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What Kind of Tablet PC to Buy?
nic barajas asks: "I'm going to be attending college this fall, so I have been looking into a computer to use on campus. My preference has been to looking at the Tablet PC, although they are still in their proverbial infancy. I have been looking at a multitude of vendors, including Sager, Acer, and Toshiba. I'm looking for something that has a sizeable screen (at least 12"), decent storage (40GB+), and a long battery life. What are some of the better models on the market with these characteristics?"
Sure, you can carry it anywhere, but it still performs like crap no matter where you take it.
Who wants a tablet in reality? Laptop yes. PDA yes. Tablet? No redeming features...
the majority of the posters here will try to steer you into a different direction than tablet-pc's.
Notepad and pencil... so much easier to edit on the run.
The bonus is that when transcribing your notes into a computer for safe keeping a filing, you are effectively reprocessing the lectures you go to. One of the best study methods i know of.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
i prefer a notepad. for like 2 bucks you can also get a "pen" which you can enter in data in directly. it doesnt take much battery power either.
Really, you probably won't use it much. I've known a lot of people who have picked up PDAs or laptops for the purpose of using them in class and, after the initial novelty wore off, reverted to pen&paper. I can't think of anyone who's kept using them.
There's something to be said about a laptop for doing work while on campus, but I don't think that a tablet is worth the extra expense.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
...when you are too fucking lazy to go out and read reviews and do research on your own.
go ahead, mod me down...but c'mon...news? that matters?
oh I forgot, gotta go to news.google.com for that.
What is the driving force to spend extra dollars for a tablet over a good laptop? What do you want to do with it? If you can answer that, it might help some of the folks here provide more relevant answers. If you can't answer that satisfactorily, that should tell you something.
Check with your prospective school. See what their requirements are and what sort of discounts/deals they offer to students who buy through the university. That should factor into your evaluation.
The Tablet PC's aren't nearly as usefull as they are touted as being. Sure, you can draw driectly onto the screen.
They are like giagantic PDA's in that respect. If you want a good PC for college, get a VERY powerful system that will last you a good three or four years before showing it's age.
Take a look at one of the high-end gaming Laptops from Dell, Alienware or other high-end laptop manufacturer.
I considered tablet PC's for some of our sales staff, after taking a look at a few models, I found them quite lacking in terms on long-term performance, long-term durability as well as usability. Some of them DON'T have keyboards at all.
If you need serious portable computing power, a Tablet PC is nothing but a really fancy toy.
Other than suggest some googling to find reviews, my only other piece of advice is a question.. What makes a tablet PC better than a laptop for school? I think that may help you make your decision.
You say you need a computer at college. Get a large screen laptop (15 inches are well under 1G now). That way it can act as a decent desktop too. You'll spend far more time at your desk studying than anywhere else.
Only get a tablet PC if you will be taking a lot of graphic design oriented classes. Or just art in general. But if you have never played with a regular ole tablet on a PC, do not go out and by a TabletPC! They have specialized art based uses, and are not useful for anything else then that (maybe except signing your name). If you do not need one, save the money from a TabletPC and get a better laptop, or more batteries.
exactly!
I don't think tablets have much of a future, but laptops that convert into tablets have a wonderful future ahead of them.
Dear sir:
.although they are still in their proverbial infancy."
". .
My friend, if you use this overused roughage in college writing courses you will be be in for quite a beating.
" I have been looking at a multitude of vendors, including [three computers]."
My pre-freshman friend. Use this adjective clause in class next fall, and you will be labeled an M, for you take a guess.
I wrote a tablet PC review which might be interesting in this context.
Summary: for anything other than truly unique situations, it's not worth it.
D
I'd say don't, get a laptop instead. Reasons:
1) Unless you are quite a slow typist and quit a fast writer, you can probably type as fast or faster than you can write. Also probably far more accurately than the computer will recognise your penmanship.
2) You can get laptops plenty portable. Dell offers lots of nice, light, but respectably powerful laptops.
3) Laptops tend to cost less, for what you get. So either save the money or invest it to get more computer.
4) All the tablets I've used have quirks and problems that laptops don't. You don't want to be dicking around with something that will cause trouble when taking notes, you just want it to work.
5) You'll find that for papers, typing is much, much better. It is a much superior interfact for composing, organising, and editing large amounts of text. A large part of what you will be doing is writing papers, so keep this in mind.
6) Depending on your major, you may want to load specialised software to work at home. For example our engineers load a student version of Pspice on their systems so they needn't work in the labs. You are more likely to have compatibility problems on a tablet than a full blown PC.
So, unless there's a real compelling reason, get a lightweight notebook. You'll be far happier in the long run. DOn't let the wow factor of tablets draw you in. They are neat, but not ready for the prime time yet.
I go to the University of Wisconsin Madison, and I would advise you not to bother. Very rarely is a Tablet PC a useful accessory. I have a Dell Inspiron, and sometimes I wish I had a regular desktop PC. Fact is, you can't carry around a laptop/tablet; it gets bumped, scratched, etc in the bustle of the college world. I leave my laptop on my desk much of the time; the only time it leaves there is when I go home for the weekend or go on Student Council trips.
