Viral Video: Windows 7 Slate vs. Apple iPad

Agree with rattyuk. I would like to see the beginning of the video. The part where they turn them both on. My ipad is always ready to go.

Hey, it has little nipple-feet… and stickers!(3:55) It probably has vent holes too. Mac laptops are thinner that this thing. 2011 can’t come soon enough.

Usability is horrid. See the pinch and zoom? Blame Desktop Windows 7.

My only excitement from this device is the prospect of installing Google’s Chrome OS or Windows Mobile 7 NOT the desktop version.

http://sumotown.com/mobile_device/hanvon-tablet

Oh, I wish there were innovation games beginning! There is no innovation in that Windows tablet. It’s almost identical to all the other Windows tablets that have been around for many years and did not sell. What is different about this one that now it’s going to sell?

Taking the keyboard off a netbook is not enough. If you don’t also take away half the weight, add double the battery life, and provide a big touch interface that you can use when the device is not resting on a desk or lap, then you end up putting the device on a desk or lap to use it. You can’t carry it around like a book or clipboard. In that case, you might as well leave the keyboard on. That is why people keep passing on these Windows tablets and buying netbooks and notebooks. Windows tablets get used on desks and laps so much that many of them have keyboards built-in that just flip around out of the way when necessary.

It goes beyond the keyboard also. To play games on the Windows tablet, you’ll have to plug in a game controller, because it doesn’t have 50,000 touch games like iPad. To install apps, you’ll have to plug in an optical disc drive, because it doesn’t have cloud installs like iPad. You’ll need a graphics tablet to draw. You’ll need anti-virus (which is also a battery killer.) It won’t sleep/wake well. No color management, so your photos will always look wrong.

Also the software costs for the Windows tablet are roughly 10 times iPad. MS Office costs $279 while iWork for iPad is $30 (and doesn’t require a cursor and mouse.) Windows Ultimate costs $399, only $100 less than a whole iPad. The iPad comes with free upgrades to the next 2 major versions of iOS, while the Windows tablet expects you to pay for the next major version.

The thing is, not everybody will understand all these differences, but they will amount to a bad experience and the Windows device is not going to get the reputation iPad has for being fast and easy and fun and productive and outrageously mobile. The reputation is what makes people buy it. The diversity of people who have bought iPad and the diversity of use cases is really incredible. There are banks that bought them and gave them to their high-dollar customers to use instead of Windows so that their online banking transactions are secure. I saw a limo driver holding an iPad up the other day on the street, with the name of the person they were picking up written on it by hand. And then some people buy it to be a hassle-free 10 hour portable video player, a true video iPod. This Windows tablet would not suit any of those uses.

At the office where I’m consulting right now in the I-T group, they have 2 problems: a Windows 7 rollout that is endlessly delayed because of software issues and users who won’t go to Windows 7 school, and an iPad rollout that is happening too fast because even though I-T has not approved the device, users are going to the Apple Store, buying iPads, bringing them in, logging in to Exchange and then hardly using their XP PC’s. Every iPad that goes to a meeting sells a couple more iPads because people with iPads have hundreds of PDF’s at their fingertips and they make everyone else look unprepared. So even in desktop systems, we’re moving more quickly from XP to iPad than from XP to 7, because *users* find iPad to be *useful*. So good luck to any company who thinks the answer to that is to remove the keyboard from a Windows 7 PC.