[eastmen]

Seems like andriod and ipads are getting all the hype but i perfer a real solution where I can use all my software and not have to have a laptop with me.

Acer has a really nice one the Iconia tab w500 coming out in april

Acer ICONIA TAB W500 a 10-inch tablet that will run on Microsoft’s Windows 7 Home Premium operating system with a customized touch-friendly Acer overlay. The W500 will feature a WXGA (1280×800) resolution display which had capacitive multi-touch technologies. Also included with this model is a 1.50GHz AMD C-50 APU (Fusion) which comes with AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics. Other features include 2GB of RAM, a 32GB SSD, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 1.3 mega-pixel front camera and a 1.3 mega-pixel rear camera. Acer will price this tablet at €599 in Europe and $845 in the US with first launch starting in mid-April.

It seems a bit expensive at $850 for the states. I'm hoping that there is a refresh with Llano in the fall

The asus slate ep121 is really nice but is a bit large for me at 12.1inch and of course $1000



A 12.1″ IPS display with a Wacom digitizer, an Intel Core i5-470UM (1.33 GHz) dual-core processor, Intel HD graphics, 2GB/4GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB/64GB of SSD storage.


The samsung pc 7 looks really good for the price , i think the oak trail z670 might be a little slow esp with an intel igp
althought $700 isn't bad


◦Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit) or Professional (32-bit)
◦Display: 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 LED HD
◦Display Brightness: 340 nit
◦Processor: Intel Atom Oak Trail Z670 Processor Speed: 1.66 GHz
◦Hard Drive Size: 32GB SSD
◦Memory Size: 2GB DDR2
◦Cameras: Front 1.3MP and Rear 3MP
◦I/O Ports: 1 USB 2.0 (dongle), Headphone in, Mic-in, Micro SD
◦Audio: Internal Mic, Stereo Speakers 1.6W Stereo Speakers, HD Audio, SRS 3D Sound Effect
◦Graphics: Intel GMA600, (400MHz Core/Integrated)
◦Optical Disk Drive: N/A
◦Connectivity: 802.11bg/n, Bluetooth V2.0
◦Battery: 3 Cell (Li-Polymer)




Are any of you guys looking at windows tablets and if so what are you looking for ?

I think i really need a dual core fusion 1.6ghz chip to run alot of the programs i want at reasonable speeds. I would perfer a dual core Llano chip however and well a price of under $700 would be good for that but i might be dreaming.

The main problem for me is that while an ipad or andriod tablet would be good for playing around and surfing the web , they wont really let me unchain myself from a laptop so i will be bringing around my ultra portable still even with an ipad 2 or xoom .

My current laptop is a amd dual core neo at 1.6ghz and a radeon 3200 + radeon 4200 . I'm thinking a dual core 1.6ghz bobcat would give me simlar cpu power and greater gpu power.

[RudeCurve]

Personally I'd get a netbook for $300 with a 250GB HDD before I'd consider a overpriced and compromised Windows tablet. With the huge HDD I could load a buttload of DVD rips onto the netbook. BTW does Win7 have a special touch mode GUI?

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

Personally I'd get a netbook before I'd consider a Windows tablet. Does Win7 have a special touch mode GUI?

yea it has a touch mode , its not to bad actually you have to make the icons bigger of course .

My intent is to buy in the fall (30th birthday so others will foot the bill ) and prob use the win 8 beta that is rumored for the fall or earlly 2012.

I use a windows 7 tablet at work right now but its only a 1.2 ghz single core atom. It sucks for everything but its extremely portable and i can just plug it into the servers and use it as a screen /keyboard or i can use it to run some antivirus programs and other things on the kids or staff's computers .

I'd want something faster for myself. I think the bravos would be a good solution although faster would be better

also alot of these companys have custom skins for touch interfaces.

[wco81]

Battery life is going to blow.

What kind of software, games or graphics? Sure you can run Photoshop but it's not going to support multitouch gestures and it will probably be slow.

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by wco81

Battery life is going to blow.

Not with the 4W C-50.
I don't know about total consumption for the Oak Trail solution, though.

