TabletPC

Toshiba Cancelling the M7?

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:56:00 GMT

I have become increasingly concerned that Toshiba is going to pull the M7 from production.

Whether this means they are replacing it with something better or overhauling it I don't know.

What I do know is very suspicious…

The RTM Vista drivers are STILL not available, every other machine Toshiba supports for Vista has drivers ready…
You cannot buy an M7 at ToshibaDirect any more, meaning something other than currently out of stock…
You could not get a Core2 Duo for this machine (at least not from Toshiba)
The NVidia Option just barely supported Vista, the Intel Option did not support Aero at all
The M7 has had a slew of problems upgrading to Vista

So, with that in mind and Toshiba advertising this machine as:

The Premier Tablet PC
The Tecra® M7 is the premier high-performance Tablet PC for mobile users that demand the increased productivity of a Tablet PC

I am led to believe that either lackluster sales of this machine, the choice to make the LCD only 1440x900 (instead of 1920x1200), or upgrade problems could mean there is a new flagship product coming very soon.

To be honest, when this machine runs, I really love it. I don't want to replace it just yet (I only bought it a year ago…)

If a new machine comes out soon, I think I will just go ahead and upgrade if it is a Core2 Duo, has higher resolution, a better video card and is fully supported for Vista by Toshiba. The weight of this machine with the optional wedge battery doesn't really bother me, though it does bother many people.

I will be keeping a sharp lookout for any mention of a new machine on the horizon, there just isn't any other machine I would rather use for my MAIN portable system, I am completely hooked on Widescreen and Tablet together, no other machine even comes close to offering what this package does for me.

Update:

Indeed, my suspicions are confirmed...

Looks like I will be getting a new Tablet soon.

Requirements:

14” Widescreen
CoreDuo or Core2Duo
2Gb RAM (more preferred...)
Vista Aero Support
Tablet... I will never buy another notebook that is NOT a tablet.

If the 15.4” MacBook Pro was a Tablet, there would be no question what I would get...

If this thing is real... Then I MAY be getting it, no pre-orders for me, I need to see at least one review first.

Bizarre Tecra M7 Sound anomaly

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:58:00 GMT

When I upgraded to Vista, I had inadvertently left my audio muted.

This has been a known problem posted elsewhere the weird thing is…

Nothing was working to correct it; no Linux systems would produce sound either.

I am fairly convinced that there is something in the way the BIOS handles sound or the way the XP driver shuts off the hardware amp that is required to fix this.

The final solution was more complex than I have seen posted elsewhere so to help other frustrated M7 owners caught in this dilemma here is how I fixed it.

First the ONLY way that worked was to reinstall XP L, this was not so bad, a fresh XP Install, then add the required Toshiba Drivers: Sound, Modem (this works on the same bus.), Common Modules and BIOS Driver. Fortunately I have an extra Hard Drive or this would have been horrid.

You can now try to get sound, but I was unable to with the 3.1 BIOS.

First I had to downgrade the BIOS (which required using the CD method) and reboot.

Still, no sound, muting and unmuting have no effect.

Next I went into the Sound Control Panel and went to the Speech Tab, there is a "Test Hardware" button on that tab that will run the sound card through its paces and when it got to the Playback device, the sound magically came back on (feeding back like crazy due to mic boost, but definitely outputting sound).

Next I upgraded the BIOS back to 3.1 so suspend works in Vista and rebooted XP. I verified that sound still worked and shut down.

Next I popped in a Kubuntu Live CD and verified that sound worked there.

Finally, I replaced my Vista Hard Drive and when I booted, Sound worked, Finally…

There should be some utility somewhere that will exercise (turning on and off…) the sound card and the hardware amps, but I sure couldn't find it.

Bottom line, if you are moving from XP to Vista or Linux, make sure your sound is working (and turned ON) there first.

Keyword to help people looking for an answer…
Kubuntu, Intel High Definition Audio, snd-hda-intel, ALC262

Toshiba has Finally released Vista Drivers for the M7

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:33:00 GMT

Update: 3/26/2007, Toshiba now has the RTM versions available

Update: 3/19/2007, Intel Display drivers are available... and THAT IS ALL... gee, thanks, I have an NVidia...

This is REALLY PATHETIC TOSHIBA!!! You have LOST a long time customer.

(Update: 12/5/06, the M7 Drivers were updated today, adding Bluetooth drivers...)

