LAS VEGAS—It's safe to say that you'll probably never get your hands on the sharpest tablet at CES. Panasonic's 4K tablet is an awesome proof of concept, but it has some usability issues and will likely carry a very high price tag—two things that suggest that it's going to take a generation or two before anything like it comes to mainstream businesses and consumers.
Ultra-HD, 4K screens are one of the big themes of this year's CES, as TV manufacturers try to figure out what will get consumers to upgrade from their existing HDTVs. Panasonic's tablet brings 4K to a smaller form factor and shows how high-density touch displays could work im the creative trades.
The tablet is a gigantic plate with a tapered, silver back and a huge "IPS-infinity" LCD screen on the front. It weighs 5.3 pounds, but feels heavier than that because at 18.7 by 13.1 by 0.4 inches (HWD), it's kind of unwieldy. Initially, the screen looks amazing; it's not very reflective, and has a stunning viewing angle.
The 4K tablet is a full Windows 8 Pro PC. The screen resolution is 3840-by-2560 at 230 ppi, driven by an Intel Core i5 CPU at 1.8GHz with Nvidia graphics. The tablet has 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. There's no read camera, but there's a 720p front camera for video chatting. In addition, there are two USB ports and a MicroSD card slot.
The problem with the tablet is that Windows software just isn't designed for 230ppi screens. In Photoshop, for instance, menus and tools shrunk down to be almost un-clickable. There was also tremendous lag when drawing with the touch pen on the Photoshop screen, and the tablet got quite hot on the back while I was drawing.
A custom architectural drawing app fared better. Designed specifically for the tablet, the app had appropriately-sized controls and the screen was much more responsive to the pen. I still got a bit of a feeling that the tablet was struggling with responsiveness at that tremendously high resolution, though. The architectural app also showed why you might want a bigger tablet than, say, an iPad. Architectural drawings are large, and it's great to be able to see and work on the whole thing at once.
Hands On With Panasonic's 4K Tablet at CES 2013
Where the tablet really shined was in displaying a presentation. Colors popped and a whole room could see the slides, thanks to the screen's excellent viewing angle.
The tablet uses Anoto's pen technology, which I've liked for years in the Livescribe pen-and-pad combo. Here, though, it was less impressive. The Anoto pen was bulkier and less responsive than Wacom and N-Trig pens I've seen on other touch tablets (largely because of the optical sensor tacked below the tip), and it isn't pressure sensitive. Anoto's strength is in making analog paper digital; I didn't get a feel for what it could add to a purely digital experience.
Panasonic says this tablet is a business product, but I prefer to think of it as what a business product could be. It's meant to generate ideas: the architectural drafting app synchronized two tablets so two architects could draw at the same time, for instance, and one of the tablets was set up as a gorgeous remote viewfinder for a Wi-Fi-connected camera. These are all potential uses, if not for this exact device, for high-res large tablets in the future.
The 4K tablet doesn't have a price, release date, or even a formal name yet.
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