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.