Ewan's Musings

The New Tablet PC

Another thing I've been keeping an eye on is my need for a bit more computing power while I'm away on these longer business trips. This week has seen the Tuesday London trip, and for that short a length of time away, the trusty Psion Netbook is more than sufficient. It's the longer trips (5 days away for 3GSM, close to 11 days when I go to Emerging Technology in March) where I'm conscious that the Netbook is not going to be the machine most suited to the job.

There's a whole bundle of little things that add up. 70mb of Thunderbird archived emails that I need to keep up to date with a million things at All About Symbian is one of them. Leaving them on the server to be picked up when I get home is a bit silly if it's more than 48 hours.

Instant Messaging is another area. Yes I have a java based MSN client and IRC client on the Psion, but they're not Skype, they won’t handle files, and yet again there's just too much going on when I chat to people. And you can forget about getting some VoIP solution under EPOC. It ain't going to happen.

Finally, doing OPL Development (and I'm in two minds about starting the process that could lead to a nightmare of a time with OPL Vol 2 from Symbian Press) for Symbian devices is, for the moment, still really viable only on an XP based SDK. If I'm looking at some of the bigger program ideas I have, the qwerty keys and limited screen on the 9500 isn't going to be enough.

All told, it adds up to needing an XP Based Laptop.

There's a huge amount of basic machines out there, and I've been circling them for a while, but I've finally plumped for a second hand Ebay'ed machine. The Compaq (HP) TC1000 Tablet PC. And it's bloody marvellous. Now I've got it, part of me is wishing Psion continued developing an EPOC Netbook for the 21st century, because I'm sure it would have been something like this. It's a full keyboard model, but the screen detaches itself to take it into slate mode, where you use the pen for everything. Handwriting recognition is much better than I expected, and the keyboard means it can be used as a standard laptop if needed, even though round the house I'm staying in slate mode for 90% of the time.

As with everyone who uses these in anger, I'm left wondering why they're not more popular, and widely accepted. I'm going to go out on a limb, but it really revolutionises mobile computing in a way that's not been seen since Palm and the Psion Series 3 days. After all, for the size of a block of A4 paper, I have a full computer, and not just an outgunned PDA.