Windows 7 Tablet - 7 reasons it sucks (and a few why it's good)

I had a brief opportunity to experience one of the latest generation of Windows 7 tablet devices on Friday and here are my views of it.

In brief - Windows 7 is not designed for a touch device and it makes for an awful user experience just putting a desktop operating system into a touch device.

The device I had time with is brand new RM tablet. First impression seeing it in someone else's hands at a few paces was positive. It has an immediately obvious difference to an iPad - a much wider form factor. One of the criticisms of the iPad for consuming content is that it's form factor doesn't conform to wide screen movie aspect ratios.


Once held, the RM tablet feels weighty, but not overly heavier feeling than an iPad. The stats show it is something like 30% heavier, but I think partially because of the different form factor, this isn't drastically obvious even when holding one of each in both hands.

The material of the case is nice to hold with a warm rubberiness that feels sure in the hand. Where with an iPad I was immediately glad I'd bought the Apple case as it felt very slippery without it, this RM tablet felt quite sure to hold - evidenced by how I felt confident holding someone else's device in one hand while flipping it over to photograph the reverse :)



So, with so many positives already in this review, why is the title of this post so negative? Well, once Windows loads and you start trying to use it, is when the problems really start.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 1: Where are the apps?
By this I mean that the user interface metaphor of the desktop works for large screens where organising your documents is the focus of your activity. Mobile devices tend not to work that way. They have much less storage and you are much less likely to be doing a lot of work on a document.

Instead, mobile devices need to be task oriented, making switching from one task to the next (or between tasks quickly), as simple, quick and intuitive as possible.


Now, Windows 7 does include the task bar at the bottom, which is certainly useful, but notice that by default, despite Office having been installed, the icons to launch the various apps have not been added to the task bar. Instead, apps like Adobe Acrobat tend to add their icons to the desktop, which would be OK if that was the place to find and launch your apps, but it isn't. Microsoft has retained the Start button metaphor as the default place to find applications and to initiate all other tasks, but this mixed metaphor means that sometimes the place to launch your app will be on the task bar, sometimes it will be easiest to hide any running apps and use the desktop, and for probably the majority of things, you'll need to open the start menu and navigate a hierarchy of folders with small fiddly icons (compared to the size of your finger) and eventually after 4 or 5 taps and swipes you'll have launched the app you wanted.

...and don't even get me started on the apps that are running but "appear" (meaning hidden behind a tiny little arrow you have to tap to show them) in the system tray.

The iPad isn't ideal for this I know, but at least it is fairly consistent, and the use of a dedicated button (home) to either click or double click (now we have "multitasking" in iOS) removes any need to stop and think "where is my app?"

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 2: Where did all my screen space go?

Not only is Windows designed for large screens, but so are the apps it ships with, and so are most 3rd party apps. As an example, this shot shows Paint running as default on the RM Tablet. The use of a title bar on the window eats some space, the ever present task bar eats more, the menu tab takes more still, the status bar takes it's share, and finally the ribbon (with nice big finger stabbing friendly icons at least) eats a huge chunk.

After all that detritus on screen, the actual visible working space is only about half the size of the screen! Now I know, the ribbon can be minimised, so can the task bar, and the status bar can be turned off, but the point is that apps are not designed out of the box at least, for this form factor or user interaction mechanism.

This isn't insurmountable as apps can be written specifically for this device type, or could sense the device type and adjust it's behaviour accordingly - but will this happen? In terms of volume, Windows Tablets are a tiny share of the Windows market and so I expect most programmer will only design for the majority market - desktops, and the interface choices that work for a desktop are almost entirely inappropriate for a small form factor touch based device.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 3: I have 10 fingers, not just 2
As the screen shot above also shows with Paint, it seems this device (the OS?) only supports the use of 2 fingers concurrently in screen at a time. Now, often, apps only require the use of one finger at a time - two when you start pinching and zooming, but many apps on the iPad allow the use of many more fingers concurrently for more complex interactions. If the hardware or OS only copes with 2 fingers at a time, the applications ability to provide a rich intuitive user interaction are much more limited.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 4: Even the bits designed for tablets fail to work well
Microsoft decided that tablets were the next big thing many years before rumours of Apple working on the iPad even started, so how come I'm saying they still haven't got things right?

Well, the big difference between the tablets Microsoft designed Windows for and the current new devices is touch instead of a stylus. The tablets that use a stylus were a flop - I know, I had use of a few way back when and they were too heavy, too hungry on battery charge and too clumsy to hold in one hand and use the stylus with the other. By contrast, the iPad is easy to hold and use at the same time, it is positively frugal in it's use of power (in comparison to the earlier tablets) and "just works".

So surely, Microsoft will have re-examined all the user interface elements to make them more suitable for the less precise input of fingers rather than a stylus? To put it bluntly, no.


Getting the onscreen keyboard right for example is vital as that is likely to be something the user is required to use a lot, so what have Microsoft done to make it touch rather than stylus friendly? Well, not a lot as far as I can see. The OS and built in apps at least do tend to recognise when the cursor enters a field where the user might like to type something and it pops up a little keyboard button which when clicked opens the full thing, but this button tends to pop up in different places each time as it is relative to the cursor position in the text box, and things only get worse once the on screen keyboard appears.

