Tablet PC Blogs

So, AppleInsider is rumoring an Apple UltraPortable by MacWorld in January. Wouldn't that be interesting? A bit surprising, given Steve Jobs' outright rejection of a PDA from Apple in the past (guess that was a good decision, after all), and the current lukewarm reception for Microsoft's "Origami" ultraportables.

This morning, when I started my tablet (a "cold" start -- I did a full shutdown the night before because it (that would be Windows) was getting "strange" -- I'm sure you know what I mean), something crashed on startup. This really isn't unusual; something seems to go wrong almost every time I boot, but it isn't the same thing everytime, of course (again, I'm sure you know what I mean).

Well, I just needed to look something up, so, because the crashed program was still stuck on its splash screen, I simply told it to turn off when I was done. Since I was in a bit of a hurry, I left while it was still shutting down.

Apparently, it didn't... and it ran the battery all the way down until it had no choice but to crash hard. (By the way, just about everytime I shut down, something or other -- different, of course -- seems to be hung up somehow, and I have to tap through all those silly "end now" dialogs just to turn the darned thing off, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised).

This really fails both the software engineering and common sense tests. So there's obviously a stability problem here with these things crashing all the time (and I'm not running anything really esoteric, frankly -- McAfee AV (gee, why do I need that?), Konfabulator, Google Desktop Search). Perhaps a rebuild from scratch would fix this... or maybe not.

As far as common sense, when I say "shutdown," I mean it. I don't really care that this application or that is not responding -- the OS should just terminate them with extreme prejudice! Instead, the brain-dead thing lets the battery run all the way down and then has to resort to an emergency power-off in such a way that the some system settings did not get saved (most obvious to me was my screen orientation preference, but who knows what else).

What a mess. At least I got my recommended deep power cycle for the month... maybe it's a "feature."

I've been using the LS800 for almost two months now and thought it was about time to do a review. There are a few other reviews out there (PC Mag, Chris Pringle, Mike Wood), so I'm not going try to duplicate them. I'm going to focus on a variety of things -- good and bad -- that I've encountered. I'll say now and again at the end: none of the things I've found on the negative side would prevent me from buying this computer (again!); all of these are really minor annoyances, at best.

General Impressions

This tablet is the perfect size for my needs, or as near as I've ever seen. It's heavier than it looks -- a number of people have commented on that -- but not heavy; it's very comfortable to hold for long periods of time. It has a very sturdy build; it is solid.

Performance is what you would expect with this processor. I have the 512MB model; Motion now offers 1GB. They've made very clear that the RAM is not intended to be user upgradeable, and that you will void your warranty by opening the case. That hasn't stopped some adventurers. I can live with it for now; when my warranty expires, I'll probably do some surgery.

Design

As I stated, overall the device is solid and well-engineered. There are a few general observations I'll make, and then I'll address the three significant items that seem to have gotten some attention: the screen size and resolution, heat, battery life, and the lack of a PC Card slot.

General Observations:

• The screen is flush with the case, which was apparently a complaint about previous Motion tablets. There is a very small gap between the screen and the case which is starting to collect "dust." I'm not sure if this was intentional to allow for expansion from heating/cooling, but if there were a way to seal this, that would be good.

• My fingerprint reader is a bit recessed -- it actually looks to be slightly depressed and crooked. I'm not sure if it came that way or got that way through use. Using it requires getting your finger down in this hole rather than just pulling it across. This really detracts from it being used to scroll; my finger gets sore from rubbing across the edge of the hole, and it isn't particularly smooth or fast.

• The LS800 also suffers from the expanding pen problem previously noticed on the LE1600. There is a small latch that serves to lock the pen into the barrel and also forcibly ejects it, but as the the pen has expanded, this has become less effective. Sometimes, only the first few millimeters of the "eraser" pops out, requiring you to pinch the small holes on the eraser and pull it (and since the eraser is otherwise smooth, small and tapered, it's not easy to grab). It's not just the pen expanding, but the garage, as well. It actually got jammed in there pretty good when I put it back after having used the machine for awhile, and unbeknownst to me, the machine got stuck "on" while trying to go to "standby" (Windows again...). It got pretty warm with the pen in there, so if it is warm and you plan on using the pen again before it cools down, don't put it back in the garage. Motion needs to address this issue across their product line.

• I've written previously about how I have tried to figure out how the designers planned for this to be held and used. I'm now convinced that the placement of ports and buttons had more to do with space and internal arrangement than usability. Here's what Primary portrait looks like:

  

  Perhaps my expectations for this are biased as a Mac user, but the arrangement makes no sense to me. As best as I can determine, it seems Motion intended the device to be used in landscape mode with the battery up. However, the assignment of the directional scroll buttons is incorrect (and unprogrammable -- why?) for this orientation. The only orientation they are "correct" in is in secondary portrait (with the battery on the right).

