Anyone tried Tablet PC?

39 thoughts on “Anyone tried Tablet PC?”

1. My boss has a tablet, a slower, older Compaq TC1000. I still steal it every time I get the chance during meetings, etc. It’s a very natural way to intract with the PC, and is useful in airplanes, walking the halls, and other situations where a laptop would be unwieldy. Wish I had one back in college. A few tips:

   – Get one with a built-in media slot that is compatible with your digital camera.
   – Wifi. 802.11g preferable.
   – RAM, RAM, RAM. Max it out. Matters more than processor speed for most applications.
   – Get one with a deteachable keyboard that can swivel between tablet and clamshell mode.
   – Avoid the Transmeta processor. Too slow.
   – Lots of free tablet utilities are starting to show up. Seek them out.
   – Car power adapter, if available, is very useful.
   – Don’t bother with expensive add-on CD/DVD drives. Just get a USB drive at your local CC/BB/Frys if you need one.
   – Don’t fret about hard drive space. You can always get a USB external drive later or upgrade the hard drive. I have an XS-Drive Pro that doubles as photo storage with its built-in media readers. High-speed USB 2.0 is *very* fast. Not as fast as IDE, but fast enough.
   – Some people swear by Microsoft OneNote, an Office add-on that has some pen capabilities and will have more in the future. I can’t vouch for it personally, but it looks neat.

   The next version of the Windows XP Tablet Edition OS (a free upgrade) is due out this summer I think, it supposedly adds a lot of feature enhancements and bug fixes.

2. The Compaq tc1100 is very nice. I tried it out and you cradle it in your arm and write on it using natural handwriting. The handwriting recognition is very good. You can switch from landscape to portrait on the desktop. The chassis has got a particularly nice fit and finish.

3. I agree with Richard on most counts. I have the M200 and find it almost perfect. I would disagree on one count – for the next couple years it is still worth having a writeable CD drive. Especially if you’re going to be going overseas or places that might have cpus a few years old… Having that CD can be the only way to transfer data from standalone PCs with no accessible USB 2.0 port. The ‘thumb drives’ are nifty, but still on the leading edge of the market, so not everyone has a cpu that can use them (e.g., it’s only been a couple years since they’ve been putting USB ports on the front of desktop machines)
   Still the M20X line is a strong one, and the ability to jot notes and pictures is invaluable to someone who doesn’t necessarily think in conventional ways.

4. I have that Toshiba Portege m200 you linked to.

   I don’t like it or pretty much any Windows XP Tablet PC-based tablet computer. Here is why:

   1. Text input is pen based. OneNote has some gesture support. Other than that, you are pretty much resigned to having to use the pen as a mouse. This might seem fine when you think about it, but you lose the scroll wheel and right mouse button (sure, you can click and hold and hold and hold), but if you are used to using a computer quickly, it gets tiring just as quick. Mouse movements are accelerated and exaggerated on screen. Pen movements are one to one on the screen. You find yourself wanting for a mouse or a trackpad.

   If you are thinking that it will act like a big Palm or Pocket PC (or a Newton!), then you will be disappointed. Those operating systems user interfaces are designed to be driven through pen input. The Tablet PC is at best a grafting on to the existing Windows user interface.

   2. LCD screens are optimized for horizontal display – they are clear from side to side, but not as clear from top to bottom. When you turn it to portait mode, you get greatly reduced side to side readability. This could be useful on a plane if you don’t want the person next to you reading the screen, I suppose, but then you are back to entirely pen input.

   3. It isn’t smaller than a really good Windows laptop. You might assume it would be since it lacks an internal optical drive, but it isn’t. It isn’t lighter, either.

   I have the m200 and an IBM ThinkPad T41 (and an old IBM ThinkPad 600x). The T41 is the best Windows laptop I have used.

5. Willie: Losing that right mouse button sounds painful. Every now and then I’m asked by someone to help them with their Macintosh and, without being able to mouse right on an object I’m totally at a loss. Still… I could plug in an external mouse for when I’m sitting at a desk, no?

6. i own the toshiba m200 and i am very pleased with it. Willie is incorrect in his assertion that there is no right mouse button. The pen that ships with the m200 has a button that acts as a right mouse button. And you are correct that you can also use an external mouse. The handwriting recognition is excellent; i find it a very effective input system. and since the m200 is a convertible model, it is very easy to switch to the traditional laptop mode and use the keyboard for text input.

7. All of Willie’s criticisms are valid, but I still think the new input method is _so_ beneficial that you’ll find the Tablet worthwile. The forthcoming improvements in the “Tablet Input Panel” (TIP) are striking — handwriting recognition is much better. Some pens have a button on the barrel that serves as a “right button,” but even more significantly (IMHO) is that many programs use CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT more often than you think; it’s quite hard to “drive” Photoshop with a pen, although it is, of course, perfect for laying down strokes.

