The best Windows 7 tablet ever made
Joanna Stern on the Samsung Series 7 Slate PC:
It literally has the guts of a high-end laptop, including a dual-core Core i5-2467M processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 64 or 128GB SSD.
Oooh. Well, oooh, if you care about specs, which most people don’t these days. So, um TECHIEOOOH.
Yet despite those organs, it is said to have over six hours of battery life.
iPads of course clock in at over six hours, too; in fact, they nearly double that. Still, Apple kit’s a rip-off, so maybe the Samsung tablet will at least be affordable.
The 64GB version, which comes with a stylus
Extra value in a losable pointing stick!
will ring up at $1,099.
Just like the iPad, if you buy an iPad 2 while simultaneously setting fire to $400.
Samsung’s done a very nice job of cramming all those components into a .5-inch and sub two-pound tablet.
Thereby making it only merely nearly twice as heavy as the iPad.
[T]he biggest problem is the software, and while the pen and keyboard make Windows 7 more palatable, finger input remains a huge issue. In my short time with it, I mistakenly poked the minimize window button rather than the maximize and struggled to dig out the Paint program from the Start Menu. Samsung is trying to improve things with its Launcher program, which is basically a series of app homescreens, but that skin doesn’t go very deep. Your best bet here is to keep the pen in hand.
Sounds great. So what’s the verdict?
[T]he Series 7 Slate may be the best Windows 7 tablet ever made
Sounds a bit like someone waggling a smallish stick and saying it’s the best stick you could poke yourself in the eye with. I’m still struggling to get Microsoft’s tactics. It has a great OS in Windows Phone that looks like it would be perfect for tablets, but, no, instead they’re still trying the same ‘normal Windows on a tablet’ thing that’s proven to have failed badly for years now.
Hey, Ballmer: 2001 called and wants its concepts back!
Hat tip: Curious Rat.
What I find damning is that Microsoft has so much experience with lighter OSs – ie Windows CE, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile. I had a Casio Cassiopeia E-125 way back in 2000 and I thought it was the best thing ever: diary and contact syncing, Media Player, MS Office document editing, games, AvantGo (offline web-page collation and caching, a service I still miss!) and I could connect it to my Nokia 6210 and surf the web with a “proper” web browser. It changed the way I ran my life and improved my productivity in an enormous way. The iPhone and iPad have too, but the increment hasn’t been as great as that first week of having my life and the web in my pocket. What the hell went wrong, Microsoft should have utterly owned the whole concept of “mobile”, leaving Apple to make pretty iPods a year later?
If the screen quality is any good then it’s almost like having a small battery powered Wacom Cintiq with you. It would certainly beat the iPad for drawing and painting.
Kind of a niche use, I guess.