ExoPC shows off some guts
posted Feb 7th 2010 8:52am by Caleb Kraftfiled under: pcs hacks
The folks over at Engadget have posted some pictures of the ExoPC’s insides. With the recent return of the tablet craze (remember xp tablet edition?) we’re seeing tablets everywhere. This one has some promise on the hardware side, sporting a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately we’ve heard using solely a tablet interface with windows7 is somewhat cumbersome even with the built in improvements. We’re not too worried though, a customized appliance style linux interface probably won’t be too far off.
The last couple times we mentioned tablet style computing, people have emailed us about the Touchbook. It also seems pretty cool, but seems like switching applications is visibly laggy in the demo video. Then again, a slimmed down interface might reduce some of that drag.
While Linux works with Tablet PC’s panel (i.e. there are Wacom drivers), it really is a long way from Windows: there is no handwriting recognition, just CellWriter (and that’s slower than an on-screen keyboard), rotating the screen doesn’t work, because the tablet coordinates aren’t rotated as well (only works in some builds), and some stupid applications won’t recognize clicks made by tapping the pen.
But with an external keyboard, and if you don’t need portrait-format screen, it’s quite usable. (I miss some cool feature though, like Xournal, the Windows Journal clone, doesn’t have OCR, so you can’t do full-text search like in Windows.)