Originally Posted by wco81

What kind of software, games or graphics? Sure you can run Photoshop but it's not going to support multitouch gestures and it will probably be slow.

With the C-50, I'll have every kind of software, games and graphics that I already have with my current Ferrari One, at the same performance (which, by my own experience, is just about enough for 99% of a personal computer usage).
Gaming performance should be ~3x the iPad 2 and games+software library is decades away from any Android or iOS device.
And now that we have GPU-accelerated browsers (FF4+IE9), everything is really smooth, given the poor processor.

But damn, 600€ is almost twice the amount I was willing to pay for that Acer tablet.
That hardware doesn't cost more than 380€!

I guess I'll wait for the 2nd generation of low-power Fusion tablets. These are clearly trying to boost the price based on the platform hype.

[idsn6]

Didn't these things fail for a reason?

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by idsn6

Didn't these things fail for a reason?

10 years ago? Yes, they failed because there weren't good enough low power x86 CPUs in the market, so they had to use super-high-binned notebook CPUs, which made the tablets very expensive and battery technology didn't allow them to have sufficient battery life.
Furthermore, WindowsXP was never optimized for touch interfaces and input was made through resistive screens (no multi-touch, poor touch response).

10 years have passed, though, and things have changed.

[Mize]

Re: Battery life, wake me when they break 6 hours of real use.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

Not with the 4W C-50.
I don't know about total consumption for the Oak Trail solution, though.

5W, and that's not including the southbridge chip which probably has a lower power version too but still contributes extra. With a 25Wh battery like iPad has you'll probably be lucky to get 3 hours at full usage, but I don't really know what the power rundown is for all the other components.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by Exophase

5W, and that's not including the southbridge chip which probably has a lower power version too but still contributes extra. With a 25Wh battery like iPad has you'll probably be lucky to get 3 hours at full usage, but I don't really know what the power rundown is for all the other components.

yea in the fall the 32nm bravos chips should hit. We should see a 25 to 40% power drop for the cpu. Still 4 hours of pc performance is much better than 8 hours of phone performance. Throw in a swappable battery and I'm golden

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by RudeCurve

Personally I'd get a netbook for $300 with a 250GB HDD before I'd consider a overpriced and compromised Windows tablet. With the huge HDD I could load a buttload of DVD rips onto the netbook. BTW does Win7 have a special touch mode GUI?

Win7 is fine with touch, it's the 3rd party applications where you may run into some problems. Adobe reader for example has extremely small folder structure buttons for it's bookmark feature. Not a problem for a slate with capacitive touch and active digitizer (like the Asus EP 121), but certainly makes things unnecessarily frustrating for a capacitive touch only slate.

And if you're going the windows route, then you're obviously wanting to use the slate for more than just media consumption and light applications and you're going to want a slate with an activie digitiser anyway.

Originally Posted by Exophase

5W, and that's not including the southbridge chip which probably has a lower power version too but still contributes extra. With a 25Wh battery like iPad has you'll probably be lucky to get 3 hours at full usage, but I don't really know what the power rundown is for all the other components.

Until the iPad comes with OSX and a dual capacitive touch + active digitizer screen, it'll continue to remain hopelessly inadequate for any reasonable use I'd have for it.

Having used convertable tablet PCs for over 5 years now, the iPad is a huge step back in functionality. It does have the benefit of far longer battery life, but for me, that's completely useless if it can't do the things I need it to do as well as my 5 year old convertable tablet PC.

As a media consumption device its fantastic. But I don't really need or want to pay for a dedicated mobile media consumption device.

Regards,
SB

[Simon F]

Originally Posted by eastmen

Are any of you guys looking at windows tablets and if so what are you looking for ?

After posting the third picture?

Seriously though, how fast do windows tablets "switch on"? That would be a major requirement, I think, if I went for something in addition to a laptop.

[Malo]

My boss is really killing me for a full windows tablet, this may be just what I'm looking for.

[wco81]

When MS finally announces a tablet strategy, won't they have dedicated OS and apps. rather than try to still push the Tablet Edition which hasn't caught on in what, 10 years?

