Amiga as a Tablet

[reticuli]

We have the advantage here. Microsoft also wants this market, because Bill Gates is blessed with a KEEN SENSE OF THE OBVIOUS. It's going this way, and not only do I want the Amiga there, I want her to be first, where she belongs.

Only one tiny eenie weenie little snag. Microsoft TabletPC based devices are already shipping.

e.g. Acer C100, Compaq TC1000 and ViewSonic ViewPad 1000.

*sniff*

[reticuli]

The other two are basically traditional laptops with rotatable screens that fall flat back on the keyboard. You get the best of both worlds... a tablet when you want to do simple, light work, or graphical stuff... and a keyboard when you want to do anything serious.

Heck... you're right on price though. Call me a cynic but it all seems to me like a marketting exercise to enable PC manufacturers to sell sub-standard PC's at high prices.

I mean... sheesh... when was the last time you saw a laptop with a 10.4" screen? And the processors are hardly anything likely to make you salivate either.

Combine this with Windows XP... Ack!

Not to say I wouldn't like to see AmigaOS run on a tablet form machine. That'd be way cool.

[reticuli]

Er... have you read any of the specs? These tablets run a special edition of XP on 800 MHz+ PIII chips.

Not exactly state of the art though, are they? You pay's your money... you get's less ;-)

And just to be interesting they throw in minor technologies like handwriting recognition to make it useful.

Not to knock handwriting technology 'cause it sure seems impressive to me but... I can type way faster than I can write. This kinda thing seems, to me, to be aimed at the 'newbie' - for whom it is probably very beneficial = but not to a seasoned user.

f people want to come up with an Amiga pipedream think small before taking over the world.

A dream, perhaps, but I'd buy one if it was one of those rotatable screen things with a keyboard. I guess the best we can hope for is when AmigaOS allegedly becomes hardware agnostic and runs quite happily on existing TabletPC stuff :-)

Well... perhaps!

[reticuli]

Actually, right now the tablet PC is more of a solution looking for a problem. Eventually people will start thinking of ways to take advantage of the form factor, and that's when it will really take off.

The most obvious one is graphics work. Drawing directly on the screen. Seem's pretty obvious to me ;-)

Prolly not exactly mass market though.

[reticuli]

Well why x86 particularly?

To survive in the desktop market an eventual shift to x86 is pretty much inevitable.

Rather, if it goes onto something like this, it needs to be StrongARM.

I'd go with Intel's implementation of the StrongARM - the XScale. 400MHgz - 1GHz last time I heard.

The 206MHz StrongARM in my iPAQ is pretty damned mean. There are 3d games to put low-end Amiga's to shame on this thing - even Quake's been ported to it. The thought of a 1GHz XScale chip at the heart of a decent tablet is extremely tempting. I'll go with what you say on the keyboard... I'd accept such a machine so long as I can add a keyboard via USB.

I'd want a minimum of 800 x 600. 1280 x 1024 pro'lly asking too much. At the size TabletPCs are I'd be looking for it to take over some of the tasks of my main machine - for that I'd want a decent resolution.

I've often wondered about an XScale based machine and what could be achieved if Amiga and RiscOS Ltd. got together for mutual gain. At least there seem to be a reasonable range of companies designing and selling complete StrongARM based sollutions for the RiscOS market.

They wouldn't have to co-operate OS wise... but from a hardware developers viewpoint the idea of being able to sell the same machine to both AmigaOS and RiscOS users might be quite tempting.

But then, perhaps I'm thinking a load of bull ;-)