Tablet PCs: laptops with a touch of magic
Posted 19 March 2007 at 9:45AM by Simon Dickson in IT systems and support
Touchscreen laptops - known in the business as 'Tablet PCs' - are one of the great lost technological advances of recent years. Microsoft released a Tablet PC edition of Windows XP in 2002, but it didn't really capture the world's imagination at the time. I had the pleasure of using a Tablet as my main machine in a previous job, and loved it to bits.
Inevitably, it's going to cost a bit more than an ordinary laptop. But prices are coming down, and now that Tablet functionality is built into the higher-end versions of Windows Vista, it's becoming an ever more realistic choice.
In its closed state, a Tablet PC looks like any other laptop - and of course, there's nothing to stop you using it like an ordinary laptop. But the fun starts when you twist the screen 180 degrees, and push it back down over the keyboard. You can touch the screen and move the pointer about, just as you would click and move a mouse... and of course, that's almost certainly better than the built-in mouse replacements in most laptops. But that's only the start of it.
Where Tablet PCs really stand out, in my experience, is in presentations. The ability to scribble on top of PowerPoint slides adds a welcome new dimension to the average talk: a bit of on-screen movement always helps to keep the audience awake, and lets you highlight the salient points as you go.
One that really catches the eye is Hewlett Packard's new TX1020. One of the first Tablet PCs to retail below £900, it has a 12.1" BrightView widescreen display, 1GB of RAM, 120GB of hard disk, wifi and bluetooth connectivity, plus slots for several different formats of memory card. And Vista's Home Premium is pre-installed, meaning you can avoid any upgrade headaches. Full details over at our partners, dabs.com.
Tags: hp, laptop, presentations, tablet, Windows Vista
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