Ebook The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide

The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide by www.AllTouchTablet.
com
Get the latest version of this guide on www.alltouchtablet.com

The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide
- rev 1.2 Feb 2011 -
Author: John Pope, AllTouchTablet.com

Lenovo X200t Tablet Lenovo

Table of contents:
1. Definition of a Touch Tablet
2. Types of touch tablets
3. Different types of technologies behind the screens and their advantages
4. Before you buy: choosing is a matter of taste and needs
5. Operating Systems for Tablets
6. Best touch tablet models available today

The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide by www.AllTouchTablet.com

1 - Definition of a Touch tablet

Before we begin our endeavor I must define what a touch tablet is, so that even the most
unexperienced users can follow this eBook from scratch and don't get lost in all the
technological terms that I'll be mentioning here. In today's rush to get more and mode tech
into our daily lives there are plenty of companies bringing to market new technologies to
see how consumers react and if a need trend ever occurs then many others will follow by
investing in the same technology (or similar because of patent restrictions).
Touch is one of our senses that was hardly ever used in computers at first, but past years
saw the increased appearance of touch related technologies in smartphones and
laptops, that offer users an alternate means of interacting with a gadget. Many see touch
interfaces as the future, while I believe there's enough place for touch and standard
keyboard and mouse control method to coexist in the same space.

We rarely use touch input with computers but things are about to change sxc.hu
When it comes to laptops/notebooks/netbooks touch technology manifested itself in the
form of a display that was fitted with a touch sensitive layer which allowed special software
to transform your finger contacts into cursor coordinates and actions (a short press is
regarded as a left mouse click, a long press as a right click and so on). More sophisticated
touchscreens can register levels of pressure, which is very useful when it comes for
example to drawing.
Touch tablets PCs have added another feature to touch enabled laptops: the ability to rotate
the screen 180 degrees and collapse it over the keyboard so you end up with a kind of
agenda you can draw upon with a stylus or, with modern tablets, you can interact
directly with fingers. Some analysts are seeing that starting 2010 a new type of tablet
will conquer the market and that is the slate type tablet, which lacks a physical
QWERTY keyboard. The first big name that announced a touch tablet is Apple with its
iPad.
So there you have it, the shortest definition: a touch tablet is a mobile device that uses
touch input to react to user's actions.

2 - Types of touch tablets

As with many other gadgets, there is more than one type of touch tablets. In this section I'll
try and highlight the most important ones. You can classify tablets by many criteria, so it's
normal to have a specific model in two or more categories because of the way those
categories are made.
Convertible tablets
Convertible tablets are the same thing as tablet PCs that are among us for a few years
already. Normally you couldn't spot a convertible tablet from a regular laptop, but once you
rotate the screen 180 degrees and fold it over the keyboard things start to unravel.

Rugged Dell Latitude XT2 convertible tablet
Due to added touchscreen layer and the special hinge mechanism added to a convertible
tablet the overall thickness is higher than the one on a laptop with similar specs. Most
convertible tablets come with a stylus, to ease interactions like writing and hitting small
buttons.

Slate type tablets
Slate tablets are the form factor for touch tablets that has gained momentum this year with
the launch of Apple iPad, a 9.7 inch screen with a small computer behind it (components
have the performance of today's high end smartphones). Almost 100% of the interaction is
made via the capacitive multi touch screen.

The all mighty Apple iPad
There are also slate tablets using netbook or laptop components but they are nowhere near
as thin as models using smartphone hardware or dedicated mobile chips like Nvidia's Tegra.
Unlike convertible tablets, slate type tablets are used mainly as entertainment devices, due
to lack of physical QWERTY keyboard and generally less powerful hardware specs. Slate
tablets are not seen as laptop replacements but a gadget in between large screen
smartphones and thin and light laptops that you use at home for navigation, media
playback, music and reading emails, eBooks.
Slate tablets are expected by analysts to raise consumers interest in this kind of touch
device, so this is the niche to follow as all big names will launch their own iPad vision soon.
Netbook tablets
This category refers strictly to the size and hardware found inside the tablet. If a touch
tablet is powered by the Intel Atom platform it's clear it has netbook guts inside. Regular
netbook tablets use 7 to 11.6 inch screen and are derived from netbook models. This is
right now the best compromise of price, performance and versatility, as netbook tablets run
fully fledged OS versions, allowing users to get things done just like on a more powerful
laptop. Of course performance limitations are obvious but not everyone is willing to pay
over 1000 $ for a more powerful tablet.
A netbook tablet is more expensive than a normal netbook because of the touch screen
layer and hinge mechanism that allows the display to move. We're talking here about
convertible netbook tablets. There are also slate type netbook tablets, with no physical
keyboard, which should be cheaper (no hinge for screen rotation) but I guess marketing
departments are setting the prices for them.