   Another point to be made is that it is impossible to ignore how _slow_ handwriting is versus typing. Pens are absolutely fantastic in meetings: quiet, unobtrusive, sufficient to capture a thought. But even in a coffee shop, you’ll likely switch over to keyboard mode (if you get a convertible, which I would strongly suggest).

8. Joe is right. There is a button on the pen for right clicks. I kept bumping it until I learned to hold it where I didn’t bump it. It then became not so useful to use the button. What I really miss is the scrollwheel. (Which is why my Macs have Microsoft mice on them. In fact, I bought a OEM pack of them and I give them to my friends with Macs when I go to help them out. :-))

   If you do get a Tablet PC and need a notebook mouse, I completely recommend the Microsoft Notebook Optical. It is light and small and tracks well. It is also a neutral mouse, so it is good for lefties as well.

   One thought that I should have written earlier. The people I personally know who are really happy with their Tablet PCs are people who predominantly using software with checkboxes, radio buttons, lists, and are not too text entry oriented.

   I would strongly recommend you find someone near you who has one and try it out. I get the sense that a Tablet PC is not something that people feel lukewarm about. Plenty of people love theirs. I dislike mine. (Did I mention how much better the keyboard on the T41 than on the Portege?)

9. I owned the Toshiba that you linked to for a few weeks. I don’t entirely agree with the assertions of the other posters. My thoughts:

   1. The system was very compact and much lighter than my other two laptops (Sony 16″ monster and Compaq Presario X1000 widescreen). It also felt very *solid* — the case was tight on the components and there wasn’t much jiggle. It was a pretty comfortable machine to lug from the office to the car and here and there.

   2. I found the pen to be a great way to surf the web and use XP in general. The only problem is that my totally insane handwriting made it really difficult to write using the thing. Most people can’t read my handwriting under regular circumstances so I didn’t expect the PC to be able to, despite my efforts at being more regular. I could NEVER get it to understand “haha” for instance. It worked perfectly for my girlfriend.

   3. It seemed pretty fast and the wireless worked fairly well. I believe it also had an SD slot which I really appreciated.

   4. It has a cool mode where you use it as an e-book by closing it and using two buttons on the screen to scroll up/down. Very cool, if I had any long reading to do.

   5. The keyboard is a little cramped but has a good feeling. I got pretty good throughput on it.

   Ultimately I returned it because I could get more bang for the buck elsewhere and the tablet features weren’t super useful to me (I’m usually just sitting alone coding). It was $2,300 after all. If the handwriting recognition had been more effective for me I would have kept it.

10. I share an Acer Travelmate with another person (zesty.ca). The hardware is a little wonky — keyboard’s unreliable (especially problematic in Emacs), sound is funky, no APM support (requires ACPI, which is a little flaky), etc. I like the pen UI, and it’s nice and light. I think it could be a really cool platform with the right software.

11. Philip –

    The main downside of tablets is the screen resolution – virtually all run at 1024×768. For many activities this is fine. I’m a programmer – like you – and for programming 1024×768 just doesn’t work, especially if you’re used to 1600×1200. You might find this is too restrictive, I did…

    Ole

12. It seems like this is a repeat of a topic a couple of months back …

    Philip: On the Mac you hold the control key down while clicking to get the same functionality as right clicking (or you just buy a two-button mouse, which work fine on Macs, if that’s too much work for you).

    Willie: You need to stick with the stylus input for a while, but it becomes easy and addictive. There are plateaus you reach (after about 3 days, 1 month, 6 months) where is gets more and more natural to use. You can program the buttons on the stylus, and getting to where you can easily use them takes a little while, but it comes. Number 1 stylus trick: you don’t touch the screen with the stylus most of the time: rather, you rest it on your finger and slide your finger on the screen, with the stylus tip hovering abut a millimeter or two above the surface of the screen; then you rotate your hand to the left to click or drag.

13. I think you can make a right-click on a mac-mouse by holding down “control” while you click and also I used a windoze two buton mouse on a mac once by usb port and the right click worked. don’t know why they don’t just ship tw-button mice with macs.

14. Talk to the guys that make Penny Arcade (http://penny-arcade.com). Their artist got a Tablet PC a while ago just for the hell of it. Before he used to sketch by hand, then scan and do the final art in Photoshop. Now he does the sketching from the Tablet and he loves it.

15. Phil, You can get the HDD Ultrabay adapter for ThinkPad and install a second hard drive. This solves capacity problem (the drives are hot swappable, so you can carry multiple, like CF cards). Also it helps if one drive fails you are not going to lose all data at once.

