Microsoft’s CES keynote is behind us, and before the thing even started, it was rumoured that Microsoft would unveil a tablet PC together with HP. Well, they did, but to say it was underwhelming would be an understatement. Instant update: El Reg has a nice list of figures presented during the keynote.
I would’ve loved to actually be able to watch the on-demand video of Ballmer’s keynote before writing this item, but Moonlight 2.0 refuses to work in either Chrome or Firefox on Linux, so I can’t watch it just yet. The live blogging article from Ars Technica will have to do for now – the Steve Jobs keynote way, so to speak.
As was to be expected, Ballmer touched upon Windows 7, and how much of a success it has been. He called it the best selling operating system in history, and claims satisfaction rates are at 94% among early adopters. And in what I can only assume is a small stab at Apple, there are apparently 4 million Windows applications.
There was also a lot of talk about Media Room 2.0 on Windows Media Center and XBox 360, including CableCARD setups and the like. Here in The Netherlands, they are switching over from CI to CI+ because the latter allows for better DRM (yup), but so far, the CI+ consortium has not yet certified a PCI or USB peripheral to allow CI+ to work on HTPCs. My ISP/cable company, Ziggo, did state earlier in 2009 that they were talking with Microsoft about this, so I hope Microsoft uses its power to do good here, and allow me to watch/record CI+-encrypted stuff via my HTPC so I can ditch my dedicated HD digital cable decoder.
The reason I’m highlighting my personal problem on this subject is because all this talk about TV on your PC is all fine and dandy, but it’s all for naught because the TV world is such a fragmented mess that even I sometimes fail to grasp, let alone non-geeks and regular people. I hope Microsoft will push the world’s cable companies and ISPs to properly support HTPCs, because I’d rather have Microsoft court them than Apple. At least the former gives me choice and doesn’t lock me into the horrible iTunes.
Anyway, I digress. The next topic was tablet PCs – or, as they are now called by Microsoft and its partners, slate PCs. HP showed off its Slate prototype, which is a tablet running plain Windows 7. “Perfect for reading, surfing web, taking entertainment on the go,” Ballmer said. He showed the Slate running the Kindle software.
Underwhelming, indeed. We had all hoped for a device with a properly designed tablet UI – instead of yet another attempt to cram the (admittedly, very pleasant in version 7) Windows UI into a device where it doesn’t belong. I just don’t understand why Microsoft does not leverage its Surface technology and software to create a tablet-centric interface – I really, really don’t want to fiddle with the default Windows UI on a tablet.
I guess the company thought, hey, our Windows XP tablets were such a massive success, why change a winning formula?
Apple is pretty much laughing its bum off right now – unless, of course, Apple plans on using the default Mac OS X UI on its tablet, which I highly doubt they will. I guess it will be up to Apple, once again, to lead the way on software. Widows tablets will sport horrid touch UIs developed by OEMs, which don’t work, crash, look hideous, and will look like afterthoughts.
CES was the perfect opportunity for Microsoft to pre-empt the tablet market, but they failed to impress anyone. This means that everything’s still wide open for Apple to come in and surprise us with whatever they have in store for us, later this month.
All in all, not a particularly exciting Microsoft keynote.
Yeah, totally boring presentation with little content, if any. Major miscalculation on MS part.
Yeah, I’d have thought Microsoft would’ve grasped a mobile UI by now. Perhaps they believe they can push it the way they did Windows Mobile, which was horrible but still gained massive penetration simply because it was a Windows product. I don’t think Win 7 would make a bad tablet os in and of itself, but the default UI is going to make for a poor experience and battery life is not going to be anywhere what it could be with something based on ARM instead.
In my honest opinion of Microsoft is that they’ve always played the “catch up” game when it came to OSs
Visual Studio and Office I can’t fault (though I /personally/ can’t stand the new ‘Ribbon’ interface and some might argue about how MS plagiarised Borland and Lotus respectively) – but in terms of OS distributions, their offerings have always felt slower / less intuitive / bloated and/or often featureless compared to many of the other competing OSs at the time.
