More Scoble stuff
Hmm it seems that Robert has made a few more comments about my posts this morning. Let me counter his feelings bit-by-bit:
“sorry, I don’t agree with you that talking generally about the Tablet helps NEC all that much. If you decide to buy a Tablet based upon my comments, but you end up with a Compaq or Acer unit, that doesn’t help me at all
Robert, I know you’re not that shallow. You know marketing a tech product is all about generating hype, you know that if your blog can get 50-100 people thinking about buying a Tablet that hadn’t thought of it before, that NEC will see a share of those sales, especially since it was you who got them thinking about it to begin with.
More Robert:
Excuse me, but until you’ve had your hands on a Tablet for a couple of days, how can you say whether or not they are lacking in anything?
By using the very things you said about it, that’s how. Let’s take a look shall we:
“No. I couldn’t get it to recognize my own name properly for the first 20 tries. Then I changed my handwriting to what it wanted to see and it works great now.”
“The other thing I noticed — at least at first — about the Tablet is my frustration. ”
“Too bad Tablets today are so expensive (some, like the Gateway/Motion machine are selling for $2700-$2900, others, like the Acer, are selling for about $1600).”
Those are three negative statements made by you, and you love it! That tells me the product is lacking because I, and many others, don’t want to have to change the way I write to get my PC to work. (How many people will bother doing it 20 times in the first place?) Every other thing you mentioned as plusses, other than drawing and writing, I can already do with a combination of desktop and PocketPC, which combined are still cheaper than a Tablet.
Does a Tablet have some advantages, yes, like you said, you can use it while standing up, but honestly what do you use it for while you’re standing up? Reading? I do that with a PocketPC, it’s a smaller screen, but at 1/5th or 1/10th the price I’ll deal with that. Writing? You admit yourself that the handwriting recognition is difficult to get used to. It may be a perfectly fine piece of tech, but I still don’t see the real need for it, unless it gets handwriting recognition flawlessly. Then you’ve got something! It’s got a Compact Flash slot? So does my Pocket PC, I can take the card right out of my camera and display pictures on it, again, smaller screen but at $250 compared to $2700? Get real!
No, I admit I haven’t played with it, and I make that very clear in my posts on the subject that I haven’t, I think that’s pretty fair disclosure on my part. I’m basing an opinion on what other people have said about it because I don’t work for NEC, and don’t live in Silicon Valley. I live in the real world where forking out $2700 to “play with” new technology is not possible. (You know, the small business world, in the Midwest? You may have heard of it, or maybe flown over it?) Sorry, I have budget limitations and if I’m going to convince my employer that we need to look at spending that kind of money so our workers can “use their computer while standing up”, I had better know exactly what the advantages and disadvantages are, which means I read between the lines when salespeople and enthusiasts write about their products, and I take a good hard look at what journalists, both pro and con, have to say. Right now, there are too many if’s and but’s when it comes to using the Tablet for me to make that kind of purchase. The ability to draw and use it like a laptop while moving around isn’t worth the money I’d have to fork out to buy it. That’s my opinion based on where I work.
That’s what this blog is, nothing less, nothing more. I’m not here trying to get people to buy or not buy any product, I’m here sharing the things I deal with in my job, and the reasons that I do or don’t think something will work in this area of the market. For all the wonderful things you’ve said about the Tablet, you’ve not addressed this market at all. You’ve talked about how you use it, how kids might use it, how it might be used in other countries, but nothing about how a small business can benefit from having a Tablet as opposed to a laptop or PocketPC. I’m not convinced, and that’s what I based my opinions on. You, and every one of my readers are free to not agree, heck for your own situation the Tablet may very well be worth that kind of expenditure. If you think it is, I wish you good luck with it! I don’t think it is and that’s what I wrote.
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