Review: ExoPC Slate

For the same price as the iPad, you'll soon be able to get an 11-inch Windows 7 tablet.

The ExoPC Slate has comparable storage to the iPad (32 or 64GB) but it also has a webcam, hardware-accelerated Flash (and Silverlight), handwriting recognition, fully accessible USB ports and an SD card slot – and of course it runs any Windows application you want.

If that were enough to rival the iPad, PC manufacturers would have been outselling Apple for months. The iPad may be locked down and far less powerful than a PC, but it's also slick, lightweight and supremely usable.

For all the advantages of Windows, making a tablet PC that's cheap, portable and attractive isn't that easy.

The announcement of the iPad also produced a flurry of slate and tablet PC announcements. Despite the fact that there have been stylus-powered tablet PCs with handwriting recognition since 2003, with an increasing number of touch-enabled netbooks appearing in the last year, most of this new generation of lightweight Windows tablets without attached keyboards have taken until late 2010 to make it from announcement to availability.

They've been beaten to the market not just by the iPad but by Android tablets ranging from the fast-selling Galaxy Tab to a plethora of budget me-too devices such as the Advent Vega.

Major PC makers seem to feel that Windows isn't quite right for a device with no keyboard that's aimed at mainstream consumers rather than industrial and business users (hence the Windows Embedded entertainment tablets we've seen instead).

Some, such as Dell and Toshiba, have been rushing to capitalise on buyers' enthusiasm for Android instead. Viewsonic's disappointing dual-boot ViewPad 10 has just arrived and although Microsoft encouraged HP to announce its Slate at CES 2009, it's only now going on sale (in very limited numbers, as HP concentrates instead on forthcoming webOS tablets).

That means that although Windows 7 runs happily on a wide range of Atom netbooks, it still has to prove itself as a touch and tablet operating system. Is this the tablet to do it? Maybe.

The ExoPC Slate has taken this long to become available because it comes from a small Canadian company that has had to switch suppliers and is still negotiating for distributors in some countries (including the UK).

It's also developed its own touch user interface for launching apps; a promising approach that's still something of a work in progress (and doesn't get in the way if you want to stick with using the standard Windows 7 interface, which has some optimisations for touch.

The ExoPC tablet certainly feels professionally designed; it's well-built and sturdy.

There's a wide bezel around the touchscreen so you can hold it without worrying about accidentally touching the screen and the sleek rounded corners, smooth edges and pleasant matt finish on the back make it comfortable to hold (that and the texture of the vents for the twin speakers give you a good grip).

It's heavier than an iPad (just under a kilogram) and larger (to fit in the 11.6-inch 1366 x 768 resolution screen), but at 14mm it's barely any thicker.

The top bezel holds the ambient light sensor and 1.3-megapixel webcam; the bottom bezel is a little wider than the others, to give you more of a grip in portrait mode (and it helps you pick it up the right way up without looking at the back every time).

The high screen resolution is ideal for video, but it also means you can fit a whole web page (or a Word document or ebook page) in portrait mode.

We've seen brighter and more vivid screens, but they're on high-end Sony laptops, and the screen quality is perfectly satisfactory, especially when you have the brightness up.

What is a little disappointing is the viewing angle; if you have the ExoPC slate flat on your lap it can actually look as if it's turned off. That's not a problem if you have it in the promised dock, but we did sometimes wish it had a built-in kickstand.

Connections

Apart from the dock connector on the bottom, all the ports are tucked away at one side of the screen: an audio socket for when you want to use headphones or a microphone; two USB ports; an SD card slot (which you can use for extra storage or just for transferring images from a camera) and a mini-HDMI port. This gives you full 1080p output, so you can drive a projector or a big-screen TV from the tablet.

There's a SIM slot on the side too, although our review model didn't have a 3G module. The power socket is tiny and, while it's far larger than the iPad charger, the power brick is unusually small and light for a PC (smaller and lighter than the adapter for the Sony VAIO P, for example).

If you end up at the Windows boot screen faced with a menu – long before the touch drivers have loaded – you don't need to plug in a keyboard; the light sensor in the top left corner also marks a touch button that you can tap to scroll through menus and press for five seconds to use as an Enter key.

It's a nice touch to mask one of the few remaining areas where Windows creaks on a touch-only device – everything else, even the BIOS, works with touch. Even so we'd like to see a hardware rotation button, hardware volume controls and a mute button.

The power button on the back falls comfortably under your hand when you're holding the tablet in landscape mode (you do have to get used to tapping this rather than pressing for too long, which wakes the tablet up then puts it back to sleep straight away).

And although centuries of books and magazines have conditioned us to use tablets in portrait mode, the ExoPC user interface means that you'll spend quite a lot of time using it in landscape mode.

Everything in Windows 7 – even jump lists – works with your finger, and there are some nice touches, such as customisable 'flicks'. If you just want to play media, Windows Media Center is a nice finger-friendly interface.

But there's a limit to the number of apps and websites you can comfortably pin to the task bar, and picking through the Start menu or typing to search isn't nearly as convenient without a mouse and keyboard.

To help with that, the Slate comes with a custom interface for organising and launching apps and URLs; a grid of 77 circles into which you can drop icons for Windows apps, or Flash and Silverlight apps from the ExoPC 'store' (these run in the ExoPC interface), as well as URLs that will open in the ExoPC browser.

You can drag icons around to arrange them (and drag them off to the side to remove them) and stack them onto the equivalent of sub-folders, each with their own background so you can keep track of where you are (and a home button at the side to get you back up a level).

The circle interface is fun and friendly; you can arrange icons in groups or create multiple pages, depending on how you like to organise things.

It has its own finger-friendly file browser and a web browser that's a very basic interface to IE 8 (you can search and type in URLs, but not open multiple tabs or even save bookmarks).

Open apps appear as circles on the right of the screen, along with the status icons from Windows; slide an app off the screen to close it. When you want the Windows interface, you tap a Windows button in the corner (or a power button to close the interface, which is just a Windows application and is fast and responsive).

It's easier to use than it is to describe, and it's so intuitive that going back to double-tapping to open icons in Windows can be confusing (of course you can always change Windows to use single clicks).

However, there are some oddities and rough edges.

For example, adding your own icons isn't simple enough yet. It's easy if you want an icon for one of the dozens of games, utilities and simple apps that are in the ExoPC store; just tap the '+' button at the top of the screen and scroll through the categories, then tap again to add the icon (the apps are either already installed or on the web – and some are icons for Windows apps such as the volume control and Windows Mobility Center).

The games range from bizarre to addictive; the apps tend to be very simple, such as calculators and sketching tools.

But to add a Windows app, you have to select it in the file browser and then tap the arrow key in the panel that pops up.

This also works for sites you've saved as favourites in IE – but if you want a nice graphical icon for either an app or a website, you need to write an XML file (a short and simple XML file, but still an XML file) to add it to the ExoPC Store on your tablet.

ExoPC is planning to make that much easier, and to add other features (such as its own interface for controlling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, screen brightness and rotation – which you currently have to do by opening the Windows Mobility Center).

Until then – easy as it is to use – the ExoPC interface is probably going to appeal more to enthusiasts than mainstream users. But it's developing fast, it looks delightful, and it's an excellent approach to making Windows touch-friendly without getting in the way.

Apart from the smaller storage, the ExoPC slate has a similar specification to a high-end netbook: the relatively speedy 1.66GHz Atom N450 with the Broadcom Crystal HD 1080p graphics accelerator making up for the GMA 3150 integrated graphics, especially for games and videos.

Even over wireless, HD video is crisp, detailed and smooth, and the widescreen aspect ratio makes it a joy to watch video (the sound from the twin speakers is nice and clear too).

BBC iPlayer on an 11-inch screen could be the nicest way to watch TV on your own that we've seen (when you're not in front of your big-screen TV).

The Atom processor copes effortlessly with the kind of applications you're going to want to use on a device with no physical keyboard – and that means painting in ArtRage, looking at photos, watching videos, reading documents and checking over spreadsheets in Excel or taking notes in OneNote as well as browsing the web and playing Flash games

Blame the Intel graphics drivers for the fact that the screen flickers to black when you change the rotation (the same thing happens on the Core i5 HP EliteBook 2740p so it's not a performance issue).

We had 10 hefty applications open before the system started to feel sluggish and, although there is a fan, the Slate never once got hot to the touch during our tests. It's powerful enough for Skype calls and video, too (although the webcam is a little on the dark side).

Touch and handwriting

The responsiveness of the touchscreen helps here; whether you're tapping apps and playing games in the ExoPC UI, swiping through web pages, using the Windows 7 'flicks' to copy and paste or zooming into photos, there's very little lag from the touchscreen.

Install the Kindle software and you have an excellent ebook reader (although you'll want to rotate the screen and put the Windows taskbar back at the bottom of the screen).

Some Windows 7 controls are just too small for comfort – especially the close button on Windows Media Player when you have it in fullscreen mode – but we didn't find anything we had to resort to a mouse or stylus for.

We were even able to finger-write the odd web address and Journal note when there wasn't a stylus to hand.

Some ExoPC models come with a capacitive stylus; we tested ours with the popular BoxWave stylus which has a large rubbery finger-like point.

This lets you draw finer lines than using your finger, and it's certainly easier to write with a pen. But a capacitive stylus doesn't give you the same smooth and fluid inking experience as the active Wacom-style pens we're used to on tablet PCs.