If your heart is really set on a tablet pc, I would advise you to grab an older generation tablet pc from ebay (like this). Or, see if you can salvage one from local companies or relatives.
If you're going to Madison, Wisconsin, contact me so you can get a students' view of things.
I use mine for college notes and stuff (including all my papers etc). Never crashes, runs MS Office (main thing you'll find yourself using) better than any machine I've ever seen. It's not a tablet, so you'll have to type, but that removes any odds of illegibility...besides, who can resist this?
Use a spiral notebook and a pen to jot down lecture notes as the traditional way. If simple illustrations are presented either on a blackboard or projection, go ahead and copy them down into the spiral notebook.
The above should work fine for most classes. With some exceptions, if you think you need a computer to 'type your notes faster than hand-writting them', you might be trying to take too many notes.
If you're taking a class like my Microprocessor Applications course where lots of code is presented that is useful in the labs, a good digital camera comes very handy. Instead of trying to handcopy the code, take a picture of the projection (obviously, with the flash off). I'm able to manage at least 1/100 shutter speed, 1/160+ IIRC so it's not too prone to camera shake. For each picture you take, indicate you've done so in your spiral notebook.
When you're done for the day, download any photo-notes to the laptop, and review your hand-written notes with them. If for some reason you wanted to archive your handwritten notes to the laptop, you could transcribe them or take pictures of them.
If you can swing it, get a second battery with your laptop for longer mobility. Other things to look for are 'legacy ports' (parallel, serial). Many new notebooks don't come with serial port, (although you could buy a PCMCIA/serial adapter) and I've seen some lacking the parallel port. You should consider these if your area of study involves using development boards.
$cat
Since it seems like we have run out of the 'Ask Slashdot to do my homework' questions, it looks like we have moved on to the 'Ask Slashdot to do my market research' phase.
I'll get the next one started: Slashdot - how do I design and install a network for an international comglomerate, integrate with legacy applications and ensure adequate security across the whole mix?
You wrote: "I use my Acer Travelmate T102i every weekday for about 8 hours a day."
...
Curious, do your classrooms have electric outlets all over? If not, how do you handle battery life? Do you carry spares, or does your schedule just work so you can recharge at the right points?
Battery life is my biggest complaint about nearly every notebook I've owned; the lead-acid battery in the Toshiba from which I type has actually been surprisingly hardy, better than any of the Li-Ions I've had in other laptops. (Who knows why?)
My 2nd biggest complaint also applies especially to tablets, which is screen brightness, but I suppose in a classroom it shouldn't be too bad
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
There are a number of reasons that CS majors generally don't need particularly powerful machines. For most work in CS, you simply aren't doing masses of computation. If you're writing something that does, you can generally run it on a powerful machine somewhere. Contrast this with, say, a mechanical engineering student, that may want to do stress analysis on their home computer to avoid having to go to a lab to do so.
Compiling code isn't a real-time, interactive task, and generally doesn't take all that long. We have pretty good systems to cache built components of software.
Furthermore, I've found that a lot of CS students know how to poke their system to run pretty efficiently, so they don't need a really jacked system.
If I had to recommend a college system...hmm.
First, laptops are popular right now, as in they're selling really strongly. Laptops can be nice, but neither are they necessary -- they tend to be more fragile, more easily lost or stolen, not very upgradable, and less comfortable to use for extended periods of time. I don't know a lot of people that do serious note-taking with laptops, though I have seen people playing games in classes with laptops. Oh, and they don't tend to be as nice for game-playing, and college dorms are a fun place to play multiplayer games. They don't seem to be a particularly necessary item. On the other hand, they do easily let you move to a lounge or library to work with someone else, they let you take advantage of more and more common wireless compus networks, and they're much easier to take home with you during the holidays.
I think that most people are going to want to upgrade their computer. They're probably going to want to upgrade at least hard drive and memory, some time in college. Since you're likely to do some upgrading, buying the fanciest system you can afford right at the start seems like a bit of a waste.
I'd recommend a quiet keyboard. Some roommates can be irritated by constant clicking. The same goes for a good pair of headphones with a long cord. College dorms are a place where you want to play speakers, but you're surrounded on all sides by people and likely have a roommate. You don't have to worry about rules about playing music too late, and it's much easier to afford really good quality headphones than really good quiality speakers.
I'm dubious about the story submitter's intention to get a tablet PC. If they're sure that that's what they want, well and good, but if they just really like the idea, I dunno if they'll be that happy with them. Tablets are expensive, less powerful than similarly-priced computers, aren't upgradeable, and really haven't caught on because folks don't seem to like them that much. The only real reason I can think of for getting a tablet is if you really want to use drawing input as a primary form of input. Frankly, for almost everything, drawing is a lousy form of input. It's slower than just about anything else. If you're taking art classes, a stand-alone drawing tablet (Wacom or similar) is inexpensive and mature.
May we never see th
Ebay for under $500
If you get yourself a notebook with a Wacom pen tablet or something like that, you could probably use handwriting (with recognition added somehow), drawing, etc. And you still will have a notebook with all the advantages of it.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.