Always Innovating Touch Book Announced

[highlandsun]

Originally Posted by Redline

Thanks for letting us know! Can you keep us informed, maybe write up some impressions, plus some pictures? There's a serious dearth of real-world information about this machine.

Lemme see if I can upload some pix...

The first shot is the closed book next to its "User manual" which is just a single folded sheet of paper telling you where all the ports are. Next are a couple shots of it next to my dv5z, and one sitting on my dv5z. The side-on view was important to me because the tablet part is much heavier than the keyboard. It's so top-heavy that if you tilt it back any further than I show, it will tip over backward. The last shot here is the keyboard with the tablet removed. And in the next post, the tablet by itself.

[Please ignore the junk in the background. There is a disassembled Thinkpad T42 behind my dv5z; the fan in the T42 died and the replacement won't get here for another couple days...]

[highlandsun]

Sorry for the picture quality. Without the flash, everything is blurry. With the flash, there was too much glare. One last shot, just the tablet. Notice that the screen orientation rotates 90 degrees in tablet mode. (I've never used a tabletPC before so if this is old hat to you, sorry.)

I'm pretty disappointed with the keyboard; I've already sent AI an email with my many complaints about it. Hopefully they'll do something useful with the feedback. I guess if you mostly just need a tablet, this could be ok. But typing on the keyboard is a real drag. I'll elaborate more later, but the feel is terrible.

I guess I need to try getting used to the tablet and/or stylus. It comes with a stylus but you can also just use your fingers.

Application startup is pretty slow, which I suppose is because SD cards are really not that fast. I may try to get some video to demonstrate...

I'm afraid I can't show you any of the network apps in action yet. My home network is WPA and the current beta OS doesn't support it, so I haven't gotten this thing online yet. I'm going to try to copy a wpa_supplicant config over from my other machine and see if I can make it talk, but at the moment I don't know where all of the right config files are located.

[Redline]

http://twitter.com/sfeger

That guy had something about WPA on the TouchBook on his twitter feed, you might want to check it out. It sounds like its a great concept, but the first version is somewhat rough around the edges. They'll have my money if they can smooth them out in Rev 2 or 3 of the device. It kind of sucks that they won't send out review units with the beta software, so I have to wait for them to finalize the software package before I get my hands on one.

Thank you for your pictures and impressions.

[peli_kan]

That is some hot stuff, thanks for sharing those photos. I'd really like to see this one in action, so a Vid as you said so would be great.

[lixuelai]

Didnt Compaq have a design like this years ago?

[coldmack]

I think one or two companies had a tablet pc with detachable keyboards no?

[Redline]

The HP Compaq tc1100, from back in the day, with a PenM and Nvidia Go420. Yeah, it was pretty sweet.

[MGS2392]

Originally Posted by coldmack

Can you run Windows CE on an arm based machine? If so that be kind of a cool dual boot wince and linux.

Yep. In fact, Windows Mobile is based on WinCE, and most (virtually all) phones with it use an ARM based processor (usually a Marvell (formerly Intel) XScale).

[highlandsun]

For those curious, I used my G1 phone to record a video of booting up my TouchBook.

http://highlandsun.com/hyc/video-200...1-22-10-48.3gp

Sorry for the shakiness, was holding the phone in one hand and trying to manipulate things with the other hand.

I uploaded the video to youtube to save my webserver from the load...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5tLK71YrLw

[Luke1708]

Nice concept at such a nice price.