I wouldn’t want to do CAD on a machine like this anyways. Something like this is great for a digital sketchpad, portable Email box, etc.
Once you start adding high powered CPU’s and GPU’s you wind up with something that only has 2 hrs of battery life (so your battery will be dead before your flight lands) or is so heavy and hot running that you don’t actually want to hold it to sketch on. Plus a 14" display will never get you enough resolution to fit all your toolbars and menus in a real CAD app (~1400x1050 14" Vs a 1920x1200 15" or 17" panel)
Still, with a Core i5 you should be able to do plenty of Photoshop (as long as you aren’t doing a dozen poster sized 300 DPI sketches) just fine. I have the same CPU in my Alienware and it cranks when needed.
If you consider this is basically a full PC for the same price as a Wacom 12WX that should put the value into clear perspective.
I’m of the opinion that if I end up in a hotel in Shenzhen for a week visiting my team and local factories, I don’t want to lug around everything I’d need to not only work productively all day in the plant, sketch products revisions and direction in the evening, make changes to huge packaging graphics files on site, review the latest CAD files that came from the domestic team (eDrawings normally save the day, but sometimes I need to get into a database and review or make changes, etc), keep up with 5 email accounts AND play angry birds! When I get back to our studio, I don’t want to switch to a dedicated desktop machine - we’re beyond that, this is the time for an all in one that does it ALL. I want this sexy new solution to simply stand up on the desk and the bluetooth keyboard and mouse recognize that she’s home and I’m back to studio mode! That’s what my Tecra has been doing for 4 years and I’m ready for a lighter, faster, more powerful version without the flip screen! The Tecra M7 handles everything I throw at it and the 14.1" screen is just big enough for CAD work, so that prompts my wish for a 14.1" Asus tablet.
My point was that this Asus EP121 is CLOSE to being just what the doctor ordered…except for the graphics card (I could be wrong) and the battery life (reviews are coming in that peg hi performance of this machine @ 3-5hrs). If I just wanted a cool sketching tablet, I’d get the largest new Android Honeycomb and hope that AutoDesk comes out with SBPro 2011 on Android.
That is until the roll out led pressure foil from Red Planet becomes available (great Sci-Fi product design in that movie)!
Has anyone tried the Modbooks (Mac + Wacom mod) from http://www.axiotron.com/ yet?
I only saw that someone had it on order, but hasn’t posted if it works well…
I think that battery life is par for the course these days - especially on any of the i-series CPU’s. The atom laptops sip power but don’t have enough cpu power for anything useful. My Alienware gets about 6 hours but thats because it’s only an 11" laptop with a gigantic 8 cell battery. (Weighs almost as much as my 15" HP but that too only gets about 2-3 hours with the standard battery)
I am about to Blow your minds! I too have been looking for a Functional Tablet to sketch on, and to be honest had no interest in the Ipad in anyway, and in fact was extremely excited about the Notion Ink Adam http://www.notionink.com/ but then I found this and am just waiting for this to hit. http://tenonedesign.com/blog/pressure-sensitive-drawing-on-ipad/If this is comes out then sketchbook pro for the Ipad will now be pressure sensitive!!!
Kenneth - I have an iPad with SBPro 2011 and while it’s cool and sketch quality is OK, the size is just too small - and that’ll be the knock on the Android tablets as well, until they creep up in size a bit - the EP121 has just about everything we want in an all-in-one PC (except battery life and graphics card muscle) at an almost acceptable 12.1".
I’m just not a mac guy, so a slightly larger Android equivalent-to-the-iPad will be a great ‘lite’ communication tool to take to lunch, local meetings, etc.
Theres been a bunch of reviews I’ve read of it - from a designers perspective they’re mostly irrelevant because people are trying to compare the experience of Windows to an Ipad.
The short/average battery life is probably the biggest gripe. It’d be great if this thing could go 6 hours but sadly that would mean sacrificing either weight or CPU power.
Other then that it seems to be a pretty solid machine and with the Wacom digitizer the experience will be pretty familiar to anyone whos used to drawing on a Cintiq.
Nice. I think I’m gonna go for it then. Battery doesn’t worry me, I want it for sketching. I was about to get a new wacom tablet, but figured this was a better investment. Even thou it’s more expensive, my arguments are that it’s more effective, flexible and I now would have an opportunity to work from home and on the road. But I want to be sure I’m not shooting myself in the foot and should have taken that intuous after all.
I know it was mentioned someone was running COD, but have you seen anything about Solidworks (or any other CAD)? I’m not planning on doing heavy CAD on it, but I def need to be able to open up files and do some tweaks and export STEPfiles etc.
I can’t imagine that those cad-needs wouldnt be satisfied. Only problem is the limited diskspace of the 64gb SS-drive. Theres a few threads about it on tabletpcreview.com, where they’ve swapped it themselves for a much larger drive. (but godd**n those are expensive)
Maybe Cyberdemon can give you a better answer though.
I tried googling this and got a bunch of mixed comments, but this thread on the Solidworks forum seems to indicate SW should run under the Intel integrated graphics, but be prepared for potential redraw issues/performance hits etc.
Integrated 3D has come a long way, but it’s still a very small niche of features it supports.
If this is critical to your work, I would try purchasing the machine from somewhere that has a good return policy in case it doesn’t work like you’ve planned.
Thanks CD. I think you may be right about return policy… perhaps I should chill for a while till it’s released in my country, by the time probably a better version.
The SW stuff really is secondary, I imagine myself using it 2-4 times a year for the “yeah hey, I know you’re out of office, but we need to update this dimension and have an SLS ready for the monday meeting”. I want to be able to at least launch SW and do some light weight stuff. But this tablet for me is 99% about sketching and that bit seems OK.
Do you have a dedicated work machine? If the use case is in the 1% range you may be able to use a VPN solution instead. It would be less than ideal, but I do it when I absolutely need to. IE I’m out of the office and don’t have the files or software on my machine, I can pop it up on my work desktop (remotely) and make some tweaks and email it straight from my work machine.
Remote desktop/VPN can be fairly robust these days, but OpenGL support is nonexistant for some software packages and this depends heavily on your internet connection. If you’re in China where they block almost everything through their firewall that doesn’t work.
It sounds like it should work though, even if it is glitchy/slow. Might also require some driver tweaking to find a driver thats compatible/stable.
Yeah I do. But VPN requires MY machine to be running at the time right? We have citrix so I can access all the files and some software from pretty much any machine that has a browser, but SW is not supported afaik. But as I said, this stuff is more as a bonus, arguments to convince my employer this is a better investment than a tablet and a laptop. IF SW was a no go, I would still be interested. But it does sound like it should work.
On the keyboard, I actually thought there were other docking options, but they seem to have been reserved for the smaller 10’ pads, while this has been called slate. I was kinda set on the transformer option, still not sure if it is available for the 12’ SLATE or not?
Asus should really stop calling everything they do EEE, what’s up with that.
(btw wow, it is confusing to refer to both wacom style tablet and a ipad style tablet with the same word, especially when discussing both at the same time)
