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Thursday, 18 April 2013 08:06

Tablets in your practice? Oh, yes! Featured

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tablet in dental officeLast August I wrote a post entitled “Do Tablets Have a Place in the Dental Office?” 

Much has changed in the tablet arena and now anyone in the dental field can answer this question with an enthusiastic “yes”!
Windows® 8 was announced in October only to be followed by a pack of tablet offerings from the major manufactures. 

Let me make a distinction with the operating system.  There are two flavors of Windows® 8:  Windows® RT and Windows® 8 Pro.  

Windows® 8 Pro will run the full complement of standards desktop applications, while Windows® RT will run only third party applications available through the Windows® Store. 

Since my company’s software is not available through the Windows® Store, I am only interested in the tablets running Windows® 8 Pro.  

I recently had the opportunity to do some testing with the Dell Latitude™ 10 product.  It ran our software with no alterations.  It also ran ancillary products like Office® and Crystal Reports®. 

The tablet was configured with 2GB of memory and 64GB of solid state storage.  All were adequate for my needs.  I was disappointed with the performance, at times. 

The Latitude 10 unit comes with a 1.8GHz Atom ™ processor from Intel®.  The Atom™ is a low power consumption processor which does a nice job of extending the tablet’s battery life but a poor job when heavy processing is needed.  

My conclusion was that our software would need a tablet equipped with the higher speed Intel Core ™ processor. 

I know this will come at the expense of battery life and additional dollars to purchase but it should approach the performance our clients are currently used to on their laptop or desktop systems.  

Here’s a brief survey of some Intel Core ™ equipped tablets.

Microsoft Surface Pro Acer W700P Lenovo ThinkPad Helix Samsung ATIV
Processor 1.7 GHz i5 1.7 GHz i5 1.7 GHz i5 1.7 GHz i5
Memory 4 GB 4 GB 4 GB 4 GB
Storage 64 GB 128 GB 180 GB 128 GB
Cost $899 $1,049 $1,500 $1,400

 

 

 

 

 

I expect to get one of these tablets in the near future and continue our tablet testing

Tablets being in your near future will be a right click for both patients and your practice.

Read 21768 times Last modified on Thursday, 18 April 2013 09:45
Bill Hockett

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