(Update: 12/9/06, the M7 Drivers were updated today, adding pretty much everything to make it complete)

If the link changes, I will try to update it so it stays current. If you notice it's wrong, please let me know.

Missing are:

nVidia Drivers, the RC2/96.85 drivers on the nVidia site are usable with a small hack though.
(There is a BIOS Upgrade for the NVidia helps with Hibernation)

~~Fingerprint Scanner Drivers~~

~~Bluetooth~~

~~Tablet Buttons~~

~~Audio Driver~~

~~HotKey for Display Devices~~

Results:

The Hibernate/Sleep mode problems are now gone... BIOS Updates fixed this

SD Works well, I read/wrote/formatted a 2G Patriot chip that fails in most machines

Toshiba Disc Creator, still has a known compatibility issue (and why do I really need this anyway... c'est la vie.)

I did not attempt the SD Boot, but it should function properly based on the other SD Tests

the Buttons actually work now but the mappings are off, for instance rotate now brings up Microsoft Snipping Tool, I don't recall ever setting the button to that, and there is no way to change them yet, I have not tried loading common drivers or other drivers from the M400 line so some might work.

Hibernation was a HUGE problem for me before... ~~Now the one that is killing me is Rotation~~... ~~On Bluetooth my phone needs it, but synching in general is not working well, so I don't really care (yet.)~~

Great Job Toshiba, we now have RC1 for everything, now we should get RTM versions soon.

Tecra M7... Coming Soon.

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:27:00 GMT

Having just bought an M4, and subsequently having NOTHING but problems with it since the day I bought it, I managed to get it returned today.

In case you missed it as I did because I was at TechED, the Tecra M7 was introduced. It should start shipping within a week or two. I am getting one of these babies instead of the M4 for obvious reasons.

The M4 seemed nice, but I must have gotten a lemon or something, the HD came in DOA (so I bought a new one instead of waiting for them to replace it...), Then the thing started heating up all the time, even under XP, and the touchpad never worked right but I could almost ignore it until I just saw this thing getting worse by the day.

Hopefully the M7 takes care of the heat problem, but who knows... I do think this may be better for my main machine over the next couple years and should run Vista better than the M4 does. Besides, I REALLY wanted a widescreen tablet.

Ink becomes a First Class Citizen in Vista

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:24:00 GMT

It has always surprised me that Ink was more difficult to implement on a desktop than it is on a tablet. Thankfully, that is all about to change.

I have a digitizer and i want to be able to make handwriting entries on my desktop, so far it has been difficult to find applications that even support it.

In Vista, there will (supposedly) be no difference between a tablet and a desktop, you will even be able to ink with a mouse if you want to.

You can annotate Live Video, something currently impossible in XP.

The MIL - Media Integration Layer has been replaced by WPF (avalon) and all the presentation is controlled and gracefully degraded depending on capabilities. It is quite interesting that all the demos of WPF is done with spinning cubes of video or some such nonsense. While this certainly has its place in some applications, it is not the first thing that comes to mind for great UIs.

I remember some of the awful UIs created with Win95 just because you could use bitmaps. When it comes to a practical UI, making Annotations is purely natural and we should be able to do that with handwriting or text depending on our ability of having the appropriate input device.

So... enough philosophizing, here are some key ideas that Avalon brings to the Tablet.

InkCanvas will be the single painting surface for Ink, replacing the current set of 3 in TabletSDK 1.7. This makes complete sense and unifying the surface is a great idea. Ink is also is a built in function of WinFX, the only reason you may need to add on the InkAnalysis SDK is to do avanced handwriting recognition.

Shape Recognition is a core component, while it will not do any actual conversion of ink to basic geometry, it will recognize a primitive shape and flag it with a property so you can tell your app to do the conversion in any manner you may need to.

The InkAnalysis SDK will offer more advanced background processing of handwriting (still in only 10 languages so far) so you can make something like Journal or OneNote without the thousands of lines of code it would currently require just to do things like paragraph, line, word, and indentation level detection. This is going to lead to some fabulous new Tablet applications that will also work in a similar way on the desktop.

As convergence happens in notebook hardware, igitizing is surely going to become as ubiquitous as wireless has as the demand continues to rise.

I very much look forward to working with the new tools soon to see what innovative ideas are possible with this simplified (codewise) Ink Model. Watch http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility fior the new SDKs.

