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Best Tablet PC For Classroom Instruction?
dostert writes "With all of the recent hype of multitouch notebooks, the Apple Tablet, the Microsoft Courier, and the CrunchPad, I've been a bit curious about what happened to the good old pen and slate tablet PCs. I'm a mathematics professor at a small college and have been searching for a good cheap tablet (under $1000) which I can use to lecture, record the lecture notes along with my voice, and post up video lectures for the class. I have seen some suggestions, but many are large scale implementations at state universities, something my small private college clearly cannot afford. All I have been able to find is either tiny netbooks (like the new Asus T91), expensive full featured tablets (like the Dell XT), or multitouch tablets, that really wouldn't allow for the type of precision mathematics needs. I know a Sympodium device would work great, but we really can't afford to put one of those in each room, so something portable would be ideal. All I've been left with is considering an HP tx series. It seems nobody has created a new tablet like this in quite sometime, and HP, Fujitsu, and Dell are just doing incremental updates to their old designs. Does anyone have experience with this?"
Don't buy a hp tx (1000, 2000 series). It will overheat, causing the gpu solder to go bad, leaving you with a dead laptop (intermittently I admit). Screens are also incredibly grainy and something has shielding issues, causing the mouse to jump around. Buy anything but a hp.
Definately Windows7 if Math is important.
There are tons of low and mid and high end slate and flip/convertable tablets that are lightweight and you can find older models from 2007/2008 for around $600 to newer top of the line models for as expensive as you want to go.
The trick is the OS, and Vista was a step up from XP TabletPC Edition, and Windows7 is another step forward with some really nice Math input tools.
Here are some of the features, scroll down to see the Math Input Panel...
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/23/ink-input-and-tablet.aspx
Also go to YouTube and search Vista Handwriting, you will find several videos of people using Vista with both Tablet PCs, and even Wacom digitizers with Vista and demonstrating how amazing the accuracy is, especially when a human can't read the handwriting, but Vista does just fine. I had a customer that signs her name so that her Capital E looks like a C at first glance, yet Vista and Win7 knew it was an E the first attempt without any training, and that is what is great, as you don't even have to go through a training process, you just start using it, and it adapts and keeps learning on the few things it might miss the first time around.
(Windows handwriting recognition system is based on 'ink' and uses all information gathered from stroke pressure to direction to speed to figure out what letter you are attempting to make, so that even if you have horrible handwritting, it will still figure out what you meant. )
Microsoft has been doing handwriging technologies since PenWindows from the 3.x days, and the XP TabletPC revamp of the technology was a new generation of computer usage. Vista and Win7 continue forward with these features included as standard features in the OSes, and all it takes is having a TabletPC/Digitizer driver installed and the features automatically just turn themsevles on.
PS The math formula stuff in Win7 is quite fun, and there are also other pieces of software from Microsoft, like the included Journal or even OneNote from Office that are amazing with a TabletPC. You can even find some really fun physics based 'object' drawing tools from Microsoft Research, and literally draw a ball and have it bounce around the screen or demonstrate gravity or motion.