Dell, a year later.

Well, after being given bad marks for their Windows 8 model lineup last year, Dell have been back to the drawing board and come up with some options that are more School-friendly.  It's nice to see the fight to take Dell private isn't interfering with the day-to-day business.  Well, at least not right at the moment.

After being given detention last year for the bizarre juxtaposition of the XPS 10 and the Latitude 10, Dell have done their homework and handed in a couple of decent assignments.  Or at least they turned up to class and made it look like they were working, the product looks promising but we haven't been able to assess it properly yet.



Dell have been getting around doing roadshows for their clients again and at the one I attended recently, the sales guys came armed with a couple of new models that piqued my interest.  The first was a new 11 inch touch enabled Netbook available in Intel or AMD (pending confirmation), starting at AUD$500.  The jury was still out at Dell as to whether the machine would actually ship with an AMD (Kabini core) CPU, but the Intel version was confirmed.  It will bear the recently revived Celeron brand, which is just the Bay Trail Atom platform in (poor) disguise.  Having adopted the Clover Trail Atom this year, we can assume this will represent good computing power for the dollars.  That and a touch-screen for that money makes for a decent little device that should run Windows 8 quite competently.  Much better than the previous generations of Netbook, that were too crippled to even run Windows XP Starter Edition, which was one or two generations older than the current Windows OS at the time.  The device itself looks and feels nice too, but that's all I can say at this point.  The example I saw was a piece of wood and plastic, not actually a working example, and some specs such as the SSD/eMMC used were a little hazy, but it's clear that Dell are aiming this at schools, who previously bought up tons of these sorts of machines.  It'll remain to be seen whether those schools can wash the bad taste of old-school Netbooks out of their mouths and put down their fisher-price tablets or cheap-and-cheerful Chromebooks to consider this sort of device.

Dell is also packing a Surface competitor in it's new lineup.  By that I mean, they'll be selling an Intel Core i series tablet with a magnetic keyboard-cover.  Sounds familiar.  The Dell Surface knock-off isn't as pretty as the Microsoft device (I have no pictures to back that up, it wasn't allowed), but it is designed to be more serviceable, including things like a removable battery and some clue how you might open it up.  It does come with an active stylus - also like Surface - which should make those schools that drank the pen based computing Kool-Aid happy.  Pricing was indicated to be competitive with Surface Pro as well, so it looks like there might be a viable enterprise-grade alternative out there soon.

Not bad Dell.  I'd give you an A, but I'll wait until I'm able to mark your work first.  Last year, I went to two of these Dell Roadshow events, and this one had more interesting new gear than the last two put together.  Last year, all they had was the XPS-12, which was fine, but not student-friendly.  Nice to see some improvement.  I await further details and the NDA's to lift.

It's All About the Pentiums

Well, it's not about the Pentiums and if it were it'd be all about the Core i5's, which makes that Weird Al song sound even more geeky (if that's possible).

What it is about actually, is the very fast and slick hardware we got our teachers this year.  That extra spend has made them eager to receive their new computer, and the brief but important introductory tutorial that goes with it.  That tutorial is key to making a Windows 8 rollout work.

Past the halfway mark with our Windows 8 rollout, and there's been no negative reactions to Windows 8 or Office 2013.  I firmly believe that's because we chose the hardware well, and understood the training that was needed.  The training has ranged from a simple 5 minute intro by the I.T. Dept. to a more comprehensive introduction by our E-Learning person.  Neither is particularly onerous, but the effect has been that Windows 8 and Office 2013 have been well received to date, and any comments we have received were positive.  Most of the positivity relates to the light and easy to carry form-factor of the Dell convertibles.  I hope that optimistic outlook continues.
So, I think we've proven something here; that Windows 8 is an easy switch with just a little bit of thought given to the user, and the right hardware (anything with a touchscreen, really).  It also proves that large amounts of the tech. press don't know what they're on about.  They might do well to stop judging Windows 8 on the old crappy desktop or Virtual Machine they're testing it on and get something it's made for.

