A Real, Lightweight, Remote Interface tablet
While the concept of a tablet form factor computer is great on paper everything I’ve tried has been far too bulky for continuous use and has been impractical for work use due to abysmal battery life. (Something running on batteries must run the entire work day non-stop to be practical for work.) The fundamental problem is that while conceived as a “light” application conventional tablet designs inevitably must host a big OS and full Office suite which means the hardware excess that goes with a full-blown computer (read: laptop) must be included.
I would like an extremely lightweight, thin-client tablet. This “InfoSlate” would function as the remote display for another computer.
InfoSlate would be just a touch screen, battery, wireless interface, and the minimal hardware necessary to drive it — low-power fanless CPU, 512M RAM at very most. The final package should be thin, very thin, and light.
It doesn’t need a hard drive — add a few media slots to allow downloading data to the InfoSlate.
Unlike typical tablet designs the InfoSlate would be just the display — it would not have a fixed keyboard attached. Optional keyboards/pointing devices could be attached with USB ports.
My InfoSlate should be secure and interchangeable between work and home. Once configured for the networks it should reconnect itself in either environment and resume the previous display session. Another InfoSlate would not be able to pick up my suspended user session without manually authenticating the connection. The ability of easily suspending one session and quickly switching to another session on the same or different computer would be a bonus. Perhaps a thumbprint reader would help expedite authentication and keep my InfoSlate from being used by others.
InfoSlate should be able to run continuously for 10 hours minimum. Electrovaya has superior battery technology — check them out.
One novel idea for allowing extremely long battery life is to offer the option of an e-book type of monochrome/grey-scale display rather than a color LCD.
As a possible starting point, NoMachine works very well and is fast, secure and has a small memory footprint. It should run easily on a very small embedded Linux system.
Here are two possible STARTING points:
http://emanotec.com/medtab.htm
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/specs
Source: kenjennings
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