I’m in the market for a new laptop. I had a Dell 4150 that I absolutely loved, but it was heavy. Well, not by conventional standards, but by my stringent laptop standards. I have a huge brick of a machine for work, it’s a loaded Dell, which weighs nearly 8lbs. I was considering using that, but the idea of lugging it back and forth to school/home/work, well, that isn’t appealing.
So I’ve been debating about a Sony PCG-TR* but I waffle back and forth. Then I had this idea about a tablet PC… I thought, maybe the convenience of changing the form factor, combined with the svelte design would be cool. As luck would have it, we have two table PCs at work for evaluation, so I checked one out this weekend.
At first, I was really impressed with the versatility of the table, but honestly, the mystique wore off pretty quickly. After you get over the “cool” factor of being able to flip the screen around to any orientation, the little roughness around the edges of the OS start to grate.
There were lots of minor annoyances, which might have been specific to the particular model, so I won’t go into those. There was one major annoyance that would keep me from ever getting one: I type nearly 5x faster than I write.
The handwriting recognition for the Windows XP “Table” Edition, actually works pretty good. But honestly, unless you type painfully slow, it’s just quicker to type. And yes, it was cool to lay in bed with my wife, surfing the web with nothing more than a pen, but that doesn’t make it worth paying a premium for a feature that is nothing more than “cool”. I guess the tablet isn’t for me. I think that if you were in the position where you made a living off of presentations (the thing would rule for PowerPoint warriors) then it might be worth it. Otherwise, it’s a cool idea that isn’t quite there yet.
So far as Sony goes, I love my VAIO. Mine is a middle of the road laptop but it’s worked quite well for the past couple years. When I first opened it, it had that cool VAIO look but felt a little plastic-y – I didn’t think that after a couple days; it just felt normal. Can’t really explain the combination of elements about it that I really like, but I’ve used a lot of different models and love the Sony. Mine has the “jog wheel” on the front and I found that to be totally useless and turned it off – but still love the darn thing. The touch-pad helped give me tennis elbow – but still love the darn thing. The Sony support SUCKS in that you have to send it in for repair – but, have to think about it for a minute, still love the darn thing.
The support is the biggest thing – aside from Sony financing – which would stop me from getting another Sony laptop. I can NOT give up my laptop for the time to get it fixed, so when I dropped it and busted the PCMCIA I never got it fixed and went to a USB wireless.
Anyway, Sony must somehow drug you when you buy one of their laptops. Don’t know. This model is radically different than what you are looking at, but I just wanted to give comment on Sony. I’m looking at their big-screen heavy model and all that has stopped us – my brother and me – is the absolute stupidy of Sony financing; you can’t combine two forms of payment like Sony credit and cash.
Later…
Scott