Smart displays miss the sweet spot

Cebit was hardly swamped with smart displays, the Microsoft-specified flat panels that double as a desktop monitors and an untethered XP pen tablet.
    Only Philips and Viewsonic had models immediately on sale (reviewed in our printed edition), though Packard Bell said it would ship one before summer. Companies like MSI and Tatung showed models without giving a launch date - perhaps waiting to see how the market pans out.
    With flat panels set to replace CRTs (see page 20) the idea of one that you can pick up and use as a tablet is compelling at the right price. But it is generally agreed that the prices of the first models, at between £800 and £1,000, are too high for any but
    well-off early adopters. These packages include Wifi but potential buyers will be quick to realise they can buy a Wifi-enabled notebook for much the same price - smart displays are simply acting as a remote interface for an XP Pro desktop (an upgrade from the XP Home edition is bundled).
    Vendors talk of a 'sweet spot' price of $500 (£320) to enable smart displays to garner a mass market - an achievable price as they require minimal extra hardware. But there remain limitations in the software, as Aubrey Edwards, director of Microsoft's embedded appliance platform group, admitted.
    You still can't use a smart display and the host system at the same time, partly because of licensing issues - two people might use the same copy of an application. Edwards said that this will change and 'Microsoft realises software in the home should be treated differently from software in the corporates.'
    Also, even though the displays are pen driven, they can't use the Tablet PC's excellent XP-hosted handwriting recognition. They have a more rudimentary form, which works if you use a child-like print, but the translation is done on the display not the XP host. 'The smart display sends only keypresses, or the translated text. It cannot send digital ink data,' said Edwards.
    Moreover, the display cannot be used to view DVDs playing on the host machine. All these functions will come, according to Edwards. The displays run a version of Windows CE but they could use another OS: you could have full XP running on Linux. So it's a fair bet that if Microsoft does not make them smarter, someone else will.
    Incidentally, I'll be taking a closer look at the ergnomics of smart displays in our July edition.

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