Just Got a New Tablet PC!
I've spent the last couple of days moving my system over to a new Toshiba Portege M205 Tablet PC. I haven't had a whole lot of time to investigate the many cool things bundled with the system yet but some immediate impressions have already been made:
- Awesome battery life! I brough the tablet to the radio show this morning. After two hours on air with the tablet on the entire time (using wireless), I still had nearly two hours of battery left. Wow! My old laptop would have been about out of juice.
- Great WiFi. The Centrino chipset in this tablet is 802.11 a, b, abd g and the signal is strong anywhere in my office, home, or at the radio station. Nothing less than a "very good" signal anywhere in any of these locations.
- High resolution display. This unit has a 12.1" screen with 1400 x 1050 pixel resolution. It takes some getting used to. Everything is really small but amazingly sharp. The display is powered by a dedicated nVidia G-Force 5200 FX with 32 MB of dedicated RAM and performance is quite good.
Some adjustments were necessay to make this screen workable. Thanks to Omar Shahine's tip (he just got essentially the same unit), I bumped the standard display resolution from 96 ppi to 120 ppi and that's made a world of difference. I'm sure there are addional tweaks I can make. But the unit has more than sufficient horsepower to drive both the built-in display and my 18" LCD panel at work in dual display mode (extended desktop).
- Good keyboard and trackpad. The keyboard is typical Toshiba quality, which is to say it's smooth and easy to type on. I just wish they'd stop putting the DEL key down at the lower right. This is the third Toshiba laptop I've used and all have had good keyboards. The trackpad offers vertical and horizintal scrolling, forward and back function in the browser, and four programmable hot spots in the corner.
I've rediscovered the joy of the Zinio Reader for reading digital editions of some of my magazines. On a laptop, Zinio is a novelty. On the Tablet, it's actually better than the dead-tree version because I can annotate and highlight easily. It feels very natural.
Similarly, Microsot Reader and Palm Reader for ebooks are awesome on this device. I'm working my way through Neal Stephensone's Quicksilver right now and it's a real pleasure to read on the tablet.
I'm studying the manual for the trial version of Franklin Tablet Planner right now and will definitely be posting a review of this app. Mindjet MindManager, my favorite mind mapping tool, is totally ink-enabled and it's a whole new experience now that I'm actually sketching maps rather than using the mouse.
The voice capabilities of this OS and hardware are very nice, although a headset is definitely required for quality recording. The speech recognition, after only a bit of training, is doing pretty well.
Oh, and there's this very cool game called Inkball included to help get used to the pen interface. It's a nice touch.
There will be many more Tablet PC oriented posts coming. So far, I am delighted.