Discussions

Bully?  You make it sound like Microsoft twisted B&N's arm to spin off their business and accept $300 million dollars.  Please...things have been real cozy between the two for several months now...probably since December when Andy Lees was moved into a undisclosed role at Microsoft.  In the end, great strategic move by both parties.

I believe Lenovo is set to release a Oaktrail based IdeaPad Slate with active digitzer for less than $600.  It runs cool, no fans and gets about 5 hours runtime.  So I think finally we will have something that is workable and within reach of consumers.  Prior to this, sure there were budget netvertibles.  However, I've seen appetizers served with skewers more substantial than the stylus included those past attempts.  So I'm really excited about this Lenovo offering. 

@Dr Herbie: Perhaps usable, but not optimized.  There are far too many OS screens/dialogs that have tightly packed miniature controls.  The default Windows display settings for 10" 1366x768 px display make tapping on something as basic as the Close button a challenge.  Frankly there is no need for a title bar, min/max buttons when working with screens of this size.  The on screen keyboard is horrid.  I have no doubt that Microsoft recognizes this and plan to address it in Windows 8 with a Metro influenced framework.

Pen is a much better story in Windows today.  Its just that you can't find a 10" Slate PC with an active digitizer for $600.  This is the premium a college student might be willing to pay over a $350 Windows netbook.  At CES Lenovo showed off the IdeaPad Slate and indicated this may hit the market later this year at a suprisingly good price point.  So there is hope, as long as they are not the only Windows PC OEM doing so and these are sold/marketed through mainstream consumer sales channels.

For the last year, typical usage of our all-in-one PC in the kitchen is split between simply viewing TV & acting as our bulletin board (YouMemo).  Media Center is pretty awesome.  As far as YouMemo, it falls short of its potential because there is no syncing to/from other PCs or our mobile phones.  I'd like to see Windows Live come up with a better answer to this. 

@PerfectPhase: yeah, i just updated the beta install...looking good.  Scott Gu has a nice breakdown of all the things released today.

@Bass: I don't have a problem if they want to support another codec, but dropping support for H264 looks to be idealogical when there is no cost.

Google have become idealogues with complete disregard of consumer adoption of H264.  Its like XPS vs PDF.  PDF is the defacto.  In any case, Google is showing its cracks.

1 hour ago, Srikanth_t wrote

how we have come to this situation.

Lack of new killer apps. Its because 60% of the time users are browsing the web or running web apps.  High speed mobile internet access is giving consumers the impresson they don't need to have a tremendous amount of local storage or processing power.  With the exception of games there haven't been any new killer / must have consumer apps to leverage the horse power of todays most powerful and expensive processors.  A few years ago, industry folks projected we see 8/16 cores become standard fare.  They never justified for what?  Artificial Intelligence hasn't made its way into Windows in any obvious way.  Microsoft hasn't evolved Speech Recognition or Vision to be core to the Windows experience.  Still I'm hopeful, the industry needs to find an answer to excessive commoditization...its not sustainable.  And I don't think counting on telecom/mobile contracts is a long term answer.  CES should have revealed something about a Windows app store and standardized UI framework appropriate for Slates.

@intelman: Windows Phone 7 is a solid offering and I think we are going to see them move fairly quickly this year.  The first device update though, yeah..Microsoft is going take its time handling that one with kid gloves.  This year success is going to take alot of creativity around marketing and partner incentives.

What new "cycle" is STB entering?  I can't imagine what triggered this.  STB revenues flattening?  Or is there some dragging of the feet in STB management to move faster into the cloud?  Whatever the reason, I'm sorry to see Bob go...I like that guy.