I think the problem is Microsoft have always been good business men. So while their OSs are “good enough” to sell, they well sell them.
Where as Microsoft’s competition have either done an abysmal job selling their (often superior) products (OS/2 anyone?) or – in the last 15 years – just have far too much ground to catch up on that raw capability alone doesn’t shift enough copies.
Anyway, after the (subjective) disaster of Vista and the (debatable) success of netbooks and other portable devices – Microsoft are loosing their stranglehold on the home personal computing sector. Albeit a very gradual loosening of grip.
Microsoft doesn’t really give you any more choice than Apple these days. You simply have a different choice sometimes, that being the program you might be able to use. Lately though, they aren’t even giving you that anymore, and they aren’t even using or recommending Plays4Sure now either which is what sometimes gave you a choice in software or hardware.
Too bad on the HP slate, the hardware looks pretty slick. But running a standard Win7 – no thanks, I’ll pass and wait for Apple’s offering or something running Android or Linux.
What’s stopping you from installing Linux on the HP slate?
(or does the device not even have a USB port?)
I don’t know yet what ports it will have. All I’ve been able to find are some press photos and a teaser video. HP are supposedly to release the final specs later today.
That was basically my first thought. “I don’t really care how badly Windows 7 does, because, if the hardware is compelling, the price is right and I see uses for the thing, I’ll put Linux on it.” Which probably won’t work well either, at first, but, will evolve over time, if enough people get the tablets.
I suppose my biggest concern is just the price of the thing. I see a only a very limited set of (lower-value) uses for such a tablet, and so the price I’d be willing to pay for it is pretty low — like, <= $200. I somewhat doubt they’ll be hitting that price point.
This new “Slate” is nothing more than a Windows 7 TabletPC without a keyboard. I can only guess that it’s going to be powered by the same CPU than Netbook. Battery life will not be any better. And I bet it will not be cheaper than a Netbook.
At least, it run Windows.
I’m back at what Marvell showed, for $200, that could be good, with a longer running time and enough power to do what you really want to do with a Tablet, everything but desktop work.
mms://wm.MS-STUDIOSMEDIA.COM/a10065/o9/presspass/1002811_CES_750k.wmv
siimo, forgive my ignorance but how did you derive that? I tried it and it works like a charm with VLC but this is the first time I have been able to view Silverlight media on my Ubuntu box.
From html source of the page with silverlight video.
This is really disappointing. The windows handwriting recognition is excellent. Probably the best handwriting recognition available anywhere. And they have been pushing tablets for ages. But by refusing to come up with a tablet-specific UI they totally lose their edge.
I have two tablet PCs (a TC1100 and a TC4400), but due to the useless UI and the lack of good tablet-specific applications I mostly use them in normal laptop mode.
I would love to see something like mathematica with a tablet style interface that recognizes formulas. This would be a real killer application for all scientific and engineering students.
There is MathJournal, but I think they use their own handwriting recognition, which is not nearly as good as the built-in handwriting recognition of windows 7. It also uses its own math kernel, which is not as powerful as real computer algebra systems.
Just a question about the slate term.
I swear, I have never heard the word slate to refer to a tablet device before the rumors that the Apple tablet will be named iSlate. Since then I keep reading things like “slate device”, “slate type computers”, “slate computing” and now an actual product named “HP Slate”.
Did just everyone renamed the tablet category based on the product that Apple might name iSlate? Is it just a coincidence? Or was the term used before and I just never heard it?
a tablet is a laptop with a touchscreen that can be flipped around so that it covers the keyboard. a slate is just the touchscreen, no keyboard.
Thanks for the clarification. The Tablet PC wikipedia article had a section about slates before the first rumors about iSlate surfaced (December 24 afaik).
Side note: When you replied to my comment, I checked the wikipedia article and the section about slates was:
About half an hour later some troll someone changed it to:
Someone not at work should change that back.