  

  This could be easily resolved by allowing the primary directional buttons to be reprogrammed for each orientation. I can't think of any good technical reason why this shouldn't be possible.

  Update: it turns out this issue is partially due to a known bug in the TabletPC Edition. These directional buttons are not reprogrammable, but they should automatically change their sense to follow the screen orientation. However, you might inadvertantly turn this off (and therefore get stuck in whichever mode you were in). To fix it, you need to reset the button assignments for all of the orientations individually, and then go back and make orientation-specific settings. Put differently, anytime you need to reset one orientation's settings, you should do them all. I still think they should be programmable, or at the very least, good user interface design would suggest that something like this that might be changed without you knowing it should at be visible so you know what happened. Thanks to Motion technical support for letting me know about this.

  As a righty, my ideal arrangement would be for the buttons to be along the bottom when the unit is held in portrait with the battery on the left. Then put the headphone, SD and USB ports on the top in this orientation, since these are the most-likely to be accessed (or have something sticking out of them) if you are reading with the device resting on your chest or the table.

• The LS800 has a combined audio/mic port. It automatically configures depending on what is plugged into it (a little window pops up to tell you when the configuration changes as you plug something in). I suppose this saves a bit of space, and there are built-in (two) microphones, but it effectively means you can't plug in a standard headphone with boom mic; you'll need to look for a USB or Bluetooth solution if you want that arrangement. I'm not sure why Motion didn't just use a four-pole connector and provide an adapter instead of what has to be a more expensive and complicated hardware/software solution. By the way, when you first plug in a pair of headphones, they emit a high-pitched tone for a few seconds while the port is configuring; you might want to wait to put the headphones on until this process completes.

The Screen

From the moment the LS800 was announced, many people said they weren't interested because it only has an SVGA (800x600) display. My response: you really have to see it to understand why this isn't a limitation, and is actually probably a good idea. All of the reviews and comments I've seen so far from people who have used one support this position; the SVGA display works just fine on this device and you probably won't notice it's not XGA.

Going with the SVGA resolution allows text and other objects to display near their "normal" (as in, if you saw them on paper) size. To understand this, consider the following: typefaces are sized in "points," where a point is 1/72nd of an inch. So, nominally, a 72-point character would be 1 inch tall. If your monitor's dots-per-inch (DPI) were 72, then the character would appear to be its true size when rendered. As you start increasing the DPI by increasing the number of pixels crammed into the same space, the character (if rendered just by the pixels), would get visually smaller. To counter for this, the character can be scaled such that uses more pixels and is actually clearer to read (the downside being you get less on the screen because the characters are using more pixels). So, the further you get from a "natural" resolution, the more you need to either scale the display or squint. The LS800 comes in at 119dpi, and a typical 17" desktop monitor is somewhere near 96dpi. Compare this to the diminutive Sony U70, which has a 5in. SVGA display; it comes in at nearly 200dpi! I have seen one of these, and decided it was just too small to read with. In a non-random, non-scientific sample of people who have looked at my LS800, none commented that the screen seemed too small to read. In fact, I have found it comfortable enough to read technical papers for hours, stopping only because the battery was drained.

Here are some screenshots I made demonstrating how much can fit on the screen, particularly for the purpose of reading. Note that these are scaled down and compressed, so even the full-size versions at the back-link are slightly blurry, but hopefully, you get the idea.

Adobe Reader in fullscreen mode displaying a standard page of text:

OpenOffice editing a Word document:

Two views of a full page newspaper from PressDisplay.com:

The screen is also not bad for writing. I'll note that I principally use the device in portrait mode, and this gives you writing space similar to that in a DayRunner.

One of the reasons I don't use it in landscape is, with all of the toolbars and other "stuff" on the screen, you don't have much vertical space left. In general, there's plenty of screen for writing, but if you like legal pads, this may not be the machine for you.

One last note that's become rather a pet peeve of mine: software that unnecessarily checks the screen resolution and then refuses to run if it doesn't like what it finds. If you use the LS800 in portrait mode, you are going to experience this, because a surprising number of applications will check the first (width) coordinate of the screen, find that it is 600, and assume the screen is less than VGA (640x480)! A particular offender is Microsoft Streets and Trips, which comes in the MotionPak (which is a very good software deal, by the way). In no case has one of these complaining programs had any problem running in portrait, as long as you launch it in landscape, which is really at the heart of my rant about these checks being "unnecessary." Conversely, one program, which doesn't complain, but really does have a problem is Microsoft's SyncToy. It uses a nouveau layout style that can't compensate for portrait, and really makes a mess of it if you switch from portrait to landscape while it is running. Maybe this one should have a warning, but more to the point, poor layout of the controls and wasted screen space are the real problems with this tool (which I otherwise really like).