16. Take a look at the new Motion Computing M1400. We just bought one of them and a Portege M200, but neither has arrived yet. I’ve played with precursors to both at several converences during the past 4 months and am pretty hyped. I’ve not spoken to a user yet who’s not completely converted. Look at tabletpc buzz for the evangelists.

17. Philip: Very excited to learn you will be in Peru and Ecuador later this month. I have been dying to meet the only blogger consistently out-hitting me on the Harvard Law roster. Plus, I have been searching Technorati and Feedster for other Ecuadorian bloggers and have come up with zip so far.

    If you are going to be anywhere near Manta, we have a beautiful place on the beach, with a guest room with 4 beds, cable TV, and a reliable, if slow, internet connection. It would be great if we could hook up – Berkman South….

    If this is a possibility email me and I will send address and phone number in Manta….

18. My work notebook is a Toshiba M200 and I think it’s great. It’s got a solid case, the screen is bright, the screen does do high resolution 1400×1280 (and looks great), it converts easily and it’s light weight (I don’t even notice carrying it around between meetings).

    I use the pen input mode primarily for notes in meetings and I don’t even bother trying to have it recognize my hand writing because I don’t feel the need to have my notes in machine readable text. My secondary use for pen input mode is to discretely read mail during meetings.

    The downside for me is that it only has a touchpad and not a nipple/trackpoint/eraser head which you’re probably used to from your IBM notebook.

19. Philip-

    I purchased the Toshiba Portege 3500 eleven months ago and have been generally pleased with its results. The system that you have linked to is slightly more impressive in its Pentium M chip (rather than a 1.3 P3-M) and expanded hard drive capacity, yet I believe the real decision sits in your “belief” for the TPC form factor and whether you’ll gain from it. Although I could try to make generalizations of the system, I can only really present my experience as a student but hope that it is of some help.

    My intentions at the time were to purchase a second lightweight notebook with the ability to take notes when I otherwise might not. As a CS student I was thinking that I could use MS OneNote to eventually build up a collection of all my course notes and not resort to loose-leaf paper, and then reap the benefits around exam time of having everything in one place, with a searchable index, to assist in studying.

    So here I am, one academic year later, in the middle of exams. I have maybe 25% of my notes on the Tablet, which was useful for diagrams and other notes from a few chalk-and-talk classes. But it really was not useful for that, even with the beauty of the OneNote application.

    As a student, the unanticipated outcome was the removal of the “barrier” between my instructors and me. Although taking notes is often slower than typing, it’s nearly a silent operation on the Tablet; instead of keeping my eyes on the screen I am more often focused on my professors and able to engage in conversation. Finally, it is discrete – having the system on the desk allows me to check bank statements or chat with classmates during the more dry lectures.

    As you travel often, you may also find it a “fun” system for reading in its portrait mode; it is convenient while sitting at the local cafes. Taking in the web with the pen & side buttons is amazing. Everyone has a very strong opinion of Tablet systems and I would recommend physically finding one from a friend and borrowing it for a few days to really make the best recommendation, echoing what others have said here. I give mine a thumbs up.

    Regarding Toshiba machines in general: In one particular course this year, there are 18 of 40 students using notebooks. Of that, 7 of us have the Toshiba tablet models; 1 has an older Compaq TC1000, and the rest are using traditional notebooks. I believe that at least vouches for Toshiba’s quality and ability to compromise between a Tablet factor and a useful, powerful notebook.

20. Thanks to everyone for convincing me to jump into the pool. I placed my order. Amazon’s statement that it “usually ships within 24 hours” seems not to have come true but maybe it will ship within 48 hours and I’ll have it on the 16th.

    Michael: I can’t see your email address! This software is so spam-proof that not even a publisher can see email. So drop me a note at philg@mit.edu if you want to meet up. So far the schedule is just Quito, Galapagos, Peru.

21. I have a TC1000. I bought it new on Ebay for $1100 primarily because I wanted a GPS moving map display for when I fly (that’s how I came to your site) but didn’t want to lay out $1000 for a dedicated handheld. I like it and use it more than my home desktop. I got real busy at work so I hadn’t had a chance to use in it in the airplane until recently. I think its going to work out great. I use RMS flight planning software which transfers the plan to the sister software, Vista, for moving map display. I use a USB gps unit ($60 on Ebay) that works well, though I’m thinking of upgrading to a bluetooth unit to eliminate a wire in the cockpit. The only issue is the display can get washed out a bit in bright sunlight, but its still visible.

    Hope that helps,

    Scott

22. Phil why do you need such a big hard drive? I’ve only got 40 and I have tons of mp3s and videos and other stuff but it’s still got plenty of room left.

23. Joe – good lord, never ask a man why he needs a bigger hard drive! If PG needs a bigger hard drive then that’s what the man needs!

