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Microsoft Announces New Version of the Tablet PC OS
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Yeah, actually. The first version was pretty fantastic. You’d never use the pen to input a master’s thesis, but for taking notes in class, it’s pretty remarkable how much nicer it is compared to a keyboard.
Tablet PCs look great and I’d love one for surfing the net and programming while in bed. The main problem is really the price. The new HP Tablet PC is like £1700! They seem to be getting more expensive rather than cheaper.
It would be nice to see some of this functionality integrated into Linux distros but it seems most are happy being tied to their desk.
£1700 for a electronic notebook by MS? <wow>!
I hope they come out with higher resolution screens for these. It would be nice to have > 768 horizontal resolution in portrait mode, especially with everyone designing for 800×600 or larger these days.
And lower price / longer battery life would be nice as always.
Hmm… how many people actually use tablet PCs? I haven’t seen many people. Are they more common in the bussiness world? It seems to me that atleaset 99% of people are still using laptops.
Interesting but internationalization?
I used tablet PCs (my university bought a few for test purposes..or maybe gateway lent us some for testing, anywho, had one for a few weeks). It is nice with places with built-in WiFi, and places with docs. I would not want to (1) use a pen always. I am faster at typing rather than handwritting. Also, (2) the handwritting recognitinion left something to be desired. Not all of my words were recognized which made it a pain. I had stored most of my notes as image files since the translation to electronic text was not as good as I wanted it. (3) The other thing is that there is not internationalization. The thing could not understand my greek handwritting whenever I wrote in greek. 1/4 of my emails and documents are in greek…this is a problem. FInally (4) this is just windows with pen input. It is nice, but not worth spending all the extra dough on. Had it had a considerable amount of *specialized* tablet applications (that I could also allow me to exchange documents with my mac, and other unix computers in and around campus) I would seriously eyeball it for a purchase, but given that it doesn’t have a lot of useful pen-based apps (or apps designed for tablet computing) doesn’t really give me a reason to spend the money for it. I would much rather prefer to buy a cheap subnotebook rather than a tablet PC
Perhaps if you go to Stanford you can afford a $2000.00+ computer to “jot notes with an electronic pencil,” but the rest of us will stick with a similar tool for jotting notes – pencil and paper. Or the more well funded (and confident) among us, pen and paper.
Yikes, not friendly. Mine actually cost me closer to $0, as I got it through work. And not only is your characterization of Stanford students as “rich kids” just not true, but I’m not a Stanford student, but rather a staff member.
And it’s not an electronic pencil. Mine is a full-featured laptop with a gig of RAM, 1.3 GHz Pentium III processor, 40GB harddrive, built-in wireless, and a real keyboard. It just happens to have a tablet screen as well.
Anyway, what’s nice about it is being able to go to meetings and take notes, and then come home and be able to search those notes. Better still is that the search uses a “fuzzy match” algorithm, so it searches better than it recognizes text (though with more false positives, which aren’t really a problem in this context).
my friend bought a tablet pc. but only because it was really cheap. a compaq for only US$800. don’t know why it was so cheap. i’ve never seen him use it for writing. only as a laptop. anyway, when i was in college, whenever i would take notes, i’d use a borrowed, unsharpened pencil and recycled paper. really cheap solution. actually most often i don’t even take notes, which is the cheapest solution yet.
I had the same question it seems to me that there hasn’t been a “gee wow! I want one” reaction. How is a tablet pc that much better than a palm pilot? We definitely need a better way to interface with computers but i was thinking of more like brain implants that translate thought into actions on computers. Cyborg me!
The best of both worlds?
http://www.americancomputech.com/smoreinfo.asp?iid=149148
You can get one loaded with HDD and memory for less than $1500. Nice big screen too.
I guess the only downside would be the weight. It’s just under 6lbs which is twice as much as a simliarly equiped tablet with an 8″ or 10″ display.
How is it that much better than a Palm?
Are you kidding or what?
TabletPC’s are full-featured notebooks with the added tablet features.
It’s much bigger than a Palm, it has some great software for doing things like taking notes and such. It’s just a great tool if you are in a situation where you can really use it.
Nice find. Although it doesn’t come with XP Tablet PC Edition. Not that it matters at that price. The VIA processor is the same as I currently have in my desktop system and have found it to be nice and speedy for everyday tasks.
That’s pretty much exactly what all the hybrid tablet PCs are like, but the hardware on them tends to be a little bit beefier (and more expensive). Check out the Toshiba Portege 3500 or the Acer Tablet PC.