I’ve been back on planes all week this week, splitting my time between Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.
So I knocked out this blog post about the new HP state 500 standing at the gate at Sydney airport.
I love being able to blog from anywhere!
Fortunately we made it out of Sydney within 30 seconds of our noise curfew. Phew! Qantas A330 is bringing me home to reintroduce myself to the family…
Here is a blog post that I wrote at the pool today.
I’ve decided to throw some ink blogs up on www.tabletpc.com.au.
According to Dave Stevens of Brennan IT, probably not. In his opinion column in The Australian IT section he compares the NBN to the government providing each household with a Rolls Royce… and as much as I am enjoying my own fast broadband at home (only 100mbps – yowee!) I think I he has a point.
Not wanting to be political, but the full capacity of my 100mbps connection is practically untouched and my real broadband needs are much more mobile oriented than fixed line.
My brother cannot even get broadband at his place in Cranbourne, Victoria and he operated entirely from Telstra NextG. For a few years my own Telstra NextG connection on my Tablet PC was equivalent if not faster than the slow ADSL 2 speeds that I could get at home.
I hate to say it, but implementing better wireless technology like 4G makes a lot more sense than Fibre To The Home… After all, why should we be confined to fixed lines to do what we need to do. Notebooks, Netbooks, Smart Phones, iPads, iPhones and Tablet PCs are not the future, they are very much here and now. They would all benefit much more from better wireless coverage than fixed line broadband.
Update: Judging by the plethora of idiots people commenting on stories on the major news websites, it appears that the NBN represents the politics of distraction.
Punters and politicians are getting wound up about technical things that way out of their depth. They are throwing around billions when none of them have a clue what they are talking about (i.e. they wouldn’t know an ST fibre connector from an SC) , and I guess that was the gambit… What did I expect?
I got hold of the Motion Computing J3500 this week, both the touch and Gorilla Glass models. As I mentioned in my last post I’ve been using the Fujitsu Lifebook T900, but I find that I use it almost exclusively as a slate. So I’m in the process of switching my mobile operations to the J3500.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the T900. It is certainly my first choice of convertible Tablet PCs. Fujitsu have been extremely reliable for us (less than 1% failure rates so far which is remarkable), and the T900 will continue to be my mobile video editing machine due to it’s performance profile.
I’m switching to the Motion Computing J3500 because of it’s smaller profile, dual battery setup (to be fair I could do this with the T900 too) and the Gobi mobile broadband. We don’t have mobile broadband as an option on the T900 here in Australia unfortunately.
So it’s onto the Motion Computing J3500 with touch. Here is a video that we shot to give you a little preview of it.
After using the J3500 and T900 for a few months now I am extremely impressed with Windows 7 and touch. The only drawback that I have found is that I am constantly touching the Wacom Interactive Pen Display in my office with my finger. I have to remind myself…
One of the best known digital inkers of all time is Sumocat who writes for Gottabemobile.com. To see a great example of what digital inking is all about, visit Sumocat’s ink blog here: http://sumocat.blogspot.com/
But something that he said in a comment on one of his articles yesterday got me thinking…
Just about the only thing I don’t like about the iPad is the lack of real inking, but this isn’t something that appeals to the masses. – Sumocat, Gottabemobile.com comments
Last night I was out at a business lounge in the Melbourne Airport Hilton with a couple of Motion Computing VPs and Sumocat’s comment came to mind… As I looked across the room I noticed business people all over the place having informal meetings and taking notes on pen and paper.
Perhaps Sumocat’s comment was referring to the fact that people don’t use pen and paper so much while vegetating on the couch (or toilet) – which is of course the intended use case for an Apple ipad. And he’d be right about that… Touch will do just fine.
However, I thought how many people work in an office, attend meetings all day long and take notes? Tablet PCs in their current form are unbelievably ideal for this use case, and I’d have to say that there are masses.
At home, at work, in the car (as a passenger or stopped of course!), at church, at the shops, at the post office… there are so many places that you scribble notes on paper. Surely everyone does that?
Touch in any form will simply not cut it to replace the ballpoint pen, but a proper windows Tablet PC with an active digitizer can! If we could only get them into a consumer format and priced like an Apple iPad.
I think now that Apple will never adopt the pen. I doubt that Google will either when they release a couple Tablet PCs shortly. C’mon Microsoft, it’s time to act on Courier – put your cards on the table(t)!
Thanks to Apple iPad madness, my Tablet PC YouTube channel goes over 200,000 views tomorrow… At the start of the year (only one month ago), I was celebrating 100,000 views. Most of the traffic has been aimed at one video I did showing off the Motion Computing F5 with windows 7 on it.
I filmed this video before the release of Windows 7 showing it alongside another F5 with Windows Vista on it.
