David in Tabletland: Toshiba Portege
Written: May 16 '03
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
|
Pros: You can write on it.
Cons: But it will be just as illegible as your own handwriting!
The Bottom Line: If you have to have the latest gadget, and you can't type, this is pretty cool. Otherwise, stay away.
|
|
|
| daviddennis's Full Review: Toshiba Portege 3500 Tablet PCs |
The nice folks in the factory bought this as a gift for the company owner, and as the IT guy, I was asked to set it up and get it working for them.
Thoughts on Quality
Maybe it's because my personal laptop is a PowerBook costing almost double the money, but I couldn't help but notice that it felt superficially attractive, but cut down to a price. The chrome trim looked stylish but felt cheap. The keyboard felt good but the keys seemed a little flimsy (more so than the $999 entry-level Toshiba). It was a little hard to type because the keys were cramped. And I found the trackpad to be a bit touchy and the trackpad buttons felt flimsy.
All in all, I'm not sure if this would last long under the kind of demanding use I would make of it.
The Display
The display looks excellent if you look at it from straight on. However, if you view it from any angle, parts of it fade away mysteriously. This is a big problem, because when you write on a sheet of paper, you are normally at an angle to it, and the same is true of the Toshiba. So during the most common use of the unit's pen features, the display is awful.
I compared it to my (admittedly much more expensive) Apple PowerBook G4 [see my review of same] and the PowerBook was much better but still not perfect. More importantly, though, the PowerBook is not a tablet computer, so this issue is of relatively little importance. For the tablet, the issue leaps up and grabs you by the neck.
The display is low resolution, about 1024x768. I'd count it as barely adequate, but it is a small display and higher resolution might be harder to read.
The display folds up to behave like a normal laptop, or down (hiding the keyboard and making the screen the entire user interface). The mechanism that does this felt clumsy and weak; I felt a few times like i might have to break it in order to use it.
The Pen
The pen is not immediately responsive; there is a lag between when you start writing and when it actually writes. This makes handwriting difficult, and I discovered that my writing was even less legible than it is with a normal pen and paper.
I handed the unit to one of our office people, and she loved the pen and started doodling immediately. I suppose that would be useful for some of our more boring meetings.
When you turn on your computer, a screen comes up where you can "type" by selecting individual letters from an on-screen keyboard using the pen. This screen hogs considerable screen real estate, and is very annoying until you close it. I would find it very difficult to peck out letters on this keyboard, when it's so much easier to just use the unit as a laptop and type normally. But for people who aren't touch typists and really love the pen, it might be helpful. From my point of view, it was extremely annoying.
The tutorial on using the pen was simple-minded and didn't teach me much. I found some of the user interface details counter-intuitive and difficult to use, such as the way you would click and hold on a document to select a context menu, and then move the pen and click on the menu items (instead of having them appear right under the pen).
I think your overall conclusion on the handwriting system will depend on whether you like writing by hand. (Is that obvious or what?) If you're a hardcore geek like me, with illegible handwriting and a fast typing speed, the tablet features will appear less than pointless - they will actually harm your productivity if you try to use them. On the other hand, if you like to doodle, and want to save your doodles as web page illustrations or the like, it might be pretty useful.
Windows is, well, Windows
If you're a Windows fan (which, of course, I am not), this computer behaves more or less like any other laptop running Windows XP. Unfortunately, there is no Apple tablet option available yet, so if you want this kind of computer, you're stuck with Microsoft.
As with all modern Windows machines, I had little trouble setting it up on the network, although dial-up configuration confused the heck out of my boss. (This might be because he's not the obsessed computer type I am).
Overall
I think the ability to write messages in your handwriting is more a novelty than something you'd use every day. After all, if you have trouble reading your handwriting, imagine what trouble others would have doing it!
Would I prefer this if Apple made it, with their better designs and cooler software? Of course I would. But would I love the tablet aspect of it? Almost certainly not; if you can type like I can, your productivity would be destroyed by using handwriting.
The only reason I would write something by hand is to take quick notes or to enjoy the tactile feel of a quality pen scraping across high-quality paper. With the time delay between writing and display, combined with the plastic look and feel of the pen, you can bet that this unit won't be used for inspired scribblings any time soon. It might, however, be pretty cool for sketches for web pages or something like that, when you don't have space for a Wacom tablet.
There's no question this is a bona fide innovation from Microsoft; however much they are criticised by many people, including myself, this shows that they are at least trying. Full marks for trying, Microsoft; low marks (at least from me) for what was actually achieved.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 1650
Operating System: Windows
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
daviddennis
|
 - Top 1000 |
|
Member: David Dennis
Location: Woodland Hills, CA
Reviews written: 120
Trusted by: 71 members
About Me:
David's creating a cool new social web site (see below). Hope you'll come visit!
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.