You would think they'd want to be in the mobile market, rather than making an extension of the PC laptop market, which hasn't worked.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by wco81

When MS finally announces a tablet strategy, won't they have dedicated OS and apps. rather than try to still push the Tablet Edition which hasn't caught on in what, 10 years?

You would think they'd want to be in the mobile market, rather than making an extension of the PC laptop market, which hasn't worked.

according to leaked dell road maps win 8 beta for tablets hits this fall. So we will find out then. Its my understanding that if you buy a x86 tablet you could still run windows 8 full verison and use win7/xp/vista apps


http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/25/a...droid-startin/


seems the iconia might only be $550 in the states. Thats a much better price

[eastmen]

Looks like toshiba has a tablet also

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/15/t...inpage_engadge

model Toshiba had on display was behind glass and wasn't actually powered on, but we did confirm that it will have an 11.6-inch display and will be powered by Intel's Atom Oak Trail processor. That's all we were able to get out of the company, but apparently that very tablet was on display at CES, and Notebook Italia gathered there that it will have 64GB of storage and 2GB of RAM.

Hopefully they make one with a bravos chip in it



i think this one looks pretty nice

[eastmen]

http://tablets-planet.com/2011/04/09...keyboard-dock/


the iconia tab is coming out its listed at $550 they are listing 6 hours with the c-50 and 2gigs of ram 32gig ssd

[ToTTenTranz]

That Iconia looks good, but there's no mention of a SD card slot?!
32GB for a Windows 7 system is way too limiting.

These devices should start sporting SDXC slots, fast.

[Xmas]

Seems like it has a MicroSDHC slot.

[Laurent06]

I fail to see how a Windows 7 based tablet makes sense. What applications are people wanting to run on such a device that would be properly usable with a touchscreen? If you need to have the keyboard, you're suddenly using your tablet as a netbook.

At least, the price looks good, let's wait for real tests about battery life.

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by Laurent06

I fail to see how a Windows 7 based tablet makes sense. What applications are people wanting to run on such a device that would be properly usable with a touchscreen? If you need to have the keyboard, you're suddenly using your tablet as a netbook.

Windows 7 with a C-50?


Keyboard-less:
- Web browsing (as in, complete web browsing, not something than needs an "app" for every webpage that lacks features in the integrated browser).
- Video, music, photo viewing, podcasts
- E-Book and document reading
- Worksheets with stylus input
- Flash games and RTSs
- Everything you can do with an iPad or any other non-x86 tablet?


Keyboard:
- Document creation and editing
- Cheap and great quality games (with a mouse or a USB gaming controller), with visuals, sonoplasty, story and character depth unmatched by any iOS\Android\other-phone-OS game to date.
- Video, music, photo editing
- Everything you can do with a PC?

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by ToTTenTranz

- Web browsing (as in, complete web browsing, not something than needs an "app" for every webpage that lacks features in the integrated browser).

I may be strange in this, but personally I vastly prefer apps on these type of devices than visiting webpages. Perhaps this becomes different on Tabs, but anything I use a lot just seems to be nicer to use as an App, especially with a touch interface.

[ToTTenTranz]

Originally Posted by Arwin

I may be strange in this, but personally I vastly prefer apps on these type of devices than visiting webpages. Perhaps this becomes different on Tabs, but anything I use a lot just seems to be nicer to use as an App, especially with a touch interface.

On an iPad, probably yes. There's no flash, javascript performance on any ARM solution is still minimal when compared to any Atom or Bobcat (so far), RAM amount is low (512MB even in iPad2), memory bandwidth is equally low, etc. so a "heavy" webpage will be sluggish.

No wonder you'll need an optimized app if you're using subpar hardware (compared to C-50).


On something like this Acer Iconia, using a hardware accelerated browser like FF4, IE9 or Chrome 10, you don't need "apps", you need "bookmarks".
Just increase the default font\icon size in Win7 and you'll have an equally "pleasant" experience.

[Hardknock]

That Iconia looks really nice especially for the price. Is the 2.14 pounds with our without the keyboard??

[eastmen]

I would love it if we see a refresh iconia with a dual core bobcat at the same price point this fall.