Asus EEE PC T91

Mini tablets
This is a category that describes slate type tablets with smaller size screen, like the Dell Mini
5, a 5 inch tablet powered by Android OS. If you are honest and don't believe all the
mambo jumbo PR departments are throwing at us, a mini tablet is nothing more than a big
screen smartphone. The advantage is clear: you have a bigger screen that helps you with
Internet navigation, the main activity that people will do on a mobile device in a few years.
If you ask me, I don't see the point of a 5 inch mini tablet, but I would carry around with
me a 7 inch model with a resolution of at least 1024 pixels wide so that I can browse a
website just like I do on my laptop, but for now this is only a dream. I hope manufacturers
will take suggestions like this and come up with a viable Mini Tablet.

Dell Mini 5, codenamed Streak
Touch tables
This is a completely different category, that consists of a narrow niche products, not related
to mobile computing, but more on social interactions. Touch tables are a concept first
presented by Microsoft, called Surface, and is basically a big table with a multi touch screen
and a computer behind it that controls everything you can do with a touch tablet.

Viewing photos on Microsoft Surface
The best use for this concept is the business environment. They can afford the dozen
thousand dollars price asked for those kind of products and they need it for things like
presentations, team work and such. Analysts predict that in future, when prices will come
down we will see growing consumer interest in this kind of product but I don't personally
expect that to happen in the next 5 years.

3 - Different types of technologies behind the screen and their advantages

OK, we all heard of touch screens but few understand what really happens inside a touch
screen display and what are the differences, advantages and disadvantages between all the
touchscreen technologies available at this moment. In this chapter I'll try and present
shortly the mainstream technologies that fight on the market today and a few innovations
that are likely to catch up momentum in the years to come.
Resistive touchscreens
This is probably the oldest touchscreen technology that ever made it into consumer devices
and uses a touch sensitive layer consisting of two flexible sheets coated with resistive
material and separated by a thin air gap. When pressed together the two layers make
contact and register that point of contact no matter what object you use (stylus, fingers etc)
that's why resistive touchscreens are called "passive".
Advantages of resistive touchscreens include lower cost of manufacturing compared to other
technologies, ability to interact with your fingers and that multi touch is possible. There are
of course disadvantages like the fact sometimes you have to press harder for a contact to
be registered and screen edges become imprecise.
Capacitive touchscreens
This is the touchscreen panel of the moment to get, made popular by the iPhone. It's more
expensive than resistive technology, but can register lighter presses and that's an
advantage for many, including myself. The way a capacitive touchscreen works is pretty
simple: once you touch the screen a slight electric charge from your body gets to the
screen, which registers the change thanks to the special transparent capacitive layer that
sits over the display.
Other capacitive touchscreen advantages are the image quality, which is less degraded by
the addition of a touch layer and the conservation of properties even when the touch
surface is dirty, unlike what happens with resistive screens.
Disadvantages of capacitive touchscreens consist in more expensive manufacturing costs
and the fact that you can't use them with a regular stylus or any other object that isn't
designed to be electric charged. Recently, capacitive styluses entered the market so a big
inconvenient was obliterated.

machinedesign.com & qasimriaz.com
Pixel QI hybrid panel: the future
This is one of the most promising touchscreen technologies out there as it blends the
characteristics of eInk screens found on eBook readers with regular touchsreens, having the
advantages of both: low power consumption, great sunlight legibility and can display
animated pictures. The way it works is simple: Pixel QI has two working modes, one is
regular touchscreen mode and one is eInk mode which is reached when you increase
brightness and contrast to maximum. At that point colors become greyscale and power
consumption drops almost to eInk levels, and battery life get to dozens of hours levels.

