Windows tablets

[swaaye]

Steve talks good, has a lot of what are literally followers, gets a shitload of easy and usually positive PR from the press (lots of Apple fans in publishing and journalists), and his products are both well designed and carry with them a semi-intangible glamor aesthetic not unlike jewelry or other such luxury items except they are relatively cheap luxury items.

I can't help but also think about the Wii and its similar story. Nintendo clearly looked at the iPod before marketing the Wii. Marketed towards women and it has that glossy white pure look thing going. But with the Wii the software sales suck because apparently people only buy the Wii for a couple of games and then shelve it after awhile.


Anyway, I'll go for a Windows tablet if it has ~7 hours of battery and isn't a hand heater. It would be nice to have more variety in every sort of app. Windows gives you that. I could run Winamp and my favorite plugins instead of dealing with whatever crap is half finished and for sale on the Android Market say. I could also run some Windows games, and touch works damn well for games with primarily mouse input like strategy games. It does look like Win7 touch also works pretty well for the more typical tablet apps.

 

[eastmen]

These look wrong. According to Acer website it's 210 x 280 mm and 1kg, which in non-metric units mean 11.0 x 8.27 and 2.2 lbs.

This site says 27.5cm by 19cm by 1.59cm (10.8 x 7.48 x 0.62).

It suddenly feels less sexy

I also invite you to show photos of both devices to your wife and see how she reacts.

Still sexier than the ipad 2 + laptop i'd have to carry around to get the same functionality for me (you can add andriod devices in place of the ipad 2 btw same diffrence)


and I don't have a wife but my gf likes the w500 and says she will get me that or a newer verison for my 30th in the fall and my sister really likes the a500 and the transformer and wants to get one of those in the next few weeks

 

[swaaye]

Ok well so which Windows tablets are the most interesting again? What's a good site to follow these things?

 

[willardjuice]

This I believe is a thread about tablets running Windows, not a thread about zunes, advertising, Apple, etc.

 

[swaaye]

You guys need to lay off before you get the thread closed. Go into PMs if you really want to continue with this nonsense. Or start a blog.

 

[eastmen]

Ok well so which Windows tablets are the most interesting again? What's a good site to follow these things?

For general tablets i use this

http://tablets-planet.com/

and this

http://www.tabletpcreview.com/


a new dell leak shows a 10inch oak trail tablet getting 8 hours battery life and has a 128GB ssd dual 1.3MP frong camera and a 3MP rear along with Active pen support

 

[swaaye]

Hmmm interesting. I would prefer something in the 7-9" range though. Will just have to see what happens. That battery life is certainly good enough.

 

[eastmen]

Hmmm interesting. I would prefer something in the 7-9" range though. Will just have to see what happens. That battery life is certainly good enough.

users are reporting 6 hours for the iconia w500 and 4 hours with 1080p video

 

[willardjuice]

You guys literally have to be "punking me". Perhaps everyone in this thread has me on ignore? Either way last warning before vacations are handed out. Stay on topic.

 

[Squilliam]

Excuse me mr mod, just to be clear when you're saying 'on topic' do you consider that to mean something along the lines of an objective semi-technical discussion or is it allowed to carry on in a subjective fashion? I think unlike other areas of the forum it isn't quite clear what the nature of discussion in these parts is expected to be.

 

[willardjuice]

Excuse me mr mod, just to be clear when you're saying 'on topic' do you consider that to mean something along the lines of an objective semi-technical discussion or is it allowed to carry on in a subjective fashion? I think unlike other areas of the forum it isn't quite clear what the nature of discussion in these parts is expected to be.

I think it's pretty clear that posts like the following have nothing to do with Windows tablets.

Wow.. so now the reviewers shouldn't be honest with their work, and just make their way into more ad clicks because that's where the money's coming?

Any press member will always go after the "hottest" topics; I don't see any dishonesty in that.

Squilliam to be blunt, I seriously don't know how an individual could be confused on whether or not his contributions are off-topic. This is like forums 101. Just use this thread as an example; does the petty press argument between Tranz and Ailuros have anything to do with tablets running Windows? No. Please use pm for the next time you have a question about moderation.

