More TX1000 Feedback Coming ...

I've written a fair amount about the TX1000 that I have on loan from HP (through AMD), and there's even more on the way. I'm heading out to Orlando next week on my first ever flight on Southwest, and I'm curious to see how the batteries (they provided two) hold up to a non-stop, cross-country flight in the cramped Southwest confines. I've loaded up some music and movies, and with two headphone jacks, I'll even be able to share it with one of my travelling companions.

Reading back over some of my impressions, it strikes me that I might have been a bit harsh on the Tablet features of this particular unit. Let me just say that the Tablet features all work, and for someone who's never used a Tablet PC before, they would likely not have the same issues that I've had with it. That said, if you have experience with an active digitizer in a Tablet PC, or if you're primarily looking at the machine as a way to add ink to documents or to take ink based notes, the experience is sub-par.

Most of my Tableteering comes by way of Microsoft OneNote, which is an absolutely fantastic note taking application. The big advantage for me is the ability to have all of my documents, notes, research, web links, etc ... all catalogued in one location, and be able to search through it all. In order for OneNote to be truly useful, however, you really need to be able to write into it as effortlessly as you would a regular notepad, and that just isn't happening for me on this machine.

It's only my opinion, but I still believe that the Tablet functionality is a by-product of having a screen that turns around (bringing the screen closer to you for watching video) and a touchscreen (for easy media accessibility with the screen turned around), and that it was never really intended to be a selling feature. That's fine, and if you treat the added features as a bonus, you won't be disappointed.

That aside, my trip next week won't have me needing to take a bunch of notes. I'll be using it primarily for web research and for giving a short presentation in close quarters, and it'll be interesting to see how it does in that capacity. I expect that being able to turn the screen towards the evaluators will be very helpful. I don't know yet if the included remote control will be able to run Powerpoint, but I'm hoping it will ... it'll be one less thing to bring with me. I might even try Vongo a bit and see how it fares. Edit: Maybe I won't try Vongo after all ...

Nearly forgot, I promised some feedback from my wife, and here it is ...

It's a nice machine, but the screen is too small.

I finally got her to elaborate (sometimes you have to drag opinions out of her), and she said that while she really liked the overall size and weight of it, some of the web games that she likes to play had elements that were too small to see clearly. She likes the layout of the keyboard far more than my current tablet, but like me, didn't like how difficult it was to get an ink stroke out of the tablet. She likes the funny sculpted trackpad, but found the mouse buttons to hard to hit by feel. She thinks that the texture of the trackpad desensitizes you to being able to easily find the buttons by feel (and she doesn't like to just tap the trackpad). All in all, she'd have probabaly bought the machine after her experience, but not for the features HP was trying to sell it on.

Yeah, once you get her talking a bit, she does OK. :)

I don't have a problem with the screen size/resolution like she does, but then again, I have perfect eyesight and she doesn't. I hate the trackpad intensely, and really miss my like track stick nubbin thing. I do think that her insight about buying the machine for purposes other than HPs intent are pretty interesting though. As a marketing guy, I had felt that the machine was sort of at odds with its positioning, and that statement from Annie made me realize that it was true ... there's a market for this machine but it's not the one HP might think it is.