Motion Computing's thin client M1400TC tablet PC
posted January 26th 2005 11:19AM
Motion Computing has decided to offer a thin client version of their M1400 Tablet PC called the M1400TC; they've essentially just stripped out the hard drive and replaced the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition OS it would usually run with Windows XP Embedded on a 512MB embedded flash drive. The big idea, just like with any sort of thin client computer, is that the tablet connects back to a server where all the heavy lifting is done and all sensitive data is stored. This may not be too terribly useful for the average home user, but for the tablet PC market doing all the buying right now (healthcare, manufacturing, and retail, of course) it drives down cost, ups reliability and security, and actually makes the generally ho-hum specs of the machine something a little more of a powerhouse on its new platform. Oh, those specs? Well, sans hard drive, it's got a Celeron M 900MHz or Pentium M 1.1GHz processor, a 12.1-inch LCD screen, built-in 802.11b/g WiFi, Bluetooth, 256 or 512MB of RAM, a fingerprint reader, and it's about 0.9-inches thick and weighs roughly 3 pounds.
[Thanks, Christopher]
Okay, so the real questions is, "How hard will it be to hack this a put the hard drive back in?"
The next question is: Why would you do that as opposed to just buying the one with the drive in it? Is the price diff that great?
I's the battery life improved? By how much?
Can it run Mira (Smart Display 0S)?
A HD like the one featured in the iPod minis would fit in there. The manufacturer of those drives, Hitachi, has a 5 GB HD out now. Also a normal iPod HD, (also made by Hitachi?) wouldn't take that much more room, and they have capacities of 80GB now! I really don't see the excuse of not bundling one in, unless battery life was affected too greatly by any HD.
Basically what we are looking at is a PDA with a freakin' huge screen! I wonder if it holds some world record...
A thin client just should not cost this much. It's a wee bit 'thick' if you ask me.
You are all missing the boat with your questions about hard drives. The whole idea of the thin client is NOT to store data on the machine. It is only a front end to access data on a backend server. This gives a company a centralized location of data for backup and management, etc. All the applications are managed on the server (so no upgrades, modifications or patches to the software is needed on the client PCs). If a user loses or breaks the thin client, no big deal since there is no critical data strored on it. Also viruses and spyware goes down to a minimum. Battery life should be improved since there are no spinning disks, etc... All the pros out weigh the cons any day. Of course this geared for a corporate market, since very few households have servers that will operate as a backend for applications, etc. But maybe one day this will all change and we will all be on this.
--Eric