November 2004 - Posts

• Happy Thanksgiving!

  It's almost time for the traditional sleep-inducing dinner, so I'd like to wish everyone a happy holiday, wherever (or even if) you are celebrating it. My friend here - Tabby the Turkey - needn't worry tonight: we're having duck for dinner. But he would like to remind tablet owners that any holiday is a time to get creative and think about doodling some hand-crafted holiday cards. I'll touch upon my own procedure for making inked holiday cards over the weekend, but for now, enjoy the long weekend and the traditional family gatherings. And, of course, don't forget that tomorrow is the busiest shopping day of the year. There don't seem to be any deals on Tablet PCs though. That's another missed marketing and sales opportunity: millions of people could have seen a tablet in their Thursday paper. At least the Averatec C3500 maybe? Instead, Best Buy's ad pushes Motorola's dubious MPx220 smartphone that you can get for $49 after some hefty rebates (at least some of which may be instant in some areas). Posted Nov 25 2004, 01:53 PM by peter with no comments Filed under: Tablet PC, Everything Else

• The autumn of film photography, and where's my multimedia tablet?

  The crowds in Las Vegas are pretty thick, and those not videotaping the universal chaos, are taking pictures. Yet there are few film cameras to be seen. Even more interesting is that camera phones seem to be outnumbering standalone digital cameras. We even saw one cute (and apparently geeky) couple handing one of those camera-equipped Palm Zires to some folks to have their picture taken. Monica and I are certainly taking lots of goofy pictures with our smartphones, and the bottom line is that cameras integrated into devices that you commonly carry, while not always work safe in some places, offer lots of opportunities to capture one of a kind moments. That's one of the reasons why I'd like to see more tablets with integrated digital cameras, along the lines of swivel mounts on the small TDV Vison tablet and Sony's tiny Vaios. Ideally, they'd be modular and removable (or attachable, depending on your point of view) to make the corporate folks feel safer. Of course, I am squarely pointing the finger at Sony here: where's my multimedia tablet? You know, the one with megapixel image and video capture, 8" wide-angle screen, inline remote with headphones, consumer IR with universal learning remote software, a Media Center control UI and sync capability, and lots of hardware buttons to control music and movie playback. I understand that the postal service probably lost my demo unit, but come on Sony, stop dragging your feet! Posted Nov 20 2004, 08:08 PM by peter with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Gadgets

• About the site changes, and tablet propaganda

  I must be getting too old, if I remember when headsets on flights used to be free. Anyway, I've already seen tonight's film, plus I forgot to pack my headphones. I have also forgotten my little clip-on keyboard, so I might be stealing Monica's in a bit. You see, I actually kept my promise to her about not bringing my tablet, so I'm trucking on with my h6315 PDA phone - a device hated and loved by many. Actual text blogging will be light, because getting to all my earmarked topics is kind of a pain from the phone. However, while I'm bored on the plane, I figure I can tackle some topics. First of all, you may have noticed (assuming you are even able to get this feed) that things are a little different and/or broken around here. I got a new domain, consolidated my two existing blogs - Tabula PC and Spotlight on SPOT - and thus effectively killed them both off. I am trying to set up all sorts of pokey redirects, but I think that right now, the RSS feeds, images, and static files may redirect properly, while old archive links do not. Unfortunately, that may be unresolved for a week or so, until I have time to fix it. If you really need an article, just replace the www.kstati.com/tabula/ or www.kstati.com/spot/ in the URL with www.peterontech.com/tech/ and it should work. Hopefully. Do report other problems, so that I know what to fix. Also, since this blog now combines posts about both Tablet PCs and SPOT products, you may wish to subscribe only to the category that interests you. With that out of the way, I really have to tackle the subject of recent (although it's kind of always been there) overzealous tablet activism. Why are certain segments of the community almost bipolar in their support? On one hand every tiny public tablet appearance is made into a sensation (and the election night sightings became a storm of hopeful idealism). On the flip side, if someone voices even a slight doubt, fails to immediately go get one, or understand why they should, the tablet brigade almost flogs them in public for such ignorance, and swarms to convince them they need it, if only for some contrived reason. Frankly, it seems a little excessive and unbalanced lately. So here's some homework for the mighty tablet armada: sell me on the tablet platform. That may sound a bit strange, given that I've run a Tablet PC site for a year and a half, but things aren't quite the same as in the enthusiastic days when I got my first tablet. I'll get into some of the reasons for my disappointment some other time, but for now, tell me exactly what the platform does for me. To make things easier, I'll even eliminate a few things for you up front: I don't really draw (no skills there), sketch diagrams, or doodle in the margins. I am not organized to the point of using software like MindManager. I am not a student, architect, math person, or engineer . No matter what you say, I type faster than I handwrite, and my job deals with many activities where a keyboard is very necessary (e.g coding, web design, terminal sessions to servers, etc.). I have no use for educational or youth software. I don't read e-books - I like the feel of a paper novel. I don't frequently collaborate with groups of people around a computer. I rarely make revisions to documents that I send back to other people. So as not to be totally unreasonable, I do take notes in OneNote. However, I probably type about half of those, because even in meetings I might have other things going on, which require the keyboard anyway. Overall, it's not an outlandish profile at all - maybe even a common, consumer-level one. Oh yes, and, of course, I have tried a number of tablets - first and second-gen, convertible and slate (and hybrid), with Lonestar and without. So you can't use that line. Given all that, convince me. Sell it to me. Design me a suitable demo. Explain to me exactly why I shouldn't go and get some cute little touch-screen sub-notebook, a ThinkPad with 7+ hour battery life, or a full-featured Media Center notebook with booming speakers and a gorgeous screen. Posted Nov 20 2004, 02:32 AM by peter with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Tablet PC