Pixel QI screen prototype on a netbook in bright sunlight
You don't get both advantages simultaneous but you get them in the same device and this
is what counts. Now all it remains for Pixel QI is to be implemented in as many products as
possible so that the proprietary company gets enough funding to develop the concept even
more. I, for myself, can't wait to get my hands on the first Pixel QI product.
Other types of touchscreen displays
There are also a lot of other touchscreen technologies in work today, but nothing had hit the
market yet. Here's a short list of things we might stumble upon next years:
Neonode zForce Pad: a new technology without a touch layer that's supposed to be
cheaper and offer even better image quality than capacitive displays
Planar scatter detection: this sounds more science fiction than it really is. Main
advantage is multi-touch on big diagonal screens and multiple contact points
detection, making it ideal for touch tablets
Displax: special cheap technology for big displays (think 120 inches and up) plus it's
98% transparent. Works on pretty much any kind of surface
Pressure sensitive touchscreens: those are pretty self explanatory and could allow
for interesting user interfaces and add no bulk to the original screen
Touchscreens that don't need physical contact: this is interesting, you just hover
your fingers over the screen and proximity is detected automatically. I found this
perspective interesting as it might mean no more fingerprints on my smartphone,
but we'll have to wait and see how it evolves
Read touch panels: those are meant to leave the front screen accessible to the eye,
without your fingers getting all over it. It will hit market first on the Motorola
Backflip. We'll see then it if catches momentum with consumers

4 - Before you buy: choosing is a matter of taste and needs

Now that we know what a touch tablet is, what are the main existing versions on market
right now and what are the technologies behind them, it's time to get to the hard part:
choosing one that better suits your needs. And I can't stress enough how important this
step is, the one with your needs I mean.
Before jumping onto the first deal you find online it's best to understand what your needs
are and choose according to them. It's no use to get something you don't need, even if it's
cheap, and this applies also to real life, not just to gadgets. I can't tell you what your needs
are but I can make a list of typical usage scenarios and which type of tablet better applies
to that pattern.
Types of user needs:
basic office work including spreadsheets and documents - here you'd be better off
with a convertible netbook tablet, but you'll have to be patient as opening
applications could take a while because of the low power Atom platform
basic web browsing - slate tablets are best for this task, especially those with mobile
chips (ARM cortex, Tegra 2) as they offer plenty of battery life and feature small
footprint
multimedia usage - slate tablets excel here too, but you might want to upgrade to a
more powerful system to store your files. If price is an important matter to you then
go for a Tegra 2 tablet with HDMI output and a bigger screen (12 inch and up)
heavy work pattern - powerful convertible tablets are required here so expect to pay
a premium for the privilege. This is the option you have to take if you don't have the
patience to wait for apps to launch and are multitasking a lot
work into outdoors environment - rugged tablets are needed here as outdoors there
are a lot of things that could go wrong. Choice is limited and price hits the sky, but
at least your're safe this way
Don't let fortune decide for you sxc.hu
I know all those advices above don't solve your problem but follow this idea to make sure
you chose what's right: start by putting on a sheet of paper the list of things you plan on
doing and see in which of the 5 categories above your needs fall. Note other things you
can't live without (eg: multi touch, high resolution screen, extended battery and such) and
choose a model that's in the wanted price range. You can't go wrong if you take a moment
and do this exercise.


5 Operating Systems for Tablets

As with any type of computing device there are multiple choices when it comes to operating
systems. And unlike on a desktop computer in 99% of cases you cant just install multiple
OSes on one tablet. So the choice of the tablet affects the Operating System youre getting.
For tablets there are now three OSes to choose from and three more coming down the road
in 2011. Current offer comprises of Google Android, Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows 7.
Later this year Blackberry OS will be here together with MeeGo, developed by Intel and
Nokia and WebOS from Palm, which was acquired last year by HP.
Windows 7
A regular convertible tablet that runs a Windows OS is dubbed a tablet PC. The advantage
of running Windows is that the owner can run it like a normal PC, installing windows-based
programs as they see fit, which is a serious advantage over other operating systems, where
you can only choose from a limited selection of applications, different from chose that run
on your desktop.
Microsofts latest OS for tablet is Windows 7. Windows 7 does not have a specific edition for
tablets, instead it includes native tablet functionality by supporting finger and pen input.
The Windows 7 is still a Windows OS, though, which means it is large and resource-hungry.
This does not bode well with the slick design of tablet PCs, with less powerful CPUs and less
available memory. Plus the UI is hard to access with your fingers, especially small elements
on screen.
On the other hand, you are sure to feel happy about the fact that your tablet PC supports as
many features as your regular PC, including the improved desktop, the Windows Aero
Theme, the DirectX capabilities and the wide array of networking features.
To conclude, Windows 7 for tablet PCs is appropriate either for high-powered tablets with
good computing capabilities or for specialized work especially vertical markets where it
only runs several windows specialized applications.
Android OS
The Android is already famous: its Googles attempt at a mobile OS for smartphones. While
its first device was the Nexus One, which didnt really catch on, the OS itself was well
received and is now running on all major brand smartphones, surpassing the iPhone in
number of daily activated devices.

