Last you may have heard, I've been borrowing a Motion Computing LE1600 slate tablet. Well, my six-week trial period was over last Friday and I gave the unit up. But since I was such a good reviewer, the team that loans these out decided to give me another—in this case, an HP tc4200 convertible tablet.
The first part about this tablet is that it's somehwhat confusingly titled. It's technically the HP tc4200, but due to the merger between HP and Compaq, the title on the unit is technically the, "Compaq tc4200." It's also got a big HP logo on it.
The thing about it is that unlike Compaq's and HP's historical laptop offerings (which were, let's face it, crap) this is actually a very solidly assembled unit. It's probably not as sturdy as the IBM A41p unit I had while working for NMT, but it's also a hell of a lot lighter, too. So far, I've been impressed with the build quality of the case (no shoddy panels), chassis (doesn't creak when you flex it), or keyboard (no craptacular tactile feedback). Additionally, it's got three pointers: an eraser-style nub in the keyboard, a touchpad with scroll bar below the keyboard, and a tablet pen. In all, it's got three left-mouse buttons and three right-mouse buttons. Hot!
I haven't had much more of a chance to play around with this unit. I suspect it doesn't have quite the "wow" factor that the Motion did, but that's what you get when you have an attached keyboard. Right now, I'm really enjoying the fact that it can be used as a typical laptop because I'm lounging on the living room couch with the machine in my lap. This is something that was quite difficult to do with the Motion.
So there we go. Hopefully, I'll have another update sometime soon on just how neat this little laptop is.
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