• Wi-Fi roaming

  Who would have thought - when the T-Mobile site said they had a "roaming location" at Philadelphia airport, they were right. AT&T provides the service, but here I am, "roaming" while waiting for our flight to Las Vegas. However, the catch is that Pocket IE doesn't seem to be able to open the critical last link to the login page, which is why I had to resort to my NetFront trial installation, just to complete the process. Clearly they weren't thinking of mobile users here. Update: Great. Apparently our first officer is missing in action somewhere, so we're waiting. I trust US Air so much more now. Hmm, so the bum is running at least 30 minutes late, but they might board us in a bit anyway. I wonder if he can even fly the plane now. One hour late and we may actually be departing... Posted Nov 19 2004, 07:45 PM by peter with no comments

• Midnight strafing run - Halo 2 is here

  Monica - being the total gem that she is - managed to snag me spot #94 (I know, probably out of a hundred here in Delaware, but still) in line for tonight's midnight Halo 2 distribution at the nearest EB Games store, so we're heading out for a dinner and movie (The Incredibles) date before heading over to the mall. I have a small caffeine supply in store for the long night ahead, but it's really a shame I can't take off from work tomorrow - I probably won't be a pretty sight. At least after all these years, we'll see whether Bungie delivered on all the hype. In the run up to the game release, another small event occurred, but only Iggy really took notice. That's right, the Tablet PC turned two years old yesterday. No fanfare, no midnight rush, no cool new power toys to mark the occasion, no new marketing campaign. If only the tablet folks could learn a few things from Bungie. Posted Nov 08 2004, 06:49 PM by peter with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Tablet PC

• Election night tablets

  As everybody is noticing, NBC's Tim Russert is using a Fujitsu Stylistic ST5000 tablet to illustrate some of the election night math. (I didn't notice, since I was watching CNN, and only switched to NBC to see the tablet after reading about it.) They even have the display projected on a larger screen in the background. My question is: does anybody know what is that piece of software running on it? It's some sort of simple whiteboard or note taking application, with big buttons on top, but it doesn't look familiar to me. It seems to hold multiple pages in the background, and callout-looking icons switch between them. Frankly, the UI looks weird and the buttons look oddly stretched out. Why not just Journal? Does the NBC app actually do anything special? Also, earlier today, Iggy complained that he didn't see President Bush's posse sport any tablets: "This confirms to me that the tablet pc is still "hard" to use for executives." Hmm, interesting point. How many real "CEOs" do you see using tablets, at least in public? I bet a lot of them still gravitate toward a quick pen and paper solution. Update: Loren has managed to take a picture of the device being used by Dan Rather on CBS, and it seems to be a Toshiba tablet. However, Dan doesn't seem to be using it at all. What a shame. At the same time, the CBS folks have this gorgeous 40+" monitor that seems to be touch operated, allowing screens to be moved and images rotated by simple gestures, and annotations made by writing with a finger. It looks absolutely stunning, organic, and fluid, much like the screens in Minority Report. The sad part is that this is something that I would expect to be able to do on my tablet, yet the tablet couldn't even dream of such an intuitive interface, not saying anything about being forced to use the special digitizer pen to operate the display on it. Update 2: This is so funny! Dan Rather was just referring to his "old reporter's notepad" - his paper pad and pencil, and then talked about the more interactive map on "this gadget here" (stumbling a bit when trying to name it) - his Toshiba tablet, which was finally shown, and he even moved the mouse around a bit. Update 3: This morning Chris sent me a link to Fujitsu's press release touting NBC's use of the new Stylistic ST5020. Nice piece of advertising, actually. I'd definitely take the latest Stylistic over the latest Motion, and now Fujitsu will get some of the brand name awareness that it still lacks. Brilliant! CBS's Toshiba doesn't seem to be getting nearly as much attention - Dan just didn't warm up to it enough. I liked this bit for newbies: "A Tablet PC is a type of notebook computer that has a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen that a user can write on using a pen called a stylus. The handwriting is digitized and can be converted to standard text through handwriting recognition, or it can remain as handwritten text. With six intuitive Application Buttons, the two newsmen were able to quickly launch and toggle between different applications during the television coverage." Toggle between different applications? I must have missed that, since I only saw that one odd notepad app running on it. Update 4 (Man, this thing never ends, just like the election): Loren must be really bored today (I am too, I'm stuck in a brain numbing all-day session), since he has put together a bunch of reactions to the now infamous NBC Tablet PC. From geeky moments, to pathetic use of technology awards, a lot of people are noticing. Two comments here. Microsoft, did you intentionally seed that tablet (or even the CBS one)? If not, kick yourself right now. And since you had everybody paying attention, and NBC actually had commercial breaks, why oh why didn't you and Fujitsu sneak in a commercial for the new tablet? People might have already noticed it, wondered what it was, and then you could have hit them with a nice TV demo. Kick yourself again. Posted Nov 02 2004, 11:00 PM by peter with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Tablet PC