Microsoft as an unfamiliar underdog | Bangkok Post: tech

OPEN THOUGHT

With tablets becoming all the rage, I, like many, wondered what happened to Microsoft.

After all, Redmond had been making tablets since the days of Windows XP. Windows 7 has upped the game and added multi-touch and other features, but it has been out for almost a year, yet Windows 7 tablets are conspicuous in the market because of their absence.

With the question of why in mind, I asked HP for one of their tablets to review.

Initially I had asked for a consumer TM2, but they gave me a top-of-the line Core i7 Elitebook 2470P. This is the second of a two-part review. I already covered the general usability of the notebook (very solid build, great keyboard and lots of nice touches such as one-hour charge and a light on the keyboard) and its relevance to office productivity applications (most of Microsoft's own programs support touch and multi-touch to varying degrees, most third party applications do not, though by and large it is a compromise).

Over the last week, I gave the Elitebook to my brother, who is an architect and university lecturer, to see what he thought about using it in a world where digitisers and fine art might all of a sudden make the Windows 7 tablet relevant again.

First things first. For some reason, there are two sets of drivers out there for the Elitebook's touchscreen _ HP's own driver, which is very laggy, and one by the manufacturer, Wacom (which is famous for its digitisers). Installing the Wacom drivers totally changed the feel of the tablet in certain programs _ not all of them _ switching it from a laggy, sluggish interface to a pretty good one.

The driver situation is odd. Windows 7 usually gets the driver game very right, but not this time. The drivers are a big 70MB download from the Wacom site which lists the HP Elitebook on it.

Digitiser-aware programs such as Photoshop and even websites such as DeviantArt work much better with the Wacom driver. General windows navigation is still a bit on the sluggish side, suggesting Microsoft has some work to do if it is to get anywhere near the slickness of an Apple iPad or Android tablet with their much slower CPUs.

If there is lag with a Core i7, I would suspect the few Atom-based Windows 7 tablets out there would feel worse than Bangkok traffic on a pay-day Friday.

Photoshop and Corel Draw are a delight with the tablet's stylus. It is a proper Wacom stylus with the ability to hover and is pressure-sensitive on both ends, with 1,024 sensitivity levels. One end is the painting instrument, the other is the eraser. The buttons on the stylus act like any other Wacom stylus and it was easy to get up to speed in no time.

But there is one tiny problem. Unlike the Wacom Cintiq touchscreen/tablet, the HP Elitebook has a tiny bit of parallax, which becomes noticeable in Photoshop when doing fine detailing and holding the stylus at an angle. It is possible to work around it but it seems like the capacitive component is sandwiched a fraction of a millimetre down under the toughened display. The other problem is that because it is capacitive, palms and hands will register on the tablet, unlike a stylus-only Wacom digitiser, but this is not a big problem.

One use-case scenario that suits the Elitebook very well is sketching outdoors. Having a real digitiser is not really an option when on the go, so it is nice to go out to a scenic view, take a picture, upload it to the tablet and go about editing it and creating works of art with it on Photoshop on site, rather than back in an office. Yes, my brother is a bit of an artist.

However, that quickly brings about another one of the Elitebook's problems. Under normal use, the batter can last around three hours _ good, but not stellar. But when in the "artist by a lake using Photoshop" mode, the machine will shut down in just over an hour and the exhaust air becomes uncomfortably hot as Photoshop taxes the Core i7 CPU to the max.

"It's great for painting in the park, but the problem is you can only paint for one hour," said my brother.

Back in the faculty room, the tablet caused quite a stir in meetings. Mindmap was pretty irrelevant and was better served with a mouse, but the ability to put up an image and have people collaborate on it with people circling and painting points was great. Now, if only Microsoft made a 60" tablet, that would be perfect as a meeting table. Oh, yes, they do, and it is called Surface.

In the classroom, it worked wonders as it was possible to go into class with an empty Photoshop screen, walk around (tethered) and draw and teach.

Using it for extended periods also was surprisingly easy on the eyes. Unlike the over-saturated colours on many notebooks today, HP chose to go for an old-school, rather washed-out look. However, the viewing angles were not old-school and it quickly became clear that it was an ergonomic design choice, not an oversight, and one that makes long days much more comfortable.

Ultimately, the verdict was that it was a very, very good conventional notebook. The Core i7 CPU was very fast. The keyboard was not quite IBM in its feel, but it was close and typing on it for extended periods felt great. But while everyone raved over its keyboard and CPU (in that order), what of the star attraction?

"I can't think of anyone other than graphics designers who would want it," was the final verdict from my brother, the artist.

"There is just no market. As a PC for painting in the park, for walking around sketching pictures, it is great, the only problem is you can paint for just one hour.

"Is it relevant? I don't know, and to top it off, it is sold only as a corporate notebook and, at that price, it just does not make sense."

Ah yes, the price. Eighty thousand baht for the base core i5 version. I did not dare get back to HP to ask how much the Core i7 version I had cost.

HP asked me not to install Ubuntu on it. I wanted to test Ubiquity, Ubuntu Linux's new touch-optimised user interface, to see how it fared. I had half a mind to do so anyway, without their permission, but I ran out of time. Maybe another day on another tablet.

We both wanted to like the Windows 7 tablet, to cheer on the underdog and the little guy, even if he is from Redmond. I came away wondering. It was a case where the whole just did not add up to the sum of the parts. Perhaps they will get it right with Windows 8 _ though by that time, it might not matter anymore.