Engadget reports: "First unveiled nearly a year ago at Macworld 2007, the MacBook-based, Wacom-modified Modbook has definitely seen its share of delays, although in the days and months since, the 13.3-inch slate has gained the distinction of being one of the few pieces of non-Cupertino, Apple-approved hardware. The world's first OS X tablet can be yours immediately starting at USD 2290."
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Member since:2005-11-14
Right now the people who rave the most about tablet PCs are webcomic artists using illustration packages tailored to the platform.
They love, love, love their tablet PCs. Regrettably this is a tiny market.
There's also an ergonomics factor most people overlook. (disclaimer: I used to be an embroidery digitizer who used old-school digitizer pucks with crosshairs on a giant 4x3 digitizer table.)
What people forget about tablet PCs is that the last 20 years of desktop/notebook computing have been built around a paradigm of fine-motor finger and wrist movement, not gross-motor shoulder and elbow movement. Artists are used to coordinating gross-motor movements, office lackeys are not. Pen computing is closer to gross motor: try to find someone who handwrites faster than they type and you'll see one of the reasons written correspondence is dead.
If you aren't an artist, tablet computing is like virtual reality: a solution searching for a problem.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-07-06
The reason for this is with hardware technology itself.
The cursor arrow doesn't seem to follow quickly the pen tip. And when It comes to handwrite recognition (ie from handwitten text to digital text) then speed would be horrible and alot of hangs would happen on even the fastest CPU, this shows a weakness in interconnects rather than the major components.
Also the screen covering glass would dimm alot the screen luminance and makes the pen friction harder and It would never give you the feeling of a paper but rather like a whiteboard.
At to these problems the uncertinity to which form to follow convertable or slate.
It is not yet the year of the tablet. Technology must mature first.