Lonestar RC2 is available

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:37:00 GMT

Lonestar RC2 is released, it should show up here today. Hopefully this takes care of the rather annoying delays after suspend/hibernate on my Toshiba M205.

Looks like they are really on schedule to get XP SP2 released on time.

Virtual Whidbey

H. Steele Price, IV — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 17:40:00 GMT

I had some trouble (read: it never worked) trying to get the May bits to install on Virtual PC 2004.

At the same time, I was curious about Virtual Server 2005...

So after getting the Beta (which is apparently still labeled VS2004 not 2005) and installing it on my development machine running W2K3 Server, I was delighted to see 3 things: It now can run in a web browser and 2 its about 3 times faster and it seems more stable than VPC.

Running it locally seems really fast, running it over wireless to my Tablet seems just about as fast or more so than Remote Desktop. In short, this is a fantastic way to run a beta product without dedicating a machine to a single beta.

I started by making an XP Tablet Edition Base and called it XPTsp1aBase. This virtual machine is what I can derive from with differencing additions. Differencing means that it has a separate virtual hard drive that all the added software goes on that is different from the base. So I set up the base as a normal virgin installation of XPSP1a and Activated it.

Then I created a new Virtual Machine that uses a differencing drive deriving from the base installation. I called this virtual machine Whidbey, installed Lonestar (XP SP2), VS.NET 2005 May bits and TabletPC SDK RC1.

This has all gone without a hitch, its running a perfectly good copy of everything I need to work with Whidbey for my Tablet Software.

I also have a third VM that I am using WITHOUT Lonestar and TPC SDK, this is so I can see if there are any big differences that I need to be aware of. I have a shared VirtualHD between them both that holds all my sourcecode so I can run it on both platforms and debug accordingly.

I'd really like to make the new Remote Control Full Screen (I suspect this will be added to the final 2005 bits), I sort of have a way to do this, but not quite optimally. If I figure it out, Ill make another post, but so far I am totally pleased with this type of testing environment, it's simple yet complete and doesn't force me to reformat everything to upgrade to new bits or make drastic changes. Since I used a Differencing drive and VM, I can just make a new VM that starts fresh from the virgin install of XP, this is a Brilliant move on Microsoft's part for the development community.

As a single developer with limited resources, I can host every MSDN target platform, test a really strange configuration, etc. right on the same box! When I have something I want a colleague to look at all I have to do now is point them to the web address of the virtual machine and they are looking at the exact same configuration I was.

I can think of dozens of advantages for this over the typical remote desktop approach. If you have a chance to test this platform, I highly recommend it.

TabletPC BOF

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 25 May 2004 23:15:00 GMT

Julie did a great job of leading a rousing discussion at the TabletPC BOF

Congratulations to the University of Washington Team for placing second in the Imagine Cup Competition. They wrote a slick Tablet PC Application for education.

Some of the topics included what different people were working on, whether they were targeting ONLY the Tablet, Thoughts on requiring students to have tablets in Universities, and inking recognition development tips & tricks.

A few of us were invited to dinner with Arin Goldberg, the Program Manager for the TabletPC SDK and several members of the development team at Microsoft. Thanks again Arin for a great dinner.

This is one platform to really keep an eye on it has so much potential, as prices for the hardware continues to fall and the software continues to improve it will become a very popular platform. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a new development platform, it's still a wide open area for all aspects of development, so many applications just lend themselves to Tablet but very little has been written so far. Now get out there and develop something interesting. (me points to self...)

Off to TechED

H. Steele Price, IV — Sun, 23 May 2004 12:16:00 GMT

I'm off to TechED I'll be blogging every day when I get a chance to upload, I'll have pictures, stories and reflections here about all the events that I am attending. I'm going to go into a reporter mode for the first time at a conference so this should be interesting.

I'll be using my TabletPC for the first time at a conference to take copious notes, lets hope the recognition engine does what it's supposed to do so I don't have to post handwriting that you can't read to get articles up quickly. I really look forward to the release of OneNote that uses the same recognition style as the new TIP, writing everything from the TIP would be really annoying.

Why didn't I think of that... no, wait, I did...

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 19 May 2004 13:43:00 GMT

When I saw this video on Channel Nine, about a new Powertoy, I thought, awesome, now I don't have to write that :-)

I am writing an application that was going to compile fonts, I also want to go the other way, take a font and make it INK, now I can focus more on that unless someone else beats me to it :-)

Making TabletPC Applications and actually just architecting them is more fun than I have in computing in years.