Finally, this tentative success couldn't have been achieved without Apple and Google (and probably wouldn't have).  The acceptance they've created for touch-first interfaces lead to the initial reaction we saw quite a lot from teachers.... "oh, so it's a bit like a phone then?"

Happy New Beer!

Well, a belated one.  The season of revelry is long forgotten and now it's down to business, sadly!



The return to work has been unbelievably busy but now that we're a few weeks in I can report on the progress of our Dell XPS-12 rollout.

Firstly, I'm happy that I actually have something to report.  Last year I gave Dell something of a hard time for being hapless with their model lineup, delivery of demo machines and poorly communicated information.  I'm happy to say they've redeemed themselves with delivery of these machines.  The turnaround was roughly 6 weeks between ordering and delivery including imaging by our local reseller.  Not bad at all for 80 machines over the Christmas period, particularly when you consider these models are only a couple of months new themselves.

So, delivery was a bit of a win for us.  I also have to say that imaging was as well, once we knew what to expect.  In having all our machines rolled out with our own software image, we hit a few problems initially (while preparing the master image machine), but it seems the process of duplicating that image was almost identical to Windows 7 machines.

Probably the biggest issue we hit was with getting sysprep to run on the master machine prior to committing it to be duplicated.  A word of warning to anyone else needing to do this - whatever you do, don't update the system Metro apps (video, people, news etc.) before sysprepping.  We had to start again from scratch after doing this, as it completely breaks sysprep.

Other issues we found were to do with customisations (like customising the Start Screen for users), we found ways around all of them with a bit of Googling, and they translated well into deployment en masse.

So the machines are here and we've handed some of them to teachers.  Now we wait to see what the reaction to them, and Windows 8 will be!  In the meantime we have to get prepared for the coming year and our new BYOD'ers!

Pre-Christmas Update

Well, a little while has passed since my last update and a fair amount has happened.  So much so that it's hard to detail it all here.  For that reason I'm going to dot-point list the goings-on for the last month and a half.

- it turns out Dell salespeople wouldn't know an active stylus from an active volcano

• The big news is that we've chosen the Dell XPS-12 as our staff computer for 2013.  Samsung couldn't produce a decent machine in time (or at all) and all the other options were either problematic in some way or just plain awful.  It turns our however that there is no support for an active stylus with this machine, so we're going to have to go without or use a capacitive stylus (it turns out Dell salespeople wouldn't know an active stylus from an active volcano anyway).  A shame, but not the end of the world.  The upside is that the XPS-12 is a really nice piece of kit, it's very fast, light and small.  Our teachers seemed quite impressed with it when we demoed it to them.  So we're quietly confident that we've chosen the right device considering the options.  Now we just have to get them delivered on time and get the staff used to Windows 8!


• We'd already decided we weren't interested in the Dell XT3, but it's worth noting here that Dell shipped us a demo that was not only heavily used, but broken.  It was also an awful clunky looking machine.  It's probably best if they don't keep that line going.


• We've been in communication with our parents about the plans to run two new programs next year.  Year 11's and 12's will need to supply their own computer next year, and year 7's will have a hybrid Windows 8 tablet supplied to them.  Parents of 11 and 12 students have been told they can supply a range of devices, basically anything that's a computer or a 10" and above tablet.  We'll set them up with network access at the beginning of the year, as well as some other tips and information.


• Our iPad group will continue into 2013.  I mention this because it's relevant as I was recently accused of being anti-iPad by an influential individual associated with the school.  I find this interesting because we run an iPad program with one particular group of students, and it was my interest in the iPad that got it going in the first place (I have two iPads myself).  Rather than unsettling that group by making changes, they'll keep plugging away with their iPads into next year.  The program was a trial, and it hasn't exactly set the world on fire, but it's not terrible either.  I quite like the idea of a multi-platform approach, as long as it doesn't put to much strain on the teachers or the I.T. Department.


