shahine.com/omar/ - No longer a tablet owner

Omar is giving up his Tablet (a Portégé M200) for a Dell Latitude D610. Unfortuantely, many of Omar's gripes could have been resolved with a little research. The coating he complains about has been successfully removed by many Tablet users (I haven't the guts to try it on my baby yet), and makes for a very nice display. The Tecra M4 has the same resolution as his D610, better wireless support (use the Intel utility, not Windows), hard drive shock protection, and I'm getting about 5 hours of battery life with two batteries.

Some of his other gripes, however, are all too valid. There is a lot of crap preinstalled by Toshiba, much of it of dubious value. The M4 runs hot (though Notebook Hardware Control helps), and the viewing angle isn't great. It sounds like Omar did consider the M4, but opted for the Latitude ... and I'm sure price was a factor.

I think there are some valid opinions out there on this ... Microsoft needs to do more to standardize the mobile Windows platform so that dozens of processes for what should be standard hardware (FN-Key combos, etc) are unnecessary. That said, it's kind of sad to see someone turned off of an entire platform because of some issues that are fixable with a little research. Toshiba and Microsoft should both take note ... they have a year before Vista is released to really fix this problem. Churning existing users away from your platform is no way to build a market segment.