Some of you may have been following that I get tablets from the office on which to test Vista. The first of these was the Motion LE1600 and after that, I had the HP tc4200. Most recently, I've been using the Fujitsu T4010D tablet.
The T4000 series is Fujitsu's mid-level tablet (starting at around $1500) and the T4000D is the slightly upgraded version with the Pentium M processor (instead of the Centrino) and an Atheros wireless chipset instead of the Intel unit. The T4010D that I've got has since been superseded by the T4020D, but they're both essentially the same machine.
So what do you get? Well, a built-in DVD drive, which is more than either of the other tablets I've tried so far. This could possibly be useful ... but so far, it hasn't been. Despite the fact that I load up a new OS on this machine weekly (or more often), I've never had to crack the drive open. So for me, it's just added weight and wasted space.
Infuriatingly, the keyboard on this machine has relegated the "Home" and "End" buttons to Fn-key variants of the "PgUp" and "PgDn" buttons. I use Home and End all the damned time and it's really inconvenient to have to hunt out the function key whenever I need them.
It does have a built-in SD and Memory Stick Pro reader, which is damned useful when I haven't had my X's Drive handy. It's only got two USB ports, owing primarily to the space used for the modem and infrared ports. Both the external monitor jack and the ethernet jack are covered by retarded plastic covers which are impossible to remove when you actually need to stick a cord in it. The USB and power ports are all in exactly the wrong place when you put the machine into tablet mode, but this will be fixed once I get button drivers to let me to screen rotation without mucking about in the on-screen menus.
The screen is about the same as the HP's. Adequate but nothing to write home about. Exactly what I expect in a quasi-budget machine. Instead of LEDs indicating wireless and drive status, there's a small monochrome LCD mounted right underneath the main display. It's got battery, wireless, and drive status icons, and it's infuriatingly small and difficult to read. Plus, it doesn't illuminate, so it doesn't grab my attention very easily and it's also difficult to see in low light.
This is the first tablet loaner I've had, however, that really feels like a cheap machine. Both the HP and the Motion had very serious heft to them, but the Fujitsu creaks and groans like a $400 Dell. This is disappointing—I was originally excited to try out the T4010D because the Fujitsu P1500D had piqued my interest a while back. I haven't had a chance to muck around with a P1500D yet, but if the build quality is anything like the T4010D, I think I'm going to have to look elsewhere for a tablet. The T4010D is an OK machine to live with for two months, but any longer would send me looking for a replacement.
The only remaining thing to note is the tablet stylus placement. Unlike the HP and Motion, which both had the stylus embedded tip-first into the laptop somewhere with a mechanical release, the Fujitsu mounts the stylus vertically alongside the screen. So instead of popping the stylus out every time I need it, I just reach over and pull up a bit, and the whole thing comes right out. I thought this was sortof cheap when I first got the machine, but it turns out that it's much more useful when actually using the tablet functionality. The stylus holder in both the HP and the Motion was inconvenient enough that when I wasn't using the stylus, I'd usually toss it on top of the keyboard, where it would often roll onto my fingers or fall off entirely. With the Fujitsu, I just stick the stylus back up next to the screen where it's supposed to go. So it's a bit cheap and looks fairly low-end, but it also works damned well, too.
I'm excited to trade the Fujitsu in on something else. It's a good piece of hardware for the price, but it's also got a lot of really plasticy parts and doesn't have the build quality of the other machines I've tried. The built-in optical drive is probably a huge selling point for this machine, but it's something that I just don't need. Otherwise, this is a run-of-the-mill middle-market machine with adequate functionality, but it isn't composed nearly as well as the HP tc4200—which is where I'd spend my money if it came down to these two.
My current laptop is the IBM X41. It's too slow, and all of the software on it runs dog-ass slow.
If someone could make a tablet that had good battery life, good performance (e.g. good scaling), and didn't weight 20 pounds they would own the market.
Well, that's the conundrum, isn't it? Long-lasting, powerful, and light—you get to pick two.
That said, I've found that the term "performance" means "crisp response" far more often than it means "more cycles." What do you mean exactly by "scaling?"
It would be nice if the computer ran at a low speed while off wall power. I know that processors do speed stepping now, but what I'm talking about is taking it to a power saving extreme.
Plugged into a wall it would be nice if good speeds were available. You're right, that's the problem with portables.
The Apple laptops seem to handle these things very effectively.
So, I'm having a hard time figuring out your comment.
Laptops generally do limit power consumption very effective when they're run off of their batteries. The backlight (which is, by far, the biggest power hog on a laptop) usually drops to partial illumination, and the CPU (which is probably the second hungriest component) often throttles itself down to half of its full-power burn rate.
So I'm not sure how you could take power saving "to the extreme" without actually shutting down the machine.
And the Apple part baffles me, too—Apple has been traditionally good at static power efficiency by limiting the clock speeds (and hence, the performance) of their processors...but the G4s in the latest generation PowerBooks and iBooks didn't have speed throttling, to the best of my knowledge. The new Core Duo and Core Solo chips do...but they're Intel chips, and they're sold in hundreds of other non-Apple laptops, too.