SteveOH

A little while ago I posted the specs of the new tablet I had purchased off eBay. I got it at a steal of about $300. It was used (a little more used than I would have preferred) but they were just cosmetic imperfections that I could certainly live with. Gotta love eBay.

But I wanted to give some time of use with the tablet before I made a decision of whether it was a good buy, my thoughts on its functionality and usability, and overall feeling of the unit.

Well, for starters I have to say that the RAM is lacking. Mine actually had 512 MB and it’s still a bit sluggish with applications running (Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0 and OneNote 2007). With both of these apps running, my system has only ~40MB of RAM free, but the processor is at around 10% usage, so the memory is the bottleneck with respect to running applications and responsiveness. However, the CPU will of course spike to 100% when writing in OneNote. This is expected, since the system must compute your movements, pen pressure and fluidity on the fly.

Other than that, I really can’t complain. I upgraded the Hard Drive to a 60GB 7200RPM drive, which runs nice and has plenty of space. Additionally, I plan on (of course) purhcasing a gig of RAM for it, at which point I’m sure she’ll run just lovely.

The usability of the tablet is awesome. I’m a student and a professional, so lugging around my 7 lbs Dell E1505 with 17″ screen is a hassle. Although it blows the specs out of the water, it’s mobility, down and dirty features for convenience (the function buttons on the screen, etc), and light weight (under 2 or 3 lbs I believe) are excellent.

Lastly, I purchased this tablet for the following purposes:

1. Light weight system to read eBooks and other electronic format books
2. System to work on school work as well as troubleshoot network / system issues

I had initially purchased a Sony PRS-500 eBook reader for ~$200. It’s a great little unit (although there’s plenty of room for improvement), but found that it was horrible for reading PDF files. And when I say horrible, I mean it. If you wanted to actually be able to read them, you would have to spend about 2 hours of format conversions, etc etc to get it to a point where it’s actually readable. 2 hours, yea right. I immediately started looking for something else. So I came across a tablet (I have a co-worker who’s always said tablets were awesome) and found this great deal on eBay. I sold my PRS-500 for and purchased the Tablet, putting the difference in cash (about $100). The tablet did everything the PRS-500 can do, and more. It’s not as light, and not as small. However, the Lifebook was made to be outside viewable (a shortcoming of LCD screens) so it’s very bright. Additionally, I can view ANY format I want, since there are free viewers out there for every format you can put a document into. PDF’s look great, and reading them off a 12″ screen (as opposed to a 6″ screen) is ideal. Additionally, I can use it at work and at remote locations, as well as take it to class. Which leads me to my third reason.

Textbooks cost hundreds of dollars a semester. This current semester my books were going to come to $300. That’s for 1 course! I had a great idea though… since I have this reader, why don’t I just download / buy the eBook versions, which are usually at a discount?! So that’s what I did. It’s awesome!

Additionally, I can use it to take notes. I don’t know about you, but I’m a geek. If I could have everything digitally and on a computer, I would. So, I take notes in class using the unit, and it’s superb. Great responsiveness, I can use colors, I can copy and paste images into them, etc etc. I can print them out if I need to (printing quality is also quite nice), and I don’t have to lug around a note book, books, and a laptop. Everything’s in the one unit!

So, I have concluded that I will never purchase another laptop.  Since a tablet (not a slate) can be both a tablet and a laptop, what’s the point of buying one that can only do one function?  Additionally, a system with dual cores should run just lovely, since one processor can concentrate on the text translation while the other runs the OS, or both at the same time to make things a lot quicker.  Dell just came out with a tablet that’s quite thin and has great specs.  The only downside I can see from the tablet is it’s cost.  Since it’s new, cool, small and light, and can be as powerful as some other systems out there, it costs more.

If you’re not a student, write a lot, or a professional who can use a light and mobile system to get work done, take notes at meetings, etc etc, then a tablet wouldn’t be for you.  Tablets are great for me though .