Rob Bushway has finally had it with the digitizer issues in the Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC. As I’ve blogged in the past, I’m frustrated by the false triggers, dead spots, erratic behavior of the digitzer too. It’s a pain if you use the Tablet features a lot.
Ideally it would be nice if Dell took the initiative here and recalled the product, offered refunds, or publicly stated that they will offer heavly discounted prices off of any updated Latitude Tablet PCs should there be one.
But all this goes beyond Dell. I’m very concerned about what might happen with the pending launch of Windows 7 betas. Here’s the problem: The Latitude Tablet PC is a rarity these days because it potentially can support multi-touch, which is a new, showcase feature of Windows 7. That’s great for Dell. The Latitude may be one of the main devices that people try Windows 7 out on for the new multi-touch features. However, if the digitizer fares no better under Windows 7 than it does now, this could be a bad beginning for Windows’ multi-touch.
In fact, the potential downside is so significant here, I’d suggest to Microsoft that if Windows 7’s multi-touch experience is poor on the Dell and there’s not any other consumer-available (and compelling) hardware that supports multi-touch, that Microsoft should pull multi-touch for now. There’s absolutely no reason to start out on the wrong foot–particularly in light of how familiar people are with multi-touch on the iPhone. If you can’t get close to this, the time is not right. Just wait a couple months for other hardware to catch up.