would be useful to do on a machine with a screen this size; you wouldn't spend this much money on a device for playing games and I don't think many people would be doing video encoding or other more demanding tasks on this size of screen. For what it's sensible to do on a machine this size, performance is impressive.

I'm impressed by the keyboard compared to anything except a real notebook keyboard - and if you want to type without a table a real notebook keyboard doesn't always prove the best thing anyway. It's the secondary keys that matter as much as the QWERTY keys. The @ key is needed so much these days that OQO promotes it to a function on the apostrophe key (next to P). The euro, yen, backslash and similar symbols are functions on the other keys, along with volume and brightness controls and the keyboard light. Not everything is where you expect it to be - but it all makes sense where it is.

Not everyone wants a tablet and a thumb-sized keyboard - but not everyone wants a miniature notebook form factor either. That means I was looking at the e2 compared to the whole range of ultraportable devices I've evaluated, not just the Eee PC - they are quite different beasts and not only because of the price tag. I don't think that they're equivalent or that the same person would want both.

Do I think the e2 is expensive? Yes.
Are there people for whom it will be good value anyway? Yes.
Are you one of them? Not if you're going to say the Eee PC is better value and you're happy with the compromises it makes. (I'm not implying you are wrong about the Eee PC; I am implying the e2 is wrong for you)
Am I one of them? Borderline - but since the Motion LS800 which I consider the closest alternative is no longer available and I want to be able to write on screen on something that fits next to my plate at lunch, the e2 is attractive. For me personally the HSDPA connection is a luxury anyway, but a very convenient one. Like the vast majority of cars and consumer electronics, not everyone needs luxury but a lot of people want it.

Time to get online depends on the method you use to connect more than the PC. Over wi-fi, the e2 is pretty much the same as the Eee with Windows XP or Linux, allowing for the fact that the e2 is a more responsive machine. I didn't test the Eee PC with HSDPA because it doesn't come with connectivity built in and it doesn't have a PC Card or Express Card slot for my HSDPA cards, but again, the speed limitation is down to the available bandwidth in the network more than the PC you use - if the network has sufficient backhaul and the cell isn't full of other users, you get a DSL-like experience. HSDPA has a connection time longer than most wi-fi hotspots but that doesn't vary much between devices; I did mention that the HSDPA software on the e2 is also the best I've tried - better than the equivalents from Vodafone or Toshiba, for instance.

Screen size and surfing; again, the higher screen resolution of the e2 and the better screen give a better experience. I talk in the review about how you can scroll down with the finger-touch capacitive scrollbars without opening the keyboard - the Eee PC doesn't have the tablet format so you can't as easily hold it in your hands, you don't see as much of a Web page on screen and the screen quality of the Eee PC is nowhere near as good as the e2 (or an ultraportable Sony for that matter). With either machine you have a full PC browser so there are none of the compromises you make on a smartphone.

One reader comment asked why this got a good review - or rather suggested that my review wasn't entirely independent. I trust I don't need to say to anyone who knows me that my opinions are independent and have been for the nearly 18 years I've been writing about technology. This isn't a positive review because of the opinions of the supplier; this is a positive review because if you need something this portable and you have the budget for the e2, you'll have a good experience using it. Hope that answers some of the reader questions.

* I'm happy to discuss Vista performance. I'll discuss it with people who have used Vista and who can provide the specification on the machine they used and the figures for the performance they're not happy with. I'll agree with anyone who says Vista file copying and related operations are absurdly slow; in a couple of days I'll have an opinion on whether SP2 fixes that. I'll agree that Vista needs a lot of RAM; I use 2 or 3Gb on my machines and get excellent performance - memory is cheap enough that I'd not consider that an extreme amount. A 4200RPM hard drive is also a bottleneck and I plan to replace that on my Toshiba R400 ASAP to improve performance. I'll agree that 2007 Office is slower than it should be. Other than that, I find no problems with Vista performance personally.

A 5" screen with an active digitiser, a slide-out keyboard, built-in 3G and Bluetooth and a nice big hard drive: full details here. I'd call it a real UMPC...

Two pieces up on Tom's Hardware today; mobile search and mapping tools and a notebook buying guide - so you could pick the notebook you want and get directions to go buy it ;-)

When you're on the move, do you want to search the Web the way you would on a PC, or rather look for what's around you? Sometimes you'll want to look up a Web page and read it, but often you want to know more where a movie is playing rather than who was in it, where to get good sushi rather than how to make it, and how long it will take to get to the theater after you've eaten. Read the rest of Simplifying Mobile Search...

