There has been a lot of discussion about Tablet PC's, here, here and here. To tell the truth I lust after a Tablet PC at least four times a week. Its every time I reach for a piece of paper to explain a concept to someone or go to wipe something on a whiteboard.
Having said that, I regularly survey the offerings from the various hardware vendors and what I have found is that they seem to be under estimating the computing requirements of some of their users.
I'm a software engineer, so I value a few very critical features in my laptop (which I use for EVERYTHING).
- Screen Resolution
- Memory Capacity
- CPU Performance
- Hard Disk Performance
The Tablets are finally starting to support between 1-2GB of RAM - thats great. Now they just have to get the screen to do what my Dell Inspiron 8500 (more than 12 months old) does in terms of screen resolution (1920x1200).
The CPU and hard disk performance is slightly secondary to that, but not much. See because I work with a variety of tools I often need to run a virtual machine, so once I have the critical memory issue covered CPU performance and hard disk performance come into play.
For some reason, the following features seem to get more airtime.
These issues are a distant second. Battery life is all well and good, but even when I travel I am not that far away from a power point. If the device can survive an hour flight from various major cities on the east coast of Australia I would be happy. If I need more battery life I will buy more batteries.
Size - did I mention I had a Dell Inspiron 8500. Thats a wide screen, the bigger the better, provided it fits in my MVP laptop bag.
Weight - my laptop bag is still not as heavy as my school bag was, and I carry the Inspiron, various cradles for my mobile devices, documents from projects I am working on, and my filofax. If I was any lighter I would think I had left something behind.
So - Robert, in essence, your challenge is to convince Dell to put a digitiser on top of the Inspiron screen.