Update on the HP TX1000

Tuesday was my first day of classes of my last quarter at the UW. I took HP's new machine to class and received a lot of interested questions from people, which was cool, but the way I grabbed their attention wasn't exactly ideal. Most people in a class won't even notice that you're writing on your laptop screen over the course of the class, but when you "break" the screen to put it in tablet mode, that will usually attract a few glances. Although in my case, I was pulling the screen back up because I just couldn't stand to keep trying to write on it.

Since the TX1000 is using a touchscreen rather than an active digitizer like my Tecra M4, HP had to turn the touchscreen sensitivity way down to compensate for the tendency for you to rest your hand on the screen while you write. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that you have to use a significant amount of pressure to get a smooth, unbroken stroke. The effort required to do this is not insignificant. Unfortunately, when you're trying to multitask during a class (especially late classes when you're pretty tired), you have to put as much effort as possible into thinking about the class and not thinking about writing. While the HP rep that I talked to last week said that it only took him a couple of hours to adjust, I'm finding it much more difficult. So sadly, I've gone back to my Tecra M4 for the time being.

This isn't to say that the TX1000 isn't great in every other regard, quite to the contrary, it's a great little machine. To make sure that you get a fair representation of the machine, I've decided to try something new: I gave it to my wife.

That in itself is a bit of a funny story. When I told her that HP was sending me this laptop to review, the first words out of her mouth were, "Goody! Now I get a laptop." Then I explained that it wasn't really going to happen that way. "So what, you get all the laptops and I get no laptops?" (I can always tell when she's irritated, but still playing with me, because she'll use just atrocious grammar.) "Yes, sweetheart, that's exactly what that means." So when I told her she was going to get a week or so to play with the HP, she was pretty excited. Maybe I'll even let her make a blog post to two about it ... we'll see how it goes.

One last note: in my conversation with HP a few days ago, I asked why they didn't include both digitizers (active and passive) in the machine. They said it was a cost issue, but when I asked them about thier target market, it seems to be targeted at segments that wouldn't be as price sensitive, so I'm not sure that I buy the explanation. Regardless, it seems that Annie is closer to the sort of person that they want to approach with the machine, so her feedback should be interesting. I know that she absolutely loves the size, and I don't know that she'd care so much about the touchscreen being less than ideal for writing, but we'll see how it fares with her under more strenuous use.