Need a bigger screen? Thin and light or mobile workstation, basic budget or high-powered business features, Macs or tablet PCs; today we’re going to tell you how to choose the right notebook for whatever you need. We’re going to go through business, general-use, budget, gaming, ultra-portable, tablet and Mac laptops to show you what to look for and offer some suggestions. Pick the Perfect PC for You...

I like ink gestures on Tablet PC but there aren't enough of them. Flicks in Vista will give me another eight (up, down, left, right and all four diagonals). I want an Undo gesture for when I'm playing Spider Solitaire and a next song gesture for music and a Blog This gesture for Web pages and a copy/paste/show me ClipMate gesture and a copy this to OneNote gesture and a Word gesture and one for Excel or recent documents or My Pictures... So I'm glad to find a free gesture tool for any version of Windows: StrokeIt

I spotted this while travelling and I think it validates a lot of what people have been saying about how a tablet PC and pen is less psychologically intrusive. I type much faster than I write but I can't keep eye contact while I'm doing it as well so writing on screen let's me look as if I'm paying more attention. Decent note software like OneNote with the audio recording let's you think, secure in the knowledge that you can write down the key bits and your analysis but go back and listen to the whole thing if you need to.
June Entman, a law professor at the University of Memphis, has banned
laptops from her classes for first-year law students, telling them they
must take notes with pen and paper. "The computers interfere with
making eye contact," said Entman. "You've got this picket fence
between you and the students." She said she wants her students to spend
less time taking down everything she says and spend time "thinking and
analyzing" instead.
USA Today, 21 March 2006
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-03-21-professor-laptop-ban_x.htm

Mary

Charge early, charge often. The Lenovo tablet still isn't giving me good battery life so I'm keeping the screen dim, setting processor speeds low and plugging in where I can.
Use a discreet recorder. When casino security fusses about photography and recordings, a tablet PC or a memory stick recorder that looks like a phone is less likely to attract attention.
Water. You need more than you think.
Locate the restrooms. Due to Water and the coffee you need to stay attentive from 9am to 9pm.
Wear comfortable shoes. The Venetian was too pricey so we're at the Imperial Palace - only two casinos away but add in the size of the casinos and the fact that the conference space is behind the casino floor and it's a half hour walk from the room.
Put your camera, business cards and the other things you want to grab often in a pocket. Put them in the same pocket each time.
If the schedule is available in advance try to prepick sessions but expect them to change. Add the sessions you're interested in to your calendar and synch that to your phone. My Vario has the conference sessions in because I used the iCal links on the MIX site to put them in Outlook. I had to update the times by hand - RSS simple list updates now please! - but I have the descriptions to hand, and I get alarms for sessions.
Go party. I grab people at the end of sessions when I can but I also look for them at the party and in the labs and chat slots. And now - I shall go party

I found myself first agreeing and then disagreeing strongly (and out loud) with the Cult of Mac blog when I got to the last sentence of this paragraph. "For most touchscreen tasks, direct visual feedback is less important than careful integration and responsive software, as the limited market penetration for digital illustration tablets with built-in LCD screens has shown. For more innovative and cursor-free touch functions, such as virtual keyboards (typing, video-editing and musical), visual feedback is far more important. On a traditional tablet PC, that eats up serious real estate and negates many of the benefits of touch input."

'Traditional tablet PC' can't mean passive digitiser (dumb screen that you can touch with a stylus or a fingernail), because those are limited to industrial tablets and PDAs, and very few of them are PCs rather than embedded OS devices (Win CE and embedded Linux for the most part). The OQO and the Nokia 770 are the main exceptions (Windows XP and a reasonably standard Linux) and they're PDA size. You do need a virtual keyboard on most passive digitisers because of the poor smoothness; even when the OS lets you write anywhere on the screen, the curves of your writing aren't what they should be.

But the modern Tablet PC running the Tablet Edition of Windows XP is a bit of a different beast. The active digitiser samples more often than a graphics tablet (though it's the same technology, just a higher sampling rate), so it's very like writing with an ink pen. The only time you'll hunt and peck on a virtual keyboard is for passwords and URLs where 'usually right' isn't good enough. The rest of the time it's up to the application developer whether you write into an input strip - or anywhere on the page.

OneNote, Journal, Art Rage, Grafigo: applications that are designed to work on a touchscreen let you use the screen without needing to go back to a keyboard (virtual or not). Utilities like Sensiva Symbol Commander and ActiveWords let you trigger actions with gestures or individual letters instead of keyboard shortcuts. ritePen is a great handwriting recogniser for desktop and Tablet PCs that lets you write anywhere, even if the application isn't designed that way. A video editing or musical composition app that understands pen input shouldn't need the keyboard input that's designed to be faster than mousing through menus when your input with a pen is both fast and accurate. The next generation of touchscreens won't have the alignment issues that have made it hard to recogise input close to the very edges of the screen (which is why Word's write anywhere option doesn't cover quite all of the screen).

