Hasta La Gadget!

This week, Apple gave us minor hardware upgrades, while a little company made a linux tablet. This might leave you wishing for an Apple tablet, but that could be a stupid thing to ask for.

I mean, really, ask yourselves this: How would you use such a thing differently than a laptop? Tablets have typically been great in note taking environments as giant, battery-constrained, heavy digital notepads in the field for pro writers and medical types or soldiers or construction workers.

But for consumers, the most obvious path is the appliance route, making it a simple web browsing machine, with some basic mail and media playback. Things netbooks and laptops can handle and have been handling. I admit, a netbook type tablet is the right form factor for enjoying media casually, away from a desk or livingroom. It fits between — actually — a TV and a Notebook, and is more portable than either. That makes it ideal for reading certain media like electronic magazines (when they’re available) and TV shows, movies, and other video clips in portable places. What does this mean?

It means that a tablet is the perfect machine…for reading websites and movies on the toilet. And yeah, um, my laptop can do that already.

Let’s talk about the UI a bit more. If the machine has a pop up keyboard, like an iPhone, you can also assume it may have a pen, like all recent tablet prototypes and models have. Either, or both.

But both of those ideas kind of suck for people raised on true keyboards.

I was raised on a QWERTY and I’ve almost failed penmanship and aced typing class. And the trend is that more people focus on typing than cursive. And as far as using the pop up keyboard occasionally, I can use these fine. Very quickly in fact. But the majority of the world hates these too and typing all day on one of these could be maddening, even at a greater size, no matter how fluent you might get. Do you place it on the table every time you type so you can use it like a full sized keyboard? Or do you hold it in two hands, like and iPhone, and try to peck away, even though reaching across the layout of the QWERTY would be much harder on a bigger device with a bigger key set? None of the typing logistics really matter if this is mostly a media consumption device. But the net appliance theory doesn’t really work for me.

The cost of such a nice screen and the surrounding hardware is going to be at, oh, I’d guess $500, if not $700 more with Apple tax. That’s too much money for a machine that can’t run all the OS X apps out there on the desktop version, too much for what’s basically a giant ipod touch. It’s also more than a regular old hackintosh’d Dell netbook.

So it has to be a laptop variant, with all the power of an full OS X laptop to make a difference to me. There are two ways this can be done. The old way is to take OS X and slap on those UI components we talked about, the pen and soft keyboard, as well as some OCR software for translating your chicken scratch into text. That’s what Microsoft did, and well, how many Tablet PC users do you know? Not many, I bet!

The new way to make a tablet? Well, I have no idea what the new tablet UI is. And neither does anyone in computing. It’s going to come down to how the UI works and I can’t even imagine what it would be like.
If Apple is going to make a tablet, they’re not going to slap on some UI extensions, they’re going to figure out a way to really use the form factor and make it a remarkable useful and significantly different device that justifies the loss of the efficient hard keyboard and cost of the touchscreen while being competitive in price somehow with the subsidized mini-tablets that fit in your pocket, the iPhones. But somehow, I doubt there’s a paradigm shift here waiting to be unlocked, because again, the tablet isn’t just an old idea, its an ancient idea.

The aspirational design for the tablet is pretty straight forward, and has been around, depending on your definition, since the 1960s or WW2 or the late 1800s, depending on which patents you look at. Or longer if you consider the stone tablet. The idea has been there, and has been flawed when translated to our digital world and weird and not much beyond basically what I called it earlier: an oversized, battery constrained, expensive digital version of a paper notebook. But, with internet video. Not so great!

Much like the S101, the T91 isn’t exactly “Eee PC” material. Sure, it’s small and ASUS-branded, but design wise, it’s a pretty bold departure. bit-tech was able to sit down and take an early look at the Eee PC T91 convertible tablet, and while the machine is still a few months out from release, it seems that you can curb your enthusiasm in the meanwhile. Critics found the touchpad to be a hair less awesome than those on other Eee PCs, the lack of multitouch to be a real bummer and the uncanny ability of the LCD to attract fingerprints as just plain annoying. Of course, their unit was still subject to alterations, so the crew isn’t completely giving up hope that things won’t improve by launch day. In fact, it noted that the inclusion of a DVB-T tuner, WWAN support and GPS functionality were very nice touches, but it still maintained that a standard netbook would likely suit you best unless you’re just head over heels for touching.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

ASUS Eee PC T91 sits down for photo shoot, early critique originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Official word just arrived this morning of Dell’s Latitude XT sucessor, the Latitude XT2, and Laptop Magazine‘s already spent some quality time with the tablet. They note the XT2’s aesthetic similarity to the previous model, but point out a few standout upgrades, most notably the 12.1-inch LED backlit capacitive touch-screen, which they say is significantly brighter than the last iteration, and the up to 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo ULV SU9400 CPU (with a Montevina chipset). They also point out that the finger navigations are “smooth as butter” — but hit the read link for full details and video of the tablet in action. The Latitude XT2 is going to have a starting price of $2,399.

Filed under: Laptops

Hands-on with Dell’s Latitude XT2 tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A hard day’s work often means dirty hands, and dirty hands and keyboards have a long history of not getting along together. Rugged tablets tend to be a somewhat better (or at least easier to clean) solution, the latest entry being Glacier Computer’s Everest E4000, a fully integrated device available in 10-, 12-, and 15-inch sizes running your choice of XP Pro, XP Embedded, or Linux. No details are available on what hardware is lurking inside that purposeful looking case, which isn’t the most attractive thing we’ve ever seen, but certainly seems a lot more durable than some of its competition — like you could back an 18-wheeler over it and then cozy up with for a nice game of touchscreen ‘Solitare’ while waiting for your invoices to print. Not that you’d ever play games while on the clock, of course.

Update: We got some further details about this brute to pass along. It maxes out at a 1.4GHz Pentium M with 1GB of memory and a 16GB SSD, which may not sound like much, but since it’s entirely sealed cooling anything faster would be something of a challenge. The 15-inch screen is 1024 x 768, 802.11a/b/g is supported, and you can get one to mount on your forklift for between $2,500 and $4,500 — forklift not included.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Glacier’s E4000 tablet is durable enough for your warehouse, portable enough for your fleet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s been a long, long time since the first information about Dell’s update to the venerable XT convertible tablet snuck out of Texas, and while we got some choice morsels of information last month, we were still missing any semblance of a release date (that original November 2008 target proved to be a bit optimistic). Now we have what could be the official spec sheet for the series and a date to boot, confirming much of what we’d heard before, like your choice of 1.2GHz SU9300 or 1.4GHz SU9400 Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs, a 12.1-inch multitouch display, up to 5GB of DDR3 memory, and either 80GB worth of platters or 64GB of SSD. Base weight is 3.62 pounds, just over the 3.5 pound target the company had been aiming for, and if this source is correct the machine will be getting an official unveiling on February 11 — close enough that we’d advise holding off on any other tablet purchases for a few days.

[Thanks, Sam]

Filed under: Laptops

Dell XT2 specs and availability leaked, launching on Weds? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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