There are also lots of applications for the Android, because the OS code is based in Java
language, which is a popular programming language. This means there are a lot of potential
application developers. There are already a few tens of thousands apps designed for
Android. Moreover, Google is putting a lot of effort into widening their app library. It
released the Software Developer Kit, the App inventor, and it organized the Android
Developer Challenge to celebrate the best Android applications.

Even if until version 2.3 Gingerbread, Android OS was not specially designed for tablets, this
is going to chance once Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb launches. Version 3.0 is recoded
from ground up to support large screen devices and is optimized for tablet use.

MeeGo
While Microsoft is aiming at the business market in tablet computers, Nokia and Intel are
working to put together an OS called MeeGo. The main reason for MeeGos existence is
Microsofts lack of interest in the casual web-surfing market. Intel and Nokia are building an
open source operating system to complement the Atom processor. Atom is an ultra-low-
voltage CPU designed for netbooks, nettops and other low-power internet devices, so it
would be suitable for tablets, but not together with Windows 7, an OS that demands too
many resources at hardware level.

MeeGo is more of a project than an actual mobile OS. Its main purpose is to make sense of
the Moblin OS (from Intel) and the Maemo OS (from Nokia), so it creates a common
framework for running both past and future applications. Also, MeeGo is designed to replace
operating systems for netbooks, handsets, tablets and in-vehicle infotainment, which means
it will have several user interfaces (UXs).

iOS
The iOS is Apples mobile OS. It runs on the iPad, the iPhone and the iPod Touch. iOS is at
its fourth generation today, launched alongside the iPhone4. Apple ships iOS with several
basic applications, such as the phone, the mail, the Safari web browser, iTunes, App Store
and others. If you need any more, youre welcome to enter the App Store, which contains
more than 250.000 apps.

As is the case with all Apple software, the iOS cannot run on third-party devices. Also, the
iOS does not support Java or Adobe Flash. This means youre not going to be able to view a
considerable number of sites powered by Flash. It does run HTML5 though, and Apple
encourages web developers to switch to HTML5 in their web-sites.

Unfortunately, iOS is only available with the iPad, and it will not run on something else. It is
not an OS for tablets, but for Apple tablets. Versions 4.x of iOS bring multitasking for iPad,
AirPlay (stream videos to large screen TVs) and AirPring (wireless printing).

webOS
The webOS was initially destined for touchscreen smartphones, and not an OS for tablets
per say. It is produced by Palm, Inc. Its main competitive advantage was its ability to
integrate web 2.0, especially social networking. In order to be attractive to users and
developers alike, webOS uses HTML5 and JavaScript. Also, the Synergy feature allows a
user to simultaneously connect to Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and a number of other social
networking sites.

After Palm was purchased by HP, the latter decided to branch out and run the OS on several
other devices, most notably their tablet computers and printers. While the HP Slate
announced for early 2011 will have the Windows 7, it is generally agreed that HP will
accommodate webOS alongside Windows on their future tablet computers, as rumors point
towards a few webOS tablets that will be released by HP this year.

BlackBerry OS
Research In Motions most notable feature for their custom-designed OS is the support for
corporate e-mail, which is so well built that the Indian government had the RIM team hand
over the encryption code so their secret agencies could gain access to e-mails sent by
suspect business-men.

The OS is at its sixth edition these days. BlackBerry OS is not actually an OS for tablets, as
it is thoroughly designed for smartphones, and sources say it will stay that way. There is
only one tablet announced by RIM, Playbook, and its supposed launch date is the end of
September.

However, this tablet will not have the BlackBerry 6.0 version installed, but a new OS
purpose-built for RIM by QNX Software Systems (the firm was bought by RIM in April last
year). The new tablet will be called the Playbook and offers complete connectivity WiFi,
Bluetooth and even 4G in select version.

6 - Best touch tablet models available today

If you plan on purchasing a tablet or a touch enabled device in 2011 then you might want to
take a look at the AllTouchTablet top guides:
Best Netbook Tablets - best netvertibles on market
Best 7 inch tablet - best mobility / size ratio for a tablet
Best 10 inch tablet - the most common size today
Best Touchscreen Laptops normal laptops with touch screen
Best Touchscreen Monitors larger displays with touch capabilities
Cheap Android Tablets - most bang for the buck
Best All in One Desktop - all you can eat in a small footprint

Suggestions for the Ultimate Touch tablet guide

If you have suggestions about this guide write to us on the AllTouchTablet Contact page.
Help us make this guide better!

Ebook The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originalbeschreibung:

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Ebook The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

The Ultimate Touch Tablet Guide by www.AllTouchTablet.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen