Which CAD vendor will be first on the slablet?

Tablets with discardable keyboards are nothing new. Several years ago, for instance, I owned an ill-fated HP convertible notebook computer whose keyboard swung out of the way, turning it into a touch-sensitive tablet running Windows. "Ill-fated," because TX1000-series suffered from a badly designed nVidia graphics chip that ruined many of them, a crisis over which HP never got around to responding.

What's new are slablets, tablets with discardable keyboards running a smartphone operating systems. ASUS and Lenovo got them running Android; Microsoft is showing its own design with Windows 8 Mobile; just Apple ain't on the scene.

With some CAD vendors all google-eyed over cloud and smartphone implementations of CAD software, who will be the first to optimize a CAD package for slabets? Or will a three-man team beat them to it.

 

Comments

[Robin Capper]

Pending actually seeing the thing run, testing with real software you could argue Microsoft is already there.
If the x86 Surface, which runs Win8 Pro, has ultrabook specs it should cope with CAD software for mobile, part time use?

[Ralph Grabowski]

Windows 8 for ARM is the start, and so it will be interesting to watch if any vendor ports his CAD software from 8086 to ARM.

[Allan Behrens]

It'll obviously be easier for current software developers to augment (add to) their GUIs to take advantage of Win8 Pro so one can assume that there'll be apps on that in the near future. The Microsoft pad certainly (on paper) looks like it will be competitive in all but third party ecosystem (in its early days). As for take-up on Win8 ARM, iOS (Pad) and Android it'll be interesting to see if take-up will include 'new' entrants in addition to 'new' software from established players. New software development techniques/tools for these platforms help lower the barriers to technology entry on (commoditising?) elements of the (engineering) software market; but technology isn't everything is it?

[cad kurs]

Generally recognized as true :)