Transmeta Webpad

Quickening writes: "At long last, the coveted transmeta webpad is available from FrontPath as the ProGear 1050 HX+. Juicy tidbits: linux 2.4, TM3200 400MHz, touchpad, 802.11b, and USB. I expect to see this kind of story on Slashdot before I run across the product surfing. These are the same Rio people that bought up the EMPEG car mp3 player." They're not exactly cheap, but they sure are nifty. I think I'll stay with my old laptop with 802.11 though.

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Here's my review of one

[Brento]

We got a demo unit a month ago for a 30-day evaluation. I set the thing up, so I'll shoot my mouth off here and let you know how it went.

We do customer satisfaction surveys - when you see a comment card in a hotel, it probably gets sent to us when you're done. We scan it, compile the comments, and give nice reports to hotel managers (among other things.)

Well, everybody wants more detailed satisfaction data, so we explored the idea of having these at the hotel front desk. When you checked out, the clerk would hand you this webpad, and you would take a survey instantly just by tapping your choices onscreen. Did you use the restaurant? (Yes/no) Then, of course, it could do things that comment cards can't: change questions based on your inputs (only show restaurant questions to people who click Yes, only show dissatisfaction questions to people who weren't happy, etc.) Anyway, that's what we were using it for - web-based surveys in a restricted environment.

First off, this thing is locked down tighter than the Pope's poop chute. After struggling with it for an hour, we called the support line only to find out that they really didn't know much about it either. When we finally got hold of someone who had a clue, he informed us that no, we couldn't change the IP address - it was DHCP-only. That should have been our first clue that this thing wasn't ready for prime time.

I couldn't tell you what version of Linux it was, because frankly, I didn't care, but you don't have access to configuration utilities anyway.

The handwriting recognition is good for a first release of the unit. (We didn't need recognition, but we played with it anyway.) IMHO, it was better and more intuitive than the iPaqs I've used.

The screen is great, very readable from all angles. It has a built-in speaker, so just for yuks, we tuned into a RealAudio station and walked around the building, using it as the world's most expensive boom box. Somehow, people were not amused. Other than Netscape, RealAudio, and a couple of obscure plugins, that was about it.

At first glance in the ads, you might think the 802.11b wireless is built in - it's not, it uses a normal PCMCIA card. FrontPath shipped them with a couple of different cards (tech support has to ask you which one you have) and we had the Lucent one, if I remember right. The coverage was absolutely phenomenal for a battery-powered unit: we could traverse most of our 35,000 sq ft building, both floors, using just one central DLink access point on the second floor. Very impressive.

Usability is pretty rough - most of the icons don't make much sense. From a physical standpoint, it's just not the right size/weight either. The weight is pretty much spread across across the entire unit, so when you hold it and write on it, you have to support it from underneath. You can't just hold it by the side, it'll flop all over the place. It's heavier than it looks, and it's awkward, too - the "easel" they give you to rest the thing on doesn't support it well enough to actually use it while it's in the easel. (Whoo, bad sentence there.)

That pricing is flexible - I think we got a quote for around $1500 for even the smallest quantity order, but I'm not in accounting so I couldn't give you an exact number.

We recommended against it just because of the ludicrous price. At that price point, we could put in small touchscreen PC's instead, and get much, much more functionality. Remember, you're paying laptop-grade bucks for a machine that only surfs the web and NOTHING ELSE.