Also, you can't rest your hand on the screen while you're writing, so your handwriting isn't likely to be as neat (it's possible to write drivers that reject the large impressions from your hand in favour of the tip of the pen – HP managed it on at least one consumer tablet PC that we've tested – so this could improve, but it's tricky to get right).

Writing a few words is quite fast and easy – a file name or a URL. You could jot down a to-do list in Windows Journal or OneNote quite happily (oddly, the handwriting recognition in Journal seemed a little more accurate with the stylus than OneNote, which usually does better at recognising poor handwriting).

But with the current drivers, taking handwritten notes in a meeting or a lecture is just a little too awkward – which is disappointing, because the handwriting recognition in Windows should be a major advantage for Windows tablets (especially because you can search handwritten OneNote notes like any other document, without converting the ink).

Typing on screen is actually more effective than writing. The multi-touch screen has two points of contact; that means you can hit one key right after another on the onscreen keyboard and still get accurate results rather than having to hunt and peck the way you might expect.

The predictive text in Windows 7 helps here. An onscreen keyboard is never going to give you the same speed as a physical keyboard, but it's perfectly usable – and the screen resolution is high enough for you to dock the keyboard even in landscape mode (or leave it floating) and still see enough of your window.

Battery life

The large screen, and the fact that Windows needs an x86 processor rather than the power-sipping ARM core that's in the iPad (and just about every smartphone), mean that Windows tablets have to balance battery life against being light enough to carry and hold.

At 950g the ExoPC Slate is about 25% heavier than the 730g iPad 3G, and you'll probably notice that if you're holding it in one hand for a long time – or even if you have it on your lap in approved iPad-fashion and need to hold it at the right viewing angle – but it's not too heavy to be usable and we'd say the same for the admittedly limited battery life.

With the screen brightness right down in 'Power saver' mode the ExoPC promises four and a half to five hours of battery life or four hours in balanced mode with a reasonable screen brightness.

Unlike some PCs, it actually delivers close to the promised battery life in continuous use with Wi-Fi on (tested across a mix of games, Windows apps, web browsing, streaming music and video).

As with an iPad, you're more likely to dip in and out of using the tablet during the day than to sit down and work with it for hours (unless you get completely absorbed in a game) and four hours is long enough for just about any movie.

You can save power by hibernating; the fast SSD means it resumes from hibernation in under 20 seconds, but sleep is unusually frugal and, once you get the hang of how hard to tap the power button, it wakes up in under a second.

It doesn't compete with the iPad's 10 hours, but to get that with a PC you'd have to put up with the weight of a six-cell battery. Until Atom processors need less power or battery chemistry improves, PC tablets aren't going to do much better than this.

If you're not a Windows 7 fan, the ExoPC Slate won't make you throw up your hands and praise Microsoft for inventing the tablet PC in the first place.

Compared to the iPad, it's heavier, the battery lasts half as long, the ExoPC interface doesn't do enough to keep you out of Windows for ever and there are plenty of places where Windows and Windows apps betray the fact that they were designed to work with a keyboard.

But if what you're looking for is a Windows tablet that gives you the freedom to run your familiar applications (and any Flash games you want on a decent-sized screen), then the ExoPC Slate does a very nice job – particularly if you're already comfortable using touch with Windows.

We liked:

The beauty of Windows is that if you want the Slingbox Player to watch your TV remotely, or BBC iPlayer, or the Sky Windows Media Center app, or the full Microsoft Office, or Remote Desktop for checking a work system, or Skype or just about any other application, you can get it (Angry Birds is on the way for Atom too).

The touchscreen is responsive enough to make the touch keyboard usable even if it doesn't stop it being fiddly.

Windows Media Centre comes into its own on a touchscreen (the big buttons work even better than with a remote control) and while it needs more work, the ExoPC interface simplifies launching and navigating apps – and doesn't pretend that Windows 7 doesn't need any help.

We disliked:

You can't get away from the fact that battery life on lightweight PCs is disappointing; the Broadcom accelerator and SSD help as much as they can, but for this size and weight we want to be seeing nine or ten hours, not four or five.

The power button is sometimes a little too fiddly and we'd like either a hardware button to rotate or automatic rotation with a button to lock the screen in place when you want to.

And handwriting with a capacitive stylus isn't yet the fluid and intuitive experience we're used to on tablet PCs with active styluses.

Verdict:

If you've been waiting for a usable Windows 7 slate, the ExoPC Slate is close to what you've been waiting for. There are some rough edges (especially in the ExoPC user interface) but the company is busy smoothing them out.

It's possible to make a better Windows tablet than the ExoPC Slate, but (unless you're happy with a keyboard you have to fold out the way) no-one has done a better job yet.