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My lovely wife bought her computer, a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv1207us notebook, in August 2005. It was the first computer she could call her own, and she loves it.
It also was an impressive enough notebook for the money -- she paid $850 for it at Best Buy -- that I recommended it to a lot of other people who were looking for a decent portable at a good price. As a result, a lot of my friends and colleagues carry one now.
Over the last year or so, my wife's been eyeing some of the Tablet PCs I've reviewed. She's a psychotherapist who's always looking for ways to cut down the amount of paper she has to touch, and the notion of being able to handwrite case notes on a computer appeals to her.
So, when my buddy Ed Bott wrote on his blog that he was selling an Acer TravelMate C314 Tablet PC, I mentioned it to her.
After two days of pondering, researching, reading reviews, checking finances and general agonizing, she's decided to take the leap. She's buying the tablet from Ed at an excellent price. The specs:
? Intel Pentium M 760 processor, running at 2 Ghz.
? 1.5 GB of RAM.
? 100 GB hard drive.
? 14.1-inch screen, powered by an nVidia GeForce Go 6200 video adapter.
? DVD-RW drive.
? 4-in-1 memory card reader.
? 802.11g Wi-Fi adapter.
? Gigabit Ethernet.
? Bluetooth.
It was interesting watching her decision-making process. I didn't push her one way or the other, but rather answered her technical questions and described for her the Tablet PC landscape -- its capabilities, how others use them and how this particular model compares.
I also happened to receive a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC for review, and I let her play with it for a while. That reminded her of a tablet's potential, though I did catch her hear snickering a few times at how the text recognition translated her handwriting.
One of the factors in her decision was that she would be making a major change in the way she works, and it would likely be a permanent change that would affect her future computer purchases. Once she began using documents generated by Tablet PC-centric applications -- such as Microsoft's OneNote note-management software -- she would be tied to the tablet platform. The computer she buys to replace the Acer will almost certainly have to be another tablet.
She's decided the features of a tablet make it worth relying on the platform, the smooth inking and the ability to search handwritten text chief among them. I wrote the chapter in Larry Magid's and my Windows Vista book that features Tablet PCs, and as a result I've got a lot more respect for what they can do.
I'll be curious to see how she adapts and changes the way she works. And I'll also end up learning a lot more about tablets, because I'll be her technical support and software consultant on it.
Also, Ed has details about the circumstances of others who expressed interest in the tablet.