The Heat

The LS800 gets pretty hot, sometimes hot enough to shutdown. I've had it turn off on a couple of occasions. The key ingredients seem to be running the machine while charging and laying it flat (or doing anything to block the vents on the back). The LS800 has no fan, so it relies completely on convection cooling and is therefore more sensitive to the ambient temperature and airflow. While three of the sides have vents, the tablet's thin profile means the majority of the venting is on the back; you simply can't block these.

I did some testing under various configurations using SpeedFan to figure out where the critical temperature is: it's in the neighborhood of 160F. With the tablet charging and running some applications (I left iTunes playing music), and laid flat, it will almost certainly reach this temperature very quickly. Replicating this setup, but running off battery, I could only get the temperature up to about 154F; I've never had it shutdown while on battery. That's not to say that 154F isn't uncomfortable to the touch! The back in the area of the license stickers gets really hot. Having wifi and Bluetooth on or off didn't make a difference in outcome in either scenario.

What can you do to reduce the heat? I make a conscious effort to hold the tablet while I'm not actively using it such that the main vents (either the back or the long docking port side) are pointing up to let the hot air flow out. This seems to make a difference in how warm it feels to the touch while using it, and I've never had it shutdown.

One of the problems I have when it does shutdown is that it displays a message box indicating that the unit will standby in 60 seconds. A few seconds later, it displays another of the same with a new countdown. Eventually, when it does actually standby, a few of these are running. When you wake it up (after letting it cool off a bit, of course), you immediately are sent back to standby by each of these other timers running out in turn. The latest BIOS is supposed to address heating issues and how heating alerts are handled; I haven't tested to see if this problem is resolved by it or not.

Battery Life

This is a perennial favorite issue for mobile device users. The short story is... it's relatively short. I get about 3 hours; a little less with wifi, a little more without. I've become obsessive about turning off my screen when I'm not actively using the machine; I reprogrammed one of the front panel buttons to this action. When you first re-activate the screen and look at the battery meter, it shows about 20 minutes more life on average (when this updates in a few seconds after the screen has been on, you'll see 20 minutes come off the runtime estimate). The external wireless devices button also helps here; you can turn them on for a few minutes to check your e-mail, and then right back off. This acts as a master switch, "remembering" which of the devices is on or off, so you can use it with the Bluetooth disabled by default, as I do, for example. Note: I would use standby much more if I could have the system only request a password when coming out of hibernation, but not standby. Unfortunately, the only option currently is to enable or disable the password for both standby and hibernation. But, I use these differently. I'd use standby to save power while I have the tablet in my physical possession, so I wouldn't need to enter a password and could quickly get back to work. On the other hand, I would use hibernate between sessions, when there is the possibility the tablet will be out of my hands for awhile. In this case, I really want password protection when it restarts. This seems like an obvious set of use cases for the two modes to me, but they aren't supported right now. So, I've opted for security, which means I rarely use standby unless I know I'm going to have time to go through the login process.

The reason for the short battery life is obvious: the battery is tiny. The hand-grip you can see is the whole battery. Here you can see the battery removed from the machine and flipped over to expose the built-in meter; note that this meter is inside the machine when the battery is is engaged, so it's not visible or usable.

These batteries ($140 each) are hot-swappable, and a two-battery charger should be available in "late" October. Note that the price for the charger plus a standard battery and AC adapter combo ($280) is less than the price for the charger + adapter and a battery ($190 + $140 = $330). There is currently no extended battery. The design of such a battery would be interesting, considering an approach such as used on the LE1600, where the extended battery attaches to the bottom (opposite the screen) side is not likely, given the numerous vents on the LS800 and its heating issues. They could simply make a wider standard battery; doubling its size would add about 3/4 of an inch to the grip side of the computer. It will be interesting to see if Motion or an enterprising 3rd party comes up with a solution to this.

No PC-Card Slot

This could be a make-or-break issue, particularly if you need metropolitan-area wireless like EVDO. The machine does have Bluetooth, so you can connect through an appropriately-enabled cellphone, but this obviously isn't where things are headed. I don't consider this a negative, since I don't need it... but you might. Of course, it would be nice for future models to have a this feature.

Like the LE1600, the LS800 does have an SD slot. This may appeal to people with a digital camera that uses SD (mine uses Smartmedia), but other than memory cards, I'm not sure what you would use this for (since WiFi and Bluetooth are built in). A PC-Card slot would have been better (and not that much bigger, it seems).

Conclusion

Overall, this is a remarkable machine. None of the criticisms I've made should dissuade anyone from seriously looking at the computer if you want something in this form factor and it otherwise meets your capabilities specs. This machine has become integral to my work and is absolutely the right device for what I needed. If you are interested in a mini-tablet, and you can live without a PC Card slot, you won't be disappointed by this computer.