My first reaction was that maybe MS has stolen a march on Apple in one way – pre-empting their name! I guess coincidence is more likely but it’s amusing to imagine a quite name change to grab mindshare on the word “slate” before Apple release their tablet.
The sad thing with MS is, as Thom says, that in some areas they still seem to be sniping on trivial matters rather than really taking the lead on things.
The term “slate” has been used for tablet PCs without a keyboard for years. Rugged PC implies the term was used generically as far back as the early 90’s (http://ruggedpcreview.com/2_slates.html), and there are several reviews of ‘slate’ PCs from 2002-2003 that ran XP Tablet Edition with a Crusoe processor (http://www.windowsfordevices.com/c/a/Windows-For-Devices-Articles/W…).
I’ve been using “The Slate” to reference Apple’s tablet for the last 2 years because it’s different from a lot of these transforming notebook to tablet designs.
There was a Newton Messenger Slate way back when and it seems to me that there was also a magnesium alloy-clad product called the Slate all the way back in the 1980s.
SLATE, a magazine since 1996 (owned by Microsoft and now owned by the Washington Post since 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16216-2004Dec21.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_magazine
I didn’t expect much from the HP machine. I DO however expect a great deal from conductive slate machines. I can see them becomming the ideal way to consume content (web, video, etc), and pretty much replacing desktops and laptops for most people. I agree with thom though, this is one place where a general purpose OS is absolutely moronic, even though the HP machine is nicer, I would rather have a JooJoo at this point for the more relevant OS.
Well, even a bog standard desktop os is better than having nothing but a web browser.
If you look at some of the prototype ideas from microsoft things could be really slick.. but a plain win7 interface will not do it for these kind of devices.. something like this would: http://gizmodo.com/5365299
Annoying to the last, I think and I wonder if he was sweating profusely while going through that bit.
The 4 million applications on Windows had to be a jab since the 3 billion downloads press release came the other day from Apple, but how many of those Windows applications they counted were malware?
The limiting factor on the HP tablet is Windows.
Since they don’t have access to the Windows OS source code they can’t rip out the parts that make Windows Tablets such a bad product. And Microsoft obviously either doesn’t care or doesn’t have a clue on what to do to help them.
HP is not a dumb company. They have great engineers. Everything they do outside of Windows is very smart and works really well for what it is/was designed for.
Since the HP tablet is still … well it just isn’t good. It is fully due to Microsoft. And wow, even Bombastic Buffoon Balmer couldn’t get excited about it and scream “Tablet” over and over in a useless attempt to get anyone excited about the product.
Even Microsoft Bob v3 would have been a better fit.
Actually Bob itself as idea was spot on, but for the wrong class of devices and the execution was annoying and lousy.
But look at what Apple did with the iPhone and what Android currently does, people want the usability of an easy to use device on something like a tablet.
A table has to be seen sort of as a consumer device which has to be easy to use, sort of an interactive newspaper, no stylus finger control and the reduction on the UI down to the bare minimum.
I just saw the video of the lenovo pad and they also are spot on with their arm/linux based UI in this regard.
I assume Apple will also go a similar route, and the concept videos floating around have some that some people within Microsoft have a clue.
(But given this was just an animation I again suspect a huge vaporware clound behind it)
So Bob as idea was not too far off, but not for a desktop computer and definitely not by annoying its users with stupid dogs.
But the main issue here is, Microsoft is still stuck in the mid 90s when it was enough to push some vaporware into the press that everyone shuddered and products were removed from the market or killed off, later they could deliver a lousy solution which was good enough.
That does not work on those class of devices anymore, and neither does it with the users who are exposed way too much to Jonathan Yves (Apple) excellent work in millions by now, but Microsoft or at least the middle and upper management have not gotten the message, but some people obviously have.
You cannot push anymore consumer devices by spouting off vaporware and then pulling off a semi working half assed solution, it is not the mid 90s anymore.
There must not have been any chairs within arms reach.