Journal Sylver Dragon's Journal: Why must tablet PC's suck? 2
In my role as a system manager, I have the enviable job of picking out new systems for people. Obviously, I work with the person who is going to use the system to come up with a good system for them, and balance it against the directives for IT from the greater University.
In the past couple of years, we have seen a shift in our area towards the touch interface. We have one Notebook/Tablet convertible, and everyone loves it. Since our primary application is ESRI's ArcGIS, we actually can make good use of the tablet interface. The users here have used touch based PDA's in the past for ArcPad, with great success. We have also used the one tablet we have for data collection, and it worked out great.
Now, as anyone who has used Arc may have realized by now, trying to shoehorn ArcInfo Desktop onto a notebook is a fun exercise in and of itself. When we look to buy a notebook, we expect that we'll start off around $3k, and go from there. That's fine, that's the cost of doing business for us. But the tablet makers seem dead set on telling us to go fuck ourselves.
For those who don't deal with Arc, as a basic idea of what it is and requires, it's essentially a CAD type application with georeferenced data. All of the lines on a map, all of the polygons, and points will have a latitude and longitude, to as high of level of accuracy as the equipment will allow. From there you can perform all kinds of analysis and manipulation on that data, and the intersection of data and so on. It's pretty damn cool. If you've used some of the advanced features of Google Maps, you've actually seen the smallest tip of the iceberg.
Like AutoCAD, the graphics cards we go for are the workstation level graphics cards (usually NVidia Quadro). Fortunately, we can get those in notebook systems. We also eat memory like a database application. We start at 4GB of memory, and a 64-bit OS, and go from there. Again, this isn't a problem with notebooks. On the CPU side, we usually get a good, multi-core, CPU with the best clock speed possible, without going nuts. Sure, we could get a 3GHz quad core processor, but the performance gains don't quite justify the cost. Also, one of the joys of ArcDesktop is that it is a single threaded application, so the multi-core CPU is mostly about allowing the user to start a process, and then do other stuff.
So, I can get a notebook with all of this, no problem. So, the next question I ask is, can I get a notebook/tablet convertible like this? And for some reason, the answer keeps coming up negative. All of the offerings I seem to find are small screen, integrated shit graphics cards, tiny and slow hard drives, memory starved, low voltage CPU, crap.
WTF, over? Would it really be all that hard to take one of those higher end notebooks and slap the touch interface on it? Yes, it's going to be a brick. Yes, it's going to eat batteries like starving cannibal in a nursery. So what? I'll deal with that, just give me a convertible with enough power to actually boot into Windows Vista.
In the past couple of years, we have seen a shift in our area towards the touch interface. We have one Notebook/Tablet convertible, and everyone loves it. Since our primary application is ESRI's ArcGIS, we actually can make good use of the tablet interface. The users here have used touch based PDA's in the past for ArcPad, with great success. We have also used the one tablet we have for data collection, and it worked out great.
Now, as anyone who has used Arc may have realized by now, trying to shoehorn ArcInfo Desktop onto a notebook is a fun exercise in and of itself. When we look to buy a notebook, we expect that we'll start off around $3k, and go from there. That's fine, that's the cost of doing business for us. But the tablet makers seem dead set on telling us to go fuck ourselves.
For those who don't deal with Arc, as a basic idea of what it is and requires, it's essentially a CAD type application with georeferenced data. All of the lines on a map, all of the polygons, and points will have a latitude and longitude, to as high of level of accuracy as the equipment will allow. From there you can perform all kinds of analysis and manipulation on that data, and the intersection of data and so on. It's pretty damn cool. If you've used some of the advanced features of Google Maps, you've actually seen the smallest tip of the iceberg.
Like AutoCAD, the graphics cards we go for are the workstation level graphics cards (usually NVidia Quadro). Fortunately, we can get those in notebook systems. We also eat memory like a database application. We start at 4GB of memory, and a 64-bit OS, and go from there. Again, this isn't a problem with notebooks. On the CPU side, we usually get a good, multi-core, CPU with the best clock speed possible, without going nuts. Sure, we could get a 3GHz quad core processor, but the performance gains don't quite justify the cost. Also, one of the joys of ArcDesktop is that it is a single threaded application, so the multi-core CPU is mostly about allowing the user to start a process, and then do other stuff.
So, I can get a notebook with all of this, no problem. So, the next question I ask is, can I get a notebook/tablet convertible like this? And for some reason, the answer keeps coming up negative. All of the offerings I seem to find are small screen, integrated shit graphics cards, tiny and slow hard drives, memory starved, low voltage CPU, crap.
WTF, over? Would it really be all that hard to take one of those higher end notebooks and slap the touch interface on it? Yes, it's going to be a brick. Yes, it's going to eat batteries like starving cannibal in a nursery. So what? I'll deal with that, just give me a convertible with enough power to actually boot into Windows Vista.
I hear ya (Score:2)
Although I'm at the opposite end of the market. (What I really crave is a diskless convertible notebook thin client with a 10" touchscreen.)
Good hunting.
Re: (Score:2)