Pacebook Tablet PC

IAmBlakeM writes "Looks like a new PC design has been released by the guys at PaceBlade. Reviewed at Anandtech, the new PaceBlade, touted as a 3in1 PC, features a Transmeta Crusoe TM5600 CPU at 600Mhz, up to 256MB of RAM, a 12.1" XGA LCD that can do 1024x768, and an "any key". Always nice to see some new designs and technology throwing curves at the norms."

Comments

No Wi-Fi?

[Punchinello]

Great looking design, but...

It seems they are missing the boat with some of the design decisions they made (ie, no Wi-Fi, no handwriting or voice recognition software). The product's usefulness is seriously limited without these two capabilities. Where's the advantage of having a tablet in your hand if you can't use handwriting or if you can't access your data?

I think they left these things out to make a more affordable product. It also made the product less desirable.

Leaves me wanting more

[Bobartig]

I was all excited when I saw this article yesterday. Then, I started reading it, and my mood just got worse and worse. The lack of native handwriting SW was a major insult. What exactly is a tablet PC for if you can't use pen based input? That, coupled with little possibility for RAM upgrade, a relatively slow processor, proprietary USB and VGA ports, supercheapo integrated video, and having menu and pivot functionality tied to WinXP sw only kinda ruined it for me. The "powered' 4-pin firewire was also a compromise in my opinion. Why use two cables to do the job of one? Especially on a laptop where cableclutter is not only frustrating and unsightly, but dangerous to the light hardware it's attached to, and the ports which tend to break easily on portables. Personally, I thought the "any key" was another slap in the face. Integrating a hardware element to deal with BSOD's (i.e. a sucky OS) is like putting a reset button on your mouse. It's not PaceBlade's fault that windows is so full of holes, but it hurts when their HW reflects that, too.

As a really minor last note, they talked about using this down the road as an LCD display/TV, but neglected to put either a TV tuner or video in onboard.

Go ahead and flame away. But in my defense, I was really excited and wanted to be blown away by this product, but couldn't find any reason this was better than one of those slim Viao offerings