• Finally, after much in the way of shenanigans, we've decided on a new Learning Management System (LMS).  Originally the decision was made to delay this decision until sometime in the future, however after coming to their senses the College leadership went with the recommendation of their 1:1 Working Party (or sub-group thereof) to implement the Scholaris LMS.  This is a widely used platform run on Sharepoint which can integrate well with our existing student data systems, making it something of a logical choice.  The Working Party went to great lengths to assess varying LMS options, create a comparison matrix of features and justify their preferences.  I'm quite glad that the recommendation was taken onboard, I only wish it had been immediate, rather than second-guessing the skilled and experienced people who arrived at said recommendation.

I think that's it, now it's off for a nice and hopefully relaxing Christmas break.  I say hopefully relaxing, because with the usual workload plus a 1:1 program, BYOD program, staff tablet rollout and a new LMS 2013 is going to be a HUGE year.

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!

Special Dell-ivery

When I say “special” I mean a delivery so special it can’t be delivered at all!

Some time ago I started work trying to get hold of a Dell XT-3 Tablet.  It’s a current model and it meets some of our requirements.  I also know of another school using it in a tablet PC program, so it’s got some credibility.

That’s all great, however months have gone by since I originally enquired about getting a demo machine.  After signing the required paperwork to ensure them I won’t break it, sell it, or take it to Mordor and throw it into a volcano nothing has happened.
If it wasn’t for the fact I have to keep my options open here, I don’t think I’d bother with it at all.

UPDATE:

After several enquiries and one somewhat unhappy email making it to people high up in Dell’s Australian sales team, I’ve been told I can have an XT3.  Apparently it’s one they found somewhere else in the company (so not a made-to-order demo like we usually get).  But I’ll take it anyway.

More potential devices?

I've made a few more contacts with regard to devices for staff and/or students.  Dell are in the process of finding me an XT3 (the basis of a Hobart schools 1:1 program), and Toshiba seem to think they can send me a demo of one of their M930.  So at the moment it looks like I might have up to four candidates, with more to be released in a month or two.

I also have a meeting arranged with Samsung.  I have to travel a couple of hours for the privilege, but they seem keen to approach schools with the promise of longer warranties supported by local service centres (that are yet to be esablished).  Interesting!

A Touch Scarce!

With the need for a specific type of Windows 8 device for both teachers and students next year, the search has begun (okay, it began back at the Dell Roadshow, but I was really just window-shopping then) for a couple of models to fit the bill.

Our consultant from the workshop was quite strong on suggesting we contact Samsung to see what they had to offer.  After some stuffing around to try and find someone to contact, I've done just that.  It'll be interesting to see if they can meet our needs.  They have some cool looking new Windows 8 devices available, but the big question is around whether they can provide local warranty and support at enterprise level (or better than retail level, at least).

But regarding getting hold of one of these new Windows 8 based machines to look at, there's not a lot available right now (September).  I've been promised a look at a Fujitsu Q702 soon, and I may be able to get hold of a Lenovo X230T as well (which may or may not be able to run Windows 8).  But other than that most of the manufacturers are telling me to wait until October 26, then they'll have something to show.  That's scarily late in the year for staff PC's, which are intended to be rolled out in January at the latest.

Dell Roadshow

I've recently travelled to Slowbart to see what Dell have in store with their Windows 8 based machines.  I can't say I really feel any more enlightened though.

The Dell sales guys brought some pretty standard laptops and ultrabooks, and an old Windows 7 tablet, but not much else.  They had Powerpoint slides of the Dell XPS-12, which is certainly an interesting machine (although I wonder about the durablity of the hinge mecahnism), and a plastic mock-up of their Windows 8 slate (the Latitude 10, I think).

Anyway, it ws nice to be able to talk to the Dell people, and I certainly got some good information about availability.  That is, that it looks like we wont see anything until after the Windows 8 launch. I also learned that there will be a lot of Intel Atom based equipment coming out, due largely to Intels very aggressive pricing of this platform.  I'm told this is an improvement on the old Atom chips.  It would need to be.