Sure, you’ve already seen some real world hands-on photos of MSI’s upcoming Wind Pad 100 tablet running Windows 7. But you know you want to see the glossy promo shots from MSI that show you exactly what the device makers want you to see and nothing else.
Well, if press shots are your thing, French news site Blogeee is the place to go for a few more like the one above. The tech blog managed to snag about 4 promotional shots of the Wind Pad 100.
Last I heard, the tablet sports a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor and runs Windows 7 Ultimate. It has a finger-friendly program launcher, which you can see featured prominently in the press shots.
But it’s worth noting that while apps like this might make it easier to launch software on a touchscreen tablet, they rarely do anything to make the experience of using apps that were designed for a keyboard and mouse easier to use with your fingertips. I suspect Windows tablets won’t really take off until developers start to write third party apps that are really designed for touch, much the way that iPad and Android apps already are.
When can we expect some news on availability and price?
to make a windows system “fingerfriendly” you only have to change the mode how “windows” behave …. as one might know – one can do this easily with properties for desktop and windows …. but it must be done by the operator.
That’s a great comment. Originally, Microsoft was a keyboard-centric company. DOS was a command line and Window 3.1 could be used without a mouse. When Microsoft transitioned its developers to Windows 95, one of the most often noted changes was that the new platform was an operating system that REQUIRED a mouse-like pointing device and TOLERATED a keyboard. You could make your way through the system with just the cursor and no keyboard but not vice versa. This was not a philosophical observation of the new operating system but rather one of its specified technical elements.
Fast forward to today, and it’s still true. I have a big stable of tablet PCs which includes 6 in slate-only form factor. Some of those have only passive-digitizers (i.e. touchscreens). Some of those only have active-digitizer (e.g. a Wacom device). Some have both. Windows XP through Windows 7 have all functioned just fine on all of them. The tablet PCs with active-digitizers provide the most “natural” experience because they provide the most mouse-like interaction. The hover of the pen allows you to track the location of the cursor before making contact with the screen to input a “click” into the system. This makes it much easier to aim your clicking, and as a bonus, using the pen gives you a much better view of what you’re actually doing as opposed to having to stick your hands and fingers between your face and the screen. On the tablet PCs with passive-digitizers, I have to ratchet up all of the on-screen widgets so that they’re bigger and easier to hit. This is because touch is much less precise and much more occluding. In fact, the easiest way of achieving this is just to switch the OS theme to one of the “high accessibility” options that are designed to accommodate somebody who might have a more difficult time operating a traditional pointing device with traditional precision.
I let anybody use my tablet PCs when I’m in public, and the response that I get is pretty uniform. There’s about an even 50-50 split between who prefer using their fingers over using a stylus on the passive digitizers, but almost everybody prefers the active-digitizers over the passive digitizers. The biggest surprise is that everybody loves my one slate that has a passive-digitizer and a screen mounted track-stick which enables you to do traditional mousing without covering up the screen with your fingers. This is universally loved, and everybody (me included) wonders why this isn’t more commonly implemented.