Many many rumours about a Tablet release

In the last couple of days we've been inundated with rumours about a Mactablet. Again. The next Apple product release may contain a Tablet, but it may also contain a new Apple TV thingmee, or a Polar Ray Dynoshphere for all we know. I'll try to collate the rumours and post a list tonight.

Musings on a Mactablet

I think what we are going to see late this year is a cross between a MID (mobile internet device) and a netbook.

There's a lot of Netbooks out there from almost all the manufacturers and there was a flurry of MID activity earlier this year.

Netbook: 5-7inch screens, some touch screens some not, some convertible tablet style, some not, some run linux some windows. Mostly they are for email, web surfing, Skype and light duties with word etc. Light, portable.
MID: 3-5 inch screens, tiny, light, good battery life, mainly for web surfing but also email and probably light document duties.

Now Apple is probably not going to do a full tablet because really the touch things that happen on Mac's is mostly designers with a Wacom and they're going to want to use a big screen with it.

The iPhone also takes care of the web surfing and connectivity which sort of flows over into a MID. But not fully. You're not going to want to do any big document work on an iPhone. You're not really gong to want to do a lot of email. So people with an iPhone will have a laptop for the bigger stuff. But if Apple comes out with a slate format 7-9 inch screen unit with all the bells of multi-touch that's a different story. Big enough for email but not too big. Big enough for web work, but still small enough to carry everywhere. It won't take out the iPhone, won't compete with the big laptops but will certainly attract the audience that is going for the netbooks in droves. I don't think Apple will do a netbook because they've got the MB Air for funk factor, ultrlight, etc and the market is saturated with netbooks. As a point of differnce a slate factor MID/Netbook hybrid would do a sterling job.

My 2.0c

More benchmarking on the LG P100

These are the crystalmark results for the high power setting on the battery miser app:

CrystalMark Result
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Display Mode : 1280 x 768 32bit (ClearType)
Disk Info : TOSHIBA MK1011GAH [ 100.0 GB]

CrystalMark : 60051

[ ALU ] 13379
Fibonacci : 6416
Napierian : 2205
Eratosthenes : 1626
QuickSort : 3110
[ FPU ] 12451
MikoFPU : 1273
RandMeanSS : 6943
FFT : 2203
Mandelbrot : 2010

Full benchmark results for the LG P100

I've been running some CrystalMark 2004R3 benchmarks on my LG P100, Hey, if you've got the most powerful UMPC tablet going you may as well show it off right? :)
These are the results I got running plugged in and with the battery miser app set to Balanced power scheme:
Mark: 58 661
alu: 11 845
fpu: 12 591

For those of you who want it all, here it is:
CrystalMark : 58661

[ ALU ] 11845
Fibonacci : 4889
Napierian : 2213
Eratosthenes : 1623
QuickSort : 3098
[ FPU ] 12591
MikoFPU : 1365
RandMeanSS : 6996
FFT : 2201
Mandelbrot : 2007
[ MEM ] 7889
Read : 3383.36 MB/s ( 3383)
Write : 1347.04 MB/s ( 1347)
Read/Write : 1345.27 MB/s ( 1345)
Cache : 17929.38 MB/s ( 1792)
[ HDD ] 2710
Read : 24.69 MB/s ( 987)
Write : 19.82 MB/s ( 792)
RandomRead512K : 10.91 MB/s ( 436)
RandomWrite512K : 7.94 MB/s ( 317)
RandomRead 64K : 2.45 MB/s ( 98)
RandomWrite 64K : 2.02 MB/s ( 80)
[ GDI ] 4261
Text : 2292
Square : 242
Circle : 863
BitBlt : 864
[ D2D ] 4979
Sprite 10 : 521.39 FPS ( 52)
Sprite 100 : 391.32 FPS ( 391)
Sprite 500 : 162.83 FPS ( 814)
Sprite 1000 : 103.03 FPS ( 1030)
Sprite 5000 : 26.41 FPS ( 1320)
Sprite 10000 : 13.72 FPS ( 1372)
[ OGL ] 14386
Scene 1 Score : 7278
Lines (x1000) : (1385028)
Scene 1 CPUs : ( 256)
Scene 2 Score : 7108
Polygons(x1000) : ( 449184)
Scene 2 CPUs : ( 256)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
System Information
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OS : Windows Vista Business Service Pack 1 [6.0 Build 6001]
Display Mode : 1280 x 768 32bit 60Hz
Memory : 3070 MB (DDR2 SDRAM PC5300)
DirectX : 10.0
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Name : Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom)
Vendor String : GenuineIntel
Name String : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU U7700 @ 1.33GHz
Platform : Socket 479
CPU Type : Original OEM processor

Battery life on the LG P100 with extended battery

This is the life I'm getting out of the extended battery. Same settings as before, wifi on, bluetooth on and screen set to about 35% brightness.I should add that the bluetooth is actually connected 90% of the time in this state as it automatically connects to my N95 and quite often I use a bluetooth mouse as well.

Battery Life on the LG P100

Here's what the LG Power panel application is telling me to expect of the standard battery: The fan runs silent and is in power saver mode, but if the machine is doing any heavy work and the fan spins up faster then the battery life drops a bit.

As mentioned before I'm running it with everything on, wireless, bluetooth, screen at about 30% brightness which is fine for most usage as it's got a very lovely bright screen.

Running like this I can get close to 2 hours.

Vista: a few months in on the LG-P100

Since it looks like I'm keeping the LG P100 even though I think the Samsung Q1U is probably the better machine for all my needs at the moment, I decided to start using the LG at least daily to try and get a better user experience from Vista.

From what I'd read the more often you use Vista the better (faster) it becomes. I've also been reading everything I can on the web about making Vista faster in everyday usage situations. Out of the box with a number of my machines Vista has been pretty un-usable. So I needed to change that if it's going to be the OS of choice on my main UMPC.

I'm happy to say that it appears to be working. Using it at least once everyday has made it much faster and more responsive to tasks as well as making applications fire up faster and seeing less of the non-responsive text on applications that was certainly a regular feature at the start. I've disabled Aero Glass but left a lot of other eye candy on as I really think if you're running Vista you may as well be able to enjoy some of it's features. I disabled the sidebar too because it's a processor hog.

The time to go to sleep and come back is now much less. I disabled hibernation because by default the balanced power saver mode was putting into hibernation too often and it is painful coming back from hibernation. Also I blame it for turning the machine on in my bag trying to go from sleep and into hibernation and then failing and staying on which led to it getting quite hot in my bag. This is an absolutely mad thing that windows OS does and I can't see any reason why and only see it as being possibly disastrous for a laptop if it was in a bag for a few hours and overheated.

Battery life still isn't great on the standard battery, i.e. 2 hours of real world use but at least I can get 5 from the extended battery.

Now that I've got a few things sorted Vista is much more fun on the P100 and having a huge amount of grunt on tap is good too. I'm yet to lag the machine out on anything and I can multi-task with Onenote, Photoshop CS3 and more without issues.