Whilst in Singapore I went out and splashed out on a Toshiba R10-P2301 Tablet PC. It was bundled together with
- An upgrade from 256 to 512 RAM
- A 512Meg USB Memory Stick
- An optical mouse
- A 1Yr International Warrenty Extension
- MS Office OneNote 2003
- Norman Anti Virus 1 Yr Subscription
The last two items I won't use because I already have a licence for MS Office OneNote 2003 and I use
AntiVir Personal Edition as my Anti-Virus software but the other items were welcome bonuses. I also paid to get the memory upgraded to 1Gig. Mine is the 1.6 GHz version and it came with a basic carry case. I have to say so far I've been impressed with it. It's light, a lot lighter than the Dell Inspiron 8500 I have been using.
I've bought it mainly to run email and VB.NET development on. VS.NET Beta 2 has already been installed and so I'll see how that runs over the next few weeks. In fact I spent most of today getting all the software I wanted onto my tablet. My reasons for buying a tablet rather than a standard laptop are that I use a computer as a passenger in a car for a couple of hours each day and one of the problems with laptops is that the screens tend to flap about a bit on the roads over here in Sri Lanka as the car bounces in and out of the potholes. I am hoping a tablet PC will provide a more robust solution as the screen can be placed face down on top of the keyboard and fastened into position. The use of the tablet pen has proved fairly painless so far. I'll see how useful it is on the move tomorrow. So initial impressions are good but I'll write a review in a few weeks to report on how I get on.