Toshiba's New Tablet PC

Michael Gartenberg | December 09, 2003, 07:42 AM

We have been looking at the new crop of Centrino based Tablet PCs lately. My colleague David Schatsky talks about his experiences with the new version of the Electrovaya Scribbler here. I have been working with the new Toshiba M205 lately. While The Scribbler is a pure slate that has a keyboard you can add on, the Toshiba is a convertible that looks like a traditional laptop but with a screen that can swivel around fold flat. Most interesting new feature is the dual axis accelerometer which according to Toshiba, "simplifies how people use and interact with their notebook". When Web browsing, this feature allows you to tilt your notebook up and down to view the top and bottom of the web page. In addition, while viewing an e-Book or digital magazine, this feature allows users to turn pages manually by tilting the notebook from left to right--just like the real thing. It's very cool, although not all software supports it just yet. Specs are impressive, a 1.5g Pentium M, Centrino chipset (batter life runs close to four hours so far) and a 12.1" high-resolution SXGA+ display. The SXGA is a little controversial, as it makes text just a little bit too small for these 40 year old eyes. Kudos to Toshiba for bundling Microsoft's OneNote with the unit. OneNote is one of the best productivity applications on the market today and really highlights the value of not only mobile computing but especially pen based computing.

I'm a big fan of Tablets in general. The flexibility of using a PC in additional places means there is a real ROI associated with these devices and the small premium paid is easily recouped with usage. The new Lonestar rev of the OS will likely add appeal and make the pen that much more useful. Since for most knowledge workers the convertible design is more functional than a pure slate model, the Toshiba design is an excellent implementation.