Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
I don't care about finger usability myself. I'd use a stylus, and only occasionally my finger. And long boottimes? Long is relative. If I have a few minutes to kill, I'd probably take out my real reader. And when I have more time, who cares about a longer boot time?
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Why is anyone talking about boot times, who reboots? I haven't rebooted my laptop or my iPhone for months, except to apply a kernel-level security update. Why would a tablet pc need to reboot for any other reason?
Though I guess with Windows you'll be rebooting every week. But still, that's once a week. Unless, do you expect it to crash or something? I don't get it. I have a Windows laptop too and I never reboot that other than security updates either.
I don't get why anyone cares how long it takes to boot up a computer anymore. If a computer can't properly go in and out of sleep mode reliably, then you need a new one because this technology has been common in consumer computers for almost 20 years now. I've personally been using it for 13 years or so, based on the earliest computer I can remember the feature working on.
And with a proper tablet, not some full-on PC shoehorned onto hardware it has no business running on (read the actual reviews on the archos 9, I was excited for it til I learned how horrible it performs, and that it only comes with support for windows 7 basic which has none of the touch features enabled), you're not even going to need sleep mode as the standby modes enable the low power mode of the processors actually designed for such devices and battery consumption goes waaaaay down, which is what enables a cell phone to stand idle for days and still take calls.
I've been interested in tablet PC's for years and I can assure you, every windows-based offering to date has been incredibly underwhelming. When you look at dimensions, don't underestimate the weight. At 1.5lbs, even the iPad seems on the heavy side. I think it will be ok, but most tablet PCs are more, approaching 2 lbs for the light end, and most just giving up entirely and running 3lbs without a battery in it. Oh yeah, and by the by, the industry standard for weight reporting on spec sheets is with every optional component removed, that means the battery, which itself will likely weigh 8-16 oz. Now that your tablet PC is 3 lbs, and its PC hardware is producing oven temperatures on your arm and blowing the exhaust into your face, you're going to wonder why anyone thought it was a good idea.
Really, if I was looking at the iPad and thought "Ugh, I hate apple, I want openness!" I would not look at windows based computers, I would look at android-based tablet competitors, like all the various MIDs that showed up at CES. They're going to be running on ARM based SoC platforms like Tegra 2 and will be much better suited to portable convenience computing than a windows based tablet.