Dell Roadshow II - Try Harder

And try harder they have, but still not hard enough.

I got to attend yet another Dell Roadshow where they're showing off their Windows 8 devices again.  This time they actually had the newly released XPS-12.  I was able to play with it and ask all the hard questions about the supposed support for pen input. They tell me it will support an active digitiser, like the one on the Latitude 10.  I'll believe it when I see it.  Other than that, aside from being a little expensive the XPS-12 is a neat device.  It's robust and manages to pack that swivel screen into a package much the same size as the slimmest Ultrabooks.  Dell tell us that the swivel mechanism had been tested for 20,000 continuous repetitions and kept on going past that, and looking at it, I can believe that.

Other than that, Dell showed how expertly they've misunderstood Windows 8.  They have a couple of "companion" tablet offerings, The Latitude 10, based on Windows 8 running an Intel Atom processor, and the Windows RT based XPS 10, on Arm.  They've chosen to offer the latter with a keyboard dock and the former without.  This makes no sense.  Of the two, if I want one to be a primarily touch based experience with an onscreen keyboard, it's the RT device, as I'm going to be using Metro apps and they're made with touch in mind.  My Atom based tablet however can run legacy Windows software, which will benefit greatly from more traditional input methods.  So as you can see, they've got it backwards.  Way to go Dell!

[caption id="attachment_151" align="aligncenter" width="604"] Dell's new Windows 8 tablets, shown side-by-side. XPS-12 on the left and Latitude 10 on the right.[/caption]

Finally, the saga of the XT3 demo unit continues.  Dell have apparently sourced one for me, but the nice man at the Dell Roadshow informs me that they don't support it running Windows 8 and don't plan to.  In fact, they seem to think it and any successors may not have a future as a device anyway, so we can just about can that line of inquiry right now.

Some doors close, some more open (but not enough)!

So the search for a Windows 8 based computer continues.  The OS launch has been and gone, and it’s now early November.  I’ve had some small wins, like making a contact at Samsung, who was quite positive about the likelihood of them being able to provide enterprise-grade local support for their upcoming products.

We’ve also been let down on a few occasions though.  The most recent being that I’ve received confirmation that the Lenovo X230T will not be supported running Windows 8.  So that’s off the table.  Also off the table are the offerings from Fujitsu and Toshiba, for reasons I’m about to cover.  The result of this though, is that the field is much more narrow than it was.  With Lenovo, Fujitsu and Toshiba out, that leaves Dell, Acer, HP and Samsung.  Acer don’t really have anything suitable and neither do HP, so it remains to be seen whether Dell or Samsung can produce something.  I’ll be meeting with Dell in a couple of days to find out about their two possible machines, and Samsung are showing some promise, although I have my reservations about their Ativ Pro running a ludicrous 1080p resolution on an 11” display.

That’s enough looking forward, lets look back at what went wrong with the Toshiba and Fujitsu machines.  I’ll start with the Toshiba, it’s problems are basically self-explanatory.

The tablet we received was the M930, which comes with a multi-touch display, a stylus, a core i5 and a range of connectivity options.  On paper this unit looks good, but as soon as you take it out of the box it begs the question “WTF?”

[gallery ids="37,38,39"]

then your lead balloon is going down like it was filled with Sulphur Hexafluoride.

Probably the most bizarre aspect of this device is the lack of a mouse.  Oh wait, there is a mouse, it's just that it's possibly the most pointless token effort imaginable.  In my experience, users aren't so keen on ye olde pointing stick, a technology that some manufacturers still persist with for various misguided reasons.  I could only assume that if users don't care for the pointing stick, then having it built into the right-hand bezel of the keyboard with sideways mouse buttons is going to go down like a lead balloon.  Then if you concede that those sideways mouse buttons are what most would consider upside-down (that is, most of our users initially, and wrongly assumed the top button is left-click and the bottom is right-click), then your lead balloon is going down like it was filled with Sulphur Hexafluoride.

That's not the only problem either.  The device converts from tablet to pseudo-laptop using a hinged slider mechanism.  The mechanism is not only quite stiff and difficult to use, it also makes the most awful noise you've ever heard.  When I first used the hinge to convert the device everyone else in the office turned to look at what I was doing, with looks on their faces that said "what are you doing to that poor computer?"

Other than that, the machine was fine, it was quite speedy, the touchscreen was responsive and the keyboard was decent, but none of that mattered.  After seeing the two flaws mentioned above we spent some time laughing about this clownputer, put it back in the box and returned it.

Okay, so what was wrong with the Fujitsu then?  The Q702 (pictured below) also looked good on paper, and even had a proper touchpad.  It's core i5 was fast enough, and with the dockable keyboard containing a second battery it got great battery life.  It even looks as neat in person as it does in the promotional material.

The big issue with this machine was the touchscreen.  It's multi-point screen felt strange to begin with, not as smooth as the gorilla-glass coated tablets we're used to.  It felt like the resistive screen on an oldschool Tablet-PC.  None of that would matter normally, we don't think our users would be bothered by the feel of the screen (and if they were, we wouldn't be).  What they would be bothered by would be the lack of responsiveness the touchscreen exhibited.  Sure it worked well enough that normal touch and swipe operations worked perfectly, as did multi-touch gestures.  The problem was evident when swiping rapidly and repetitively to scroll through a long document, or sometimes even a heavily loaded Start Screen.  The screen would miss one in every few swipes.  This meant you couldn't flip neatly through your start screen and you couldn't get the fast scroll going down a page like you could with an iPad.  To anyone that was used to that on their phone or tablet, it felt like something was broken.  We therefore couldn't put this in front of our users and say "here, this is your wonderful new machine with Windows 8" knowing that the experience would be less than ideal because of the touchscreen problem.

So, after trying and failing to communicate the problem to Fujitsu and get a fix, we've struck the Q702 off our list as well.  I might add that the price-point for the Q702 was such that you'd expect it to be flawless.  It's not cheap, so we felt this made it even harder to justify the machine.

Now, on we go, the list is ever shorter, as it our timeframe.  With only a few weeks until I absolutely must order something new for our staff, we've not got a lot of options remaining.

Eek!