The default size of the keyboard is fairly small. It can be resized and moved around the screen but resizing is awkward as it needs a fairly accurate tap on the edges, and because it floats over the top of the running apps (rather than "shoving them out of the way" which the iPad does) it hides a lot of the screen, which more often than not I found included the space I was trying to type in!


Worse than that, compared to the trimmed down keyboard Apple have designed for the iPad, Microsoft have thrown the kitchen sink at the number of keys it puts on screen at once. This better matches a physical keyboard and does allow direct access to more symbols than on the iPad, but this isn't a real keyboard and you tend to need those symbols a lot less often than the letters of the alphabet and number so it's a reasonable compromise to keep them out of the way unless you do need them.

In addition, Apple on the iPad have actually implemented 3 (or more?) different keyboards which appear depending on the context of what you are typing - so for example, when typing in a web address, the keyboard includes a key for typing ".com" with one key press. Microsoft haven't included any of this context sensitive nature into their onscreen keyboard.

What absolutely infuriated me within minutes though was that when launching IE, if I started trying to type a URL straight away, once the default home page loaded, the content of the address bar was refreshed, losing anything I had already typed and completely scrambling what I typed next by putting it somewhere in the middle of the address it put in. Again, this could be improved by changing the default home page to blank, but why should I have to customise a device to stop me wanting to throw it out of the window? (is that why Microsoft call their OS Windows? ;)

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 5: Even the basics go wrong

One thing that made the iPhone and later the iPod touch and iPad "magical" was the way it automatically rotated the display to match whatever way you hold the thing. Well, this RM tablet does that too...except you have to wait a second or so before it realises it needs to do anything, and then instead of smoothly animating the rotation, the screen worryingly goes completely blank before reappearing a noter second or so later - and then the apps running often take a little while to readjust themselves to the new size they need to be, and the on screen keyboard just sits dumbly wherever it was before, meaning you have to manually move it to a new more suitable location on screen.

Once you've done all that, you might expect to be able to hold it any type with your thumbs as you can with the iPad, but the keyboard clutter is even more apparent at this size and typing becomes even more of a chore. A pity as the wide screen aspect ratio actually gives a more usable amount of working screen space in portrait instead of landscape, although notice how the ribbon in Word has compressed itself a lot so that many more functions now need multiple taps to get at them. Again, this changing user experience just from rotating the device makes it much less intuitive.

Reason Windows Tablets Suck 6: Tiny interface elements

I've said it before so this might be counting the same fault many times, but Windows is designed for an interface that allows precise activation of its user interface elements. Microsoft do allow the DPI setting of Windows to be adjusted to make everything bigger - I tried this on the RM Tablet and it helps, but makes the impact on workable space on screen much worse too. You can also selectively resize some of the UI elements, which Acer do on the touch screen desktop and laptop we've had in the office recently.

Other apps tend not to work well with a change in DPI in Windows and even less provide a way to tweak the size of the buttons they use to make them suitable for a touch interface. Take the included calculator app in Windows as an example. Even with the DPI set to 125%, because the app is actually designed to be usable on screen alongside other apps, it is positively tiny on this touch device, with the buttons much smaller than my finger tip. I could still often get the right buttons, but if I were typing a column of numbers in, I wouldn't feel any confidence I could do that accurately without taking great care, and losing patience.

Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 1:Media Centre

One application I feel Microsoft has (inadvertently) got right for touch is Media Centre. They have designed this for Nettop PCs that plug into a TV and tend to have quite an inaccurate pointing device to select options. As a result, the way it takes over the whole screen and provides nice big buttons to select things works on a touch device quite nicely.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the wide screen form factor of the RM Tablet does lend itself to watching HD video in it's native widescreen format using the whole screen to the full. As a result, even just quickly running the sample HD video that ships with Windows 7, it's apparent that this would be one area that Windows devices might eclipse the iPad.

Reason Windows Tablets Doesn't Suck 2: It's Windows - just like my desktop/laptop
This I think is the key positive for Windows based touch devices. The same apps can be run as on someone's desktop, with the same file types, the same rendering of pages, it can network with other Windows devices for sharing files and it doesn't need any effort searching for an app that does the same as you are used to using on the desktop - you can just use the same app - paid for again if needed of course.

...and that last point is actually my last Reason Windows Tablets DO suck 7: who wants to pay desktop prices for apps on a touch device?
One of the joys of using the iPad is that the apps cost peanuts compared to buying fully fledged desktop Windows programs. Many cost nothing (ad supported sometimes), or often only 0.59p in the UK. An "expensive" iPad app tends to still be less than £10, for instance the "MS Office like" Pages/Numbers and Keynote are each only £9.99, meaning you can have a practically complete office suite for less than £30. Compare that to the cost of adding even the cheapest version of MS Office to a Windows Tablet device.

Summary:
Is there a place for a Windows Tablet in my life? No. It would drive me crazy in no time and I can already do almost everything I need for work and personal computing on my iPad.

Would I get one if I didn't already have an iPad - more difficult, but I would still opt for an iPad. Despite its own many foibles and compromises, the iPad "just works" and can do almost everything I need of a device - assuming I have access to a Windows device I can remote desktop to if needed :)

Can I see a place for it for some people? Yes. If the most important thing for you is application and file compatibility with other people running Windows, then the huge compromise in usability is probably worth it.

So there you go. Which would you get and why?

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