24. Joe: You’re the kind of guy for whom Hitachi has decided that it won’t bother going over 80 GB! I don’t keep videos on my laptop but I do like to have a big classical music collection and it is all at 160 Kbps. That will probably grow to 40 GB over the next year or two. A cheap digital SLR produces 10 MB RAW images. So every time you take 100 pictures that’s another GB down the drain. I could probably get by with 80 GB but it doesn’t seem worth the hassle of reinstalling all of my apps just to go from 48 GB to 80 GB. But today I will reinstall all of my apps just to go from XP to Tablet…

25. it do the tamplate of jpg in xp what’s wrong with that/?

26. it do the tamplate of jpg in xp what’s wrong with that/?

27. Do get a Tablet PC, but make sure it is a model with a keyboard that is attached most of the time and is easy to use like a laptop. The Fujitsu/Motion/Toshiba ideas of moving to totally pen-based is unrealistic, because most software doesn’t work that well with the pen, and because you may not realize it, but you type a lot faster than you write by now.

    The HP TC-1100 is a gorgeous machine that has the speed. Don’t get the TC-1000.

28. Philip, Get a Macintosh 17″ Powerbook and the leave the boring Windows generation. It has everything and works beautifully.

    I am not sure where you are these on your hunt for the PDA. I have started using iPOD as my PDA. It doesn’t let me write, but who cares.

29. Get a ThinkPad T-41 with the long life battery. I think there is a 80 Gig drive. But the killer feature is the battery. I got 7:45 the other day, and when the dust settles, you are only as good as your battery….

30. Phillip, when you receive your new M200, make sure you go to Internet Explorer, Tools, Windows Updates and run all the Critical and Recommended updates. Next, install Windows XP Service Pack 2 RC1, it includes the beta of Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004 (Lonestar). If you’re converting your handwriting to typed text, you will see a dramatic improvement in recognition over the original OS release. Of course, saving your ink notes is very useful and you can search through them too.

    You can see an image of Lonestar at: http://www.tabletpcpost.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&req=viewdownloaddetails&lid=80&ttitle=Windows_XP_SP2_RC1_Technical_Preview

31. Okay, I’ve got the machine now. I can’t figure out, when answering email with handwriting, how to do a “carriage return” with the pen and expand the area of writing. Sometimes it seems to lock up so that moving the pen over the main pull-down menus has no effect. It is very confusing. One bright spot: I was drafted into participating in an MIT event last night. I couldn’t get the machine on MIT’s network because you have to go through so many gymnastics to gain access to their sacred 802.11b system (visitors to MIT need not apply!). I handed the computer to one of the undergrads and he made it work. We were sitting in a circle of 8 undergrads and me. I thought I would impress them by letting them play with my fancy new toy. I asked “Who hasn’t used TabletPC yet?” Nobody responded.

    In the How to Get Rich Running a Popular Web Site, my friends at photo.net tell me that Amazon has already recorded the purchase of this $2500 and allocated a referral fee. photo.net is now $10 richer.

32. The original tablet tip doesn’t allow simple carriage returns. I’d go download Windows XP sp2 for the new interface. While it’s still in Beta, it’s quite stable.

33. i like this toshiba!!!

34. i like this toshiba!!!

35. How about another 40GB of HD space? Toshiba just announced a 100GB 2.5″ drive: Press Release. Not quite the 160GB you were looking for, but getting there. If the tablet PC uses a standard drive, then this might work.

36. I like my acer TracelMate C100. Its better than all my pda’s even under Windows XP.
    Since now 512 MB RAM-chips are available (yes were still in europe and yes things to much longer….) it works like a charm, even under RAM hungry Windwos XP. It’s a timer saver. Bevore i’ve spent hours to scann my notes, diagrams, etc. now i draw them directly. You should, however spent for at least one extra battery and the external loader (a bit bulky and made for a different model, but it’s worth the few extra bucks, and you always have a full charded battery at hand).
    There are sever usefull Programms for Tablte-PC available. The on in like most is MindManger 5 for Tablet PC’s since it’s more natural so draw mind maps with the pen than with the mous.
    The acer TravelMate C100 is good enough for the day work, even with it’s 1024 x 768 resolution. And its light and works great for surfing while in bed or in the bath :-). The “old” Processor ist good enough for most of the things, but RAM is important. Get as much as possible (I’ve spennt 300 EUR on 2 x 512 MB chips).
    I never leavy the house without my acer TravelMate C100.

37. I’m considering purchasing a tablet PC. You’ve had yours five months and I, perhaps others as well, would be interested to read your impression of the tablet PC. What do you like? What could be improved? What were your expectations and how did it meet them? Thanks.

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