Does anyone else think it's kind of tacky? I especially don't like all these gradients. I just noticed some 3rd party tools are starting to employ gradients into their own products, maybe to give consistent user experience with VS.NET 2005. It's distracting I tell you and it does not add any value.
Toshiba has two brand new TabletPCs in their line-up.
I've never seen TabletPCs in real life but I love the idea of hoisting around a what's-essentially-a-digital-notebook in my hands and being able to do all kind of cool things with it. I tell you I'm just waiting for the price of the darn things to drop. And those two TablePCs are a good sign of things to come. I hope.
So, here's my rant.
Who designs these pieces of hardware? I mean in general, who's in charge of putting the feature list and the form factor, etc. together for a device, be it a laptop, PDA or TablePC? Every time a new device comes out, I am always excited at first but then I get disappointed by the lack of certain obvious things that should be there or some things that should not be there.
Now, these two TablePCs are what they call convertibles. You can turn and twist the screen around so you can use it like a laptop or a tablet. Pretty cool, eh? NOT! If I wanted a laptop, I would buy a laptop. Who wants to lug around a 6 lbs of metal and plastic in your arms? I certainly don't. I'd rather have a thin, light, and affordable TabletPC with no keyboard and no nothing. Just a screen and a pen, and me of course. That's all I need on the road and if I need serious sitdown time, I'd use a dock or something. That being said, if any TablePC manufactures are reading -- I doubt that very much, but oh well --, here's my ideal but reasonable setup for a TabletPC.
- Processor: I don't think I need a super-powerful processor here. If the processor is fast enough to recognize my pen strokes in real time and display the information fast enough, that's good enough. I am not particularly looking to do .NET development on the thing. See Battery.
- Battery: Definitely one of the most important feature for sure. The thing is if you want a bigger battery, your overall weight goes up. So you have to make compromises here I guess. However, without some of these excess extra components, we should be able to squeeze out a good 6+ hours of battery power, don't you think? Hurry up with those methanol or hydrogen batteries already!
- Hard Drive: Again, I don't need a huge drive. Can it store my documents and some pictures? 20GB should be plenty. Of course, if there is no significant difference in price, performance or battery life, bigger drives wouldn't hurt I guess.
- Memory: I'd guess 512MB(min) to 1GB(max) should be good. Again, no development. No video editing either.
- Screen: I'll be looking at the thing all day, so it should be nice and bright and have wide visible angles. I think the size can vary here but again I'm guessing bigger screen would draw more power. Maybe starting with 12” and going up to 15”? 17” would be nice but again, the battery... Hurry up wth OLED already!
- Connectivity: I would say, that the wireless connectivity should be there. USBs should be there. Not sure about IEEE 1394 though. Having a SD card or CF card slots would be nice. The three standard audio ports should be there. The video-out can be argued but not a big deal. The two toshibas have more than enough connectivity options and I can't complain much there. However, I don't want my TablePC to have too many “holes”. It just ain't pretty.
Notice that I don't have any optical devices listed up there. I think it's an overkill for a TablePC.
All other features are optional and should not be included. Put them on the dock. Most people nowadays have a desktop or a laptop at home since they are so cheap (some of the laptops aren't really laptops but a small-form-factor desktops, really). So I'm sure file transfers and even network installs or network boot shouldn't pose a serious challenge.
Now, here's a wild idea though. I am not a hardware junkie so I don't know if it's at all possible.
Notice I said that a powerful processor isn't needed for my TabletPC -- actually I said super-powerful but that's beside the point --, but it would be nice (read: optional) to have the necessary horsepower to do development or something like video editing. And let's just assume that you don't have another PC available or you just want to do it on the TabletPC machine, for some reason. All of that really doesn't matter actually. Let's just say you want to do that on your limited horsepowered PC.
What if your dock contained a processor? A processor or processors more powerful than what is found in your TablePC. So that when you dock your TabletPC, the whole setup will run in parallel as if you had mutiple processors. So you would have two processors running simultaneously to give you that extra boost you need to do whatever your heart desires. Or if that's not possible, here's a simpler idea. Upon docking, your processor in the TabletPC shuts down and the processor(s) in your dock takes over. I can dream, can't I?
Oh, also check out the new camera/mp3/photo m:robe 500i from Olympus. I like it. Now if that thing were able to play DivX, that would have been beautiful. Too bad.