Article:		Can't Afford a Tablet PC? Try This!
Subject:		Disappointed
Date:		2003-01-19 18:02:09
From:		anonymous2
The beauty of a tablet PC is directly interacting with the screen. I was hoping this $100 solution would show me a way to overlay a wacom or other tablet across my existing monitor (or even a portion of it.) Good overview for the article, annoying teaser title.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• Disappointed??? What about...
  2003-06-24 03:03:49  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  You could invest in a set of HUD (Heads Up Display) Goggles that project the screen output onto specially coated optics where the "lenses" of the goggles would normally be (like what they use in fighter planes, less the Oxygen feed!)
  
  Then, when you look at your plain old white tablet (BTW, Wacom's "good" tablets aka Anything that is not a Graphire series kick serious butt once you get used to them) you would see the display. It would be a simple matter of aligning your field of vision in the same place when you used it. The benefits???
  
  I envision a single splindle (aka Ultraportable) notebook one would purchase from eBay (for example) that had a smashed display but had the display housing. Then just cut out the right sized hole in the back of the housing to access the tablet surface, and the old front bezel of the no longer present LCD module would hold it in. A little dremmel action to allow the cord outside the housing to allow it to plug into the USB port, and viola! You could probably power current HUD glasses via the USB/Parallel/PS2 mouse port power output that most of these units would have and even the HUD+Tablet would probably pull less juice than the LCD module. If you need to use the keyboard, open it up and do so, just look at the back of the tablet for your "screen" or look wherever! You could use the trackpad/trackpoint/whatever is built into the keyboard on any laptop in leiu of the tablet while using the keyboard.
  
  Seriously, thought, the really cool thing on these tablets is that you can access the BIOS from the tablet, enter power on passwords thru an on-screen virtual keyboard, etc. Also, the HP/Compaq one shown uses a Transmeta Carusoe 1GHz processor and gets like 5 hours of actual usable life on a charge with reasonable power management settings. And it runs cool and hardly even needs to use the fan. My friend got one and let me play for a day with it. I'd probably rather spend that kind of cash on a Cintiq from Wacom if I had it to burn on a toy. (The Cintiq is a integrated large format, high resolution tablet and large LCD display that plugs into any VGA+USB desktop (Mac or x86 class) and sits in your lap or on your desk while you work on it.
  
  Food for thought...