Shortly after getting the LS800, I started looking for good bags to get it around in. Computer bags -- even for the smallest laptops -- are too big, while PDA cases are too small. Sounds like an opportunity for an entrepeneur...

I had a small laptop sleeve for the iBook that I used for a few days, but the LS800 was basically loose inside. I had also been putting this sleeve in a larger messenger bag-type briefcase, but this was pretty bulky (and the idea with the LS800 is to be light). So I went looking and happened upon two fairly good solutions.

First, for my briefcase needs (since I still have some papers and the occassional book I need to lug), I found a briefcase by Eddie Bauer. What's great about this one is that, in the main compartment, it has two half pockets -- the LS800 fits perfectly in either of them. The bag itself is relatively small, but still has a bunch of compartments for things. Here it is with the LS800:

And now with the LS800 in the half-pocket (it's pulled tight around the LS800, but you can see the other pocket on the right):

The bad news: I think this may be discontinued. The closest they have now is this messenger bag, but I don't know if it has the half-pockets.

For trips where I want to be even lighter, I was looking for something just to contain the LS800. Motion has a nice bump case (although the picture here is of the LE1600 and its bump case...), but I wanted something that would fully cover the unit, especially the screen. I was kind of thinking of a hip pack, but the ones I kept coming across were too small... until I found the Roo by The North Face. Now, this one is also a bit of a conundrum, since there seems to be a Roo and Roo II, and I have no idea which is shown on their site -- the one shown on the North Face site is not the one I have. (Go to eBags.com to see both, for example). As you can see in the pictures below, mine is more rectangular and the front pouch goes all the way around rather than across the front. They say they are all the same size, but I would be concerned about the less-rectangular variants; it is a "just barely" fit, as is.

Here it is with the Roo:

Here it is in the Roo; you have to give that last corner a bit of pull to get it to fit, but once it is in, you can't see it -- so I've left the corner out.

The Roo (whichever I have) has two pockets; if you use the back pocket for the LS800, and put the screen toward the back (where there is additional padding), it is very secure. Added benefit: if it happens to be in standby, it makes a great lumbar warmer -- finally the heating issue becomes useful!

If you do go bag hunting, take your LS800 with you. There's nothing like proof-positive for the right fit.

Since I'm working in two environments, I need a way to keep files in sync between them. Right after getting the LS80, I downloaded Microsoft's SyncToy beta. It had a few rough edges, the most problematic being for network shares, you had to specify a mapped drive (you know, the DOS C: thing); how archaic. Well, SyncToy 1.0 was released and it fixes this problem! It also added support for 800x600... more on this later.

The addition of UNC paths to folder pairs makes this work really well with the Mac. You can use the Mac's built-in Windows Sharing (in the Sharing control panel), but that only shares your home folder. To create shares for specific folders, you will need SharePoints. You need to turn on Windows Sharing in the control panel first, then you can add whichever specific folder you want to share in Sharepoints.

In SyncToy, simply specify the UNC path for your share: \\MyMac\MyShare, where MyShare is the name you gave the share in SharePoints. You can also use your Mac's IP address instead of its name. The nice thing about this arrangement is you don't have to connect to the share before using SyncToy -- it will do it for you when you sync.

So, there are still a few annoyances. One is that you can't change a folder path once the pair is created; you have to recreate it (am I missing something?) The second is my increasingly favorite peeve: the new version works in 800x600, but not 600x800 (and don't switch from portrait to landscape after starting SyncToy, or you get a real mess -- I'm guessing this is using Windows Forms on .Net or something). What's annoying is that there is absolutely no reason it needs that much screen real estate. All the elements of the GUI would fit just fine in a 600x800 display. Makes you wonder how we ever got anything done in 640x480. Ugggh.

In my original set of comparison pictures, I forgot to show the LS800 with my previous mobile mainstay, an Apple iBook (Dual USB from 2001). So here's some shots:

I had a really strange thing happen while I was setting up to take these pictures. The LS800 just turned itself off with no warning. It was on battery power and had only been running for a couple of minutes, so it wasn't heat. I don't think I was pressing any buttons, and I wasn't holding the pen. Hope this was just a stray cosmic ray and not an omen of things to come...

While I've been unsuccessful in pairing my Apple Wireless Mouse with the '800, and I haven't tried pairing the keyboard, a little multi-platform app called Synergy has come to the rescue. I can run the server on the Mac and the client on the tablet, and by moving the pointer off the side of the Mac screen, I can use the mouse and the keyboard with the '800. And, copy and paste works across platforms. Very cool.

More pictures and comments on the '800 soon; we have guests for the next few days, so I don't have much time to play...

A quick note to say my LS800 is on order. Now the wait begins... and the post-purchase, "did I just make an expensive mistake" trepidation sets in. The good news is, it's usually immediately dispelled when the box arrives. Hopefully I'll have some time to get familiar with it before school starts (three weeks from today).