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Tablet PC can't seduce Mac lover
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Kenneth
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May 9, 2005, 05:00 PM
 
You heard it right! I read this from today's Seattle Times

Monday, May 9, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.

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Tablet PC can't seduce Mac lover
By Compiled by Times technology staff

Business journalists who heard Bill Gates speak at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference last week in Seattle didn't get the full story.

The Microsoft chairman pitched the Tablet PC during his speech and mentioned that Detroit Free Press tech columnist Mike Wendland used one during an interview the previous week. "He'd switched from an Apple," Gates said.

Not exactly. Wendland said his Motion 1400 Tablet is a great tool for a reporter and he did bring it to his Gates interview. But Wendland remains a diehard Mac user.

"I'd never leave Macs," Wendland said via e-mail, after the speech. "The Tablet is my portable notepad. Macs are my main squeeze."

Wendland described the Tablet as the "closest thing to Mac 'cool' I have ever seen in a PC." Yet it's not cool enough to replace the three Macs he runs at home � a G5, a 20-inch iMac and a 15-inch PowerBook.

"Just as I wouldn't drive my wife's Honda to an interview with Bill Ford at the Ford Motor Co. (I drove my F150 pickup), I brought the Tablet to Gates," he wrote.
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historylme
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May 9, 2005, 06:00 PM
 
Aha! That's great!
     
OldManMac
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May 9, 2005, 06:05 PM
 
Wendland used to be a die hard Windoze user until Apple shipped him a G4, a couple of years ago, for a review. He's syndicated nationally in newspapers, and he does a weekly technology show. He still writes a lot about technology, but he's become a real Mac fanatic in the last two years, and he owns three Macs now.
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kikkoman
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May 9, 2005, 06:52 PM
 
Tablet PC can't seduce Windows users either from what I've seen.
     
Millennium
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May 9, 2005, 07:08 PM
 
I'm still a skeptic. Tablets are good if you're drawing, or if you're writing in any of a number of East Asian languages, but for most things there's simply no killer app to be found.
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Demonhood
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May 9, 2005, 07:16 PM
 
most of the table PCs i've seen aren't pressure sensitive. this makes them not so useful for real drawing either.
     
B Gallagher
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May 10, 2005, 12:45 AM
 
ugh. Tablet PC. No thanks.. they're just not practical enough IMO...
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MilkmanDan
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May 10, 2005, 01:42 AM
 
Tablet PCs may work for like .005% of computer people. But honestly, not very impressive in an office or home setting.
     
andretan
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May 10, 2005, 03:58 AM
 
Tablet PCs are a great idea, but the specs that they come with are totally pathetic, ie; you require a dock to use the optical media bay.

Just my thoughts.
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Ham Sandwich
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May 10, 2005, 06:36 AM
 
Our CIO just had to have one - you know to show off to everyone what a geek he is

He used it for two months and turned it back into us, where it sits in a drawer collecting dust and went back to using the standard issued Dell laptop POS.

It's some Toshiba thing and it was dead horrible: "No, you can't boot off this CD drive with this cable, you have to use THIS cable instead. But that cable you can't use with the CD drive for normal use, it's only for booting."

I kid you not.
     
mdc
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May 10, 2005, 08:32 AM
 
i would have taken the powerbook to the bill gates meeting.
     
Millennium
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May 10, 2005, 09:32 AM
 
Originally Posted by MilkmanDan
Tablet PCs may work for like .005% of computer people. But honestly, not very impressive in an office or home setting.
I can see them working very well in Asia, actually. The handwriting-recognition software for most Asian writing systems is actually quite advanced, and those writing systems are set up in such a way that simply writing the characters would be easier than trying to cram them all into a keyboard using romanization systems.

But once again, there's simply no killer app for them in regions where the dominant language works well with a keyboard. Without pressure-sensitivity they're not actually very good for drawing either, except for the most basic sketches.
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