Travels with a Tablet, II 

As I mentioned in my previous article, I’d been looking at purchasing a laptop of my own for some time and my first glimpse of the Tablet PC sold me that it was the way to go.  Having seen one first hand and realised the potential of it straight away sold me on them but now I had to figure out which one to buy.

Before I set out to make this decision I thought about what I really wanted from a portable device and laid out some guidelines to follow.  My main work takes place on my workstations either in the main office or at my home office so horsepower wasn’t the greatest concern, though I didn’t want a dog!  The tablets available were (and for the most part unfortunately still are) Pentium III and Transmeta based for the processor so this limited my choices somewhat.  Another key concern would be the graphics chipset – I needed an ATI or NVIDIA based chipset to ensure reliability as well as performance; particularly since the processors available aren’t rockets!  From here memory and hard drive size were the next choices – at least 512MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive were must haves for a good basic portable.  Networking came next and wireless connectivity was a must as well as on-board networking since there’s no point having it if you can’t connect to anything.  Most important of all was the battery life though – a device that lasted the distance (or at least made an effort to do so) was a must.

My criteria rapidly narrowed things down for me, particularly battery life.  Although I’m a solid Intel fan (I’m one of those folks who’s really run applications that don’t work with AMD’s) the Pentium III couldn’t hold up to the Transmeta in power consumption and performance-wise they’re similar, so Transmeta takes the choice there.  Many devices had graphics chipsets that were “okay” but not ATI/NVIDIA so this further narrowed it down to only a couple of choices.

What ultimately made the decision since there were only a handful of portables with fairly similar specifications was the form factor.  This was to be a device that would replace my leather binder, would allow me to connect to the Internet and use it easily, would support all of my general applications, would allow me to present from it, wouldn’t be a burden… The convertibles were, when all was said and done, just laptops – they have a larger form factor than a slate and the keyboard is a permanent fixture so no points for keeping it thin & light on the ground.  The slates suffer the other extreme as I can touch type to 180wpm and sometimes I need a keyboard to get everything out quickly enough.

So after reviewing the options again and again along with a friend who was looking to buy as well, we both consistently came up with the same result as the best bang for the buck device – the Compaq TC 1000.