'careful integration'. Definitely important.
'responsive software'. Absolutely.
'eating up screen real estate'. Not when you design and integrate it well. Touchscreens aren't the problem; it's understanding how to use them to replace the keyboard rather than replicating the mouse.

This is another place where I'm impatient for Vista; it will have a cross-hair cursor to make it obvious you’re using the pen, on-screen ripples that let you know you’ve clicked on the screen and eight gestures called flicks that mean you can copy, paste, undo and delete just by flicking the pen in a particular direction. Vista can also learn what your handwriting looks like to make it easier to recognise what you write. If you want to use your finger to touch the screen to select something and it's a combined active and passive digitiser so you can, there will be a little magnifying ring to show you more clearly where you're clicking.

As to the form factors, the first is very like the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook with touchscreen sitting on my desk at the moment. Folding the screen down to use it without the keyboard is the principle used by any convertible Tablet PC, although I can't see room on the mockup for any hinges ;-) And yes, narrow widescreen is a little off when you rotate it to portrait. This falls in what Ken Delaney at Gartner told me he calls “the 1kg wasteland” because so many products of this size and weight have failed, compared to standard notebooks or smartphones and PDAs. “You don’t have the benefits of the larger devices or the portability of the smaller devices”.

The notebook using a second screen as a configurable keyboard looks huge fun. OLED would do that nicely. It would, as the blog remarks, be pricey. It's price that's held people back from buying devices like Wacom's Cintiq (a touscreen monitor that's a desktop Tablet PC) because everyone one I know who's seen one wants one but not enough to pay that much. And I don't think a screen would be comfy to use for typing - with no key action your fingers get tired very quickly on projection keyboards. We've been using pen and paper for centuries and we're good at it. Making software as good at it shouldn't take that long.

Too many solutions are half the answer and that can be worse than no answer at all, because you think you’ve solved your problem so you don’t do it properly.

I left my keys at home today. Two neighbours have keys; one of them was home but of course the keys he has are the old set that only let me into the hall and not the flat. The other neighbour has up-to-date keys but was out. Usually I'd just go to a coffee shop and work (I don't peg Starbucks as a globalising bad influence for having more branches in London than New York because 1. having Starbucks has improved the quality of coffee available generally and 2. they have sofas, WiFi and in some places desks with powerpoints - they're raising the bar on places to get something done when you're between places). This time I had to stay in for a courier, plus I wanted to use the WiFi to grab the files I'd usually have on my laptop or tablet, but this is my first day with a new ThinkPad. Great signal, but I couldn't get a network address; that’s the frustrating bit, along with the fact that the default setting on the ThinkPad is ‘optimise for performance’ not ‘optimise for battery life’ which I think is the wrong default on any portable, so by the time I started trying to connect I was down to 33% battery.

In other respects the ThinkPad seems to be a lovely notebook and a disappointing tablet, because no thought has gone into using it without the keyboard. For example: how do I turn the WiFi off? Software configuration, three levels down in a tab headed Device 3 (I missed the Beware of the Leopard signs). How do I turn screen brightness down? Flip the screen and use the keyboard function keys: pretty futile when I’m in a hurry because trying to quickly cut back on power consumption. Don’t expect me to have prepared everything in advance: give me the tools to work with keyboard or pen as I prefer.

I’m going to implement a half solution to the file problem; stick the basic files on a 1GB flash memory stick and try to remember to update them from time to time. It’s not the real synchronisation I want but it’s useful. To me the utility of a process or a device is not ‘what can it do?’ but ‘what will it let me do?’. Take the £1.50 apple corer and slicer we bought at Ike yesterday. Usually I’d say it’s plastic tat that duplicates what I can do with a knife because what it does is core and slice an apple. But I saw elimloth’s wife Selene use one last year and I realised what it lets me do is grab an apple and have it sliced up - so I’ll actually eat it rather than leaving it in the fruit bowl - in about 5 seconds. And that means I’ll start eating apples regularly again for the first time since I was 13!

The BlackBerry receives and sends email (except on Oxford Street where I can’t get GPRS for love, money or cursing); what it lets me do is not care if I have an urgent email and a good reason to be out of the house at the same time. Configuring the right soft-key on my Windows Mobile smartphone gives me one key access to my task list; what it lets me do is think of things and write them down really quickly and have them show up in Outlook (this is only wonderfully useful in Outlook 12’s ToDo bar from which I now run my life although I'm looking at add-ons that may do the same thing). Sometimes being useful for one little thing is better than being halfway useful for a whole bunch of stuff.