Robert Bentley .NET

Those who have known me for any length of time will know, I’ve always wanted a Tablet PC since piloting the original concepts for Microsoft and RM back in my college days.

With prices of IT equipment constantly falling, partly due to the impending credit doom we’re all scared of, I finally bit the bullet and purchase myself a Latitude XT, Dells first attempt at a Tablet PC.

It’s a very nice machine, decent build quality finished in matt black. Some of the features that initially stand out are the obvious; it’s a laptop as well as a tablet. The screen has a single centre hinge – open the laptop twist the screen 180 degrees, close the lid again and voila – Tablet PC.

The screen is nice and bright and easily usable outdoors. It also comes with an ambient light sensor to allow the system to adjust the display brightness dependant on the light falling on the screen. Resolution is lower than I’m used to at 1280×800, but to be fair it is only a 12.1” screen. Capacitive touch is Dells big selling point on the XT tablet allowing you to touch the screen without using the Pen/Stylus and I have to say it’s very precise – that said I’ve no experience of the supposedly inferior resistive touch screens to compare it to.

The processor is the Core2Duo 1.20 GHz from Intel. While not the fastest sounding processor in the world, it does stand up to my day to day tasks quite well – I don’t really expect nor need my Tablet PC to outperform my desktop – it’s a mobile unit after all to keep in touch with support tickets & emails and jump onto remote desktop every now and again to debug issues.

RAM is a strange one on the XT. 1GB fixed onto the system board (non-removable) and a single DDR2 slot which takes a single 1GB or 2GB chip making 3GB maximum RAM. Suffice to say I’ve installed all 3GB given my next point, the OS.

Windows Vista Business came pre-installed and the machine is very capable of running Aero. The XT out-performs my old laptop given the lower screen resolution while having the same ATI Radeon X1350 with 256MB RAM as my 1680×1050 HP.

The handwriting recognition is excellent, and I find myself using it extensively to write notes when walking around the data-centres (this is when a tablet really shows its hand). Gone are the days of kneeling down and balancing a laptop on my leg behind a rack.

I’m also due to meet up with Philip Stears at the end of this month for coffee, cake and to make tablet pc comparisons. Philip has purchased HP’s tablet offering, the tx2550ea, which is actually the reason I ended up buying the XT. I’d forgotten all about wanting a tablet until Mr Stears piped up about the HP after finding it on Dabs.com at a competative price. I can’t have the guy who got broadband when I was stuck on 64k ISDN getting a tablet before me too!

So in summary, i’ve very happy with my purchase - time will tell how much I use it, but so far its followed me everywhere. Its much lighter than any laptop i’ve had before with the bonus of touchscreen, which I do find myself using alot even in “laptop mode” to switch between windows. My only gripe is the PC ExpressCard slot as apposed to PCMCIA, so I need to buy a new 3G/HSDPA card

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.