Tablet PC Review : First Experiences

SlashChick’s first review of her new Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC.

My tablet PC arrived today (Monday) after being shipped out from SoCal a couple days ago. (I knew that tracking number that said it would be delivered on Friday wasn’t telling the truth.) I unpacked it to find it lighter than I had imagined (it weighs in at somewhere around 4.5 pounds, which is definitely a step up from my 3-pound Thinkpad, but worth it.)

I opened it up, and to my dismay, pretty much the entire surface around the keyboard was covered with garish red stickers advertising different capabilities of this Tablet PC. I spent the next 10 minutes picking off stickers (3 Toshiba stickers, 1 Nvidia, 1 Energy Star, 1 Intel, and 1 Winders.) Once all the gunk was gone, I plugged it in and turned it on. I went through the Windows setup, clicked Next a bunch of times, and was dumped into XP. XP did detect my wireless network, but it’s not like it’s that challenging — it’s an access point called “default” with no encryption or security of any sort. It then prompted me to install a bunch of updates (thankfully, it comes with XP SP2 already installed) and reboot. After rebooting, I finally got my first experience with the Tablet PC interface.

The first thing that hit me was that this makes computing a lot more interesting. Along with “interesting” comes “learning curve”, as you have a pen that can perform several different functions, as well as several different (and some very weird) butons along the side of the screen. You can use these buttons in Tablet PC mode. I was too tired to figure them all out, but one of them acts as a mini-joystick, and one closes the window that’s in focus. There are also a bunch of pen motions you can do while holding down the button on the side of the pen to do things like Alt-Tab, Maximize, and New Document. I wasn’t quite expecting such a new way of doing things, so it threw me for a bit.

Back to the laptop itself. The screen is very bright (much nicer than the Thinkpad) and the 1400×1050 resolution is definitely nice. I’ll have to bump up the text to Large Fonts to really work with it, but that’s OK — that’s what I do on my home desktop too. I had a very positive experience with the keyboard. I love the tactile feel of my Thinkpad, but the darn Ctrl button isn’t in the lower left-hand corner like it should be (no, some genius at IBM made that key “Function”.) I was worried that the keyboard wouldn’t be as nice as the Thinkpad, but in fact I feel it’s even nicer — the Ctrl key is in the right place and they’ve moved the Windows key out of my way. (I use an IBM Model M “clicky” keyboard here on my home PC, and it has no Windows keys at all. I wouldn’t have it any other way!) The keyboard keys are spaced nicely and it’s really a joy to type on. The slightly bigger form factor really makes for a much nicer keyboard layout. I have small hands, but even I felt cramped on the Thinkpad sometimes. No such problems exist with the Toshiba.

I flipped the screen around and it flipped into portrait mode. This is a pretty cool feature — for those of you who are not familiar with how a convertible Tablet PC works, you grab the screen, turn it to the left, and it folds down and snaps on top of the keyboard. Toshiba’s software then orients to rotate the screen so it’s like you’re holding a real paper tablet. This is where those nifty buttons come in handy… the little joystick lets you scroll up and down, for instance. I played around with entering website URLs with the pen, and although the handwriting recognition was good, bookmarks will definitely become a lot more critical on the Tablet PC than they currently are on my desktop. Once the website was loaded, however, surfing was easy and intuitive with the pen interface and the little buttons.

My first impression of my new Toshiba M200 Tablet PC is thus summarized as follows: It has a bit of a steeper learning curve than I expected, but it looks like a great product overall. It’s definitely unique and will be very fun to take to meetings and such. The fast processor and great screen will also make it worthwhile as a standard laptop. I’m not regretting the decision to upgrade. I give it a 9/10 based on my first impression, and I will update later with additional information as I continue using it.