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Review of the 8 Hour Tablet: Electrovaya Scribbler
Lisa Gade, the chief geek over at MobileTechReview.com, reports that they've
just published an in-depth review of the Electrovaya
Scribbler SC2200. "It's a
Windows XP Tablet Edition with lots of the features you'd expect on a high end
slate machine like a 12.1" screen you can write on, a Dothan 1.4GHz processor
and WiFi. But its real claim to fame is the huge capacity 10,200 mAh SuperPolymer
battery which will get you through a work day without a charge."
Because of the way the Dothan (a.k.a. Pentium M) is designed and wired with the rest of the Centrino chipset, it can do more per cycle. In fact, a good rule of thumb for Pentium-M (and Dothans, likewise) is to add one GHz or so and thats the equivalently-rated Pentium 4 speed. There's a good article on Wikipedia with more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M#Dothan
As a college student, I'll tell you that the Tablet PC coupled with Microsoft's OneNote software is a killer app for the Tablet PC. I was able to type notes, draw pictures, record a lecture as an audio clip (annotated with written notes), and grab a couple of web screenshots into a note file for my class, then catalogue and index the notes and make it all searchable. That is incredibly powerful.
That said, the recognition software is NOT crappy, it's remarkably accurate considering my terrible handwriting, and any mistakes are also easy to fix. This is assuming you have Windows XP SP2, which has updated TIP/Recognition software in it. The initial software wasn't nearly as robust.
Lithium ion is far superior to Li-polymer, Electrovaya's polymer is well known for only getting 200-300 cycles, only a year of use for business... Li-ion typically gets 500 to 1000 cycles with a nicer fade over the life cycle.
I vote for the Toshiba Portege M200 though. Much higher resolution (12.1" XVGA+ 1400x1050 pixels), faster Centrino (1.5GHz on mine, 1.6GHz on newer versions), SD card reader, PC Card slot, USB 2.0. And a very cool built-in accelerometer that is underused, but there's a demo application available called WinGimcana.
The battery life we got with Scribblers was closer to about 6 hours than eight, but it's still pretty good.
The irritating thing about them is that you have to manually turn the wireless connection on every time you boot the tablet. You can't make it automatic. Very irritating.
In addition, we did a review on one model scribbler, which met our needs (2050, I believe). By the time we got around to ordering them, they had discontinued that model and gave us newer ones (2150, I believe) Every single one of the newer ones has had major issues remaining connected to the wireless network. They are constantly dropping packets. It's possible they fixed this in the 2250, but I'd be careful before buying one.