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Comment by BigZaphod | Hacker News Reader

Here's one of their promo videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX-B2wG1e4&feature=playe...

That video makes it look even worse. Don't they realize that people can type faster than they can write with a pen? It took that guy a long time to pull out the pen, write "Rear Light" and put the pen back. Should have been <2 seconds with a touch keyboard.

It's just so weird! It's like they are advertising to an alternate universe where the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch don't exist. I can't believe how slow and laggy it looks in their own video. How can they not see this?

I actually laughed out loud when the doctor zoomed in on the x-ray and there was visible lag and tearing as the screen refreshed. That's the best shot they could come up with to show off zoom!?

At least you know they're not faking the video...

Evidently you've never tried to write something like "Rear Light" one-handed on the iPad keyboard. Or, you don't have ogre fingers like I do.

More seriously, the pen is pretty fantastic for things like reviewing papers. Having used tablet PCs for years and now having used an iPad for a while, I can say it takes significantly longer to annotate PDFs via iAnnotate or goodreader and either my finger or the iPad keyboard than it did with Acrobat and the pen+tablet pc input panel.

I just tried typing "Rear light" on my iPad with one finger of my right hand while holding the pad itself with my left hand. It took about 2 seconds. On my iPhone, with only my left hand holding it and using my left thumb to type leaving my right hand doing nothing, I can bang that phrase out in about... 2 seconds. In the promo video, it took the guy just about 5 seconds with the pen.

Not that this matters a whole lot - just adding my own data points to the discussion. :)

I agree that the keyboard on the iPad is hard to type on, but from the looks of the video, the latency with pen writing would be even more annoying!

Have you looked at the Pogo Sketch?

Thanks for the promo link. It appears their target audience are people who need to write things while having a full blown OS. I teach math and tablet PCs have been a great help. People simply do not type math or read typed mathematics well. I'm a heavy user of Captivate and Camtasia and this is the sort of tablet I need.

Wow, it lags when zooming a picture (0:17), in their promo video. Not inspiring.

At the same time, kudos for showing actual product performance. Thanks to their advertising, I feel like I can make an accurate judgment of the device's performance.

Contrast the Slate's ad to the overly-aggressive critique of Nokia's advertising for the N97 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU

Fair enough - I guess I was taking the perspective that since things are usually portrayed unrealistically in a promo video like this, the perf must really suck.

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