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North American’s in search of the perfect tablet PC Steve Job would never make, won’t have to wait much longer. Gigabyte’s S1080 made its way through the FCC offices last week, and is expected to be made available here in the next few months. The tablet has been on sale in Taiwan since mid-April, and is pretty much the anti iPad in every way possible. Under the S1080’s 10-inch 1024x600 res display, sits a dual core Atom N550 processor, along with a 320 GB hard drive preloaded with Windows 7.
In terms of tablet PC hardware this sounds pretty standard, but it’s on the input/output end where things get a bit crazy. The S1080 features optical mouse controllers on either side of the screen for thumbs only operation, along with a USB 3.0 connector, SD Card reader, and an Ethernet port. Also included is a 1.3 megapixel webcam, support for 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and even a VGA port for those who want to rock out analog style.
The price is expected to be somewhere in the $700 range, but the company hasn’t confirmed this, or even official street dates just yet. An iPad killer? Probably not. An iPad competitor? You be the judge.
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tornato7
May 01, 2011 at 2:57pm
I bet the battery life sucks--- Then it's just a netbook with no keyboard
brentrad
May 01, 2011 at 1:48pm
@sdcat: My guess is because this tablet is aimed more at business users, which are the only users really in the market for a Windows 7 tablet. And if most businesses are anything like my company, we buy inexpensive LCD screens for use when laptops are docked, which don't generally have display port or HDMI, sometimes have DVI, but ALWAYS have d-sub.
I work in the IT department at a medical clinic, and we currently use Fujitsu convertible tablets (full keyboards like a normal laptop, convertible into a tablet.) Fujitsu, we've found, is the only manufacturer that is really serious about Windows tablets. They have some really nice Windows 7 convertible tablets with touch-screen capabilities as well as pen capabilities. Our medical charting app (and Office and other apps essential to our business) is Windows-only - we're trying out alternate OS's like the iPad using Citrix Connector, with limited success. Some physicians absolutely love using an iPad with our charting app - mostly those that have an iPad themselves. Others have tried it and gone back to their Windows tablets.
I took a serious look at this tablet, and it looks great, except for the relatively low vertical resolution of 600. Unfortunately our charting app requires minimum of 800 vertical resolution (its screens are bitmapped, not easily resizable), so regardless of how nice this tablet looks, it just won't work for us - it would require scrolling up and down on almost every screen, which gets annoying quickly.