 

[Squilliam]

Spoiler

Sorry. I just realised you probably deleted offending posts. and I don't think I need to PM atm (can't due to broken browser anyway)

Anyway back on topic:

From a technical perspective I cannot really see myself holding my breath for Windows based tablets based off of Windows 7 simply because the equation of: "work performed vs energy input required" isn't nearly as good as many other combinations of architectures and operating systems at this point. Windows was not designed around the idea being limited by hardware capabilities. The assumptions written into it are essentially that hardware would improve and therefore software didn't need to be written in an efficient manner. This isn't a paradigm which translates well to an energy limited architecture interface issues aside.

 

[eastmen]

Well windows 8 beta shoud be announced early sept and apprently we will see windows 8 announcement in June.

As for what your saying , its really the hardware that is holding back the life span of tablets. You can turn off some windows features to make it more portable friendly but in the end the hardware is going to determin the max battery life you can get.

 

[Squilliam]

As far as I can imagine Windows 8 will probably be a great tablet OS. Windows 7 however is not a great tablet OS no matter how you swing it. At best it's workable and it has it's useful niches here and there. For the main, the hardware requirements are simply too high for a workable device.

 

[Laurent06]

As for what your saying , its really the hardware that is holding back the life span of tablets. You can turn off some windows features to make it more portable friendly but in the end the hardware is going to determin the max battery life you can get.

I don't want to sound harsh, but that makes no sense: the OS kernel (whatever it is, Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.) has a very strong impact on battery life, and you can't necessarily control its efficiency (or lack of it) in that regard. Of course you can improve battery life (and boot time) by turning off unneeded services, but that's far from being enough if the kernel can't be optimized for power efficiency.

 

[swaaye]

.............nm

 

[eastmen]

I don't want to sound harsh, but that makes no sense: the OS kernel (whatever it is, Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.) has a very strong impact on battery life, and you can't necessarily control its efficiency (or lack of it) in that regard. Of course you can improve battery life (and boot time) by turning off unneeded services, but that's far from being enough if the kernel can't be optimized for power efficiency.

Last time i checked windows enables scaning of hardrives for its search function and that is constantly on. Disabling it on my laptop can give me another 20-30 minutes of battery life

 

[swaaye]

As far as I can imagine Windows 8 will probably be a great tablet OS. Windows 7 however is not a great tablet OS no matter how you swing it. At best it's workable and it has it's useful niches here and there. For the main, the hardware requirements are simply too high for a workable device.

Well that's if you ignore that these Windows tablets seem to have similar battery life to the Arm devices running Android.

They do have much more RAM, but hey 512MB is limiting even on Android.

 

[eastmen]

I have been wondering what kind of battery life one of these devices will have when it's actually doing something that loads down the CPU for a significant amount of time.

acer w500 with the c-50 will get 4-4:30 minutes of 1080p playback as tested by users and reviewers

http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc.../acer-iconia-tab-w500-936986/review?artc_pg=2

That said, we only managed four and a quarter hours of battery life (258 minutes to be exact), out of the Iconia Tab W500 when playing back HD movies. You'll get up to twice that with less demanding tasks, but we would have expected more from the machine.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc...ab-w500-936986/review?artc_pg=2#ixzz1KYyR0IUn

Its not bad , more than double my dm3z with dual core neo when playing back hd . They were able to play rift and minimum settings also which bodes well for its gaming capabilitys on the go.

The bad news

Redrawing the display to accommodate a change in the orientation of the Iconia Tab W500 takes at least five seconds to redraw, which is infuriating. This will have you reaching for the orientation lock on the base of the unit, which does negate the usefulness of its tablet form factor somewhat.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc...ab-w500-936986/review?artc_pg=2#ixzz1KYyxo1OZ

although this could be fixable with a driver update perhaps ?

 

[swaaye]

That redraw thing is very strange indeed. Any of these PC devices has a GPU that shouldn't have any sort of trouble with GUI.