Educate me about and recommend Tablet PCs to me

[Mycanid]

Hello all.

I have been dimly considering the possibility of my next laptop being a tablet pc. I recently saw in the "Should I get Vista now?" thread that some posters were talking about having tablet pcs. I recently saw one - the hp tx1000 that caught my interest for some reason.

While looking further I came across the Acer TMC215TMi ... wow. High powered indeed, especially for the price when compared for other things you can get tablet wise for the same money....

Could all those who have tablet pcs tell me about them. What do you use them for? What should one look and not look for in a tablet pc? What particular models should be avoided and which sought after? Which OS? Etc., etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[MarauderX]

Get a panasonic tablet. An HP may be ok, but my experience with them has been poor at best. I've put a panasonic through it's paces at work, and have to say it has taken it all and been able to pull through. Power surges, being dropped, coffee spills, being used as a foot rest in a car, etc... it still kept going without a scratch on the screen.

 

[Mercule]

I got a Gateway tablet a couple years ago and it has served me well. At the time, they edged out Toshiba a bit in performance, plus had the tempered glass (vs. acrylic) screen, so were more durable. The glass screen feels like writing with dry erase markers and the acrylic feels more like paper, FYI.

My experience with the tablet is that I really don't use it in tablet mode very often. YMMV, but I'm not sure I'd go with tablet again -- not for any technical reason, but because it just isn't worth the extra cash. Of course, one reason for that is that I use PCGen for my game and Java doesn't seem to play well with the stylus (it doesn't automatically give you the popup handwriting area). You also pay with screen real estate.

Finally, I never did get OneNote to payoff for on-the-fly note taking.

That said, if you are a handwriting type of person, then a tablet may be a great choice. If you're taking classes or something similar, then you're good to go.

 

[Mycanid]

Hey you two, thanks. Every little bit helps.

 

[doktorziplok]

question heavily whether or not you want a device that invites you and others to poke the screen. i have to use a panasonic for work and the screen is wrecked. dirt, smudges, scratches, wear marks.

 

[Plane Sailing]

As a player, one of the most interesting uses of a tablet was for mapping - the ability to have 'graph paper' showing in OneNote, and to be able to scale the view, never reach the 'edge' of the paper, and scrawl notes in important places works very well indeed.

Cheers

 

[JDragon]

Mycanid

I actually already now I want a tablet and have spent the last two week doing a lot of research.

I found a great website that has reviews and some decent forums. www.tabletpcreview.com They even have one board just for people asking ?'s about what kinda laptop they should get.

What I have discovered is you need to figure out what the top two or three things you want from it and use that as your basis. For Example: screen size, weight, battery life, HD size, what programs you want to run, cost, etc. FYI if you want a computer for Computer Games a tablet PC is not the way to go as the graphics cards are limited on 90% of them.

From what I've been reading Vista is doing fairly well on the tablets and has the tablet support built in to the Home Premium and above. Plus there are a decent # of programs that help you get the most out of your tablet.

I plan to use mine when I'm at the gaming table both as GM & player.

Right now I plan to continue to use custom made Excel sheets for characters and tracking monsters when I DM. Plus being able to easily read PDF's will hopefully allow me to cut down on the amount of items I have to print. For this reason I'm making sure I get one of the Intel Core Duo processors so it will handle the multiple programs easier.

Hope that helps some.

JD

 

[Mycanid]

It does ... and thanks for the post! I have been going to tabletpcreview.com already ... I am a daily visitor to notebookreview.com and an occasional visitor to brighthand.com already, so it was not hard to just click another tab.

For me the main issue would probably be battery life. I am looking for a 12" screen or so. I have REALLY been liking the fujitsus and lenovo's x60 tablet (would that I had a gazillion dollars to spend on one of these) ....

I have been really asking myself of late whether or no I would actually USE the tablet features on a frequent basis to justify the purchase. I know there is a learning curve in this, kinda like there is with pda's. Once you get over the curve the things are indispensable. But not everyone can get over the curve. With a pda if you cannot you have not "lost" that much money wise. A tablet is a different price range altogether ... especially the sort I would use.

Sigh ... still thinking about this and weighing it against a normal 10.6 to 12 inch long battery life standard laptop.

I have seen some stupendous values on eBay recently ... new machines for sale with three year warranties and such. Still ... the time to strike has not hit yet. Still thinking....

 

[JDragon]

Understand that.

I have been wanting to get one since they first came out, but have not had the cash.

Well timing is finally on my side, we got our taxes done and have a good refund coming along with my bonus from work. I've been give the green light by the CFO (Wife) to get one once my bonus comes in at the end of the month.

Right now my top runner is the Gateway CX210X, with a 2.13ghz Core Duo 2, 1 gig Ram (which I'll bump to 1.5 or 2 fairly soon), 80 gig - 7200RPM HD, wi-fi, bluetoth, 14' screen and 3 year warrenty & protection plan. Priced it over the phone last night and looking at just over 2k after taxes & shipping.

Good luck, I'll try to post some thoughts once I have it. But that will probably be almost a month.

JD

 

[Pyrex]

question heavily whether or not you want a device that invites you and others to poke the screen. i have to use a panasonic for work and the screen is wrecked. dirt, smudges, scratches, wear marks.

It's pretty easy to find thin clear plastic screen protectors. I've got them both for my pocketpc-phone and my DSLite, which should prevent most of the screen damage.