I wanted to show off the improvements for tablet PC users in windows 7 as well as the Motion F5 hardware… I think that I’ve certainly succeeded in both! This video itself will account for 100,000 views in a couple of days.
The thing that strikes me is that there are so many people who still don’t even know about Windows Tablet PCs, even though they have been around for 10 years in their current form (20 years really on Windows).
Sure 200,000 views is nothing compared to the dizziness that surrounds an Apple product launch, but I’m still proud of what we have achieved so far here down under… All part of a days work for me to get the message out about real, useful tablet PCs that will make your job quicker and easier – not just Apple richer. Swipe!
I was seriously expecting the Apple iPad to be a game changer, but it appears to me that the folks at Cupertino haven’t spent any time using real Tablets. If they had, the iPad probably wouldn’t be lacking an active digitiser with digital ink capabilities.
When commentators said that the lack of Tablet PC sales means that people don’t like the pen, maybe Apple listened. But most of those folks that pass comment on Tablet PCs haven’t seriously used one either…
It’s not true that people don’t like the pen. They might not like the idea of it, but for the most part they’ve never tried it, so they don’t really know that they don’t like it. It’s an experience that they have never been able to have, so they really don’t know how useful it is. The disappointing thing is that thanks to Apple, they may never know.
Windows Tablets are still far from perfect, but due to the lack of a digitiser they are still far more useful than the iPad appears to be.
To give you an example, I spent the weekend in a conference. I took notes through the entire full day session on a Motion Computing C5 tablet on one battery. That included scribbled notes, mind maps, sketches, drawings and audio. Windows indexed all of my handwritten content in the background so that I can search through it… which I often do.
Another example, when a customer calls on the phone, I have my Tablet PC open with Microsoft OneNote and our enquiry form template. I fill in the details we discuss without distracting the person on the other end from the conversation with the noise of frantic key tapping. It’s much faster to note take this way than on the keyboard anyway.
When I go to a meeting with a customer, I always take notes and fill in the answers to my questions so that my sales process does not rely on tatty notebooks, sticky notes and lost paper.
I often take screen shots of things like web pages, pictures, documents and videos, then scribble on them and email them off using the Microsoft Snipping Tool.
I never print letters of faxes that I have to sign. I just sign on the screen and email them straight back using Bluebeam or Word.
Digital note taking, sketching and drawing is all impractical on a device like the iPhone or iPad. There are no tools to do it with… Sure, you could use the brushes application shown at the iPad launch to draw with your finger… But that’s a bit like drawing with a blunt stick. Practically useless when compared to using a Tablet PC with a Wacom active digitiser – Which is both proximity and pressure sensitive, while your touch screen is neither.
No, there are only 2 things that have held Windows based Tablet PCs back from going where Apple is about to go (and I’m not talking about UMPCs here).
Windows Tablets did not take a huge hit today, because Apple decided to play it safe. Did Apple fall into the old corporate trap of too many focus groups, too many committees, too many meetings, too many voices of fear in the back of their heads? They played it safe and just supersized an existing product… I don’t think that’s going to fly.
This is not the mobile phone scenario where windows mobile is being seriously spanked by the iPhone. Phones are pretty much a closed system, whereas Windows Tablets leverage the 92% of computers in the world that run Windows, not to mention the fact that they can connect to and access practically any server be that Windows, *nix or Mac.
That said, if Microsoft et al don’t act – and be seen to act – it may be only a matter of time until history is rewritten by Apple.
Remember the first iPhone? With no 3G, no video, no app store? Apple won’t stand still with a seriously deficient product like this until it becomes a seriously useful product like the iPhone 3Gs.
Seth Godin confirmed tomorrow’s release of Apple Tablet on his blog this morning…
I want to be the very first author to announce a new project for Apple’s tablet.
He adds,
Steve Jobs will probably never speak to me again for announcing before his launch. That’s okay, he never speaks to me anyway.
It’s not really news, but it’s still interesting… As is the Vook Video / Book reading platform that is referred to in the post.
Read it here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/jumping-the-gun.html
I got a chance to get up close with the Kindle 2 over the holidays… Until recently, that’s been pretty hard to do here in Australia.
My verdict: Super impressed!
The eInk screen is very comfortable to read, although I didn’t get a chance to use it in the sun (as it rained in QLD pretty much the whole time).
What I like about the Kindle 2:
What I don’t like about the Kindle 2:
Pros outweigh the cons as far as I’m concerned. The Kindle 2 will do much to attract people to e-reading.
What I’m really excited about is the prospect of using a Tablet PC or UMPC that fills this form factor. No, I don’t want it to run some dumbed down mobile phone OS like Google Chrome or Windows Mobile either… I want full Windows on it. I want it to replace my desktop like my Motion J3400 does… Can’t wait for that – It’s only a matter of time.
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