$550 Apple iPad Tablet Computer Releasted at March
Digital Life Tech Test Archos Tablet$550 Apple iPad Tablet Computer releasted in March: Apple brings out its iPad tablet computer in late March, but other companies are already preparing a new batch of tablets running Windows. Judging by a model that’s already out, the $550 Archos 9, the Windows tablets have a rough road ahead.
Windows just don’t seem at home when squeezed into this 1.8-pound slab, with a touch-sensitive screen that is 8.9 inches on the diagonal. It’s sluggish, and the controls aren’t adapted to the size of the screen or the fact that there’s no real keyboard or mouse.
On-screen keyboards kept popping up in the wrong places, blocking the fields where I wanted to enter text and the buttons I wanted to push. I struggled to hit the little “x” in the corner of the window to close it, so I had to fall back on guiding the mouse cursor with a small touchpad that’s built into the tablet’s frame.
It’s also a bad idea to couple a touch screen with a slow computer. When I pressed an on-screen button, I found myself wondering whether the computer had failed to register the press or whether it was just working on reacting. I kept jabbing at the screen like I was poking at a lazy dog, just to be on the safe side.
Archos 9 is lethargic because it runs Windows 7 on a processor that’s even slower than those used in netbooks — those slow, small laptops. How slow is it? Windows rates computers from 1.0 to 7.9 based on how fast the hardware is, and places the Archos 9 at a 1.3 — the lowest I’ve seen. It takes nearly two minutes to boot up. TV shows on Hulu.com stutter so badly they’re like slide shows with a soundtrack.
It’s a little disconcerting that the Windows tablet experience is so poor, nine years after Microsoft made a big push for its Tablet PC version of Windows XP. Clearly, Microsoft hasn’t really adapted Windows properly for this type of device.
